Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated
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Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science. It's more about how we choose to value various courses of action and potential consequences against each other, and there's rarely a clear, obvious, or simple answer. "Science" can only give us an estimate of what the results of a particular course of action might be, it cannot compare once against another and tell us with certainty which one is better.
"Trust the science" is usually a rhetorical weapon used by a side that is attempting to show one particular potential outcome as the worst thing imaginable that must be avoided at all costs, but in reality there are rarely things that bad. I'd like to have a world where we can look at the actual science and economic costs of all choices and rationally debate exactly which road to take, but it sure feels like we're only moving further away from that world.
And in that light:
Both science and economics are used broadly and brutally to justify a biases.
Both are ignored for their ability to measure, and used to shout over disagreements instead.
May we use both for more nuanced conversations, instead of less.
I think this is true but I doubt it's anything new. I think the fundamental similarity between religious belief and "trusting the science" is the psychological simplicity of delegation to authority, and probably a deep seated property of the human mind.
Not knowing the right answer to questions we deem important, or worse the mental state of doubting what we've been raised to consider foundational and "obvious", is just too uncomfortable for the majority of people (I would've said all people, but I can't be sure).
But can we though?
If the vast majority of papers can't even get that right, I don't care as much about the HN idea of what 'reproducibility' is - i.e. check if 'git clone <xyz> && run_model.sh && run_tests.sh' says 'All OK!' at the end.
There’s an article on the front page of HN about a nature retraction that came from someone asking authors of a paper for their data. That tells me that the data can be useful for fixing suspicions results. But also that simply asking for it can be sufficient. I wonder how often authors say no to data requests. My guess is only in the fishiest cases and in old cases. Publishing code and data isn’t high up the priority list, but in a lot of studies, it’s simple enough to be good ROI.
The usual objection to this is that it's hard to assemble the data to make these evaluations. But imagine if society's standard response to this was to simply ignore any scientific claims not backed up by publicly available data sufficient to evaluate the predictions on which the claims are based? Note that physicists, for example, have no trouble making reams of data freely available online, or writing periodic review articles that summarize the current state of scientific models in a field, with copious references to the original research that verified the predictions.
Note, also, that in many cases trials that produce statistically significant results, even when replicated, are not testing any actual model. They are just testing a hypothesis about a correlation. Correlation is not causation, and most such trials are not even capable of testing an actual causal model--they can test for the presence of a correlation, but not why it is present. Figuring out the actual causal process and developing a predictive model based on it takes more follow-up work. So really most such trials are just a first step towards developing a predictive model at all--but even after such a model is developed, you then have to take the time to assemble a good predictive track record for the model.
Yes; I would not consider this as evidence in favor of any scientific model, since, as you note, we don't have a scientific model that predicts what drugs should relieve headache pain. It's just an empirical generalization; as an empirical generalization, yes, it has a solid track record of accuracy behind it, but only as an empirical generalization, not as support for any scientific model. Of course we humans have lots of empirical generalizations we use all the time that are similarly not based on any scientific model. I am certainly not claiming that we should not make use of such generalizations when we have them. We just shouldn't confuse them with scientific models.
Religious teachings can be questioned and reasoned about. Prevalent understanding and interpretations of scripture also change over time and in different groups.
And of course, there is no "the science". "The science" for decades said that fat was bad and carbs were fine. There was other science that said otherwise, but that's what "the science" said. Same with tobacco and many other things. And people believed them, because they just "trusted the science" instead of doing their own reading. The most scientific thing one can do is to always view something with skepticism and subject evidence to harsh scrutiny. There is a reason that things as well-established as evolution and relativity are still theories.
I like Murray Rothbard's take on this "scientism", and would recommend his writings. https://mises.org/library/mantle-science
Statistics and reasoning are almost always applicable, and that's the extent science is applied to most fields.
If you want people to act in an evidence-based way without invoking trust/faith, they need to understand statistics and be able to evaluate studies on their statistical merit. Unfortunately that's quite difficult and the educational systems we have do a poor job of teaching it.
Statistics is subtle. For example, "It turns out, most doctors don’t know actually know probability." https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-k...
Perhaps more controversially, I also don't think statistics in general is a particularly rigorous or well-founded field. Where there is any analysis at all in the field - that is, very rarely - it provides guarantees only with hefty assumptions and in the limit. I'm fine with that from a theoretical perspective, but practitioners of all stripes seem to assume that with real world phenomena, the data either satisfy the assumptions or, more defensibly, don't violate the assumptions by enough to invalidate the results.
I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example.
To reign this little rant back into a well-formed comment, perhaps my summary is "everything and everyone is wrong, almost all the time, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that."
* In my personal experience.
BTW, I think your use of the asterisk goes beyond what was intended. Its typically been used to omit things or add caveats that only matter in very specific situations. 'in my personal experience' could mean you know 5 scientists or 5 thousand so mentioning a rough range would certainly give more credibility to your comment over the asterisk. That said, I broadly agree with the rest of your comment, but this did bug me enough to comment I suppose.
>I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example.
I'm interested in knowing about them. Any major ones that come to mind?
Agreed. Providing us with some statistics would help support their argument here.
I would add that resolving those issues should involve engineers because they try to design solutions that take reality into account. To often solutions from politics and government are based on hope and intent. Sometimes they dont even care about money, principles or goals.
Most importantly, nobody is actually experimenting. (Not even the Chinese.) Status quo is king, old tried solutions are queen, and propaganda is jack.
Experimentation with society requires risk taking and uncertainty. Of course no one wants it.
What if someone came up to you and said "hey we're going to put your kid into a new type of experimental school. We think there's a a 50% chance we can save money on education but there's 20% chance they'll be severely undereducated. Btw, you can't opt out because that would mess up the integrity of the randomized selection process"
That's some dystopian level shit
This has been pretty evident in the past year when the experts have often been wrong, or at least pushed their opinions in a way that wasn't really supported by the underlying evidence ("the public doesn't need to wear masks" back in March is a good example). It actually wasn't really that hard to dig in to the underlying evidence, assess the validity of that evidence, and make up your mind for yourself.
So in the end it is reliant on science communicators, and there is enough people who are either bad at it, fake it or altogether evil and misrepresenting scientific evidence for it to fail.
You always will have some authority needed as you have to be able to read really well and a lot of practice with the specific field to handle the outputs of science.
The reason why we haven't done the same for critical thinking is that the people in charge won't be if we had a citizenry which could think logically.
Case in point: NYC and SF have the worst homelessness problem of any city despite being in the hands of the party that keeps saying they are for the poor. That you now have dozens of reasons lined up in your head why it's not their fault despite having the power to solve it for decades and should be let off the hook is the lack of critical thinking in American education at work.
The last bit is especially common in the most important but soft sciences like psychology, sociology, economy, history or anthropology...
Or worse, it may be in principle verifiable but only at high expense, or the results of the analysis are incomplete or buried.
This is why we have things like the CDC offer guidelines, taking into account the changes and growth in our knowledge base. Knowledge is collected and verified over time and eventually becomes distilled in easy to understand ways to the public.
This is a rich take coming from anyone living in the US. It's a two party system - the failure of the party partially aligned with your views does not and has never made voting for the party expressly against your views the correct outcome.
This is you telling people to think critically while failing to think critically (because it suits the politics you want to advocate for).
In NYC and SF? Sure. Or Greens, Independents, Socialists, anyone but Democrats.
I'd be giving the same advice to anyone from Alabama about voting not Republican.
Politics isn't about good and evil, it's about who gets what. If people who keep failing to give you what you want keep getting your vote they will keep doing what they were doing.
Instead of this, you can stop acting myopic towards elections and punish your party (vote the other one, 3rd party, or even write-in Bernie Sanders/Ron Paul) and force the political powers to answer accordingly if they want your vote for the next time.
Question: in a first past the post electoral system, what happens if the vote between two parties in a three party election is split 35% and 20%? Does either party take power? Do any of their candidates take power?
NO.
The other party wins - with 45% of the vote. EVERY TIME.
Third parties in the US literally cannot win, unless some mysterious outcome hands them an immediate largest share of the vote. Which isn't going to happen in one electoral cycle, which means the ascendancy of such a party has to involve decades of losses for whichever party they accidentally poach more voters from each cycle.
Preferably for their own side first because I am really sick of predicting what the next 4 years will be like, being called shill, having that prediction borne out and then being told that it was actually impossible for anything else to happen from the start.
The knowledge itself matters. The ability to see when is the statement subtly exaggerating what facts say, so that one can use it in manipulative "logical" claim matters great deal. The ability to understand nuance matters a lot too. So does the ability to deal with bad actors in discussion, to understand motivations of whoever wrote this or that document matters.
But in fairness to the average person, scammers have to play big numbers games to find suckers and pick weaker targets like elderly because the average person isn't that incapable of critical thinking.
As you might imagine, students mostly learn this for the exams and forget everything when they leave schools. The poor political and economical situation in the country reflects the ineffectiveness of this approach.
And hey, schools in yugoslavia also taught marxism as a subject I kid you not (it was an established science back then!). Yet the whole generation in the 90s soon abandoned it for the next shiny thing. Most probably expected to become capitalists themselves, forgetting that even in capitalism someone has to actually do the work and only cca 200 families would actually own the businesses.
(Logika curriculum in croatian) https://mzo.gov.hr/UserDocsImages/dokumenti/Publikacije/Pred...
Homelessness is a deeper problem that requires cultural change. It's not simply an economic problem.
For example, when I lived in Taiwan in the early 90s there was nary a homeless person. That's not because Taiwan's government had a better social net, nor was it because Taiwan . It was simply because in Taiwan's culture it was unheard of for anyone to let anyone else in their family go homeless. That in America people could have a homeless sibling or child or parent was almost unfathomable.
