Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
royalsociety.org
royalsociety.org
What we can do is delegate the process.
There’s a difference between saying “whatever X says is true, because X said it”, and “I trust what Y says because Y has explained the process and methods of how it was derived, and I don’t have reasonable doubt to assume Y lied”.
- Anthony "I am The Science" Fauci
or
- Dr Malone (mRNA inventor)?
Who to believe?
Difficult to say, but these days, sadly, the first (and prudent) thing to do is to follow the money. While credentials matter, the first thing I check when I read a paper/publication is who funded the work.
Even if the original paper was an unfunded honest mistake, grifters can find a way to profit from spreading it especially if its novel and sensational.
If you can't figure it out, hedging your bets is better than choosing a side.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
Either way, I'm pretty sure Malone's claims about vaccine safety are dangerously wrong. After literally billions of doses of mRNA vaccines, the adverse effects he's been warning about simply haven't materialized. The rate of those effects isn't zero, and surveillance at mass scale has identified adverse effects that the original trials weren't powered to detect; but for now, the risk/benefit ratio for the vaccines looks highly favorable. Malone's baseless assertions otherwise are causing real harm.
That said, please don't take anything above as a defense of Fauci or of censorship. While I'm pretty sure that Malone is dangerously wrong, this pandemic has repeatedly demonstrated that the mainstream consensus can also be dangerously wrong--so like the Royal Society, I'd rather tolerate false information from the contrarians than risk a false mainstream view that can never get corrected. That doesn't mean contrarians are automatically (or even usually) right, though.
"Follow the money" may sometimes be a useful standard, but I don't see the relevance here. Fauci appears to get his money from the government, where he's the single highest-paid employee but still earns less than countless anonymous tech workers. This seems more to me like a matter of prestige, ego and power for both men.
I was thinking more of stuff like the origin of the pandemic. It's far from proven, but I believe it's entirely possible that (a) the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic originated from reckless virological research; (b) if this research continues, then new pandemics will occur by similar means in future, with similar or worse mortality; and (c) the only force likely to prevent that is public outcry against continued funding of such research. For about a year, discussion of this possibility was grounds for a ban from Facebook. It's only thanks to the huge reputational risks taken by a small number of researchers that this topic has now entered the mainstream. Without those few dozen people, we could easily have landed in a world where that topic remained forbidden indefinitely.
Closer to the Malone case, the BMJ published an article alleging improper conduct by a contractor that conducted some of Pfizer's vaccine trials. (For emphasis, they're not saying that any of these allegations, even if true, would mean the vaccine is unsafe. The point is to expose and correct localized procedural failures before they become patient safety failures.) Facebook marked this as "partly false information", and indicated that users who shared the article would see their posts deprioritized. This has been widely publicized, and Facebook hasn't changed its position.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/376/bmj.o95.full.pdf
So if the vaccine were actually dangerous, then would I ever find out? (Again, I strongly believe the vaccine is safe; but I'm asking this hypothetically.) I think I still would for now, because the censorship on the major platforms isn't complete, and I spend enough time on other platforms that they don't have total control anyways. It's not a comforting trend, though.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj0016
Last I checked, Baric still thought a natural origin was more likely; but the point is that he considers an unnatural origin sufficiently likely that an open investigation is required. The FBI assessed with "moderate" confidence that the pandemic had unnatural origin, while some other agencies assessed with "low" confidence that it was natural and the rest declined to judge.
We don't know how the pandemic originated. Nothing is proven in either direction, but mainstream consensus now absolutely includes the possibility that it originated from such a research accident. Your dismissal of that as "FUD and propaganda" now puts you in a position as fringe as the opposite would have been eighteen months ago. From your other comment, I guess you think I should have been censored for entertaining it back then. But given that the mainstream consensus has since changed--apparently without you realizing--do you believe that you should be censored for rejecting it now?
Unless you somehow become our dictator, you are unlikely to find that the censors' arbiter of truth always agrees with you. Specifically on this website, I believe that Paul Graham is our dictator; and from his Twitter account, I'm pretty sure he disagrees with you on this matter:
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396787092726984707
He surely can afford to moderate as strictly as he wants. But he doesn't seem too inclined to censorship, so you got to post your comment. I'm fine with that, among other reasons because it gave me the chance to explain the basis for my beliefs, and possibly change your mind (or that of someone else reading).
As to your link, I assume you're aware that the host and guests on TWiV have advocated for and performed exactly the kind of high-risk research that may have caused this pandemic? That certainly gives them special expertise that deserves attention, but to trust only them on this question is like trusting only Monsanto on herbicide safety.
> mainstream consensus now absolutely includes the possibility...
I don't think this is the case... Your belief is obviously different to Ralph Baric's which is yet different to the belief of those who worked in the Wuhan laboratory.
I.e. the scientific consensus was that it was extremely unlikely, Baric now says that this is less likely than the zoonotic origin, and you say "entirely possible".
You can use the catch-all "includes the possibility" to treat all of them together, but if you had to pick numbers for the probability of the lab leak, you'd likely pick different numbers than Baric or others.
I.e. just because something is not impossible but merely "extremely unlikely" it's still reckless to have our media talk about it in the way it has.
If anything, if the real consensus is that we don't know... The media should not carelessly talk about any hypothesis without also mentioning the others, and why they are more/less likely.
This is not a topic that needs to he hashed and rehashed every few weeks: the consequence of treating this like it has been done, is that now a bunch of people think that the lab peak is what actually happened, and just today I've seen another article which defends Joe Rogan by saying that there's "consensus on the lab leak hypothesis"...
I.e. if there should be censoring about this, both me and you should be censored, for not being concrete and impartial enough.
> I'm pretty sure he disagrees with you on this matter
I'm not sure what this appeal to authority wants to imply. Of course the decision process for how/when to censor it's a delicate one, and ideally left far away from millionaires who think that they are more competent than they actually are.
To clarify, just because a private person owns a platform, it doesn't mean that they should be the only ones to make rules on what contents are allowed. They can make things stricter, but they shouldn't be able to make things laxer by allowing what's otherwise illegal (obviously, that depends on jurisdiction, which is why countries censor websites via DNS or routing)
> I assume you're aware that the host and guests on TWiV have advocated for and performed exactly the kind of high-risk research
The only people who describe this as "high-risk" are also the people who believe in a lab leak being actually what happened
Do you think that EVERY "gain of function" experiment is high risk?
As I said in my previous comment in exactly those words, "We don't know how the pandemic originated". So I'd certainly agree that the media should make that clear. (I mean that as my personal opinion, not a call for censors to force them to.)
Given that we don't know, regardless of whether one thinks a research accident caused the pandemic with p = 0.01 or p = 0.99, I believe that an investigation of all possible causes is required. Ralph Baric and I probably disagree on the exact probabilities, but we agree on the investigation. There are many significant unexplored paths for that, even without the PRC's cooperation, including subpoenas for the records of the WIV's American collaborators.
With millions dead, such an investigation is inevitably political. You'd probably rather the investigation were left to scientific experts, and I would too; but someone has to choose those experts. In a democracy, that job goes to elected politicians. The performance of those politicians is ultimately judged by the voters. Without open discussion, I don't see how the voters could make an informed choice. (I guess the politicians could decide what information the voters deserve to know, and the voters could judge the politicians according to that filtered information; but I assume you see the flaw in that system.)
> I'm not sure what this appeal to authority wants to imply. Of course the decision process for how/when to censor it's a delicate one, and ideally left far away from millionaires who think that they are more competent than they actually are.
I mentioned Paul Graham's beliefs not because they were specially valuable in themselves, but because under present American law, he's probably the person with authority to decide what is censored on this site. If he were inclined to censor, then I don't think he'd decide in your favor.
It seems like you believe American law should be changed, by amending the constitution to eliminate the First Amendment, and the American government should exercise strong powers of censorship over such forums directly. That seems very unlikely to happen. But even if it did, a majority of Americans (including a majority of Democrats) believe not only that an unnatural origin of COVID is possible, but that it's the most likely explanation:
https://www.newsweek.com/most-republicans-democrats-believe-...
So if the American government were censoring, then do you really think they'd be censoring in your favor? If you think stronger government censorship early in the pandemic might have changed public opinion now, then remember that Trump was president at that time. If his government had had that power, then I can't imagine you'd have been pleased with how they used it.
It seems like you're hoping for censorship in the abstract, in service of perfect truth. That can't exist. Censors are humans, and censorship is subject to the same mistakes and corruption as any other human endeavor, especially those affecting the flow of political power. All of this requires human judgment; and once the wrong humans get the job, any apparatus designed to suppress falsehood works just as well to suppress truth.
> Do you think that EVERY "gain of function" experiment is high risk?
Almost any biological experiment involving genetic engineering (or even just culture with artificial selective pressure) may be reasonably anticipated to cause some gain of function. Most such experiments present minimal risk.
The research of concern is the search for deadlier and faster-spreading human potential pandemic pathogens, whether by laboratory gain of function or by collection from nature in areas with minimal other human traffic and thus minimal risk of natural spillover. This was a concern even before this pandemic, and is absolutely a concern even to those who believe that's not the origin of this pandemic:
> “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who coauthored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
Probably yes, especially since the rest of the world still often takes inspiration from what the US does.
But frankly, I don't live in the country in which I was born, and neither of those are the US. It would be enough for the law to be changed in my relevant jurisdictions
and then, if news.ycombinator.com but especially other sites with user generated content (e.g. Facebook) are not compliant, they could just be blocked (forcing me an others to use a VPN, if we'd still want to interact with these sites)
> Censors are humans, and censorship is subject to the same mistakes and corruption as any other human endeavor, especially those affecting the flow of political power. All of this requires human judgment; and once the wrong humans get the job, any apparatus designed to suppress falsehood works just as well to suppress truth.
Definitely true, but not censoring anything is not a neutral decision (just like deciding to censor is not a neutral decision). There are risks either way.
To tie back to your previous point:
> The performance of those politicians is ultimately judged by the voters. Without open discussion, I don't see how the voters could make an informed choice.
But do they make an informed choice, on aggregate?
Are people like Trump and Biden legitimately the best that the US could muster? Isn't this facet of democracy mostly a popularity contest, in which popularity is hugely affected by which claims are most often repeated in the media (and less on the actual compentences, policies espoused and reliability track record of those political figures)?
I think democracy can be achieved in a different way (but this is getting out of topic)
> https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
That's very informative, thank you. I knew about the BSL-{1,2,3,4} rating... But I didn't know that the Wuhan labs were only BSL2
I'll look up more info now, but this is definitely something that should be addressed (and I'd be surprised if something hasn't been done about it already)
Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...
> Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
I'm not sure what you think is addressed there? In that interview, Dr. Shi confirms that they were working with bat coronaviruses at BSL-2. Various papers published by her group before the pandemic also confirm this. They also had a BSL-4 lab for animal experiments, but experiments on the viruses in cultured cells were continuing at BSL-2. That's what Lipkin thought was "screwed up" (i.e., presented an unacceptable risk, regardless of whether it actually caused this pandemic).
As far as we know, all of Dr. Shi's work was performed in compliance with her institution's safety standards. The question is whether those safety standards were adequate, though--her standards were already a step below Ralph Baric's, and long before this pandemic academics like David Relman thought Baric's experiments were at or beyond the edge of acceptable risk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
Baric and the WIV later submitted a proposal to perform exactly the same kind of research as in Relman's hypothetical, not with SARS-1 and MERS but with novel bat viruses collected by the WIV:
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
> “We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.
That proposal was rejected by the American government for safety reasons, but there's no way to know what work continued in the WIV with other funders.
I don't. I think it's reckless to tolerate contrarian information (and in fact, it's causing a much higher death toll during this pandemic) in public.
I agree that specialists should still be allowed to discuss contrarian information, via papers, peer review and the overall scientific process.
But should Software Engineers (like most of us here) really be warranted a platform, a listening audience on their ideas about virology?
Implying that anyone has to have expert knowledge.
> I trust what Y says because Y has explained the process and methods of how it was derived, ...
Doesn't that directly contravene what you said before?
> ... and I don’t have reasonable doubt to assume Y lied”.
Completely different issue, same problem though. Reformulated by sylogism, you are basicly saying "I trust that I don't have reasonable doubt, because we can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment.", which is really a definition for what you might consider reasonable. It's a recursive definition at second order when "What expert X says is true, because they do not have reasonable doubt. They sometimes have to rely on other people. We can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment." Whereby the default case for the recursion is "I don't trust X, because Y said they's an ass" or something like that where being an arse can come in many coloures.
When it comes to complex scientific decisions with significant impacts on the public, nuanced and detailed justifications are required. Instead, we often get simple declarations written by PR departments at juvenile reading level. This spawns chaotic and poorly conducted debate in all walks of life.
What is required is a robust and transparent framework for honest analyses of topics. For example, if the CDC has a specific recommendation, They should provide an outline of the arguments, counter-arguments, assumptions, and supporting data for each part.
It seems that the status quo is to completely ignore any arguments against a given recommendation. This suffocates any honest discussion in the crib. It also suggests to some that the justifications are not robust enough to survive the light of day. If you cant show your work, people will be skeptical that you did it all.
This is applicable to any science based public policy, but especially obvious to covid policy.
How can you have scientific communication without nuance? We know nuanced discussions can't happen at scale. Is this even solvable?
I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?
This is what I am getting at. If we claim these decisions are science based, communicate the science! e.g. if X% more people are vaccinated, we will have Y more hospital beds, and Z more elected procedures. make an honest calculation, show the work, and stand behind it.
But the problem there is you are not asking for nuance, you are asking for.. lies? The answer is that more vaccination means more hospital beds and elective procedures but no one could credibly argue any specific numbers - it was just not possible to make that calculation without enormous error bars, you can only make the nuanced argument that vaccination produces reduced case counts and hospitalization, and that the public has to understand that this will allow for better services against an unvaccinated baseline. The good news is that a huge majority of people do understand that!
Alternatively, if you haven't done the math, or it doesn't actually support a robust position, say :"This is not a scientific argument, be we are really hoping this helps. no promises"
If you think of it as (1), you see failures in scientific communication.
If you think of it as (2), you see an authority expecting to be obeyed.
In some countries we will see mandates without any perspective. For the third dosage? The fourth? The opposition is correct when it says you only get your freedom back if you boot out those responsible for this in the first place. No politician comes out and admits mistakes, not even in democracies.
People talk as if a political and a scientific opinion are equivalent. That is obviously not the case most of the time.
If you want to someone to take an action, tell them specifically what they have to gain, dont just provide some general platitude that it is good for you.
If you want someone to get boosted, say you have X% reduced chance of death and Y% hospitalization. Make an honest calculation and keep it up to date.
If the data doesn't exist, we have much bigger problems.
So you have one group of people literally scared to death and that’s why they take the vaccine, and another group seeing other data that makes them say “I’ll take my chances”
Honestly I only trust the CDC because I have the knowledge and capacity to verify what they say and ignore the bullshit. A lot of people don't have that. And there is bullshit to filter.
The message to the public, assuming the CDC is interested in actually convincing people, needs a simple path forward individuals can take to get said individuals something they want, even if it taps into a selfish motivation and isn't 1000% technically optimal. (i.e. Get vaccinated and the mask requirements go away). And it should be repeated in every statement, regardless of new data. It should have been consistent for the past 2 years. It should have a catchy slogan. It should be on fucking billboards. People would still bitch and grumble, and some would never be convinced. But we'd probably have more people vaccinated if that approach had been taken. Instead we confused people and handed ammo to the anti-vaxxers by the truckload, relying on peoples' better natures and assuming a higher average level of education than actually exists in the American populace.
In short the CDC should optimize for leadership and "good enough" solutions, not strict scientific accuracy and trying to save each and every life in their public statements. Publish the hard science/raw data in more obscure releases that only scientists will care about. And they need a better front person than Fauci. Fauci just radiates highly-credentialed-beltway-insider arrogance however nice he tries to sound and however right he may be.
Of course you could argue such a role should be the place of the executive, and the CDC was trying to fill the gap left by a largely absent Trump administration, and by the time the Biden admin took over Fauci's position as front-man/leadership was already too solidified. Maybe so, but the CDC and public institutions in general have failed the task of public leadership, although thankfully have had success in logistics/vaccine development.
This type of PR will not work with a modern information infrastructure anymore or at least significantly less effective.
> handed ammo to the anti-vaxxers by the truckload
It is a stupid image of an enemy and policy was crafted with a steady look on these groups. That is a mistake in leadership if there is one. You have provided them with legitimacy without anything for you to gain. A complete waste for nothing and you elevated your opposition without benefit to you. That is neither competent leadership nor politics. Figuratively not looking them in the eye would be better. They are beneath you and don't even warrant attention. Few politicians would have even used the term, at least the smart ones.
That said, since I oppose mandatory vaccination I am an anti-vaxxer myself in the eyes of many.
I explained this fairly simply but the message didn't get through (to a reasonably intelligent person) and they thought I was saying the complete opposite of what I was saying. Instead, they are insisting on continued PCR tests (for "more data" even though I have a doctor's note saying to use antigen tests.
In your case, wouldn't it be helpful to have a a recognized stand reference you could just point them to and let them read, instead of having to explain it and point to some random web page faq that they may not trust?
If I detected you were being condescending I would do exactly this. Mostly to piss you off for thinking you’re better / smarter than me. You may know more than this staff member on this subject but there’s an appropriate way to explain things. Assuming from the get go they’re too stupid / uneducated is offensive.
Whether you communicate, or do without communicating, there needs to be accountability.
When there's no accountability, it boils down to power games, which is what we've always had, because as soon as you start playing accountability, you have to justify why you have power and I don't, and that makes people in power extremely nervous, because most of them are really not that bright and any requirement to use rationality exposes it all too clearly.
Maybe one mitigation is to make public figure / media accountable to the avoidable damage their speech end up causing? E.g., if I listen to your anti-vax radio program and consequently decide not to get vaccinated, before catching the disease and dying, then my family can sue you for damage as long as it can established that you have purposefully misled / failed to assess the potential harm.
After a few class-action lawsuits like this, public figure & media will probably be more careful when they want to spread misinformation.
The leaked Collins and Fauci emails show there was a deliberate decision to trade truth for control of the narrative. [0]
This isn't incompetence or messaging being too simple. This is a failure of philosophy: that of "noble lies".
Much of our leaders behaviors can be explained through this lens.
Masking, natural immunity, lab leak, etc.
At every turn, the facts were skewed and skeptics were penalized in order to railroad everyone into vaccination.
The failure is that the people in charge don't see this line of action as a failure, but rather a necessary evil. A means to an end.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/reps-comer-jordan-expose-fauci-160210...
But its still "upstream" from communication. Philosophy informs action.
Your original point is that our leaders need to get better at communicating nuanced issues. That's a non-starter if the people in charge see nuance as an obstacle and straight up adopt an anti-nuance attitude.
My point is, they're bad at communicating nuance in the way that a bulldozer is bad at building a house. It just wasn't their mission. And that didn't become obvious until after these emails were leaked.
Listen to Lux Friedman - episode 254 with jay who professor the medical department at Stanford. It’s entitled the case against lockdowns.
‘ Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.’
-Bertrand Russell
Edit: lol, little disinformation quip of my own. He’s just a professor, doesn’t head the department after a quick google search.
However, the way the quote ends paints a slightly different picture:
`The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine.`
Also, the reason i left the rest of the quote out is it takes away from his argument because despite the fact of him writing an entire treaty on revolutionary thought, he didn't seem to study most of the 'Revolutions' that occured from those thoughts. You can replace 'The doctrine of __x' with anything in the sentence and it would have range true historically. when the Tzar of russia decided that liberalism was needed in the late 1800's, the more people he freed the more those people who were freed swung further and further left until everyone was screaming some kind of collecive anarchism forwarded by bakunin and the Tzar was assassinated.
We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time.
So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc.
We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Because when we start to doubt them, we then inevitably elect alternative bodies, simply due to limited thinking capacity/time - as explained above it's impossible to do otherwise, no-one derives from first principles every opinion they hold.
The best way, _overall_, to convince someone to do something, is by clearly explaining to them the positives and negatives and letting them come to their own conclusion.
It doesn't always work, and there are specific situations (e.g. someone is holding a gun to your face) in which the cost/benefit analysis is very different - in such a situation, the short term is all that exists, the long term effect of misplaced trust is irrelevant - you simply have to neutralize them.
But in general, I'm absolutely sure that education over coercion is the correct approach for society.
Because if you force them, sure, you've got a short term win, at the long term cost of trust. What is the long term cost of lost trust?
(... And that's assuming it can be provided without being shut down as "indoctrination").
Loads of people are well aware that wearing a mask would result in less coronavirus particles being emitted from my face if they were infected.
But they don't act on that for various other reasons unrelated to the virus.
The same is true of climate change. You can think that it's real and still drive your car for precisely the same reason that you can think that cirrhosis is real and still drink a few beers.
This part is a huge society-wide problem that can theoretically be fixed so people can become more informed and active participants in the framework of their daily lives. Don’t ask me how, though, because I just got off work and am too exhausted to do anything except let the news tell me what to be afraid of today, then probably binge The Office and slam a few brewskis until I fall asleep on my couch ‘cause I got work again tomorrow
You have to trust yourself to try anyway. Beats doomscrolling even if both are equally meaningless in the long run. Something that helps me is refusing to accept any narrative or conclusion about any topic where it would require a specific named group of people (e.g. members of any nationality, profession, corporation, ancestry, presentation, etc — anything) to be uniformly dumb or malicious.
That might sound silly but it means there’s no downside to entertaining any consideration, not even the downside of my own bad feelings from negative ideas. It totally removes a layer of mental latency I didn’t even realize I had until recently, even about topics where that wouldn’t ever be a question that’s possible to ask.
Instead of getting bogged down checking one story after another it’s easier to ignore entire storyline arcs at a time once they’re more obviously one set of jangling keys after another all vying for my attention at a higher priority than any self-directed interests :)
They lie and then act incensed when the public stops believing them. Given the massive damage they've done, I'd consider it justified.
The CDC is an incompetent, bloated and fundamentally dishonest organization that was perfectly comfortable throwing grandma to the wolves via lies (masks don't work!) if it meant their unpreparedness wasn't exposed.
Via anti-masking lies, CDC irreparably damaged their reputation and also likely got people killed who believed them. The damage is deserved.
Still, I don't share the distrust of a lot of folks regarding their policies and decisions over the last year or so. I think they're probably making reasonable calls for the available evidence even if hindsight eventually proves them wrong. To the extent their critics are correct, I think most will have arrived at their conclusions as a matter of luck (e.g., someone who knows nothing of virology happens to hear some study or other that hints that the CDC may be wrong and bases their entire worldview on that study without any awareness of the counter evidence).
What caused that trust to be lost? Is it something they did?
Over and over again those with authority have squandered it. An opioid epidemic devastated so many communities after doctors, health care executives, and McKinsey and Company said the new class of drugs were non-addicting. Our manufacturing sector evaporated after economists and politicians said free trade would benefit everyone. Thousands of young people were sent to die in the Middle East in a war all the experts said was necessary and would be relatively painless.
Those are just the first three examples off the top of my head. I could keep going. We were promised technology would improve our lives. We were promised borrowing money for education would improve our lives. And on and on and on.
All bullshit. All promulgated by supposed experts with impeccable credentials. It’s a full on disaster and the chickens have come home to roost.
Just to clarify, many experts from generals to peacenik linguists to gonzo journalists predicted immediately that the wars would be an expensive and unwinnable series of atrocities. They weren't given airtime.
But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.
- https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/15/20849072/...
> [Biden] was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position.
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-bi...
More?
> Iraq in 2002 was devastated by economic sanctions, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was known by even the most pro-war experts to have no missiles that could come close to the United States. The idea that this country on the other side of the world posed a security threat to America was more than far-fetched. The idea that the US could simply invade, topple the government, and take over the country without provoking enormous violence was also implausible. It’s not clear how anyone with foreign policy experience and expertise could have believed these ideas.
> Senator Dick Durbin, who sat on the Senate intelligence committee at the time, was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said.
- Also from the Guardian link.
And that's just war. We were lied to about sugar; about margarine, about recycling, about oil spills, about agricultural pollution, about public transport. We were lied to about trade, espionage, healthcare. Repeatedly, barefacedly. Lies are the most bipartisan issue in America.
In the face of all this, we're told the enemy is distrust itself, told to trust the science, told to believe that Biden and the Dems are fighting for us. We're told anti-war news outlets and comedians are secretly communist, Russian funded. It's all such utter wank.
I think a good analysis of the history and changing landscape of media is highly in order if we want to get to the bottom of this.
As for me, I like to remind people of Operation Mockingbird quite a bit lately, and rest assured the name just got changed after the Church Committee and given the explosion of the internet they are certainly extremely pervasive in the new system.
As CIA director William Casey said: "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
Nobody takes note of the hundreds of life improving drugs developed in the same time period as opioid epidemic. Nobody takes note when cops arrest the right guy and saved the day. Nobody takes note when a country doesn't militarily threaten or invade the US.
