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Comment by ChefboyOG | Hacker News Reader

I understand what you're saying, but I think there's some "both sides"-ism at play here.

Yes, there is a level of scientific ignorance displayed when people hand wave and claim "the science" is on their side without actually understanding the science. However, there is a huge qualitative difference here, illustrated even by your example of quarantine recommendations.

If we approximate an answer to "What is the optimal quarantine strategy?" through the combined efforts of various sciences--statistics, biology, etc--then while the results are not guaranteed, the recommendation is certainly not unfounded. It may be incomplete, but it is built off of decades of empirical evidence.

Conversely, outright ignoring recommendations about COVID or climate or something similar, simply because "science isn't always right" or because you "aren't a scientist" is a different thing altogether.

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Isn't that a strawman though? How many people actually give an answer like "science isn't always right" when choosing to ignore recommendations about COVID? Perhaps it's the circles I move in, but most people who think COVID recommendations are junk (which doesn't mean they don't follow them) can give far more reasoned and deep explanations for their views than the people they disagree with. Absolutely standard to get an answer like "because I trust the experts" (i.e. "I have no idea") from people who are the most passionately in favour of masks, lockdowns etc. You don't see that in reverse, because people disagreeing with authority by definition can't make an appeal to authority.

This is not my experience at all.

I've seen many people opposing masks and lockdowns due to dangerous half-knowledge and appealing to "that one doctor is also saying that the recommendations are junk (but they are shunned by the mainstream press)".

Of course, we usually find our own reasoning valid and logical and tend to think that the other side can't give "reasoned and deep explanations". I can't claim to be unbiased here.

I'll just note that, from a Bayesian perspective, "trusting experts" is usually not the worst idea and something we're basically forced to do every day anyway. I listen to quite a lot of what some of the experts way, but of course, I am completely unable to independently verify that what they say is valid - without decades of experience in the field, this is simply impossible.

I think they're just using a different definition of "expert" to you. Your reply alludes to this; your definition of an expert involves whether journalists say they're experts. How would journalists know?

Trusting experts is definitely a good policy from a Bayesian perspective given the dictionary definition of expert, i.e. "a person who is very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area" to quote Google's top result for the definition.

The problem we have with COVID is the people journalists present to us as experts (invariably academics) keep saying incredibly dumb stuff that's totally wrong, and by now many of us have concluded these "experts" don't actually know any more about disease than the man on the street does.

This is an inevitable problem with how academia is structured. Academics aren't financially rewarded for being correct, like private sector experts are. They're rewarded for writing things their peers find interesting. That's a totally different thing. We hope that being interesting and being correct are strongly correlated, but the replication crisis and general low standards observable in research papers are strong evidence they actually aren't.

I am completely unable to independently verify that what they say is valid - without decades of experience in the field, this is simply impossible.

The people you're disagreeing with also disagree about this. I've read a lot of epidemiology papers this year. The field is a joke: epidemiology is a piece of piss. The Gender Studies of medicine. It's just stats and some basic programming. I've not once had to look up any biology when reading these papers (microbiology being a genuinely hard field) because none of them use any. It's absolutely straightforward to find major, severe defects in these papers without decades of experience in this field. There's definitely a huge gulf in how difficult and deep different fields are, certainly, not all scientific endeavours are the same.

> The problem we have with COVID is the people journalists present to us as experts (invariably academics) keep saying incredibly dumb stuff that's totally wrong, and by now many of us have concluded these "experts" don't actually know any more about disease than the man on the street does.

It's not "what journalists say". Those people usually have valid credentials, e.g. when they are the people that developed the first PCR test for the new Coronavirus. I trust such people much more than random people on the street (or on the internet).

> The people you're disagreeing with also disagree about this. I've read a lot of epidemiology papers this year.

Forgive me if I don't find it terribly convincing that someone over the internet is trying to sell me something like this. Many fields of study are really hard to understand without a lot of context. There might be implicit things you might not be aware of. The internet is full of people who think they have found "flaws" in mathematical proofs or have discovered why FLT is true.

But you're also claiming that all the "experts" and all the relevant papers are from epidemiology whereas we also have a lot of contributions from other fields, such as virology or vaccinology.

