Against Scientific Gatekeeping | Hacker News Reader

Against Scientific Gatekeeping

reason.com

20 pointsjohnwdefeo4 comments

I'm not sure what the primary example (the hydroxychloroquine business) has to do with a scientific "priesthood". Scientists rightly criticised the idea that a very small study that didn't prove causality should be used to inform public health, and then people in power with an ideological bent went ahead and did it anyway. If anything, that's an argument for the scientific orthodoxy being correct in that case, given that it ended up being that hydroxychloroquine doesn't actually help with covid. All that they were asking for is that better studies be undertaken before it was adopted as policy, a reasonable recommendation.

It concerns me that advocating for random citizens "doing their own research" often leads to people getting their medical opinions from dodgy Facebook groups and trying to cure their cancer with essential oils. The scientific establishment isn't perfect but at least it's broadly aligned with finding out the truth instead of selling people falsities for profit.

Yeah, I think he picked some bad examples to illustrate an otherwise good point. For instance, the issue with Ioannidis is not really that people thought he was supporting Trump, it was that he made wildly controversial points on flawed, limited data. And even with what we know now, he was wrong. The HCQ stuff was hardly ever controversial from a technical standpoint, it has always been a stupid shot in the dark.

On the other hand, the trends he highlights are indeed dangerous. We have become way more partisan and dogmatic in the last few years, even when it comes to scientific research and communication. And there is a growing tendency to fossilize an imagined consensus into scientific truth. As we all descend into tribalism, it seems that our interpretation and communication of basic scientific facts is succumbing to it as well.

Well, if somebody who has been pushed outside the realm of scientific acceptability has a point to make, can't they conduct a study to prove the hypothesis they're trying to forward? Sure, the US is becoming more divided, but even in calmer seas I would expect scientists to criticise anybody trying to drive policy based on shaky science, because that is inherently an antiscientific and irrational approach to policymaking. If you genuinely want to explore whether some given protocol (say, HCQ for covid) is effective, just do good science. We should all be skeptical of "scientists" skirting around the scientific process.

I get what you mean, but do you see how the politics around otherwise sterile scientific decisions influence how scientists will decide what to test, and what gets ultimately funded and reported? For example, HCQ is and has always been a shot in the dark, based on some wonky theory about transmission rates in Africa. That it became a major talking point in some parts of the world before any tests were conducted meant that a) a lot of funding would inevitably go towards testing it, which is likely suboptimal and b) scientists who do not support the politicians who talked about HCQ in the first place may be inclined to review the evidence in a more negative way (and vice versa). Another level of distortion is added by media, as different organizations may report only results that confirm the biases of their clientele. "Just do good science" is an aspirational goal, not the reality we see.

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