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We need scientific dissidents

chronicle.com

388 pointsGeorgelemental976 comments

The problem is when we fully defer to scientists on things that are beyond their area of expertise. For instance, while an epidemiologist can provide valuable guidance on measures that could reduce the spread of a virus, they might not be equipped to assess the broader implications of these measures on aspects like the economy, child development, or mental health. Similarly, a climate scientist can project temperature changes for the coming century, but determining the comprehensive impact of these changes on human societies or conducting a cost-benefit analysis of various measures to mitigate it might be outside their domain.

Fortunately, expertise is not limited to a single concrete topic. There are experts in climate change from a socio-economic perspective, which are able to do science in such complex environments :)

If such experts existed, centrally planned economies would work wonderfully. Unfortunately, they don't. For sufficiently complex problems, the knowledge is diffuse across a wide range of individuals and there is no one expert we can turn to. That's why debate, and tolerating dissent, is important.

Huh? These experts absolutely exist - look e.g. at iSAGE during the pandemic in the UK. They combined epidemiology with sociology to provide a more comprehensive view of the situation. It's just that you ultimately have to listen to people saying "do X, which is expensive". Governments don't on the whole tend to love that.

Dissent is important, within reason. Things like claiming a medication we know is ineffective can cure Covid in the face of 99% of the medical establishment telling you you're a moron is not within reason, for example.

If we had made significant investments in CO2 reduction a decade or two earlier when scientists told us the full range of future effects, we would be in a much better position than we are today. Whoever is selling you this “comprehensive impact” nonsense lied to you so they could continue using the atmosphere as a dumping ground.

The GP comment is objectively true. Most climatologists study the climate, rather than the economics of climate intervention. “Climatologists agree that global warming is real” is them speaking within their area of expertise, “Climatologists agree that an investment in solar panels is worth the cost” is laundering their authority from one area into a superficially similar one. The fact that solar panels are worth the cost doesn’t impact this argument

However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue (regardless of what it has to do with the climate)

>since climatologists are much smarter than the average person

What's the logic behind that? Intelligence doesn't conjure up knowledge out of thin air, doesn't make someone any more knowledgeable about something outside their specialisation than anyone else.

It’s an especially weird field to make that claim about, given every major prediction to ever come out of it has been wrong.

Got any data to back up that claim? Because all the data available to me disagrees with you. Here’s an easy to digest presentation of said data: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...

Apart from the fact that Scientific American has taken an unfortunate ideological bent the last years and as such is no longer the "unbiased scientific source" it once was reputed to be I don't think the claim of 'every major prediction to ever come out of it has been wrong' can be refuted by an article which claims that 'things are even worse than currently predicted'. It could be refuted by showing earlier predictions from climate science which did come true. This is probably what transcriptase was referring to when he made that claim as it is indeed hard to find historical climate predictions - made before the subject was politicised - which turned out to be true while the field is littered with predictions which turned out to be wrong. From Ehrlich's famine forecasts through the new ice scare of the 70's to acid rain there are plenty of examples where things did not turn out as predicted.

Maybe you have some examples where the predictions actually came true? If so, please share them. It is much harder to find out when things went as predicted than the opposite since the former does not nearly get as much attention as the latter.

A downvote is not a vote of confidence in climate science but more of the opposite. I can only assume that there is no proof to be had of earlier predictive successes and with that the original statement made by transcriptase is strengthened rather than weakened. Assuming that this is not the intended result it would be good to get an actual answer to the request - give some examples of predictions close enough to the mark to matter.

You may think this is just a word game but there is more at play. Blind belief in the outcome of flawed models is a bad foundation for good science. Climate models are notorious for their dependency on 'fudge factors', magical constants which need to be introduced to make their outcome match the expected one. It is not clear what those fudge factors actually represent, it can be anything from a simple miscalculation of a given effect of one of the inputs - i.e. something which does not change the predictive power of the model once the factor has been dialled in correctly - to an unknown variable input which has substantial effect on the output. The latter can seriously affect the predictive power of model output since it is by definition unknown whether the fudge factor is related to the output in some way, e.g. cloud cover affecting temperature sensitivity which in turn affects cloud cover leading to uncertainty in the climate sensitivity of simulated inputs. Cloud cover is just an example, there are many other similar factors which can wreak havoc with the predictive capacity of complex and sometimes - often - poorly understood models.

Scientific American is becoming borderline misinformation machine. You're spot on, don't mind the downvotes and flagging on HN. It's a badge of honor at this point.

> However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue

Half of everyone is 'smarter' than the other half.

There are climatologists that are not 'smarter' than me. Should they defer?

> However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue (regardless of what it has to do with the climate)

Its not always a mater of smarts - you also have to look at the incentives. A scientist that tells you everything is fine gets a lot less attention than one telling you to panic.

Some things are simply not a matter of expertise.

One could theoretically show comprehensively that individual freedoms reduce economic output and decrease average life span, and that would still not be an argument to restrict them.

Why not?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Maximum economic output isn't the ultimate "good" most people are aiming for.

True, but output is highly correlated with prosperity in most places and through most of history for which we have data. Increased lifespan is also generally understood to be positive.

I would rather not have the government tell me how to live my life even if it means I die young.

At best such things are decided through majority vote, at worst through some series of opaque bureaucratic bargaining.

And the proportion of mostly self-interested folks is quite high in both cases, or at least that's what many HN commentators allege to be the case.

You've answered your own question by posting that response.

You mean like drug abuse?

There are all sorts of things that I personally disagree with that I'll fight for your right to do.

If you want to have ten sexual partners at once, do a ton of drugs, generally live a hedonistic lifestyle, you do you. I'll judge you and won't associate with you, but I'm not going to stand in your way.

The hard cases are when one person’s freedom conflicts with another’s. Like my right to own firearms vs your right to be safe, or my freedom to run my polluting business vs your freedom to have a clean environment, or my freedom to ignore lockdowns in early 2020 vs your freedom to get care at a hospital with capacity.

Sure.

The ability I have to leave my house and walk around is of a different quality to the ability I have to go to the supermarket and buy some food. Positive vs negative rights, something like that. I'm feeling lazy in my explanation but probably you know it already. :)

With drug abuse I feel it's quite simple. If you want to do meth in your home, I think you're a bit daft but I'm mostly happy for you.

If you end up in a tent city under a bridge abusing passers by and committing crimes to get your next hit, well, we should punish that hard.

> For instance, while an epidemiologist can provide valuable guidance on measures that could reduce the spread of a virus, they might not be equipped to assess the broader implications of these measures on aspects like the economy, child development, or mental health

Amen to that. Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis. And we let these jackasses (some, not all of them) drive the bus!

I don't agree anyone let scientists drive the bus. Scientists advised and the responsibility of balancing that advise against factors such as the economy was entirely the responsibility politicians and leaders.

de facto vs de jure

> Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis

Massive economic impact from social distancing vs massive economic impact from mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system. Those are your choices lol.

Except there were no mass casualties and no first world healthcare system collapsed. Covid was not space aids. We knew this within weeks of “two weeks to flatten the curve” and rather than celebrate the models got it wrong, society decided to double down on the insanity.

At least a million people died in the United States of Covid, and that's probably an underestimate. Imagine if we had done nothing. The healthcare system remained intact because we took public health measures to slow down the spread of the disease.

protecting the young and physicall healthy had zero impact on that number. For the counter argument, you can look at excess deaths in Sweden and some red states (who probably made the right decision for the wrong reason--just do the opposite of what the progressives want).

Yes, this is true, but then who actually takes the decisions? Someone who isn't an expert on anything at all.

I don’t think we need experts, we need polymaths, people who are sufficiently good enough not in one thing, but in multiple things and work at the intersection of the information needed to make proper decisions.

Society is meant to overcome individual shortcomings via constructive collaboration.

Adding individual strengths, not weaknesses, necessitates adherence to some rules in open communication. Science should know explicitly how to do that.

Perhaps I was misunderstood; the idea is that this polymath would collaborate with the experts and act as a bridge between fields.

They ain't the ones in charge either, though I think I agree with the need for such people.

We basically have PR people deciding what's going to look best for them.

Yes, but those polymaths are rare obviously.

Wherefore I mentioned how the same might be accomplished without them, simply by listenening and explaining to each other.

Of course, if you assume individual experts to be really entrenched in their particular fields and entirely unable to bridge the gaps between them, you might be dependent on such talent.

I have never seen a job offering to that effect though?

No one is looking to people who do weather modeling for policy advice. They do occasionally ask economists, but then generally ignore their advice due to being politically unpopular.

I suspect you greatly over-estimate how much politicians listened to epidemiologists during covid as well. A lot of decisions were more out of desire to be seen to be doing something, because the voters went to them and essentially demanded they do something.

"Policy makers", aka the government, should be weighing actions depending on their outcomes as projected by expert consensus. That weighing should be to optimize according to a pre-defined value system, which of course is a matter of political deliberation.

To prefer personal interests (like not to have to wear a mask) over common interests (to protect against pandemic effects) incurs the negative consequences irrespective of whether one pretends to know better than the experts.

To let others play dumb and act against society is to be dumb yourself.

what about deaf people who need to see faces? Or do we not care about those people. What about small children who need to see faces to properly develop? Or does that not matter. What about people who just think they are uncomfortable for whatever reason? Who are you to force others to wear a mask?

Whataboutism very much, but to entertain you:

Yes, what about them?

You conflate individual discomforts with numerous people actually dying or suffering lasting physical damages. Who are you to pretend your personal idiosyncrasies and weird preferences were more important than society as a whole?

Despite the phrase used, this is not whataboutism. They are direct negative results of a practice with benefits in another domain. Weighing then against one another is a real and important thing to do

Whataboutism is more like a redirection / distraction. "X is bad". "Yeah but what about Y that's even worse!" when they aren't even related

Luckily, scientists don't make these decisions - policymakers do.

This is a non issue.

Rather than do their job of balancing competing priorities, many of the elected policy makers handed the keys over to a bunch of insane public health officials. In many places said unelected, unaccountable public health officials had the authority to enact all kinds of crazy crap. That’s why many blue state cities continued to have mask mandates, vaccine mandates and more well into the three year mark.

If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that technocracy is a horrible form of government. If “heath-care experts” were given the chance, I fully imagine us still playing covid theater to this day.

Again, health officials don't make these decisions. They don't have the power.

> If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that technocracy is a horrible form of government. If “heath-care experts” were given the chance, I fully imagine us still playing covid theater to this day.

You may want to take a look at the mortality rates of the US vs those of other developed nations where the "technocrats", as you call them, were listened to closely. What I see in there is a complete failure of the US as a society, an example of people throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to avoid slight inconveniences like wearing a mask.

Regardless, the opposite of this "technocracy" is leaving specialized agencies in the hands of utterly unprepared people, career politicians, businesspeople and lawyers, instead of scientists and engineers. That is just madness.

> people throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to avoid slight inconveniences like wearing a mask.

That's one variable. I suspect another is ~revenge, for past transgressions, real or imagined.

As the saying goes: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap", and while sayings like this (there are many) is obviously speculative, I suspect there's a lot of truth to it.

> Regardless, the opposite of this "technocracy" is leaving specialized agencies in the hands of utterly unprepared people, career politicians, businesspeople and lawyers, instead of scientists and engineers. That is just madness.

An alternate approach is that we could collectively pursue optimality, regardless of whether that is outside the current Overton Window of behavior. No obligation, but it is an option if things ever get really bad.

This is what so called democracy is advertised as doing, but I suspect that advertising is rather false.

Except if you look at COVID mortality by state, there's only partial correlation between the zealousness of mandates and death rates [link below] Also, easing up on measures that never fully clarified their cost-benefit analysis and caused all kinds of real harm while also often descending into the ideologically and theatrically absurd wasn't just about "avoiding slight inconveniences".

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

Cannot comment on these numbers, other than the fact that they are incomplete. Again, compared to other developed countries, the US had one of the worst outcomes.

> Also, easing up on measures that never fully clarified their cost-benefit analysis and caused all kinds of real harm while also often descending into the ideologically and theatrically absurd wasn't just about "avoiding slight inconveniences".

I'm waiting for anyone to prove that having to put on a mask was much more disruptive than COVID-19 or death. In HN, "social issues" come up a lot, like kids having to use masks and somehow suffering from "delays" in social learning, which doesn't seem to apply to me, as I have two young kids and they and their friends turned out to be just fine.

Funny though, kids seem to bitch less about masks and vaccines than adults.

> Funny though, kids seem to bitch less about masks and vaccines than adults.

That is only because they are too young to have the life experience required to call bullshit. And even if they could they have zero political power because they are kids.

And keep dreaming about how it caused no damage. We fucked over an entire generation of kids. It’s absolutely shameful what we did to kids. Adults sacrifice for their young. Not the other way around.

> Adults sacrifice for their young. Not the other way around.

Kill them grandpas, I want to go to the bar. Am I right?

A rational response would be to isolate and protect those most vulnerable (65+) and not treat everyone as a homogenous-risk group. The risk to those under 30 was miniscule, despite the news attempting to focus on the few outlier children that unfortunately were on the wrong side of the statistic.

Honest question, how do you isolate their caretakers? And their families? And their neighbors? Also, this would apply to those with comorbidities.

Maybe you start from the premise that you cannot control or contain a highly infectious respiratory virus? Maybe you do a cost-benefit analysis?

Too bad doing cost/benefit was impossible because lockdowns were never tested or proven before being used to the scale we used them. Yet we still did them despite oodles of sound, solid logic suggesting the costs would be astronomical.

That alone should have been a clue that we never should have done what we did. Especially given we already had pandemic plans… even ones created by “experts!!!” Funny they explicitly said to not do literally every single thing we did. But oh well… only covid mattered. Screw everything else.

If you think me going to a bar killed grandmas you are badly, badly misinformed.

In Finland, they started demanding COVID passports for staying at the bar in the evening. Also, if the establishment didn't sell alcohol, you didn't need the passport. The coronavirus is an amazingly smart pathogen, it can tell what you drink. Or the purpose of an outdoor gathering so it will definitely kill churchgoers but spare the BLM protesters.

> In Finland, they started demanding COVID passports for staying at the bar in the evening. Also, if the establishment didn't sell alcohol, you didn't need the passport.

Not true [0]

> Or the purpose of an outdoor gathering so it will definitely kill churchgoers but spare the BLM protesters.

Also, not true. But even if it was, given your apparent position about COVID, you must admit that outdoor gatherings are less risky than indoors.

[0] https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-//1271139/restrictions-on-open....

Even if it was “risky” indoors it didn’t matter. State the risks and let people decide what to do. Don’t force a barbaric, draconian, unproven, unscientific set of multi-year mandates on people.

Better to force illness and death, of course!

You sound a lot like the “I want to socialize, fuck them grandpas” kind of crowd. Bet you were devastated when you couldn’t go to the office and had to hang out with the family (ugh) all day long.

What a privileged myopic view you have. I’m glad your experience of the lockdowns worked in your favor. You are incredibly privileged and lucky. Good for you. Many people were not so fortunate.

There is more to life than the myopic focus on covid. Sorry you think otherwise. And shame on you for forcing me into your uncontrolled experiment I never consented to. Morals and ethics apparently don’t apply to covid. Neither does common sense.

Shame on you for not understanding that you are part of the same society you need to make certain sacrifices for, even at the high cost of, oh no, your convenience.

That you also have the audacity of mentioning “morals and ethics”, when you said that “adults should sacrifice themselves”, is further proof of such a hypocritical stance.

I find running uncontrolled experiments on a population without their consent highly unethical and immoral. The whole thing was unethical and immoral. And I have just as much of a right to that opinion as you on yours. Unfortunately society decided to force your opinion, despite being unproven, immoral, and unethical. It is the closest my country ever came to straight up facism. It was scary as fuck how people cheered it all on too.

We never should have mandated a single thing. It was perhaps the most evil thing humans have done. Especially what society did to children. What we did to children is absolutely shameful.

They absolutely did have rules like that - a bar I went to had to adopt those strange measures to stay open. They got amended later when people complained that the measures were completely silly.

Oh please, the contortions done by many clinical experts, media reporters, politicians and so forth to justify the mass gatherings of BLM protests while explicitly condemning other types of large gatherings and protests that weren't given a social seal of politically correct protection were blatant, common and obvious.

As for what you say about outdoor gatherings vs indoor gatherings, you're doing the same. Many of those BLM protests were not well-spaced light outdoor meetups, they involved thousands of people jam packed together in the streets. Aside from political affinity towards them or not, if you're criticizing large gatherings based on COVID fears as many of a certain political persuasion did, the BLM groupings had absolutely no reason to get a free pass.

Health officials literally made extremely poor, technocratic decisions all throughout the pandemic, I don’t know how you can claim otherwise. Quite literally, signs were posted in places like parks, beaches, and outdoor spaces that you could not go there “per order of the health department”.

The idea that you can’t go to the park to get fresh air when there’s an airborne virus floating around in closed spaces is literally the perfect example of a technocracy going completely off the rails.

You may want to read those signs a bit more closely, because the CDC did not close schools, parks, beaches, or restaurants.

> Police enforced the orders in a lot of cases, astonishingly even when there was no law in place delegating that authority to them, or when it was blatantly illegal and contradicted the US Constitution (i.e Religious assembly).

That's one of the things why the US was a laughing stock worldwide: prioritizing going to mass to a pandemic.

But it is worth noting that these orders came from state governor offices, not the CDC. Again, the CDC does not have that kind of power.

My friend, it isn’t 2020 anymore. It’s okay to admit you got fooled. Everybody will eventually convert to my side. Because those of us who see the lockdowns as a colossal mistake will be (sadly) proven right. What we did in response to covid was perhaps the biggest fuckup in human history.

The story of covid is 10% disease mitigation, 20% intellectual error, 30% media fearmongering and 40% politics.

Fooled. Tell that to the million plus people dead.

