The Daily Sceptic is such a piece of shit, I try very hard to feel sad but I can't.
I know that it's a question of big principles etc... but still.
I know that it's a question of big principles etc... but still.
"principle: a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning."
To quote Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear."
(Yeah, freedom goes both ways)
Not saying paypal isn't shit but there is some schadenfreude to be had for sure.
They’re a right wing “bastion of free speech” and proud of it.
Anything at all to show how right wing ideology is not literally and figuratively destroying the world?
Stick to the topic you yourself established, don’t move the goal posts.
If you have nothing more to contribute, then don’t.
Left-wing ideology is trying to drive five billion people, as fast as possible, to first-world living standards (via either open borders fanaticism, direct aid, or economic globalization), with the accompanying carbon footprint implied by a first-world lifestyle.
All whilst bemoaning carbon emissions.
Yawn. Wake me when your own ideological compatriots demonstrate your concern for the climate with policies that won't absolutely destroy it. As it currently stands, you're actively trying for 500ppm.
what you're describing here is capitalism.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/14/global-covid-pandem...
So you see where is the conspiracy theory in that, now?
Can you point out where it says he knew there would be a pandemic?
Do you think the public deserves to know that Bill Gates and his foundation contributed $789 million to the World Health Organization in 2021 (more than the U.S. Government)?
The part "he knew there was a pandemic" is actually a reply to the previous commentator speaking about "well timed and well documented investments" from Bill Gates related to the pandemic, which is a way to present it as "he knew what was coming, how weird". Now I hope you see why, at least in that commentator post, that sounded extremely conspiracy theoretical.
Please restrain your misinformation. You agree you should now have your bank accounts closed?
But this illustrates the dilemma quite well: ideally we would like payment providers to be a public utility that is not allowed to make whimsical judgement calls, on the other hand we would like them to employ good judgement about facilitating things that are clearly detrimental.
While I share your schadenfreude in this case, I don't see how this is solvable in the general case.
What day was the harm posted?
The Growing Menace of Bill Gates’ ‘Global Health’
Whale Population Grows Despite Attenborough Climate Scaremongering
Headmistress of England’s Most Successful State School Reported to Police For ‘Hate Crime’ After Jordan Peterson Visit
Pentagon Launches Probe into Woke Diversity Officer After her Tweets Asking Where She Can “Get a Break From White Nonsense for a While”
Woke High School Defends Trans Teacher With Prosthetic Breasts in Name of Creating “Safe and Inclusive Environment”
I agree with the "big principle" that they should have access to basic internet services, in theory.
But I also think that there should be laws forbidding anti-science and conspiracy theory mindset, because it ruins everything brought by knowledge and rationality, and leads to stupidly destructive actions.
Obviously, the positions held by the site are shared by a lot of people here, but that doesn't change my opinion of it. If you believe they are spreading worthwhile information on there, that's obviously your right and my beef is not with you - I think it should be possible to politically disagree with someone and still be able to go out and have a beer together. My beef is with sites like this which are causing harm on a societal scale.
I do actually think the site is unethical, yes. But those are not "my" ethics, just ethics in general. There is sufficient evidence to argue against the Daily Sceptic on purely humanist grounds. On top of that I do find the site personally objectionable, that is also true.
I also believe that the intent and consequences behind opinions matter. If there is a website that clearly influences a lot of people to be anti-science and that tries to promote social inequity then I don't view this neutrally as just another opinion. Ethically, this is not on the same level as, say, someone's opinions about the Game of Thrones finale.
> But if you're ok with companies that should almost be utilities withholding their services
I told you two times already that I'm not okay with this, only that this is one of the exceedingly rare cases where I welcome the way things have already been working for years.
Who or what is this site harming?
This is very harmful for everybody who read it without a critical mind (i.e. exactly the public it targets).
At what stage of the scientific method is inquiry no longer permitted?
> COVID and climate change,
Are the authorities 100% right about both of these topics?
> which contributes to the harm caused by those things.
