I see a lot of loose criticism of Neal Ferguson and the model for the Covid-19 pandemic which his team at Imperial College released on March 16. "These dummies forecast 2.2 million deaths in the US! They were just spreading hysteria to get the government to do what they wanted!"
Of course Ferguson's team may have made faulty assumptions, but a lot of the criticism I see is quite unfair, in fact reminds me that conservatives also often criticize without bothering to read first.
As the team says clearly, the 2.2 million number assumed that no one did anything at all -- not even individuals - to stop the spread. They also say they thought that "unlikely," meaning they did NOT expect that many deaths. (Of course, some of their assumptions may also prove mistaken, as the case may be -- we're a month + futher into this now, and learn new facts daily.)
Experts are human beings, and we should always treat important claims with due skepticism, considering biases. methodological flaws, and dubious assumptions. But we should also treat experts with due respect and fairness, and not assume that their arguments are so easy to refute, we don't even need to read them first.
On a related topic, a liberal (I guess) called me an "idiot" yesterday, and tossed me from a conversation (thankfully) in which I pointed out that a photo taken from a low angle with a 200 mm lens may make a beach seem more crowded than it actually was. He wanted to make conservatives look like careless fools, all packed together on the sand and no doubt coughing in one another's faces just to defy the gobamint. A perfect "picture" of distorting the facts, in the strictest optical sense, to smear people.
Here's a good trick if you want to lose friends left or right : be obnoxiously, stubbornly faithful to the facts.