Note well: I'm not actually a consequentialist. I'm just pointing out what "for success" actually means, at least some of the time.
We don't allow nonconsentual body snachers to harvest one person to save many. Alternatively we may allocate finite funds to save several lives instead of a single life. We may also choose not to spend the money to save a life
The outrage economy tends to focus on people and interpersonal drama. Some comedian said this, or maybe some company did something stupid and there’s a walkout.
If anything there’s a massive shortage of outrage. Given the degree of misery the entrenched elite is inflicting on the masses, the fact that we don’t have a general strike or torch wielding mobs swarming over the gates of billionaire’s houses is frankly astonishing.
It’s a struggle between the masses and the ruling class about who gets to make decisions in our society, not like lunch meeting where we can find common sense action items to agree on.
I don't think outrage changes minds, just engages your base. It also encourages the working masses to lash out at each other. Most outrage topics serve mostly to pit the masses against each other, based on skin color, gender, or who has bigger scraps from the economic table.
If you want real change, the solutions are relatively simple IMHO. Ranked choice voting, proportional representation in senate and congress, and less winner take all closer to a Parliament.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arkansas-inmates-ivermectin-fed...
Hmm. I wonder how we got there...[1]
The other one that pops to mind is probably statistical calculation helping services.
Maybe there are lots of other things as well - I haven't been involved with scientific research in a long time.
A theoretical climate change example might be:
Car A emits 10% less CO2 than car B.
Driving is 30% of your annual emissions (i.e. it's significant and one of the low hanging fruit).
That 30% of your annual emissions if multiplied by 7 billion people is likely to cause X.
If everyone drives car B instead of car A, Y will happen instead.
Y is better than X, because we end up with a more verdant Earth, cheaper food, better weather, less war (insert reason here).
Therefore, our overall quality of life is higher if we switch to car A.
Without the whole information chain, you just have isolated statistics that don't really mean anything.
Convincing argumentation is not only about mathematics, it's about appealing to the things that matter to people.
The problem is that while it's easy to calculate exactly how much less CO2 car A emits than car B, it is close to impossible to use science to predict to any useful degree of accuracy how much cheaper the food, better the weather, or less of the war we will get. It's often hard to even predict the sign, not even trying to determine the magnitude. This means that when scientists or politicians tell you that "we need to do X, so that we get Y", they're very often fooling you, because they have no good idea how much (if any) Y you get for each unit of X.
We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This way people would trust the results.
If you ask anyone who was senior working in these institutions in the 1970s, things were far more dodgy back then.
Corruption and bigotry were rampant. But it was far easier to cover up back in the day.
Politicization is mostly driven by transparency.
Politicization is not a new thing, it's a fact that there's a lot of extremely conservative individuals in each country. And technology has bought them closer to their institutions.
Society is being brought very closely together, and we're working through the teething issues.
It is wild how people think things like institutional bigotry aren't politics. How is a scientific organization that excludes large swaths of the population due purely to the circumstances of their birth apolitical? Science has always been political because politics is how people interact with each other. That is true whether we are discussing how governments behave on the world stage or how that big project is being managed at your job. Wherever people exist, politics exists.
But, if we acknowledge that was true then – why shouldn't we expect the same to be true now? The prevailing prejudices and ideologies may have changed, but has anything changed about the actual practice of science to make it more immune to those forces? I think a lot of people can't see it, because it is far easier to see when science is being influenced by beliefs you reject than when it is being influenced by beliefs you yourself share.
I think the politicisation of science is inevitable, and science is never going to be entirely politically neutral. Scientists are human beings, and as Aristotle famously said, "man is a political animal". I think science is going to achieve the maximum possible political neutrality when it is either (a) things so clearly established no one can sensibly debate them (which especially happens when scientific theories get translated into widely adopted working technologies–the very fact that the technology works is proof the theories behind it must be mostly correct); (b) things that avoid political entanglements because they have little relevance to everyday human life (e.g. string theory vs loop quantum gravity isn't influenced by broader societal politics because it has no relevance to issues of social/cultural/economic/political power, although even it is surely influenced by the micro-politics of the theoretical physics community, its funding models, etc.)
Take something like human-induced climate change – personally, I accept the mainstream account of that topic as most likely to be correct, but I can't be completely sure that it is right, surely there is some non-zero probability (even if a small one) that it is wrong. But, I expect people in a couple of centuries from now will be able to reach a much firmer consensus – they'll know whose predictions turned out to be right, plus technological and economic developments will likely greatly reduce the number of people with a vested economic interest in the non-mainstream answer. I think the most likely outcome will be that the mainstream account will be vindicated, and almost everyone will acknowledge that the minority were wrong; but it isn't absolutely impossible that it could turn out the other way around. And whichever way it turns out, I think people will see politics as having played a major role – if the mainstream account is confirmed, people will see much of the opposing minority as being led astray by politics; but, conversely, if the sceptical minority turn out to have been right all along, people will reach the same conclusion with respect to today's mainstream.
Compare now to ten years ago, before me too. Things are hugely different.
I fully expect that if you give it a long time, things will be markedly better. In a hundred years for example.
Perceptions of progress seem to depend a lot on (a) where in the world you are, (b) what things you value, (c) whether you choose to optimistically focus on the positive developments (from the viewpoint of your own values) or pessimistically focus on the negative.
Even if we agree that certain forms of progress are occurring, do those various forms of progress necessarily entail scientific progress? I think, the only form of progress which necessarily entails scientific progress is technological progress – but even for that, some scientific fields have much greater technological relevance than others, continuing technological progress requires continuing scientific progress in technologically-relevant fields, yet is compatible with going backwards in areas of science which lack direct technological application.
Getting physics and chemistry right is really essential to technological progress. How can technology advance if your physics and chemistry are wrong?
But, what about "softer" sciences, such as psychology or the social sciences? It seems you could be moving in the complete wrong direction with them, and yet still be advancing technologically – because technology largely doesn't depend on them.
And even for the "hard sciences", technology generally only depends on certain areas of them. How much of the Standard Model of physics is actually technologically relevant? Technological progress is strong evidence you've got the technologically-relevant parts of physics right, but is compatible with serious error in low technological-relevance areas. What is the technological relevance of electroweak unification, for example?
We also don't know what we are missing out on. Neuroscience is an area of biological research in which many promises of clinical translation have thus far failed to deliver. Is that because this the brain is very complicated, and we just have to wait longer and invest more before we see more results? Or could it be that we are doing the science wrong, and we'd clinically be in a much better situation now if we were doing it right? How can one tell which of those two possible situations we are actually in?
Why say "in the past"? Do you think it's not now?
How are you using “conservative” here? The right certainly has no monopoly politicizing science.
It's not like the medical system was a highly trusted and respected institution that politicians somehow undermined in the last few months. The lost of trust in the medical system has been literally over 150 years in the making. If you read some books on the history of the rise of homeopathy in the United States in the mid 1800s, the parallels with today aren't exactly subtle.
Tell an algorithm to optimize for engagement and it will promote the content causing the most engagement: novelty, conspiracy theory, outrage, surprising "revelations" and all sorts of clickbait.
If we removed Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok and reverted YouTube to the pre-algorithmic (subscription based) era, we'd still have free speech on the internet but probably a lot less bullshit.
Note: Twitter would still promote bullshit even without a ML algorithm. The rules of engagement:
- short content
- individual popularity means content popularity
- retweeting is instant, requires no critical thought
Technology is supposed to compensate for our failings, not exaggerate them to the extreme.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/michelle-shock...
The Clown Timeline might have been the last Cold-War era weapon, a doomsday weapon.
"You were -too cautious- about that new disease that was killing everybody in 1985" feels more like a dark joke than a serious claim. Everybody was shocked when Rock Hudson died in 1985.
History repeats itself.
There is nothing organic about the speech that happens on YouTube. Veritasium explains the shift that happened when youtube switched to an algorithmic model from the subscriber model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 - you need to carefully manipulate people to click your thumbnail based on the picture and the video title.
Making outrageous but believable shit up to sensationalize your content is a well known tactic of tabloids (which does continue today to some extent). YouTube and other social media incentivise exactly that.
The particular platform that has these characteristics is arbitrary and beside the point. No one is arguing that Tik Toks particular implementation of a short form engagement optimizing feed is dangerous.
A big part of the anti-vaxx movement comes from the fact that the government have made it very clear they will lie and misrepresent data whenever it is politically advantageous for them.
If you want a very recent exemple, just look at this interview from someone very high up in the food chain at Bayer (youtube.com/watch?v=qowDwaYx7vI) and then try googling about whether or not mRNA is gene therapy. it was considered dangerous misinformation to say what he just did and yet he is overseeing the fabrication of covid vaccines.
It's far from the best example, but it's one where I won't have to waste an hour getting proper sources
However, even if it delivers to you true information about abuses and lies being told to you, you should still be aware that the system is doing this so that you will be outraged, rather than that you will be informed.
Here the exec is stretching the definition of the term gene therapy to include things that don't alter genes "mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy". He basically makes a mistake, because the same platform is also used for gene therapy.
To use a software analogy, just because both mRNA vaccines and mRNA gene therapies are software, doesn't mean that mRNA vaccines perform system updates (instead they trip the suspicious behavior detection of the anti-virus and trigger a download for new virus definition files).
Additional subtle distortion happens later on social media when people take this mistake and "shrink" it in the opposite direction "actually mRNA vaccines are NOT vaccines because they're gene therapy".
Joe Rogan then takes that and stretches it further to imply this is why the vaccines don't last long
> This is really gene therapy. It's a different thing. It’s tricking your body into producing spike protein and making these antibodies for COVID. But it’s only good for a few months, they’re finding out now. The efficacy wanes after five or six months. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t take it. But I’m saying, you’re calling it a thing that it’s not. It’s not exactly what you’re saying it is, and you’re mandating people take it
Sinopharm makes a COVID vaccine from dead / inactivated virus. Its used widely in China as well as in the developing world. We've also seen the same reduced antibody neutralisation there, and it isn't necessarily because of the passage of time but to a large extent due to the evolution of the virus to be significantly different from the original.
So yeah, this is a perfect example of how social media spreads engaging novelty - whether its deliberate disinformation or simply mistakes - and continues to distort it further by continuously applying stretching and shrinking. The info blob continues to evolve to evade people's "immune defences" and cause them to re-share it (e.g. retweet).
This is not something new, traditional media have been doing it for decades ever since the rise of the yellow press, with varying levels of subtlety. The difference is that this here is an "organic", crowdsourced process that yields better, more convincing results, as it has to defeat the "immune systems" of many people to get a good reach via resharing. Only the highest quality misinformation makes it through.
The worst bit about this phenomenon is that corrections don't work well. People who haven't heard the rumor don't care about the correction (its not interesting) so they don't share it. People that have heard the rumor before don't like being wrong, so they don't share it either. So it doesn't matter how many scientists explain the difference, the explanation will never have anywhere close to the reach of the original (likely hundreds of millions of people)
That absolutely will never happen as long as the funding comes from the government.
The best you could possibly achieve is funding purely through small time (non business) donations from the public - and I'm still a little skeptical as to the scope of research that could realistically fund.
Of course it would. Whoever pays the piper always calls the tune.
It's no surprise that NPR and PBS advocate for the government point of view.
What I'm talking about is removing micromanagement and ensuring that the institution is trusted.
Historically, scientists either were well-off and independent (e.g. Ulug beg, Newton, Cavendish), or worked at the expense of very rich personal patrons (e.g. Tycho). This limited the number of potential scientists, and the amount of science done, quite drastically.
In 18th-20th centuries it was somehow overcome, when partly states, partly industries gave more scientists more resources. By mid-20th century, the system started to develop cracks, as science became increasingly driven by formal metrics, such as impactful publications. The metrics are actively gamed, but worse, since science is unpredictable, honestly checking everything and building a picture of reality became a worse strategy than going for a flashy if more weakly researched result.
I don't know a good way out of the current trap.
Research is a high stakes, high rewards type of game. You need to pursue many potential ways forward, and most likely only one will win.
Rewarding short term wins makes academia no different from industry, and prevents finding anything but the local maxima.
Social media just put some gas on a fire with engagement optimization. The rest was just human nature.
Given the level scientific institutions have been spending trust over the past few years I'm not sure how this problem can be alleviated within our current framework.
So what happens when you present a video testimonial like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ - and people just dismiss it, people not understanding that with clinical trials you're meant to keep track of and report all outcomes, and not only that - by limiting the scope via an app that has limited options, and no free form input, you're crafting a very narrow scope of outcome, literally doctoring the outcome by minimizing the potential range and severity of adverse events? (If the people even watch the video or understand the implications of what Maddie's mother has shared; and if not, then you're not able to educate or inform them further - probably because it's a counter-mainstream narrative point, arguably the mainstream and government captured, regulatory capture from industrial complexes, etc)
Does the video described build or harm trust of our institutions? Does that this happened with this clinical trial, does that not automatically extrapolate that all of the other clinical trials were ignored, not given proper oversight, nor having integrity to them?
Skepticism of any claims is a pretty good heuristic, but should be equally applied to counter claims.
Everyone would agree that a person wandering around the street firing live rounds into targets is acting in a dangerous manner.
No-one would agree that a person drinking a cup of tea in their own house is acting in a dangerous manner.
But coronavirus isn't one of those things. It's genuinely a borderline issue, and not because of the science, but because it's almost exactly on the line in which some people consider it to be a disaster and others consider it to be a bit of a nothing burger.
As a result, you end up in a situation as described by rgrieselhuber below.
Some people think that we need to close (e.g.) schools to stop coronavirus. Other people think that we need to stop caring so much about coronavirus, so that we can go to (e.g.) school.
The question of whether there's misinformation is almost tangential to the point because there are huge numbers of people who do not doubt official statistics or modelling but also believe that data or those models are not severe enough to require us to 'stop the world' so to speak.
I guess my thoughts are that, if we can't even convince each other (and from what I can tell neither of us have really fallen for misinformation), what hope is there for the actual 'vaccines cause 5g' nutjobs?
What does this have to do with the price of fish?
Moreover, it's not just about the media's coverage of COVID or the moon landing, but about their overall credibility during the prior decade. For example, the media has reliably and brazenly lied and mislead on racial justice protests from ~2014 through 2020, which almost certainly affects its credibility on other issues (e.g., covid). Of course, the same applies to the academy and other institutions.
Why do you assume that the financial incentive is for the truth rather than for the conspiracy theory?
But do you not see how this will result in conspiracy theories? You are no longer engaging with the merits of a study and are instead questioning the motivations and source behind that study. You are shifting from a more objective argument to a more subjective one allow more room for conspiracy theories.
>Collusion is very real when billions of dollars are on the line and it is naive to assume otherwise.
Yes, which is why "do your own research" is often misleading because those billions of dollars have greatly impacted what research is available to you.
It’s fundamentally an epistemological question: what is the ontological basis for thinking we know something?
Once again this is thinking that doesn't go beyond the first layer. If this situation is possible for the first link, it is possible for the second and the third and everything on the first 5 pages. However deep this hypothetical researcher is willing to go, if there are enough billions at stake the manipulator can keep pumping out misinformation. They have a financial incentive to lie and no one has a strong financial incentive for truth so how does this researcher find the needle of truth in the haystack of lies?
This is basically "fact checking". In theory it's good, but it inevitably degrades into a farce with stuff like [1] or [2].
If however fact checkers were a pain in the butt for mainstream media and politicians as well they would be much easier to listen to.
Unfortunately "bad science" cuts both ways when it comes to miscommunication.
Do you think 'scientific research' is in a great position from a funding perspective right now?
Have you looked at the press or out the window as to how "science" is portrayed due to covid? The lack of sanity in both political directions is alarming and depressing all at the same. Both sides of the public on this are both, equally, damagingly, wrong. However, they pick up and throw around scientific papers as though it gives them the right to be the next pope...
If science is paraded around like nonsense in the press there's a matter of time until we end up with politicians who make the decisions sit there and say "I don't see any public benefit in researching this".
That day will only come sooner if things carry on as we head into a recession.
Edit: My proposal to fix, as I've suggested elsewhere, keep scientific papers behind some (non-for-profit) walled access, obviously that has damaging impacts when you say X from country Y can't read paper on Z, but frankly maybe the public isn't grown up enough for completely open discourse when they can't understand the material.
I’m not sure that has anything to do with “science”.
I think the problem could be "science communication", not bad communication or anything like that, but the existence of it in general. There's a casual interest in scientific stuff in the public, there's an entertainment market for it, and so now we have a scenario where people that publish research have to weigh this impact when publishing, including it's benefits. But most people interested are only casually interested (and most vendors of the entertainment have incentives not necessarily aligned with presenting fact, but that's not my point, only a secondary problem). I think it's possible that it might be better if, when someone was interested in something, they had to dig it up online. If we get rid of the whole "science communication" thing, truthful or not you get rid of all these problems.
I know it's impossible to do that, but it's interesting to consider that the problem isn't bad communication, but this drive to communicate everything all the time skewing the incentives and public perception.
You can add any number of layers of scientific rigor and it won't convince someone who has a favorite talking head.
If someone is trying to take advantage of a situation that's inherently complicated or unpleasant - it's easy to do so with a simple message that makes it digestible, even if it's wrong or harmful. We've seen this time and time again over the last few years. And then worse still, social media perpetuates it by keeping you in a bubble and pushing you further down a path.
But is it sustainable to lie to people in order to effect a desired (even if positive) change? How long can it go on for before people just turn off?
Maybe the answer is indefinitely. Empirically at least in my country this doesn't seem to be the case.
I've heard this been described as "pandemic fatigue", but it seems to more revolve around taking orders than believing in or being concerned about the pandemic itself.
People are willing to follow counterintuitive rules for a while, but eventually they need to understand some sort of final benefit derived.
The vast majority of people don't get "not drinking bleach fatigue" because they know it's bloody awful and that if they don't drink it, they're gone.
The scientific process involves testing the accepted and pushing ideas to there extremes. The fact there is a test of 5G on mice isn't surprising, but when these show a statistically insignificant blip and it's not in the conclusion that's not "big science hiding the real truths", it's that this blip in isolation is a true statistical anomaly...
In particular I appreciate that you model authority as an analogue for trust, and trust as an analogue for independent verification.
I think trust is a prerequisite for successful convincing, because it is hard for human brains to overcome the emotional and relational elements of discourse, and we need to be in a receptive frame of mind. [citation needed]
We should study how authorities have built and lost trust, but I don't think we should be rebuilding those authorities using this knowledge. Instead I think focusing on how members of the public and different experts and scholars can build more diverse networks of trust relationships would create a more resilient system in the Internet age.
For example, instead of "I trust the CDC because they are an authority on disease" or "I trust Fauci on COVID because he is an immunologist", what if the common relationship was "I trust Fauci on COVID because his work on Zika and HIV was very interesting".
A related problem is what I call the 'knowledge gap'. Researchers develop a very comprehensive understanding of their chosen subjects, whereas members of the public have only a lay-person level of understanding. As experts become increasingly experienced and knowledgeable, the gap between lay-person understanding and expert comprehension grows. This means researchers are not always able to understand what a member of the public needs to know or how to explain it: how do you compress years of learning into a few minutes of talking, as part of a conversation? Good science communication skills are essential for experts if they want to develop trust relationships with members of the public, and if we as a society want to move from authority and coercion and towards education.
For example, I think many distrust Fauci less because of Fauci himself and his behaviors and more because his behaviors may remind them of their primary care physician who treated them condescendingly, saying they were stupid for asking a question. Or because their parent got Alzheimer's or cancer and don't know where it came from and were told by doctors that their family member would be fine, even though their family is not fine.
I guess I just wished we paid more attention to the transgressions that happened to find the presumed cause of distrust so we can repair it, because I think trust can be highly efficient and distrust highly inefficient at times.
I can say, "I want to be honest with you, your relative may only have a few weeks left. I imagine that might feel really scary to hear or perhaps you might even feel angry, I don't know. I wanted to be honest with you and to let you know that my team and I will be here for you and your family."
I've posted elsewhere in the thread about my own opinion that I believe the main issue we have is not with trust in the scientific sense (e.g. I think that most people generally _do_ believe that epidemiologists know what they're doing and that the outliers are exceptions), but with trust in the plan of action e.g. the entire chain of process.
Examples, all primarily via trust (I'm not a biologist):
I believe that excessive consumption of sugar can cause diabetes.
I know that alcohol can (will, given enough time) cause liver disease.
I know that driving my car drastically increases my risk of being in a car accident and therefore meeting a swift end, an agonising end, or perhaps a lifetime of disability.
I still engage in those activities despite the downsides because I believe them to be of net benefit, both to myself and to society as a whole. I'm willing to fully argue through that process.
Where I think the issue lies at present is that we're sorely lacking in convincing full-chain argumentation.
A person can trust that the UK health authorities know their stuff, they can believe that coronavirus exists and can be dangerous, but that doesn't solve the problem of whether or not they should skip out on their friend's birthday party or not. It only makes up a very small part of the jigsaw puzzle, the rest still has to be filled in somehow.
I mean there is no real way for me to know if a vaccine is safe. I assume it is, and prefer to gamble on it not harming me and potentially helping the current situation.
But there is really no way for me to know for sure.
To put it another way, when the Omicron variant emerged, there were newspaper articles that often showed pictures of the spike protein labelled with different mutations.
As it happens, I did research in protein structural bioinformatics, so I have a good idea what the detail in these images 'mean' in a certain sense. However they are of zero use in making a single meaningful decision about how to alter my behaviour (or not!).
Of course, the journalists add these images as decoration, but to me it symbolises the mass of irrelevant detail provided. Which is not the same as saying 'just believe science!' as that is also wrong and unhelpful.
I'm not sure what the answer is, really.
But that safety has to be balanced at some point. Same is true for any ministry of health.
Dying sober might not be the preference of everyone and optimizing on a trivial metric might do a lot of wrong. In fact I believe most people would be horrified to lead a completely rational and reasonable life.
Yeah, because there's no rational basis to continue to afford them that trust. You're describing the symptom, not the disease.
On the other hand, I don't disagree that the level of misinformation is ridiculous. It's difficult to understand why someone would trust someone with a popular podcast so much more than licensed professionals. Maybe there shouldn't be censorship, but where are the medical malpractice claims against these people? I think it's all tied in with the general acceptance of the "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" supplement industry. As long as your supplement does not do too much direct harm, we allow it.
I'm less convinced that this is a matter of trust, I think it's more about value systems and priorities.
I trust my dentist to recommend me the best filling or crown material for my teeth, even in the face of financial incentives.
But his advice does not tell me, in an absolute sense, whether it'd be worth me paying $1K for a crown if that means I miss the rent next month. It's not a tractable problem.
I can't speak to the US situation, but in the UK in my peer groups most coronavirus-related argumentation doesn't revolves around whether e.g. wearing a mask reduces the spread of coronavirus, but around whether wearing a mask is a net positive for the society and/or the wearer. The former is a matter for epidemiology, the latter is nowhere near clear cut.
But in the US, we have this extreme irrational vaccine skepticism where the math just does not work out. People believe the vaccine is much worse than its benefit. It's hard to argue with since prominent people are supporting this idea.
I think once you get into the situation in which people think "I'm being forced to do X", you've created an impossible catch-22 and you've basically ensured that some % double down.
It's hard for me to explain because it just seems intuitively obvious. I really enjoy a beer after work. But if you forced me to drink one, and made me document the fact in order to go on holiday or whatever, I would feel less inclined to do so because I'd instinctively think that something fishy must be going on.
I've personally had the generally recommended number of vaccines at the right times etc, but when it comes to stuff like showing barcodes to get into places, I've faked it on principle, I think it's a dystopian horror and it doesn't surprise me at all that a lot of people have responded by just tuning out and refusing everything.
To me it's analogous to like, telling one of my overweight friends to go on a diet so that I can pay less for the NHS or something. They don't want the advice, it feels rude more than anything else (even explaining this feels a bit ick!)
If it was shown that we could eliminate sars-cov-2 via herd immunity I'd probably be a bit more keen to encourage it but I still don't think I'd support mandates unless we had some crazy ebola mutation and people started dying in massive numbers.
Triple vaccinated and completely in agreement.
An argument can always be made that they fill up hospitals, but that same argument can be made against parachuting, being overweight, racing (or driving in general), all alcohol etc.
If choice is to meaningful it includes bad choices.
You would think that, and they promote that, but it does not. It is obvious when you consider that all the vaccine skeptics were also vaccine skeptics before there was any hint of force involved.
I know a lot of people who took the first or second vaccine but are refusing further due to the coercion involved.
Or more generally, they behaved "carefully" in the early days of the pandemic but then switched off over time as they tired of being given legal commandments from God rather than sensible advice.
I agree that the same set of people think crackpot stuff like "5g causes corona" or the vaccines have microchips, I don't think those people are really relevant to the discussion.
This isn't actually a problem so long as those past errors were caused by the limits of what we knew at the time and efforts are made to help prevent similar issues in the future when it's possible. It's inevitable that as our understating of science and medicine evolve we're going to discover that what made sense before is no longer a good idea.