I don't think virologists have contributed much so far, at least not to government policy. That's driven almost entirely by modellers.

I'm not asking you to blindly trust me on this. By no means. Go read some of the papers yourself if you like. The value of academic credentials in the field of epidemiology is zero. These people just constantly make basic errors in their papers and standards are so systematically low across the board nobody notices or cares.

I've posted here a list of just some of the problems I've noticed whilst reading these papers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25202182

By all means, have blind faith in the credentialed classes. Just remember these are the same people who came up with critical race theory, every replication failure in the field of psychology, the decades of 180 degree turns in nutrition, etc. This article is a good (albeit slightly technical) introduction to some of the problems outsiders find when they sit down and actually read academic output:

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...

It's useful because it has some meta-scientific analysis of quality problems in scientific papers.

Virologists have been instrumental in the debates relating to hygiene rules, the role that aerosols play for the infection, the different tests that exist and when/how they should be applied, what mutations mean or don't mean for infectiousness and immunity, and they can at least partially speak to why certain hypotheses that were observed empirically are not implausible from a biological point of view, or to how vaccines fundamentally work. They're also often in regular contact with practitioners on the field and can speak to the situation there, probably more so than random people on the street.

Here in Germany, virologists have very much been at the center of media attention (and not only of the media: the first PCR test for covid-19 was co-developed by Prof. Drosten who leads the virology department of the Charité clinic in Berlin).

> By all means, have blind faith in the credentialed classes. Just remember these are the same people who came up with critical race theory, every replication failure in the field of psychology, the decades of 180 degree turns in nutrition, etc.

As well as with countless examples of genuine scientific and technological progress. It's not that credentialed scientists are always right, it's that the scientific community (not so much individuals) is much more likely to be right than random people. And that doesn't mean that publication bias isn't a thing, but I'm not gonna hedge my bets on what some un-credentialed people are going to say because they looked at a bunch of papers.

edit: and I'll also mention that it seems you imply that scientists are a uniform bloc or that they all propose the same measures but that's not even true. But they do, largely, agree on some key issues, most notably, that this is a dangerous virus. It is my understanding that not even Tegnell (from Sweden) denies this.

At least in the English speaking media I hardly ever see virologists mentioned. However, maybe I should read some of their papers too then because basically all the advice around masks, lockdowns and so on has been proven wrong by observational data. Totally unclear why; perhaps there's some basic issue with germ theory. It seems unlikely but there aren't that many possible explanations. However these policies (the "non pharmaceutical interventions") have in the Anglosphere all been proposed by epidemiologists, not virologists.

Oh, the Drosten PCR test is under fresh fire today by a team in Denmark for having design issues, and of course we may observe the claim that PCR testing has no false positives must have come from either microbiology or virology (not that there's much difference).

the scientific community (not so much individuals) is much more likely to be right than random people

It's clear now that this isn't the case at all. The successes of physics and chemistry tell us nothing about fields like social psychology because the norms and practices within those fields are totally different. There is no "scientific community". Wildly different thresholds for statistical significance are one such difference that hits you immediately when comparing fields, but the issues are far deeper and more complex than just that.

Epidemiology is a pseudo-science. I've read so many papers by now that are just ludicrous and would never be accepted (I hope!) in more rigorous fields, that you can't really convince me by making vague allusions to the awesome powers of SCIENCE! Epidemiologists aren't wrong as random individuals, they are wrong as a bloc, as a set of institutions, as an entire field. That's exactly why peer review doesn't help: the papers are reviewed by peers who have standards just as low as the people they're reviewing. And unfortunately in academia, peer review is the only tool they have to catch problems.

But they do, largely, agree on some key issues, most notably, that this is a dangerous virus. It is my understanding that not even Tegnell (from Sweden) denies this.

That's a vague and unscientific statement, so sure, of course epidemiologists make it. "Dangerous" is entirely relative. Dangerous compared to what? Statistically it's about as bad as a bad flu wave, which is the sort of event that's been seen many times in the living memory of even quite young people. Most people wouldn't say that's dangerous, even though in some senses almost anything can be dangerous to some people. After all, lots of people die from drowning. Is water dangerous? In some contexts, sure. In others, no.