I'm not suggesting America adopt Taiwan's culture. But I am saying American culture's hyper-individualistic sink-or-swim culture has consequences. It's only in the context of such a culture that the neoliberal Democratic party appears "left", when in fact it is quite center if not center-right.
There are several obvious ways of doing this, from "just build more homeless shelters" to a UBI to less restrictive zoning so that people aren't priced out of housing etc. But these all cost money or political capital, so we see where the priorities are.
> It's only in the context of such a culture that the neoliberal Democratic party appears "left", when in fact it is quite center if not center-right.
This is old talking point that might have been true in 1994:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
Unless you're talking about what they do instead of what they say they're going to do. Then you might still be correct.
Yes. That’s my point about culture.
There’s a reason racism and sexism still dominate despite a constitution that has said “all men are created equal” for nearly 250 years and then clarifying amendments 150 and 100 years ago. It’s the culture. Both problems could have been vanquished long ago if they were truly priorities in people’s hearts. But there are not. American culture, both liberal and conservative subcultures, always put self-interest ahead of common good when the chips are down.
Your link speaks of liberal vs conservative. Talk to any true leftist: Liberal != Left. See “neoliberalism”. See the nomination of Biden by the Dems. See Diane Feinstein continuing to be California’s senior senator. Etc. See the amount of wealth inequality just within the liberal subset of the population. New York has the most segregated school system of any big city despite being liberal, and then look at the backlash by liberals over attempts to desegregate both in NYC and SF. I could go and on.
So for example, a primary reason why there is such high homelessness in San Francisco is high housing costs. But it's in the housing developer's self-interest to knock down some housing valued at $4000/month and build 50 units of the same size on the same lot, even if the aggregate effect of doing so at scale is to cause the value of each unit to fall to $2000/month, because 50*$2000 is still a lot more than $4000. Which in turn reduces housing costs and homelessness. What's stopping this isn't individuals acting in their own self-interest, it's the local government being captured by local landlords who don't want rents to fall.
The reason racism and sexism still dominate is that they're a wedge used by elites to keep poor black folks and poor white folks on opposite sides of the isle instead of voting together against the corruption that victimizes them both, and sow general discord in the population by dividing any group that contains both men and women, which is just about all of them.
They convince black people that their enemy is the redneck and vice versa so that the two groups don't get together and start asking why it's so hard to start a small business. The true solution to racial and economic inequality is upward mobility, but notice that nobody is even talking about that anymore. As if the solution to race is taking down statues and similarly worthless symbolic voids.
But none of this is culture or individualism. It's purposeful manipulation.
I think this is only true because people think its true. There's plenty of PhD holding scientists that still participate in tribal politics. There's also plenty that are smart in their field and nothing more. This was logic that was used in the past and every time we've educated people the elite haven't lost their positions of power. But everyone's lives have increased in quality, I mean we don't use the streets of London as a sewer.
I think that this is [citation needed] category.
Actually in both ways, my kids were not taught multiplication as 7 years old. At that age, they were still doing additions in school.
I feel like its much worse than that. All of current research is very specialized. I am not a scientist but I do work in vaccines. After having worked for the past eight years in this field, I feel I can generally get the gist of scientific articles/papers, and understand if its something useful or junk - but only in my niche areas. Outside of that, I'm pretty much your average Joe.
As an example I have chronic sinusitis without polyps which totally destroys my quality of life, while I can probably live with it for a long time. I’m looking at the successful cystic fibrosis inhaled vaccine trials that looks like a great way to help the cells produce missing proteins.
I’m hoping for similar treatments to be available in the near future, and I have some money that I would happily use to invest / donate in a chronic sinusitis vaccine development, but so far I see only biologics trials that are probably much slower to go through because of the greater toxicity.
Actually your knowledge is enough for you to have an edge over other people in investing in biotech companies.
I don't know much about the particulars of the vaccine you are referring to, but when it comes to investing, I think it is always safe to assume that all major investing firms have ready access to SMEs that can give them the scoop on any company they're interested in.
As the drug delivery platform is working great, it seems like it can be reused (unlike with older platforms), and the hardest part of developing new mRNA vaccines is to research the genetic code to put in it.
The delivery platform is reusable, which is a big difference from older vaccines, where the virus that is delivered can be used only once (Sputnik-V vaccine uses 2 different delivery platforms _because of_ this.
The other thing to look at is efficiency: as the vaccines can deliver mRNAs that cells express anyways in healthy people, the lesser toxicity can mean a higher likelihood of success for the drug (which is the main problem with drug development in the last 10-20 years).
While we're all cheering for its success, its important to remember that the current authorization was under the 'emergency use' clause. Also, our body continues to evolve to fight attempts by external agents to inject foreign genetic material into our cells. Whether the same platform with work on future vaccines will be known only by performing science. But as always, data >> opinion.
You seem well read so you've already identified one of the key problems - the genetic code that forms the basis of the vaccine. Its not really my area, but from what I understand, dealing with synthetic RNA (RNA Mimics) is tricky since its never identical to cellular RNA. All of the associated problems will already be known to anyone working in that field, so there's nothing of value that I can add anyway.
At the same time the vaccines can't control which cells get the mRNA delivered as opposed to non-syntetic cells, where the cells are differentiated by their methylation and other epigenetics and gene expression control pathways, which I guess can be problematic for some cell types.
But I was making a different point. Even before you get to the final expression of the protein, there are various steps that need to go smoothly. The mRNA sequence is carefully engineered to dodge the body's various defenses, among other things - and this sort of engineering is not trivial - which is the point I thought you were also making with - "and the hardest part of developing new mRNA vaccines is to research the genetic code to put in it. ".
But maybe I misunderstood your original point?
Last time I saw my ENT doctor he's like well it's not that bad and I just wanted to scream at him.
I liked how someone else on HN put it: your body is constantly sending an error code but there's no way to shut it off.
Do you also have chronically irritated, dry sinuses with no polyps?
I've tried nasal irrigation and a corticosteroid but nothing works.
Right now the only thing I can do is travel away from Europe to south/central america for the winter.
I tried all commercial air cleaners, but they don't decrease toxic gases, just PM2.5, which doesn't help me. I'm thinking of building a house/apartment with very clean air (maybe using nitrogene and oxygene concentrator). Also I'm planning to try cortisosteroid in my sinuses using a biodegradable net.
Biologics may help as well, but they help only IL-4 / IL-5 type inflammation, and I don't know what cytokins are causing my inflammation (I was thinking of doing an cytokin profiling from biopsy, but of course I need a great ENT doctor to help with it).
At the end the main problem is that there are multiple causes with CRS symptoms, so it's impossible to have 1 drug to cure all the symptoms. Also as it's not deadly short term, FDA is much stricter with the drug companies that try to come up with treatments, which is understandable.
But this is disincentiviced and labeled as conspiracy theories.
In other words, prophets, pastors and priests.
The conflation of academia and science is starting to grate.
science is hard; human behavior is even harder.
This should be the main concern of every individual. Governments can worry about whether they work en masse.
Many people are nowadays wearing FFP2 masks, which are available everywhere.
we shouldn't accept mindless rules from our "superiors", especially incorrect and politically motivated ones, but rather demand timely and correct information devoid of political intent, so that we can internalize the risks appropriately and act accordingly.
There is plenty of pseudoscience masquerading as science unfortunately. A good book to read on this is Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". A significant portion of the book is devoted to what Sagan calls a "Baloney detection kit" that he thinks everyone should have. If more people could accurately distinguish science from pseudoscience, the world might be a better place.
My personal pick for pseudoscience that is routinely given credence by the general public is nutritional studies. Any study that says an oddly specific food (e.g. blueberries) is a "superfood" is probably baloney. Producers of that food probably got together and funded a study that, surprise, says what they produce is good to eat! Why aren't other berries just as good? What about berries vs other fruit? What is in blueberries that is not present in other berries?
The thing about nutritional studies is that they're so hard to do properly that virtually nobody does. If you wanted to find out which foods are genuinely healthy you'd need a large sample size of people willing to have their diets and activities micro-managed in a way that would make most people rebel. You could probably do a decent study if you had enough money, but nobody is willing to foot the bill. The only people with skin in the game (e.g. blueberry producers) have no interest in a study that puts blueberries fairly in their place amongst a plethora of other foods.
My crazy prediction is that, sometime in the next century or two, we're actually going to become interested enough in optimizing healthy bodies that governments will start funding real scientific studies on nutrition, exercise, etc.. The crap that's out there today is going to be seen as utter quackery, albeit with some nuggets of truth mixed in almost by random chance.
You don't. You use the sources you've seen to make the best analysis you can, fully prepared to drop it if with further evidence.
Say you're a researcher fifty years in the future who is doing a literature review. When a paper about anti-hydrogen trapping works in a reference to climate change, you won't even need to look at the date of the paper to know, roughly, when it was written.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209761
I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows.
Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks.
The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them?
Making science into a catechism is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. I actually am somewhat o.k. with this. Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy.
The only problems with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked actual scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.
Why not Math as a religion, dumb down complex problems, if it's wrong for the common Joe, it's okay cause he wouldn't understand it anyway.. not a good strategy.. I think if Science has a knowledge management problem, that should be addressed rather than dumbing down of things for public consumption.
I will point out that math discoveries don't have quite the same kinds of asterisks as the physical sciences.
Math is indeed a religion deep down, at least according to people like Hume, you have to "believe" in things like induction, you have to "believe" that natural numbers "don't end at some point" (for lack of a better word) or that two parallel lines don't finally meet, because who's there to watch them till the end of the world to say that they don't in fact meet? (Hume writes it down way better than I could ever do).
Thus, we come out on top, since we know what happens in all possible worlds.