The problem comes when we weren't wrong because of what we didn't understand, but because people who knew better just thought they could get more money if they manipulated results or outright lied. We had the tobacco industry pay off scientists to lie about the cancer risks the industry knew to be a problem. The resulting rise in people with lung cancer wasn't a mistake. We had doctors pushing opioids on people at insane doses because they were paid kickbacks if they did. That wasn't a mistake either.
What we need is strict regulation and oversight so that when science and medicine do get it wrong, it's because we couldn't have known better given what data we had at the time. That'd be a huge step up from where we are now.
First, the primary organs that would be capable of this education are the media, who have a profit motive to stoke any and all fears (immigration, radiological warfare, world war, coffee being carcinogenic).
Second, I think this distrust goes beyond "the CDC said something wrong once, I don't trust them as much anymore." That could be solved with education. But we're seeing a more fundamental rise in broad-based distrust of any authority figure, and it's a much more instinctive response.
In a world where authority is more powerful and centralized than ever, some are bound to feel powerless. Someone's actions on the other side of the world have more impact on your life than they ever could (pick depending on your priors: a Wuhan wet market customer's appetite, or a Wuhan Institute of Virology employee's carelessness). With such an interconnected world, how could conspiratorial thinking not be appealing to some people?
Power inherently fosters distrust and cynicism. You can have as much pedagogy and education as you want: rational discourse just can't combat a fundamental instinctive reaction, a growing sense of claustrophobia and powerlessness that some people are bound to feel. And the response to this distrust? More control over discourse, over communication mechanisms[0], and ultimately, over citizens. Governments and corporations are more powerful than they ever were. Surveillance, and enforcement of rules, are easier and more automated than ever. How could our primitive, Dunbar-number brain wiring not react with distrust, or even hostility towards (some) authority figures?
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany...
Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies. Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an entity that has shown willingness to bend the truth 'for the good of society', isn't distrust and cynicism is rational?
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-sets-shor...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wro...
Instead they prefer messaging to achieve an outcome instead of direct truth.
politicians, sure, but public officials such as the EPA?
> that doesn't reassure will quickly be replaced by one that does
sure, just doesn't need to be the EPA that does it. pre-empting politicians and doing their manipulation for them is not justified - politicians are not a source of truth.
I disagree. I think a big part of the problem is people having unreasonable standards of accuracy or consistency. On COVID, the CDC was never going have everything perfectly figured out in the beginning, and then consistently repeat the same message from January 2020 to January 2022. There have been too many unknowns and too much of a need to act urgently before everything was figured out. To this day you still have people people justifying their distrust by saying things like "I though we just had to stay home for a few weeks to flatten the curve."
Also, there's an unreasonable expectation that messaging should be be all things to all people. If a message widely disseminated and understood, it needs to be simple and clear. However that will lose nuance, and some people will launch into distrust because the nuance they demand isn't there. The problem is those goals are contradictory, so someone's not going to get what they want.
> Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies. Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an entity that has shown willingness to bend the truth 'for the good of society', isn't distrust and cynicism is rational?
I don't think distrust and cynicism is rational in that case. It would be if they "lied" [1] selfish reasons, but if you assess that their motives are pure, then descending into "distrust and cynicism" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
And frankly, if "noble lies" bother you, wait until you learn the kind of ignoble lies people start believing when they become distrustful and cynical.
[1] Quotes because frankly most things people call lies aren't actually lies.
Perhaps not purely rational, but predictable and consistent with emotional norms.
That makes no sense to me. On an emotional level, my assessment of someone's intentions is a far more important factor in determining how I feel about them than any statement or group of statements.
You may assume that "I" do not have sufficient education and training to interpret state-of-art publications, and/or assume that "I" would end up trusting dubious alternative theories, but you do not know. The "average" person may indeed be incapable of finding out the truth by themselves, but I'm really sick of "science-y" people giving blanket statements on what others should believe without actually checking whether they deserve the condescending remark in the first place.
If you're that smart, you should be smart enough to 1) understand the pressures they're under, 2) be empathetic, and 3) seek out information that may not be adapted for mass communication.
> but I'm really sick of "science-y" people giving blanket statements on what others should believe without actually checking whether they deserve the condescending remark in the first place.
Check with who? The public? You personally? Throughout this whole pandemic, precisely zero "science-y" authorities have had conversations with me on this, so I'm speaking exclusively about mass communications.
Institutions being wrong and misleading is something that is immensely harmful because of trust.
Most of the CDC guidance has been verifiably insane from the start of COVID — often from the CDCs own advice before the pandemic.
We need to stop excusing their behavior.
Are you talking about the "don't buy masks" thing? Because when I dig up the actual early communications, they're not lies:
https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473
> CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness. #COVID19 https://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
> “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, said in a tweet on Saturday morning. “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!”
Both of those statements were made at a particular time under a particular set of unknowns, and the only way I could see them as "lies" is if I misinterpreted them by failing to consider that context.
The most egregious false statement is probably the thing about hand washing, but it's a not a lie because given how little was known at the time and the fact that the CDC isn't up in some ivory tower, so they had to say something and just recycled previous advice. In Feb. 2020, there wasn't much COVID period, so running around with an N95 to the grocery store would just waste it, especially if it's worn incorrectly (and I saw lots of that, especially using only one strap).
Also, both those statements are far more nuanced than I remember, which I think kind of proves my point about nuance. People claim they want it, but they still strip it away and remember some highly simplified version.
The CDC still has not performed or directed any large-scale experiments of any kind. They are a political institution, not practitioners of science.
Saying something definitive like 'Masks are NOT effective in preventing #Coronavirus' before the evidence is in is quite anti-scientific.
> Saying something definitive like 'Masks are NOT effective in preventing #Coronavirus' before the evidence is in is quite anti-scientific.
1. The statement you quote came from the Surgeon General, not the CDC. The Surgeon General is a political appointment, and as far as I know, the CDC does not report through him.
2. IMHO, the CDC's problem was actually the opposite of what you are complaining about. It was too scientific. Science is slooooooow, so if you rely on it too heavily then your problem will get "inside your OODA loop" and you won't be able to act quickly enough to tackle it effectively. The CDC has multiple hats, and it needed to push its science hat back in order to wear its crisis leadership hat in front.
Science is not the right tool for every job. It works great for things that change or move slowly (like physical laws) and very poorly for things that change or move quickly. It's an error to expect/demand every problem be solved with science
> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
> "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 think it's pretty clear that they intentionally downplayed mask wearing for the public with the goal of saving masks for hospitals, even though kn95 masks were on the market[1], and wearing masks would have saved lives.
[0] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200407162126/https://wiphone.i...
This is ultimately what happened during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It's what happens during fuel scares, it's what happened during 911 as a below poster explains, it's what happens within companies when layoff rumours circulate.
Even within the closest of romantic relationships each partner is not 100% truthful with the other because there are some things that are simply better not said.
Unless the idea is that we descend into some sort of authoritarian nightmare and the general population becomes irrelevant though, I'd argue that social order does require some semblance of trust in power even if only in the basics (e.g. if I don't cross the State, the State won't cross me).
Once that falls apart the whole thing is in ruins.
But it's the only correct way, if credible studies contradict an official agency (more often it's the degree of the opinion where there is disagreement, not the opinion itself), my advice would be to trust the studies. For instance MRI contrast agents: the EMA banned most of them while the FDA did not, which is not the advice one would form by reading studies on the matter.
Being able to construct a graph does not mean it's possible to check whether the claims are correct though..
In this way it would be more obvious why policies are choosen and provide a way to express current knowledge. As more nodes are added to the graph, the policy prescriptions would change which would prevent mistrust that is based on "health department said do x, now they say don't do x".
It is also difficult to come up with an example where it was warranted to suppress information. Can you name one? Educated and intelligent people are often very distrustful, especially of authority.
Society is not a boot camp of grunts.
This misses a lot of the cause. People aren't listening on the vaccine because there were no WMDs in Iraq. All the "experts" said that too.
The fact that huge frauds have been perpetuated at scale against our entire society and nobody has been held to account is a major reason for collapsing trust. It would be very helpful if the parties responsible had at least been censured even if the political class couldn't muster the will to truly apply penalties, but few in the political class have even admitted that anything bad happened.
When trusted authorities perpetuate frauds or display extreme incompetence and then just paper it over (often at others' expense), they are destroying the fundamental trust basis of society. Opportunistic politicians are destroyers of civilization.
Who knows what damage that has done to my internals.
I'm not a primitivist by any means (I'm using a pc right now as it so happens) but we continue to have a lot to learn from modern hunter gatherer societies both in terms of social organisation and food consumption.
Sorry I know this sounds a little woo-woo fruity, but that’s Humanity’s godlike power to transcend the limitations of our bodies’ material dimension where energy can’t be created or destroyed.
Collectively we’re like a blockchain holding a mirror-image dimension of all the best ideas just by virtue of the other nodes not making it, growing over time as our new embodiments get to start at what from their point of view is “zero” despite being unknowably old and full of patches and bug fixes. Storage and retrieval are the same operation!
I share the feeling that better nutrition is probably not as much of a significant factor in developed countries. For what it's worth, we are more obese than our ancestors.
Our World in Data has this nice chart of life expectance by age in England and Wales [1]. I have this pet hypothesis that a good chunk of the increase in the life expectancy of the younger people in that chart is due to vaccination and better hygiene. And, for older ages, the a good chunk of increase is due to advances in surgery.
The effect of antibiotics is probably more uniform across the ages. It is note-worthy that penicillin was discovered in 1928, so the increase in life expectancy before then can't be due to antibiotics.
I have no expertise in this area, so you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. The Our World in Data chart is really cool though. That steep fall and rebounce due to the Spanish flu, and the contrast with COVID-19 with respect to affect on different age-groups is also interesting. [2]
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-ab...
[2]: I think comparing the naming of the diseases also tells us something about how society has changed.
Life expectancy made huge gains throughout the century before antibiotics.
You can't really see the invention of antibiotics clearly in the curves.
The way I think of it is that of course penicillin increased life spans, but the discovery and industrialization of it was highly correlated with rising GDP.
Also, low life-expectancy in the past was in large part because of child/infant mortality, not croaking at 50.
You should make sure you understand what outliers are. The fact that you can name people from outside modern times that lived a long time is meaningless to the discussion.
They weren't outliers. I simply looked up famous Indians because I remembered one had lived to a startlingly old age, and skipped those who got killed by other people. If their diet caused health problems, you wouldn't have all these folks living to a decent age. All the Indian leaders would have bene these young guys who died off at 45 from eating too much venison.
- it plastic no food
- it’s vegetable good
- it’s cholesterol bad
- it’s trans fat bad, butter no trans good
- cholesterol ain’t real, margarine good
I don’t care :p
- Accepted fact 2: eating trans fat is bad. A diet high in trans fats can contribute to obesity, high blood pressure, and higher risk for heart disease, because intake of dietary trans fat disrupts the body's ability to metabolize essential fatty acids. Trans fat is also implicated in Type 2 diabetes.
Historically margarine was low in saturated fat but high in trans fat due to partial hydrogenation - hence the questionable "health benefits" of it vs butter.
Currently in most of the developed world vegetable spreads are not allowed to contain significant amounts of partially hydrogenated oils, and thus margarine should be healthier - but there is a powerful dairy lobby so the bad reputation will last for a long while...
Several studies suggest that eating diets high in saturated fat do not raise the risk of heart disease, with one report analyzing the findings of 21 studies that followed 350,000 people for up to 23 years.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
People often learn their understanding is flawed by saying something "stupid" and getting a response to that. Censorship fosters a climate of fear where people are less likely to say the "dumb" thing and get it explained.
A good policy with raising children is "There are no bad questions. You can ask (parent) anything and will not get in trouble, even if the answer is Wow, that's a really bad word and means (something bad). Please don't use that at school or I will get called by the teacher."
Arguably thesis by body of work is less corrosive, but the production of 3-4 papers from the PhD is basically now a signal to the university you can be that performing seal.
That, and IPR. "a new drug which xxx (in mice)" paper is worth significantly more to the company behind it during share price discussions. (Obviously this is shorthand because IPR has risks in premature publication as well)
> For decades, corporate undermining of scientific consensus has eroded the scientific process worldwide. Guardrails for protecting science-informed processes, from peer review to regulatory decision making, have suffered sustained attacks, damaging public trust in the scientific enterprise and its aim to serve the public good. Government efforts to address corporate attacks have been inadequate. Researchers have cataloged corporate malfeasance that harms people’s health across diverse industries. Well-known cases, like the tobacco industry’s efforts to downplay the dangers of smoking, are representative of transnational industries, rather than unique. This contribution schematizes industry tactics to distort, delay, or distract the public from instituting measures that improve health—tactics that comprise the “disinformation playbook.” Using a United States policy lens, we outline steps the scientific community should take to shield science from corporate interference, through individual actions (by scientists, peer reviewers, and editors) and collective initiatives (by research institutions, grant organizations, professional associations, and regulatory agencies).
UCS Case studies: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/disinformation-playbook
The real issue here, in my opinion, is attributing malice so quickly and with extreme prejudice. Tensions are high and it seems to have become commonplace to assign ill-intent to the other tribe way too easily. In my opinion the answer to all of these problems is compassion and statistical thinking. Most people mean well and often times the only way you can get people to go to extremes is to negatively reinforce them into deeply entrenched tribal thinking.
It will always be a safer assumption to assume somebody means well even when they are wrong. Humans did not become the dominant species on this planet without cooperation and pro-social behaviors.
If you would let folks wear N95 with exhalation valves (highly comfortable) it just makes it easier for folks to protect themselves (and indirectly others).
And for those who don't care, let's distinguish slightly between making sure those who want to protect themselves as much as possible can, and the need to force people down a path which for the < 29 year olds really doesn't not have hi mortality rates, and for whom vaccination does not eliminate the disease the way it might something like smallpox etc.
My own view is the battle is largely lost already by the health authorities. Locally we have an indoor mask mandate including offices with all staff fully vaxed, and the natural desire to comply with this has gotten lower and lower if you are pretty spread out in large cubicals etc.
There is of course the "overcrowded hospital" issue, but I have a hard time coming to terms with that being a real problem - if it were a real problem why has hospital capacity been in decline this entire pandemic? Is it an unsolvable problem or is it just not a real problem outside of fantastically clickable headlines? I lean heavily towards the latter but I could be convinced otherwise.
I have friends who treated folks with covid wearing N95's and did not get covid.
So I really wish we could let folks make the personal health decisions here a bit more. If you want to wear a bubble helmet with filters in it - go for it. The full respirator (almost always with an exhalation valve)? Go for it. The N95 with an exhalation valve? Go for it.
Instead, delta airlines says no full cover, no N95 with exhalation etc. So now you have people who don't want to wear masks forced to wear them, and they are preventing folks who really DO want to be protected (while on a flight) from fully protecting themselves. This is all in the name of "science" which really is not science but "public health" mumbo jumbo.
It goes back to this issue of basically not realizing folks have different risk profiles / tolerances. If I'm allowed to wear my N95 with an exhalation valve for 4 hours, I frankly don't care if the guy 2 rows back has his mask off his nose.
This mistake is lecturing everyone (often with bad info) and then blocking folks from solving their own problems. remember when the anti-body rapid tests had to have a chip, an iphone app and a medical professional in the mix?
And no, I don't believe in those cloth masks, and surgical masks on a plane for 5 hours? Hard to imagine that being highly effective.
People who don't want masks aren't getting fitted properly for n95's, they aren't shaving, they aren't behaving consciously in the many ways you can behave that render masking ineffective.
I shave (this comes from scuba diving where shaving provides similar benefits). I have my own reasons not to want to get covid. So I like doing some things that I'm confident reduce my risk meaningfully. But I don't lecture others, I solve my own problem here.
That's interesting there is some protection, I could believe still better than things like cloth and surgical because the strapping tends to be tighter.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00375
If your endpoint is to not catch covid and someone ineffectively wears their mask such that they would not have caught covid if they wore it correctly - then the mask was ineffective even if statistically they _maybe_ had lower chances of catching covid than without wearing a mask at all.
and I say maybe very strongly here...we do not understand transmissible diseases nearly as well as many would like to think - there are plenty of observable datapoints that correlate mask usage with increased transmission...my gut feeling would be to explain those away with confounding variables, but my gut feeling is not science and no substitute for a testable understanding of the problem and solution
> People who don't want masks aren't getting fitted properly for n95's, they aren't shaving, they aren't behaving consciously in the many ways you can behave that render masking ineffective.
Maybe you weren't saying not shaving renders an n95 ineffective.
Detailed rules always lead to insanity. The best way is always to be upfront about the risks, how to mitigate them, and then let people make their own risk assessment and do whatever they're comfortable with.
But instead of saying "Flying carries a risk of exposure to this virus and others, here's what you can do", we're saying "If everyone engages in this piece of safety theater, flying is perfectly safe and fun for everyone!"
Then I won't care if someone has their mask on their chin while they eat some food.
Instead, I can't wear the mask I want, and we play this stupid game of forcing folks to wear ineffective masks in a highly closed off space who don't care / don't want to / have already had covid and don't believe the doctors claims that there is no element of natural protection as a result.
If masks work, they work on a mechanistic, physical, level. They filter air, and if you use your masks wrong, or take them off, they stop filtering air.
But if you look at how people are actually using their masks, they pay zero attention to the mechanics of it, and 100% attention to the appearance of it.
Someone who wants to wear an N-95 mask for the duration of the entire flight, and who won't remove it for eating, understands the mechanics of how they work. That behaviour is not theatre.
Someone who wears whatever because they're told to, crams it in their pocket now and then, removes it while eating, and still believes they work, do not in fact understand how masks work. And whoever is making rules and mask mandates that allow for this behaviour also clearly do not understand how masks work. It's all theatre. It's masks as make-belief lucky rabbit's foot talismans, and yet we're supposed to believe that the rules are based in science.
So yes, people can get infected at half an hour. Are their odds much higher to get infected at 5 hours than 0.5 hours? I'd assume yes.
Heck, even people who wear it over their mouth but don't cover their noses, yes, they're potentially leaking covid out of their nose and breathing it in thru their nose. But if they cough, I imagine a percentage of the covid comes out their mouth and gets trapped in the mask...even despite them not wearing it 100% properly.
I'm saying that some of it may be theatre, or maybe much of it is (by theatre being ineffective but trying to appear effective), but I don't think it's all theatre.
Also, male doctors and nurses are require to shave before donning their masks for a shift because even the slightest overnight stubble will ruin the seal. The chances of general public wearing an N95 correctly to get the most benefit out of it is close to nil.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...
Hospitals have been jam packed the entire time. There is data everywhere to support this. Tons of procedures are not being done due to beds and ICUs being full. Ask anyone who works in a hospital. Call one if you'd like.
https://news.usni.org/2020/05/15/usns-mercy-leaves-los-angel...
The Mercy was deployed after some communication between New York hospitals, and the understanding at least was that it would mostly be handling emergency, trauma, and routine patients (what military docs are good are at as a stereotype), and free up capacity for the hospitals to deal with COVID. The "normal" medical stuff promptly dropped in demand with lockdown, between fewer accidents and deferred care. So there wasn't much for the Mercy to do, the few covid patients sent over were about all of an "unknown air transmissible virus" (working theory at the time) that it was really equipped to handle, because that wasn't the mission they were expecting.
"Another of the Navy’s two hospital ships, the USNS Comfort, was sent to New York City to treat non-coronavirus patients. However, after treating only a few dozen patients, the Comfort changed its rules to allow coronavirus-positive patients on the ship.
The Comfort had been docked in New York Harbor in Manhattan since March 30 but departed last month for its Norfolk, Va., home port after treating just 182 patients."
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/497987-usns-mercy-leaves-...
So again, my question is this - if hospital capacity is truly a crisis, why have staffed beds been in decline since the beginning of the pandemic? Half a million healthcare workers have left their jobs since just the start of the pandemic. If this is a crisis, why isn't there any initiative to get them back? Instead the only initiative we've seen with regards to healthcare workers is massive layoffs firstly because of lockdowns, but then later also massive layoffs because of vaccinate rules.
So either this is a terrible problem with no solution, or the problem is exaggerated and it's not really a crisis.
I know some folks who had covid, and just don't want to trigger their bodies systems again with a series of shots.
For some reason, if you have other diseases your immune system likely provides some protection against re-infection, but we are being told covid is different. This just seems so likely to be a lie its mind boggling.
Let healthcare works test their blood for cross-reactivity with omicron / antibodies. If you are equal or better than some threshold (pfizer vaccine from 10 months ago) you get a card and are good to go.
I don't know what you're talking about. There is some protecction, it's not enough to make things safe, what's the lie?
If you're talking about those people still having to get a vaccine, that's a whole mess of tradeoffs but also not based on lying.
Either of these means this isnt something to worry about
Staffed beds are not in decline, and of course hospitals are trying to get more workers, they are offering crazy pay incentives right now.
The mean capacity doesn't disprove what I said in the slightest.
https://i.imgur.com/s8RRK76.png
the dark gray represents ICUs in the studied time window (which wasn't 2013, it was a study done in 2013, the study measured ICUs from 05-07)
Here's an interesting fact[1]. 2020 hospital capacity in the US after the start of the pandemic never even got up to the projected capacity as projected using data from 2015-2019. So no, I don't believe these scary-tale anecdotes I've been reading the entire pandemic. They are not backed in data they are backed, at best, in bullet points without context designed to scare the ignorant.
[1]https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/trends-in-overa...
Here's a really good breakdown in canada of capacity with ventilators - you'll note almost every single graph shows higher numbers in 2019
We filled hospitals over capacity and burned out healthcare workers. They decided to quit rather than work in such conditions. Don't overwork healthcare workers and maybe they won't burnout so quickly.
Exhalation valves are great if you're using the mask to filter external dust.
Here you're trying to filter outgoing and ingoing droplets. Filtering is still going to be most effective at the source, even if you are wearing N.95.
Adding a valve is going to reduce the utility of the mask a lot for this application.
On egress, just a quick look at the valve, it's going to stop the velocity and either block or drop particles - however ineffective that might be on egress there is NO WAY it is worse then what I see others wearing (surgical / thin cloth etc), mask off the nose, mask off while they eat etc.
Finally - folks historically have a natural "self interest" motivation. Ie, if you let folks act in a self interested way - personal protection, personal comfort - you are likely going to be better off policy wise.
You can do a rough risk computation yourself I guess. Both ingress and egress is worse if you have a valve though. Does seem like egress is still a bit better than what other people do (in this model at least - which could be wrong), but one shouldn't set one's standards by "what other people do".
In policy matters one can and should.
This is the stupidity I think of the scientists here.
If others are wearing surgical and little cloth masks, only wearing them a little bit, but then they say I can't wear my valved N95 (which I do very carefully) it's both totally arbitrary and unfair (my exhalations are still equal too or less others).
They also miss that the tradeoff might not be between my 5 hours of N95 use in a relative high workrate environment and something perfect, but that I will join with just about everyone else and ignore what they say, or go down to something like a surgical mask for comfort. Or take my mask off more for comfort to "drink" etc.
I'm convinced many folks on HN sit behind computers in empty rooms alone and NOT wearing a mask. If you have to wear a mask every day - these issues would matter a lot more.
This can't be resolved without a bunch of additional training.
Of course if we'd done THAT, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place, and the whole discussion would be moot. %-/
Masks with valves were available (because part of one's regular PPE at times before the pandemic), but no longer permitted.
"This said, the World Health Organization does not recommend the use of FFP2 for everyone, stating that non-medical face coverings should be used by the general public under the age of 60 who do not have underlying health conditions. FFP2 masks are best used as personal protective equipment (PPE) by healthcare workers or those caring for someone who may have Covid-19 in a community setting. "
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-are-n95-and-ffp2-face-m...
1/23/2022
Authority figures are not accurately representing risks and rewards of different actions and have deliberately shaped their messaging to achieve outcomes.
Direct from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473 "CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness." from 27 Feb 2020.
They weren't saying this because they thought face masks were ineffective, they said this because they were worried about supplies for healthcare workers. (obvious by reading subtext)
This is a repeated pattern. Making recommendations and sharing "facts" omitting important details in order to push for an unshared outcome.
Nobody is properly sharing how risks have changed, nobody is making premeditated decisions about which risks will be associated with which mitigating actions. The goalposts are constantly shifting to match present feelings instead of setting limits based on reason and sticking to them.
The censorship problem comes in when publishers are half-way committing to a narrative which changes by the week, failing to shut down people who are just saying things a subset wants to hear in order to get money and actively shutting down others who are actively trying to engage in reasonable debate.
The fundamental problem is this:
People have different risk tolerance and different priorities when it comes to personal risk, and individual actions affecting the community. These differences in this case are ultimately fairly small but getting blown out of proportion because it's profitable to get people upset.
It is all a moot point now and nobody seems to be able to articulate or admit it yet.