Have you considered that trying to shut down free inquiry into these things makes many people even more distrustful of what you have to say?
Well, this is media reporting rather than scientific inquiry. There certainly are ethical limits to what can be published if it goes against fact or scientific consensus. For a more clearcut example, it's harmful if a publication reports that drinking urine cures cancer. I don't think you'd disagree that this would be hamrful (maybe you do?) but perhaps you differ on whether we have the same confidence about climate change and COVID. Which I suppose ties into your next question.
> Are the authorities 100% right about COVID and climate change?
Not sure what you mean by "authorities", but the current scientific consensus that the Earth is warming due to human activity is so strong, that it's practically comparable with statements like "the Earth goes round the sun". These are the people whose job it is to be objective and sceptical. Not everyone has the time and inclination to read the literature and understand the models ourselves, so we either trust in the science, or we think that the whole of science is caught up in some kind of mass hysteria or conspiracy.
> Have you considered that trying to shut down free inquiry into these things makes many people even more distrustful of what you have to say?
Sure, but I'm not sure I consider one company distancing itself from another to be the same as shutting down free inquiry. And anyway, the question I was considering was "is there an argument that the DailySceptic is harmful". I was simply proposing ways in which it may well be causing a social harm. Balancing that harm against the harm caused by restricting free speech is much trickier.
The first step of the scientific method is observing and questioning reality. Whether this action is performed by somebody with "researcher" in their job title or not doesn't change that.
> There certainly are ethical limits to what can be published if it goes against fact or scientific consensus.
It was also scientific fact at one time that the Earth was the center of the universe, or that washing your hands before surgery was pointless. How do we know when it becomes ok to question fact or scientific consensus or not?
> the current scientific consensus that the Earth is warming due to human activity is so strong
For the sake of argument, if we take that statement as an iron-clad fact, we're still left with a wide range of outcomes within the reality of climate change.
1) How much is earth warming?
2) What level of harm would that cause? Might some areas of the globe benefit while others are harmed?
3) What if the proposed solutions to climate change cause more problems for humans than benefits?
Is there not room to disagree with many proposed climate change solutions without being labeled as anti-scientific?
> And anyway, the question I was considering was "is there an argument that the DailySceptic is harmful".
Since you seem to be focusing on utilitarian outcomes, have you even considered the ways in that skepticism of what you're told to believe might perform a social good?
So, when those people gather and are in a consensus about a specific question, it means a lot.
Whereas when a lay person without such title or background questions the consensus, it really means little.
A great way to be helpful to Humanity, for the Daily Sceptic, would have been to take important things brought by researchers on, say, AGW, and make an effort to transform it in a format more easily understandable to the public.
In place of that, they pick articles bearing ultra-minority opinions against the consensuses, and they propulse them to the rank of "just another opinion in a controversial problem", although the problem is not at all controversial, it's just that there always exist people who say anything.
I mean, the straightforward answer to this is "when there is a high degree of confidence that the claims are harmful, incorrect, politically motivated, and reported in the media rather than scientific publication". At some point we have to draw an epistemological line and say we're sure about this, and we're sure what you're saying would cause suffering. The fact that humanity has been wrong in the past doesn't mean we should stop trying to prevent harm.
> Is there not room to disagree with many proposed climate change solutions without being labeled as anti-scientific?
There is, but that's not all that this website is doing. A very quick search brings up two articles where it publicises very fringe claims by people who are not climate scientists:
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/14/climate-emergency-not-su...
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/06/24/climate-scientist-says-h...
The second of these is particularly bizarre. The title actually says "climate scientist" and in the slightly more measured footnote calls him an "atmospheric scientist". It neglects to point out that he is a retired researcher in laser engineering who has apparently conducted his own investigations - neither published nor peer reviewed as far as I can tell - http://hharde.de/#xl_xr_page_index . This is very typical of presenting a false balance in order to push an agenda.