Talking about "all possible worlds" is religious-talk (at least that's what Hume would say), afaik we only know of one world, talking about the "possibility" of other worlds is what established/institutional religions do.
This seems like a false dilemma. Joe Public is as capable of reading a paper on sci-hub as anyone else. It would probably do everyone a bit of good if JP were more likely to do that when he's wondering what to do about the aphids in his garden, or read a patent relevant to his mechanics business, or assess the evidence around masks during a pandemic. And I think it's the idea that science needs to be dumbed down for a certain kind of person that keeps ordinary people from digging into the asterisks when things are relevant to what they're doing. Executive summaries are useful when something isn't very relevant, which is most of science for most people. But some science is relevant to everyone, and it would be good if we challenged the myth that one needs to belong to some kind of separate class in order to practice science. Science is for everyone. No one can know all of it, but everyone will come to a point where they'd benefit from knowing some of it.
Discussions on social media rarely indicate much effort at nuance...
Even when giving scientific talks, the advice I give my students and post-docs is to first have a clear idea of who the audience is: is it
a) experts only from your area? [e.g. conference]
b) people from the same department who may be generally aware of the area without knowing specifics? [e.g. job talk]
c) General public [e.g. showing lab to school kids. This is the level at which you talk to the public. soundbites - so it is invariably misrepresented by the media]
All three levels require different approaches for the same subject. (b) is especially tricky - you are talking to experts, but from a different field. So you have to simplify, while not being patronizing. As for (c), I think it is best to avoid it. Except in situations like the pandemic, it rarely is beneficial. Also, to do it right, it requires a lot of preparation.
I'd be curious if you disagree with any of that in theory or just have a better appreciation of the practical difficulties...
I have faith in religion. Science my friend stands on that other line there where everything has to be proven. That is the strength of science. If it tries to get in the religion line where I need to put faith and belief it's no longer Science.
Engineering is where things are proven, by building things using or that are proving scientific findings. For example, Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the final engineering steps for drugs, with partial engineering step being chemistry and process chemistry. Similar steps should be done but are often omitted for social sciences.
The exception to this is pure mathematics.
Example from biology: you found some fun cellular process model description. Fine, now you have to mess with it using engineering to prove it actually works in the way you described, is not missing crucial steps and so on. This for example happened a lot in gerontology - studies of aging. People latching on to small pieces of mechanism which actually are not very relevant or actionable.
Examples from physics are machines that use physics theories, such as quantum communication devices, particle colliders, clocks or nanostructured devices.
Examples from chemistry are evaluations of synthesis processes step by step by introducing various process changes.
Analysis is rather on the side, as without engineering first you cannot really proceed with it.
This may be debatable, but seems to accurately describe what most academics call "science". The more common understanding is what's described in the parent.
Often times when people say "trust the science" they're referring to results in the first category, but people take it to mean not "these results are preliminary and unproven" (and filled with asterisks), but instead "to deny this is denying empirical fact."
There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't.
Also "trust" is a loaded word .. but mostly we just mean "predictability" - ex: to "trust someone" means to be sure that if you know what they've said, you can predict what they'll do. Much of empirical science is about offering up data and models that aid such predictability, so declaring "trust the science is extinct" is an outright rejection of these empirical methods (ex: randomised control trials) that have taken a long time to mature and take root as standard practice.
What is needed though is to be able to separate the science from policy making. As Dietrich Dörner has shown in "The Logic of Failure" [1], folks in the hard sciences don't fare very well when policy making in systems with complex causally interconnected parts is tasked upon them due to learnt heuristics that don't fare well in that world.
Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...
But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people?
One prime example is last years long and detailed study on how there was no "gay gene". In effect, homosexual activity and inclinations could not be shown to be the result of any specific gene expression after many trials and searches for such.
The scientists, worried about how this result would look to the public, worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups to shape how the paper would be released to the media and explained to the public[1].
Now, a sizable portion in HN's demographic will feel this is all well and good, but how far should this go? The uncomfortable truth here is that people are not "born gay" as we have been told so often. And that has been a very important talking point in the past two decades when debating about gay rights. Many people were convinced to support gay rights for this reason alone (however we might feel about that, it's true). They very well may feel duped by scientists and no longer "trust the science". How far should scientists go to shield the public from uncomfortable truths? And how much will the public continue to trust them when such veiling of the truth is made known to them?
That isn't a problem with science. It is politics .. as @AnthonyMouse noted.
Communication is an incredibly tricky thing. Even when the science is sound, shortsighted approaches at communication can have serious repercussions, even potentially causing deaths (think public health guidance being misinterpreted, misunderstood, or decontextualized, for example).
Being conscious of this doesn't dilute the truth of the message, and being respectful/mindful of others doesn't mean we need to compromise on the science either.
For clarity: this is not a response to any part of your comment other than the reference to the nature article.
"sexual orientation is not the expression of any one gene" is not the same as "people are not born gay".
It may be a complex genetic interaction or it may be some other effect at play, but whatever it is, it doesn't contradict that people don't choose their sexual orientation.
Since people have justified all sorts of atrocities based on the misconception that being queer is a choice for people that they could just not make, I can understand scientists who want to make sure their research doesn't fuel that again.
The underlying problem isn't actually a problem with science, it's a problem with politics.
You need to hire some scientists to do your experiments. If they follow the scientific method, you get results using the best system we know how.
But if they follow the scientific method then the Republicans work to defund climate science research and the Democrats work to cancel any scientist whose results challenge the orthodoxy on race or gender.
And if politics interferes then it's not science anymore. If research leading to politically inconvenient results has its funding withdrawn or scientists are intimidated into self-censorship then it's all just selection bias and fudging the numbers.
Maybe what we need is to do something like the court system, where you have multiple research funding "judges" which have lifetime appointments and each get a given amount of research money to dole out every year, and their job is to decide how to spend it. Then they can spend it however they like and can only be removed for e.g. corruption, not for funding research somebody doesn't like.
Eventually the governments who support technology will win - either via war or economic advantage.
It matters kind of a lot whether the winner is a liberal democracy with free speech and civil liberties or a totalitarian communist dictatorship.
> It matters kind of a lot whether the winner is a liberal democracy with free speech and civil liberties or a totalitarian communist dictatorship.
This is irrelevant to the conversation, but yes that is why we spend trillions on defense technology, so that if it comes to blows we don't lose out.
In as much as science deals with things that cannot be affected by policy (ex: stellar physics or nuclear fusion), the "law" doesn't apply I think, except maybe in perception (people may believe that a particular nuclear fusion technique doesn't work even though it's been demonstrated but policy forbade it to be implemented).
For some cases, we would want Goodhart's law to apply - ex: climate change. We'd want actions to be taken to reduce the impact on the planet as we gather and report climate parameters accurately. Similarly, we'd want accurate reporting of gender discrimination in society to result in the reduction of such discrimination. The question really is the way the change is effected. If "salary difference" is an indicator of gender discrimination for example, law makers can pass laws that fix it, thereby removing its effectiveness as an indicator .. but we're happy for even that at some level. That would be similar to a government sending teams to re-freeze melting glaciers because climate scientists are using it as an indicator of global warming.
True policy thinkers, though, would want to ask the "five whys" and work to fix the underlying problem.
One year on and that "prophecy" (because that's what that was, just a prophecy) turned out to be pretty damn false. Nevertheless, we still let the people/scientists who deceived us back in March 2020 to take "science"-based decisions that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions going forward. Nobody will be held responsible, apart from a few politicians.
Experts worked on detailed plans for staged re-opening after the lockdown. I don't know about Europe, but the US did not follow such a plan. Different states reacted differently, and politics had a bigger say in how reopening was done than any epidemiologist.
And Sweden wasn't exactly a success, and has done far worse than their nordic neighbors, say, Norway. The numbers do not lie here.
Belarus had a very effective plan - they tested far earlier and more often, and have far more hospital beds per person.
Straight up country comparison is just a fool's game. We will have to learn from this as best we can - what worked, what didn't work, where, and why. If everyone wore masks properly, was lockdown necessary? We need time to study and find answers.
> Sweden wasn't exactly a success, and has done far worse than their nordic neighbors, say, Norway
> Straight up country comparison is just a fool's game
As you can see we now have vaccines - it would not have been a few years of lockdowns.
Of course, had no action been taken to slow it down, and millions had died last spring (in the US alone), the public opinion would strongly demand a lockdown, as well as become so scared that they voluntarily self-isolate.
New Zealand did lockdowns for a month or two and became completely Covid free.
China did lockdowns for a month or two and became almost Covid free.
Most European countries did lockdowns for a month or two and were quite open over the summer.
So either it was a different prophecy in the rest of the world or the prophecy was correct after all.
Then how did the lockdowns work in say New Zealand or Australia, or Singapore, or China? What is the mechanism of action?
I know Australian people in Europe who haven't been able to visit home in a year. I know second-hand that in China if you had multi-stop flights you needed to quarantine at every stop. I don't know what test and trace measures the AU and NZ governments decided on, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't like them if I knew.
And it's easy to say 'well, good, people shouldn't travel now' - but this is not just about holiday. These restrictions keep families apart, make it more difficult for people to care for each other. Imagine someone close to you is in distress and you can't go help them because of this, how would you feel?
I don't know about you, but I would not want to live in China, even it gets to zero covid. And I wouldn't particularly like being isolated in AU or NZ either.
My comment was a response to parent, who feels betrayed by science, because lockdowns were supposed to work.
What I will say though is that there is no win scenario. It's lose-lose, either way. A non-Covid world does not exist anymore. Lockdowns come with exactly the downsides you describe. No lockdowns come with an overload of the health care system and high death tolls. Light lockdowns are a combination of both.
