‘I hope you die’: how the Covid pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists
nature.com
nature.com
I didn't expect, quote
>Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence.
This is disturbing. I am wondering if these reaction are more mixed with political reaction rather than the refusal of science. And interestingly, they are mostly twitter and not Facebook. But currently Facebook gets all the blame.
- Karl Rove
There is a very loud lack of respect from all sides of the equation.
Remove the people with the "useless degrees" and you'd be left with shamans, witch doctors and a pathetic existence that can be ended on a whim by any civilization that kept its own people with the "useless degrees." That is what happened to natives in the Americas when the European touched their shores. Their demise was trivial. Not even with modern WMDs can you wipe off whole populations across whole continents that easy.
So if these people don't like to be treated idiots, they better stop acting like idiots.
There's going to be a VERY angry, VERY desperate underclass that's going to overrun to indolent elite in society if they keep going down this arrogant path.
My interests aren't really in the threats per se, but rather, the hostility towards science.
Do they have poor critical thinking skills?
Why are they so angry about the scientists? Do they consider science some sort of a threat ?
Maybe there is a mental illness at play? Maybe not in the generally angry people, but at least in the minds of the people who actually make the threats. I suppose one may take anti-social action without being mentally ill, just immature.
Fundamentally, I'm curious about how their brains work. By what thought processes do they reach their conclusions?
What I'm personally always worried about is to what extent I might be doing it myself. It stands to reason that these people themselves don't believe they're engaging in unacceptable behavior, after all.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8035125/
They've also been farmed and radicalised by Q-like coordinated anti-vaxxing campaigns which use emotively loaded disinfo to legitimise violent beliefs.
The disinfo includes claims that the vaccine kills children (it doesn't) and causes lasting side effects (it doesn't.)
The combination of emotionally disordered people and lurid claims about a vaccine "threat" promotes violent outcomes.
News from the UK is that an MP was stabbed in his office today. The anti-vaxxers on Twitter seem delighted about this.
If you need an example of long term effects from the vaccine visit the vaccinelonghaulers subreddit. [2]
There are people advocating violence on both sides and we should condemn them both.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dyi...
Lasting side effects: of my girlfriend's friends, 4 of them still have periods that are disrupted or entirely missing months after the vaccine. As far as the establishment is concerned, that's impossible and never happens. Do Not Fear Because The Vaccine Is Perfectly Safe And Definitely Does Not Impact Fertility In Any Way, Citizen. Except it obviously does, and it must be happening at scale, because on the incredibly rare occasions a woman manages to get an article published on this in the news media they invariably seem to mention that it affected both them and many of their friends too.
Your belief that all these sorts of real events we can observe with our own eyes are "disinfo" is dystopian.
> According to one U.S. study that has yet to undergo peer review young males under 20 are up to six times more likely to develop myocarditis after contracting COVID-19 than those who have been vaccinated.
> The Danish Health Authority said it had made the decision even as "heart inflammation is an extremely rare side effect that often has a mild course and goes away on its own".
> Although both vaccines are based on mRNA technology, the Pfizer shot contains 30 micrograms of vaccine per dose compared with 100 micrograms in the Moderna vaccine.
Your belief that "The Nordic countries have removed Moderna from circulation for younger people because it kills them more than COVID does" IS "disinfo", and dystopian in its own right. You are merely proving the point of the original post.
According to Stanford[1], out of 45 of the most influential clinical studies, only 44% were successfully replicated. So there is some truth that just because something is supported by evidence in a clinical study, it doesn't mean that it is factual.
Then these people see politicians using "the science" as an excuse for attacking their livelihood, shutting down their business, or putting their life in danger from what they see as an unsafe product. /r/HermanCainAward exists for similar reasons, those people see antivaxxers as putting their life in danger so their death has to be celebrated. Extremism on either side is a bad thing.
[1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201218#not...
It's essentially the same as religious thinking: Jesus said that lusting after a woman is adultery, so I need to be upset with porn stars for ruining marriages. Tucker Carlson said that my right to go daydrinking without a mask is a core American value, so I need to be upset with doctors for recommending the bar be closed or have distancing/mask mandates in place, and thereby infringing on my liberty.
It's not about thoughtful conclusions, it's about dogma. If you show a Southern Baptist evidence that porn isn't detrimental to marriage, they will just start defending their religious beliefs. The same pattern is happening with anti-mask and anti-vaccine culture.