Like, WTF dude, come back down to earth, there was a pandemic and millions died.

Those people were still gonna die no matter how much yoh shamed people for the audacity of going fishing or going on a hike or using a playground. You can’t control covid. Sorry.

And speaking of… how do yo explain Japan’s huge surges of covid despite being the most mask heavy country in the world? Did the Japanese not take covid seriously?

Anyway I’m bored of this. You will wake up someday and realize how badly you got duped. There are billions of other problems in the world besides covid. The myopic fixation on covid-only was a disaster. History will prove it.

The ratio of infections and deaths in Japan is a small fraction of those in the US, with more population density and an average age 10 years older of that in the US. This is all publicly available data.

Yeah, they did way better with worse odds.

What a egotistic fool you are.

Thanks for the name calling. But don’t worry I’m used to it by now. Your responses do a great job highlighting how naked fear coupled with intense propaganda can turn people into monsters.

I truly believe if one of “the experts” gave permission to physically harm dissenters like myself, my entire family would be dead. And the dudes who snitched me out (which includes you by the way) and executed me and my daughter would go to sleep with a smile on their face. And that is not hyperbole at all.

The fact so many otherwise smart people don’t see that is scary as fuck. Fear, tribalism and propaganda is a hell of a drug.

Next up, “why being stuck at home is literally like nazi Germany”.

Grow up.

You were “stuck at home”. Your expendable delivery boy wasn’t. Neither were the people who made your food, packaged your Amazon shipments, kept your lights on, kept your favorite TV show running. But they are all expendable, right? As long as you are “safe” being “stuck at home” role playing pandemic, all the service workers can all just fuck off die. And shame on them for not “staying the fuck home”, right? And if they got laid off or lost the business they built who gives a shit about that either, right?

Again you have an incredibly privilege take. It’s so easy to cheer for lockdowns and shame those who object when you weren’t personally affected.

Why don’t you grow up? You flushed several years of your very short life down the toilet for absolutely nothing. You got played. Sorry.

You apparently lived through an experience where both the policies proscribed by the government and the organic behavior of the people on the ground constantly changed as an environment of uncertainty slowly turned into one of more certainty, and a lack of medical tools turned into one with multiple tools available... and didn't see ANY of that but just think everything was fearmongering and propaganda.

People and governments behaved differently in March 2020 than they did in September 2020 than they did in January 2021 than they did in July 2021, etc, etc, in extremely reasonable ways.

And you're trying to score political points off the fact that in hindsight you would've done some of those things differently. Well you don't fucking get to have hindsight in advance. Give up your crusade. "What we did in response to covid was perhaps the biggest fuckup in human history" - read more history.

The technocrats themselves didn't believe in their own measures, as seen by press briefings where people took off the masks the moment the briefing was over, or decisionmakers flouting their own rules to go dining out in an indoor location while the plebs were in lockdown.

Anecdotal.

It takes an incredible amount of sheltered privilege to write of what I wrote as anecdotal.

But anything that doesn’t support the politically driven covid narrative is misinformation. I’m used to it by now.

Somebody I once asked me if I’ve been living under a rock when I raised similar concerns early on. Which makes me laugh… the people living under rocks are all the people who cannot see the damage their myopic fixation caused. Writing my concerns off as “anecdotal” just demonstrates my point.

Anecdotal.

> an example of people throwing the most vulnerable under the bus to avoid slight inconveniences like wearing a mask

Which is cool unless you are deaf and need to see faces to understand what people are saying. But who gives a shit about those people… as long as it isn’t covid it doesn’t matter.

Speaking of vulnerable people… how about victims of domestic of violence forced to live with their abuser because of lockdown orders? Doesn’t matter… not covid.

How about the elderly in assisted living facilities who were isolated from their friends and family thanks to lockdowns? Loneliness is an actual killer you know. But since they aren’t dying of covid who cares if they die completely alone. They don’t even get a proper funeral… unless they are George Floyd, then you get multiple huge public funerals. Speaking of funerals none of those “millions” of dead covid people didn’t get funerals either. Only celebrities get funerals in covid land—everything else is a “superspreader” event killing hundreds of grandmas.

Speaking of vulnerable, how about kids whose only safe haven is school? What about special needs kids whose classes and therapies were canceled? What about them? Since it’s not covid, who gives a shit.

Nope. In the myopic world of covidianism, the only thing that matters is covid. Anything else doesn’t matter at all. Covidians can wave the “I’m saving grandma” flag all they want and call everybody else selfish assholes who don’t care about “vulnerable people” but those same people don’t give a flying fuck about vulnerabilities populations at all.

/s ?

Ackshually, plenty of policymakers have no clue about the topics they decide on, and that's a big issue.

> Ackshually, plenty of policymakers have no clue about the topics they decide on, and that's a big issue.

Yes, sarcasm.

When I see someone complaining about technocrats, my eyes roll so hard it hurts.

These people would be happy with a TV host as head of NASA, and see no issues with it.

Who are these “policy makers” and how did they come to power? I believe the leadership in the major blocs(the U.S.A, EU, China) are not doing a great job running the planet.

In most of the western (so called) democracies, the “policy makers” primary skill is being put on a ballot for a political party, by the party leadership, frequently not the most qualified people to rule a country.

Crucially, popular referendums should be held, often and the more radical proposals the more important it is to have the popular support.

This is not the problem. The problem is that thinking in terms of these distinct subject matter is at the very heart of the problem. Reality doesn't have a clear divide between different subjects.

You can start from anywhere and build knowledge from there, there is no faculty that gaurantees some knowledge being objective. There is only conjecture and criticism.

i can't think of a better mechanism of dissent than to be more accepting of people outside of their domain trying to make claims on something they're not an expert on. even if its wrong, it can still get people thinking from a different perspective.

The problem being that scientific dissidents are always attacked with “the science is settled”, “trust the science”, “conspiracy theorist”, etc.

See: ongoing statin controversy. Pretty much every drug related to diabetes. The discovery of the Benadryl-dementia link. Etc.

The science is never settled. That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving.

If you were right, scientific knowledge would be inexistent and scientific opinion meaningless.

To come to an agreement among experts just like among anyone else one has to adhere to some obvious(?) rules.

Everybody having their own opinion without sound arguments validated by others leads to a useless cacophony.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The problem is that "scientific dissident" is a meaningless term. You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist. If you already believe you know everything, then there's no need to engage in the process of experimentation, recording, and ultimately discovery. As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

"The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. It's an inappropriate idea from an inappropriate place with inappropriate ends.

Dissidence != Appropriate scientific skepticism.

I believe appropriate skepticism is part of being a skilled scientist, being a dissident is part of being a noisy scientist. These two do not always correlate with each other.

That said, standing up when it is right is a good thing. But the above is similar to reasoning that I hear from a more anarchic political view, and I do not generally agree with that way of handling issues or doing science.

I think there's a pretty big difference between "this is what our knowledge of medicine and most experts in the field are telling us to do now and it's the best answer we have so we're going to do it until the consensus in the medical community changes" and "the science is settled". Nobody was trying to manipulate the "will of the citizens". Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take.

> Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had

Um, no. Wrong. The Great Barrington Declaration was not put out by a bunch of "random morons." Yet Francis Collins said it needed a quick and devastating takedown. Someone with scientific integrity would have said your first quote, not that.

When I say "Everyone" what I mean is, the vast majority of the scientific community in both those fields. Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine.

Ah, "the vast majority" other than the ones at the top?

And by the "fringe idea" you mean the one that the virus was a lab leak? That fringe idea?

You sidestepped their point:

"Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine."

Also, many prominent and credible scientists did support the lab leak hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

No, they sidestepped the main point about integrity. You don't get to tar your opposition with the actions of a few nutcases.

The "many prominent and credible scientists [who] did support the lab leak hypothesis" faced merciless censoring & blacklisting for it.

The fringe ideas about herd immunity and the Great Barrington Declaration go hand in hand.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-publi...

The Great Barrington Declaration was indeed the actions of a few nutcases and was not supported by science. Furthermore, many signatories were venturing way out of their lane/expertise along with, likely, a majority that were not even real/certainly not remotely close to being an expert:

"While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration, this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings". More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner". An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt. Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#S...

uh-huh. All those deplorables.

"not supported by science" -- i.e. the Establishment didn't like them.

Instead of looking at the fake names, how about we look at the non-fake ones?

Like Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff. Are they nutcases, too?

And your fake name issue actually IS addressed in here:

https://gbdeclaration.org/why-was-the-declaration-written/

The fact that you're using the word "deplorables" kind of gives away your views here. There's room for debate but going for herd immunity would have been utter insanity to be frank. We know how bad uncontrolled Covid would get from places like Italy early in the pandemic and it wasn't pretty. You're basically saying you'd be willing to accept millions more people in the United States dying of this disease so we can maybe get back to a functional economy in 3 months. And the deaths would increase as we ran out of things like ventilators and asthma medication that we're actually shown to be effective treatments. Your view is incredibly callous.

Wasn’t the point to try to protect the more vulnerable?

Realise that we solidly failed to do this with all our masks and measures.

I’m not at all convinced that by those who argue it was not possible to apply focused protection. We spent so much on unfocused protection. What if we took those resources — or even just a fraction of them — and redirected them to those at most need.

The point of masks was always to limit community spread, principally to prevent a situation where hospitals are so full you can't treat regular issues like car crash victims. In practice that means you do try to keep vulnerable people out of the hospital but it's not the main concern if you're goal is to prevent a really bad public health situation.

Masks and social distancing absolutely had an effect on the situation, and the main reason we had to do unfocused solutions as you call them is because people infected with Covid did not always have symptoms, and it was extremely contagious. If algae is exponentially covering a pond, it covers half the pond the day before it covers the whole pond. The exponential nature of infection is really hard to reason about and I think people like you really aren't understanding that at the time, with no vaccines, the only way to protect the most vulnerable was to reduce community spread. You also don't have a magic eight ball telling you who might get hospitalized. We had really fit people dying in two weeks. There was no way to tell who was and wasn't vulnerable.

ah, I see. You have a one-way view of political leanings. Got it. You're not only deplorable if you question "the science," you're deplorable if you use the word "deplorable."

also, skipping over the most egregious thing of all: censoring anyone who suggested lab-leak.

And thanks for illustrating the main point: anyone who dared to question the "settled science" got a Twitter rage mob howling at them and hurling feces like a pack of monkeys. Including some "journalists."

It only seemed like “the vast majority” because to go against the grain, no matter how right you are, would instantly label you an alt-right grandma killing asshole. You’d probably destroy your reputation and career standing up for what you think is right.

I mean hell, there are people right in this post calling dudes horrible grandma killers for stating rational, logical opinions against “everyone”.

I mean how right were they? There's hundreds if not thousands of cases of people "going against the grain" and then dying of Covid. People did die because someone wanted to spread some ignorant ideas about what they thought of the pandemic.

> Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take.

In the pandemic, those in charge were asserting that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) and were shutting down domain experts who asserted that Covid was a virus that was fully airborne (like the measles).

> Aerosol researchers started warning that "the world should face the reality" of airborne transmission in April 2020. Then in June, some claimed that it was "the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19".

In July, 239 scientists signed an open letter appealing to the medical community and governing bodies to recognize the potential risk of airborne transmission.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/04/who-corona...

Because they were only willing to accept a theory that was incorrect and ignored domain experts, those in charge were pushing mitigations that could never be effective against a virus you caught by breathing.

No amount of hand washing, wiping down surfaces, putting up sneeze guards, or staying six feet apart can possibly protect you from breathing in a virus that floats in the air.

This was the biggest failure of the pandemic, and it took two years for the truth to start being begrudgingly accepted.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...

> As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

The lived experience of a recent Nobel prize winner is illustrative here.

> In April 1982, Shechtman spotted an odd atomic arrangement through his electron microscope at Johns Hopkins University: A crystal of aluminum and manganese arranged with pentagonal symmetry. It was thought to be impossible — five sides do not a perfectly repeatable structure make. The laws of nature held that the atoms in a solid could be arranged in an amorphous, blob-like pattern, or organized with symmetrical periodicity into crystals. Shechtman saw something that fit neither category.

https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus...

You would think a scientist holding physical proof from an electron microscope that atoms can arrange themselves in a way that had not been previously recognized would be able to share the discovery without being targeted by the "experts".

> He told his colleagues what he’d seen and they laughed him off, he said in an interview earlier this year. He was eventually asked to leave his research group for “bringing disgrace” to its members, he told the Ha’aretz in April.

Two years later, he finally published his findings, yet the skepticism remained — and it remained bitter, as the AFP explains it. The famous American chemist Linus Pauling once declared at a conference: “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists”.

https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus...

Nope. He was attacked by world famous scientific "experts" including a double Nobel laureate and fired from his job, despite presenting proof that what he was reporting was real.

And the beauty of science is that despite all that human drama and our inability to live up to our best standards, the _is_ a fact of the matter that eventually people will recognize, given enough time and false starts.

You can forget a scentific knowledge and somebody in the future may stumble in the same thing. The same can't be said of other human activities

Do you have any proof of what you said?

The GP has given evidence of some instances where people who claim to be scientists obstruct the investigation of truth.

You merely gave an assertion. Appeal to emotion.

Isn't there a possibility that we are much more ignorant than we thought, the scientific process much worse than you'd thought, and the instances in which we "eventually" realized the truth are just the tip of an iceberg, of which those cases merely reflect survivorship bias, and that there are many more cases in which the truth never came to light?

You have to be an extreme optimist to look at the history of science to claim that there is a "beauty" in the persecution of those who seek truth, only because eventually in a couple of cases, the truth was eventually discovered. Perhaps there is a beauty eventually, but are you seriously going to say to those people who have lost their reputation and job that it's "beautiful" that the system is doing that to them, because maybe in a couple decades they would be vindicated assuming they aren't already forgotten?

This attitude is really sick, and honestly, a bit psychopathic.

PS: Also, what does "The same can't be said of other human activities" mean?

Even the worst of superstitions and persecutions eventually stopped. The Romans eventually stopped feeding Christians to lions. The Catholic Church eventually realized burning witches wasn't a good idea. Germany renounced Nazism. Europe eventually realized colonialism was a bit sus. Americans eventually abolished slavery. Things do fix themselves, even outside the realm of science. Is there a similar "beauty" in those systems as well?

What is so special about the modern scientific process, in which you seem to admit it has flaws, just like religious and political systems, that allows it to realize the truth unlike the others?

I just meant that other human endeavours are less constrained by facts and thus we explore the space of possibilities in many many arbitrary ways. If you shun a cultural reformer it's unlikely that a thousands of years from now people will spontaneously recreate the same culture. Yes, there is some degree of convergent evolution even between cultural artefacts, but I think it's fair to say that science is more objective and can as a whole survive individuals not living up to it's standards

>the _is_ a fact of the matter that eventually people will recognize,

Wrong, very wrong.

Ok not sure why is this contentious.

Do you believe that reality doesn't exist?

>Do you believe that reality doesn't exist?

'Reality' isn't something that different people can easily agree on. Most people including professional scientist have little or no inclination to investigate their beliefs.

My point is that the scientific process is the thing that allows reality to be eventually probed despite the occasional stubbornness or irrationality of a particular individual or even a whole generation (or a whole century).

You seem to be throwing the baby with the bathwater and being too cynical if you conclude that reality just cannot be something people agree on just because there are (and always will be) particular areas of research where people are far from objectivity because led by other interests)

>You seem to be throwing the baby with the bathwater and being too cynical if you conclude

No, I didn't disagree with the scientific process per-se. But don't put too much faith in it either if there are things at stake for you. You have to personally investigate a subject if needed if the stakes are high enough. Medicine is one area I can think off. Don't always conclude that it is a generally upward trajectory of better understanding either. People often replace one set of superstition with another.

In the end it really depends on your personal background and experience. If you have never taken on the establishment or if you never observed an anomaly with established expert/scientific opinion you won't know the rot.

> You have to personally [..]. People often replace one set of superstition with another.

indeed you're right to be suspicious of others, when there are incentives that drive their behaviour in ways that are not necessarily aligned with your best interest (consciously or unconsciously).

but, the sad truth is that you yourself can be victim by all sorts of biases and not even personally investigating stuff will necessarily bring you closer to an objective assessment.

The best you can do is to be critical of your own biases, inasmuch as possible.

It cuts both way: the superstition of the conspiracy is also a thing that clouds the mind.

> "The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens.

Especially those citizens who follow sheep-like behind a Media Personality who happens to believe that vaccines will make you a magnetic zombie from beyond the stars and give all your chakras autism of the turbo-cancer.

Who are you referring to?

Probably this "doctor": https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/doc-who-thinks-vacci...

> You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist.

No. There are still so, so many things left that humanity doesn't even have an idea about what exists... submarine life is probably the largest of the uncharted territories. Or simple QA - repeating and reproducing the discoveries of others to uncover missing data, incomplete documentation or unthought-of implicit dependencies (e.g. barometric pressure, effects of gravity or magnetic field). For all of that, you don't need to be a "dissident" in whatever meaning of the word.

There are plenty of people and established organizations, experts, and scientists that will assert, with full confidence, a "complete" explanation for something in nature and decry further examination. This is part of the arrogance of the academic class that assumes they know everything there is to know about something.

I categorically disagree that you do not need to have both some humility in your own understanding and some rejection of the status quo of current understanding (the word dissident was used here, I feel this captures the idea) to have the curiosity to pursue study that others reject.

Pure science exploration is continuously challenged by experts and administrators holding the purse strings in the pursuit of something more marketable, profitable, or easily reproducible (think something like iterative changes to drugs to be different enough to patent but similar enough to have the same effects and use the same processes of manufacture).

> That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving.

I think the point is actually to get a high degree of epistemic rigor, and when you see science "evolving", it's actually because the epistemic rigor in that field wasn't very good in the first place.

Physics hasn't really "evolved" very much in the way medical "science" has. It's developed, but it's never needed to totally contradict itself. QM and SR are refinements on classical mechanics, not rebuttals.