Both proponents and opponents share the same motivations by the way - to be able to see relatives, meet other people etc.
Please stop pushing the unproven narrative that lockdowns stop the healthcare system being overloaded. It's morally wrong to push for such a destructive policy without good supporting evidence.
Sweden, Japan, Uraguay, South Korea. No lockdown. No problem for any of those healthcare systems. It can be easily shown that curves were flattening before lockdown had a chance to take effect.
This is about as close as we will get to a controlled trail on lockdowns.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.28.20248936v...
You don't need lockdowns to stop the healthcare system from being overloaded, if everybody wears masks, socially distances, agrees to track, trace and isolate programmes, there is mass testing, no incentives for people to come to work sick, etc. One year on we have a pretty good estimate how each behaviour/measure influences the reproduction rate of Covid-19.
> Please stop pushing the unproven narrative that lockdowns stop the healthcare system being overloaded.
I don't understand what exactly is unproven. Lockdowns correlate with behaviour. The Chinese healthcare system was completely overwhelmed, even with CCP spin on things. In Bergamo, Italy, the dead were carried away in army trucks. Look at fatality rates for both countries at the time.
Speculation without evidence.
Lockdowns are apolitical decision, not a scientific one. Lockdowns can be avoided if governments choose not to implement them. But most seem to be relishing in the emergency powers given to them.
not any more https://time.com/5939502/new-zealand-covid-19-lockdown/
This might be because there is very, very little scientific thinking in the general population. People like doctors who, due to their education, should have scientific thinking, no longer can be trusted to have this scientific thinking. Instead of approaching issues with a scientific attitude, the resort to "trust me, I'm a doctor".
Scientific thinking, at its core, is just "things might not be how you think they are". It is a type of skepticism about your own thinking and a reliance, or trust, on a set of processes that have been proven to produce useful epistemic truths. A good example of this is the Monty Hall problem where loss aversion would make most people pick the suboptimal solution. The Cognitive Bias Codex [1] documents a lot of these cognitive biases.
So, the way to move forward is to fix the education process so that this kind of thinking is inculcated into most children by age 12.
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...
Popper, K. (1978). Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica, 339-355.
You're setting up a bit of a straw man that science can not tell us with certainty what is the better course of action. Stating that science can give answers with absolute certainty is a stark misunderstanding of the scientific process (something alluded to in the article). However, trusting the (scientific) evidence (what is typically meant when people use "trust the science") can very definitely guide our decision making process. People typically bring up "trust the science" when proposals are being rejected based on some "ideological" reasoning.
To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working. Now one might still reject the concept of UBI for various other reasons, but this should be underpinned by evidence based arguments, not saying that the side which says trust the science (evidence) is treating it like a religion.
When people use the term "trust the science" what they typically mean is "trust the (scientific) evidence" and yes that is what we should be doing, even outside the "technological fields". The "trust the science" argument is often made when people reject an
In the medical area (testing medications) history is full of wrong studies either by negligence or just by greed.
"Trust the science" is never a good argument as being to general. I'd trust most of the science in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Apart from those there are too many shenanigans.
What you're saying is that wrong understanding is better than not to try. At least when political action affecting many is derived from science, standards must be higher than currently.
For example the mRNA vaccines: As far as I know there is no or little research for possible long term side effects as the original research is for cancer medication which has vastly different risk trade offs. Nevertheless the vaccines are approved for use. I've read and seen in many discussions if one raises doubts that just "trust science" is the answer although there is no science. At least I expect when asked that a proponent can name a study which researches on the long term effects of vaccines or the underlying technology (eg. safety of packaging, which is deemed a trade secret and thus not public afaik). "Trust us" is the wrong answer as long as regulatory capture is a thing.
You can be wrong but state clear hypotheses and a non logically flawed reasoning that allows you to make statements about the world. These can then be tested for their validity.
What you claim is that the standard for the quality of the test are not high enough. That may be true or false however this is only one aspect of science. For instance many people misunderstand the use of maths in Economics. The point of using mathematical models is not to be able to make predictions about next year's GDP but to make sure that what follows from your clearly stated hypotheses about human behaviour is consistent.
One of the main counterarguments to the universal basic income is that napkin math does not work out. You don't even need to get the "science" involved, just relatively simple algebra. Humanity does not have the resources for the majority of the population to receive benefits out of thin air. And no, $3200 AMZN is not really a resource most people would feel comfortable surviving on, unless they can exchange it for something of an actual value.
p.s. the Amazon bit is related to the "let's divide the wealth of the billionaires and we all will live happily ever after" mantra.
That said, answering with "napkin math" to a complex costing problem like UBI is exactly the problem and why we should listen more to scientists.
Unfortunately, many of us engineering types are way too quick to make very strong statements based on essentially no expertise except for some math and engineering education. Interestingly in my observation this behaviour is less prevalent in scientists (i.e. people coming from a science opposed to an engineering background). Obviously, this is only anecdotal, but I would be interested if others have observed this.
“Trust in science or “because science” are just ways to shut down discussion or lines on inquiry that dare question the existing narrative.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an example.
Have you ever wondered, just hypothetically, if the Covid outbreak may have had any relation to the bio research lab located in Wuhan?
Well, you can’t wonder about that. If you do, being called a conspiracy theorist is the nicest thing anyone will say about you. If you think this is a good thing then you’ll be in for a rude awakening hen you happen to find yourself on the wrong side of the “scientific” debate.
Did the participants receive enough money to maintain their current standard of living? Was the UBI granted for life or just for a few years? If it was granted for life, did the participants fear that the program might be ended prematurely? Did they keep working to be a role model for their children, who might never receive UBI? Did the participants even have a job to begin with? A study can give only unemployed people UBI and if the participants don't seek employment, the unemployment rate doesn't change, and your conclusion drawn from this fact is all wrong.
If anything, I see this as the good example of "trust the science" used as a thought-terminating cliche - a way to shut down questioning without having to provide answers.
> To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working.
In literally every study ever done, the UBI substitute was not permanent. Studies of the impacts of a temporary stipend do not logically transfer to a permanent stipend. If you get a source of income that will stop in three years, it makes perfect sense to use that income to prepare yourself for life after the income. If you get a source of income that has been guaranteed for life, you've got a completely different set of incentives and there is no reason to assume that studies of temporary stipends apply.
People like Jacques Ellul had been warning us about that for at least five or six decades now, I guess that's how long it takes from an idea first being "caught" as actually "existing" (for lack of a better word) to becoming so prevalent as to be very easily observable.
I'd also very highly recommend the works of Ulrich Beck [1], well, his "Risk Society" to be more precise, to quote wikipedia: "Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk" [2]. It is a book written in the mid '80s, right before Chernobyl, and recently other people have (re-)discovered him too, like in this "Foreign Policy" article [3] from last August.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Beck
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou...
"-"using the scientific method to judge the scientific method is circular reasoning". Scientists attempt to discover the laws of nature and to predict what will happen in the future, based on those laws. However, per David Hume's problem of induction, science cannot be proven inductively by empirical evidence, and thus science cannot be proven scientifically." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
See:
Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
I've heard this argument several times. I don't buy it at all. They could have instructed people to make their own masks especially since everyone was stuck at home. There is no shortage of fabric that I'm aware of. It also would have given manufacturers more time to produce masks.
Also, it's not okay to lie to the public, especially if you're supposed to be non-political. They deliberately lied and didn't apologize. There's no way I can trust someone who does that. That's not how my brain works.
It's clear that some medical professionals felt the science wasn't there, and ofcourse it wasn't. The science takes a long time. i.e. there was no science that showed that for Covid19 the use of masks would make a difference. Sure, it's common sense, but medical professionals don't use common sense. There might have been some papers about the Flu (with mixed results) and there were some other random papers, but there was no clear evidence either way. If touching the virus and then touching your face is the primary vector then it is possible that masks make things worse. Again, to me it was always common sense you should wear a mask (and not touch it and not touch your face) but even here on HN people were arguing both ways given the existing papers/publications.
Then there's the nature of public health, where your messaging isn't necessarily about what's the right choice for an individual, but rather what's the right choice for the public as a whole.
I don't think the public would understand the nuance of make a mask vs. buy a mask, ofcourse there'd be a run on PPE. Even with the message there was a run on PPE. Good luck trying to find an N95 mask in Home Depot last year in the first few months of the pandemic.
I'm not sure what's the takeaway here, public health officials, and medical professionals are not really scientists, they don't communicate science, they have their own objectives. Generally their objectives should be aligned with our objectives as a public but they may not be aligned with our objectives as individuals within that public.
The bigger issue to me is how slow the response has been across the board in most places, because all those bureaucracies move at the pace of a snail, pretty much every country on this planet botched the initial handling of this (of special note is China ofcourse) and blew away our chance of containing this early on. By the time we were on the mask vs. no mask debate the die was already cast (and a lot of people wore masks anyways and a lot of those who didn't wouldn't wear one anyways).
"For respiratory exhalation flows, the critical size of large droplets was also between 60 and 100 μm, depending on the exhalation air velocity and relative humidity of the ambient air. Expelled large droplets were carried ... less than 1 m away at a velocity of 1 m/s (breathing)." -- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0668...
Hence the idea of social distancing (for airborne droplets) and frequent hand washing (for surface contamination). (And, of course, staying home if you have symptoms like coughing or sneezing.) Convincing people to use masks consistently and correctly has previously been shown (and remains!) to be an uphill fight.
(I note that there was a meeting of epidemiologists in March, 2020, where famously, no one wore masks. How far are you willing to to go to lie?)
Later, it was found that viruses could be carried by much smaller particles, much farther.