When the majority population believes in omniscient cosmic puppeteers, how much logic can you really expect?
Some people just cant accept they were wrong. You would not even question whether it is critical thinking, you should be wondering if they are thinking at all. They are basically Sparrows in Game of Thrones, or fanatics.
They see and hear a scientist telling them that they are wrong, and the culturally instilled fragile narcissistic ego -- which overwhelmingly correlates with being white & male -- can't tolerate that injury. They lash out to hurt the person that is threatening their narrative of reality.
In the media and politics, there has been a concerted attack on public trust in science, and it’s working. When science is telling us things we don’t want to hear, things that are hard to change, sometimes people with agendas try to undermine the message in hopes that we don’t affect the economy or have to undertake any costly actions. That effort seems to get getting stronger, and of course when the President participates and publicly calls scientists names, it certainly doesn’t help.
There are quite a few good articles and podcasts covering stories of smart people who went down the Qanon rabbit hole, I think that’d be a great place to start exploring.
Sometimes when you find yourself thinking, maybe lots of people around me are just really, really stupid, it helps to look at analogous situations from other times or places. Do things look different then?
Consider the example of Lysenkoism. It was a strain of thought in the USSR in the 1930s mostly related to biology and agriculture, presented as scientific. And in some ways it was - he made apparently scientific sounding claims about experiments he (claimed he) did around selective breeding, cross breeding of plants etc. But it wasn't actually true and crop yields declined. Unfortunately for ordinary Russians, Lysenkoism became the official biology of the state and all opposition was suppressed. Any scientists who opposed it were censored and "cancelled" (jailed). In its place the media published stories claiming it had led to great harvests in Siberia, and that anyone who opposed it was guilty of "mysticism, obscurantism and backwardness".
Would it have been right for a Russian who knew the truth to threaten Lysenko? Perhaps it's not worth discussing - that would lead to "was it ethical to try and assassinate Hitler" type territory. But at the very least a rejection of it would have been understandable and rational, even though at the time - to someone in the grip of state propaganda - attacks on Lysenko would have seemed like irrational attacks on science itself.
Now you're going to be tempted to argue that people who attacked Soviet biologists and people who attack "COVID scientists" are totally different because obviously COVID science is True, and Soviet agronomy was Not True and therefore there's nothing to learn from it. But we are in the same situation today that the Russians were. Although western media isn't technically state controlled, it might as well be. The media is controlled by people who are extremely loyal to the prevailing state ideology and narrative, to the point that the absurd extremes of media propaganda routinely become memes (let's go brandon!). From within the system it can be hard to tell who is really right, and you should think twice then three times before assuming that you're the one who's got it all figured out.
It is hard to overstate how bad this advice is, and how demonstrative it is of the broken policing system we have in the U.S.
Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide. In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.
All of this is publicly available information, and the cop's advice to someone facing substantial psychological stress was to "get a gun."
We are so, so far away from a sane, functioning public safety system in this country it can be depressing.
It is disingenuous to conflate "gun violence" with suicide.
>In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.
I've never heard of this statistic and I suspect that the relevant literature is an interpretation based on questionable assumptions. Do you have a source?
>We are so, so far away from a sane, functioning public safety system in this country it can be depressing.
Allowing responsible gun ownership is neither insane nor an indication of dysfunction. In fact if you remove a single demographic from gun violence statistics, the US becomes one of the top 5 or so safest nations, in spite of the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.
Usually this group shows up in stats as "gang related crime" or something like that.
Basically it's all the violence that lawful businesses don't need to use to settle business disputes because they can use the courts and threat of state violence to settle their disputes instead whereas the drug industry needs to bring it in-house.
Isn't that a bit disingenuous?
I'd imagine you'd see similar improvement in other countries stats, if you remove the poorest and the drug gangs.
I do not understand this "the proposed solution is either a panacea of don't bother" attitude to major problems in society. The whole point of guns is to make it extremely easy and simple to apply lethal force instantly from a distance onto multiple targets and without any chance of defense. Don't you think that taking that away from practically all attackers improves everyone's chances of surviving an attack?
Gun ownership, self defense, and most importantly, the maintenance of real armed power in the population at large discourages a worse outcome, than the loss of any particular life.
