89. THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF COVID 19 - Checking For Symptoms In The Dark

“Miranda Fricker wrote of what she called “epistemic injustice” - “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”. She identified two forms of such injustice: “testimonial injustice”, the injustice of denying credibility to someone’s word, and “hermeneutical injustice”, the injustice of disadvantaging someone in their access to interpretive resources and forming an obstacle to their capacity to know. This week a member of Sage, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, urged the UK to expand its official list of Covid symptoms so that UK citizens could better identify if they have the virus. In this article I intend to show that by ignoring this advice, and keeping the official list of symptoms restricted to a high fever, a new continuous cough, or a loss of sense of smell or taste, the UK government is permitting a continuing epistemic injustice to occur which is causing unnecessary and highly preventable suffering.“

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34. DID I SLEEP OR NOT? - An Insomniac's Epistemological Struggle

“When we are, and when we are not, conscious seems to be a fairly fundamental piece of self-knowledge every human being should have access to. The more I worry about my insomnia, however, the more I realise how little about our own unconsciousness we actually know.”

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13. WHO AM I MEDITATING FOR? - A Brief Consideration of the Mindfulness Industrial Complex

“As someone interested in critical thinking and intellectual analysis I have significant objections to the idea of a completely mindful life, and rather suspect the ascendency of mindfulness as a practice to cure all ailments in the modern day has a lot to do with its overall lack of threat to the status quo.”

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5. BIG DATA - The Importance of Remembering there Can be a Data/Facts Disjunction

“Data, in theory, means measurability, tracking and accountability, and therefore is favoured and celebrated by those in the business of measuring education, tracking education, and holding education accountable.  Every year teachers across the country collect spreadsheet after spreadsheet of meaningless data on their pupils.  They analyse that data and discuss it endlessly with managers and leaders and make decisions about future planning based on what the data says.  But the data gathered is, invariably, pure garbage.”

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