"Our laser light scattering method not only provides real-time visual evidence for speech droplet emission, but also assesses their airborne lifetime. This direct visualization demonstrates how normal speech generates airborne droplets that can remain suspended for tens of minutes or longer and are eminently capable of transmitting disease in confined spaces." -- https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11875
Sure, science progresses over time. It's fallacious to say that science is wrong because we used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Evidence evolved, ideas changed.
But dismissing all instances of scientists changing their mind, when they really just lied, as "oh, evidence evolved" is the kind of thing that (I feel) erodes trust in science.
I think the evidence is strong that advice against masks was a lie meant to prevent panic, not honestly communicated "best we could do at the time" science. A lie with good intent for overall public health, but dishonest nonetheless.
I don't see that being very practical. The average person simply isn't qualified to read scientific literature and draw their own conclusions. I doubt I'd be able to make much sense of a research paper on virology or epidemiology, despite that I consider myself scientifically literate in the general sense.
The answer is to have credible communicators of science. The best way to do that is with credible institutions. If the assumption is that this is impossible, the game is already lost.
> the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
Broadly agree, although I think anti-mask sentiments are due to mindless partisanship rather than listening to Fauci's early lie.
On the other hand, the separate disciplines are more and more specialized and complex, so then I agree 100% that communication (translation) is key.
Lastly, "mindless partisanship" may be the cause, but is also an effect of other longer/subtler trends in media-tech, culture, education, etc.
Reading the scientific literature is still "trusting the science".
Are we replicating experiments to see for ourselves if the data is correct? Are we re-working the error calculations to make sure the statistical evaluation is correct? Are we studying the topic so we're informed enough to identify poor work as well as the peer reviewers?
I believe the answer to these questions is "no".
Well, if I were to follow your skeptical line of thinking, I'd say that vaccines are never safe/effective, they simply have a confidence interval attached to them. Furthermore, vaccines made using novel processes have no long term data. Its never this simple :)
You see, we can't really apply such logic to every day decisions. The 'error bar' you referred to is of little benefit here, and also subject to the same skepticism. Its useful when you know a high percentage of the the variables, and all the mechanisms where data can be wrong/insufficient, etc. But you can't know that when you know so little of the pathogen. Its turtles all the way down :)
Also, HEPA masks cannot filter out COVID-19 (~ 100nm). HEPA filters, or sterile filters in general are roughly around 0.2um (200nm).
(source: works in biotech on vaccines)
Something can both not cause problems, but also be such that one cannot yet rule out with high confidence that it might.
Like, it probably makes sense to trust glass or ceramic glasses somewhat more than plastic or metal glasses, just by how long the technologies have been around?
I think I hadn't read all of your previous comment, and was largely responding to just the first part. Whoops?
So, this troubles me.
One thing about science, of course, is that you need to be certain of your measuring equipment, and of your observations.
I cannot find any evidence that Fauci ever said that "masks don't work".
I have found:
* Late Feb: "at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis"
* March 8th: "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask"
* March 8th: "When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face"
* March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks … You should think of healthcare providers who are needing them and the people who are ill."
I see:
* ~"No need to panic at this time" (Feb)
* ~"Masks do not confer perfect protection, make sure to use them correctly, social distancing is still required" (Mar)
* ~"Reserve PPE (e.g. N95 masks) for the people who need it most" (Mar)
And shortly after this time, his recommendation changed to strongly recommending masks, when three critical things changed: asymptomatic spread was established, PPE supplies were beginning to stabilize, and testing determined that cloth masks are roughly as effective as surgical masks (not N95 masks).
All of those statements and decisions strike me as reasonable, from a spokesperson for public health in that time frame.
My memory of last spring is that masks were not recommended for the general public, but the clear message was that they do work, otherwise they would not be recommended for health workers.
I do not ever remember any non-political health professionals saying that masks do not work. So it troubles me to see it repeated ad nauseam that Fauci said such a thing.
If I have missed something, please help me out.
What do you think is being communicated here? It makes you feel better, but there are unintended consequences is worse than they don't work, it is saying they are worse than nothing. Around the same time the Surgeon General more explicitly said they don't work.
“They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Which was an absurd statement at the time - if they are not effective for the public, why would health care providers need them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
But I hear, and I heard at the time, "Masks help, but they are not perfect, and if you use them in the obviously-wrong way, they are useless or harmful".
Which aligns with my understanding of every tool used for any purpose.
The Surgeon General, OTOH, was never a person to be taken seriously. But I don't blame Fauci for that.
Why? I'm not from the USA, so obviously I don't understand the specifics of that position.
Some have been better than others, but they mostly serve as a mouthpiece for the administration's agenda as it relates to health-adjacent matters.
As such, when the President does not take a health matter seriously (historically: AIDS, opioids, obesity, guns, tobacco, mental health, drunk driving; newly: COVID-19), the Surgeon General is not to be taken seriously.
but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
I suspect at the time of the statement, health care works where struggle to get PPE, which would not have been helped by the run on masks by the general public.
In that context I see this a plea for the public to understand a mask in the hand of a medical worker is much more valuable than one in the hand of a member of the public. So lets try and help the medical staff before we try and help ourselves.
It was really short-sighted. He could have suggested cloth masks.
And Fauci was considered the best COVID thought leader. US is so dead.
Again, this is repeated a lot -- but it does not match my memory, nor can I find evidence of it in my searches.
If you know differently, please share a link.
> He could have suggested cloth masks.
IIRC, the consensus pre-COVID and post-SARS, was that cloth masks are inferior to N95 masks. When the supply of N95 masks was not considered unreliable, there was no need for public health to think about bandanas.
In Feb/Mar, before asymptomatic transmission was proven, it was reasonable to not bother suggesting cloth masks, and simultaneously to preserve the "useful" (N95) masks for the most at-risk.
> US is so dead.
There were so many failures. The system that Fauci was relying upon turned out to not have been funded. Maybe he should have known that, but I'm not sure he had visibility into the problem.
I see Fauci as the firefighter who arrives at the scene, hooks up the hoses, and discovers that the hydrants are dry and the city hadn't bothered to tell anyone.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that. He has definitely made some mistakes, but the system which is supposed to back him up has completely failed him and all the rest of us.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...
It makes no sense since cloth masks don't cause PPE shortage.
> IIRC, the consensus pre-COVID and post-SARS, was that cloth masks are inferior to N95 masks. When the supply of N95 masks was not considered unreliable, there was no need for public health to think about bandanas.
It's inferior but still better than nothing.
So, you agree that cloth masks are better than nothing.
> In Feb/Mar, before asymptomatic transmission was proven, it was reasonable to not bother suggesting cloth masks,
The precautionary principle 101.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
They should have be cautious first. Like come on, it's beginner's level of crisis management.
They even implied against it (because you would touch your face and etc.)
A tweet from US surgeon general: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/healthcare/2020/03/0...
"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
Why would you say masks are NOT effective? With emphasis on NOT.
Fauci never refuted this tweet at the time, so what were we supposed to think?
> I see Fauci as the firefighter who arrives at the scene, hooks up the hoses, and discovers that the hydrants are dry and the city hadn't bothered to tell anyone.
It's more like he showed up and said water didn't help put out fire. Let's not use water.
He also didn't regret it because, well, we were in the water shortage period.
> He has definitely made some mistakes
A mistake that caused many lives.
He made a bad judgement call. Bad at communication with public. No idea how to manage crisis.
Just say "hey, it looks like a flu. We should be cautious and cover our face with something. Please don't buy n95 because doctors need it".
At the time, I covered my face in public and kept saying masks worked, and I felt like an anti-vaxx for going against "science". What a shit show.
Cloth masks were a thing in Asia, but the US had never thought about them much. They were not available for sale.
When Fauci discouraged use of masks among the general public, but implored that they be conserved for medical professionals, he was speaking in the context of PPE. N95 masks, etc.
Sometime in March, people started asking "well do cloth masks work at all"? And there was no consensus answer until (IIRC) early May.
Maybe someone should have said "Hey, we don't know for sure, we've never studied it -- but they use cloth masks in Asia and they have more experience than we do. They certainly can't hurt as long as you recognize clean side/dirty side, and wash them regularly. You can't buy them, but you can make them. Don't make them poorly."
Remember that Fauci was sidelined for a while in there though. And that his job is not public health communications management.
I really don't think you can blame Fauci for the failures here. His messaging, when able to speak, was not that confusing or contradictory. And yet he still got in trouble with the people who wanted him to be less honest. He was simply not able to counter the extreme bloviation and misinformed dishonesty coming from the administration. And he received death threats for trying!
Blame Deborah Birx, a bit, for conflicting signals and bending to pressure. Blame Jerome Adams, for not having the background to separate truth from fiction, and lacking the strength to demand accuracy and clarity. But even those two didn't have much power, their biggest error was lending the appearance of credibility to the broken process which employed them. Blame their boss for having an agenda at odds with direct and honest communication.
Anthony Fauci did not save us, nor did Robert Redfield. We all wish they had. They both spoke honestly when given the chance though, and in a functional government, they (along with the rest of NIAID, CDC, HHS, and OSG) might have given the country a fighting chance.
Or maybe not. Most of the rest of the world is in pretty rough shape too.
Nah.
Putting any filter between 2 people are going to reduce particle exchange. Even bad filter would do.
Isn't this just physics regardless of whether it's classical or quantum?
Asian countries don't have greater insight. It's common sense. Someone coughs at us. We put anything on our face to reduce the particles reaching us. Somehow you tried to argue that this was a recent scientific discovery.
We can agree to disagree.
The fact remains. Fauci could have easily recommended bandana or any type of face covering. He didn't. He even admitted he lied for the greater good. He didn't even think of bandana. And this is the best person we have in US...
That's really not true though.
Early speculation included aerosol transmission, which is not effectively stopped by cloth.
