How the pandemic is changing the norms of science
tabletmag.com
tabletmag.com
I feel like I agree in isolation with almost everything he says (science should share more data, corporations shouldn't be trusted to generate science that affects their bottom line, science is a complicated business with lots of opinions).
But sprinkled into it he seems to be attacking some technocratic elite of pundits and I'm not sure who he's talking about. (There's another article from the same magazine recommended as related that tries to define who these elites are and what they are up to, but if anything I'm less sure what they're talking about after reading it.)
America’s Smug Elite Is Harming Our Kids The push to decouple skepticism from science turns schoolchildren into victims by Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/americas...
Googling smug and elite brings up a lot of weird articles.
edit: found this enlightening:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...
> Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?
So much for "science fiction". In my view, Ioannidis is a person who can't function without data. However, there are many situations in life where one doesn't have data to make a decision. In many cases, there are more than one options for decision making to achieve similar goals. Ioannidis doesn't get it.
However, I simply can't read the article without recognizing the context of its author: John P. Ioannidis.
For those who don't know, Ioannidis was widely criticized early in the pandemic for his studies on the effects of lockdowns [1]. This essay seems, in part, a response to that criticism. But contrary to his writing,
1. He was widely criticized for his work by peer scientists [2], not just the public, not just for the rigour of his work, but also for his personal conduct.
2. He made the choice to share his ideas on Fox news, essentially entering the public debate himself [3], and willingly exposing himself to public scrutiny
3. His work has not been censored. It remains in major scientific journals and is highly-cited! He quotes "organized skepticism" like he just read Merton the night before, acting like it has somehow vanished during the pandemic, and yet his actual scientific work remains firmly within the scholarly discourse, its the public scrutiny that he doesn't like.
So I am not sure exactly what his point is. The "science" seems to be working as well as it ever did, with a wide variety of research and viewpoints being published. Public controversy reaching scientists is its own issue and one that I'm sympathetic towards, but I feel that Ioannidis is a poor spokesperson for this issue, and his personal grievances bleed into his writing.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
[2] https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lan...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioan...
The popularization of science I see as a problem but I guess I see it happening anyway because of dynamics in the scientific community itself. My sense increasingly is that shining a light on things, opening it up to as much transparent scrutiny as possible at this point might be the only way to get out of the problems eventually.
Make the news media more accountable.
People are only given binary options.
People think well for themselves when given the information.
This kind of thinking, that the average person is a moron that shouldn't be allowed to think for themselves, is arrogant and ignorant in itself.
Seeing scientists disagree, debate and use repeatable experiments to settle disagreements could help bring the rational argument back, instead of the current "my science is stronger than your science" style of debate. My 2c.
People LARP as scientists, but they only use that skepticism to avoid expert wisdom. Science is messy, scientists are fallible, and yet it’s better than any other process we’ve got. But people think that fallibility is therefore evidence that the fake certainty of chiropractic alternative medicine or conspiracy theories or woo is better.
I’m not sure it has been a net good at all to teach about skepticism but not going all the way to instill self-skepticism.
What I do see as a critical failure of the current state is the lack of a scientific method to resolve disagreements: the clearly explained methodology, reproducible results, etc. And in the lack of it, the only way to resolve disagreements is to shut down opponents, which also gives rise to a cottage industry of consensus forming and discrediting minority opinions.
Push back to this and return to debating topics on merits would be a great help. My 2c.
In order to do that, there has to be a framework. The framework currently used is a peer reviewed publications. Currently, the disagreements are being settled not based on experiments in but on opinions in mass media, Twitter threads and Facebook posts. That's not the agreed upon framework.
I know that "peer review is fallible" but that's the current agreed upon framework. None of the others are ideal, it's the best we have at the moment unless we come up with another one.
Focusing on reproducibility helps a lot: when one can do an experiment with fruit flies one can see if genetics or lysenkoism better explains the results.
Last but not least, I agree completely with your view that disagreements are solved today on Twitter and FB and this is not good. While somewhat tangential to my main point (focus reproducibility and scientific methodology can remove most other obstacles): given their impact on society and the active role they decided to play means that they should be regulated the same way as other mass media, both for monopoly checks and for responsibility for publishing materials.
Scientific consensus is "when almost all scientists in this speciality believe this" and takes a lot of time to reach.
Scientific consensus also happens via peer reviewed summaries of research in a particular domain.