> outright ignoring recommendations

Have you ever wondered why it's not terribly controversial to "recommend" seat belts and airbags?

But when your "recommendation" is to join a large organization and funnel millions of dollars into it, or to levy massive taxes to prevent "the end of the world as we know it"? Pardon me, but I'm deeply skeptical.

Do you remember Solyndra? $500 million loan from the government. Went bankrupt.

I will not accept this straw man re-framing of the issue. Yes, "some people" say "but science isn't always right", and that is a poor argument indeed. But I am not.

>why it's not terribly controversial to "recommend" seat belts

Yet this was not always the case. Growing up wearing seatbelts was the exception, not the norm. Much less the law in some places.

Yes, and I remember having discussions on whether airbags caused more injuries than they prevented! But the fact of the matter is the issue is largely settled in the public eye. How did we get here? The answer is simple. The approach was a dispassionate search for the best solution.

There were no "scientists" claiming hyperbolic doomsday scenarios if we didn't pass specific legislation by a certain date. The collapse of our transportation infrastructure due to Kessler Syndrome -- but for highways. This should cause any rational person to be skeptical.

There were no fund raising rallies held by highly influential "scientists" who refused to wear seat belts themselves. This too, should cause any rational person to be skeptical.

People did not start with a chosen solution, and selected evidence to back it. They started with evidence, and searched for the best solution.

In effect? Seatbelts and airbags weren't a cargo cult driven by celebrity "scientists" that relied on emotional appeal. If you want your politicians to "listen" to "science", then you must divest the emotions, the desire for power, and the appeal to authority from it.

I assume it was a combination of incremental laws and public safety campaigns. It's also true that, in the US and I assume many other countries, there's been a general and incremental shift towards safer behaviors and products of which airbags and seatbelts are just two examples. Increasing automobile safety even at increased cost, etc. wasn't exactly swimming against the tide.

When seatbelts were introduced, there was indeed a number of people opposed to it and just like with COVID19, claiming it infringed on their rights and refusing to wear seatbelts out of spite.

The reason it's not controversial nowadays is because it's (almost) universally accepted as a good idea (though people do buy fake seatbelt plugs to disable the alarms)

> I understand what you're saying, but I think there's some "both sides"-ism at play here.

Why do these conversations "always" go like this, even on a site as rational as HN? If we can't even discuss these very real issues here without rhetoric, how do we expect politicians and the masses (and here I include literal deniers) to do so? Because that is what we are asking of them, is it not? To stop being stupid (which they are doing, to a very large degree), and to start being rational?

Also: why is an article as reasonable as this [flagged] (and therefore removed from the public discourse here)? We ask others to stop living in an information bubble, yet are we willing to do so ourselves?

Might this flagging (of which this is but one of who knows how many instances - HN users shall not know such things) hint at some underlying human characteristic that is a root cause of why we cannot have nice things? Obviously speculative, but it seems reasonable to me.

> even on a site as rational as HN?

This site is made up of people, just like all the other sites out there. As a group, HN is no more or less susceptible to biases and irrationality than any other group of people or any other website. Our starting lemma should be that we are flawed, not that we are inherently less flawed. Acknowledging our biases and irrationalities is the first step toward overcoming them.

> This site is made up of people, just like all the other sites out there. As a group, HN is no more or less susceptible to biases and irrationality than any other group of people or any other website.

From a binary perspective, agreed. From this non-comprehensive perspective, you are correct.

But the reality here is more complex than a binary.

From a continuum perspective, is it actually correct that HN is "just like all the other sites out there", that they are "no more or less susceptible to biases and irrationality than any other group of people or any other website"?

This level of precise consistency across any arbitrary grouping of people seems rather unlikely to occur in reality, and if it was like this, you'd think someone would have noticed it. Also, this take on it seems rather contrary to my "feel" for the aggregate self-evaluation that the individuals members of this community have voiced. I'm fine with either one, but perhaps it might be useful for us to decide on which it is.

If you think about it, if superior rationality is literally impossible, then are we not completely wasting our time on discussing where flaws exist in society, and which groups need to be focused on and improved (which is a very common topic of conversation around here)? If nothing can be done, why do we not just abandon the entire topic of improving the world and devote the remainder of our short lives to enjoying ourselves?

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