Anyone strongly endorsing cloth for aerosol containment would have been wrong, and blamed for misleading the public, and lost their job, probably.
Current estimates put cloth masks at a ~15% reduction in transmission by droplet. This is significant and important and makes them worth wearing! But if it had been aerosols, they would be <1% effective. And if people believed them to be effective, more people would have been infected.
We will disagree on whether Fauci lied. I believe that he did not lie, although I do believe he was duty-bound to speak when no one had perfect information, and that some of the things he said were misinterpreted.
I never read anything from him that communicated "masks do not work". I did read "masks are not perfect, most people don't know how to use them correctly (N95), they are awkward and uncomfortable to use properly, they are essential for health care workers, they are in short supply, and having a false sense of security is dangerous". This is the message I took from him last spring. Although I was definitely aware of the dishonest noise in the air, it was not coming from Fauci.
I wish he had been in possession of perfect information, and had been able to communicate it with perfect clarity, and without interference from batshit-crazy alternaquacks. No one else was better though. Many were far worse.
Two points that are worth repeating;
1. The precautionary principle. We should be more cautious. This is crisis management 101. It was way more likely that masks would help than not.
2. Fauci admitted he lied as in he didn't regret anything because of the PPE shortage. Not because he thought masks didn't work. This implied he believed masks worked but didn't want to say it out loud.
> But if it had been aerosols, they would be <1% effective.
If it was aerosol, many many more people would be infected. It would have been 10x. This was already unlikely back them.
Again, with the lack of data, we should have been more cautious. Not less cautious.
Even aerosol was true, wearing masks would still be better.
"False sense of security" is mostly a myth. It's a pandemic. We could have done both social distancing and wearing masks.
Not sure why you assume wearing masks and other activities are mutually exclusive.
Just because I wear a firefighter suit doesn't mean I will run toward every fire I see. Be real.
His concerns were that (1) cloth masks wouldn't help, and (2) that wearing masks incorrectly wouldn't help either. He was wrong about (1), but (2) is still a problem.
I'm sure I'll have opportunity to provide updates as I get further along. :-)
The Nature podcast didn't get on the mask bandwagon until early June, when they had an interview on the effectiveness of masks in this specific case.
No one I've seen has said that medical masks don't work.
fauci was well justified when he said before that mask wearing isn't the solution to this pandemic, but now any nuanced discussion is not tolerated, which, perhaps, is the reason people aren't trusting the science. another reason is that politicians are making arbitrary decisions claiming it is what science (facts and data) told them to do.
* the production hadn't been outsourced to China which then decided to ban exports while also accepting the PPE donations of other countries
* the government would have noticed that there's a pandemic brewing, and instead of saying "nothing to see here" would have ramped up PPE production or at least procured PPE from the market.
* failing all of the above, at least instituted an export stop so that the remaining PPE wouldn't have been bought from under their noses.
But yes, when one fails so utterly, one has to end up begging the people to work against their own interests with predictable results.
And yes, Fauci and the surgeon general lied. Nothing ambiguous about it, even if they were trying to save PPE for medical personnel.
We had lots of studies around mask wearing, and most of them really struggled to show any kind of benefit.
That's obviously false. And an individual will be first and foremost concerned about their own safety, not if they can single-handedly stop the pandemic.
It's not obviously false, because there were studies available at the time that showed masks did not work to protect individuals, especially members of the public.
But, again, I'd be interested to read any studies you have that were 1) available at the time and 2) showed benefit of wearing masks.
That's why most Western countries were stockpiling them - as protection in case of a flu pandemic.
This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.
We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations. This may involve changing the institutions themselves to fix legitimate issues (like the funding fiasco), addressing misunderstandings by the public that also contribute to mistrust, etc.
There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As with many issues of our day, the challenge will be in disciplined focus on the issues themselves and what changes we should make to address them, instead of surrendering to tribal bickering.
But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.
I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.
Low-calorie? Low-carb? Dairy-free? Meat-free? Low-sodium? Low-fat? High-fat?
As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.
It takes an enormous amount of domain knowledge to reasonably interpret the statistics of experiments, epidemiological studies, etc. We may think we can read them and come to our own conclusions, but I think it's usually our hubris that leads us to believe that those conclusions are justified and not just rolls of the dice.
Putting it that way is putting the cart before the horse. Our institutions need to become more trustworthy, then we'll be able to trust them more. Even then, I suspect a certain level of scepticism is needed to keep them honest.
For most people, even educated people, they are more likely to hold correct beliefs by listening to experts blindly than investigating papers themselves. Sometimes experts are wrong. But experts are wrong way less often than laypeople. A culture of a bunch of inexpert youtubers reading papers and convincing people of medical advice is perilous.
There is a reason surgeons wear masks in operating theaters.
They said that mask don't work in preventing you from contracting covid. This holds up to this day. As early as February, Fauci was saying that he was discouraging masks because he wanted make sure there were enough for healthcare workers and sick people, but people are acting like it was a secret agenda. I think that people are deliberately misinterpreting Fauci's words, so that they can blame someone besides themselves or their own social circle for the pandemic. People completely ignored stay at home orders and social distancing. Masks are only meant as a last resort if you have no other choice.
And N95+/FFP2+ masks work at protecting one from the virus, why else would medical personnel wear them? They work even when not worn perfectly.
Of course many are being purposefully obtuse and call those "respirators" in order to muddy the waters and don't even consider them to be masks, even if one wears them on their face and breathes through them. Those so-called respirators are high-quality masks, that's all there is to it.
I get so sick of people talking about "trusting science". What they always seem to mean is "trusting some specific scientist or group of scientists". At this point I'm inherently cynical regarding anyone who claims to have "science" on their side.
Science is a process for establishing trust in an idea. It is a process for evaluating theories. It is a process for creating evidence. Science is a process.
The notion of what science exactly is, and how to use it isn't even taught in schools. (Stuff like Popper's falsification techniques)
As a result people find that the only way they can verify information is through appealing to authority, which of cause manipulates them to their own will.
That, of course, says nothing about trusting individuals or daring new hypotheses, which is what the article seems to address rather pointlessly, with some hand-waiving, and avoiding the difficult issues: you might want to apply the proposals to physics, precisely because it is so trustworthy, but probably not to the other disciplines.
A majority of experts, in their day, agreed that the sun is rotating around the earth. A majority of experts agreed that time and space are absolute. And since it's trendy these days to declare absolute medical truths, a majority of experts agreed that disease is caused by imbalances of bodily fluids and that bloodletting is the cure to any disease.
Very few of what pass for sciences today in our world, save for the sciences of chemistry and large parts of physics, have achieved such precision of prediction in the laws they have been able to come up with to describe the universe.
Parts of Medicine largely fit the bill but other parts aren't yet that far along.
Psychology and psychiatry are at best a crap shoot and do not have solutions that work for all, in a repeatable fashion.
Economics and social "sciences" are at best a set of theories with varying degrees of merit or applicability but are mostly a set of opinions and authorities who like to argue with each other about their own pet theory.
It's amazing how far humanity has come thanks to the advance of true science but it's important to not forget we have a long ways to go still.
speaking of trust. here's a PSA for those, who like myself, had trusted the media and thought that happened:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/...
You can watch the entire press conference here [1]. The relevant portion, starting at 27:04, is:
-----
Bill Bryan: We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just spraying it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster ...
Donald Trump: A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.
-----
This matches my recollection of what was being reported at the time. The fact check you linked to is about a claim by Joe Biden, not a media report.
I really dislike Trump, but I feel like I end up defending him quite often against people who are just completely uncharitable in their interpretations of everything he's ever said or done.
We have things that can be injected to destroy the virus. They are called "vaccines".
Trumps dumb suggestion is like watching someone use a weed whacker in their yard, then asking if microscopic weed whackers can be injected to fight the virus. I expect it off a young child, not a President.
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai-statement...
If you believe that he's telling you to drink bleach is up to you, but some people certainly did, and tried it.
We need to be humble about what science can actually achieve. Yes, it's the absolute best humans can do given the limitations of our senses and no signed contract from the universe to always behave as it did yesterday. But we need to stop treating the "facts" it produces as divine revelation that we can beat the congregation into submission with.
Then the public and policymakers should be aware that there isn't a consensus. If there are question marks about a lot of points of detail, then we can't just average everyone and then be confident in the result of that.
No one who uses first principles experiments for anything is capable of forming higher-level hypotheses. Heck, I've never even really formally tested if rain causes the roads to be wet.
I think a lot of the science today is not easily reproducible, which makes it hard to trust.
The calls to "trust the science" also often extend beyond what the scientific material states. For instance, the science might tell us that the coronavirus poses a particular level of risk in terms of mortality. But deciding whether or not to react to that risk with heavy measures is still a human decision that crosses value systems, economic considerations, moral considerations, etc. Still, somehow you see people in social media or news media attaching the "science" label to their opinion on what must be done, even though that final consideration is an opinion or judgment call.
But overall, for sure, boundaries what's scientific or non-scientific are a bit fuzzy. And Popper criterion is not the only criterion for definition whether something is scientific or not. But still I think they key point is making verifyiable predictions.
You have to understand those results as well, before you can interpret them, and while "understanding" is surely fuzzy, it's completely missing in his commentary, as if Popper suggested at any point that the moment something unexpected happens, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
"Wobbly philosophy would become part of legal doctrine."
It's only wobbly if you leave out large parts of it, as the author has...
The title of the article suggested nuance, but I don't see much of it in the article itself. It seems as if the author attempted to take down a basic tenant of science, and feeling satisfied that he had, moved on to draw further conclusions that result. I don't think he succeeded in that set up, however, which makes the second half of the book review (the part about the actual book) less interesting or compelling.