This is a big flaw in human psychology
Emotion is where cults live, and we have science worshipers that attach themselves to an "Expert" like one would attach themselves to a Cult Leader, instead of being rational actors looking at the data the experts are presenting and using their own rationality and logic to understand the situation
The instinct has always been to hush up any disagreements and present a united front on all matters that the public are interested in, even if this means that the "front" then has to change later as better evidence emerges. But that instinct doesn't actually help - the change in position is seen as "not knowing what they're doing", or "can't get it right". The question is asked "why should we believe you now when this is different from what you said last time?".
Actually having the fight in public would at least show that science is an ongoing discussion and exploration, rather than a fixed set of answers. Of course people will pick sides and favour one argument over another, but they do that anyway. I think the age of allowing scientists to quietly conduct research in academic journals or conferences is over.
My view on this is kind of pessimistic. The mindset of science, based on curiosity, feels to me like a small boat which can only sail when seas are relatively calm. But politics is a storm. The waves are too tall. Maybe the boat just cannot sail in this storm.
> …In March 2021 Ioannidis estimated the global infection fatality rate from COVID-19 at 0.15%, in an article in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation where he also wrote unusual ad hominem criticisms against a co-author of a higher estimate who had criticized his work on Twitter
I thought he made some good points in the OP, and also some weird points.
I think science as actually practiced is a human endeavor in which at it's best the humans involved try to use systems and procedures to neutralize the inevitable biases and interests of the individual humans involved, but this is a goal that we (at best, and we're not always at our best, including lately) approach asymptotically. I think this understanding is compatible with Ioannidis own framework for understanding science, and he'd largely agree with it. I think this perspective tells us that it's not irrelevant to look at the personal context and interests of someone participating in the discourse with an opinion piece like this (unlike Ioannidis famous "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", this piece is an opinion piece, not the report of scientific research. It's true that I could have included the context that he's the author of that well-known-on-HN piece too; I did link to the wikipedia article where anyone can read more).
See also RA Fisher and his bad analysis of smoking and cancer. Fisher was famous enough that his celebrity overrode his terrible analysis during one of the most crucial questions of his time.
Please show a source for that claim about a 3.4% IFR in the IHME. As far as I know, nobody serious ever made such a claim. The serious IFR estimates from very early on were roughly 1% plus minus a little (e.g. the Imperial models were assuming a 0.9% IFR), and it looks like those initial estimates were spot on.
The exception to that is Ioannidis, who early on was claiming that the IFR would be two orders of magnitude lower than that. He predicted there would be only 10k dead in the US when there were 120 deaths. Three weeks later, there were 20k. He staked his reputation on absurd claims, and has been doubling down on borderling fraudulent research since then to support those initial mistakes.
I don't have a cite, but I feel like I remember people suggesting (whether based on something other than their imagination I don't recall) up to 5% IFR if no medical care was received, perhaps because medical system had collapsed under demand?
But in general of course what you say seems right, and I appreciate your well-informed discussion contribution, thanks.
- He calls himself an epidemiologist but is actually a student (no PhD) who has barely published anything.
- The guy's criticisms of Ioannidis' work aren't technically valid.
- He is a columnist at the "American Council of Science and Health" but doesn't report that as a conflict of interest.
Despite this, Ioannidis goes out of his way to say nice things about the tweeter, like "The Twitter account has interesting, smart content with strong advocacy, often supporting worthy causes".
This dispute seems fairly typical of the science world. Things are in one moment totally unacceptable and terrible, like "armchair epidemiologists" commenting on things they aren't specialists in, and in the next moment pointing out some rando on Twitter isn't a qualified epidemiologist is "unusual" and an unacceptable ad hominem attack.
COVID's not the first time such sentiments have been called "science". It might just be the most successful wave yet.
"Scientific skepticism had to be shot" is the comment you get when you try to compare fighting a pandemic with scientifically studying a pandemic. When the firefighters rush in, they will not wait for the fire scientist to first finish all the measurements, write it up, have it peer reviewed, and published. You try to save lives, learning as you go along, that's necessarily messy but the best we have.
Were mistakes made? Surely - but what would have been the alternative? The primary goal was/is to beat COVID and save lives, not to completely understand it before doing something about it.
Also, the disparagement of automotive engineers hits needlessly close to home ;-) -- the simple fact of the matter is that there is a whole field that studies injection, sprays, aerosols. These are experts with decades of experience in how droplets form and propagate through the air. I'm not giving carte blanche, but this seems like knowledge and experience that could be usefully tapped in this case.
That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled. They know exactly what will happen when you do X to a fire and they know how to stop it fast and efficiently. They know what the consequences of spraying water on a fire are and when you won't be able to put one out etc.