There is very little community protection left available by vaccinating. Vaccinated people can carry and spread the disease, the new variants are a lot less deadly, and a sizable proportion of the population already has natural immunity from getting the actual virus (~75M confirmed cases in the US for ~330M population, with estimates that there may have been as many as 4x as many cases which went uncounted)
It's over, we lost, the outcome we have is what we got and there is very little leverage to change it at this point because the vast majority of what was going to happen has already happened and the prevention tools we have are mostly ineffective at curbing spread.
It felt like a medium flu for the adults and just bounced off the kids.
It is bad to prioritize healthcare workers by sculpting messages i.e. manipulating the population.
A message for Feb 2020: "Masks will likely help curb infection for you and transmission for others, masks are most important for healthcare workers and the medically vulnerable, wearing them when you're around people is a good idea, but we need to make sure they get into the hands of people who need them most first"
Either we take lying off the table or we don't. Fiat justitia etc.
This doesn't pass the smell test because governments could easily have banned the private sale of masks.
Many governments have used their powers to confine us to home arrest without a trial and they expect us to believe they couldn't have confiscated all the masks?
I largely agree with the rest of your points - particularly the outcome we have found ourselves in. Barring the emergence of some horrific new variant (Imagine Omicron with 10x the fatality rate), this is just another bug we can no longer avoid without effectively destroying our existing society - time to move on and live with it.
"However, whilst this approach [content removal] may be effective and essential for illegal content (eg hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material) there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach for scientific misinformation, and approaches to addressing the amplification of misinformation may be more effective. In addition, demonstrating a causal link between online misinformation and offline harm is difficult to achieve [25, 26], and there is a risk that content removal may cause more harm than good by driving misinformation content (and people who may act upon it) towards harder-to-address corners of the internet27."
I'm happy that this point has been raised in this report. Lot of understandable hand-wringing and fear about online misinformation about over COVID, but it was never clear to me that online misinformation is a variable that explains differences in vaccination rates across countries, or to what extent it affects an individual's decision not to vaccinate. Turns out that this is hard to measure.
The CDC messaging was really bad and problematic on several counts right from the get go. Its not like the US is incapable of messaging about the link between individual behaviour and societal good in the long term (for instance, there were initial protracted battles, but we eventually agreed largely on condoms and HIV, or smoking and lung cancer risk) or in the short term (as in the lifestyle sacrifices that WWII engendered for wartime production). I wonder what went right in those situations (if they did go right) that went wrong in the messaging this time around.
Over and above the masking, some observations --
1. Transmission risk, I think, was never the primary end-point of vaccine development, but rather, to prevent hospitalization. But the messaging from CDC and others on the vaccine implied that transmission would keep declining with increasing vaccination rates, which turned out to be true only to a limited extent.
2. The early messaging was that this would be one wave of infections, and that one round of vaccination would end it all. This was tough to defend given what happened with the flu. I understand that telling people that "Well, the vaccine may not give long-lasting immunity and still leave you susceptible" is not going to promote vaccination, but perhaps emphasizing that vaccine-immunity is controlled and safe than an infection that might hit all organs, would have been a better way out?
I agree that the link between online misinformation and real world harms is tough to measure. I've read some studies of radicalization that found meatspace was the primary avenue for radicalizing, even if cyperspace allowed extremist groups to raise more awareness, and I suspect the same is currently true here.
However, I don't think this is some "constant of human nature" and is more likely an accident of our current society. As people grow up with and on the internet, I would expect this to change: I would expect the link between online communication and radicalization to strengthen over time.
More recently another paper on covid and childhood diabetes (cause now they’ve gotta push the jabs on the young ones) has been causing the same level of scrutiny.
This isn’t science anymore.
We all aren't in the same boat. Certain decisions are harmful to certain groups and beneficial to others. Lockdowns, for example, decimated small businesses and crushed the working class. Amazon and many corporations, on the other hand, welcomed the lockdowns as a boon to their businesses.
We are not one nation. We are not one world. These centralized authorities are sanctifying the plundering of certain groups on behalf of others--or so it seems.
Science is 'right' up until it's wrong.
Maybe it would help to put in terms of a (not-so-implausible) scenario folks here are more familiar with. Suppose one day a niche topic in computer science became the subject of mass public concern, e.g., a computer virus escaped the lab and programable computers became heavily regulated. Anyone caught running unapproved software could face criminal charges. "But Turing Machines can be good, creative tools", you protest. "No, we cannot predict their behavior and unsanctioned software endangers us all," says your friend. As a programmer whose creative freedom depends on libre software, how would that situation make you feel?
I think the gain of function research that may have lead to covid could possibly have had interesting applications, but it also (possibly) lead to something terrible, probably best to regulate it more.
In fiction AI is banned in Dune and Warhammer 40k because of past events. It makes sense that if something really bad happened because of AI you might want to put regulations on development of it.
https://cdn.futura-sciences.com/buildsv6/images/mediumorigin...
The tooling for all classical techniques seem to have been broken as of late, getting rid of critical thinking for free speech, and replication for science.
With that, the debate is what is and has been the due process of much great science and yes, science learns more from its mistakes than any unattainable being 100% right all the time.
For without the ability to question and debate things that for some may appear as facts, we stifle innovation and creativity. Which is the crux of advancements' of science for by its very definition, sits on the edge of fact or false.
Rationality is probably the only remaining weapon humanity has to survive, and it sure is threaten, especially in light of the modern social medial business model.
The pandemic has really shown how weak and sleazy all institutions are.
Any while 'scientific misinformation' means there's at least a modicum of science in place, wait until you see what people are really sharing privately!
The disaster that will come is well deserved to all governments and institutions.
There used to be a time when transparency was seen as important. Well, no transparency if it's for the greater good!
From what I see people are not stupid. And I suspect they are getting better at detecting manipulation too. In the end, what the state / institutions say will be seen as just noise. A sort of advertisement with no real information.
They don't seem to realize that the internet makes their tactics extremely visible to anyone who has a memory and access to a search engine. All of their statements are semi-permanently somewhere on the internet, in chronological order.
They do realize there's a problem however, and their response has been to infiltrate the floundering but still widely respected legacy media companies and attempt to get tech companies to support their narratives. This is also clearly visible to many people, but not known widely enough to stop them.
In effect, they're competent in 20th century propaganda techniques, but unable to convincingly adapt them to the 21st century, and that's why we're seeing this insanity. There are a lot of people who distrust them out of instinct, but are unable to articulate their distrust with proper information, and so come up with wild claims (like Bill Gates microchipping people). There are others who straight up reveal the truth (Snowden, Assange) and get "taken out" one way or another.
Many other people have a vested interest in wanting to believe the institutions, either out of fear or because they are benefiting from the status quo in some way - ie. the Zoom class. They rationalize the unethical propagandizing and attacks on human rights as being "for the greater good" and participate in the essentially state-sponsored slandering of opposing voices.
What's dangerous is that people are becoming more and more detached from reality, one way or the other - propaganda or conspiracy theory. Of course, on some level the propagandists are right: there is a lot of misinformation on the internet. They however refuse to acknowledge that they are on the other side of the same coin, or that they are in fact the ones with all the power.
There's currently more people per capita in hospital fully vaccinated than not in a lot of places. That's interesting, but I don't see a single part of 'the consensus' investigating this, just dismissals.
Saying science is only the consensus is dangerous. A lot of the studies published as the 'peer reviewed science' have poor errors/data (E.g. excluding groups that negatively affect the outcome our using relative risk as high significance against low absolute risk), but that's fine, science working properly when it's wrong that way because science changes as we learn, except if it says what we don't like.
And that's the strangest thing, the science has changed the whole time (covid isn't airborne- then it is, masks don't work- then they do, then only N95 do, vaccine will stop it dead (yes Fauci said this)- then it will reduce spread- then it just reduces hospitalization and death- then it's better than nothing- then we're working on a new one because the old ones don't work. All the while refusing to even be curious about the side effects because the greater good and then vaccinating children because 'the risk is not zero' even though the risk of side effect including death is not zero'
But hey, shut up Rogan etc, they make us feel uncomfortable about our accepted 'truths.'
- https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jan/06/who-robert-ma...
- https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252...
> As we prevent three deaths by vaccinating, we incur two deaths.
> "Are we headed for the situation where the ~30% unvaxxed will be devoting their lives to operating whatever is left of the economic infrastructure and serving as caretakers for the vaxxed?"
This is what got him banned from twitter.
Why don't you try to investigate a bit yourself? People with credentials can have no other motive to spread misinformation and all the motive to "save the humanity" ? Sad to see this on HN.
The things he mentioned in the podcast that I agreed with and honestly are pretty convincing:
- censorship of criticism of COVID medicine online is out of control and dangerous. How can you ethically give a drug if you're not allowed to publicly question whether it's safe or not? He gives a ton of examples of very mundane statements by many different people on many different platforms that led to disproportionately negative impacts on their lives relative to the fairly mundane claims they made.
- conflicts of interest exist and are not to be taken lightly. The FDA, CDC, drug companies, are all basically the same people. There is a profit motive to minimize the harms of certain drugs. This is not a hypothetical -- see oxycontin, tobacco, etc. There is reason to be suspicious of "health authorities".
- a lot of people seem to have crazy, obviously wrong/outdated views of COVID that are orders of magnitude off from the actual risks, and are very militant about policing those views and imposing them on others through government action. In some respects it resembles mass hysteria (this is the "mass formation psychosis" meme that went the rounds on the news, where he compared it to the rise of the Nazis. This was taken out of context largely I think, but you should listen to it for yourself).
- the nuance is lost in discussion of covid these days. You're either a science-based smart person or a conspiracy theorist antivaxxer. There is no in-between, and the truth is probably not absolute on one side even if it's heavily leaning on one side.
The thing he mentioned that I disagreed with or found less convincing, but are worth mentioning because they raise points that can and should be addressed:
- Malone's most questionable claim and the one he caught the most flak for is his claim that the risk of serious side effects in some populations as an adverse reaction to the MRNA vaccines can exceed the reduction in risk from covid-19. These are populations like kids, 20-year-olds, or people with a history of allergic reactions to vaccines. He claims that while the data on its own suggests the opposite is true, the side effects of vaccines are underreported due to flaws in the federal vaccine side effect reporting system, and that the deaths by covid are overreported by hospitals.
(He gives a fairly reasonable argument for this, and I think it's worth listening to it for yourself rather than reading the same mostly out-of-context sentences repeated on news articles reporting on the podcast, but after further research I am mostly unconvinced -- the main counterargument that is convincing to me being that over 100 countries have given the MRNA vaccines and you'd expect at least one of them to notice such a serious effect if it existed)
I do not like censoring by big tech as well, but when they take down outright lies which actually get viral and change people's opinions, I am no longer sure. Nuanced facts, data does not go viral. Tweets with controversial information do.
Serious side-effects, risk-benefit calculations, are very nuanced and take much more effort to bring up and share [1]. He presents a very one-sides story, every single day. That is not helpful.
He took very selective parts of news which aligns with his opinions and tweeted just that. Thanks to twitter's censoring, I can't even share those :facepalm: but you can look up archived data [2]. It is not even a single person, they have a pretty good group doing it every single day (Peter McCullough, I am sure you heard of him) [3] [4].
Also look at how viral this stuff gets [5].
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749381
2. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/mrna-technology-...
3. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pilot-vaccinefalse...
4. https://twitter.com/P_McCulloughMD/status/148679283709416244...
5. https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1486792837094162442
I am fairly biased though -- I would rather 100 dangerous falsehoods get shared (even if it results in a lot of people believing wrong things) than a even 1 true fact get censored and that puts me in the weird position of often defending people and takes I disagree with and dislike.
No, misinformation is true information that is misleading (as to some other topic), morally wrong, etc.
If it is not true, then it is “not” information. It is “dis”-information.
(From Fluoride pdf)
Update: E.g. Consider the statement: “According to the FBI, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019.” That is information. It is knowledge which is conveyed / stored / etc. Some people use that fact to argue that AAs are inherently violent people. In the context of such an argument, the fact is potentially misleading / misinformation. The premise is true, but not the conclusion.
An example of disinformation would be to say: “According to the FBI, African-Americans accounted for 85.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019.” That’s not true. That’s “not” information.
How was your reaction to the above comment?
I care more about concepts that are meaningful for humans and I find frivolous the machine needed technicalities to get them working.
https://karlstack.substack.com/p/frauds-in-the-duke-boston-a...
Misinformation is like junk food. It triggers people's endorphins while scientific thinking is vegetables and fruits. It can never win.
The lack of public understanding of the scientific process and ability to parse published articles in context over the last year unfortunately shows the desperate need for scientific outreach to explain the current state of research to there public.
And obviously nobody listens anyway because everything has become overly polarised.
Maybe journals should be behind some sort of access restriction (not cost) so that the scientific method is less disturbed by the public and political idealogs...
They define misinformation in terms of a "scientific consensus". That alone seems problematic[0].
I thought we had more faith in the majority of our scientists.
Shameful.
If you can't trust people with the ability to see or hear certain information, how can you even trust them to vote?
Luckily, so far there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Second, mail in ballots for sure won Democrats the election.
No fraud? They changed the rules so they could win
If there were widespread voter fraud, how would you hear about it? Knowledge mechanisms have become so centralized I’m not certain the general public could be informed anymore.
It's perfectly coherent to think that voting is a good mechanism to express preferences while at the same time thinking that your average person can't really validate scientific claims.
discourse about values in regards to covid or climate is sensible. Do you want more freedom, more safety, fewer deaths, more economic growth? That's something every person has a meaningful position on. The safety of mrna vaccines? That's not a layman's question, and these factual technical questions are where misinformation enters the picture.
And the twisted thing about the debate is that saying this often creates accusations of elitism. But really, if scientific literacy is required to have coherent political preferences, what does that say about the right of participation of people in a democracy who are simply not educated or smart enough?
Ellul would likely argue that prerequisite of any propaganda is the obligation for a preference -- regardless of whether the individual knows anything at all. The purpose is to include him/her in the machine.
Personally, to me it is akin to my aunt telling me computer's are devil's creation ( she did ) and be the downfall of us all ( possible ). Yeah, maybe basic literacy is necessary to participate.
[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
Your comment implies that you don't want representatives, you want other people to vote for whatever it is you want. All I can say to that is: ask God for the serenity to accept those things you cannot change.
https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/the-powerball-revolution/
For example you can Ctrl-F "disinformation" on this Time article: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
There is however a famous quote about this: “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them” - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/03/misinformed/
China is notorious for censorship but from speaking to friends there it seems everyone is totally on board with vaccines and very few people doubt climate science. People know everything is censored but trust in science, experts etc is relatively high.
> China is notorious for censorship but from speaking to friends there it seems everyone is totally on board with vaccines and very few people doubt climate science.
A consideration: could it be that acts of censorship decrease trust in a society that is already divided?
More generally though, it seems to me that:
1. A minimal censorship information environment is essential to scientific progress
2. The average person lacks the epistemological foundations to handle a minimal censorship information environment
If these are both true, it seems like we should either:
1. Invest massively in improving people's epistemological models or
2. Apply a censorship gradient (i.e unrestricted for the purpose of academic exploration but have minimum standards for wide-reaching, publicly shared information)
For example, many Chinese know about Tiananmen, and the burying of the high speed rail accident, even though those were heavily censored
Would be an interesting causal relationship.
Disseminating DISinformation should be considered fraud, provided it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the purveyors knew the information was false. Otherwise, any provably-false thing is misinformation.
The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselves.
Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. Plenty of useful or interesting angles are not investigated at all because doing so would risk invalidating the expert status of the incumbents. Of the science that is communicated to the public (much of which is complete horseshit), the scientists themselves are often complicit in the misrepresentation of their own research as it means more of those sweet, sweet grants. The net result is the polished turd that is scientific research in the 21st century.
"Educated" people can say what they want about how important it is to believe in the science and have faith in our researchers and the institutions they work for.
The fact remains that if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong.
Has that maybe been true since the beginning of 'natural philosophy'? Perhaps things seem (much) worse now because we have survivorship bias, the same way classical music seems higher quality than pop, because the 90% crud[0] has been long forgotten.
Unlikely. In its infancy, science -- aka "Natural Philosophy" as it was called at the time -- had to establish its credibility. It did so by delivering results.
But the self-correcting nature of science is still its biggest redeeming feature. And therefore unless I can figure out things by myself, I'll trust scientific consensus. I may not trust individual papers, as people make mistakes, may have an axe to grind, but I'll believe the consensus. For sure occasionally even scientific consensus will be wrong.
Scientific consensus can be a hard thing to define sometimes. Climate change is an example where there are enough studies out there that a meta-study can prove consensus, but what about something more recent and difficult to measure, like the effectiveness of covid vaccines/measures?
One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continued to be used for many years, leaving many women disfigured, in spite of wide evidence that it did not produce better outcomes vs more restrained breast tissue removal.
In the history of science, many of these kinds of bad ideas have persisted simply due to deference/seniority - the incentives are all stacked towards paying your dues and not challenging the status quo and absolutely not towards being right/following the actual scientific method. There is a reason the saying "Science advances one funeral at a time" exists - as Max Planck noted: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
I remember seeing a plot of the values over time, but my google-fu is failing me.
https://alexholcombe.medium.com/confirmation-bias-in-science...
It that the one you remember?
So kinda like the democracy then.... the worst system, apart from all the others (paraphrased)?
Most doctors are more like engineers than physicists.
This also paints a too-simple picture, since there are obvious things like the promise of quick recovery if you do simple stuff (cancer being a big one) and the alternative medicines seeming cheaper than regular medicine (It may be the only treatment you think you can afford in the US). Not to mention the dismal state of "Health classes" - I'm a little over 40, and those classes mostly just told you about the parts of the body, the food pyramid, and that sex was bad and would probably kill you through disease unless you only had sex with another virgin.
I think COVID has demonstrated that a substantial fraction of people would still be opting for quackery instead of conventional treatment.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-0348-9008-3_...
"Even individual fanatic scientific advocates of the Einsteinian theory seem to have finally abandoned their tactic of cutting off any discussion about it with the threat that every criticism, even the most moderate and scrupulous ones, must be discredited as an obvious effluence of stupidity and malice"
People often present science as some sort of free-floating edifice that "self corrects" through mysterious mechanisms. It doesn't. Scientists with wrong ideas have to be explicitly corrected by other people, some of whom will be random Swiss patent clerks and other outsiders. Therefore you cannot have science without free speech, because otherwise there's no way for bad ideas to be corrected. It's as simple as that. And yet, academic "scientists" are often at the forefront of demanding it be shut down.
Overall it just felt like she was a hot potato and nobody wanted to put their name on *anything* outside of protocol. Even blood work. She was treated at the James Cancer Center in Ohio and we got second opinions from Cleveland Clinic and MD Anderson in New York. These are all fairly well regarded institutions in cancer treatment. I was expecting strong opinions and got hand waving and reluctance to interfere with any treatment selected by her primary oncologist. In the process of all of this i read hundreds of studies and research papers, spoke with numerous PIs, trial coordinators and industry reps. I couldn’t get any traction for anything and came away feeling a bit hopeless.
After it was all over i started making public offers of $25k as a starting point to just review her case from end to end to assess the quality of her care and determine if anything could be learned from it. The only takers I got for that were lawyers who were hoping to twist it into malpractice case, which I wasn’t interested in.
The experience left me extremely bitter about the current state of healthcare. After a while i was able to develop some empathy for the providers. They’re trapped in a system that mortgages their future with student loans and directly threatens their ability to cover with litigation and insurance. They have to stay on the rails or risk financial ruin.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
– Michael Crichton
Too bad his criticism comes from fantasy, instead of facts.
And of course he's a climate change denier.
The quoted passage specifically says his area of expertise is show business. Do you know of misinformation that he endorses or spreads on that topic?
"State of Fear" is a polemic against climate science.
If all you read was the comment I responded to, then it's no surprise that you don't think I provided enough information to criticize his books. Read his books, then read my criticism.
How unrealistic. Scientists like Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance would never do anything evil or untoward, such as using grant money to perform dangerous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, demonstrably lying to the NIH about the scope of this research, and then misleading the public on the COVID-19 lab-origin theory while failing to disclose their financial and professional ties to the lab in question [0][1][2].
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/25/one-perso...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak...
I didn't say that.
My point is that your comment reinforces the point that is made by the much-quoted quote.
He said he knows show business. Calling his writing on climate science crap is consistent with the quote.
Can you see how your comment sounds paradoxical?
You seemed to be saying "don't pay attention to his quote because he's clueless about climate change", but the quote is about people who aren't, say, climate scientists, being gullible about the topic.
It's a self-referential quote. If you refuted it, does that mean that non climate scientists can judge climate science?
It seemed like an amusing paradox, and I guess I'm curious about your motivation.
Thanks for the upvote.
Sure, the quote in itself is great, but the post that you replied to is pointing out that the person who made that quote is himself doing the same thing as those journalists that he is criticizing.
But this quote isn’t really a criticism of science. It’s a criticism of journalism.
I think most people here on HN agree with his premise regarding the quality of science journalism. I’m not so sure about his conclusion that all journalism should be treated with the same suspicion.
It always fights against anything new, and will try to be opposed to anything against the status quo. It is so confident it is right it actually feels like it is doing the right thing by trying to suppress ideas opposed to the establishment.
Kind of like Galileo I guess, and the religious leaders of hus day are like the intellectual elitists of our day.
Thinking about the copernican revolution it made sense the establishment was opposed to it, not because it wasn’t factually correct, but it was like knowledge people aren’t ready for. And it was too unpredictable what it would do if the idea became dominant.
People have done lots of harm (burning money is doing harm) with crap science. That is totally wrong and harmful.
What may happen later is not a solution.
I don't think most people really try to argue against "science" as is, or even the scientific process in the large scale. The gripe we have is against people who first do bad science (or popularize them), refuse to admit they're wrong, then patronizingly tell the public to trust them anyways, and still have the audacity to reassure us that "it will all work out (50 years later)".
For the record I now know a professor at one of the premier institutions in the world, who is a total fraud. Their research was fraudulent in grad school. Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. Then they got a premier post-doc position. People in their lab (who I caught up with at a conference) mentioned their work was terrible. Now they’re a professor at a top tier university.
Along the way, everyone knew and when people tried to bring up concerns higher ups in the institution suppressed the knowledge. Mostly because their fraudulent work was already cited tens of times.
This wasn’t directly in my field, but I saw it go down and followed it.
In my day job, I just throw out papers that don’t publish datasets and code. Most cs work is equally useless. It’s all a farce.
EDIT: I recommend the book for some insights - “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris”
There’s also a decent podcast by Bret and Eric Weinstein that dives into a similar story https://youtu.be/dJNjH4SP6vw?list=PLq9jO8fmlPee9ezOraOHAJ3g9...
There are many examples, at the end of the day... the people in the institutions will protect themselves.
As you are doing here. I don't see a name or any specifics anywhere in your comment. Of course not including any names or specifics also means you could be making it up for a good story. We have no way of knowing.
Your second comment was effectively "Well I don't know they are a fraud and I'm not going to be the one who upsets people by trying to put a stop to it".
I don't say this as a criticism of you. I say this a defense of the people you are criticizing. Stopping people like this takes a lot of work and often some personal risk. Most of us aren't willing to do it despite us pretending otherwise.
That is an awfully authoritative statement to make based off what OP shared.
But either way, this has been proven time and time again whether we are talking about simple corruption like OP mentioned or more serious forms of injustice. People will judge themselves based off motivations and others based off actions. We can excuse ourselves because of the personal inconvenience that acting will cause us. But other people don't get that luxury. They get criticized purely based off that lack of action because if we were in their situation surely we would do the right thing. Being honest about this is important step to actually fixing the system because we need to identify the motivations which lead to the lack of action in order to remove them and encourage action. Simply vilifying people for not acting accomplishes nothing.
Which part do you disagree with? Maybe the 'much' on much less risk?
'given evidence' is true unless OP made op the story. (And even if OP made up the story then we're judging fictional people and the judgements are still valid.)
I think 'less risk' goes part and parcel with being administration rather than someone lower rank reporting a problem.
And it seems clear to me that it's their job.
So, criticism. Which is not a particularly harsh outcome. And doesn't necessarily mean they made the wrong decision, but them providing a justification would be a good start.
Inaction is often excusable when it's not your job. It's always important to look at motivations, but vilification can also be appropriate when there's dereliction. Sometimes there are no significant motivations leading to lack of action, there's just apathy and people that shouldn't have been hired to the position.
OP never mentioned evidence. People just "knew" this person was a fraud but there was no mention of the actual evidence of fraud. The closest thing to evidence is that "their work was terrible" but that isn't evidence of fraud.
>I think 'less risk' goes part and parcel with being administration rather than someone lower rank reporting a problem.
We have no idea the risks involved. It would be highly embarrassing for a prestigious school and/or instructor to admit that they admitted a fraud into their program. Maybe this isn't even the first time this has happened to these people. Would you want to be the person know for repeatedly being duped by frauds? Maybe that would that ruin your reputation more than looking the other way and letting this person fail somewhere else where you would not be directly tied to their downfall. It is also incredibly risky to punish this person without hard evidence as that can lead to a lawsuit.
