Constructive and obsessive criticism in science

For those interested in this topic but who would like to see it explored with greater remove from present controversies, there’s a ton of great academic writing from the mid-20th century by historians and philosophers interested in looking at science primarily as a sociological phenomenon with cultural consequences rather than just as an epistemic tool for making inferences.

Among many others, Thomas Kuhn makes for a great introduction to stepping back and looking at science from that sociological perspective, and Paul Feyerabend — respected but controversial - anticipated exactly the sort of challenges we see surfacing today.

They are mostly focused on medical science, but they do mention the precedent from climate change. We seem to have moved past a lot of that, or at least into a new phase, but as far as I'm aware no-one has even been held accountable for the lies spread around that topic. Is there any mechanims to do so?

All those scientists hounded for 'faking' climate change. Did they ever get compensated for that? If not then we've basically created a situation where it's fairly cheap to harass people who do science that will affect your bottom line.

Given the recent Alex Jones ruling, I can't help notice a parallel there. Is an online mob of people with mental problems the best new way to censor information and discourage scientific oversight?

> the critics often lack field-specific skills and technical expertise

> (in "diagnostic criteria") Lack of track record of field-specific skills and sufficient field-specific technical expertise

So it's a closed club: "You're not one of us, so you're not allowed to criticize us"

> (in "diagnostic criteria") Argumentum ad populum: claiming, without evidence, that most scientists disagree or believe the work is harmful

Almost everyone on both sides seems to do this. Claiming that there's a "scientific consensus" usually only means that contrary views are refused by the leading journals.

Real consensus only emerges over years or decades. The big bang theory only became consensus when all the other theories had failed.

This is a condition of human social life. Tribes protect their area of interest, the domain in which they dominate is what provides them bread, butter, and prestige. But it is more than that nowadays, it is the primary identity marker for many. In some sense this is needed in a civilization to enable the scientific endeavour, but I feel like the gravitational pull that reverts to mean, has always, well yeah, reverted, is a function of the cost of information movement. Today crazy ideas can gain traction in days, rather than decades, and I fear that some of these narrative bubbles are beyond pulling back in.

It seems as though the authors of this paper were vocal critics of the government response to Covid-19, and faced the full "obsessive" wrath of criticism (although, unlike many others, they don't seem to have lost their jobs). The same thing happens to non-conformist scientists in other highly politicized areas like man-made global warming. I think it is similar to what happened to Galileo 400 years ago.

Ioannidis is just butthurt that he has been criticized for being wrong https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...

How much of this is actually criticism of actual science vs politics justified as "science?" I have seen very little of the former and a lot of the latter. And the massive jump in 2020 due to covid makes sense. Many decisions made by the government, and publicly justified as "science" were clearly politically motivated, and could not even be said to be scientifically supported. e.g. covid checks crossing borders when covid was rampant on both sides. And political leaders not only justified their decisions as scientific, but also implied that this made them unassailable by the public and even called for censorship of opposing views under the guise of "misinformation." e.g. the whole lab leak controversy. If our leaders continue to act like this, they can expect the "obsessive" criticism to continue.

It took a while for the author to move from a very abstact concept to the concrete example, and that was Covid-19 (and only Covid-19). However, there's also a good argument that the scientific and medical experts flubbed certain aspects of the global response and investigation of the pandemic in many regards. Note also that failures and errors stand out more than successes do, that's just a common human social phenomenon.

These problems can be plausibly grouped into (1) investigation of the origin, (2) effectiveness of masking, and (3) effectiveness of the vaccines.

With respect to the origin, it's plausible that the Wuhan lab (funded in part by the US government via Ecohealth alliance) was the point origin of the pandemic. The natural zoonotic origin theory, however, was trumpted by the experts for months as the only possible explanation, and critics were silenced and targeted by the establishment media and leading academics in the field. Currently, lab leak theories are of three types: (a) the lab collected a wild-type virus from a remote region (southern China/border perhaps) and it escaped from the lab, (b) the lab cultivated that virus in bats and genetically modified mice, which increased its virulence via serial passage, and then it escaped, and (c) the lab modified the viral genome directly by inserting sequences into the cell-binding domain (the furin issue) using a CRISPR strategy (developed in the USA some years previously) which allowed it to jump easily to humans. Most rational people disregard claims that this was some deliberate release. Refusal to investigate all this immediately was a major failure of the scientific establishment. See the book 'Viral' by Ridley & Chan for a comprehensive discussion.

With respect to masking, there was a lot of contradictory messaging along with a lack of any convincing studies on effectiveness, plus a lot of politicization of the issue. The most solid conclusion is that people infected with respiratory pathogens should wear masks to prevent infecting others. Note that for many years, this has been the social norm in, for example, Japan. Note also that handwashing is just as important for stopping transmission, but for some reason that never became a political 'red-vs-blue' flashpoint.

Finally, the effectiveness of the vaccines was oversold. The rapid rise of mutations was certainly a confounding factor (i.e. the vaccines may have been more effective against initial strains), but they were promoted as polio/smallpox/MMR type vaccines, i.e. once vaccinated chances of getting infected and spreading the disease were supposed to be essentially zero. It turns out the vaccines are more like flu shots, only partially effective. Vaccinated people can be asymptomatic carriers and spreaders of Covid-19. This created quite a bit of distrust, and may have impacted the other issue, claims about prevalence and severity of side effects of vaccination (smallpox vaccine had more severe side effects, but was also much more effective, so...). There's also many suspicions about the profit motive of the vaccine manufacturers, particularly with respect to pushing the boosters and the necessity of vaccinating the under-18 and young-adult population. Additionally, the effectiveness of post-infection 'natural immunity' was never really examined in the context of the necessity of vaccination for such individuals.

The scientific and medical response to Covid wasn't all bad, of course, people did a lot of hard work in an effort to stop it, but these failures and errors certainly stand out. There was a kind of paternalistic flavor to the public messaging as well, as if people were too stupid to handle the facts and complexities, which led to distrust. Also the 'stay in your lane' theme of this article is a bit offbase, you don't need to be a working expert in immunology and virology to be capable of seeing these problems (my working academic background is in microbiology and molecular biology, for example).

The title should be "Scientific harassment"; obsessively criticizing science is how we do science.