I wonder…
Well, urine isn't on this list: http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/a-z/u
But as this is about the principle and not just the specific, the Daily Mail is famous for saying things cause or cure cancer and the UK seems to let them get away with this without much in the way of noticeable impact on life expectancy ranking.
Once you see that, very hard not to be pro-it.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-revi...
It reports on some claims (pre-print) that changing the name and title on a paper between a nobody and a Nobel Prize winner radically changes the likelihood of paper acceptance, i.e. scientific journals are relying mostly on reputation and not paper quality in their peer review process. If true that's not scientific and can lead to "consensus" that just reflects the opinions of a tiny handful of people through inertia.
Here's an article by an anonymous academic criticizing a group of scientists who were engaging in political lobbying:
https://dailysceptic.org/archive/when-did-scientists-turn-in...
In general, consider how much COVID science was advertised as a consensus right up until the moment it inverted or was proven false. The lab leak was a disproven conspiracy theory right up until the Biden administration admitted it could be true and should be investigated. Vaccine mandates were required to stop the spread, then it was admitted vaccines didn't stop transmission. In the UK, Omicron had the same IFR as Delta and refusal to lock down over Christmas would create 4000 deaths a day, except that it didn't.
The DS started as a blog for people who scratched the surface of these claims and went looking for the papers. When found they were invariably either missing or pseudo-scientific so there was a need for people to exchange notes and demonstrate their arguments for why this wasn't really science. It's important that such sites exist.
I'd say further, the clearest sign that somebody or some organisation is not listening to science, is that they are actively questioning scientific consensuses.
This is the authoritarian pseudo-science that has been corrupting actual scientific progress for some time now. You are wrong for three reasons:
1. There's no such thing as a scientific consensus because science is a method, not a set of people, but a method can't have a consensus about something.
2. None of the positions they attack are actually a consensus anyway even if we replace the word "scientific" with "academics/scientists", and they like to prove it from time to time by pointing to scientists or entire groups of scientists stating that they disagree with those positions (see other comment).
3. Their writers provide data backed and scientific [counter-]arguments for their positions.
There's also lots of articles there sounding the alarm about corruption of scientific institutions. Like this recent one [1] about bias in the peer review process. Here's another where they decry ideological bias in Nature [2]. They pretty regularly cover cases where scientific institutions are clearly acting in unscientific ways.
[1] https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-revi...
[2] https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/02/the-ideological-capture-...
You seem to think that science is way more than what it is.
Science is just knowledge + logic. The presence of logic gives a highly structured architecture to it, true, but it is guided by logic so it all has a reason to be.
B/ I would add: very nice for them to play the Knights of the Lost Cause with minor theories, but they seem to ignore the adage "choose your fights". Which is most important, highlight a very unlikely small possibility that AGW does not exist, or help people understand the known mechanisms of it and organize themselves to counter it? Yeah rhetorical much.
"[consensus means] the specialists of the subject overwhelmingly agree ... Science is just knowledge + logic"
So is science what specialists say it is, or is it just knowledge+logic? If the latter then what specialists say doesn't matter, because anyone can obtain knowledge and apply logic.
So, people expressing themselves outside their domain of expertise are not to be trusted.
In your example "that oil wells are beneficial" means probably "also beneficial for the climate"? "for our future as Humanity"? "for health"? So you see, it is vague and probably wrong.
The point here is you can't go from "specialists assert something about their field" to "and therefore it's true and we should do it". But this is how you're defining science - an unquestioning belief in whatever specialists say, as long as seems to be about their specialism.
That's a mental shortcut and it often fails. All scientists - climatologists included - have to master all kinds of skills from outside their own field. For example scientists routinely use statistics and programming yet they aren't specialists in those fields. In the early days, the Daily Sceptic carried a series of articles by a software developer who showed that the COVID models were full of ordinary coding bugs. They didn't generate correct results because they were doing things like using buggy random number generators, they had buffer overflows, race conditions and other stuff. So in that dispute over models who wins? Is it the specialist in programming or the specialist in the thing the model is supposed to represent?
