Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

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Sadly, these days Lynn Margulis is better known for her AIDS crankery:

> Margulis said that "the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS," and also noted that Kary Mullis[a] said that "he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, 'There is no such document.' "

> This provoked a widespread supposition that Margulis had been an "AIDS denialist." Notably Jerry Coyne reacted on his Why Evolution is True blog against his interpretation that Margulis believed "that AIDS is really syphilis, not viral in origin at all."[50] Seth Kalichman, a social psychologist who studies behavioral and social aspects of AIDS, cited her 2009 paper as an example of AIDS denialism "flourishing",[51] and asserted that her "endorsement of HIV/AIDS denialism defies understanding."[52]

Also: 9/11 crankery!

> Margulis argued that the September 11 attacks were a "false-flag operation, which has been used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as unprecedented assaults on ... civil liberties." She claimed that there was "overwhelming evidence that the three buildings [of the World Trade Center] collapsed by controlled demolition."[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis

The complication with (incorrectly) labeling Margulis "an AIDS denialist", msla, is that you then make her responsible for a whole collection of unsubstantiated tropes that are targeted by that label. That's unwarranted, because Margulis was doing something quite opposite to "AIDS denialism"; Margulis, an esteemed scientist, was proposing an alternative causative factor that may explain AIDS, which isn't HIV, or more precisely, which isn't HIV in isolation.

This fascinating discussion will make your jaw drop https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/discover-inter...

> Margulis, an esteemed scientist, was proposing an alternative causative factor that may explain AIDS, which isn't HIV, or more precisely, which isn't HIV in isolation.

She's not esteemed in the field of what causes AIDS. She's esteemed in a different sub-field. In terms of AIDS, the actual experts have come to the conclusion she's wrong, and one thing we should all have learned by now is that our ignorance is not equal to the knowledge of experts.

> This fascinating discussion will make your jaw drop

Not for the reasons you think it would, though.

>She's not esteemed in the field of what causes AIDS. She's esteemed in a different sub-field. In terms of AIDS, the actual experts have come to the conclusion she's wrong, and one thing we should all have learned by now is that our ignorance is not equal to the knowledge of experts.

The history of science also told us by now that experts are stubborn, and sometimes they have to first die, for the next generation to accept another theory.

It has also taught us that important new discoveries more often than not come not from established experts in a field, but by people from another sub-field or another field all together...

It has also taught us that scientists should continue challenging prevailing hypotheses all the time, because that's part and parcel of doing science...

> The history of science also told us by now that experts are stubborn, and sometimes they have to first die, for the next generation to accept another theory.

It tells us too that cranks will be cranks regardless of the evidence against them, and that cranks are more common than true revolutionaries.

Exactly. An “expert” is a skilled practitioner of some domain of human endeavor; a scientist is a truth-seeker. Expertise is orthogonal to scientific truth.

> Expertise is orthogonal to scientific truth.

Expertise is the result of successful scientific seeking.

Not seeing how these two are connected, equivalent, etc

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