Because much of medical science is based on assumptions about how the unknown works.

You can test gravity using [almost] any method you want and nobody will care.

Start testing medical assumptions and pesky things like “ethics committees“ and “police” will show up rather quickly.

Such generalizations are too easy. Plenty of science is very settled. Germ theory, accuracy of Newtonian mechanics at low velocities...

not always; this seems to be a new phenomenon in the last three years

What’s the statin controversy. I mean I know what it is, but do you have reliable citations?

I'm not an expert by any means, but here's the gist of my understanding of the statin controversy from reading Metabolical:

- There's two types of LDL cholesterol that are measured together in a standard fasting lipid profile: type A LDL and type B LDL

- Type A LDL makes up 80% of LDL and is increased by dietary fat consumption

- Type A LDL is not predictive of heart disease nor does it drive the accumulation of plaque in the arteries

- Type A LDL is lowered by statins

- Type B LDL makes up 20% of LDL and is predictive of heart attacks

- Type B LDL is not lowered by statins

- Taking statins comes with a bunch of side effects

- Selling statins has been a lucrative business

Citations at https://robertlustig.com/metabolical/metabolical-references-... for pages 34 through 39

Indeed this is the case. The timing was unfortunate in that the pandemic hit during the absolute lowest point in trust of public institutions and bad faith actors stepped into the void to take advantage of that.

In terms of covid specifically, experts did what they typically do for high mortality diseases e.g. ebola, SARS where the mortality is high and the only course of action is to seal an area and let it burn through the population but at least contain it. That turned out to be the direct opposite course of action needed.

It’s a bit more than them starting with a random default playbook for serious disease outbreaks. They started with the playbook for this specific virus family! “Covid” is a synonym for SARS-CoV-2. It’s not that surprising that experts would start with the set of procedures that had successfully contained and eliminated SARS-CoV-1. It didn’t work in the case of v2, but I have trouble seeing why it’s a bad starting point to start with what actually worked in practice to stop v1.

It’s sort of interesting to me that the partisan politics on this have flipped from the early days though. Early on, Bill DeBlasio (at the time, NYC’s left-ish mayor) was against cancelling anything or imposing any travel restrictions, even telling people it was racist to avoid Chinese New Year or St Patrick’s Day celebrations, and xenophobic to ask for restrictions on travel. The NY conservative media were very critical of his decisions to let those events move forward and called for travel bans and event cancellations to stop the virus. Fast-forward a bit and they had each adopted the other side’s positions.

Early on it made sense and we were told the lock-down would be a couple of weeks. Those couple of weeks stretched for years and that's why there was a switch when it was obvious lock-downs didn't work but were still imposed.

It's an interesting game-theory problem. If everyone locked down, the virus would have been contained. But global cooperation is pretty much impossible, and every choice had its cost.

locking everything down is impossible because ppl would start to starve within a week or so. specialisation and compartmentalisation of labor has a price

For a lockdown to be effective, it didn't need to shut down the city completely. Just do enough to get R0 (the avg number of people who each person infects) below 1. This causes the case numbers to drop exponentially. And when case numbers are small enough, contact tracing can be used.

You assume that lockdowns actually work. We have three years of evidence to suggest otherwise. And if that isn’t enough there is this gem of a study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/

Turns out that even after seventeen weeks of complete isolation in Antarctica you can still catch the common cold…

So yeah… you can’t stop Mother Nature no matter how hard you try.

Do we? Case numbers in Melbourne seemed to go down a few weeks after we went into hard lockdown, each and every time we did it.

It could have been a coincidence each time, but I’d need some good studies to convince me.

It was a coincidence each time. The problem is that epidemic waves last a certain amount of time, and politicians tend to enact lockdown after a certain amount of delay because they want to be sure it's really going up and have to wait a few days for the announcements to propagate etc, and then you have to wait a short period before you expect any impact anyway. And then that's when the epidemic naturally goes into decline.

It's trivial to prove this because waves last roughly the same amount of time everywhere, so you can just compare places that went into lockdown with places that didn't and see what happens. The answer is that the waves are the same size and shape regardless of what governments do.

You can also do a regression analysis on "strictness indexes" and case counts, which also yields no correlation. There are such studies:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

"Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate"

https://thefatemperor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1.-LANC...

"Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people"

But you don't need studies. The fact that Sweden didn't lock down and yet has some of the lowest COVID mortality in Europe is decisive. Claims about the effects and necessity of lockdowns were universal and made no exception for Sweden, so the existence of even a single counter-example disproves the theories.

afaik swedes did the lockdown more or less voluntarily.

dunno how much that is true or played into it thou

That is a false premise. First, even if all humans locked down for weeks that wouldn't have contained the virus due to the existence of animal reservoirs. Second, even with perfect global cooperation it's not even possible to lock everyone down. What about farmers, food distribution, healthcare, utilities, law enforcement, etc? Those people are going to carry and spread the virus. The notion of containing a highly contagious respiratory virus was just stupid and unrealistic from the start.

If I remember correctly, the stated goal was not to eliminate Covid, but to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed

[Speaking from a UK perspective, YMMV in other countries] Originally it was, yes, yet this shortly got brushed under the carpet, and we were repeatedly told "just two more weeks!" with the apparent goal of solving death. Society only opened back up because ordinary people got sick of it. If we'd carried on "listening to experts" we'd have been lucky to have last Christmas with more than 6 people round the table

The goalposts really went supersonic once vaccines came onto the table. Allegedly, they were supposed to be our ticket out of hell, but clearly the enthusiasts were enjoying it too much to allow that. From "just wait this lockdown out until we have a vaccine" to "until all over 40s have been jabbed" to people still insisting that "it's not safe until we've triple jabbed 18 year olds", as we opened up and their apocalyptic fantasies did not come to fruition

What it would have done was taken the reproduction number below 1, making contact tracing effective. It's the distinction between 'elimination' and 'eradication'. TB is a classic example of a highly contagious respiratory disease that has been eliminated from much of the developed world. Yes, active TB cases still pop up, but the spread is stopped before it goes out of hand. The fact that associations like the NBA managed to implement a successful bubble shows it would have been possible for essential services to keep moving. Yes, the cost of doing so would have been high, but if people in February 2020 knew what was coming they might have considered it more seriously.

> What it would have done was taken the reproduction number below 1, making contact tracing effective.

This assumes that most people in the society are not very privacy-conscious, i.e. are fine with being tracked (contact tracing).

Nonsense. Contact tracing failed everywhere it was tried. And any measures were temporary at best. You can't eliminate a highly contagious disease with multiple animal reservoirs. The virus was always destined to run through the entire human population regardless of what we did. Any belief otherwise is pure hubris.

And personally I'm certainly not willing to participate in any scheme involving the government tracking my location.

A fair number of countries did have lockdowns that successfully eliminated (as in: completely eliminated the virus within their borders) the virus within weeks. China is the elephant in the room (local elimination by about April 2020), but there are several other countries that did the same thing (such as New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan).

On the assumption that you're an American, your country was not organized enough to couple a lockdown with effective contact tracing and mass testing, which is what other countries did to eliminate the virus.

Yep. Australian here. We successfully brought our case numbers down a number of times through expensive, city wide lockdowns. Each time we succeeded and then opened back up, the virus unfortunately found a new route in the country and case numbers went up again.

If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely.

Lots of lives were still saved by our strategy because almost everyone had a chance to get vaccinated before getting covid.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, its still controversial whether the lockdowns were worth it overall. But they were definitely effective at containing covid.

It's also with noting that there were other zero-CoVID countries that were able to maintain control of the virus with less significant lockdowns. The key was early detection of new outbreaks and effective, rapid contact tracing.

Between the initial outbreak and Omicron (roughly, April 2020 - March 2022), most people in China never experienced a lockdown, because each new outbreak was controlled locally before it could spread to the rest of the country.

Australia became a full on prison colony. They didn’t contain covid, they imprisoned their entire population.

I understand why you believe that. Plenty of other Australians think likewise (including most of my Australian friends who live overseas).

And yet, in my home state of Victoria, the state premier behind the lockdowns was reelected after covid with a huge majority. It seems like the way the story unfolded for people inside of Victoria was very different to how the story was told everywhere else.

I am trapped inside of Victoria, unfortunately. I wholeheartedly agree with GP poster. We saw visitor bans, curfews, work permits, arrests, rubber bullets and riot gear police deployed as "epidemiological" measures. My respect for police and public service in general went right out the door. Now there is only fear. Biggest regret of my life to settle down here. The huge majority electing the same person only solidifies my view that they may just be the different biological species. The "premier" spared no expense in making the event all about him and only him - just check the Wikipedia page [0].

That's a feat no other leader in any world's jurisdiction even attempted to. I don't know if it is another "red shirts" undertaking or a sycophantic "grass roots" movement - wouldn't be surprised with both, but just don't care at the moment. Seeking an exit of Victoria, but the most likely one for me will be out of existence.

If you think public support validates the "measures", check another example of similar landslide victory - election in Belarus of 1994. That win was as democratic as they get, I am telling you as a first-hand witness. The support was very genuine, for at least a decade to come. As for myself and my family - we feel that we escaped that hellhole only to land in a worse one... where there is no escape from.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Victoria

> city wide lockdowns ... If the whole world had adopted this strategy, covid would have been eliminated from the planet entirely.

Did you know that covid can infect many other mammals? Here's a summary of the science on this: [0]

> appears that many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible

> the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human

> found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species

> found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested

> Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs

Does your belief that city wide lockdowns could be used to eliminate covid take the above into account? Wouldn't covid continue to spread in other mammals and reinfect humans again?

I don't know that any experts ever said that lockdowns could eliminate covid. From where did you get such an idea?

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...

It's not a "belief." It's a fact that was repeated in many cities - and countries - in the real world.

China completely eliminated CoVID-19 from its population in early 2020, and a bunch of other countries did the same.

The post I replied to said that if the world had adopted city wide lockdowns covid "would have been eliminated from the planet entirely". I objected that this doesn't account for covid in animal populations. Your reply mentioning China in 2020 doesn't address that objection.

Are you saying that you agree with the original poster, that city wide lockdowns could have eliminated covid from entire planet?

Even if every person in the world were isolated for weeks, so that covid no longer existed in the human population, many animal species would still carry covid, like rats [0] and pets like cats and dogs [1], and humans would become reinfected again.

Unless perhaps we destroy all those animals? And deer, and minks, and bats, and perhaps a few dozen other species [2]. Bats carry hundreds of different coronavirises and spillovers happen all the time [3]. There's evidence that Omicron evolved in mice then jumped back into humans [4]. It doesn't seem possible to eliminate covid from all those animals, does it?

That's why city wide lockdowns could never -eliminate- covid from the planet, as the original poster stated. They could only temporarily suppress covid in human populations. Like what happened in countries that did impose lockdowns. Temporary.

Here's what the scientists say:

> The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said. [5]

I assume that some people don't want to face the fact that diseases spread between animals and people and there's nothing we can do about it, and that scares them. Some people get so afraid they would do anything, even the impractical, to believe they retain some measure of control. They might not want to face facts that conflict with their fears. Not everyone thinks this way.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_S...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/20/8077428...

[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr...

[5] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus...

Lockdown may have made sense as a strategy to vaccines and treatments in place. To abolish the virus? It could never have worked. I mean, tell me how likely do you think it would have been that every country could have done something like that, in synchrony?

What lockdown? Not a single jurisdiction in the US did a true lockdown like New Zealand, Italy, etc. Not even for two weeks.

I also can’t think of anywhere in the US where anything was still mandated closed a single year after it started, let alone multiple years. I’m struggling to think of anywhere that even came close to a full year.

The revisionism around Covid has gotten wild. Certain businesses had to close for a few months (with government aid), capacity limits came and went for a while after that, and some places required you to wear a mask for longer. But somehow the narrative has become “the government would not let me leave my house for multiple years”.

In California during December 2020 after allowing outside dining they shutdown all restaurants. I don't remember when they relented and allowed outside dining again but it was into 2021. Most schools were closed for almost 2 years. Most offices and theme parks were much much longer.

People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California. While I wasn't boarded in my home, I was turned away while outside dining to use the restroom in a restaurant and got threatened by the police by the beach when beaches and parks were still closed.

The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy.

A policy is not meant to be fun. Paying tax and taxes wearing seatbelt are policies geared towards living together as a society

Seatbelts and taxes vs. covid lockdowns are not even close to comparable.

Restaurants closed for about 6 weeks in some regions in December-January, and ICUs statewide were at 0% capacity in late December so I’d say that was a really good idea. That still doesn’t reach a year after the first shutdowns, and anyway they had been open for months prior, so not even close to a year of total closure.

Most schools definitely were not closed for almost two years either. IIRC the only district that even came close to 2 years was San Francisco (due to seismic levels of school board incompetence, ending in a recall). If you live in SF that could be why it feels like most schools were closed that long—but in fact that length was so abnormal, even in “harsh” California, that it got a generally pro-covid-restrictions city to recall the school board.

> People conflate China style lockdown with massively disruptive policies we had in California.

Ok and they’re wrong since they aren’t even close. People conflate all kinds of things. I’m sorry a police officer threatened you—as a country we definitely have a problem with power-tripping cops. Still doesn’t mean we did a China-style lockdown policy.

> The narrative is more, if anyone advocates for anything like that again they are the enemy.

Yeah see this is what I mean about how this discourse has gotten utterly deranged. Yes, if there’s a respiratory illness straining the ICU system to the breaking point again in the future, I think the government should close restaurants etc. for a few months (with aid for small businesses and individuals). So what does it mean that I am “the enemy”? Are you going to do something to me in that scenario?

It is not possible to have true lockdowns within the US as a Constitutional matter. Any restrictions on free travel within the US is a fundamental right subject to the "strict scrutiny" standard, which could never be met by broad lockdowns.

This shows the limits of a 200+ years old piece of paper

That god for that. Counties that didn’t have such a government turned into authoritarian hellholes (Australia, China, and Dominican Republic are good examples).

Or are you arguing we should have gone full China?

The revisionism seems to be in the other direction. Perhaps this wasn't the case in some of the US (and I commend those states for that), but in the UK there definitely was a good year of on-and-off restrictions involving significant periods where it was outright illegal to meet up with your friends indoors, and businesses had capacity limitations extending well into 2021, even if they may not have been legal requirements at later stages. And even when the restrictions were lifted in 2021, there was much screaming and crying, predictions of medical apocalypses, and accusations of granny killing. If we'd carried on "following the science" (for what it came to mean) we'd barely be out of lockdown now. And when I say "The UK" I'm really talking about England - Wales and Scotland had even harsher lockdowns

> The revisionism around Covid has gotten wild. Certain businesses had to close for a few months (with government aid), capacity limits came and went for a while after that, and some places required you to wear a mask for longer. But somehow the narrative has become “the government would not let me leave my house for multiple years”.

Technically that's one narrative among many - popular with some, unpopular with others.

Possibly relevant:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

Etc

There was also a switch in narrative - early lockdowns were meant to contain the virus while it was changed to "flatten the curve" for the longe lockdowns. Its not unreasonable to be in favor of the former but not the latter.

Ultimately, the key learning was the CDC and other federal agencies will propagate misinformation knowingly and intentionally for their perceived public health reasons. I'm no stranger to massive state restrictions of individual rights when fighting infectious diseases. DOTS and friends are an effective means of fighting TB. But intentionally misinforming crosses a line since it makes the organization untrustworthy.

Irrespective of whether masks work or not, the state apparatus chose to go with the message that they don't for the reason that they wanted to preserve supply for healthcare workers.

I had a supply of N95 masks from earlier preparation for forest fires that I gave to healthcare workers here in SF. In future, I shall not donate like this. It is clear that every man is an island and the agencies set up to inform us believe they must control us through deceit instead.

“For the greater good”

For us personally, a quick thought experiment with 4 quadrants:

    - wear a mask vs don’t wear
    - mask helps vs mask doesn’t         help

The balance of inconvenience in the “wear mask, mask doesn’t help” vs possible avoidable death in the “don’t wear, mask helps” made it a very easy decision.

Without the actual numbers this is just a more complicated Pascal's wager. The same argument can justify wearing a helmet because you might be hit in the head by falling meteorites, or wearing a life vest to work in case you slip and fall into a pond.

Not to say wearing a mask is bad! It's just that it needs justification by actual or estimated data, not a fuzzy thought experiment.

It isn't rocket surgery.

If you have a cold, wear a mask. Or at the very least cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze. Do you also need a hundred year weather analysis if someone suggests carrying an umbrella because it is cloudy?

You make it sound like masking for a cold is as obvious as knowing it’s going to rain.

When was the first time you wore a mask when you realized you had a cold? (Serious question; not rhetorical.)

I have to say, I don’t know anyone who thought that was an obvious thing to do until 3 years ago. In fact, I know a few people who still wear masks every day, but otherwise, no one I know does it anymore, even if they have a cold.

I don’t think there’s anything obvious about it at all, if obvious means something that everyone can see.

several countries in asia have done this for decades— it’s basic safety and politeness

That's not a reply to what I wrote. I agree that preventative measures against the spread of disease include wearing a mask in public and that this is a good idea if you've got a cold, but I think that because of an assessment of the risk.

Do you need to wear a mask alone in your own garden? It could still help you avoid a possible death. The only thing that changes between "in public" and "in my garden" is the risk: the consequence is always death. Your four-quadrant thought experiment is meaningless unless you intend to suggest that any risk of death, no matter how minor, justifies an inconvenience that might prevent it.

Frankly, yes, you should look at a daily weather report before carting an umbrella around. If there's a 0.0001% chance of rain then it's okay to risk it.

> It isn't rocket surgery.

You are right, it's worse: it's metaphysics.

> If you have a cold, wear a mask.

I have even a better idea: everyone should behave according to my biased, subjective whims.

