Between pre-prints, overly enthusiastic press releases, and reporters who often don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about it’s not worth it.
I’m not surprised an ever increasing portion of the public doesn’t believe in science. We’re practically conditioning them not to.
Honestly, since this is really just a shadow discussion of the same Reddit posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w2x10v/beware_of... and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w1ahrq/scots_tea...) we should all just come out front and say "A bunch of people overreacted to single non-science source of bad and un-peer-reviewed research". The fact it was debunked so quick is a credit to the science ecosystem. The fact that a bunch of dopes piled onto the original report without any due diligence is the problem. That is a problem worth unpacking - how information is distributed and our poor general education in critical thinking and evaluation of source materials.
I don’t think most people do.
And I don’t care if it was debunked in a day or two. It’s not 1980. It spread very far in that time. And given how outrageous the claim was (and the knock on effects we should be seeing if it was true) no outlet should have ever published it in the first place without further review.
If the police tell the media they shot someone in a robbery it gets reported. It’s reasonable to assume that’s not fake.
If police say they shot 5,700 people during a robbery at a McDonalds this morning, no one would report that uncritically. They’d look for some kind of confirmation because the story is so far out there.
That’s what I expect of science reporting. At least the most basic cursory check. I’m not asking for the media to duplicate studies themselves. But blindly reporting what someone tells you uncritically is likely to lead to obvious mistakes like this.
"Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.
Re-reading my comment it may be unclear what I meant. So to state it plainly it was the original claim I knew was bunk.
It makes sense for a lot of people in the US to be scared of COVID, it is a dangerous, infectious disease after all.
>The authors mined electronic health records identif[ying] 353,164 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 2020 and November 2021. They then matched each COVID-19 patient in a ratio of one to five with 1,640,776 control patients. All of the survivors and controls were monitored for at least a month and up to a year. Overall, 38.2 percent of COVID-19 survivors developed a post-COVID condition, compared with 16 percent of uninfected controls.
(Also note that the “post-COVID conditions” include things as minor as a persistent cough.)
The real headline should be "More than 1-in-5 COVID cases serious enough to be noted in medical records may result in long-term symptoms, greatly ranging in severity."
Upwards of 60% of the US had been infected with COVID as of April 2022 [0]. If serious long-COVID symptoms indeed occurred in upwards of 20% of COVID cases, that would mean >12% of Americans are currently suffering from debilitating long-term illness, which would be obvious on a societal level. We simply do not see this.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220426/almost-60-percent-i...
there is active research on the topic but no conclusive evidence that it's any more than a form of negative hawthorne effect and/or hypochondriasis.
and a science writer is often writing about science far afield of their narrow education/research. the author of this very article is the "automotive editor" at ars, not a marine biologist, or anything close to it.
"expert" is a normative (aka political) nominative, not a descriptive one.
At the risk of committing the sin of No True Scotsman, perhaps these people don't really have the expertise they claim.
I would expect a journalist who has actual, real expertise in a particular field to be able to sort out the junk from the newsworthy, at least most of the time. If not, then I don't think their expertise really exists. Sure, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but I would expect people with real expertise to be at least mostly reliable.
The author has a PhD in Pharmacology. Biology is an integral part of Pharmacology.
Not to mention that if you click through the author's article history, the most recent three pages of articles he's written (over 100 articles) are exclusively about cars, not science. (Ok, one exception, looks like he wrote an article about Disney's Obi-Wan series.)
While I wouldn't say he has no domain knowledge at all, I don't think it's fair to say he has "expertise in marine biology". And he doesn't even write about stuff related to his credentialed field, at least not recently.
Equating the two is just nihilism or solipsism, as if there's no reality, just people saying things.
> they're not in this business for commonwealth, objective truth-seeking.
This is an attempted attack on motives, and again, not on any real substance.
> "Ars Technica is pretty good, partly because so many of their writers are experts with advanced degrees."
passes the test for "real substance"?
read both, and any other favored news service. read a small sample of their coverage and their self-serving motives jump right out of the page and slaps you silly like a rubber chicken. it's that obvious. and it is their problem, by association, since you're trying to make a (unsubstantiated) claim on reputation.
that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.
There is some evidence. But as you said, it's a novel disease and still being studied.
https://www.bcm.edu/news/what-eegs-tell-us-about-covid-19-an...
Some of the EEG alterations found in COVID-19 patients may indicate damage to the brain that might not be able to be repaired after recovering from the disease.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
Unless they all would have died at that time regardless, in the absence of COVID, isn't this a distinction without relevance?
"with covid" is the same. that's why co-morbidities are almost universally indicated in covid deaths. it's because the people dying of covid are pretty unhealthy already, and covid is not the primary cause of death, but a contributing one, often a minor contributor at that.
the distinction is also important because it has multi-faceted follow-on effects. in terms of treatment, a doctor could otherwise have focused more on treating a co-morbidity than covid. a researcher might focus more on other ailments than covid. the public might have been less fearful and tribal. public health guidance might have been different. it has lots of relevance actually.