He gives an example of a theory that's falsified, so it's clearly falsifiable! And yet it's not science! Well duh, if it's falsified it's obviously not correct. A robust theory is a theory that is falsifiable but isn't falsified even under heavy scrutiny.
Politics looks at science and religion and sees a precious and innocent teenager. It smiles and nods and knows that it can grab either or both, hand it a gun and it will happily run out to do whatever it's manipulated into doing.
My personal definition of politics is "help your friends and hurt your enemies." Anytime I read an argument from a disinterested source - science or religion - and the end result is one or both of those things I get suspicious.
It's not to say I don't agree with it. Frequently you need to one, the other or both but once it's a question of politics you have to think about the issue in political terms. You have to consider about compromises that have nothing to do with science or religion.
That, in turn, seems ripe for exploitation by the not insignificant set of people who see politics as simply a route to power.
Meteorites (as in: Rocks falling from the Sky) were not acknowledged as real until 1803. Only then did a large meteorite shower in France give enough evidence for the general public to acknowledge their existence.
Of course meteorites had fallen before and were even in people's homes (who just picked them up). But they were dismissed as conspiracy theories/hoax.
However, please don't misunderstand this comment as me saying you should believe in flat-earth theories and similar nonsense.
Conflating failure of imagination (lack of proposed mechanism) and impossibility is a rather common failure mode. Heck, it took a decade for biologists to just agree on the Hardy-Weinberg theorem!
It's common to see people say 'believe the science' as if science is a person making one specific claim. The scientific method is a process practiced by humans. Humans are prone to error and dishonesty depending on the circumstances. They are also able, on occasion, to make brilliant discoveries.
I find the framing of conversations about science to be dishonest and intended to make one party in the discussion look like a fool.
Science is important because you know it can be wrong. It evolves when mistakes or errors are found, not when it is confirmed.
This is similar to Hume's argument for our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Obviously, we all believe (even flat-earthers) that the sun will rise tomorrow and we have much science to indicate this will continue to be the case for a long time. Still, that doesn't mean we can be 100% confident this is the case. It's frankly just exceedingly difficult to be 100% absolutely sure about anything, unless it's first order mathematics.
Not to a flat earther. There is a mountain of garbage you need to wade through. You can sit there and talk about observing the curvature across bodies of water or with satellites or whatever and they will just sit and say "nuh uh". At that point "the science is settled" is way easier than wasting your time with them.
In serious debate, "the science is settled" is the intellectual equivalent of "because I said so". But I don't believe it comes up often in serious debate, it's more likely to happen when two parties that don't really understand science are having an ideological debate that they pretend had to do with science as a rhetorical device to gain legitimacy.
The problem that people have with this tends to be that when they notice somebody being “wrong” about something, they want to be able to conclusively prove that the other person is wrong, and that they are right. Especially if it’s in regards to an issue they consider important. If you think that the scientific evidence supports your position in a situation like this, the temptation is to claim that science unequivocally proves you are correct. It is however, an outright abuse of the scientific method.
This sort of situation has become very common place. When science communicators are faced with anti-scientific assertions of absolute truth, they’re not inclined to acknowledge scientific uncertainty, and the limits of their own understanding. Sadly this has created a culture of anti-scientific science worship.
Even if every person could understand every scientific paper, no one has the time to read them all.
How should some practically interpret the truth of a scientific claim? I really find it unlikely that the answer doesn’t at some point hinge on “I trust the judgment of this other person”
The government and media should be rebuilding trust and making amends because if we can't trust what our leaders say, civil society simply can not do anything but crumble. That's not an easy thing to accomplish, but it could be done if approached in a genuine and humble manner. Unfortunately, there's no sign of that happening anywhere.
The problem is that there that the rational position is that there should be no trust in science. 70% of papers cannot be replicated (see the replication crisis).
There is also the issue of funding - you get what you pay for. There are really only 3 funding sources of science - government, military and corporations. (To me, these are actually just one source 3 facets of the same beast, but not everyone agrees with me that we live in a fascist state.) But those funding interests don't make for 'free' science.
No one will research good diet - confusion reigns on the best diet for people. They will research expensive drugs and treatments. No one researches how climate change isn't happening, only that it is. Etc. The upshot is, that with enough funding you can fairly quickly have reams of papers and documents in support of whatever case you want to promote. The broader scientific 'truth' is left at the wayside.
True, no matter how long something has settled in science, it can be overturned by more evidence (hence Newtonian gravity, once quite well settled eventually be doubted then disrupted by GR). But, even given that, it's still true that science on a topic may be presently settled.
So, it seems to me, more import than dismissing every use of the phrase is to judge the context of how it's being used. If it's being used to dismiss the presentation of evidence or anomalies ("hey, it seems odd the Mecury's orbit doesn't quite fit the prediction") then the phrase is absolutely being abused.
But if instead it's being used to dismiss a claim that lacks any evidence ("the apple falls because the earth is flat and accelerating upward due to the giant turtles it rests on"), then the phrase is better applied.
"The Earth is flat. The science is settled." "No, it's actually round." "Okay, it's round. The science is settled." "Actually, it's an oblate spheroid."
And that last one matters for GPS.
Beyond that, there is always a new question. Sure, the COVID vaccine works with small enough side effects. Cool. What about medium-term side effects? What about long-term side effects?
Also, "science" is the process, not the body of Knowledge or the consensus. See https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/what-science-is/ .
For as long as we've had anything resembling science, we've known the earth was round.
But none of that addresses my point. I'm not saying that nothing in science is overturned (in fact, I pointed out exactly that).
In saying the phrase can be reasonably used in some contexts.
It can _never_ be reasonably used to dismiss evidence or anomalies.
It can _sometimes_ be reasonably used to dismiss completely unsupported and unfounded claims. If someone claims the earth is flat, I will happily tell them that it is not, and the science on the matter is settled.
Again, to rule out evidence or anomalies, no. But to rule out unsupported claims, I'm still going to use it.
If you think that wrong, you should probably be ignoring me.
However, in my experience, that phrase more often comes from someone who claims to be a scientist, which is why it puts me off.
If you don't claim to be a scientist, then I can respect that.
The times I use this phrase are typically when having political arguments where what we know is correct is pitted against monied interests that aren’t seeking truth but working hard to obscure it (“is smoking cigarettes harmful?”, “is climate change real?”, “is the earth round?”, etc).
Hmm, be careful ridiculing all of this, because under GR the earth is accelerating upward toward the apple; it has to in order to remain in the same spot in curved spacetime.
But, insofar as there was a broadly accepted pre-GR scientific explanation, it was not “The earth doesn’t accelerate upward, the apple accelerates downardThe second half, yes, but not the first.
Since gravity wells are generally spherical in practice, up is always going to point radially outward, so there's no distinction to make.
https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship-cons...
That's the role that politics serves. To take into account all of the data we're given, think about outcomes across all scientific fields, take into account the opinion of the population and execute on it.
I think that for the most part, snappy soundbites like "follow the science" are a result of social media and reactionaries breaking our normal, carefully considered methods of discourse.
Physics tells us that the Universe has enough space for an unfathomable number of humans.
Biology tells us that the conditions aren't there.
Psychology tells us that even if they were, people wouldn't be happy plugged into capsules.
Behavioural science tells us that, regardless of the other three, we might just have to work out a solution anyway, because we're gonna breed.
Politicians... well, from what I can tell usually they just sort of do whatever they want and manipulate the population into wanting it. :)
Then again as Alvin Weinberg wrote in the 1970s, there are questions that can be posed scientifically but whose definitive answers are beyond the normal scientific method to answer. He called this "trans-science"
And understand its limits.
I think most people don't, and that's why it gets more and more religious. I think that's actually why conspiracy theories are on the rise, because both 'sides' are becoming more dogmatic.
If someone reading this is curious and wants to learn more, I recommend getting books on theory of science.
The scientific method cannot actually Prove anything to be true. That's right. Nothing can actually be proven to be true with science.
If you have a hypothesis it is fundamentally impossible with science to prove that the hypothesis is true. It is only possible to disprove the hypothesis. I'm not making this up from some obscure philosophical conjecture. See this quote from Einstein:
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
Literally, all of Einsteins theories have never been proven to be true by science. This occurs because the domain for evidence is literally unknown. At any point in time someone can discover new evidence that can disprove a theory. Thus relativity will always be a target for disproof.
What we do have is evidence supporting Einsteins theory but we currently (nor will we ever) have anything that can prove relativity to be True. Know the distinction.
I feel "Science" is just a cover word. To truly understand the magnitude of this you need to rephrase the saying and get rid of the word "science":
"It is fundamentally impossible to prove anything to be true in reality as we know it. Proof is the domain of maths and logic."
Once you thoroughly understand this, then you will know the limits of science and why people always talk about "falsifying" things: Because like I said earlier "true-ifying" anything is fundamentally impossible in reality as we know it!
It's extremely normal not to believe in the morally twisted, incomplete, politically-charged, with perverse incentives and written in a clickbait language modern scientific journalism.
I am not doubting the unbiased science. But I can't find it almost anywhere.
- Richard Feynman [1]
The problem trusting the "Science" has is that the moment we anoint an institution of people as the holders of truth, we diminish lower-case "science", which is the activity useful for determining truth in an objective way.
When I trust a person, that means, even when I cannot possibly know, I still believe that they are telling the truth.
I tell you the results of an experiment, you say, "ok, prove it," or "I'll see for myself." That's science. The rest is PR and politics.
The royal society's motto: "nullius in verba" = "take nobody's word for it"
but then, there are multiple meanings for "science", and I was only thinking of the method, not the institution or "scientific community", or even the body of knowledge that all get lumped together.
As sabine hossenfelder says.. science doesn't tell you not to pee on electric fences, it just points out that urine is a decent conductor of electricity...