> The same argument can justify wearing a helmet because you might be hit in the head by falling meteorites, or wearing a life vest to work in case you slip and fall into a pond.

This is just ridiculous because you're purposefully ignoring context.

Getting hit in the head by a meteor is an extremely unlikely event. It's also an event, were it to occur, is even less likely the helmet would actually prevent injury. Those odds don't justify the action.

If you spend no time around bodies of water where a life vest would protect against drowning, then there's no need to wear a life vest. However if you do spend a lot of time around such bodies of water wearing that vest makes more sense. There's nowhere meteor helmets make much sense but very clear situations where life vests make sense.

On the spectrum of utility masks are much closer to life vests than meteor helmets. Masks clearly slow transmission of some diseases. Every operating room in the world requires masks for good reason. They're not magic though, they're simply a component of a hygiene regimen.

The odds on a mask preventing transmission of a respiratory disease are easily high enough to suggest wearing one when a respiratory disease is prevalent. A mask in a grocery store makes sense. It makes less sense pumping gas. It makes no sense at home or driving alone in your car.

And multiple studies have shown that even masks worn in the operating are causing more problems than they're solving.

As for Covid, fresh air and sunlight would likely help more.

I was fortunately already equipped and with reuse (which I, as a superior epidemiologist to many currently so certified, concluded correctly was safe) was able to wear a mask against the advice of the HHS and the NIAID. As someone who already wore masks when ill so as not to infect others, this wasn't too much of a stretch, and it made for an interesting challenge running up Twin Peaks.

However, I have still lost trust in the HHS, who I'd hoped would have been honest about their objectives. A modern shift among institutional scientists has been a substantial loss of truth-speaking. It appears that if they were to consider a random variable x in (0,1) under the conditions:

- that they estimate it to be X

- that they believe the people estimate it to be Y << X

- that they believe the people will estimate it to be Y if they were to reveal that they estimate it to be Z >> X

then they will publicly claim that the variable is valued at Z. That is, despite being tasked with scientific examination, and knowing that they are known to be unreliable they attempt to manipulate the situation so that the public will have the same estimate as they do.

This has the unsurprising effect that their credibility reduces, and therefore the value of Z required rises sufficiently above X that their claims no longer seem reasonable, resulting in a positive feedback loop that results in catastrophically deteriorated credibility.

> The balance of inconvenience in the “wear mask, mask doesn’t help” vs possible avoidable death in the “don’t wear, mask helps” made it a very easy decision.

This assumes that the respective person has a risk-averse personality profile. The mere existence of ice climbers and BASE jumpers should provide sufficient evidence that not everybody's life is about avoiding risks.

Secondly, in many countries masks were mandatory, i.e. the government said it is perfectly fine to use violence (police using violence to enforce the penalty fees) for this. Is applying violence to enforce masks justifiable? I rather don't think.

I think it’s amusing that your biggest gripe about the pandemic is a few weeks in 2020 where the government put out confusing information about masks. Sure it’s a screwup, but compared to the government’s ongoing foibles sourcing and distributing PPE it was a nothingburger. By contrast, the governor of my state had to obtain PPE through his wife’s connections and had to show up with police to keep the Feds from confiscating it.

Not "confusing". Intentional misinformation. I am familiar with lack of state capacity. That can be worked with. I am also familiar with state capacity directed towards information manipulation. To me, the latter is higher risk than the former.

Propaganda is a fact of life. Why would the COVID topic be any different? If state lies about reasons to start a war (life & death literally), it can lie about anything.

Who is "They"? Science is a practice not an organization. There's no pope or single church that has rules.

It's crazy your criticizing people for changing if new information comes out. That's the basis of science and why it's not like religon

If you don't let some information out in case it changes The Science, what then?

What does that mean to let some information out in case it changes?

Science doesn't change it's a process, a way of understanding the world.

Ok.

I'll explain because there seems to be a genuine misunderstanding.

Of course the scientific method is great, and the only tool we have to understand the world. Of course. Very true.

"The Science", on the other hand, is a sales tool. Something to be invoked to push a product, a policy, whatever.

Science, the scientific method, the sum total of humanity's knowledge and wisdom, can't be stopped. It may be delayed, but truth wins because truth predicts the future, and lies don't.

But "The Science", that's different. Pay off a few key people at the right time, and you can get yourself a nice handy "The Science" to sell whatever it is you want to sell. It won't work forever, but it doesn't need to. By then they've already cashed out their shares, won the election, whatever.

"But "The Science", that's different. Pay off a few key people at the right time, and you can get yourself a nice handy"

If it's accurate how is this is a bad way to sell something? What's better? You're claiming that it can be corrupted, that applies to many things in life.

Why is lying and censoring dissenting views a bad way to sell something? Because it destroys all trust we have in that institution, and now every time they try to push something again we have to wonder "What lies and censorship are they doing this time?"

Who is they? Why are you grouping all scientists as one?

Lying and censoring isn't a good way to sell something but that's has nothing to do with science nor can you place blame or reduce your trust across all scientists and scientific institutions.

It a reporter at NBC lies and gets caught why would that affect the reputation of a reporter at another news network? It shouldn't and if it does then explain why?

"Because it destroys all trust we have in that institution"

What institution? If a specific company, government agency, or educational institution is caught lying or censoring and the management knew about it, approved it, or didn't take reasonable steps to stop it then you should reduce your trust level for them.

BUT I don't see any specific one being mentioned. I see "science" and "The Science".

> […] but that's has nothing to do with science nor can you place blame or reduce your trust across all scientists and scientific institutions.

It has everything to do with science when you have actual scientists directing and encouraging the practice.

I get that they are in the employ of the government, and one could perhaps argue they are more politician than scientist at that point. But they were trolleyed out and identified themselves as such, and appeared in every other way as if true scientists.

As for the blame part, that’s a judgement for individuals to make. Personally, it shook me to the core, and I do blame those scientists at least as much as I blame the politicians. I now look very much more closely at recommendations from public health and other government institutions, and take far less on trust.

> nor can you place blame or reduce your trust across all scientists and scientific institutions.

And yet I did, and so did millions more. Now what? You think we're irrational? Ok, that doesn't fix it.

That is what "destroying trust" means.

Besides, that's not even accurate. Of course every time I get lied to by a scientist I should update a bit more towards believing scientists less. That's not only common sense, it's Bayesian rationality by the book.

An issue I had, having been previously quite familiar with the literature on the 2003 variant of COVID, is that the government manifestly ignored many of the scientific findings of that earlier outbreak for political reasons.

It would have been great if they leaned on the science from the 2003 version of the disease, but they didn’t and some of the policies made no sense in light of that prior literature.

Perhaps, but are you familiar with the practice of the 2003 version, too? I don't mean that facetiously, but my experience is that practice and literature are two very different things in medical sciences (and others, too). There is a social component to epidemics, for example, that you don't just get to ignore.

The public health measures used against the original SARS were not effective. They did almost nothing. The disease burned out largely on its own.

That is weird, just one of many weird things around the whole COVID spectacle.

Also weird: that we don't do any serious post-incident analysis so we can harden procedures and institutions in case a really big problem knocks on our door someday.

There's something suspicious about this planet if you ask me.

> That turned out to be the direct opposite course of action needed.

I wonder, in hindsight, what would have been the better course of action.

Taiwan did that and their mortality and contagion rate is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. Same goes for Japan. Hell, even most European countries have a lower mortality rate than the US. All of these countries have also a higher population density than the US.

> Taiwan did that and their mortality and contagion rate is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. Same goes for Japan.

This is simply not true. I don’t care how much the data gets massaged to align with the narrative. It’s a lie. Misinformation, really. Which is par for course when it comes to covid.

> This is simply not true. I don’t care how much the data gets massaged to align with the narrative

Long story short, you wouldn’t take anything that would not align with your narrative.

A religious zealot.

The countries the tried to contain it until we had vaccines to protect vulnerable populations had far lower mortality rates than those that opened up, including the US.

Seems to me the containment strategy was exactly the action that was needed. Countries that followed the experts advice did far far better.

Disagree. COVID was high mortality at 1% before the vaccine with an especially high contagiousness. Hospitals were overwhelmed in areas that couldn't control the spread, which meant shortages of beds and oxygen for those who could be saved.

Oh no, those poor innocent institutions having to suffer from low public confidence. How could this have happened to them.

Sure, but is it too much to ask that the dissidents accept when they've lost on the merits instead of pivoting to an inane meta-argument about their theories being "silenced"?

Command dissidents to accept consensus (even if they disagree) is how you eliminate the possibility of dissidents. It's a contradiction.

To decide if they did or did not lose on the merits you need open discussion, as otherwise the more aggressive side can simply assert that they won and then silence the dissidents when they point out it's not true.

So, the "inane meta-argument" as you put it is in fact required to be resolved first before you can even get to the point of deciding who's right. Nothing inane about it. Without that, science can't be done at all.

In order to have scientific dissidents we need to -as a society- reject dogma. I'm looking at all of you who "followed the science" dogmatically these past three years.

I did not <follow the science> so to speak in that I believed the masking restrictions were not strict _enough_. But in this climate any criticism of these practices is co-opted by the anti-science people into shitting on all scientific practice and also for some reason invoking rants about wokeness, Bidens age and aliens. Simply put I feel afraid of saying anything about this for fear of getting clumped with people like Joe Rogan, RFK or any of these VCs who associate with this crowd now.

Your reply is worse than dogmatic. It is an attempt to enforce conformity.

> I feel afraid of saying anything about this for fear of getting clumped with people like Joe Rogan, RFK or any of these VCs who associate with this crowd now.

Who cares about the stereotypes and generalizations of intolerant idiots? Say what you believe, and associate with people who appreciate honesty.

Those that turned off their brains and need to hear this message won’t, sadly.

I mean, what exactly about the science are you disagreeing with? Do you think that Covid wasn't airborne? Or that putting a piece of cloth over your face doesn't slow down the spread of disease? Do you believe this pandemic wasn't ended by a set a vaccines? I'm really curious what your actual positions are here, and whether or not you're just an ass hole who thinks they're a "free thinker".

You do think it was ended with vaccines?

Okay yeah, not worth talking to you.

I think one cause of this inability to tolerate dissent is how scientists and capital-S Science have functionally (and inadequately) replaced religion/ethics/philosophy for a sizable portion of society. Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study. Of course, they do this without understanding that this position is itself a philosophical position, the result of centuries of intellectual development.

The result: science, which is supposed to be a neutral process that encourages dissent, becomes a political game, where scientists are treated as the ultimate authority on non-scientific questions.

Complete with "believers" and "non-believers." Which has no place in the actual scientific process.

Even priests! When's the last time Neil Degrassi Tyson did any science? No he just preaches the good word for speaking fees that would embarrass you.

Did he ever do anything worth mentioning?

He sounds like a bureaucrat that just climbed the hierarchical ladder.

I couldn't find any "influential" papers by him.

Here's a fascinating read about Neil's scientific output. The graph at the bottom is quite informative. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/09/neil-degrasse-tyson-not...

The fame x paper sequence chart was telling:

https://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/images/20100719_astron...

and, as noted, Dr Brian May is completely off the chart (fame - wise) with relatively few astro papers (just his doctorate?).

Neil de Grasse Tyson’s academic output is exactly what you would expect from someone did a phd then left research science. He has a few first author papers that have a couple dozen citations and a few papers where he’s only a contributor. He hasn’t written academically since then. He’s not doing active research, which may mean he’s fallen behind on the cutting edge, but that doesn’t mean he’s not qualified to talk about astronomy with the public. He has the relevant training and knowledge.

Emil Kirkegaard, whose blog you linked to, is not a reliable or unbiased source for this kind of judgement for a wide variety of reasons.

The gist of this article seems to be that Tyson is "not much of an astrophysicist" because he has too many social media followers compared to the number of papers he has published.

That kind of analysis seems nonsensical to me.

"Trust the science.", which I recall was often preached during covid lockdowns, is about as religious as it gets.

Things can get way more religious than that. For example, we can look at the science and do the exact opposite of what the data tells us.

Funny. That is what seemed to happen in reaction to covid. Data and science were routinely ignored and replaced by fear and tribalism. How else can you get people to sign up for insane never ending government mandates?

I couldn't agree more. Widespread belief in 'the science' is no different to any other cargo cult.

One should either know whatever-it-is because one has verified it, or one should be able to express one's assumptions re one's hypothesis. Social beliefs ought to have no part of it. Objective truth is not uncovered by consensus.

Science is different from religion in that it could be wrong and the basis is empirical tests.

Religion is never wrong, faith is believing without evidence, and religion doesn't test it claims

That is a game of motte and bailey really. The hard definition of science is another than the one we've seen over the years in mass media.

The "mass media" is not one organization. I haven't seen any news reports redefining what science is, feel free to provide evidence of that. Finally it's not a game of definitions because science has a specific meaning. You can't just change that meaning (even if you add a captial S) then be critical about it.

You're critical because some organization in the government lied? Nothing to do with science

You're mad because some scientist committed fraud? Nothing to do with science.

Peer reviewers aren't properly checking papers, that's their fault and or their university/company. Nothing to do with science.

The majority of scientists believed something through experiments that were faulty or limited data then later turned out to be wrong? That's how it works, science isn't perfect but what's the alternative?

If you aren't an expert in a field or willing to put massive amounts of time in researching something but you have to make a decision doing whatever the majority of people in a field say is the most logical course of action

> You're critical because some organization in the government lied?

I’m critical because it’s systemic. And made in the name of science. For all intents and purposes, this is the science we’re subjugated to.

> You're mad because some scientist committed fraud?

Again, critical because it’s systemic and people have lost their jobs, entire families had to move regions because the father expressed doubts about a scientist, to be later revealed that doubts were correct. The amount of harm done over this science is unbearable to see.

"critical because it’s systemic"

Good, I would hope the government basis it decisions on science.

"people have lost their jobs,"

I assume you mean people who didn't get vaccinated. That's their decision, a decision based on misinformation, emotions, or politics.

"because the father expressed doubts about a scientist, to be later revealed that doubts were correct"

What what were his doubts based on? Just because he later turned out to be right means nothing unless his claims were based on something substantial.

"The amount of harm done over this science is unbearable to see."

Covid killed 1.2 million people in the US. Your right wing self inflicted suffering over vaccines means nothing compared to this.

You see, you’re doing it again.

Science can be perfectly faked. Mostly happens when people get over the top about it.

Trying putting uppercase “You guys killed 1.2m people, you murderers”. If I find a single bike accident among the number you shamed me with, then all your accusation falls in shambles.

Stop screaming numbers at people as if they were true. What you’re doing is not science, it’s screaming.

"Stop screaming numbers at people as if they were true. What you’re doing is not science, it’s screaming."

Even if 50% of those deaths are incorrect the number is massive. I'm relaying stasticis by saying I'm screaming you're trying to counter my argument with an unrelated attack.

"Science can be perfectly faked"

Yes it can, is that happened here? Did doctors around the county all decide to lie for the purpose of?

What evidence do you have it's fake?

You're conflating two separate things - science as a concept, and the scientific establishment. As a concept, sceince obviously works and can't be changed. The scientific establishment is a bunch of people and institutions, and it's practices may or may not match with the concept of science, and may change with time.

To imagine an extreme case, Nature could start publishing theology papers instead of physics and biology - in that case, an important part of the scientific establishment would have stopped doing actual science. But, based on reputation, many people would keep believing what Nature prints and would still point to the new theology articles as "scientists have discovered that [...]".

This is what people mean when they say science is becoming a religion: not that the concept of what science is changing, but that certain parts of the scientific establishment are not doing science per se but that their conclusions are still regarded as scientific based on past reputation.

A specific example would be someone like Michio Kaku. He is nominally a scientist, and is often interviewed as a scientist and many believe he is there to present what science says. But he is in fact just some public speaker/sci-fi author who last practiced science decades ago and now revels in speculation and exaggeration. He is essentially a priest of scientism.

", and the scientific establishment"

This isn't a thing. There's no unified organization of science, therefore making generalizations about it ss wrong. It would be just as wrong as saying "Fast food restaurants need to..", "The media always ...", "Black people should stop...".

----------

That's not the fault of science that's the fault of either the SPECIFIC establishments or the person. Reputation is based on past actions like truthfulness, admitting fault, etc. Not only the specific of what they did. If a company made pizza and had a reputation for quality then decided to sell bagels is it wrong of me to trust the quality? If Nature had a good reputation with scientific papers and started publishing theology papers, then why is it wrong to trust them?

* the new theology articles as "scientists have discovered that [...]".*

I don't even get this example. If a theology article starts with that sentence then that's kinda weird, I would have to read more but say the article is just fraudulent or uses "science" to justify something. That's the fault of Nature for publishing it and the author for writing it. It has nothing to do with "science" (a process) or other "scientific establishments" (since they aren't a single organization).

----------

According to Wikipedia he seems to have done a great deal of scientific work -

"Between 1970 and 2000, Kaku had papers published in physics journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.[13] In 1974, Kaku and Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University co-authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.[14] Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory. An explicit description of the second-quantization of the light-cone string was given by Kaku and Keiji Kikkawa.[15][16]"

Is there some expiration on calling yourself a scientist? It looks like this was his life's work. Like if stop researching physics for a month then spoke on a podcast where I was called a physicist is that deceptive? I could understand if someone never did any research and was being presented as a scientist but hasn't this person earned that title? Finally if someone is a scientist and a person trusts them explicitly because of that then that's wrong but that's the fault of the person.

now revels in speculation and exaggeration

I don't know anything about him, these are subjective assessments, but assuming they are true: If he speculates as part of a discussion and it's obvious or he makes it clear that it's speculation that's not a bad thing. If he exaggerates then he shouldn't, that's a personal flaw that doesn't reflect on "science" or "scientific establishments"

He's also not a priest. The definition of a priest: "a person whose office it is to perform religious rites, and especially to make sacrificial offerings."