It's quite different to run in and say we need to mask, lockdown, close businesses/schools, produce a vaccine and distribute it immediately. Ok why? Are you sure this will save lives? They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction. You can partially justify these things when they didn't know how bad COVID was going to be but then they continued with them for 2 years with very little evidence to back up their decisions. At some point you have to back off and say "hey we don't have a damn clue what the best course of action is". If your fix is worse than the problem you might need to re-evaluate and wait for the actual science on it.
I think people make the assumption that you HAVE to do something immediately when bad things happen, sometimes doing nothing and observing is the better option. There are multiple examples of the choice to do something being worse than doing nothing during this pandemic (e.g. governor sends infected persons into nursing homes) and as time goes on I think we're going to see more fallout from some of these choices.
Yes, the CDC models out pandemic responses in advance between panedmics. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm
One obvious weakness of the options they have to do this is they're preparing for diseases we've seen, not novel diseases we haven't seen yet. But in the case of COVID-19, it's an airborne pathogen so the flu containment protocol was the best tool in the toolbox. Masks, hand-washing, and lockdowns didn't come out of a vacuum; they're part of the standard process (which most people perhaps didn't know because unlike, say, fire-fighting, we don't have regular TV shows about pandemics).
I'd say the science is settled on what the most effective thing was to eliminate COVID: complete and total shut down, as soon as possible: New Zealand has the lowest casualties of any OECD country and held sporting events in full stadiums when the rest of the world was hoarding toilet paper.
Thus as a strategy it's not really a sustainable one at all, but can work at a small level for a short time.
I'm gonna guess that would have been immediately labeled as racist if Trump even suggested that. Oh... wait he did and immediately got labeled racist.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-coronavirus-borders_n_5...
"Trump clearly sees the novel coronavirus as just another foreign invader to keep out — a viewpoint reflected both in his policy proposals and the way he and his administration talk about the virus. This approach is in line with his overarching political strategy of exploiting Americans’ fears to justify racist, nativist policies."
It's actually a good analogy, it just points to exactly the opposite conclusion from the one you drew.
That is not quite true. Where science is not available firefighters go by experience and best guesses. The same goes for cops and even doctors.
Not everything we do has good science behind it. Instead, science is coming pretty often much later, simply because actual science takes a lot of time.
You're being pedantic. I was just using a metaphor to explain we have a lot more data for one thing and it's pretty clear what path needs to be taken in a fire. Yeah it's not 100% but it's much further along than COVID "science".
For this specific fire though? /s
COVID isn't the first Virus in the world. There is a good quantity of science on combatting viruses. Sure, we need to figure out where COVID falls in our overall knowledge of viruses but claiming "They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction." is far from the actual situation.
Science isn't just a game scientists play for fun; the scientific method is the correct method for making inferences and predictions. If you don't have enough information to make a scientifically/probabilistically sound prediction, you can't make an accurate prediction.
Sure the goal is to save lives, but if you don't have a robust, falsifiable and tested scientific model of what you're doing, you have no idea whether it will really save lives or not. For instance, the science suggests that harsh lockdowns did not in fact reduce mortality (did not save lives): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... . They did however contribute to significant excess deaths in under-65s; in Canada's case, more than the number of under-65s that died of covid: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210712/dq210... .
But let's run with your argument for a minute: So what you're arguing is that we should kick out of our hospitals anyone with cancer, ALS, HIV/AIDS, heck, the cold and the flu - because if we don't know how to heal it, we clearly don't have enough data yet. How about letting people drive cars even though we haven't been able to solve 'accidents'?
If you've ever seen the aftermath of a successful large-scale firefighting operation, you know the building is generally left uninhabitable. And this is preferable to the alternative, which is an uninhabitable building full of dead people (or a larger swath of dead people and damaged buildings).
The time to perfect the art of fighting fires is in the downtime between fires. During the fire, you rely on your training and preparation and you act. Not all those actions will be optimal; maybe, in hindsight, you didn't have to crush that wall or hose that room full of artwork. But unlike regular times when cautious action is preferred, neither a fire nor a pandemic will wait patiently while the optimal path to fighting them is found.
First, the truth is being stretched to hyperbolic proportions. Anyone can see it. "The vaccine is 100% effective, and has no complications!" slowly became "It might wear off in five months, and has a cardiac risk."
Second, we are attaching moral judgements to a technical problem. When choosing whether to use NodeJS, Python, or Rust -- there may be a better fit. But if you choose NodeJS, it does not make you a bad person. If you do not get the vaccine, "the science" crowd will label you as a morally bad person.
The emperor is naked, and I'm tired of being told only idiots and bigots say that.
Source? Who claimed this?
> If you do not get the vaccine, "the science" crowd will label you as a morally bad person.