These are not meant to be definitive statements. They are just hypothetical that show how we can't judge people's motivations without knowing a lot more about the situation.
I don't recall where I first heard it, but the principle that it takes 10x the amount of energy to refute bullshit as it does to generate it certainly seems to apply in this case.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20a...
Reality is almost irrelevant in the face of ideology, dogma, and all the other forces that keep counterintuitive or uncomfortable reality out.
While I agree that there are frauds out there in academia and elsewhere, I have no reason to believe that you’re not yourself some sort of fraud. You’ve essentially posted “I have direct knowledge of [unspecified academic fraud in which somebody claimed to have direct knowledge of [unspecified academic fraudulent conclusion] but can’t back it up] but won’t back it up”
Your overall point is… what? Fraud of perpetuated by cowardice? Self interest? An overall sense of apathy towards the truth? Your comment could be construed as any of those.
There are people that love to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt without having to rely on being truthful. People that are intentionally misleading with the sole intent of leveraging people’s biases and emotions to confirm folks notions and whip people up into an artificially-created frenzy make statements yours.
Serious questions: 1. Do you actually give a shit about this big fraud you’ve brought up but not revealed? And 2. Why did you post?
To expose it directly here would likely have little effect generally, but would have an outsized effect personally (damaging trust). If it did have an impact it would likely expose those involved (many careers). I am not in the command chain, I have seen the evidence and it's overwhelming. But I'm not in a position to enact the requisite change.
That said, I don't actually give a shit about this particular case. It's widespread, insanely wide spread. Most studies / work cannot be replicated.
> 2. Why did you post?
As an anecdote to highlight something that I've seen. I also linked to several other informational pieces with public accounts (so don't trust mine, fine -- trust theirs).
Sorry, I don’t mean to pick at you but… what?
If you were to anonymously post the name of an academic fraud, you personally would necessarily be found out, and it would ruin multiple careers?
The powers that be know who you are, know of the fraud and its nature and those involved? You’ve been privy to this big juicy secret that’s shared by many, but if its content were to be revealed, you would certainly be the one pointed out?
Are you the only person that could reasonably know about and publicly object to this fraud? If so, is it a necessary function of your social or professional life to cover up this fraud? If so, I’ll go back to “why did you post?” (“Sharing anecdotes” isn’t really an answer to “Why did you share this anecdote?”)
I think its more "how dare you hint scientists are corrupt!" that kind of drives the outrage.
Correct me if I am wrong, but this website, and the owners are in U.S. of A. If so, an appropriate court order would force the disclosure of logs, IP addresses, accounts, etc. There are plenty of examples where sites had to disclose sufficient details to track an 'anonymous' writer down. With multi-million (billion?) dollar endowments on the line, I would be worried to presume just a throw away account would work.
Feel free to dismiss the claim if you wish.
Sure, sometimes people lie on the internet but this is not an outlandish story.
“Best case” scenario everyone loses their funding, including the colleagues who did report this stuff. The institution, the lab, etc would lose their funding. Those wanted to get PhDs in those labs will lose theirs. It’ll have a serious negative impact on everyone, even those who did the correct thing.
This is why academia is as corrupt as it is. They all evaluate each other’s paper, give each other grants and anyone who exposes anything loses their entire careers.
That's an odd way of reading a post about "a professor" that contrasts them against the rest of their lab.
As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research.
Now I went to a premier university and I'm friends with some smart cookies, but I don't buy for a second the overall theme of this comment chain. There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it.
The reasons for that can be myriad. Actual or false scientific success of the last 30 years is not necessarily it.
Also, don't you feel the ship has kind of been slowly going down during the last 10 years, wealth-wise ?
Not for the rich, so the reasons are not that much to do with value-creation (it's value distribution that's rotten).
IMHO, there is also a tremendous amount of value dilution going on, and not just due to the action of the US FED or Treasury, or other central banks.
The problems are systemic and global, and conjoined with the problem of value distribution.
That said, I have also witnessed plenty of low-level fraud: changing of dates to match documentation, discarding "outlier" samples without justification or even documentation, etc. Definitely enough to totally invalidate a result in some cases.
Yes but we’re talking about academics.
Academic misconduct.
> Against whom?
I don't know, which puts me exactly where I was ten minutes ago. They have no control over the situation, and if they hadn't posted I would know even less, so it's not suppression.
They have complete control over how complicit they are in preserving the coverup of acts they allege to know are definitely true.
> and if they hadn't posted I would know even less
The reality is that right now you know exactly as much as before they posted because what they posted was unsubstantiated. They may as well have said that their name is Princess Peach and that they're pregnant with the mustached child of a certain Italian plumber for all the good it does you.
One of three things must be true:
1) They have real firsthand knowledge that the claims are true and they're actively deciding to protect the identity(ies) of a conspiracy of rampant fraudsters whose actions are so egregious that they tarnish the very essence of the scientific academy itself.
2) They don't have any real knowledge that the claims are true, and the story is rumormongering.
3) I swear I had a third one, but now that I've written those two I can't think of what it was. I'll leave this placeholder here in case it comes to me.
There was an interesting research paper that claimed you could up your IQ with a computer game called dual n back and a lot of paper tried to replicate it, but my mind was blown when I realized none of them used the same code. None of them actually shared the code they used for their research and then they all claimed they were testing the same thing when they obviously weren't.
To me, refusing to share the source code to a program that could be used to replicate your research seems like a big middle finger to science itself. It shows a total disregard to study replication.
Some well intentioned papers share code which is hard to run years afterwards. It's sometimes much simpler to reimplement things that to get the code to run if they are described accurately.
Besides, some articles hide ugly things, nasty tricks and lies in the code, which make their results a lot less believable and valid. Being super upfront about models in terms of equations and pseudocode is important.
Of course, we should also have standards to make code reproducible. Perhaps depositing a VM with everything ready to run.
Yes, this is hugely important. We need clearer requirements for what constitutes properly 'published' data, code and methods. It should include all raw data (both used and discarded) as well as complete snapshots of each preliminary and intermediate processing step in a time-stamped chronology.
This is an area where the expertise and best practices of software development, documentation and source control could help inform standards and tooling which would dramatically improve the quality of scientific publishing and replication.
Umm, not really? How many years are we talking about here? Because even Cobol is runnable. Sure some OS related quirks may need changing but getting the raw source is much more likely to expose a subtle flaw in the researcher's method than just the equations. For example, an incorrect negative check (to string vs < 0) or an off by one error.
Also, the Python script crashes on loading the data files unless there are two (but not more than two) spaces in its full file path. This is not documented anywhere.
But properly running code is not the solution either. I can count on the fingers of one had the downloads of some of the codes we've published (easily compilable modern Fortran), and AFAIK nobody ever published anything using them. Having a multitude of codes available does not mean much if nobody runs them, assuming they can be compiled. And I would guarantee that none of the scientists who download these codes would be able to understand what they do in any detail.
The danger then is that the VM has so much undocumented complexity that if anything goes wrong, or goes "well" when it shouldn't, no one can explain why. Which also reintroduces a vector to hide nasty tricks.
The worst aspect of this is the lack of will or funding to replicate, replicate, and replicate again all significant results that get published. Post-processed data can be altered, but a TB of raw data is meaningless as well if it hasn't been produced properly, has been obfuscated, or is weirdly formatted.
Data availability is a red herring for the vast majority of the science being made right now (almost everything that does not depend on a multi-millions dollars experiment). If data availability is an end in itself, we would just have moved the goalposts and have a data quality problem instead of a reproducibility problem.
It is done on purpose.
The sad thing is that it isn't. It's just how the things are done.
src: friends in HEP
Peer review isn't what it's chalked up to be. Basically it's two other people in the same field saying "There's no blatantly obvious issues with this paper" and even that isn't always guaranteed. Reviewers don't make any efforts to actually replicate the research, crunch the data, etc.
If it's hard or tedious... well so what? So is life. That's most of science is exactly that rigor.
You might as well say no one else can grow a potato because of all the work your farm had to do all year to arrive at your crop. Yes, any other farmer will have to do all the same stuff. It's an utterly unremarkable observation.
src: I used to be in HEP
Independent replication is inherently expensive, but also critical to the field at large. Some sort of code vault that releases the code and data after a period could be a solid compromise.
Reproducing the code base from scratch just isn't going to be tractable for large scientific pieces of software (e.g. CERN).
Better to have the source code and dig through it carefully as part of the review and replication than insist everyone write their own cleanroom copy just to avoid systematic bias.
That said I am all for peer reviewing code, but that’s not where this ends up. People are going to reuse code they don’t bother to dig into because people are people. The obvious next step would be to reject any paper that’s reusing code from a different team, but that’s excessive.
That said reusing code or data is much safer than reusing code and data.
I can’t begin to understand where you are coming from.
If existing code is buggy or doesn't do what its authors think it does, this can be a big problem. Even if the idea is correct, whole swathes of downstream literature can get contaminated if authors didn't even attempt to implement an algorithm independently, but just blindly reused an existing docker image that they didn't understand. I consider that poor practice. If you claim that your work is based on Paper X, but what you really mean is that you just ran some Docker image associated with Paper X and trusted that it does what it says it does, instead of independently reimplementing the algorithm, that is not replication.
In older areas of science the norm is to try to replicate a paper from the published literature without reuse of "apparatus". For example, in chemistry you would try to replicate a paper using your own lab's glassware, different suppliers for chemicals, different technicians, etc. Analogies here are imperfect, but I would consider downloading and re-running an existing docker image to be dissimilar from that. It's more like re-running the experiment in the first lab rather than replicating the published result in a new lab. As a result it can, like re-running a chemistry experiment in the same lab, miss many possible confounds.
Of course, you do have to stop somewhere. Chemistry labs don't normally blow their own glass, and it's possible that the dominant way of making glass in your era turns out to be a confound (this kind of thing really does happen sometimes!). But imo, on the code side of things, "download and rerun a docker image" is too far towards the side of not even trying to replicate things independently.
The original comment was with respect to some n-back training program. There's so many other potential places of bias in an experiment like that, that you'd be foolish not to start with the exact same program. If an independent team uses a different software stack, and can't replicate, was it the different procedure, software, subjects, or noise?
The first step in scientific replication is almost always, "can the experiment be replicated, or was it a fluke?" In this stage, you want to minimize any free variables.
It's a matter of (leaky) abstractions. If I'm running a chemistry replication, I don't need the exact same round bottom flask as the original experiment; RBFs are fungible. In fact I could probably scale to a different size RBF. However, depending on the chemistry involved, I probably don't want to run the reaction in a cylindrical reactor, at least not without running in the RBF first. That has a different heating profile, which could generate different impurities.
Likewise, I probably don't need the exact same make/model of chromatograph. However, I do want to use the same procedure for running the chromatograph.
Essentially, this would be like trying to reproduce a paper and starting by checking if their mathematical apparatus is correct. It's not useless, and it can help detect fraud or just plain bad peer review of course, but I wouldn't call that an attempt to reproduce their results per se.
Also doing an independent implementation doesn't mean you should start there - what if it doesn't replicate with the same code?
The paper is entered into the scientific record, not the code, which will inevitably become obsolete (old language, old frameworks, implementation details tied to old hardware or operating systems, maybe some source code will be lost, github will go out of business). If the code is necessary, then crucial details have been left out of the paper, so it is not reproducible (although there are some journals that let you submit code as an artifact).
Pseudocode is better, IMO.
If the results are sufficiently different, then look at the source?
In medical studies, one level is to reevaluate the data from the same set of patients to see if any bias or errors wasn't included, perhaps with a different or newer statistical idealogy. The best is for the study to be repeated with a fresh set of patient data to see if the underlying conclusions were valid.
Yes, but that's useful too.
COVID-19 lockdowns largely kicked off in the west due to an epidemiological model from Imperial College London, written over a period of many years by the now notorious Professor Neil Ferguson.
When his team uploaded a pre-print of his paper and started sending it to government ministers, the code for his model wasn't available. They spent months fighting FOIA requests by claiming they were about to release it, but just had to tidy things up a bit first. When the code was finally uploaded to GitHub the world discovered the reason for delay: the model was a 15,000 lines of C trash fire of race conditions, floating point accumulation errors and memory corruptions in which basically every variable was in global scope and with a single letter name. It was a textbook case of how not to write software. In fact it was a textbook case of why variable names matter because one of the memory corruptions was caused by the author apparently losing track of what a variable named 'k' was meant to contain at that point in the code.
Not surprisingly, the model didn't work. Although it had command line flags to set the PRNG seeds these flags were useless: the model generated totally different output every time you ran it, even with fixed seeds. In fact hospital bed demand prediction changed from run to run by more than the size of the entire NHS Nightingale crash hospital building programme, purely due to bugs.
And as we now know the model was entirely wrong and the results were catastrophic. Lockdowns had no impact on mortality. There are many people who looked at the data and saw this but here's just the latest meta-analysis of published studies showing that to be true [1]. They destroyed the NHS which now has a cancer treatment backlog and pool of 'missing' patients so large that it cannot possibly catch up, meaning people will die waiting for treatment from the system they supported with their taxes for their entire lives. They destroyed the tax base, leaving the government with an unpayable debt that can be eliminated only via inflation meaning they will have soon destroyed people's savings too. It's just a catastrophe of incompetence and hubris.
The incorrectness of the model wasn't due only to programming bugs. The underlying biological assumptions were roughly GCSE level or a bit lower (GCSE is the exams you take at 15/16 in the UK), and it's quite evident that high school germ theory is woefully incomplete. In particular it has nothing to say on the topic of aerosol vs droplet transmission, which appears to be a critical error in the way these models are constructed.
Nonetheless, even if the assumptions were correct such a model should never have been used. Anyone outside the team who had access to the original code would have seen this problem immediately and could have sounded the alarm, but:
1. Nobody did have access.
2. ICL lied to the press by claiming the code had been published and peer reviewed years earlier (so where was it?)
3. Then when it was revealed the model wasn't reproducible, they teamed up with another academic at Cambridge and lied again by publishing a report+press release claiming it actually was reproducible and claims otherwise were misinformation.
4. And then the journal Nature and the BBC repeated these false claims of reproducibility.
All whilst anyone who looked at the GitHub issues list could see it filling up with determinism bugs. If you want citations for all these claims look here, at a summary report I wrote for a friendly MP [2].
So. It's good that the Royal Society is telling people not to engage in censorship, but their justifications for taking that stance reveal they're still living in lala land. By far the deadliest and most dangerous scientific misinformation throughout COVID has come from the formal institutions of science themselves. You could sum all the Substacks together and they would amount to 1% of the misinformation that has been published by government-backed "scientists", zero of whom have been banned from anything or received any penalty whatsoever. For as long as the scientific institutions are in denial about how utterly dishonest their culture has become we will continue to see a weird inversion in which random outsiders point out basic errors in their work and they respond by yelling "disinformation".
[1] https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
Overall it seems that they would have been better served by adding lockdown compliance to their models, which would likely explain much of the difference. It's absurd to claim that lockdowns don't work when a country like Vietnam (100 million people, first detected cases of COVID-19 community spread outside China) had <100 total COVID-19 deaths in 2020. Strict targeted lockdowns, strict isolation requirements after every identified case, for contacts up to the third degree ( contact of someone who was a contact of someone who came in contact with a patient) - these all must have played a role, and any study that fails to explain such extreme success is simply flawed.
"If this interpretation is true, what Björk et al. (2021) find is that information and signaling is far more important than the strictness of the lockdown. There may be other interpretations, but the point is that studies focusing on timing cannot differentiate between these interpretations. However, if lockdowns have a notable effect, we should see this effect regardless of the timing, and we should identify this effect more correctly by excluding studies that exclusively analyze timing."
"It's absurd to claim that lockdowns don't work when a country like Vietnam (100 million people, first detected cases of COVID-19 community spread outside China) had <100 total COVID-19 deaths in 2020"
Many countries claim an improbably low level of COVID death. That doesn't mean their numbers can be taken at face value, although poorer countries do seem to be less worse hit simply because they have far fewer weak, obese and elderly people to begin with.
It's certainly not absurd to claim lockdowns don't work. You're attempting to refute a meta-analysis of studies looking at all the data with the example of a single country. That's meaningless. A single data point can falsify a theory but it cannot prove a theory. To prove lockdowns work there has to be a consistent impact of the policy.
"Lockdowns" is shorthand for "people not coming into contact with other people in a way that spreads the virus"
It's shorthand for a set of government policies that were intended to reduce contact, not eliminate it, because "not coming into contact with other people" is impossible. People still have to go to shops, hospitals, care homes, live with each other, travel around and so on even during a lockdown.
Your belief that it's "completely absurd" to say lockdowns don't affect mortality is based on the kind of abstract but false reasoning that consistently leads epidemiologists astray. Consider a simple scenario in which lockdowns have no effect that's still compatible with germ theory - you're exposed to the virus normally 10 times per week every week. With lockdowns that drops to 5 times a week. It doesn't matter. Everyone is still exposed frequently enough that there will be no difference in outcomes.
"Because the virus cannot teleport through walls, lockdowns necessarily prevent transmission"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/18/i...
Viruses can in fact teleport through walls: "The SARS virus that infected hundreds of people in a 33-story Hong Kong apartment tower probably spread in part by traveling through bathroom drainpipes, officials said yesterday in what would be a disturbing new confirmation of the microbe's versatility."
In this scenario, lockdowns work fine, but are insufficient! Perhaps with stringent use of N95 masks during contactless food ration delivery it can be reduced to 0.05 times per week. Then the pandemic ends and we go back to normal.
Also, if you only go out half as often, that's not exactly a lockdown either. A lockdown is people not coming into contact with other people in a way that spreads the virus. It's not people still often coming into contact with other people in a way that spreads the virus but not as often as before.
That might be a definition issue. Here in Germany, we had several lockdowns. Many (most?) countries would say we had no lockdown at all.
This kind of completely irrational reasoning is exactly why lockdowns are now discredited. The fact that the response to "here's lots of data showing that lockdowns didn't work" is to demand an impossible level of lockdown that would kill far more people than COVID ever could simply through supply chain collapse alone, really does say it all.
Antivaxxers often bring up papers concluding that mask mandates don't work, as evidence that masks don't work.
> First, people respond to dangers outside their door. When a pandemic rages, people believe in social distancing regardless of what the government mandates. So, we believe that Allen (2021) is right, when he concludes, “The ineffectiveness [of lockdowns] stemmed from individual changes in behavior: either non-compliance or behavior that mimicked lockdowns.”
> Third, even if lockdowns are successful in initially reducing the spread of COVID-19, the behavioral response may counteract the effect completely, as people respond to the lower risk by changing behavior
Since it is an obvious consequence of the germ theory of disease that isolation stops the spread of disease, the only real question is if lockdowns are efficient at enforcing isolation (and in what conditions, with what costs etc). At best, the paper concludes that they are not, and that government propaganda about the risks of the disease works as well or better.
> You're attempting to refute a meta-analysis of studies looking at all the data with the example of a single country. That's meaningless. A single data point can falsify a theory but it cannot prove a theory. To prove lockdowns work there has to be a consistent impact of the policy.
I would say the null hypothesis would be that lockdowns do work, by relatively simple, almost mechanical, principles (lockdown forces isolation, isolation means the virus can't physically get from one person to another).
And there is basically no country that hasn't seen significant isolation that did well in the pandemic. Whether that isolation was caused by efective, if perhaps draconic lockdowns (such as in China or Vietnam) or by cultural norms and self preservation (such as in Finland or Norway), this remains true.
The real exceptions are countries that successfully isolated themselves from the outside world, and thereafter isolated only those carrying the virus, through broder closures and strict quarantine requirements plus testing - Taiwan, New Zealand are examples of such.
For this type of response, using broad statistical studies that equate very different ground-level phenomena (lockdowns varied wildly in form and in the degree of compliance, but the paper ignores all that in its quantitative data) to make it look good on a graph are mostly misleading - but what more can you expect from three economists dabbling their hand at epidemiology and sociology?
But there is a valid reason for this to happen, and it doesn't mean bugs in the code. If the code is run in a distributed way (multiple threads, processes or machines), which it was, the order of execution is never guaranteed. So even setting the seed will produce a different set of results if the outcomes of each separate instance depend on each other further in the computation.
There are ways to mitigate this, depending on the situation and the amount of slowdown that's acceptable. Since this model was collecting outcomes to create a statistical distribution, rather than a single deterministic number, it didn't need to.
The fact the model was also drawing distributions also will be why different runs produced possibly vastly different results. Those results would be at different ends of a distribution. Only distributions are sampled and used, not single numbers.
Regarding the GCSE level comment, my concern was the opposite, that the model was trying to model too much, and that inaccuracies would build up. No model is perfect (including this one) and the more assumptions made the larger the room for error. But they validated the model with some simpler models as a sanity check.
My view on criticisms of the model were that they were more politically motivated, and the code takedowns were done by people who may have been good coders, but didn't know enough about statistical modeling.
Here's John Cormack's take on the model, he saw and cleaned up the original version before it was released. https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876...
This is the justification the academics used - because we're modelling probability distributions, bugs don't matter. Sorry, but no, this is 100% wrong. Doing statistics is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for arbitrary levels of bugginess.
Firstly, the program wasn't generating a probability distribution as you claim. It produced a single set of numbers on each run. To the extent the team generated confidence intervals at all (which for Report 9 I don't think they did), it was by running the app several times and then claiming the variance in the results represented the underlying uncertainty of the data, when in reality it was representing their inability to write code properly.
Secondly, remember that this model was being used to drive policy. How many hospitals shall we build? If you run the model and say 10, and then someone makes the graph formatting more helpful, reruns it and it now it says 4, that's a massive real-world difference. Nobody outside of academia thinks it's acceptable to just shrug and say, well it's just probability so it's OK for the answers to just wildly thrash around like that.
Thirdly, such bugs make unit testing of your code impossible. You can't prove the correctness of a sub-calculation because it's incorporating kernel scheduling decisions into the output. Sure enough Ferguson's model had no functioning tests. If it did, they might have been able to detect all the non-threading related bugs.
Finally, this "justification" breeds a culture of irresponsibility and it's exactly that endemic culture that's destroying people's confidence in science. You can easily write mathematical software that's correctly reproducible. They weren't able to do it due to a lack of care and competence. Once someone gave them this wafer thin intellectual sounding argument for why scientific reproducibility doesn't matter they started blowing off all types of bugs with your argument, including bugs like out of bounds array reads. This culture is widespread - I've talked to other programmers who worked in epidemiology and they told me about things like pointers being accidentally used in place of dereferenced values in calculations. That model had been used to support hundreds of papers. When the bugs were pointed out, the researchers lied and claimed that in only 20 minutes they'd checked all the results and the bugs had no impact on any of them.
Once a team goes down the route of "our bugs are just CIs on a probability distribution" they have lost the plot and their work deserves to be classed as dangerous misinformation.
"My view on criticisms of the model were that it was more politically motivated"
Are you an academic? Because that's exactly the take they like to always use - any criticism of academia is "political" or "ideological". But expecting academics to produce work that isn't filled with bugs isn't politically motivated. It's basic stuff. For as long as people defend this obvious incompetence, people's trust in science will correctly continue to plummet.
"Here's John Cormack's take on the model, he saw and cleaned up the original version before it was released. https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876..."
If you check the commit history, you'll see that he quite obviously didn't work with the code much at all. Regardless, if he thinks the model is not worthless, he's wrong. Anyone who reviews their bug tracker can see that immediately.
Functionally, what's the difference? The output of their model varied based on environmental factors (how the OS chose to schedule things). The lower-order bits of some of the values got corrupted, due to floating-point errors. In essence, their model had noise, bias, and lower precision than a floating point number – all things that scientists are used to.
Scientists are used to some level of unavoidable noise from experiments done on the natural world because the natural world is not fully controllable. Thus they are expected to work hard to minimize the uncertainty in their measurements, then characterize what's left and take that into account in their calculations.
They are not expected to make beginner level mistakes when solving simple mathematical equations. Avoidable errors introduced by doing their maths wrong is fundamentally different to unavoidable measurement uncertainty. The whole point of doing simulations in silico is to avoid the problems of the natural world and give you a fully controllable and precisely measurable environment, in which you can re-run the simulation whilst altering only a single variable. That's the justification for creating these sorts of models in the first place!
Perhaps you think the errors were small. The errors in their model due to their bugs were of the same order of magnitude as the predictions themselves. They knew this but presented the outputs to the government as "science" anyway, then systematically attacked the character and motives of anyone who pointed out they were making mistakes. Every single member of that team should have been fired years ago, yet instead what happened is the attitude you're displaying here: a widespread argument that scientists shouldn't be or can't be held to the quality standards we expect of a $10 video game.
How can anyone trust the output of "science" when this attitude is so widespread? We wouldn't accept this kind of argument from people in any other field.