(or words to that effect)
I trust the "best available science"... as a rule. (YMMV)
It's "trust the science more than guessing because at any given moment, it has a much greater chance of giving you useful information than guessing".
Science is the least bad way we have of learning true things (or at least useful approximations of truth) about the world.
Quote from a disillusioned researcher.
"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. (To Bryan) And I think you said you’re going to test that,too. Sounds interesting, right?"
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
Then, later, after asked directly by a reporter if he meant that people should inject disinfectants:
"It wouldn’t be through injections, almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work, but it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object."
Or as the Russians say, "When you see an Uzbek punch him - he'll know why."
"bringing the [powerful surface-sterilising UV] light inside the body" and "injection inside or a cleaning [of, again, powerful surface disinfectant]" is a five-year-old's idea of how stuff works.
And "oh it wouldn't be through injections, almost a cleansing and sterilization of an area" - what does that even _mean_? Clearly just backtracking once people started making fun of how dumb the original statement is.
Science says very little about the things we actually care about.
The purpose of making a 90 year old person live another 2 years, i am not sure we are all pursuing it. Is there a scientific evidence that there is a way for that 90 year old man to live another 2 years? I bet there is. However who said that is a worthy endeavor to invest money and time on?
Well the proponents of the Covid hoax, that's who. However science provides us with an infinity of evidence, that we didn't do even that, in any country.
“ Correlations are a profound part of our universe.
When observing the universe, humans can never prove any facts about the universe. We can only establish correlations. Correlations between events that occur in our universe is the furthest "truth" we can establish about the universe short of a full on proof.
What this means is that nothing in the physical universe can be proven. Proof is the domain of maths and logic, correlations is the domain of science. Science cannot prove anything, it can only establish correlations and causations.
The reason this occurs is because at any time in the future one can observe an event that contradicts a hypothesis. You can hypothesize that all birds have wings and observe 2 trillion birds with wings but you never know when one day you'll observe a bird without wings disproving your entire hypothesis. That is why nothing can be proven, you can only correlate things through observation.
The other interesting part about correlation is what it isn't: Causation. People often talk about how correlation is not causation but people never talk about what causation is and how to establish it. If I can't empirically use correlation to establish causation how on earth is causation ever formally established? People rarely question this disconnect.
The fact is, causation is rarely formally established but a method does exist and it's subtle.
If I observe that whenever Bob flicks a switch the light comes on then I established that the light coming on is correlated with Bob flipping the switch. This is as far as I can go with just observation.
To establish causation I must make myself both an observer and an entity that is part of the system itself. I have to take control and flip the switch randomly and observe that when I don't flip the switch nothing happens and when I do flip the switch the lights come on.
By doing this I establish causation. To establish causation to higher and higher degrees I need to Cause (keyword) random events and make sure that a cause influences an effect AND absence of a cause and therefore absence of an effect occurs.
Also note that establishing causation is not proof. At any point in time in the future I can flip the switch and the light may not come on which is contradictory evidence for causation.
Causation in the statistical sense is like correlation, you establish it to a degree of confidence but you can never Prove A caused B.
Note that there are ways to test causal hypotheses without intervening.
For example, suppose we wish to test the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer via the main mechanism of tar buildup in the lungs, against the alternative hypothesis that smoking is correlated with lung cancer because of a gene that predisposes people to both smoking and lung cancer (this example comes from Judea Pearl’s Book of Why).
If the former hypothesis is true, then we should see a correlation between smoking behavior and tar deposits, and we should also see a correlation between tar deposits and lung cancer even after controlling for smoking behavior. Composing the causal effects at each stage, we can then calculate the indirect causal effect of smoking on lung cancer. If this suffixes to explain the correlation, then that rules out the alternative genetic explanation for the correlation.
Of course, we can always propose ad-hoc further hypotheses that complicate the analysis: maybe the correlation between smoking and tar deposits is itself non-causative, etc.
This only goes to show that scientific inquiry must be done with judgment and with expert domain knowledge, testing plausible hypotheses in good faith. But that’s true for detecting mere correlations too — we can always doubt our instruments, or claim the data is a statistical fluke. And it’s true in randomized controlled trials: it’s conceivable we didn’t properly randomize, for example.
* This (causation as correlation) revelation was highlighted by Hume and this and other work by him had profound influence on Kant (famously awaking him from his "dogmatic slumbers") and scientists like Darwin and Einstein - the latter obviously in a more healthy scientific age when those at the forefront of physics were not so disdainful of philosophers. “
This article is pretty good on the surface, but I wanted to point out that terms the author uses such as “climate change denialism” and “anti-vaxxer” are themselves derogatory terms meant to attack and demean people who question official established scientific narratives. For example, Robert F. Kennedy was recently banned from Instagram for his views on vaccines. It is the mainstream consensus that he is an “anti-vaxxer”, but if you actually read what he writes and watch videos where he talks, all he wants is transparency and accountability for big pharmaceutical companies who have rushed Vaccines to market with minimal testing, have legal indemnity against lawsuits due to emergency use authorizations, and stand to make many billions of dollars in profits. I urge people to read this post from him:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/robert-kenney-jr...
I hope one day we will be able able to speak our minds once again without worrying about the repercussions
see: "Will COVID-19 be evidence-based medicine’s nemesis?" (June 30, 2020)
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
"Once defined in rhetorical but ultimately meaningless terms as “the conscientious, judicious and explicit use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients” [1], evidence-based medicine rests on certain philosophical assumptions: a singular truth, ascertainable through empirical enquiry; a linear logic of causality in which interventions have particular effect sizes; rigour defined primarily in methodological terms (especially, a hierarchy of preferred study designs and tools for detecting bias); and a deconstructive approach to problem-solving (the evidence base is built by answering focused questions, typically framed as ‘PICO’—population-intervention-comparison-outcome) [2].
The trouble with pandemics is that these assumptions rarely hold. A pandemic-sized problem can be framed and contested in multiple ways. Some research questions around COVID-19, most notably relating to drugs and vaccines, are amenable to randomised controlled trials (and where such trials were possible, they were established with impressive speed and efficiency [3, 4]). But many knowledge gaps are broader and cannot be reduced to PICO-style questions. Were care home deaths avoidable [5]? Why did the global supply chain for personal protective equipment break down [6]? What role does health system resilience play in controlling the pandemic [7]? And so on."
...
"It is surely time to turn to a more fit-for-purpose scientific paradigm. Complex adaptive systems theory proposes that precise quantification of particular cause-effect relationships is both impossible (because such relationships are not constant and cannot be meaningfully isolated) and unnecessary (because what matters is what emerges in a particular real-world situation). This paradigm proposes that where multiple factors are interacting in dynamic and unpredictable ways, naturalistic methods and rapid-cycle evaluation are the preferred study design. The 20th-century logic of evidence-based medicine, in which scientists pursued the goals of certainty, predictability and linear causality, remains useful in some circumstances (for example, the drug and vaccine trials referred to above). But at a population and system level, we need to embrace 21st-century epistemology and methods to study how best to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability and non-linear causality"
"In a complex system, the question driving scientific inquiry is not “what is the effect size and is it statistically significant once other variables have been controlled for?” but “does this intervention contribute, along with other factors, to a desirable outcome?”. Multiple interventions might each contribute to an overall beneficial effect through heterogeneous effects on disparate causal pathways, even though none would have a statistically significant impact on any predefined variable [11]. To illuminate such influences, we need to apply research designs that foreground dynamic interactions and emergence. These include in-depth, mixed-method case studies (primary research) and narrative reviews (secondary research) that tease out interconnections and highlight generative causality across the system [16, 17]."
....
"In the current fast-moving pandemic, where the cost of inaction is counted in the grim mortality figures announced daily, implementing new policy interventions in the absence of randomized trial evidence has become both a scientific and moral imperative. Whilst it is hard to predict anything in real time, history will one day tell us whether adherence to “evidence-based practice” helped or hindered the public health response to Covid-19—or whether an apparent slackening of standards to accommodate “practice-based evidence” was ultimately a more effective strategy."
> We might require that they have reasonable arguments concerning the theory or data’s flaws that do not presuppose, as some anti-vaccine arguments do, the existence of a large-scale conspiracy to distort the truth.
Fair enough. Then the _very next sentence_, I read:
> And we would be well within our rights to demand that they argue in good faith and not...as professional water-muddiers, following a playbook first written by cigarette companies attempting to obfuscate a known connection between smoking and cancer.
Wait, we're not allowed to muddy the waters with allegations of conspiracies, and yet, it is admitted that conspiracies exist? I mean, not just the tobacco industry, but HN just discussed a conspiracy by the sugar industry. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183)
I understand that strong allegations require strong evidence. But to say that strong allegations will be dismissed even though the evidence is strong is an admission of being disingenuous.
Also, "science" is the process, not the body of Knowledge or the consensus. (https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/what-science-is/)
On top of that, people will often test only one factor, such as the effectiveness of double masks in blocking aerosols, and then claim that since double masks are better, we should all wear two masks. But that ignores the other factors. In science, _true_ science, all factors matter! (https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/in-science-all-factors-matte...) They matter even if they don't because you _never know_ if they actually matter until you test them.
And to go even further, why in the world should we trust the scientific consensus when in the face of all of the scandals in the scientific community? Besides the outright (admitted) lies, or the failure of "experts" or "scientists" to be apolitical, there are two more scandals: the Replication Crisis and the Retraction Crisis. (https://gavinhoward.com/2019/12/replication-and-retraction-c...)
"Trusting the Science" is not complicated; it's impossible. Trusting the _process_ of science, going so far as to learn statistics, how to read scientific papers, and to test hypotheses for yourself, is hard but not too complicated. And it is what I do.