You are trying to take words related to religion, generalize them, then using that more general definition apply it to a scientist to claim that science is a religion. Yes, we all like to spice up our sentences : "I worship pizza" "He's the priest of this fraternity". Is the fraternity a religion now? Is Pizza my new God? (it is actually) Taylor Swift isn't a religion because her fans worship her and go to mass gatherings where she performs """rituals"""

Mostly I feel like you are trying to show that incorrect usage of terms, personal flaws, and companies that misuse titles and/or reputation make science a religion because there are people who explicitly trust science, like some do with religion. Let's address that:

--------------------------------------

"Trust the science"

Let's say you need to answer a question or make a decision about something you can research. Unless you are an expert in that field and/or are willing to put massive amounts of time learning and doing your own research, you should just trust what the majority of the people in that field agree on (i.e. trust the science). Why? Because what's the alternative?

If you want to call this worship, fine, but don't claim it's like a religion. Religions don't test their truths/claims and they don't think you should test them. They want you to have faith AND faith is the only option.

So you might say something like "oh but you have faith those scientists had the right data, weren't lying etc etc"

You can do your own research, read their papers, run your own tests if you wanted to. Yes it's difficult and for many nearly impossible but the point it the information exists. The evidence to backup scientific claims exists. If someone makes a claims but lied about the evidence, that's not science. If they want you to believe their claim, have no evidence, and there's no way to test the claim, that's a religion.

Sorry this was so long

> The "mass media" is not one organization. I haven't seen any news reports redefining what science is, feel free to provide evidence of that.

You really want to tell me that you never heard something along the lines of "Science says ..." or "the science"? Not buying it. The usage of science in mass media is a different one than the one you want to hammer home.

> Finally it's not a game of definitions because science has a specific meaning. You can't just change that meaning (even if you add a captial S) then be critical about it.

This is mostly self-soothing I suppose. Just denying reality outright.

> You're critical because some organization in the government lied? Nothing to do with science

Motte and bailey. You just mean the hard definition. As long as you deny that a soft definition exists, it's a bit hard to argue with you.

> You're mad because some scientist committed fraud? Nothing to do with science.

You should look up motte and bailey maybe. You seemingly don't know it, but you're playing that fallacy. (Also: stop projecting)

> Peer reviewers aren't properly checking papers, that's their fault and or their university/company. Nothing to do with science.

So you want to tell me that the actual scientific process in action has nothing to do with science.

> If you aren't an expert in a field or willing to put massive amounts of time in researching something but you have to make a decision doing whatever the majority of people in a field say is the most logical course of action

Who makes the election of what the majority of people in a field say? That's where the mass media (that is not one organization) comes into play. This is basically The Science™ meme in action.

> Religion is never wrong

That is complete rubbish. There are plenty of examples from East and West. In certain parts of China, rival monasteries would have a throwdown over theology, hold a debate, and the losing monastery would convert.

The difference is that Theology can take personal experience as a logical prior, and work from there. Often that is the grappling hook thrown over a chasm which allows a bridge to be built to a new level of understanding. A bit like the way that infinitesimals are used as a device in the derivation of calculus.

One of the great (if unfortunate) advances in human society was the discovery that “personal experience” is a very unreliable way to learn about the world.

And yet it mediates your entire existence. Without both objective (or analytical) science and subjective (or holistic) theology we're trying to understand the world with one hand tied behind our backs.

Personally I think understanding the story should carry equal (or greater) weight when compared to examining the letters and paint used to write it.

By saying you have one hand behind your back you're implying holistic subjective theology has value. Why does it have value?

"Personally I think understanding the story should carry equal (or greater) weight when compared to examining the letters and paint used to write it."

Why?

Because it has meaning to me.

"Without both objective (or analytical) science and subjective (or holistic) theology we're trying to understand the world with one hand tied behind our backs."

One definition of science is "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation."

If you want to understand something about the world and you can do it using science why would you use any other method.

"Because it has meaning to me."

Excuse the bluntness but so? and why? This doesn't answer my question about the value and why you should use it.

How is this unfortunate? If you drawn conclusions about the world around you using your limited personal experience then it is unreliable. Relying on personal experience to learn about the world leads to faulty conclusions, more than data or experimentation would.

- I live in X city and I get robbed at gunpoint, is this city unsafe?

- I buy a new Toyota Corolla, it breaks down, does that mean the Corolla is a unreliable car?

- I go to Vermont and I decide to go hiking. The trail I picked is muddy, it's boring, and there are bugs everywhere. Is this a good place to hike?

Wrong conclusions but harmless you might say, how about:

I'm walking in a mall and I see a Black person steal a purse, it's the first crime I've ever witnessed. Are Black people dangerous?

My sister is raped by a Chinese person and my uncle tells me a Chinese person stole his mobile phone. Are Chinese people criminals?

Of course when it comes to situations that only involve you or your direct interaction with a unique situation that makes sense. Taste, smells, sexual attraction, friendship, even your relationship to God. However for most? situations it's not reliable.

Does God exist? Maybe?

Theological differences are interpretations.

Define "Social beliefs"

The problem is that nobody can verify the truth of every statement for themselves. Reality is too complex and no individual person has the time or the resources. For the vast majority of our beliefs, we have to rely on the consensus of experts, and that actually works really well. That doesn't mean science is perfect. But look at the theories that allow us to build a CPU with 50 billion transistors or a rocket that can go to the moon and tell me there isn't objective truth there.

When I worked on the design of the 757, we knew it was going to fly.

It works until it doesn't.

«Hey, science community, look: I did an experiment and it disproves X, so everything you build on top of X is flawed too. Start from scratch, please!». Science community: «fck off».

For example: Michelson-Morley experiment — disproved by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.

> For example: Michelson-Morley experiment — disproved by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.

Care to elaborate?

Michelson-Morley experiment found no changes in speed of light at all. Nothing. Zero fluctuations.

These fluctuations of speed of light were found much later, by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.

The flaw of Michelson-Morley experiment is that it was performed in isolated environment, but tried to measure an external effect.

Imagine that we want to measure atmospheric circulation in the same way: by measuring speed of wind in an closely isolated and insulated room: it's impossible.

However, Michelson-Morley experiment is one of corner stones for theory of Relativity.

> This incongruous result puzzled the physicists of the world until 1905 when Einstein published his theory of relativity. Viewed in the light of Einstein's revolutionary work, the null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment were not only predictable, but provided experimental confirmation of Einstein's theory.

Michelson’s experiments only proved there is no “Aether”, a supposedly invisible medium to carriers light. It also proved that the speed of light isn’t affected by (relative) movements. In some sense, yes one can say the speed of light of is constant. But in the context of the cosmos, it strictly doesn’t say anything about the speed of light in the past.

However, LIGO, VIRGO, and NANOGrav experiments and observations proved that speed of light in vacuum is NOT constant, which makes Michelsons's experiment obsolete.

The LIGO/VIRGO experiments proved no such thing. You seem to have a fundamentally flawed understanding of these experiments.

That the speed of light is constant in vacuum is one of the fundamental assumptions of general relativity. The results of LIGO/VIRGO are so far fully compatible with GR.

^ This is the problem we are looking for in this discussion.

The problem in this discussion is that you don't have an understanding of the concepts involved. You haven't properly understood the LIGO experiments and you clearly know nothing of general relativity. There really is no point in continuing this further.

It doesn't looks like you wanted to discuss flaws in GR with a dissident, who, obviously, too stupid to understand GR and SR. You told me that. You did the job. Now, «shut up and calculate».

You started this discussion saying "LIGO, VIRGO, and NANOGrav experiments and observations proved that speed of light in vacuum is NOT constant". This is completely absurd, as anyone who works in the field will tell you.

I never said you're too stupid to understand. What I said, and maintain, is that you lack a basic understanding of the concepts involved. If you want to have a proper discussion, you need to first properly study general relativity, and refrain from making ridiculous assertions about things you are obviously not an expert on.

(Translated by ChatGPT)

If we want to predict what the camera attached to a rocket moving along a complex trajectory at a speed close to the speed of light will see, we need a powerful theory that can predict the image and characteristics of other physical processes that this camera will observe. The Theory of Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity can predict these characteristics. However, the Theory of Relativity doesn't explain the «why» behind this happening.

If we consider the theory of the ether, the speed of light is the speed of wave propagation in the medium, which is itself determined by the speed of an interaction between particles in this medium (which is usually higher than the speed of wave itself).

In the case of experiments like LIGO/Virgo or NANOgrav, the speed of light changes because gravitational waves affect the medium.

If we take General Relativity (GR), the speed of light is the ultimate speed because Einstein stated so.

In the case of LIGO/Virgo experiments, the speed of light remains constant because the speed of light is the constant, as stated by Einstein, and space and time stretch in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th dimensions, which leads to light moving slower, although the speed of light itself doesn't change. :-/

^ This is just a load of rubbish. It makes absolutely no sense. Thanks for proving my point.

LIGO proved there is an aether and density ripples in it change the distance that light travels — as shown by a characteristic oscillation generated by dense objects colliding causing interference between the arms of LIGO.

The reason MM failed to show that light changes speed is because we’re not moving through the aether, but are ourselves aether stuff — and so our own perspective gets equally warped. Since us and the light both change with the relative motion, we can’t see the change.

I don't agree with this characterization. This is not to say that foundational studies are never invalidated: I just don't think MM was one of them.

> Michelson-Morley experiment found no changes in speed of light at all. Nothing. Zero fluctuations.

The MM experiment aimed to observe a predicted effect of the theory of luminiferous aether, which would have enabled measuring the Earth's speed relative to a canonical reference frame (the aether). It was sufficiently precise to observe that predicted effect but did not observe it, which provided strong evidence that the aether theory was wrong.

Finding that any variation in the propagation of light was too small to be detected by their instruments (and too small to be consistent with aether theory) is not the same as finding that it's exactly zero.

> These fluctuations of speed of light were found much later, by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.

It's not the same fluctuations though: these experiments found much smaller fluctuations than MM looked for, from a different effect. They're not even (understood to be) fluctuations in c, but in the shape of space.

> The flaw of Michelson-Morley experiment is that it was performed in isolated environment, but tried to measure an external effect.

The later interferometer experiments (LIGO and VIRGO) are conceptually very similar to the original MM experiment. The environment is not fundamentally different, and on the contrary LIGO and VIRGO are better isolated (against ordinary vibrations: we don't know any way to isolate an experiment from gravitational waves). They're just much larger and more precise, which is why they can observe the much smaller effect of gravitational waves.

> However, Michelson-Morley experiment is one of corner stones for theory of Relativity.

Yes, but the effects observed by LIGO and VIRGO are predicted by general relativity, which is what inspired scientists to carry out those experiments. As far as I know, they are consistent with GR to the extent that LIGO and VIRGO have measured them.

> The MM experiment aimed to observe a predicted effect of the theory of luminiferous aether ... which provided strong evidence that the aether theory was wrong.

MM failed to observe effects predicted by theory of STATIC luminiferous aether. It looks like there is no absolute aether frame (which will be strange to have in the infinite Universe).

> They're just much larger and more precise, which is why they can observe the much smaller effect of gravitational waves.

Yep. We can discard MM experiment now, because LIGO/Virgo is much better.

If we want to measure wind at high altitude, but we put our measurement tool deep and isolated it well, with high enough precision, we will be able to measure distant earthquakes and nuclear explosions. No luck with wind, of course.

To catch the wind, we need something like NANOgrav, but at much smaller scale at high orbit around Earth. Luckily, we have large number of GPS satellites with high-precision clocks in the sky: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10291-017-0686-6 . I see strong annual signal here.

> Yes, but the effects observed by LIGO and VIRGO are predicted by general relativity

This doesn't make GR unique. Other theories can predict this too. It's just waves in a medium. However, GR is abstract theory, which lacks explanation power. Lack of explanation causes lack of understanding.

> Hey, science community, look: I did an experiment and it disproves X, so everything you build on top of X is flawed too. Start from scratch, please!

This happened several times, for example when Einstein was proven right about the Theory of Relativity, showing that Newton's Laws of Motion were not precisely correct. The physics community eventually found out that Newton's Laws were a really good approximation of the better theory under conditions we experience on Earth (if you plug numbers at human scale to the Theory of Relativity, the equations actually approximate really closely to Newton's Equations which is truly remarkable - you can do it yourself as the Maths are not too complicated at all - I did this in Physics 101, first year undergrad Major in Physics), so they were not just dismissed, but continue to be used to this day as they are extremely successful in predicting the movement of bodies at human scale.

Your comparison with Michelson-Morley VS LIGO shows you don't really comprehend what you're saying, as all LIGO did was show that Gravitational waves can distort space-time to an extremely small degree (compared to astronomical measurements), which does not prove at all that light speed is not constant in all directions - and it boggles my mind why you think it does! You could make the same incorrect argument by mentioning how light speed is not the same in different materials?? The fact that space-time is distorted at places (including near large bodies as well - even ignoring gravitational waves) just shows that light can have different speeds when you consider such distortions - it feels stupid having to even say this out loud - but no, that doesn't prove light speed is not constant in a vacuum that is free of such space-time distortions!

> Gravitational waves can distort space-time to an extremely small degree

Space-time is not a physical term, it's framebuffer. You are talking about mathematical model. Can you switch to physic, please?

This is nonsense. Spacetime is a concept intrinsic to both quantum field theory and general relativity, our best physical theories. Quantum fields are defined as a value for every point in spacetime. General relativity defines gravity as the curvature of spacetime. Show me a physical theory that makes the same predictions without spacetime, and you can probably win a Nobel prize.

Mountain is just excitement in heights field. There is no mountains: it just geometry, people just follows the shortest path. Heights field just warps space-time, mountain is just illusion. And other nonsense from «shutup and calculate» guys.

Switch from the model (heights field) to the physics (stone) language, please.

You are trying to sound smart, but your argument actually illustrates the point that "there is no mountains" pretty well... You think "stones" is the real physics, while quantum field theory (presumably what you mean by using the word field) is something silly scientists came up with (the shutup and calculate guys)!? This shows a high school understanding of physics... because if you want to be pedantic, yes, there's no mountain!! Our world is basically empty space, with lots and lots of tiny disturbances in the quantum fields (particles and virtual particles) being the only thing that we can consider to really exist when we look deep enough... a mountain is just an emergent property of the arrangement of those fields in this particular region. That's what physicists mean when they tell you you never really touch anything because the force of repulsion between the atoms in your hand and the atoms in other things is so strong the atoms remain at a considerable (in the quantum realm) distance. But you probably don't "believe" any of this, right?

Field is a mathematical therm. You are talking about model.

Look at hydrodynamic quantum analogs. You will see, that many quantum effects, maybe even all of them, can be explained by waves, in therms of Newtonian physics. For example, the double slit experiment can be explained by self-interference of then pilot wave.

When I can see quantum effects with my own eyes, all this mumbo-yumbo about waves of probability, half-dead cats, space-time bending, etc. don't work on me anymore. It's like tales about 4 elephants when I see round Earth in a porthole.

> think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study.

When you turn the cultural relativism up to eleven.

Modernity is when you pilot society using science. See: EPCOT and Disney’s vision in the 1950 of building entire cities with everything perfectly entirely planned.

So when you control science, you control the laws. And you can’t control science, but you can control the press around science, and how people talk about science.

>Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game

Well, "subjective" is the wrong word, but I get what you mean. However, aren't they just word games? It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real. They just investigate what can be deduced from specific axiomatic systems that are entirely divorced from reality. Theologians aren't even consistent, since they have dogmas that they'll contort around in order to avoid contradicting, even if that involves contradicting other parts of scripture.

I'll never forget the time I asked a philosophy undergraduate why he decided to go to university for philosophy rather than just reading the bibliography by himself, and he told me that by doing so he could teach philosophy. An academic pyramid scheme.

Generally speaking university gives you the tools and guides you. Most of the people aren't able to study university level subjects on their own.

That was the idea in the past.

University now teaches you precisely what to think, and makes clear the consequences of ‘wrongthink’.

That might be the case for other disciplines, but it certainly isn't for philosophy. There are no special techniques, you just read what other people have said on the subject. What else is there?

Discussions and having a peer group seems like it would be helpful for learning philosophy.

Sure, but my question was about the purpose of studying philosophy in university. "It's easier than doing it by yourself" is not a purpose. There's still nothing you can do with what you've learned, other than become a professor.

I just want to point out that you haven’t made a good argument for this to be true at all. One person does not make a pyramid scheme. Someone into cooking and teaching could go to culinary school and tell you their dream is to be a culinary instructor. Doesn’t make it a pyramid scheme.

Philosophy has one of the highest average incomes of degrees, because of the number of graduates that go into law and business.

The implicit argument is that I don't see what else one could possibly do with a degree in philosophy.

> Philosophy has one of the highest average incomes of degrees, because of the number of graduates that go into law and business.

And why do they need those degrees in order to do that? What are they employed to do?

One thing you can do with a degree in philosophy is get into law school. After graduating from law school you can be employed as a lawyer. They’re not philosophy lawyers, just normal lawyers.

This isn’t some fringe thing. Play around with some Google searches like “what can you do with a philosophy degree?”, “best pre-law degrees”, “philosophy and law school” and you will see what else one could possibly do with a degree in philosophy.

I didn't think I needed to specify "that you can't do without a philosophy degree". You can get into law school without a philosophy degree, too.

That’s a pretty important qualifier. Most degrees don’t take something from impossible to possible. That’s pretty much only certifications. Is there anything you can do with a CS degree that you can’t otherwise, besides be a CS professor? Even really high level jobs will have people with other degrees.

> It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real.

That is a viewpoint. This is the exact fallacy pointed out upper in the thread. This is just a viewpoint of yours, however commonly held it may be in the society of today.

No, I'm not talking about something as banal as whether a god exists. I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture. That's not a point of view, that's what theology is. Regardless of whether magic exists, I think we can both agree we can't find out by reading Harry Potter.