Report 9 talks about parameters being modeled as probability distributions, i.e. its a stochastic model. I doubt they would draw conclusions from a single run, as the code is drawing a single sample from a probability distribution. And, if you look at the paper describing the original model (cited in report 9), they do test the model with multiple runs. On top of that they perform sensitivity analyses to check erroneous assumptions aren't driving the model.
I have spent time in academia, but I'm not an academic, and don't feel any obligation to fly the flag for academia.
Regarding the politics, contrast how the people who forensically examined Ferguson's papers were so ready to accept the competing (and clearly incorrect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKh6kJ-RSMI) results from Sunetra Gupta's group.
Fair point about academic code being messy. It's a big issue, but the incentives are not there at the moment to write quality code. I assume you're a programmer - if you wanted to be the change you want to see, you could join an academic group, reduce your salary by 3x-4x, and be in a place where what you do is not a priority.
ICL likes to claim their model is stochastic. Unfortunately that's just one of many things they said that turned out to be untrue.
The Ferguson model isn't stochastic. They claim it is because they don't understand modelling or programming. It's actually an ordinary agent-like simulation of the type you'd find in any city builder video game, and thus each time you run it you get exactly one set of outputs, not a probability distribution. They think it's "stochastic" because you can specify different PRNG seeds on the command line.
If they ran it many times with different PRNG seeds, then this would at least quantify the effect of randomness on their simulation. But, they never did. How do we know this? Several pieces of evidence:
1. There are no confidence intervals in Report 9, only different scenarios. See for yourself: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
2. The program is so slow that it takes a day to do even a single run of the scenarios in Report 9. To determine CIs for something like this you'd want hundreds of runs at least. You could try and do them all in parallel on a large compute cluster, however, ICL never did that. As far as I understand their original program only ran on a single Windows box they had in their lab - it wasn't really portable and indeed its results change even in single-threaded mode between machines, due to compiler optimizations changing the output depending on whether AVX is available.
3. The "code check" document that falsely claims the model is replicable, states explicitly that "These results are the average of NR=10 runs, rather than just one simulation as used in Report 9."
So, their own collaborators confirmed that they never ran it more than once, and each run produces exactly one line on a graph. Therefore even if you accept the entirely ridiculous argument that it's OK to produce corrupted output if you take the average of multiple runs (it isn't!), they didn't do it anyway.
Finally, as one of the people who forensically examined Ferguson's work, I never accepted Guptra's either (not that this is in any way relevant). She did at least present CIs but they were so wide they boiled down to "we don't know", which seems to be a common failure mode in epidemiology - CIs are presented without being interpreted, such that you can get values like "42% (95% CI 6%-87%)" appearing in papers.
Luckily they published their reasoning on the number of realisations in the supplementary materials of a prior paper cited in report 9 (citation 5): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04795#MOESM28
"Numbers of realisations & computational resources: It is essential to undertake sufficient realisation to ensure ensemble behaviour of a stochastic is well characterised for any one set of parameter values. For our past work which examined extinction probabilities, this necessitates very large numbers of model realizations being generated. In the current work, only the timing of the initial introduction of virus into a country is potentially highly variable – once case incidence reaches a few hundred cases per day, dynamics are much closer to deterministic."
So looks like they did consider the issue, and the number of realisations needed is dependent on the variable of interest in the model. The code check appears to back their justification up, "Small variations (mostly under 5%) in the numbers were observed between Report 9 and our runs."
The team's claim that you only need to run it once because the variability was well characterized in the past is also nonsense. They were constantly changing the model. Even if they thought they understood the variance in the output in the past (which they didn't), it was invalidated the moment they changed the model to reflect new data and ideas.
Look, you're trying to justify this without seeming to realize that this is Hacker News. It's a site read mostly by programmers. This team demanded and got incredibly destructive policies on the back of this model, which is garbage. It's the sort of code quality that got Toyota found guilty in court of severe negligence. The fact that academics apparently struggle to understand how serious this is, is by far a faster and better creator of anti-science narratives than anything any blogger could ever write.
I have given a possible explanation for the variation, that doesn't require buggy code, in my previous comments.
An alternative hypothesis is that it's bug driven, but very competent people (including eminent programmers like John Cormack) seem to have vouched for it on that front. I'd say this puts a high burden of proof on detractors.
Then there's literally no point to using PRNG seeding. The whole point of PRNG seeding is so you can define some model in terms of "def model(inputs, state) ->" output, and get the "same" output for the same input. I put "same" in quotes because defining sameness on FP hardware is challenging. But usually 0.001% relative tolerance is sufficiently "same" to account for FP implementation weirdness.
If you can't do that, then your model is not a pure function, in which case setting the seed is pointless at best, and biasing/false sense of security in the worst case.
As you mention, non-pure models have their place, but reproducing their results is very challenging, and requires generating distributions with error bars - you essentially "zoom out" until you are a pure function again, with respect to aggregate statistics.
It does not sound like this model was "zoomed out" enough to provide adequate confidence intervals such that you could run the simulation, and statistically guarantee you'd get a result in-bounds.
So, run the code with a seed in a non distributed way (e.g. in R turn off all parallelism), and then the results should be the same in every run.
Then once this test output is validated, depending on the nature of the model, it can be run in parallel, and guarantees of deterministic behaviour will go, but that's ok.
I didn't develop the model, so can't really say anything in depth beyond the published materials.
I just found it odd at the time how this specific detail was incorrectly used by some to claim the model was broken/irredeemably buggy.
Edit: Actually, in general, perhaps there's one other situation where the seed might be useful, assuming you have used a seed in the first place. Depending on the distributed environment, there's no guarantee that the processes or random number draws will be run in the same order. But it might be that in most cases they're in the same order. This might bias the distribution of the samples you take. So you might want to change the seed on every run to protect yourself from such nasty phantom effects.
Make no bones about it, these are programming faults. There's no reason why distributed, long-running models can't produce convergent results with a high degree of determinism given the input state. But this takes some amount of care and attention.
> So you might want to change the seed on every run to protect yourself from such nasty phantom effects.
That's a perfect example of what I mean where a seed is actually worse. If you know you can't control determinism, then you might as well go for the opposite: ensure your randomness is high quality enough such that it approximates a perfect uniform distribution. Adding a seed here means you are more likely to capture the true distribution of the output.
I saw the John Cormack review which suggested there was nothing overly troubling in the code, https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876...
The other takedown reviews focused on the fact that there was non-determinism despite a seed, without understanding that's not necessarily a problem.
Agreed on the second point about not having a seed, but I added the "assuming you have used a seed" caveat because sometimes people do use the seed for some reproducible execution modes (even multi-thread/process ones), which are fine, and it's just easier to randomly vary the seed generation rather than remove it all together when running in a non-deterministic mode.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1254872369556074496
This is literally impossible, because viruses cannot teleport through walls.
Unless there is confusion between the government calling for lockdowns, and people actually doing lockdowns?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
Also food and other required resources are similarly unable to teleport through walls, so the people involved in growing, transporting, preparing and delivering them to your door can't do "lockdown" like the minority who are able to work from home.
> In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E...
https://quillette.com/2021/07/06/looking-for-covid-19-miracl...
https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/09/15/a-progressive-biologis...
> “I am unvaccinated, but I am on prophylactic ivermectin,” Weinstein said on his podcast in June. “And the data—shocking as this will be to some people—suggest that prophylactic ivermectin is something like 100% effective at preventing people from contracting COVID when taken properly.”
He wasn't just claiming that ivermectin might have some efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 (possible, though I doubt it), or that the risks of the vaccine were understated to the public (basically true; but it's a great tradeoff for adults, and probably still the right bet for children). Bret was clearly implying that for many people--including himself, and he's not young--the risk/benefit for prophylactic ivermectin was more favorable than for the vaccine. There was no reasonable basis for such a belief, and the harm to those who declined vaccination based on such beliefs has become obvious in the relative death rates.
The first article I've linked above is by Yuri Deigin, who had appeared earlier on Bret's show to discuss the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 arose unnaturally, from an accident in virological research. This was back when that was a conspiracy theory that could get you banned from Facebook, long before mainstream scientists and reporters discussed that as a reasonable (but unproven) hypothesis like now. So I don't think Bret's services as a contrarian are entirely bad, but they're pretty far from entirely good.
For an expert's take on Eric's claims specifically, see https://www.cantorsparadise.com/eric-weinstein-how-not-to-fo...
And the ones that are masquerading as having Nobel worthy research chops to get the audience to believe their gripes about the scientific establishment is on topic enough.
I recommend this podcast for a complete breakdown of the Weinsteins. https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/eric-and-bre...
But in my experience (math, science, & engineering), it is actually far less prevalent than in other places.
Forget the overzealous #sciencetwitter people. I have found that academia is one of the rare places where people the absolute top of their field who are often actually modest & aware of their ignorance about most things.
This view doesn't really align with designing public policy - while those people exist - they aren't the problem (or are insofar they aren't voicing their positions loud enough).
Coming from a place of modesty and acknowledging limitations is not the "believe science" movement.
This extends well beyond the science itself, for what it's worth. It's an open secret in every department that professors X, Y and Z have the same level of sexual restraint as Harvey Weinstein. It doesn't stop the "woke" institutions doing everything they can to protect these professors' reputations, though.
I understand after some time it would be an embarrassment for the department because they hired, vetted them, etc. But why did that get tolerated initially, was it a case of nepotism? It seems they must have had some kind of a special privilege or status to skate by so easily despite the accusations.
Now, yes, impurities — even minor ones — can have significant effects. But that tends to be in rare circumstances and chemists are quite aware of the need to check for it where it's most needed such as catalysis research.
No one is going to scream "I have a new drug" for something for which the composition is unclear.
I don't know what world you live in, but it isn't one of a typical North American nor European university research lab.
I have not seen or heard of Eric Weinstein so I can't comment.
I'm not sure what kind of bar you're using to compare your chosen media, but it seems extremely high, and I'd like to know what you consider to be suitably informative.
They really haven't. They continued to double-down on ivermectin and other COVID era flim flam as it came to light more studies were dodgy or outright fraudulent. It's pretend science theatre from a former small university lecturer who managed a couple research papers in 20 years. For example, telling the audience with a straight face that it doesn't matter if the studies going into a metaanalysis are biased because the errors will cancel out.
Edit: I don't want to say (like Ayn Rand, who can be pretty black and white) that it is all bad and we should do away with it, but it's something we should be very aware of and try to build in mechanisms to protect ourselves from these effects.
[0]: https://www.conservapedia.com/State_Science_Institute#Typolo...
Hey careful there, it must depend on the area because all the type theory and functional programming research comes with and always came with proofs and working code. It couldn't be more rigorous and useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle
Though probably Planck was at the time still under the impression of the C.G. Barkla affair.
I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.
There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism).
Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.
What do you mean by "etc."? Do you have another example?
150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. Science is always a mixture of more and less wrong stuff. It's people doing work, for good reasons and bad reasons. Some of them are crazy, some are corrupt, and many are doing their best in good faith.
Unless you think we had a special good period in, say, the twentieth century that we've retreated from. It did seem to be an acceleration.
But there's at least some pretty amazing biotech going on this century.
I think most every activity sector has the phenomenon that 80-90% of the people/companies in it are a pointless waste of time and money. It's the price we pay for the 10-20% treasure.
First, phlogiston theory was considered obsolete by the late 1700s, so you're off by a couple of decades.
Second, that's not even remotely comparable. While phlogiston theory is incorrect, at the time it was first proposed it seemed as good a guess as any other, and remained a viable explanation for how combustion worked until experiments proved it wrong. What's happening today is that respected researchers at reputable institutions publish results that they know are wrong or statistically meaningless, in order to game the academic system towards awarding them greater respect and influence. The problem is fraud, not ignorance.
I strongly suspect there's a survival bias, where the past fraudulent and otherwise incorrect stuff is forgotten in favor of the great stuff. So it always feels like today is the worst time ever.
We produce more science now than ever before. If you have 10 scientists and 9 of them produce rubbish it won't take you long to read a paper from the one who doesn't.
If you have 10,000,000 and 9,000,000 produce rubbish you can spend a thousands lifetimes reading nothing but rubbish.
Social science != Science. (OK I over-react but come on, the field seems barely literate in statistical methods last I looked, i.e. mean != average for all cases)
Medical science has a massive reproducibility problem largely brought on by the demands and pressures of industry funding.
Chemistry is still allowing us to make better turbine blades for jet engines and Physics is still explaining the weird world of quantum mechanics.
Just because some fields can't keep their facts and figures straight we shouldn't tar the whole of "scientific research" with the same brush.
Academia has been taken over by an advanced persistent threat of social sciences that are all completely corrupted. That corruption infects and touches every aspect of the academic's life cycle these days. Funding determines most research and doubley so the conclusions. The infection politicizes everything and rewards those who use scientific branding to support the establishment.
Your claims have merit, but they’re stretched slightly too far. The best work is done among the chaos. And doing stellar work is often a lot more chaotic than it appears in camera-ready papers.
This has been going on through all of recorded history.
Disrupting belief in any important part of your opponent's society, is key. The goal is to cause societal disfunction, an inability to work cooperatively.
Why fight a war, if your opponent destructs from within? Or, almost as good, loses some capacity to make war?
Also good, is if your actions cause your opponent to change regimes, and become aligned with your goals.
Frankly, I'd be astonished not.
While I agree with the general sentiment, science and academia is still better than random YouTube videos.
> What do you recommend I do right now [...] ?
(1) Obtain a solid understanding of statistics, (2) formulate a hypothesis, (3) collect multiple viewpoints, data and arguments related to that hypothesis, (4) sift through the collected data and judge their quality based on reproducibility and history of the author, (5) be prepared to not reach any solid conclusion
Making a decision for your and your family's health is orthogonal to all of that.
For example, you will be hard pressed to find a virologist, immunologist, or epidemiologist that isn't vaccinated and having their 5yrs and older kids vaccinated.
I also like to get my health information direct from doctor groups like the American association of pediatrics. Another good resource is directly on the website of groups like the mayo clinic, Cleveland clinic, or the editorial board of the New England journal of medicine. All of these groups are made up of many expert doctors and issue guidance based on input from a lot of experts.
I'm speaking from a first-hand experience in a private university whose image heavily depends on what "shiny and new" thing their students somehow invent. My university spends so much advertising those things and constantly raise prices at the same time, a shady business model. One of my business professors, who teach in the same institution, also subtly judge the ethics of these kinds of universities.
Censorship is a short-term game.
I don't follow, could you please expand?
I don't see how YouTube could be a better source for certain fields of information (say, medicine) than a collection of scientific studies.
Believing in science is a very old thing, Maya have believed in their eclipse prediction science so much that were even making human sacrifice to save the sun from being eaten.
We should teach the public not to "believe in science", but the main skill of any scientist: to try to find errors in the theory you think is right with more ardour than in the theory you think is wrong.
I actually think this was one failure in our response to the pandemic. Take N95 masks or testing or what have you. There’s been so much back and forth on how well things work and changes of messaging - often driven by real studies, thus reflecting the uncertainty we’re talking about! - and I think that’s the cause of some distrust you’re talking about. In an alternate reality CDC would came out on day one to say “N95s are obviously good, and so are widely available rapid tests so let’s make a ton of them” and stay on this message. It’s the uncertainty and doubt that creates distrust, not the other way around.
The initial stance on masks was to lie that they are useless so that people don't buy masks that were needed for doctors, so if CDC was to stay on message it would stay on that message not the one that masks are good.
Your proposed approach of a few people making decisions and the rest not even being allowed to debate, can not create trust, it can only create USSR or North Korea.
A sidenote on CDC, the null hypothesis is institutional inertia: there were no mask mandates during many recent pandemics so CDC was simply following the long standing policy. This doesn’t require lying: if you believe that a policy is useless and will actively harm supply of masks it makes sense to come out strongly against it. I’m open to evidence to the contrary though.
Do you really think that if you were to look at most research done between 1897 and 1922, the overall quality would be higher? And that there would be less social factors competing with the integrity of work?
How long has it been since replicating someone else's study to validate the results was routinely part of the scientific process?
>The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially of substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum, it still needs humans to do grunt work and those humans need to be paid, and there isn't much money in replicating an existing study and saying "yep, that's what we thought".
I'll add the other sentence from the first paragraph of the source above.
>Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially of substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
I'm asking how to fix it. How do we incentivise reproducibility?
One thing we could do is mandate that some portion of all grant money has to be given to independent researchers who will work to confirm your findings. I could imagine some downsides to doing this, but at least it would put money in play.
Also, another problem is that the people doing research are usually grad students working toward a Ph.D.. No one wants to do a Ph.D. confirming someone else's results. You'd need some other workforce to do the work of reproducing research. Again, doable but there needs to be money allocated for this task.
Right now, far too often "review" is a rubber stamp and replication never takes place. That's because often science isn't really being done. If you're Tropicana you might happily fund study after study after study tweaking it each time until you get the results you're looking for so that you can get "OJ may reduce risk of cancer" into the headlines, then bury the results of all the research you funded that contradicted that, but that isn't science it's just advertising. In a better world, anyone involved in that kind of shit would be blacklisted as disreputable if not charged with something.
Research that isn't or can never be replicated is just barely better than speculation, and not really worth much of anything. If someone wants to fund science, we should be insisting that the process is actual science and the results are meaningful.
But again, this is an economic problem. In a perfect world, we'd have an infinite fund for doing science and you couldn't publish a paper until your results were reproduced.
But we live in a capitalist society where incentives are profit-driven (mostly). That's a reality regardless of whether you think it's good or bad.
See e.g. “Leviathan and the Air-Pump”
I suspect yes, because the poor research was simply not be being done. Science was not a career, there was no pressure to publish, it was the pastime of an elite few.
One of the critiques I hear about Academia these days, even in hard sciences, is that it is now significantly more dominated by the sons and daughters of elites (who don't have to take out loans and can afford unpaid research opportunities etc. etc.) So it might be on its way back to that.
Not being a virologist or epidemiologist, I have to listen to somebody. Are you saying I'd actually be better off listening to Art Bell and Joe Rogan than official sources like Fauci? If so, that's an extraordinary claim if there ever was one.
You need to collect information from across your infosphere and intensively de-bias and cross-check it.
It'll take a lot of effort. If that's not worth it to you, go agnostic on things you don't have time to figure out, or join a tribe and shout the slogans with your tribe-friends. Your life choices will depend on your values.
Every time I get on a plane I have to trust the science and engineering behind it, I have zero clue why it works but I can't become an expert in aerodynamics just to go on holiday. When I drink milk I have to trust the science behind pasteurization, I trust the physics calculations when going up a high rise and the same for when I take medicine.
I have to trust someone for 95% of my day to day actions, and while a system like "science" is flawed it's the best we've got so far. All up for improvements, but let's not throw the baby with the bathwater.
You're correct, in that what you describe isn't a threat to the ivory towers of 'science'.
Unfortunately, here in the real world, outside of academia, those people's unassailable belief in all flavors of bullshit has quite a negative effect on the quality of life of the rest of us. But at least I can sleep soundly, knowing that 'science' isn't being harmed by them.
When, say, the planet burns down around us, because of inaction on climate change, I'll take solace in knowing that the science behind climate change was never in any real danger - unlike the rest of us.
As I keep saying, why can't we just make the planet better? Why is that so difficult? What's the risk?
Also the research could be downright fraudulent. A very interesting case is the Schön scandal, involving organic semiconductors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
There is an engrossing set of videos about it:
With respect, you can make this criticism about every single field and discipline. This is because the endemic problems under discussion have nothing to do with science per se, but are unique to the human condition.
I am also somewhat skeptical that removing funding pressure will reduce fraud. It may reduce the amount of show publications, i.e, work that doesn't really make any progress but isn't wrong either. But in my experience outright falsification of results comes from entitlement. A fraudster feels that they entitled to a certain level of achievement and recognition for it, and are willing to make something up when they're not getting that recognition. I believe that the pressure that drives a person to commit fraud is internal, not external.
There's a reason technology has changed the world significantly in the last 50 years and other scientific areas (e.g. medical research) haven't as much.
Admittedly, part of the reason for that is that what's left in medicine is the "long tail" of as-of-yet relatively neglected conditions.
It’s flawed and can be improved, but it’s still the best thing we have.
It's not just a case of it being a sub-optimal or there being waste here and there, the way a healthy but "real world" company might be.
The entire system really does work against you to make sure you don't achieve the goals that you're ostensibly aiming for.
Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
When I hear people disillusioned with how science works, more often than not I see someone who is forced to see that the mental model they had of how it works doesn't line up with how it actually works. It's messy, and has always been messy. Just read some history books, and you'll see "scientific" ideas in the 19th and early 20th century that persisted for a long time simply because some people disliked specific other people with opposing ideas. You'll see horrible egos, non-scientific arguments to reject ideas, people scheming and trying to undermine each other, and so on. Basically, humans being humans to each other. There never was a time when science was performed in the idealized model that we sometimes wish it was done: it always involves people being people, flaws and all.
Plus, I don't know any working scientist who doesn't assume most scientific discoveries are complete bullshit (or, more likely, they aren't bullshit as much as they ultimately contribute no new knowledge or understanding). We all know how the game works and why people put ideas out there (especially with the increased volume of publications people are expected to have now). What keeps people like me going is that I know most ideas are dumb or flat out garbage, but good ones emerge from that churn too and push things along. I like to think that some of my dumb ideas, when I throw them into that churn, will also occasionally push things along.
Don't get me started in the "believe in the science" line. The fact that we've turned that phrase into a political cudgel is not helping the situation.
It's obviously not a completely worthless institution - there have clearly been some impressive discoveries despite all of the bullshit.
I think the main source of distrust comes from the jarring disconnect between the way that the institution is presented to the public vs. the way it actually functions in real life. "Messy" is a beautiful way to describe things from the inside.
The problem, in my opinion, is how external entities treat science. Some examples:
* Media reporting low grade papers as "Science" which constantly contradict each other. "Scientists found out $something causes cancer", then a year after that "Scientists found out $thatsamething cures cancer
* Pseudo scientific drugs being sold for a health-and-beauty-obsessed general public with little to no effect
* Political think tanks funding flawed research to push their own agenda and heavily echoing those researches in their echelons for political gain
It seems that academia has become a foundation for other entities to cling on for profit, and now the it's the acamedia's reputation that has been shattered.
There absolutely is. Scientists and universities are constantly declaring themselves to be bastions of reason and enlightenment, and their research that they themselves know is shit to be of great significance and rigor.
I'm not even talking about the outright corruption that you mentioned - just the more mundane things like researchers publishing papers with completely useless/misleading information (e.g. testing a ML algorithm on a single dataset and declaring it as a breakthrough in neurosignal decoding) just to get those updoots from your mates.
Despite all the brilliant minds and appearance of professionalism and pride and campus pageantry...
it's easily a much more insecure, drama-filled, immature, and petty social dynamic and environment than most high schools.
That seems imo to be due to a combination of academia itself and a govt (or govt style) administration apparatus, where everyone is constantly trying convince everyone else of the importance of what it is they do.
I get the feeling that you claim that it is all fraud and lies, and that those who disagree can see no wrong with it at all.
Then someone responds with a nuanced reply, something that I, as someone who lives in a university town in Sweden, have the impression that almost everyone in academia actually agrees with.
And then it turns out that you also mostly agree. So, now I'm asking myself (and you): Why did I read that first post of yours as so hostile? As someone who was actively trying to create mistrust?
Is it just because how the debate climate is on the internet, or should you perhaps consider trying to be a bit more nuanced when communicating on the internet?
I think this happens all the time - popular opinion swings far in one direction, criticisms then go in the opposite direction as disillusionment and problems get exemplified, again too far, back and forth, rediscovering the lessons of the past and settling down.
How else do you define bullshit?
I feel the HN community might resonate with how startups are seen currently. Most of them fail, some are outright fraud, but a few completely change the game.
The model to assess the scientific enterprise should be similar to a VC. Most will fail but the few big successes will more than compensate for the losses.
The anti-pro-sciencers are claiming there is not just noise, but a sea of deliberately fabricated conspiracy theories concocted over many decades with an ultimate end goal of putting tracking chips in them.
The corruption of science into advertising and science by press conference is a huge problem, but it's not the fault of science itself. It's the institutions we've built around science that are responsible. The way we choose to handle funding, the universities, and the journals, these are all systems that were created and they are all systems that can be replaced or reformed. The underlying framework for scientific observation and testing are still solid and remains the best way to further our understanding the world we live in, but we need accountability and regulations in place to keep the output high quality.
It's the same issue we have with medicine. Not enough accountability and oversight has allowed for things like doctors taking kick backs from pharmaceutical companies (the opioid crisis was a good example, but it's been going on for ages) and people like Stella Immanuel who can tell her patients their illness is caused by demon sperm and alien DNA but she still gets to keep her license to practice medicine.
Without regulation and oversight every system is vulnerable to corruption and failure. It doesn't mean you should throw away the system, it means we aren't doing our job to keep it functioning.