In reality, although academia strongly encourages this kind of silo-ization you can't actually do it. You always need multi-disciplinary teams, you need people who have different incentive structures to poke and prod at claims. The platonic ideal of an unbiased scientist specialized in one domain who issues proclamations of consensus is all too often a fantasy that we try to cling on to even when it becomes untenable. If you use counting experts as a way to decide what's true you can't resolve disputes correctly. If you apply rational skepticism, you can. Although the Daily Sceptic is nowadays mostly just news, it's historically focused on dispelling this fantasy in the realm of COVID science, where "specialists" often turned out to have no deep understanding of disease, and be amateurs in skills you'd think were essential.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9215332/
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774/...
Re: climate. Scientists are in fact speaking out against the ever more unhinged rhetoric around climate. Here's Zeke Hausfather, a well known climatologist - who bizarrely and very problematically given this story is a climate research lead at Stripe - saying that even he is now being called a "climate denier":
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1533875297220587520
That's a guy who's very much done his part to stoke those sorts of claims! Yet he now argues that "Doomerism is a disease, and a self-fulfilling prophesy"! Go outside the field and you can find lots of scientists and people with scientific training who disagree that there's much urgency at all, here's just one example:
https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-0...
The point is, actual science is a methodology, not a set of people in a set of institutions. The Daily Sceptic has consistently defended this view against people like henearkr above, who is literally arguing that being pro-science means blindly agreeing with whatever someone (him) has declared is the "scientific consensus". It's the opposite of science to believe this. It's pseudo-scientific authoritarianism of the sort that enabled Lysenko and worse.
I've not been calling for banning anything, I'm arguing about whether misrepresenting science causes harm. This whole thread is a response to logicalmonster asking "Who or what is this site harming?". Now it feels like the goalposts are being shifted to "okay but these other things are harmful too!"
I've not seen evidence of CDC lying about mask wearing etc.. so you'd have to reference what you're talking about there (I'm not from the US).
Re Zeke Hausfather tweet, interestingly he's not denying there's an emergency, he's just saying that doomism is not an appropriate response. Elsewhere he writes:
> The environmental crisis is one of the most serious and pressing issues facing the world today. We are already living with impacts of human-caused global heating, and the world is not doing nearly enough yet to put us on a pathway to avoiding potentially dire impacts later in the century to both humans and the natural world.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/06/global...
This is in line with the consensus claimed (correctly) by henearkr, as evidenced by reference [2] in my post above.
The CDC lied about a different topic, whether they would monitor the VAERS database. The NIH lied about masks (Fauci stated in the NYT that he had lied to try and preserve masks for healthcare workers), and herd immunity (Fauci in the NYT again, he changed his claims about the herd immunity threshold based on opinion polling).
"Re Zeke Hausfather tweet, interestingly he's not denying there's an emergency"
Yes as I said, he's a well known climatologist who very much has done his bit to stoke claims of doom. I picked him as someone who can in no way be labelled as out-of-field, not a specialist or in some way a minority scientist. Yet he is now pushing back on claims that are to be found all over media, politics and even this forum e.g. a well known US politician has claimed that "the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change". That's clearly nonsense but saying so means now even Hausfather finds himself labelled a "denier" who is outside the consensus. If he can be, anyone can.
So he's a good illustration of the risks of this ban-anyone-who-disagrees-with-whatever approach, which to your credit you aren't proposing, but obviously PayPal and others are implementing.
I can't find his exact quote, but so far I'm not sure that he actually lied about what the science shows? I mean it does all sound pretty weaselly, but it's not on the same level as what the Daily Sceptic is publishing. We genuinely didn't have much reliable data at the time.
So to me this seems like a separate issue, what should the government advise, based on the science? There are lots of other factors coming in to play; it becomes a game of predicting how the public will respond to what's said and whether to advise things "just in case". Here in the UK it certainly felt like the government was basically playing catch-up and giving out advice only if they thought it had a high chance of being followed.