The same for philosophy. I like to half joke that modern philosophy is what's left after taking out all the useful parts of ancient natural philosophy and putting them into either mathematics or science.

If you think this way you must also think lawyers don’t study anything real because they study laws.

It's not really an apt analogy. Law is not a field of inquiry like science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology are. Lawyers do not push the boundaries of understanding, they're clerks. That aside, laws are not divorced from reality, they're agreements that members of a society enter into regarding how the society is supposed to function. To study law is to study the way society works. Yes, society is an artificial construct, which why law is not a field of inquiry, but it still provably exists.

Again this is your viewpoint.

Very naive of you to think that religion, scripture, or existence of God are unprovable problems.

Many people don’t agree with you on the both sides. Many think there is definitively no God and many think there is.

> Again this is your viewpoint.

What is my viewpoint? Exactly what that I have presented as if it was an objective fact is subjective? Please enlighten me, because I have no idea what you're trying to say.

>Very naive of you to think that religion, scripture, or existence of God are unprovable problems.

When did I say that? What I said was that society provably exists, and I said that to emphasize that the subject matter of law is something real, not to imply by omission that the existence of god/a god/gods is unprovable.

>Many people don’t agree with you on the both sides. Many think there is definitively no God and many think there is.

Cool. I'm not talking about the existence of a god nor about what people think about the topic. I'm talking about theology and philosophy as fields of study.

I’m a different person, but maybe I can help clarify.

> I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture.

This paragraph, especially the italicized portion, implies the statement “scripture isn’t real”.

That can be taken a few different ways. One is that scripture doesn’t exist. Obviously that’s not true, so probably not what you meant.

The other is that scripture is fiction or wrong or made up or not representative of reality or something in this general sphere of belief. Your clarifications, like mentioning Harry Potter, show that this is what you meant.

Stating that scripture is fiction is a viewpoint. You’re not even describing just Christian theology but theology in general. So you’re putting out that every claim that some text was divinely inspired is false. I’m not arguing with you on this, just saying it’s a viewpoint you’re putting out.

I don’t think you mentioned it explicitly, but theologians also study more than scripture. So to say theologians don’t study reality is to also say this is t real (although you didn’t say that explicitly).

This all adds up to you taking some position, having some viewpoint in the realm of metaphysics, ontology, theology, etc. You’re saying some things are and are not true about god, like the holy bible is not truth based on reality.

I agree with this. On top of what he said, I can add this just to clarify more:

> I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture.

Your viewpoint unshared by many others here is that we cannot determine the existence of god by studying scripture. I say 'unshared by others' to emphasize they are subjective.

There are no non-scientific questions, are there?

Little more complicated than that. Here’s a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

You just asked one.

Sure there are. "Is the universe really billions of years old, or did it pop into existence three seconds ago in its current state including all of your memories?" It's impossible to answer this question scientifically because no empirical test could ever possibly be devised.

Funny, that's a variety of Russell's Teapot, which stemmed from philosophical arguments about religion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Also known as Last Tuesdayism, where the universe happened last Tuesday. I and other intellectuals consider this ridiculous. It was in fact last Thursday.

Metaphysics and ethics in philosophy are non-scientific. And these are extremely important things. Religion, which is folk metaphysics and folk ethics, is, to billions of people now living on this planet, more important and relevant to their daily lives than science is.

Science only gives us an idea of "What is?", it does not really help with the question of "What ought to be?".

Proper science is value neutral.

> Proper science is value neutral.

Is that supposed to be a neutral scientific statement?

Right. Science can't stand on its own. It can never be purely objective.

Any single player (scientist) cannot be purely objective. Which is exactly why diversity of thought is essential for science (the process) to work. Scientists with different points of view can then challenge each other on the basis of evidence. When you take viewpoint diversity away this process breaks down and you are left with mere ideology pretending at science.

I am not a positivist, so that statement is quite okay for me to make. I can judge a process that aspires to be scientific by how likely it is to result in an approximation of objective truth.

Science has come against its own limits many times.

Hume's problem of induction shows you that every scientific conclusion is a leap of faith. Scientists try to make it as small as possible of a leap, but it is still a leap.

Chaotic systems require more percision than physics allows, making many systems theoretically unpredictable. Having accurate models is useless. If you have a model that's theoretically accurate but requires more accuracy than the universe actually has then what does that even mean? Where does that information come from?

Qunatum mechanics was basically the end of causality as we know it. Forget correlation does not imply causation. There is no causation.

Godel's incompleteness, Turing's halting, prove that formal systems have limits and that even logic itself cannot go everywhere.

There is also an aspect where it goes from science to policy, and there is this step where certain parts of society simple state: "how dare you think you know better then x, who studied y for x amount of year, or this scientist".

It happens here too. During Covid, also here the lab leak theory was talked as a crazy non-scientific conspiracy.

Actual scientists proposed the lab leak early on before they were prompty shut down by the Fauci establishment and the fake Lancet

Common sense proposed the lab leak. Was absurd and scary how easily it was dismissed in pretty much the entire Western media, not only the US. Even this forum got subjected to it.

Well it's potentially racist to some, so common sense has to go out the window.

The fact that labs exist in other countries with people of different ethnicities is not racist

But the fact it was basically a recycling of several racist "those filthy foreigners are responsible for disease" tropes along with "scheming orientals" tropes.

No the argument is nonsensical on its face. A lab leak supposedly recycles those tropes but emergence from an unsanitary wet market does not?

Seems more like you projecting some racist stuff no one else was thinking of.

As opposed to the "approved" knowledge that it came from foreigners with poor hygiene eating strange animals?

It's not "potentially" racist. It was being spouted by racists and directly leading to violence against asians in America and elsewhere. When this behavior is seen, and with the standard lack of any nuance in both reporting and social media, making such claims publicly if you're less than 95% certain is irresponsible.

What makes you certain that there was less than a 1 in 20 chance that the lab leak theory was wrong at the time?

After all, percentage fbtou are going to wait for every theory to be 19/20 chance of being correct before you announce it as a theory, no theory would have been announced at all for COVID

You can't prove a negative. Again, you are ignoring my point - most science isn't trying to make claims already being used to incite violence. There is a higher standard before publicly discussing such things.

The lab leak theory was not being touted by the Black people who beat up Asians in droves the last 3 years. The idea that it was Trumpists was a conspiracy theory not borne out by stats

It was not just “common sense”. I was reading in-depth articles about the GoF line of research and all the characters involved (Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, etc) back in March/April 2020. Basically the entire body of circumstantial evidence pointing to the lab leak hypothesis was known and reported within months of the start of the pandemic. Every in-depth article written since then has been mostly a rehashing of what various bloggers and alternative news sites had already published.

There is a huge reason to downplay it, especially in the USA, until things could cool around it or things could be worked out 100% factually and it is a science related - basic Psychology.

That reason?

Hate Crimes - https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027236499/anti-asian-hate-cr...

Even in my small town of 7000, an Indian lady was assaulted to "get back at those Chinese for giving us COVID (which doesn't exist and is just made up by the lame stream media)".

I don't think we should reject reality just because we're concerned others can't handle that reality without reacting violently. The notion that we should downplay certain ideas because of crimes committed by people that misunderstand those ideas is not something I can get behind, sorry. Do you post on reddit a lot? The phrasing of your argument and the intermittent spacing has that reddity vibe to me.

GP didn't suggest to reject reality out of concern for others. He said we should make sure to be 100% certain of what the facts are before asserting what reality is to the public, especially when it comes to sensitive subjects.

The alternative is to say that reality is A, have a lot of people face (just or unjust) repercussions, then say "Oopsie! Turns out we were dead wrong". The damage is already done by that point.

No this isn’t a good reason to shutdown actual scientific discussion and this whole thing felt like a red herring specifically played up to shut down dissent.

Anti-Asian hate crimes are a real thing, but both black and white Americans endure them at a higher rate[1]. Further, these types of attacks went up across the board during the pandemic however Asian based hate crimes represented only ~8% of these attacks with most other ethnic groups having way more attacks targeted at them[2]. Seems to me like an example of cherry picked statistics being used for political gain. Asian hate crimes being something that became way more common during the pandemic is simply not grounded in reality.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/737681/number-of-racial-...

https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2021-hate-crime-stati...

It’s all mess though.

It must have been really obvious to all concerned that, by running to ground the lab leak theory, if it ever did get out (what they did) that it’d be a big net loss for trust in government and science.

So it follows that they must have been really (like really /really/) scared that it was absolutely necessary — damn the consequences.

But my guess it’s actually a feedback loop gone out of control. (We knew even then that this was no Ebola.)

At the same time, in the UK, right at the start, we have those now famous words: people were “made to feel more personally vulnerable”.

My guess is that the intended recipient of that initiative was us (i.e., gen pop), but the acute recipients (i.e., those most likely to hear, actively listen and be influenced) were those already involved in the campaign.

The volume could not be turned down (because it was assumed gen pop would otherwise not listen). But very stupidly, there also was no moderating mechanism for those “in charge”. So we have our loop.

(This doesn’t fully track, because later the British PM got seriously ill. And later still, the British PM also went back to partying. So, there would have been re-injected some non-trivial rationale to the severity worries, albeit only later. And there was also apparently a very effective moderating mechanism at least in central government. But as a simple model, it explains a lot for me.)

> It must have been really obvious to all concerned that, by running to ground the lab leak theory, if it ever did get out (what they did) that it’d be a big net loss for trust in government and science.

But a lab leak in itself would be a big loss of public trust in science. It exemplifies the worst fears of the uneducated regarding "God-playing scientists" who slice and dice the DNA like a Frankenstein, produce plagues for curiosity and "we were preoccupied with whether we could, but not whether we should"-style tropes. A real leak would validate these nutteries and play into the cards of the woo anti-science people (remember those times? Penn and Teller's Bullshit etc...). The fear around GMO etc. And this sort of research is international and wasn't localized to China and the Wuhan experiments aren't solely with Chinese involvement. So they thought better roll the dice and see if it gets out.

----

Trust is a very feeble thing, and nobody wants to do an honest postmortem. The train is simply moving forward faster and faster. Erode public trust, then smear and name-call anyone who doesn't adhere to an ever narrowing band of acceptable beliefs, dismiss them all as everything-ist nutjobs. Never admit wrong, just crank the heat up steadily year by year. Because surely that will solve the problems.

As someone who believed the lab leak theory from the start, I don't ever remember it being treated as a "crazy non scientific conspiracy".

I do remember some people pushing the leak theory as if it was 100% proven and them getting called out.

I also don't have any hard evidence for the lab leak theory so I'm open to being wrong. I'm just suspicious because China hasn't been forthcoming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

> I don't ever remember it being treated as a "crazy non scientific conspiracy

Consider that this treatment may have taken place in the editorial boards & newsrooms of the outlets you read before the debate ever had the opportunity to reach to your attention.

Perhaps epistemology is not just individual in scope, but societal.

Indeed, I also didn't remember it being treated in Jan-Oct 2020 as a 'crazy non-scientific conspiracy'. But we know today, (reference any journalist talking about origins on Twitter) that lab leak was being treated amongst themselves as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory

I also felt it was the most likely explanation from the first time I read about it (March/April 2020) but even if it was “just one hypothesis” here’s the thing: if true, it has profound implications for the future of humanity. It’s not like this is just an academic question about what killed the dinosaurs. It doesn’t matter whether it can be proven; the fact that we consider it in the realm of possibility means we need to figure out what can be done to ensure the next “hypothetical” leak isn’t even worse.

Does it really matter? I mean we did had deadly pandemics before biolabs were a thing. Other than blaming China because that’s what Americans want to do now, I haven’t heard anything interesting about what to do if the lab leak hypotheses is right.

It doesn’t matter in the sense that we just had to deal with the virus, no matter what.

But it does matter with regard to public trust in science and government.

Others have also pointed out that it matters because of it being a potential spark for racism (and that’s a reasonable concern no matter if you think the response wrong or right).

Also, I remember some concern that it may be a bio-weapon. And, although slight far fetched, it would be consistent. Ironically, I suspect the intent was to discount the possibility to prevent panic. (Though they were happy to spread lower grade fear, so go figure…)

Thoreau made a similar argument after his carelessness started a major wildfire, stating that once he lost control of his campfire, it was "as if the lightning had done it". His neighbors weren't impressed, and I'm not impressed here either.

This thinking is just bizarre. ~20M people are dead. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident at the WIV, then those deaths were all avoidable, simply by not funding research that was already considered to be an unacceptable risk by many academics (Relman, Lipsitch, etc.) before the pandemic, and actually defunded until 2017. These were real people, mothers and grandfathers and friends. Would you not rather they hadn't died?

The WIV was funded by the American NIH, and used techniques first developed by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident there, then the American government is in no position to blame China. On the other hand, that gives the American and Chinese governments a collective incentive to downplay that possibility, as seems to have occurred.

Here's The Lancet in Feb 2020:

> We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Nothing in that condemnation is limited to claims of deliberate release. That article contributed to a false scientific consensus, which social media operators used to justify banning any account that suggested SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from a research-related accident. For example, Facebook did so until May 2021.

I only remember the lab leak theory being discussed seriously once Biden had been elected. Prior to that, it was treated as unenlightened racism.

Not that I'm a Trump fan. But the man was a lightning rod like I've never seen for the left here in America.

Then again, just flippantly referring to Covid as the "Kung Flu" just might have something to do with it.

I’ll take that over “how dare you question X YouTuber or Y politician or Z super pac who has been “studying” this since March 2020” any day.

So basically all of the politicians who enacted crazy covid mandates for three years?

For being shutdown and canceled, the lab leak theory is and has been talked about a shocking amount for the past 3+ years. Rarely a day goes by here that it hasn't been talked about, especially in 2020.

Oh boy, a good old fashioned science versus religion brawl is about to go down. I haven't had a good one of these since the Atheist Crusade of the early 2000s.

I don’t really think my comment suggests that. I am saying that people should study philosophy and religion more, because it’s an extremely influential topic, especially when it comes to science. The framing of science and philosophy/religion as antagonistic is part of the problem.

Science is a human endeavour and therefore it's always political.

In some sense sure, but that doesn’t imply that scientists ought to function as political actors - especially when doing so puts the actual practice of science at risk.

It cannot be helped.

Is always takes precedence over ought.

What can’t be helped? Your comment is too vague for me to understand what you’re getting at.

As I said in my original comment, I think scientists are being put in political positions because of a failure of culture/people/society to care sufficiently about philosophy and religion.

The solution to this seems obvious to me.

One, what does religion have to do with those?

Two, individuals are political therefore their politics bleeds into science.

If you think there is an obvious solution then you are most assuredly incorrect. Understanding power dynamics is part of philosophy, not something that is separate from it.

The entire intellectual history of the past 3,000+ years has been shaped by “religion”, which as a separate concept is a fairly recent phenomenon. Everything from individual rights, the value of Truth, the concept of secularism, and a million other things can be directly traced to conflicts and developments of religion. Part of the problem that I alluded to is the refusal of many intelligent people to recognize this.

Secondly, there is a major difference between scientists having political beliefs and scientists being put in political positions where they make decisions for society at large. These are not the same thing.

Thirdly, the obvious solution was to make people care more about philosophy and religion and not continue to put scientists into a political position where they are incentivized to quash dissent.

Oh astronomy and black holes influence everyday policy? Do you enjoy blanket statements much?

The process of studying those subjects is very strongly political.

Stop assuming bad faith and stick to the point.

Counterpoint: No it's not.

«Big Bang» model of Universe evolution has religious origin. It's politics.

We look at the movements of body in the sky, we find that they are pretty clearly expanding, and given that if we assume that this has been going on for a long time (and there's very little reason to believe otherwise given what we know about physics), we can clearly see that there must have been a moment in time where everything was much closer together, up to an infinitely small point... this is basically what Big Bang says. Can you please tell me what religious origin there may be in this??

Why are we looking at the sky in the first place?

Humans are curious. We've always wanted to know what those little dots of light in the sky are.

We used to make up stories to explain them... but now we don't have to, we can figure it out using our knowledge of matter and physics, make predictions to check whether those are correct, basically the scientific method... religion is not necessary to explain why we look at the sky, nor why we feel we have to be decent people for that matter, or why we would like to know where everything came from and where we're going. Simply being consciuous and rational and curious is enogh for all that.

It’s not necessary, but seems to be sufficient for many, maybe most people.

Big Bang model was originally formalised by Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics Georges Lemaître.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

Expansion of our local group of galaxies is coincidence. We are falling into Big Attractor, which falls into Shapley attractor, so our local group of galaxies is stretched.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mQr6mzmzbU

https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02483

(unproven ideas:)

On big scale, gravitational noise, discovered by LIGO/VIRGO/NANOgrav, causes red shift of photons.

Microwave background is light of distant galaxies with z=1000, or about 4 trillion light years.

> Expansion of our local group of galaxies is coincidence. We are falling into Big Attractor, which falls into Shapley attractor, so our local group of galaxies is stretched.

Wow that's some really shady stuff... you're talking about the actual Local Group, part of the Virgo Cluster? Do you know that the Local Group is not actually expanding?? It's predicted it'll stick together in the far future, while other parts of the visible Universe shift away from us. It's even been calculated that the Virgo Supercluster's enormous gravity slows down recession of the Local Group from the cluster by approximately ten percent[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_Cluster

No, it's not about Local Group. It's about Local Supercluster, Perseus–Pisces Supercluster, and so on, which are attracted by Shapley attractor, but stretched into different directions.

They influence funding grants, which is public policy.

> therefore it's always political

Therefore it will always contain politics. Just like everything humans do. Just like software engineering. But that doesn't mean the technical aspects of software aren't also important. All the political insights in the world won't tell you how to make a webpage or how to build a telescope.

Tell me there's politics involved and I still have no idea what goes on in your research lab or your software team.