What reason does a corporation have to pay for science that they know will not work? That's self-defeating. At best it's only advantageous in the very short term before you try to actually sell a product that doesn't actually work. (One more reasons these absurd pre-revenue SPACs are horrendous.)
When the world learns of your treachery, you sponsor scientific research in which monkeys are exposed to your modern VW diesel tail pipe emissions and also model year 1990s Ford diesel fumes, to show that you’re really pretty harmless compared to old pickup trucks. Your research is trash, the conclusions meaningless, and scientists cash your checks.
Hypothetically: you manufacture cigarettes..
Hypothetically: your fracking is injecting heavy metals into my groundwater..
Hypothetically: you manufacture margarine..
I mean. For God’s sake. Think for just a moment.
A lot of the antivax folks cling to the idea of natural immunity being better somehow, but who in their right mind would choose immunity from getting infected with a virus that can make you very very sick (or dead) and cause you to infect many others around you if they could otherwise get immunity from a free vaccine with none of those problems?
From what I've seen a prior infection may give stronger protection than vaccines which is great for people who caught the virus and survived without long term health issues, but that's no comfort for the people who didn't. I hope that access to vaccines has improved in South Africa since whatever degree of protection we get from either an infection or a vaccine doesn't last very long. I'll be trying to get my 4th shot in a couple months.
This is my own opinion based on my observations in South Africa. Yes it is unfortunate we could not get access to the vaccine at the quantities and time we would have liked to but the lesson is we need to improve our ability to manufacture vaccines. There are some promising initiatives in this regard. I digress though. South Africa keeps an eye on weekly deaths[1] and can then work out excess deaths. The excess deaths during the recent Omicron wave which peaked at the end of December were significantly lower than the deaths during previous waves. Government continues to encourage vaccination but the restrictions to reduce spread Covid are at the lowest we have had. Even during the peak of the Omicron variant over New Years restrictions were being lifted [2]. So without coming out and saying it, it looks to me that SA government acknowledges that natural immunity seems to be helping keep hospitalisations and deaths low. This is because most of the research in SA anyway tends to place less emphasis on natural immunity but focuses on the vaccine. So all communication from government continues to stress need to vaccinate yet restrictions continue to fall. It could be that I have not read enough but government's attitude has been welcomed.
[1]https://www.samrc.ac.za/reports/report-weekly-deaths-south-a... [2]https://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/435601/government-lifts-...
Profit. The only reason a company does anything. You see it when companies pay for research so that they can get "X product may reduce risk of cancer" in the headlines, or when they want to put "Scientifically proven to Y" on their product labels. Even if it takes funding 100 studies to get the results they're looking for they can just bury the results of the first 99 that contradict their soundbite or ad copy.
The tobacco industry paid off scientists to lie about the cancer risks of their products so that they could continue profit from killing their customers. DuPont did the same thing. The company knew about the dangers of PFAS for decades, but they went around funding research on it and pulling that funding the minute research showed results that their product was harmful. They also paid off a scientist whose job was peer review to protect their interests while hiding his ties to the company.
There are a ton of ways lies disguised as actual science can make money for those with no morals and corporations don't have morals, just shareholders.
Semi-related, I was reading about the history of some of the "US greatest universities"; Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. were actually Christian Universities? Wasn't even Cambridge founded in the 1200's have similar history?
https://www.quora.com/When-did-Harvard-College-stop-being-a-...
I'm not sure of the complete validity, but it's an interesting perspective for sure.
I even remember reading Einstein working alongside Father Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest (Founder of Big Bang Theory) on some groundbreaking work?
I've always joked that maybe G-d gave us the computer as he felt pity on us for it took 4000 years for man to calculate several hundred digits of Pi, and who knows how many great minds dedicated to hand calculating only a more "perfect circle". Didn't even Archimedes die calculating Pi?
"Nōlī turbāre circulōs meōs!" a Latin phrase, "Do not disturb my circles!". It is said to have been uttered by Archimedes—in reference to a geometric figure he had outlined on the sand—when he was confronted by a Roman soldier during the Siege of Syracuse prior to being killed.
The medical profession is largely still the snake oil industry it was hundreds of years ago, and Govt legislation enables their monopoly.
I have as little to do with the NHS as possible because these so called experts are experts in minutiae and not the big picture. They prescribe what they have been taught. The Govt/NHS also limits a GP's prescribing ability so private healthcare should be the gold standard not a communist era make work scheme like the NHS.
You try getting a doctor to explain their thinking, most will not, and when you challenge them they go all jihad on you, in a western country of all places!
This just demonstrates cognitive dissonance in what they have been taught, but any country or institution or individual who believes in sky faeries just shows humans can hold some diametrically opposed beliefs which are irrational and should be cause to be struck off any so called professional register!
This is not a fact, it's a claim (may even by a hyperbole, we don't know for sure). But even at that, you're overlooking a very important perspective: there are more important and less important discoveries (results) and thus the effect of them being wrong should also be weighted. I'd also be inclined to think that the more important ones are scrutinized more and thus are likely to be right more often.
The great and unique thing with science, not ignoring the issues you've raised, is that it can correct itself. And it's better at it than everyday people are. So yep, the issues mentioned by you and others should be corrected (and some of these, like the replication issues and the publication bias, etc. are well known which means that I'm sure they are being worked on). But the general public also has to learn that science is still our best chance to understand reality.
Because most science (and thus reality) deniers usually just look at it as if it was a simple choice between "do I believe them or not" as in "do I let myself be lied to/mislead or not". Whereas the real choice is who do I rather believe? The science guy or myself (without knowing much about anything, basically). Which will give me the better results? Because when I have to make a decision (e.g. vaccinate or not) then it will be a decision between these too. (Just like "vaccinate or not" is really a decision of "contract the virus with or without being pre-immunized by the vaccine". And not "do I want to risk the side effects or not".)
As a doctoral student I had a paper rejected because I didn't toe the dogmatic line of one prestigious reviewer (seriously, the review feedback lacked only the word "dogma"). Terrible, right? But this is a common theme over centuries as near as I can tell, and here we are, living in a magnificent future!
We will continue to benefit from the scientific process, despite all our individual flaws, and despite how easily we each fool ourselves (and sometimes others).
The landscape is different today, which attracts a different sort of character. Back when scientific pursuit was a passion, you mostly had the creative and innately curious types who were drawn to the field all working on the same problems.
Now you have a large swathe of careerists with a handful of curious types, which invariably means the curious types get drowned out in the discourse and ultimately chased away from scientific pursuit.
The incentives are different as well. Peer review and showcasing ideas/work for grant money are new things. All of your work has to go through a committee of your non-curious careerist B-tier colleagues. If they don't like what you're doing, you won't get published and you won't get a grant.
It's now become a Job with the objective of getting all your work approved by committees. So it's different today.
Trump lied about it when he was president. Biden lies about it now. The most powerful politicians in the US.
One major point in this comment and in many others in support is the observation that the quality of research output is increasingly poor and degraded. It reads to me there is an implicit assumption that because of this the overall process is no longer valid.
It’s not at all clear this is the case, and jumping to that conclusion is taking a very emotional and unscientific stance. Many academics get a shock at some point early on when they look into how things actually work at a small scale, and often later in their careers come to see the effectiveness of consensus and reproduction (or don’t care and just try to get credit for them and theirs). Jumping to the conclusion that science is somehow falling apart requires taking about change over time, not point observations.
Now I’m not providing evidence either way, and definitely see reasons why it could be the case. But at the same time the volume of scientific output is larger than it has ever been, and many fields are developing at an unprecedented rate. And we’re seeing the result of this in rapid technological advancement in many fields, so it’s clearly not all complete horseshit. It’s possible, likely even, that due to comparatively rapid advancement in comparison getting to solid consensus appears to take longer.
That doesn't sound like a fact to me ...
We're seeing all kinds of chicanery that I had thought had largely been consigned to history, but it's all making a comeback.
This comment shows the problem in the argument. Science does not require belief or faith. In fact the idea of faith is the antithesis of science.
Science is about the hypothesis supported by evidence and remains current knowledge until a hypothesis that is better supported by the evidence.
Questioning is required, inquiry is required, not faith.
When presented with a claim by authorities about a new virus and say it's going to be dangerous, do you think, authorities always lie about everything or do you think well virus are a thing, I know they can mutate because I know that if I get the flu this year, it's no guarantee that I will be immune from the version that will come around next year. You also have seen evidence that vaccines are generally safe and work because most people have had them and for the most part don't have people suffering from polio in the western world because of that.
You could say, nah, they lie, this is plot to force us to have genome altering vaccines that will install mind control chips that kill kittens. (yeah, over the top I know)...
Most people have a degree of trust (not faith, very different) until proven wrong that public health figures are actually their trying to improve public health.
The problem is when you would expect someone else to to have faith just because you do. Or equally, that you would expect someone to find an explanation compelling just because you did.
People who don't understand speak with conviction as if they do, but then resort to this chained together appeal to authority as their reasoning.
If this were true, then you could easily provide numerous examples of discredited papers published in journals like those of the AAAS and National Academy of Science, and yet you didn't. Your comment is worthless.
I don’t know what Universe you all live in, but I’m in my 40s and scientific research has made incredible strides just in my lifetime. This includes academic research, industrial research, both together or looked at separately. We have made amazing progress in understanding the human genome, the internals of living cells, devising incredibly powerful semiconductor devices, probing the mysteries of the Universe, developing useable machine learning technology and other areas. We have a goddamn space telescope at L2. Even the “controversial” areas are incredibly successful. In the aggregate, climate change papers from the 1980s and the 1990s broadly predict the warming we can measure today, and COVID research (despite being about two years old) has gifted us vaccines that provide enormous measurable benefits and were delivered on a timescale that previous generations would be amazed by.
Yes, at the micro level there are some individual bad results as there have always been and a few fields have had difficulty with replicating small-effect-size experiments, but even there we only know about these issues because scientists pointed them out and began improving their techniques. In the vast majority of sciences, if you pick a point 20 or 40 years ago and look at the tangible progress we’ve made, it’s enormous and more impressive than anything we have accomplished in any other area of human endeavor. I’m not sure if people here are angry at the world, or if they’ve just raised their expectations to unattainable heights, but it’s awfully depressing watching people ignore this progress.
However, I would say there's a lot of pointless research. Lots of graduate student and postdoc working hours are spent to produce results that no-one could possibly think are interesting or useful just because papers need to be produced.
I think it's the reduction of the system into a career mill (PhD for students, tenure for postdocs and grant money for professors) that ruins it. Science is inherently too unpredictable to be reduced into an algorithm that just about anyone can use to produce knowledge.
It's not that bad because it doesn't need to be. In theoretical physics I could have spend all day every day working on problems that have no physical evidence behind them at a top tier university. This is fraudulent because physics should have something to do with the real world. If you want maths for maths sake go into maths.
Because have you noticed how when something "real" hits the science shelves, any honest research grounded in reality and careful thought, it goes like hot cakes? The research doesn't even have to be revolutionary: anything repeatable, or at least sanely executed. The bar is incredibly low.
Everyone is starved for real ideas… or at least real implementations. Anything authentic, in the sea of marketing BS.
Which I find a hopeful sign! As long as that human instinct persists, the truth bubbles up. People still "feel" wrong when lying, which is great. When that stops (a question of culture?), we're in real trouble.
Funny aside: The front page of today's national news: an elected university rector had to step down. Reason? Academic fraud!
https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/vojtech-adam-rezignoval...
A lot of these influencers have been deplatformed and flocked to alternatives like centralised telegram groups, social media. Non-conspiracy people treat conspiracy people like outcasts, no one likes arguing with no conclusion when the answers is 'I don't believe your source' so they retreat to these echo chambers for social acceptance. I've seen this happen to people I know, they just doom scroll, share anti-tech, -media, -pharma, -government memes. They become rabid in their beliefs and there is no pulling them out. I've seen this firsthand infect people who are "smart" university educated, career success. It's a shame, part of decent people I know are gone. There is a simmering undercurrent of I'm smart and you're an idiot and its probably felt both ways. I'm not from the US, but I've read accounts of what Fox News does to people and it feels similar.
The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned. Not some BS CS paper on a performance improvement in something that will be read and forgotten about, or that some new medication/fruit/treatment has some miracle cure that others can't duplicate.
We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people and that Covid is a hoax by the world government and no one has died. Academia may be broken - but don't loose faith in science.
Or shutdowns of discussion that some health authorities, like Sweden, have (IMO correctly) judged that there is no clear benefit to vaccinating kids under 12 against COVID [2].
The issue I see is less on the fringe 'microchips' but more around the complete shutdown of discussion of complex topics are not binary.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0/figures/2
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...
If everybody else takes a vaccine it is almost always far safer for you not to take it. Vaccines help society by stopping illnesses spreading, they just need enough people to collectively accept the personal risk for the good of everyone else - the same was true for Polio, TB, measles.
If the vaccines are creating sterilizing immunity, this might be true. For example the measles vaccine does that.
But for all current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines we have we don't get sterilizing immunity.
So it can still make sense to get vaccinated even if society at large is vaccinated.
That is to say that there is a selection bias for people who did not die, and this is a significant oversight in your interpretation.
They make the claim "vaccines that pose 50% higher excess risk of myocarditis compared to an infection", and this is a misleading claim.
The risk to an individual of taking the vaccine is more sensibly measured against what happens to somebody who isn't vaccinated, not what happens to somebody who isn't vaccinated and also didn't die.
This is like comparing injuries in people who survive jumping out of a plane with and without a parachute. How important is it if people without a parachute break their arms less often?
Your counter-claim is that this alternative question is what they should have been discussing, and if they had been, it'd be misleading to focus on the risk of myocarditis alone. Which is correct, but then they'd also have to take into account injuries and deaths from other non-myocarditis vaccine side effects, the costs of medical care not given due to the spending of resources on vaccines instead, QALYs and so on. But the sort of institutions that fund such research don't want to know about vaccine downsides, so don't fund any research into it, and moreover expend considerable effort to suppress whatever little research does get done.
Also routinely says not to listen to him, they're his opinions and probably wrong.
Good to see that the Rogan stans in tech are classy as fuck. Jesus...
I would prefer that the general public take advice from scientific researchers with a grain of salt, with an understanding that the system is far from perfect and much of what is published either contains methodological flaws that lead to false conclusions or cannot be reproduced at all.
I also think a little bit of common sense would go a long way.
A big problem, as I see it, is the unwillngness of academia to engage in debate with the public. Whilst academics nowadays are supported and encouraged to engage in "outreach"; the nature of that is almost always in broadcast mode.
In the age of social media, science needs to learn how to communicate, and engage with non-tenured people asking good, evidence based, questions. Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.
Trust is breaking down in society. Is there any wonder, when trust grows from interaction?
> Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.
I think it is a really hard problem. Figuring it if someone is arguing in good faith is hard. And engaging with someone arguing from bad faith is really draining. Besides the difficulty, people worry that engaging with some people will draw even more responses, many of them being in bad faith. Certainly only responding partially often leads to "yeah you are responding to them, but what about X".
I think in the end, wading through all the abuse is just so painful that many people decide to ignore input. And doing anything that might cause more abuse to flood in is reflexively avoided, since that abuse actually hurts.
Solving this is going to require specialization. Because being able to wade through the abuse is not something everyone can do. It will also require proper incentives to actually do this, because the people who can handle the abuse aren't going to do so out of charity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
Robert Malone's bio
"Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment."
Do you really think it is unreasonable to listen to what someone with this kind of a background has to say about mRNA vaccines?
So no, I don't think his random commentary is particularly relevant or reasonable to listen to, any more than Jaron Lanier's haterade @ the tech industry is relevant just because he was working on shitty VR in 1990. Some people are dinosaurs and just need to be ignored, it's not unusual for people to grow to hate the things that they worked on when they were young and get increasingly unhinged arguing against them.
I don't think Rogan should be censored, for sure, 100% and without any reservations - free speech should be absolute, I'm old-school in that respect. But I absolutely think anyone paying attention to this crap should be socially scorned as a dumbass, and TBH I can't get my chuff up too far over people trying to convince Spotify to boot Rogan over this, free markets are also sacrosanct and that's what this is (even if I also would vastly prefer that Spotify holds to a hardline free-speech ethos and leaves him up).
Imagine this in any other field. It is not exactly reasonable to separately bring both a Nazi and a non-Nazi and claim to be impartial. In that scenario, most likely the normal person would sound relatively ambivalent, while the Nazi would be extremely agitated and emphatic that urgent action must be taken.
This kind of example is common. It tells me its worth questioning research and looking deeper at what ever is released. When someone questions research to look at the merits of what they say.
These snake oil salesmen have quickly cottoned on to the fact that they can take disenfranchised and usually uneducated groups and regurgitate them their own opinions with the air of authority, thus gaining an almost fanatically loyal following.
It's the new age televangelists, but instead of preaching salvation for tithe, they preach actually dangerous drivel that gets people killed. It feels like a low point in human evolution, where our tools enable sociopaths to mislead clueless masses on an industrial scale.
And do you know what is the worst aspect of this? That we can't ban them in good faith, because banning information is a slippery slope one way street that we mustn't take a single step on. The only way out of this quagmire is education, but it's a long slog that will pay off in decades time and only if we make a great effort now. It's literally the tree we have to plant and yet our current generation won't get to enjoy it's shade.
He’s in the industry of going against “mainstream [ie scientific] knowledge”… which provides him and endless stream of salesmen who cherry picked scientific papers that support their schtick… and a lot of interested listeners who get an excuse for everything they don’t feel like doing (“oh, this guy on Rogan said brushing destroys your teeth, so I guess I’m better off leaving them alone”)
This seems to be equally valid for basically any media (using brush and toothpaste is not news). Would you say that all media is in BIG conflict of interest? Or how is Joe Rogan fundamentally different?
We know that traditional media has analogous biases towards celebrity scandals, and towards FUD and polarization in politics, and that bottom feeder broadcasters with no ethics thrive on those.
... He does it with lifestyle / well-being specifically, inviting people that peddle diets, supplements, etc.
Being less biased doesn’t make one more true. Both can be wrong
In that instance, a doctor who was part of the team who invented RNA-based vaccines. Any problem with that ?
Yeah, no: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
Right, because there is no way a 5000 word article could in anyway clarify or add context to a specific claim once it mentions a name.
It does not say he knows anything about the things he talked about on JRE: hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or anything about the specific mRNA being delivered to fight COVID (unless you are suggesting that ALL mRNA insertions kill people), or anything about immunity at all, or anything about Israel/Palestine, or anything about epidemics, or anything about monoclonal antibodies, or anything about mass formation psychosis (except to the extent he is trying to make it happen).
1. Things that are false, whose dissemination regardless creates significant harm to society.
The latter is pretty much moot.
You do have to understand that when people say "I got banned because I said COVID may have leaked from a lab" they don't actually mean "I got banned because I said COVID may have leaked from a lab". It's significantly more likely that they got banned because they said COVID definitely leaked from a lab funded personally by Dr Anthony Fauci to create bio-weapons against America to aid the spread of communism with Chinese characteristics because he is secretly an illegal immigrant from Kenya.
2) The scientists who are involved are unusually politically motivated. Most of the scientists I can name off the top of my head are in government (the likes of Fauci in the States or Kerry Chant of Australia. These people are in a position of arguing that their opinion should be given emergency power to decide ... most aspects of the social sphere. This is an excellent time to be looking beyond credentialism to actual arguments and trade offs. Without the "noble lies", please, lets make policy decisions based on facts.
3) I still haven't found anyone who can argue why the vaccine mandates aren't human rights abuses. We're talking the really basic stuff like right to work, right to assemble, right to religion, etc. I don't care who we listen to as long as they are arguing on the side of those basic freedoms. If Joe Rogan is arguing for those things, I'd rather people listened to him. Those concepts have a better track record than technocrats. We can worry about run-of-the-mill stupidity after we've dealt with the real risks here.
That's a strawman. He's interviewing doctors, scientists etc. He's not putting forward his own views, apart from when he recounts his own covid experience.
It's like saying the left gets all their news from John Oliver.
No, that is the strawman world constructed by the mainstream media. The microchip story is actually: https://news.rice.edu/news/2019/quantum-dot-tattoos-hold-vac...
Human bar code tattoos financed by the Gates Foundation. Opponents are discredited because they get an insignificant detail wrong.
We see the same thing in the reporting of the Canadian trucker protests. There are 10,000+ peacefully protesting people, the media find three with a swastika flag (which could even be a literal false flag operation), and reports "right wing protests".
They also report the "desecration of an unknown soldier's memorial", which was a single woman basically walking on the monument. Compare that with "mostly peaceful" BLM protests, where whole cities were burning and monuments were actually destroyed.
Well, as far as I remember - the root of that conspiracy has a true base - that Bill Gates really talked about the possibility of a health chip injected into peoples, as a vaccination certificate. So no chip coming with the vaccination, but a digital health certificate under the skin. But now it is framed, as if he never even spoke about chipping people and I cannot even find the original quote on reddit anymore.
"The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned."
And too many things are getting thrown into the same bucket. Because the mRNA vaccinations are not 50 years old, but brand new. I can very much understand, being sceptical of a cutting edge proprietary technology, to be injected into my system. And I cannot verify the build process. I have to trust government inspectors to do that.
And as a matter of fact, one of the scientists involved with the original mRNA technology Dr.Malone advises strongly against it.
And the process of getting the data for the safety, is not perfect either, as a whistleblower showed:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
Now sure - when reading a bit about Malone, it seems he left the realm of science and entered crackpot area some time ago and the data scandal is not so bad as it sounds - but they are real events nonetheless.
Also despite it is being repeated as a mantra that the vaccines are totally safe - there are strong indications, that people died because of the vaccinations. Not because the vaccines are a poison, developed by shape shifting reptiles, but because some production facilites messed up and some production batches got contaminated with various rubbish, which can happen in the real world when people are in a hurry.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/comment/moderna-va...
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/protein-impurities-found...
So there is a chance, a vaccination does not help, but harm you as a individual. This chance might be very, very small and statistical speaking it probably still makes sense to get the shot. But the possibility exists. And is not really communicated this way, probably out of the fear that since people do not know statistics - they misinterpret.
But this is what fuels conspiracy theories. I mean, the flat earthers are out of the realm of reason anyway - but not everyone who is sceptical of the vaccination and the official data about them, is a crackpot tinfoil hat nuthead. Or am I?
Well, I know that I got angry beeing told by my doctor, that my vaccination (Astrazeneca) is totally safe - and only learned about the contaminations by chance the next day. Something the doctor should have known. So this was bullshitting me, which I do not like. Now I think I do understand the reasons for this bullshiting - because of negative placebo effect. Meaning if I would believe the vaccination is dangerous for me - it actually might be. I suspect many of the reported heart attacks as side effect, are showing just that. People got so scared and stressed that they developed real symptoms. While people being calm about it, have a better of not getting bad side effects.
So this is the problem as I see it. There are people who can handle real data and people who cannot. But we are all getting treated the same idiots. (And I believe people will never learn to deal with real data, when they are always only getting comfortable lies).
"So shut up and take the shot. The one we prepared for you."
I understand people getting upset with that as I do not like being treated as a sheep either. I am not a medical researcher, but I can read papers. And I would like to choose for myself, of whether I trust Moderna, Biontech, Astrazeneca, Sputnik or Sinopharm. But I do not get even that choice. For some reason BBIBP-CorV, the one from Sinopharm, which uses a very safe old school vaccination principal, of deactivating real virus - is not approved in EU, despite being in use worldwide and approved by the WHO. People being vaccinated with it, are recognized as unvaccinated here. Why is that? Is there some data, which is not shared? It is hard to tell for anyone not deeply with it.
> consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice [...] being questioned
This is precisely what scientists should have been doing! I'm afraid having your work done for you by unqualified amateurs is a kind of punishment for skimping on it for too long.
> a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter"
This is essentially a class-ist argument: Someone who tells dirty jokes on netflix couldn't possibly, by the essence of their being, decide for themselves which scientist to talk to. What's particularly striking is that this comes after the author seemingly accepts the parent's premise that academia is borken. What I'm hearing is "Yeah, we haven't earned your trust, but at least we're not those people". This is not a winning argument, and certainly not a scientific one.
> We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people and that Covid is a hoax by the world government and no one has died
This too seems heavily influnced by class. When people believe "Bill Gates is inserting microchips" they are factually wrong but tentatively right. They are powerless in politics, while oligarchs, including foreign ones, have outsized influence. Wild conspiracies are how these feelings find expression in those that have no other way of doing so. By taking everything literal ("no, Bill Gates is not literally inserting microchips"), their enemies can avoid dealing with the issues a more charitable interpretation would be getting at.
> don't loose faith in science
To the extent that science is used as the underwriter of various political projects, I think people are perfectly fine losing faith in it. 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good, so what's the point? On the other hand, I'm not worried that people will stop using material science... By and large mistrust is very well placed.
This is so on the mark - too often we forget to focus on what someone is _really_ trying to communicate, and take their words at "face value" - which is not communication at all.
>This is precisely what scientists should have been doing!