Like, I imagine that my country would the greenest & cleanest in the world, if we would get to disregard all factory and car emissions, from our stats.
And I'd be rightly downvoted for making that claim.
I'm talking about the fact that a person whose ostensible role in society is enforcing laws and ensuring public safety told a psychologically stressed out person facing death threats to take an action that increases their risk of death by suicide by 3x.
This is not a criticism of responsible gun ownership. This is a criticism of the idea that "owning more guns will solve public safety problems," which is demonstrably false.
Did you also remove "a single demographic" from these other nations gun violence statistics?
If you remove the poorest segment of the US population form all statistics, I'm sure the US is going to look a lot better in many ways compared to the full population of other nations.
They were called out separately, and distinctly in their own sentences and one of them had a specific statistic. That is not conflation.
Also, increased monitoring on a vulnerable person with known death threats against them.
Also, if it were available, counseling.
I agree with you on the points about increased monitoring and counseling.
It is legal to carry in California, at least.
Bear spray is pepper spray in a different concentration, and with a different spray pattern. s/bear spray/pepper spray/ if it brings clarity to the recommendation.
So recommend pepper spray. It's less dangerous and more effective.
Bear spray creates a cloud, rather than a stream that must be accurately directed at an assailant (like, e.g. pepper gel). In a situation where the one goal is "escape, alive" bear spray is a reasonable choice for an untrained, likely panicked individual.
You may yet be right! I'm not a self defense professional. But I was not mistaken in my understanding of the products.
Bear spray is also a really crappy choice indoors. Good luck finding your phone and calling 911 in a sufficiently timely manner after that.
Not that this particular police officer gave particularly bad advice, but that this idea - that adding more guns solves public safety problems - is so pervasive and _so wrong_.
All that is completely beside the point though, because none of it is pertinent to whether the advice to get a gun was reasonable.
I suppose for the police officer, solving the problem of "a stranger is making death threats" is to take a proactive defensive measure and arm yourself.
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What if you were to imagine the advise from some sort of other professional? Maybe a social worker who helps victims of domestic violence ?
What other professionals would have good advice to offer the scientist ?
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I did think it odd that the article mentioned the "go get a gun" response. Was the author's intention to drive home the point that the police were unhelpful ?
That sounds like some backwards causality to me. It seems way more likely that people own guns when the likelihood of murderous break ins is high, rather than the idea that the same break in situations are happening and they're just getting into firefights and losing.
A person with a gun may feel like they can "handle" the intruder more than someone who is unarmed. If you're unarmed you may take the less risky action of barricading yourself in a room and calling the police.
I'd imagine that people living in areas more prone to gun violence are also more likely to arm themselves.
>the cop's advice to someone facing substantial psychological stress was to "get a gun."
I don't think it's the worst advice, probably could have been delivered with more tact. Having the means of defense gives one agency and can be reassuring. Instead of lying awake hoping no one breaks in, you now focus on how you'd most effectively detect and stop someone breaking in - you're now a player instead of a victim. That said, responsible gun ownership requires knowledge and training, so probably not the best time to suggest gun ownership for the author.
I'm all for skepticism, but at some point people's willingness to assume that peer reviewed research is flawed in _the most obvious possible way_ and that the researchers made no attempt whatsoever to correct for _the most obvious possible failure mode of their study_ borders on insane.
Do you really think that nobody thought of that before just now?
Nonetheless, there are enough really bad peer reviewed studies out there (which get attention) that it's not insane to willingly assume the worst.
Maybe the reason for this particular brand of reflexive skepticism is not genuine concern about the quality of the research, but an attempt to rationalize their own actions and beliefs without actually doing any introspection or self-examination.
Look at the comment down-thread. Only 44% of a set of highly cited clinical trials had been successfully replicated and 32% appeared to be wrong when replications were done. That's for clinical trials, let alone stuff like social psych! Given a random clinical trial it is in fact pretty reasonable to assume it's wrong, and might even be rational, given that you'd hope highly cited and impactful studies are more likely to be correct than not.
But don't take my word for it. Take it from a former editor of the BMJ:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...
"Science" really is just that terrible, unfortunately.
The average gun owner has not received a death threat.
Few would wince for example, had someone wished an early death to mengele, while many would wish Einstein or Feynman were still around.