This has nothing to do with the "science" crowd. The vaccine reduces the spread of infection. Infection causes harm. Taking the vaccine reduces the statistical probability of you spreading infection to others, and others suffering the consequences of infection. That's a moral issue.
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1376080062131269634?...
Of course that aside his predictions throughout the pandemic have been consistently terrible and undersold the threat, so I'm honestly not sure why we're still listening to the man.
Another point on the war/science claim in the piece
"When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear. "
It's more than reasonable, on the policy front at least, to treat a real biological agent who is killing your population as an enemy. A pandemic is a state of exception, and countries that acted swiftly, with utmost precaution in mind, dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives. A war is exactly what it is, and treating it like an abstract academic issue to engage in intellectual contrarianism to elevate one's own profile, while being consistently wrong at that, is a good way to lose it.
He also attacked Theranos for their media portrayal and secrecy long before anyone else did. Was that an ad hominem too? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/21109...
> Of course that aside his predictions throughout the pandemic have been consistently terrible and undersold the threat, so I'm honestly not sure why we're still listening to the man.
Now you 're making an ad-hominem too (just like the tweet you linked)
> dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives.
You really can't say that. Years later, with hindsight we ll be able to assess how many lives were lost because of the rampant policy errors all around. The pandemic was in no way optimally handled
Isn't discussing the author's credentials pretty much the definition of an ad hominem? It goes against the person and not the argument the person has made.
If you read the final paper (linked by bergstorm) it doesn't contain any of the excerpts that he screen-shotted. They probably existed in an early preprint of the paper, but they don't exist in the final paper! : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554
There is nothing extraordinary or wrong about people publishing articles while they "hasn't finished their Phd". Having published articles is practically required prior getting Phd. As such, it cant possibly explain anything. What Loanides is doing there is manipulating people who dont know how science works, how Phd is obtained nor know and how publishing works into thinking there is something lesser about author.
In the context of "scientific norms" this is egregiously bad behavior on Loanides side.
It also creates a disastrous precedent for the future, since people will be reconditioned by having engaged in this warlike behavior.
Prove it. I want definitive proof that the measures they took saved more lives than alternative measures that might have been taken.
Of course it's impossible to "prove" which measures had which impact without running the same experiment 10000 times on 10000 different Earths.
But here's almost a (horrible) controlled experiment, as close to an apples-to-apples comparison we'll ever get:
Sweden, famously praised by some U.S. politicians for its non-intervention response to COVID, suffered significantly more both in terms of loss of human lives (10x (!) more people (per 100,000) killed than in neighboring countries), and economically (more , than its direct neighbors:
"Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway."
"Plus, Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%."
"Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
You're cherry picking, and the country you're doing it with is pretty weak evidence.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Here's a fun one. Explain why states with less strict mandates aren't worse.
If you're going to group countries together in an attempt to prove the measures are working you should be able to take that same theory and do it all over the world. Except if you were to do that then it wouldn't up.
So, sure apples-to-apples buddy. Get to explaining why your theory isn't holding up in the rest of the EU or the states.
Fundamentally, due to the urgency of the problem, the certainty / urgency tradeoff has been shifted for this disease specifically; there isn't time to exhaust the space of understanding how masks, hand-washing, etc. impact this virus while people are dying from it right now. A practice that is low-cost and 50/50 likely to help with low chance of harm is worth doing.
This isn't the way we treat most diseases because most diseases aren't this virulent and deadly.
"This is a repository containing an implementation of a blockchain which supports an unique feature set: asserting trust of information organised in JSON documents.
The goal is to have a global public notary service, for people and corporations to issue signed statements which are globally recognized and verifyable, which are identified by a QR code, which the media and news channels can reproduce and which can be verified by the consumers of information (i.e. ordinary people). The vision is to combat fake news by using a thing blockchains are very good at: distributing reliable data, and by providing a low-tech user-centric interface to it, which everyone can use to verify random junk they hear on the media."
If the purpose is to let X make statement Y and prove did X said Y and only Y, there are at least five more prevalent standards to do so ranging from other blockchains to web sites/archiving, DNS records, various archives across the world, etc. We can make the QR example work today with a URL.
All these mechanisms are much more likely to survive longer than the suggested project, and are less subject to Proof-of-work energy waste.
That leaves the voting mechanism, which isn't very useful either - truth isn't subject to majority vote.
Some software engineers seem to walk around with this belief that all of life's problems can be solved through software. It's so strange! No other field has this kind of thought process. Electrical engineers don't immediately start cabling wiring things, mechanical engineers don't fire up CNC lathes at the drop of a hat. Yet here we have a coder who thinks that blockchain will solve everything. That JSON will solve everything!