My reference was to the years since we've virtually eliminated the deaths from polio, TB, and measles and other diseases in countries that have used vaccines against them. There have been studies that have shown that some vaccines cause side effects in some people, but none have shown to be comparable to the millions of lives that have been saved from debilitating diseases.
> 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good.
Says the person writing a comment on HN through a network of hardware and software unimaginable 50 years ago that was at least partly made possible by scientists and academic researchers making real breakthroughs. My comments were to the poster who thought scientific research was a polished turd because of his experience in one part of academia
How else do you think scientists reached consensus, exactly? Maybe the problem lies with the unqualified amateurs, who are, well unqualified to do that?
Scientific consensus is reached gradually over the course of decades, after a theory stood the test of many many challenges. No scientific theory is absolute and final and challenges are welcome, but they should be scientific, i.e. based on real data and statistically gounded analysis. Yes, it's hard to change consensus, not only in science but in any kind of community. This does not mean everybody in that community is corrupt. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". If changing a consensus was easy, it would not be a real consensus.
>> a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter" > >This is essentially a class-ist argument: Someone who tells dirty jokes on netflix couldn't possibly, by the essence of their being, decide for themselves which scientist to talk to.
No it's not. Getting all background knowledge and staying up to date with all pubblications in a given scientific field is very difficult and time-consuming. Expertise does exist, and takes year to build. Somebody who tells dirty jokes on netflix likely does not have the time or energy do to that. Maybe, but quite unlikely.
> To the extent that science is used as the underwriter of various political projects, I think people are perfectly fine losing faith in it.
What is the alternative? If no policy should be based on science, then what? Tea leaves? Crystal balls? Shamans? Prayers? Goat sacrifices?
> 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good.
You really need to elaborate here.
Please, please, please. Do not confuse science (the process of discovery) with scientific institutions (the groups of humans with all their defects).
I'm afraid you're lacking imagination. Also, the irony of these being historical examples rather than made up seems to be lost on you. Humans are strange.
On a more serious note, if you were interested in what a modern society looks like that is no longer guided by science, you could study Russia. It seems a cynical blend of religion, nationalism, and imperialism is what it is. I'm not advocating for this, I'm describing what it looks like.
>> 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good.
> You really need to elaborate here.
I specifically prefaced it with "as underwriter of political projects". Over that time, the #1 influence on policy has been economics, and besides covid all of the most pressing issues today are economic: Stagnation, deindustrialization, inequaliy, and inflation. People are asking, if policy over that period was built on such solid scientific foundation, how come we've ended up here?
(A) In some aspects, 50+ years of accepted medical science was wrong. "Droplet dogma" [1,2] was wrong. Now we know that respiratory viruses spread by airborne aerosols [3].
The epistemological tradition of modern medical science seems to be almost solely based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They think everything should be studied and verified the same way that new drugs are studied. We use a lot of physical safety measures, like seat belts and airbags in cars, hard hats in construction sites, etc. because they make physical sense, and their protective properties have been measured in engineering laboratory studies. Like using crash test dummies when crash testing cars. Engineering and physical sciences have methods to achieve and test knowledge, that are not an RCT with real people.
Now the topical topic is face masks. Engineers know respirator masks can filter over 95% of fine particles, but a sizeable part of the medical science still doesn't believe in face masks, due to lack of decisive studies using an RCT-based setup.
(B) But then we also have a surprisingly strong anti-vaccine movement. In this case, the consensus of medical science is correct, and vaccines work.
So we have A, where medical science was wrong and a bit stubborn to correct itself. Science as whole was not wrong: Engineers and physicists worked out the details of aerosol spread of the virus and the filtering properties of face masks. And then we have B, a genuine anti-science movement.
But what to do? If we didn't question the established dogma as used by the authorities, then we would still believe in the droplet dogma, and we would still think face masks are useless. But if we allow the questioning of the established dogma when the dogma is indeed wrong, the how can the general public know when the old dogmas are questioned for good scientific reasons (A), and when not (B)?
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2021.004...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3904176
For example, Aristotle (generally a very influential and intelligent man) believed scallops emerged spontaneously from sand because of the limits of what he could observe back then. The observation itself wasn't wrong as far as the absence or presence of visible scallops, but what he didn't realize was that there was an entire system that he couldn't observe with the tools at his disposal, and this ignorance lead to an incorrect conclusion.
Even Isaac Newton, who forever changed the world with his work on physics and calculus, was an alchemist as well and had some weird ideas about how to treat the plague of 1665-1666 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-p...). These were also born out of observation and Newton just doing the best he could with the tools he had at the time.
Overall, I believe it's both important to believe in science and scientists (even in the face of those cynically exploiting the system), but also to realize that even at its best, scientific information is ultimately about observations, not the ultimate truth of systems, even if that's the unattainable goal of science.
These days science is so specialised and lacking narrative that you can reach PhD level without any notion of what's really going on in your field, and even less into others.
But doesn't low quality science impact the universities and papers that host these things? Wouldn't e.g. Elsevier want to keep charging money for high quality content? Are people and organizations not losing their reputations, jobs, and income over this?
I don't think switching over to laypersons' podcasts is a valid alternative to bad science.
Sadly, no, it doesn't.
"Are people and organizations not losing their reputations, jobs, and income over this?"
They are not. The system doesn't actually self correct in any visible way. The people who fund bad science either can't tell the difference between good and bad science, or don't care, or both.
"Wouldn't e.g. Elsevier want to keep charging money for high quality content?"
You mean the companies that happily publish gibberish written by spambots as "peer reviewed science"?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03035-y
"Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers. Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal."
You have hard science where the research is based on repeatable experiments in a lab where you can clearly isolate every other effect.
You also have softer sciences where experiments are difficult or impossible, and where people try to come up with the best approach. Climate science falls in that category (you can’t really experiment with Earth’s atmosphere, at best backtest your model to check it is compatible with your data).
The problem is that medicine falls within both of those categories. Some parts are fully replicable (like test 3 anti-allergy creams on the same skin at the same time), but many others don’t have the luxury of being able to experiment on humans. So you end up relying on correlation analysis with low samples and a million possible variables. Some bits like epidemiology are more akin to climate science.
The problem with these softer sciences isn’t that they aren’t science (the progress of medicine over the last century is prodigious), but that it’s hard to trust any study individually. So when someone points to a paper that shows a reduction of X by Y% if you do Z, my first reaction is skepticism. So I am struggling with the whole “follow the science” thing, and the idea that any objecting opinion must be crushed.
Still, you're take is wildly, overly cynical.
At the end of the day science is nothing more than systematically looking for explanations that help to make predictions. There is no way that that doesn't converge on something useful, since every explanation that is of any consequence will ultimately be put to the test and it will become entirely obvious whether it is useful or not.
And so here we are, computers compute, drugs are effective, airplanes don't fall from the sky. Is there uncertainty at the margins? Sure! But no one who proclaims to know things better than "the scientists" due to some fundamental flaw in "science" as whole has anything to say that would be worth listening to.
Because that's not how the world works. Understanding things is not about picking the right team, it's about deeply engaging with the data and formulating logical hypotheses. And once you're doing that, you're now also a scientist.
Edit: To add a bit of personal experience to the somewhat theoretical argument above... I've met a lot of good people and a lot of assholes in academia. I've certainly met a lot of people who liked to make their results sound a bit more important than they probably really were. Never once have I met someone who didn't ultimately care about drawing valid conclusions from good data.
Some fields, like social sciences have long been very politicized and ideological, and this situation hasn't changed for better. I wouldn't take most studies from fields like social sciences, business and humanities very seriously, especially qualitative ones.
Secondly, pay and working conditions in academia generally suck, which means most actually competent people avoid it like plague. This also has an effect on the quality of research. Becoming a researcher these days in my country at least generally means becoming a working poor, who wants that?
This is what a lot of students hit if they're ill prepared (this is not a bad thing on behalf of the student). I remember my advisor saying he saw it as his responsibility to shield the new students from something crazy controversial until we knew how to walk for ourselves, make plots quickly easily, understand the jargon and materials... aka until we were mid-way through, then we should be thrown to the wolves to form our own opinion on topics.
You're now falling for the daily mail mistake of 'big sensational headline in field X' therefore it must be false.
Just look through the nobel awards for understanding what directions and leaps fields of science are making and ignore the self-perpetuating egos that end up on the front of 'Nature' or the daily fail. We have cloned animals, we have perfected fiber-optics, we have discovered the nature of the Higgs Boson, gravity waves and I don't even understand enough about chemistry to understand why or how that field has advanced but it clearly has.
Unfortunately I'd suggest your supervisor failed to prepare you for your PhD.
Don't worry I can point to several papers which have maths flaws in that impact the result by 2-sigma, but nobody cares about those results because it doesn't change the over-all message. "We saw nothing after intensive scrutiny and looking for it." despite being on flaky mathematical groundings.
That 'rabble' of science deniers is growing very quickly (just look at the evolution diners in the US) and keep making arguments like. "you can't take the people of of science".
If the rabble gets big enough, politicians listen and then when politicians are listening to anti-science people on whatever topic, funding inevitably gets cut or re-directed and scientific research suffers.
Don't worry I'm not talking about types of research that supports raytheon by making bigger bangs, but research that cures cancer in babies and infirmity in adults and makes better and materials for the world...
Assuming that that paper is not false, it highlights lots of areas/reasons why things can go wrong.
Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the 'scientific method' is the best we've got. "How do you get people to discover reliable knowledge without getting sidetracked by bias, bribes, career incentives, corporations or politics" is actually a very hard problem to solve. The cobbled together bunch of institutions, practices and traditions that we call 'the scientific method' needs to be understood for what it is - a patchy, error prone but just about servicable method for fighting our own biases and shortcomings.
Always good to look for ways to improve it I guess but overly cynical or overly optimistic takes on it don't help much. We need to have a realistic view of it.
So the solution is to somehow decouple it again. Give universities a blank cheque to employ scientists to work on whatever for sciences sake, not for business. Sure, that's obviously open to exploitation in a new way, but we only need one major discovery for the whole thing to be worth it which we can't get with small incremental research.
Personally, I favor the opposite—stop awarding universities the "indirect costs" part of grant awards unless they agree to cap the hiring of grant-seeking investigators. The number of grant applicants needs to be balanced with the supply of public funds, and I don't think the public is willing to pay much more than they already are. And I say this as someone who is currently grant-funded.
While you might not have enjoyed your stint the sausage factory, sausages have a long, successful history. Handling meat safely is hard, and it has been done with varying levels of success over the years, but historically sausages weren't much worse than any of the other meats despite the nature of their creation, and with modern food standards they are pretty much safe when handled properly (of course proper handling depends on the type of sausage).
If you didn't like what you saw and, as a result, decided not to eat any more sausages, this seems more like a gut response on your end than any particularly deep insight into sausage production. People are generally aware that some of the steps in the process aren't nice to look at, but they judge the product based on the end result.
The grant agencies are at least part of the problem. They seem to have set up the wrong incentives.
Let's move towards reviewable moderation.
I'm happy to see this issue recognized by research. I believe secret removals, where authors of content are unaware it's been removed, are the primary problem. Removal in and of itself might not be a big deal if we could all review what's been removed.
Is this a prank, i.e. obvious misinformation?
The prior point that surveilance is needed, following that individual platforms shouldn't be relied on for censorship would also widely be considered plain wrong.
It's really questionable how science is to be defined, as soon as social aspects enter the picture.
Deplatforming creates martyrs and conspiracy theories, as does the lack of communication or the lack of reputable authorities.
I don't know how we can scale the limited time of subject-matter authorities except to direct their cannons at the biggest sources and individual instances of nonsense.
Many scientific breakthroughs did not come from repeating the established consensus and a lot of scientific consensus has been horrifically wrong in the end.
My issues are that more men than women live in rural areas[1] so on average men will have to drive more and use more fuel. This data also seems to come mainly from a study in 1998 but they continuously say "men today", the data is from two decades ago. It also suggests that buying local food is better for the environment then importing, but they probably don't grow food in Stockholm so it would come from regional areas. Men also need more calories so even though women emit more from their food, men are actually doing much better considering they are generally recommended to eat 1.25x more calories than women[2]. I'm also very sceptical about the energy used for clothing and furnishing in the study.
This study was widely shared in places like NPR[3], The Guardian[4], CNN[5, CBS[6] and The Independent[7]. I feel like the issues I've pointed out are super obvious and if there's a reason they are not problems then they should talk about why those issues are not relevant, especially in the news articles.
I haven't read the whole paper, I actually just looked at the study to see how much clothing emits per person(after an article on fast fashion was posted on here). It's very concerning to me that that is published in "pro-science" news papers. Perhaps even worse is the original paper is not even really casting blame but the articles all do.
[0]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13176
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301672...
[2]https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/wha....
[3]https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018796496/men-spending-carbo...
[4]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/men-caus...
[5]https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/21/europe/climate-carbon-gender-...
[6]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-footprint-men-more-women...
[7]https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/sustainable-liv...
And independent thought is inconceivable.
So ya, the zombie apocalypse happened yesterday and nobody noticed.
This is a known fact.
Sounds like we need more evidence, rather than accepting the null hypothesis. C'mon Royal Society, this is stats 101.
Misinformation isn't harmful in itself, what is harmful are the choices people make based on that (mis) information. That's what legislation should fight, that's what society should fight.
Instead of censorship, how about more information, more education? People, even antivax and the like, have a good measure of cognitive capacities. We should strive to educate and inform them, and accept that some people are just gonna think differently. If they are 5%, well, that's alright. Maybe one of them is the next Galilee.
Don't believe me? When was the last time you heard about the MMR vaccine causing autism?
The "good" part of this is that rejection of science, politicization of science and the use of this issue to manipulate people who somehow claim to be "free" yet are the most easily manipulated aren't new issues. There was the MMR autism issue, resistance to polio vaccination and resistance to smallpox vaccines before that.
The damage is of course huge. The US is sitting at >3,500 Covid deaths per day currently. Annualized this is well over 1 million people per year (although it'll likely trail off), 90-95% of whom are now unvaccinated. These are people who are now steadfastly choosing to die. The government has moved on from this (eg the updated CDC guidelines on isolation to keep the economy going). People seem to have moved on (IME).
I don't think we should be worried about censorship of misinformation. Credible-sounding misinformation is easy to produce and hard to refute (aka the bullshit asymmetry principle). Leaving it out there does more harm than good (IMHO). You'll never completely get rid of it but the less of it out there the better.
As to what to do about this, the only cure is to teach critical thinking at a relatively young age so people can ask questions like "who is telling me this?", "what are their sources?", "why shouldn't I trust the CDC?" and "who benefits from me believing this?". Conservatives know this which is why they're busy passing laws to prevent such teaching.
It's why college graduates tend to be more liberal: colleges generally teach critical thinking and that tends to kill conservatism. Of course this is predictably painted as colleges being hotbeds of political indoctrination. So here we are.
A big problem with misinformation being out there is how people can fall into the trap of bothsidsing the issue (which is a logical fallacy, for the record).
My parents coming from a communist nation (Yugoslavia) I strongly disagree with this. Who determines what is truth and what is misinformation? One of the major arguments communists used to oppress speech was to prevent panic and the spread of misinformation. (Misinformation being anything that wasn't pro-communist)
Imagine that the worst and most corrupt people you can think of are now in charge of controlling truth and misinformation. That is why the freedom of speech is a fundamental human right - no one should have that kind of power. I agree that we need better fundamental education and critical thinking, but not less rights and more power for large entities.
Instead we have private actors choosing not to be in the misinformation business. Various hate groups and such have been deplatformed by Twitter, Facebook, etc. Those fringe sources still exist. They're just in darker corners of the Internet. They're not entitled to free, mass distribution just to spew lies without recourse.
Lastly, it's worth pointing out that we censor things all the time as it is when there is an overriding interest in doing so. Examples: criminal cases involving minors (ie their names), naming certain victims in court cases, courts sealing records, publishing of military secrets, publishing of dangerous information (eg how to make a biological weapon), information to doxx/swat people and so on.
And little seems said, but I can't help notice the quite communist behaviour to demand the state mandate 'choices' for the populance wholesale 'for the greater good.' Especially knowing the vaccines don't stop the virus or the spread.
Protecting information is not censorship, and your example highlights an incredible ignorance of what censorship (which is a government tool the first amendment is specifically designed around) actually is.
But what I do know (as evidenced by your history) that having reached that conclusion you now work backwards. You're against "censorship" of misinformation because that misinformation contradicts your anti-vaxxer beliefs and therefore it's bad. I'd bet money if we were talking about censoring information that showed vaccines are safe and work you'd have a completely different view.
Your right to promulgate propaganda isn't being violated here. Platforms just aren't required to distribute it and use their judgement about what they want on their platform.
The data doesn't lie. Were you aware Pfizer finished their phase 3 trial after 3 months partly because 97% of the control group got vaccinated? Is that good science?
Are you aware many countries count a covid death as any death within 30 days of a covid diagnosis?
Are you aware in the US that doctors and hospitals receive compensation specifically for recording a covid case but not for other illnesses?
Are you aware that in the UK, out of 170K+ deaths, less than 100 were under the age of 20, yet vaccines are pushed to all with a higher side effect profile in the young?
Are you aware that in Pfizer's presentation for approval of their vaccine for under 12's that they didn't even demonstrate a clinical outcome?
Did you see Bourla himself say two doses do nothing against Omicron, three 'a little,' and yet they're still being pushed/mandated?
And look at Ivermectin. The response has constantly been 'more research needed' yet no big investment, even though the investment in the vaccine was unprecedented. Why wouldn't masses of funds and research be put towards it if it looked promising (which a number of studies, though not all, showed).
I change my mind if the evidence and data are strong. I don't sent the vaccine does work to an extent for specific groups, but you have to work really hard to not see massive problems with things like mandates and vaccinating kids based on the data. Locking down seems to have worked best, but that's political suicide now so 'just get more jabs' that don't stop spread or hospitalisation is the go...
Biologically, we're still hunter gatherers, cognitively optimized to deal with tiny scale societies and its limited information diet.
Even in our area of culture (since only 10K years ago, start of agriculture) we dealt with almost no information at all. What we consume in information in a single day now is the information load of an entire year just centuries ago.
Even in my lifetime, early 80s, information was limited, and slow. When I grew up, we had 3 national TV channels, a few magazines, and a library of dated books.
The current age is not "business as usual", it's brand new. Information is unlimited. Information moves at breakneck speed. Information has broken free from institutions, all citizens are producing it. Information has no accountability, anybody can say anything.
We're not equipped for this. We don't "scale" in this way. That's why I don't see a true solution. But that doesn't excuse us from trying...
Academics should produce more idiot-proof takes that are proportional, connect with the real world and include counter points, rather than producing a simplistic paper for the sake of producing a paper to meet some perverted internal metric. The emphasis should be truth and the purpose of it, outcomes, not checklists.
Traditional media should stop turning themselves into a Twitter account or juicy Tumblr blog. Stop thinking in narratives and us versus them type of reporting as is so typical of US media.
Social networks should ban paid advertising for anything that has a societal impact. Further, social networks should stop rewarding the most extreme, dumb, controversial opinions to the mainstream as this normalizes outrage, division and minsinformation. The reasonables should win, not the crazy ones.
This last part is perhaps key. There will always be misinformation but the way it spreads is the real issue.
Say a controversial character has 100K followers. The character posts something new and it's now anyone's guess how many of their followers see it. My guess is that it's fairly low, perhaps 10K. If it would end here, it's fair game.
But that's now how this works. At all. There's a retweet button. This single button brings it under the eyes of countless additional audiences, and it spreads like wildfire. Because the take was controversial. As part of this effect, the character gets even more followers, and so on.
At the end of the day, you basically take a village idiot that would normally be completely isolated in their opinion, and hand them the microphone to address an audience of millions.
In fact, the only reason this person had 100K followers to begin with was because of this effect: richly rewarding controversy, bad takes, etc.
This is not a new development: the boundaries of scientific knowledge - across all fields - have required a large amount of specialization for a while now. The barrier to entry is a PhD, and even then you’re only an expert in a small part of your field.
If you suddenly decide to jump in without context and make judgements about topics you are not qualified to talk about all while ignoring the state of the art, can you really expect others to take you seriously?
I think the real cancer is the rapid rise of distrust of subject matter experts.
I think the problem is this, in a reasonable society we would say: here are the relevant facts, here's the supporting data, make up your own mind. In reality what our society now does is says "_you must accept conclusion X, and if you don't you're an idiot_" with absolutely no real justification.
I don’t agree with the “no real justification” part. But even if we set that aside, context matters! We are almost 2 years into a global pandemic with multiple vaccines widely deployed and extremely well-tested, yet a significant minority is still denying the vaccine’s efficacy.
To be quite frank, after witnessing how the world has reacted to this pandemic, I am now much less surprised by the ignorance depicted in zombie movies and shows :)
I think a big problem with the vaccine messaging (from people and institutions) is that it ignores human psychology. To give maybe a silly example, lets say I was hosting an office party and I brought a soft serve ice cream machine. The value of ice cream speaks for itself, so I imagine I would be giving out a lot of ice cream. There are probably a few people that wouldn't want ice cream though. Maybe they're lactose intolerant, or on a diet, or they have tooth sensitivity. Lets say I start pressuring these people, mocking them and generally getting in their face about it. People would start to think something is up right? What if I then said "everyone must have ice cream, or you're fired", people would suddenly start wondering: why is this guy so insistent that I have ice cream? Is there something in the ice cream? Is this some weird Jonestown thing going down? I imagine a lot of people would refuse the ice cream on principle.
I feel like with the vaccine and the mask mandates "not getting sick from a horrible virus" should be able to sell itself. But people are now really distrustful, partially because the messaging has been so over the top forceful, often contradictory or misleading, and partially because the vaccine has been overhyped (remember when Biden said if you got the vaccine you wouldn't get sick? That's just demonstrably untrue.) And now people think that if they just double down on this it's going to help, but like in my ice cream example, it's just going to make people wonder what on earth is going on.
Unless you have some sort of real power over people, attempting to bully them into seeing your point of view just is not an effective way to convince anyone.
The most troublesome parts of expert mistrust was one scientific group going after anothe, as with scientists of one specialty turning into epidemiologists overnight and claiming that vaccines have contributed to thousands of deaths. As a statistician, I had to deal with junk statistics and regressions in just such a pre-print that caused a lot of panic in my little research community here.
If people don’t understand a complex subject, then I think they should neither endorse nor reject SMEs’ opinions on the matter. People don’t have to have a belief about everything. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. Blind trust is dangerous.
Intelligent people who questioned Daszak's paper got memory-holed. Their posts were removed, had their reach limited, were placed under warning banners, etc, simply for raising the mere possibility of lab leak origin.
I could give many more examples of "subject matter experts" giving us ample cause to throw them in prison, never mind distrusting them - WMD lies, false flag attacks, staged incidents, etc.
All reported and repeated with zero gorm. No accountability. Dissenters get smeared, fined, jailed. Protestors get blocked off, boxed in, ignored, mocked, minimized. Rare politicians speaking truth get marginalized, smeared, mocked, ignored, cheated. Threatened.
Seeing this get worse and worse for decades, how can you seriously argue that our distrust is the problem? Distrust is more than justified, it's demanded. Anything else is ostrich shit.
Can PhDs and Nobel Prize winners, the quintessential experts, make decisions about complex subjects?
If they could, wouldn't Long-Term Capital Management still exist today?
Would the IMF have said, months before the subprime crisis, that global economic risks were on the decline?[0]
Nassim Taleb's tweets are an endless source of examples of experts (PhDs, even!) being clueless, sometimes dangerously so.
Excessive trust of subject matter experts is a very real danger, and a significant one.
[0]: World Economic Outlook: Spillovers and Cycles in the Global Economy. Washington, DC: IMF, April, 2007
Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald; these are the cancers, not the concept of representative democracy. Attempting to spread lies and unconsidered science on other people's platforms, and then pretending like they're entitled to those platforms is arrogant, completely wrong, and degrades what it means to own property. If you have to let people use your services, your property is no longer your own; it is owned by the government, it is nationalized.
I want private companies to be able to decide how their platforms get used. If Spotify doesn't want to deplatform Joe Rogan, that's fine, but they should deal with the consequences, which is also fine.
There are plenty of other people who do all of the things you seem to like about those two, but who are also good at journalism and haven't otherwise fallen victim to their own greed through moral turpitude.
And you may think representative democracy doesn't work, but I think you need to understand that it's more or less all the West has going for it. If you throw out representation, you throw out more or less every modern democracy in the world, and I'm personally not willing to do that. The alternatives are ghoulish and chilling to think about.
I'm not suggesting removing representative democracy, you're creating a strawman there, I'm saying that starting at the assumption that everyone is a moron that must have their information stream managed is bad for democracy; and that your average representative has more blind spots than we care to admit.
Besides, frankly your average representative doesn't actually do that much research into most topics, they either take the party line or do whatever their biggest donors ask them to do. So in essence you're not generally represented by Jim Bob, you're represented by oil companies or insurance companies or hedge funds etc..