However. This is a long way from where things started.
*> that's not to dismiss the threat of covid’
Actually, I think what you’re doing is worse. As a doctor I’m happy to treat current covid as something we need to live with and get on with, but you’re actually dismissing the prior threat of COVID as well. Dismissing all the people who did die. Dismissing the 140,000 children who were orphaned in the US alone. Dismissing the real contribution of COVID to actual deaths - your distinction of ‘deaths from covid to deaths with covid’ is meaningless when excess mortality clearly shows that without the impact of covid the US population would be 1m higher than it is today.
The fact that you choose to see the COVID information as having sowed division speaks more to the bizarre information landscape you have in the US. Many other countries found the last couple of years intensely frustrating but managed to forge a sense of national spirit in fighting it, and as a result have significantly lower excess deaths, significantly less orphaned children, and significantly lower societal scars to bounce back from.
no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it". every single person on earth will get covid at some point. at best, we've delayed that point a little bit for some people, not to mention some shifting of mortality. note that liver disease and chirrosis deaths rose last year - why aren't we making video montages and pouring one out for them, or their orphaned children, again?
>no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it".
This is simply not true. Countries that avoided early surges, avoided overrunning hospitals and were able to get their populations vaccinated and dealing with lower virulence covid strains have had lower overall deaths over the 2 and a half years of the pandemic.
Australia for example, had largely flat excess deaths in 2020 & 2021 (actually a reduction in 2020, due to no covid, reduced travel, no flu season). Australia started dealing with the actual burden of COVID in late 2021 and 2022, and has seen 10,000 COVID deaths so far. Excess deaths in 2022 is 17.5% above average for the year to end of May. [0, 1].
If the US had of been able to pull together, instead of, as you have, variously dismissing it as 'nothing more than the flu', 'no more important than Cancer and Heart disease deaths', or moving the goal posts and declaring that, essentially, the area under the curve will be the same but the timing will be different (which is at conflict with earlier points) - ie if the US had of been able to pull an Australia (or one of many other countries that didn't just totally shit the bed and hide their heads in the sand) than COVID deaths, scaled for population, could have been in the 150-200k range.
Or, to put it another way, if Australia had of shit the bed as badly as the US did, then Aus would have had 60,000 deaths.
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-... [1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...
Add in how overly sensitive the tests were, especially pcr, testing for the virus and not for actual proof of infection... It's all a joke.
But the skill had atrophied.
I had to learn how to count again, practice counting, and cool thing is I can now count--with about the same level of error I had as in late high school--to 18, 20, 30, 32, 37 the way most people can count instantly when there's 6 or less. I made a game to practice.
But back to the point: yeah too many people blurt stat. They didn't count right. Just blurt stat.
“Nullius in verba” is the original motto of the Royal Society, arguably the birthplace of modern science. It roughly translates to “take no one’s word” and encouraged an epistemological worldview based on empiricism. This was situated in a world where truth of all matters was primarily dictated by authority, even those of the natural philosophies.
The truths of science were to be experienced in the laboratory just as the truths of a cake recipe were to be experienced in the kitchen.
The person that I am responding to is lamenting the fact that there is a certain expectation that one must “believe in science”. This is in direct contrast to “nullius in verba”.
Believing in whatever is said by a random person claiming to be a scientist is less solid.
Believing in what is reported in general news media as being the discovery of said random people is rather gelatinous.
Read the abstract of the research article and look for the most important graphic / table. Does it support the abstract of the article? Does it even support the caption of the figure? Ctr+F for some keywords, like "control group", "exclusion criteria", "almost statistically significant". Try to find out if they are using some "interesting" method to filter the data.
Use some back of the envelope statistic, like comparing the difference, variance and Sqrt(N). Count how many results are statistically significant and how many are reported. How many implicit results are not reported? Also, are there some results with an incredible small error?
There are just too many predatory journals and bad journals with a peer review that is a joke. Unless it's a journal in your area, just ignore the journal and look at the data. And even some serious journals publish bad articles.
I use a modified version of the crackpot index were the article starts with +5 points https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
In god we trust, all others must bring data.
Abstract and conclusions. The middle if it seems interesting, followed by looking for related research to confirm the conclusions.
Most people don't have the skills to do this, we need better science journalism.
(We also have an incentive problem for science, but that is another problem.)
It's the sane approach.
It's incredibly myopic to state first that you don't believe in the science news you hear, and yet somehow you (a) believe the news you hear about how much of the public believes in science, which itself would appear to be [social] science news, and (b) have apparently discounted the probability that the public just like you doesn't believe in science news.
Really, it's not myopic, it's xenophobic and bigoted.