These sort of reductive, absolutist claims only sound wise when you're young. They basically never tell you anything useful about how to act in the world. Years ago a friend of mine would rant at length to anyone who would listen about how everything in human society is based on economic incentives. He's right! But I could easily make the same argument about all sorts of things. Everything in human society is also about status. Or politics. Or the myths we tell about ourselves (like religion and science). Everything can be explained by evolutionary biology. Or the tribe, or the individual. Or how children are raised. And so on.

There are so many important perspectives to have. But if you really want to know what goes on amongst scientists, there's no alternative but to spend time talking to them. You're so much more right, and more wrong than you think. The details are, also, everything.

>But if you really want to know what goes on amongst scientists, there's no alternative but to spend time talking to them.

I guess I can always have a monologue...

The only "practical" thing I learned from pure math (I'm not good at it) is that everything is more or less, "word game", and everything can be questioned.

Once you realize even the most obvious things, like "A < B || A == B || A > B" can be not necessarily true for real numbers, you really can't stop wondering if what authority says is so true...

The Reals are ordered right? Any two elements can be compared.

I'm guessing you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.

> you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.

Yeah. Since "uncountable infinite" has no real world meaning (maybe in some modern physics it does?), it's hard to say what the natural definition of real numbers is, and things like axiom of choice's true value is quite arbitrary.

But even at a less-abstract level, I don't think the comparability of real numbers is so obvious. For example if you just define a (irrational) real number as a non-repeating decimal, or "a program on a Turing machine that prints digits and never halts"[1], then how do we know comp(A, B) halts or not?

It's not a proof of that real numbers are not comparable (since it just reduces comp(A,B) to halting problem, not vice versa), but at least for me it's telling that simple things like comparison is not always simple.

[1]: Of course it's ill-defined and can't cover all real numbers, since the number of programs on a giving Turing machine is countable.

You can encode halting of a program P as a comparison of a computable real number Q with a fixed number R by defining Q as 0.111..1 where each step of P adds one digit of 1 to Q’s expansion. P will halt iff Q is less than R=0.111…

Any subset of reals is ordered as it inherits the usual order from reals. The existence of well ordering (related to AOC) is difficult issue).

But the trichotomy of A>=<B does fail for a different but useful logic - remove the law of contradiction. There is a number e which is neither equal nor not equal to 0, with e^2=0. This leads to simplifications of concepts and proofs - you can define derivatives without limits for instance. This topic is studied in synthetic differential geometry.

But the real response to the comment ‘everything is just a word game’ is ‘just’ is not apt. You are free to fix rules of the game, once done you face questions which are possibly beyond your ability to answer. A person could run a program checking id Fermat equations had solutions in 1950’s. Only In 1990’s we know after great advances (like discovering a route between mountain ranges) that this program wont halt (or ZFC is inconsistent which would be even more surprising).

Dude, scientists (in my experience) handle dissent just fine. The idea that scientists have problems with dissenting opinions is mostly propagated by assholes with some other agenda, whose scientific ideas have already had a fair hearing, who are just trying to prolong the public discussion for reasons typically unmotivated by genuine scientific interest.

I've spent most of my career around scientists of one stripe or another and I've literally never met a scientist committed to even their pet ideas at some kind of ideological level.

Are scientists perfect? Hardly. Have their been scientific paradigms or ideas that have persisted longer than they should have? Definitely. Scientists are human beings. There are limits to how rational they can be, especially in groups, but to suggest that science is somehow intolerant of dissent is a straw man cartoon ass argument.

Covid debunks all your claims. I’ve taken all my covid jabs and boosters so I’m not coming at this as some alt right antivaxxer, but the systemic and systematic shut down of any dissent against mainstream science and scientific organisations was/is disgusting.

In my jurisdiction at least it was hijacked for business purposes. I believe that all the lockdown stuff was necessary but after a while certain actors started to take advantage of it, for instance supermarkets selling a broad range of stuff while all regular stores had to stay shut. Hurdur supply chain.

Then there was the stockpiling of PPE, hand sanitizer. The dismissal of masks unless they were “very good” (totally ignoring collective benefit vs individual) and self testing (again ignoring aggregate benefit vs individual). As soon as particular commercial interests got their positions covered these things all of a sudden became “okay”.

Again, like I say the Covid outbreak was real. We did need to do what we could not least to safeguard medical services.

But boy did the schemers go to town once they figured out a way to get rich from it.

Still waiting for that windfall tax on the supermarkets.

> Covid debunks all your claims.

No it doesn't.

Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.

There were routine talking about alternate therapies among the scientists/doctors/researchers about these topics. You can search for the UCSF Covid Grand Rounds on youtube and watch the history of their open discussions as research was routinely presented from all over the globe on the various items.

I code for a living and have no idea about this stuff, but my wife's goal is to make patients better and she would watch the grand rounds (or similar) every time and I'd listen from another room. Not a single alternate treatment wasn't discussed and evaluated.

I’ll give you an example.

Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit.

Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.

>It was just an old idea

but it is from the experience of another Corona virus outbreak last time.

Asia just know wearing mask is helpful anyway.

But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.

Source of western healthcare authorities telling the public this?

edit: also the airborness of it was also a repeated topic in the cited grand rounds

The WHO only declared COVID-19 to be airborne in December 2021.

There were many articles at the time describing this failure. It’s interesting how quickly it has faded from memory.

I’m on my phone, so this is just an example from a quick search. Again, there are many like this:

“Public health organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) initially declared the virus to be transmitted in large droplets that fell to the ground close to the infected person, as well as by touching contaminated surfaces. The WHO emphatically declared on March 28, 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne (except in the case of very specific “aerosol-generating medical procedures”) and that it was “misinformation” to say otherwise. […]

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States followed a parallel path […]

“The very slow and haphazard acceptance of the evidence of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by major public health organizations contributed to a suboptimal control of the pandemic, whereas the benefits of protection measures against aerosol transmission are becoming well established.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070

You said

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

There was certainly mainstream belief that covid was limited to droplet transmission (though I remember much discussion of that as well) but the idea that Western medicine didn't think any viruses were airborne is nonsense.

Another comment brought up measles, which is a great example, and known for many decades.

>Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

"Healthcare authorities" are not necessarily scientists, they are professionals. Nor am I aware of them ever making this claim in the first place, at least never in any kind of coordinated way. Please provide a source.

If you're talking about masks for Covid, that was because the Trump administration bungled the mask situation so badly that we were critically short on masks[1]. It was decided that to minimize causalities, focus would be on making sure health care professionals got masks first.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/n95-...

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

Did measles not exist before 2020? Where do you people find this crazy shit?

> Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief.

Regardless of whether this particular "belief" was actually held by anyone (it probably wasn't as others point out), science is fully based on evidence. If what you say is actually true, what those people claiming that were doing was not science by definition. You cannot claim something which you can't back up with data and plenty of evidence and call what you're doing science.

the scientists are not the problem here, PUBLIC science and public institutional structures were, are, and will be. The media takes a scientist, who has a strong tendency to say "this may work, we can't be sure" and "under some conditions, we believe that it might" and turns it into "we know!"... for institutional media reasons. Some scientists like the attention and are willing to play along, to an extent. Public institutions need "certainty rhetoric" for legal and PR reasons. The reason Ivermectin was so clubbed to death wasn't because it ddn't work, it was because the legal process of emergency certification of the vaccine required that there are no working cures, so that could institutionally not be pursued. No evil intention is needed here; "we want to help and this is a legal hurdle", on the one side, meets "we want to sell this thing and need the certification" on the other.

Scientists will always say "wait a minute, were not sure". Institutions and their structures leave little room for this, so scientists get translated to certainty rhetoric, and the gullible public who often has a quasi-religious view of science swallows it, as that's how the media makes it for them.

>Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.

Japan used it and it worked there.

A quick google search disagrees:

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-439365261885

You were living in an echo chamber if you think that is true. I dare you to question any covid crap in front of your parent or (former) friends and relatives. Wait until they call you every awful thing in the book.

Criticism or intellectual curiosity was absolutely not tolerated.

> my wife's colleagues

Your wife’s colleagues are not the scientific community at large. Organisations such as WHO and numerous government regulators flat out lied to the public throughout the pandemic.

Take the UK. Our health watchdog swore that masks were not needed and people shouldn’t wear masks at the start of the pandemic. This was specifically to stop hoarding of masks needed in hospitals. 3 months later mask mandates were a legal obligation with fixed penalty notices given for not wearing them.

Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

And yes. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine etc.

Finally. Vaccine safety. There is a lot of evidence that there was not informed consent on the full impact of taking the combine vaccine. Like I said, I took all the doses. I’m not an antivaxxer. But the scientific community destroyed careers of anyone that tried to say otherwise.

> Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

What? I thought it was widely acknowledged to not be ruled out. But how could it be shown to be correct?

> Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.

A possible lab leak was never ruled out, just most of the evidence does not point to it. It was never 10% ruled out during the pandemic and now.

I'm a biologist, have friends who also biologists and work in connected fields. Unless you think a possible lab leak is the same as someone posting "100% proof covid is a CCP bioweapon!!!!)

vermectin and hydroxychloroquine still are not correct treatment of covid-19 now.

I think this is a tricky one. Certainly I wasn't particularly impressed with how the science was communicated in a few areas:

- The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics

- The WHO's position on airborne transmission of Covid-19, and the way in which understanding in this area was misrepresented to the public

I took part in a vaccine clinical trial myself, and there was a much more in-depth discussion as to what was known about the candidate vaccination, its side effect profile - and, more importantly, the limits of our knowledge given the small population it had been tested in when I volunteered.

We didn't see much of that nuance during the height of the pandemic.

At the same time though, some may argue that trying to combat misinformation requires over-simplifying some things, such that they can be effectively communicated to the public.

Ref:

https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

> The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics

This is more of a matter of public health than science though. It would be nice if they were the same thing but it's like asking for people to be perfectly rational and well-informed actors like in those economics models

Not sure the claim is true in the strong form, but that aside: was the approach wrong as far as policies and social outcome are concerned? Would a more nuanced approach have worked better and by what metric? Just being unhappy about what happened isn't enough for things social.

There is a bunch of examples of extremely influential theories that were dismisses because of authority figures, I don't know if you count math as science, but for example set theory was extremely controversial.

And yet set theory is now regularly employed. It used to take humans hundreds of years to adjust major ideas. Now dummies complain if an idea takes a decade to gain acceptance. Science is still probably the most flexible and adaptive social milieu in the history of the human race.

Every one of the CoVID examples given there is obviously wrong, even with hindsight:

* The "Great Barrington Declaration," if followed, would have likely doubled America's already extremely high death toll. Which countries did the best in the pandemic? The dreaded zero-CoVID countries, which got all the way to vaccines with extremely low death tolls, often with a much greater level of normalcy in everyday life than the US (see: Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). The idea of letting all controls on viral spread drop (which is what the GBD effectively was) before vaccines were developed was just a plan for everyone to get the virus without the benefits of vaccination, with the ensuing high death toll.

* Mask mandates supposedly useless: challenging the idea that proper masks (N-95s or equivalent) do not dramatically reduce spread of the virus is like challenging the idea that parachutes break falls. They do, for very simple mechanistic reasons.

* Young people being vaccinated: The risks of vaccination are far lower than the risks of CoVID in all age groups. The worst side-effects of the vaccine (which are extrememly rare) are actually far more prevalent after infection than after vaccination.

All of your examples hinge on the idea that killing or infecting people is bad. You have to broaden your mindset to consider that some groups and people see those outcomes as okay.

To point 3, they’re not.

According to this UK government data which lists the number needed to prevent one serious case — which are higher than the number at which we’d expect one serious side effect.

Literally a QALY negative treatment.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

You're comparing two different things: prevented cases and side-effects. The rate of those very same serious side-effects is far higher from CoVID itself than from the vaccine. You're literally increasing their frequency by refusing to vaccinate.

I’m not:

If you don’t prevent at least one serious case per serious side-effect caused, your treatment is a negative contribution. That’s what QALY negative means — that you’re doing more harm than good.

This government information clearly says that the number of immunizations needed for young people to prevent one hospitalization is far above the number at which we’d expect a serious side-effect, eg myocarditis.

Please stop denying government health data to promote your kook theories. You’re hurting people with misinformation.

> If you don’t prevent at least one serious case per serious side-effect caused

Severe cases and serious side-effects are not the same thing. In the document you linked, a "severe case" is classified as one in which you end up on ventilation in the ICU. You don't even state where you're supposedly getting your information about serious side-effects, or how "serious side-effect" is defined (I think the technical term is actually "severe adverse event"). You just assert that "severe cases" and "serious side effects" can be compared 1-to-1, and then pull a statistic on "serious side effects" out of nowhere.

> Please stop denying government health data to promote your kook theories. You’re hurting people with misinformation.

The government report you cited doesn't make the claim you attribute to it. It says nothing about vaccine side-effects. You're stringing together various bits of information that you don't fully understand to make major claims, and then accusing others who don't buy it of misinformation.

Vaccine side effect rate:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332/

I’m also the only one posting data — while you keep asserting they’re beneficial with no evidence.

What you're doing is worse than providing no data. You're posting links that you claim support your argument, but which on inspection do not actually support your claim, partly because you don't understand what the statistics mean (e.g., you think that a "serious side-effect" and a "serious case" are 1-to-1 comparable, even though they're very different things; partly because you don't pay close attention to what you're posting, such as your latest study, which is about vaccine side-effects "in adults"). And then you're making broad claims (childhood vaccination reduces QALYs) based on your uninformed interpretations of the data.

This is a study specifically about safety of the mRNA vaccines in children.[0] It looked for 23 likely severe side-effects. The children covered by the study collectively received 250k doses of Biotech/Pfizer or Moderna. The side-effect rate is small enough that the study was unable to detect any increase at all in side-effects in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children.

0. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/152/1/e20230...

> count math as science

It's not. They're both offshoots of philosophy, but they're distinct from eachother.

I don't think the problem here is the actual scientists. The problem is the "I Follow The Science™" laypersons. A scientist can speak on a subject with some degree of authority, and be perfectly open to dissent if it's followed with sufficient rigor. However, their layperson followers may go on to parrot a claim made by said scientist, proclaim it to be an absolute truth, and shun anyone who might casually question it. A situation not unlike religious zealotry. In general, science is great; scientism isn't.

They're wrong an awful lot less often than the "The Science Conflicts With My Strongly Held Opinions So I Reject It" laypersons though.

I really seldom ever see them though. Like the vast overwhelming majority of people who reject what may be the broad scientific consensus these days will not outwardly claim to be rejecting "the science", they'll say they believe some alternate source who also claims to be doing "the science"

There are a whole lot of rants about "scientific establishments", "naturopaths" etc that suggest otherwise.

Whether "the science" is the correct label for broad scientific consensus is something of a moot, semantic point anyway. Either way you have a bunch of laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they trust the scientific consensus and a bunch of ignorant laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they don't agree with the scientific consensus [because someone else who may or may not be a researcher says some other thing]... but unless the evidential value of the weight of research that results in "scientific consensus" is on average worthless, the "trust the science" blind followers of scientific consensus followers have the better heuristic than the blind rejectors of scientific consensus.

I mean, sure, but literally every avenue of human endeavor endures ignorant and/or contrarian criticism. Science certainly isn't spared from this, but it generally doesn't prevent good science from getting done.

However, the premise of this thread is that scientism's blind dismissal of dissent _does_ impede the process because it turns a fluid search for truth into an ossified political position, which can, in turn, provoke actions that chill dissent.

So there's dumb dissent and smart dissent, but if there's a large contingent of scientism zealots who are indiscriminately dunking on _all_ dissenters, then that's a problem.

That does rather depend on whether the scientism zealots have any influence on the practice of science (I'm really not sure why ignorant people who agree with the mainstream consensus would be any more likely to prevent good science from being done than ignorant people who dissent from it, especially since the latter often hold political power too). And for that matter what the net impact is, given that being a dissenter is a route to outsized fame and influence as well as outsized criticism on many topics.

I mean, I don't think it was members of the public endorsing the scientific consensus that ossified the divide between mainstream medical professionals and homeopaths, or added political implications to debates on anthropogenic global warming. And whilst lots of laymen shouted at each other over whether Invermectin was a miracle cure that Big Pharma were trying to suppress or an unproven Covid remedy most loudly promoted by quacks and anti-lockdown politicos, lots of studies on its efficacy were carried out and I suspect the career implications for those developing world doctors who carried out studies on their patient base, found some benefit and continued to prescribe it even after other studies suggested it was not a cure for COVID symptoms[1] were generally very positive.

[1]it probably helps that, being scientists rather than campaigners, they might have been capable of reaching agreement with the scientific invermectin-sceptics that it quite possibly was only protecting against parasite-related comorbidities, but that still meant it made sense to prescribe to their at-risk patient group

Uhm... It depends on the scientist. I've met a more then a handful of the "it has to be this way" types. The kind who thinks that being correct and being a brute are interchangeable words. Maybe the real problem is they feel the need to be correct about the unknown? Unclear.

Good scientists are what you describe. But they seem to be becoming more rare.

Scientists or professionals?

Like I've found a lot of people thinks medical doctors are scientist. A doctor has learned the knowledge at the time they were in school. Now practices medicine, maybe keeps themselves up to date a little, but can often be very biased in their ways, because they're used to some practice and will use their anecdotal experience during their practice as truth.

You could say they are "experts" or "professionals", but they'd not be actively applying the scientific method or even keeping themselves up to date on all the relevant and related studies about a subject.

I would be a bit cautious with that statement. Sure, your local general practitioner may not be a scientist, but quite a lot of medical doctors attached to major research hospitals and medical schools are both physicians and scientists who not only treat patients but also conduct research on the efficacy of treatment and publish papers on this.

Not all scientists are equal.

For sure, most of the ones I know are pretty honest with a high degree of integrity.

But it's also not hard to see there's an increasingly lot of politics involved in "science", the further up you go in the hierarchies, not to mention among public figures.

I agree with both of you, and I think a distinction is to be made around the "genre" of the dissent.