In the end, the aim of the Daily Sceptic seems more to undermine and weaken (by discrediting them) the ways of action that exist to address the current crises.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-...
As the article states, there was no change in available data. That is yet another lie. If there was, he'd have pointed to the new study and everyone would have been looking at it, because it would be extremely famous as the study that upended mask science. No such study exists. One day "the science" changed, except it hadn't really changed, simple as that. He did the same with vaccine herd immunity:
"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85."
The man is a liar. He makes claims about scientific issues that he makes up on the spot to generate policy compliance. He ran most of the US COVID response, therefore nothing he said can be trusted, nor can anything said by anyone who reported to him. That makes him by far the biggest source of COVID misinformation out there, by his own admission!
"it's not on the same level as what the Daily Sceptic is publishing"
That's right! The Daily Sceptic was created specifically to combat the sort of COVID misinformation government officials like Fauci, Ferguson and SAGE were spreading. I don't read it much anymore but I read it throughout COVID and its writers never lied, or at least I never caught it if they did. And they reply to people trying to "fact check" them, they don't ignore criticism. Every day, they downloaded the data, downloaded the papers, checked them against the claims being made and documented when they didn't match. They showed that "the science" was being made up on the fly and frequently built on bullshit. They are by far the best COVID fact checkers out there, which is why establishment authoritarians inside PayPal can't stand them.
"Here in the UK it certainly felt like the government was basically playing catch-up and giving out advice only if they thought it had a high chance of being followed."
The UK enforced its decisions via police power and fines, it wasn't voluntary. But regardless, the UK health authorities also routinely spread misinformation. As just one example SAGE claimed there was no data on Omicron severity so they'd assume it was as severe as delta, even though from the moment Omicron was discovered it was accompanied by data showing it was far less severe. They just ignored all of it, in an attempt to keep lockdowns going as long as possible. And they lied to the government about the contents of their own meetings (Sunak talked about this).
Fundamentally, if you want to crack down on COVID misinformation, government agencies have to be the first to go. Nobody else comes close to their impact.
When I said "not on the same level as what the Daily Sceptic is publishing" I meant that Daily Sceptic are currently pushing a dangerous anti-scientific agenda on several topics e.g. Ivermectin. I think you know what I meant and were being glib.
I don't know if this approach is different from their early days, but I would describe their current agenda as pretty harmful.
Re SAGE, I found one of their reports from Dec 2021 - early days of Omicron - which appears quite balanced to me. They didn't just ignore the available data, but they took a rational and critical approach towards what was quite preliminary at the time.
> It is still too early to reliably assess the severity of disease caused by Omicron compared to previous variants. Although a preliminary analysis from South Africa suggests that this wave may be less severe than previous waves, a comparison of SGTF (mainly Omicron) and SGTP (non-Omicron) cases within this wave suggests less difference between variants. Some severity estimates should start to become available in about a week as hospital data accumulate. Even if there were to be a modest reduction in severity compared to Delta, very high numbers of infections would still lead to significant pressure on hospitals.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-99-minutes-c...
Again, may be useful if you provided more of a reference for what you mean.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/03/ivermectin-cuts-covid-mo...
It's reporting on a very large study from Brazil that was published in a medical journal. If you think the study is un-scientific then could you explain it? Or better, why not write an article and submit it? The DS does publish articles that disagree with each other pretty regularly. They aren't a site that has a particular "line" on most topics beyond lockdowns, e.g. they have hosted articles both agreeing and disagreeing that there is an excess deaths problem in England.
I ignore most Ivermectin stuff because at least as of last year there were lots of studies and they mostly seemed to be junk quality. Also I can't easily get it here anyway so whatever. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that whatever health authorities say about it is nonsense. Horse paste and all that. I'm not being glib.
For Omicron I meant this:
https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/omicron_engla...
It was LSHTM not SAGE sorry (hardly any difference though, LSHTM modellers contributed to SAGE stuff I think), they uploaded a document on 11th Dec - a long time after Omicron was announced - that stated "Due to a lack of data, we assume Omicron has the same severity as Delta". There was no lack of data that could have justified this assumption. This got in the press and spooked the govt.
They later admitted it was all wrong:
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/09/sage-gloomsters-admit-th...
Seeing recent articles about Ivermectin on DS made me suspicious because it's such an odd and distinctive right-wing talking point. It's now been found in repeated meta-analyses that its ineffective. Studies showing a significant effect all had serious flaws like the above. Yet if you search for it in the Daily Sceptic you only find four articles which cherry-pick the data. You'd think a website which genuinely cares about scientific truth wouldn't have that sort of confirmation bias.
I spent some time today reading more about the website and it turns out it's effectively a mouthpiece for right-wing agitator Toby Young. IMO he exploited the lockdowns as an easy way to curry popularity. From day one he's been on a crusade to downplay the pandemic. The Daily Telegraph had to issue a correction to an article he wrote which misrepresented the stats. On Newsnight he admitted he was wrong to claim that there was no second peak. He even went and deleted all of the tweets he made in 2020, presumably because they painted his predictions in a pretty poor light.
I agree that government agencies behaved in a way that eroded trust, but in my eyes Toby Young knowingly committed the much graver sin of exploiting and aggravating the situation for personal gain. He's done far more to harm the public than either the US or UK governments, and I'm grateful that his opinions are relegated to the back waters of the internet.
"IMO he exploited the lockdowns as an easy way to curry popularity."
That's a pretty staggering statement. Opposing lockdowns, especially in March 2020 when he started, was the absolute worst thing you could do to make yourself popular. It resulted in him immediately being cancelled all over the place, and for most of the pandemic Lockdown Sceptics was a blog that subsisted off donations. People who opposed lockdowns were routinely told they were directly killing people! You yourself are still implying that in your final paragraph, even after everything that we now know. Nobody but nobody adopted that position because in bad faith to curry popularity or obtain "personal gain", lol, that's crazy. Maybe in a year or two that'll be the case as more people conveniently forget about their support for it, but to take that position back then you had to truly and seriously believe it.
And it was correct to believe it because the arguments made in support of lockdowns, masks, mass testing, border closures etc were all un-scientific when investigated. Someone had to stand up for what science is actually meant to be about, and at a time when nobody else did, Toby Young stepped up.
"He's done far more to harm the public than either the US or UK governments, and I'm grateful that his opinions are relegated to the back waters of the internet."
Well, I think (know) that you're wrong about that and in fact, it was those governments and their supporters who have harmed the public on a massive scale. Young and his writers did what they could to stem the tide but the absurd over-confidence and lack of scientific approach amongst public health authorities have now destroyed confidence in all government health advice amongst vast swathes of people. Look at the rejection rate in the USA for the mRNA vaccines for children. Despite urging by the government not even 2% of the eligible children under 5 have been given the shots. Nobody is listening to them anymore because every day, more people figure out that public health workers lie all the time. The damage they've done is on a staggering scale and trying to silence the DS/FSU is just another attempt to cover up what a catastrophe their rule has been.
If all he was doing was challenging the government based on known facts, I would have much less of an issue. But he went much further than that; he managed to get himself published in the mainstream media saying shit like "the country is well on its way to herd immunity" (March 2020), "the virus is expected to vanish in London by the end of next month" (May 2020), and "people will have a natural immunity because they’ve already successfully fought off other coronaviruses, such as the common cold" (July 2020). At best, these were based on wishful and imaginitive interpretations of data. At worst, they were simply made up to bolster his agenda, which is why the article containing that last quote had to be retracted. Either way they were unfounded, and fueled and exploited a growing atmosphere of distrust and division.
And let's not pretend that there was no one else out there looking directly at the science and communicating it to the public. There were websites like Science-Based Medicine to YoutTubers like John Campbell doing a decent job of it (at least for the first year or so). Toby Young was just the one that would promote any voice which parroted his own views.
... which should also be illegal.