The reason I have to pick a somewhat awkward word is because awareness to the level of discussion and labeling of this concept does not yet widely exist, so I have to invent it here.

Is the dissent something which reinforces the money, power and people of my field (which, wherever in said field I am placed, I benefit from and aspire to ascend) or is it something that undermines (or is perceived to undermine) these vital field pillars?

TL;DR - Is the genre of dissent something the field can roll with, or does it threaten (or seem to threaten) to upend it?

To paraphrase Michael Douglas, scientists are like horses: easily spooked. If something smells like bad news for the field, then...woosh (sound of scientists galloping towards stability).

The reason it appears both as if: "dude, scientists handle dissent just fine" and "[scientists have] this inability to tolerate dissent" is because in case of each, the genre of the dissent differs (for that field).

Now would be a good point to chime in with some concrete examples, but you need to be an expert to really do that, and I'm not, so I'll probably get the example that supports my thesis wrong. My example:

In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing).

In conclusion, I think scientists handle one genre of dissent (including but not limited to specific technical dissent), just fine, and in so doing are performing the normative work of their field: interrogating theories through measurements; but, I think they have an inability to handle another genre of dissent (including but not limited to field-upending dissent), which makes step-change field-evolving progress glacial slow.

Depending upon which side you come down you will likely declare: "Well, that's as it should be!" or "That's exactly the problem I'm talking about!"

Perhaps that's why scientists, like horses, need some form of management, that is--well...--"unscientific". They do the work, but "management" (comprised of non-scientists) sets the priorities. I know, I know, awful...just unspeakably awful: But unless we can "train" scientists to embrace what threatens their daily bread, the ideal of science will be chomping at the bit of the restraints of its implementation structures for the foreseeable future...

Main criticism: "but the daily bread of science is constantly interrogating through measurement field upending dissent, that's literally science!"--I agree, but science as 'it should be', not, how 'it is'.

Second criticism: "well maybe in other fields, but not in my field". Fair enough! Maybe you can teach the rest of us how you manage it so well!

"In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing)."

Yes, but in point of fact there is a lot of dissent of all sorts in this field and very little commitment among experts to the idea that our fundamental approach (QFT) doesn't require some kind of conceptual revision. Even among people proposing major revisions (strings, lqg, etc) I've never detected any powerful suggestion on the part of most scientists that their pet theory is clearly and obviously correct and should just be accepted without evidence.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter and widely felt to be inadequate explanations but major revisions in this ontology haven't manifested in the field because no one has proposed any effective ones.

It is extremely easy in hindsight to say "this theory should have been more readily accepted," but that view ignores all the incorrect revisions which a field rejected because of due diligence and a reasonable expectation that new theories require good evidence.

The discussion is about some specific area of science (epidemiology, sources of disease, ...) that inherently has social and political impact/interaction. There is no decoupling and decisions based on science there are political in nature, potentially trading off science vs social/political objectives. Typically, science cannot answer those trade offs easily (or at all sometimes).

What do you mean with subjective? Both philosophy and religion are highly social topics. And past trivial instinctive moves, you need some languages and cultural framework to achieve anything that allows transcending individual limits.

Science names a lot of heterogeneous practices which all have in common to be constraint by human interests. So they are neutral only if you define neutral with this highly sociosubjective consideration.

By subjective I mean relative, I.e. there is no real difference between different options and it’s all no more significant than whether you prefer Pepsi or Coke. This is the attitude many people hold toward the topic.

Not all that greatly favor science turn science into a political game. Likely the small majority actually do.

Anyone that treats a scientist as an authority on non-scientific questions isn't practicing science nor are they being smart.

Could you fill in the logical leap from "spiritual institutions are no longer credible" to "science is now political"? That is not an intuitive leap. There are many independent and more plausible explanations.

Also, the pretense of scientists not being good at science (i.e. cannot handle dissent) is a rocky one. Any scientist worth their salt is a person of science.

I think you can make a narrative something like this: traditional spiritual institutions lose their authority at the same time as technological-scientific ones gain in authority. Human beings are not good at following abstract ideas; they need other human beings to follow.

Hence scientists fall into the role of “wisdom-givers” previously held by village elders, religious leaders, etc. Seeing as scientists are not trained to care about “wisdom” or ethics beyond the basics, it’s a mismatch that results in the problems I mentioned.

Adding to this: the typical narrative is that scientific advances eroded spiritual authority, but many philosophers like Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) show that is a vastly oversimplified view of what happened.

> Any scientist worth their salt is a person of science.

Fun with set theory, tautologies, and rhetoric. Let's hope there are no negative repercussions!

"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."

> religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study

Innit, though? The people who whine about 'scientism' tend to be selling a religious or political ideology. They reject the need to measure things because they don't want their shit tested.

No, it isn’t, and the fact that someone could seriously suggest that the entire field of philosophy and religious studies is some kind of elaborate grift is a great example of what my original comment said.

Slow down, pardner, you're the one conflating religious studies with actual, and sometimes useful, philosophy.

What your original comment said is that people are blindly deferring to the authority of scientists, when they should instead be blindly deferring to the authority of theologians and philosophers (and presumably only those of your preferred faction).

(In the spirit of the continental philosophers, I read between the text.)

Your comment is full of false accusations and has nothing to do with what I wrote.

Where did I say they should blindly defer to philosophers and theologians? I said these subjects should be studied more. Nor did I say people currently blindly adhere to scientists.

If you’re going to argue, at least bother to read the comment carefully first.

Why is it a bad thing that science has replaced superstition?

How could one firstly measure science and superstition in such a way that this question would be answerable?

I feeling like this whole science has replaced religion is just right wing cope because science doesn't represent their feelings.

Also because people are becoming less religious, its an argument to prop up religions by saying: don't quit your current religion, all those "atheists" are just upholding different religious ideas, so they it is the same as switching to something like buddhism.

This is a non sequitur, which is ironic, given the rant.

For one, there are entire disciplines about ethics and philosophy of science.

Also, the number of scientists that have been legitimized outside their area of expertise, in the context of public discourse, is orders of magnitude lower than pretty much in any other career.

Some thoughts:

Science as it is taught, is about the conclusions that scientists have come to over the centuries, it's about how they made their observations and how smart they were. It is taught as an orthodoxy, a settled thing that you can trust. This does not reflect science as a current work product.

A related phenomenon is the math problem on social media - what is 2 + 2 * 3 (or similar). A complete answer is "Using PEMDAS, the answer is 2 + 6 = 8". But instead of giving the complete answer, which includes your assumptions, people fight about the answer. It's GREAT for engagement.

---

It's interesting to me that religion has evolved many times in many places. It must fulfil a human need. It would be a nice story to tell oneself that one has no need of a childish crutch from a bygone era. It's a much nicer story than realizing everyone needs crutches. (Not the person reading this comment, of course, you are beyond such things; Now tell me again, who is the object of your righteous anger?)

in case of cosmology Halton Arp's Seeing Red might be of interest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp

https://archive.org/details/halton-arp-seeing-red-red-shift-...

It's a little unclear to me what happened in Halton's case? Was he disregarded by his peers?

Off wikipedia: "Arp never wavered from his stand against the Big Bang, and until shortly before his death in 2013, he continued to publish articles[14][15] stating his contrary view in both popular and scientific literature, frequently collaborating with Geoffrey Burbidge (until Burbidge's death in 2010) and Margaret Burbidge.[16] He explained his reasons for believing that the Big Bang theory is wrong, citing his research into quasars or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). Instead, Arp supported the redshift quantization theory as an explanation of the redshifts of galaxies.[17]"

The thing is, policy and policymaking and the responsibility of policymakers all bring about different dimensions from pure scientific inquiry.

For example, it's probably best that we learn later that it actually was a lab leak from China. Because during a global pandemic, making China an enemy, when you're trying to all collaborate on dealing with the problem, maybe is not good policy.

Similarly, masks might be a toss up, but you make a decision on policy and you commit on the gamble.

Causing unnecessary panic also doesn't help. We saw that a lot of people kind of lost it, conspiracy theories exploded, now some of those theories might be legitimate, the scientific method could evaluate them one by one, it would take time, but in the meantime, people might act irrationally and cause more harm from a hypothesis. So maybe you try and not bring it up. As not to cause more concern that isn't productive.

And I think true censorship is terrible here, but something that's more a toning down of certain theories that are not really doing any good and causing panic, doubts, distrust, etc.

Keep the information available if someone searches for it, but maybe don't let it get promoted and fed to more people, until a more appropriate time comes, and it's now had time to develop more evidence, etc.

This whole area around policymaking is much more of an imperfect art, it's not science, it's more similar to a betting market, it makes bets, as leadership, and hopes that it leads people into the right outcome.

But I agree, there's a fine line, you also don't want to swallow alternate hypothesis that might end up proving to be the truth. It's a difficult balance to be honest.

This presumes you’re smart enough to make good policy choices absent honest debate and that you can enact policies effectively without public buy-in through authoritarian means.

Both assumptions are untrue — and we’re only beginning to see the consequences of the institutional failures. Eg, why does excess death remain high in Western Europe but not Eastern Europe? — why is only Eastern Europe showing the decline in mortality we’d normally see after a pandemic?

Policy choices — based on lies, manipulation, and force.

Policies are shaped through a democratic process where leaders, elected by all of us, make choices based on sometimes confidential info. Their powers are balanced, by a representative republic, with laws and regular check-ins. Disagree? Vote 'em out!

We assume that we elected smart officials, that will engage in honest debates, and discuss with experts first.

Some policies may not vibe with you, but others are on board. It's not all about science; decisions factor in global stuff, potential chaos, and even sanitizer-in-veins scenarios.

It's not based on lies, manipulation and force, it's based on the rules of a democratic, representative, republic.

A few points:

1. Not restricting communication is a law, that they violated repeatedly in this process.

2. Democratic process doesn’t consist purely of elections, but a continuous public debate for the purposes of reaching communal consensus and informing representatives of our collective will — and that fundamental democratic process was subverted.

3. This absolutely was done with lies (eg, Pfizer never tested for preventing transmission and public health officials outright lied), manipulation (eg, preventing scientific experts from communicating their views with the public through government censorship), and force (eg, mandates that coerced people to take experimental medical treatments in violation of the Nuremberg standards).

There have always been some people who happily cooperate with authoritarians subverting liberal society — that they did so now tells us nothing.

We’re only beginning to see the reckoning for those failures.

> This absolutely was done with lies (eg, Pfizer never tested for preventing transmission and public health officials outright lied), manipulation (eg, preventing scientific experts from communicating their views with the public through government censorship), and force (eg, mandates that coerced people to take experimental medical treatments in violation of the Nuremberg standards)

I'm willing to accept some of this if you show me proof.

Who exactly lied, where did they lie, what official source shows a lie?

What scientific expert was prevented from communicating their views by the government?

Where were any treatment experimental, that had not gone through the standard set of protocols that all treatment goes through?

1. Masks, that vaccines would prevent transmission, etc. This has been testified to in Congress.

2. Robert Malone had his views censored on social media by the government, along with other examples from the Twitter Files — which outline government requests to censor on the topic of COVID.

3. The vaccines are experimental and went through an emergency use approval — despite existing treatments like monoclonal antibodies. They didn’t have standard testing for pregnancy effects and didn’t have proper testing for boosters.

No.

That line of thinking destroyed free speech and destroyed whatever trust was left in science, medicine, governments and media.

Was it worth it for a bunch of maybes? "maybe China wouldn't have collaborated" (also, collaborate how? They didn't, they don't).

There is a reason why these freedoms are absolute and non-negotiable: Even when people think they have a good reason to violate them, they're wrong.

> and destroyed whatever trust was left in science, medicine, governments and media

If you can't distinguish between science, medicine, media and government policies, there's little we can do.

People need to have basic understanding and the ability to differentiate and not mix up and conflate everything.

If you're getting your scientific data from headlines, for-profit media outlets, opportunistic politicians, or podcasters and what not.

This isn't the same as scientific dissidents.

Do we need more political dissidents? Maybe that's the better topic here.

> There is a reason why these freedoms are absolute and non-negotiable: Even when people think they have a good reason to violate them, they're wrong

Those freedoms are actually not absolute, and are negotiable. I understand that you would want them to be absolute and are a freedom of speech absolutist. But don't claim that they are currently absolute.

So in fact, we might ask ourselves, why aren't they currently implemented in an absolute framework in any country not even the US?

Now, to be frank, I'll admit the possibility that maybe an absolute freedom of speech is better, but I also recognize certain dangers with it that might want to put a few little caveats to protect from misinformation, abuse, hatred, defamation, fear mongering, incitement of violence, etc.

And I don't know which is truly best.

My point though is that, when making policies, these concerns come into the picture, where they do not in a purely scientific framework.

Because when making policies, you also need to ask yourself:

1. Could this cause a panic

2. Could this hurt our collective effort to fight off the virus

3. Could this cause unrest that would just add to the pile of problems we already face

4. Could it just distract us and lead us towards a dead end

5. Is there a solid evidence base or data to support this

6. How might international implications or considerations affect it

And so on.

> If you can't distinguish between science, medicine, media and government policies, there's little we can do.

I surely can. And this thing you say has nothing to do with what I said, which is that they destroyed completely trust in all of those institutions.

I don't know what you're arguing for, all of those things you list happened because of the desire to ignore the actual science and common sense in favor of preferred policies.

1 They caused a panic

2 They didn't fight off the virus very well

3 There was unrest, there is still unrest, and to all those problems, add that people don't trust science, medicine, governments or media

4 The policies enacted kind of were a dead end? A waste of 2 years for little benefit?

5 There was none. No studies, no data, no previous experience.

6 It came out anyway and thanks to point 3, all the goodwill is gone.

I don't know, apply those standards to the course taken? What conclusion do you reach? That everything would be much worse otherwise?

So that's my point. The "clever" policies are going to fail anyway and now nobody trusts the people who pushed them.

It's not difficult: Don't lie. And whoever feels the need to censor people who disagree with them, well, I don't need to check if they're lying anymore.

> So that's my point. The "clever" policies are going to fail anyway and now nobody trusts the people who pushed them.

I get your point, but without any argument, rationale, or data, behind it, I don't know what to make of it. Now it just seems like your opinion.

What policies do you think failed? How do you quantify failure? What do you think would have been more successful? How can you know it would have been more successful? How do you know trust was lost because of the policies themselves, and not because of some of the opposition's agenda to push mistrust?

You say: "don't lie", ok, where did you see lies? Who did you see lying? Who censored what?

> You say: "don't lie", ok, where did you see lies? Who did you see lying? Who censored what?

The most obvious one, which you already admitted to in your original post, is the lab leak theory. They knew it was a very likely possibility, and lied. And dissenting opinions were labelled conspiracies, censored, deboosted, demonetized, the usual.

The masks are the funniest one, because it's double dumb. When they thought they worked, they told us they didn't work, and after we knew they don't do much they still mandated masks.

Or how about ivermectin being called a "horse dewormer" so that people didn't use it? If you think that's not lying or censoring because it can indeed be used to treat horses, I don't know what else to tell you.

As for policy that failed, how about the lockdowns? You may argue that it's because they didn't go far enough, like in China or New Zealand (where they also failed, as excess deaths are through the roof anyway) but it would still make it a failed policy, failure of implementation is still failure.

I'm not going to give you any sources, you can Google them on the spot as well as I can, and it seems like you need an out here.

> The most obvious one, which you already admitted to in your original post, is the lab leak theory

This goes back to my original point. Policies have to also account for geopolitical tensions.

You're at the beginning of a Pandemic, China just released the genetic material for the virus. You're hoping they collaborate with you to exchange more info about it and help fight it off. You're hoping not to hurt our trade with them, and other such things.

It could be a lab leak, it could be a natural origin.

China says it's not a lab leak, do you come out gun blazing and accuse them of hiding things and that they're responsible for COVID?

Even though, it's not like you have proof it's a lab leak either.

Or do you focus more on mitigation, containment, developing a better understanding of the virus, finding ways to fight it off. And leave actually figuring out if it was a leak or not and if there are responsible parties to later?

I know your opinion is that you'd have accused China right then and there. And maybe it would have led to better outcomes, maybe not.

My point is that this whole consideration is not part of the normal scientific inquiry, but something that policy making has to contend with.

Now for masks, I mean they know they work when using real PPEs worn properly. There was a shortage. Again, it's a policy thing. Your medical staff needs PPEs, not even just for COVID, they need them for other pre-covid diseases too.

Later, it was maybe a toss up. Individually it works, but collectively it's unclear, because it also encourages more social proximity, and how many people will wear crappy masks or wear them badly, take them off when they talk, etc.

With Ivermectin, initially, you'd get things like this:

> An adult drank an injectable ivermectin formulation intended for use in cattle in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 infection. This patient presented to a hospital with confusion, drowsiness, visual hallucinations, tachypnea, and tremors. The patient recovered after being hospitalized for nine days.

Again, from a policy point of view. When you see things like that. You might think. Ok, hold on. It's not currently approved for COVID, we're still figuring out if it works. Then we're still working the guidance for when to prescribe it for COVID, how much to use, etc. In the meantime, we don't want more of these kind of situations where people think it's a miracle cure, so maybe let's tone down the hopes around it.

I don't know if Lockdown is a failure either. With policy, again, you have to compare against alternatives, not like the outcome. Could there have been better policies that would have had better outcomes. A end COVID with zero death Policy most likely didn't exist. It clearly slowed down the spread, which gave the medical system breathing room. It clearly did something for me, since I didn't get sick at all during that time, not even a cold. Did it make everyone depressed, affected the economy, it did as well. I don't feel it's really clear if not having them would have been overall better or worse. You can have an opinion, but I doubt you have clear evidence one way or another.

Let me end with, there also likely has been some corruption, some self interest, and what not. And I think we should continue with investigations, like how Biden opened up a bunch of investigation into figuring out the origin of COVID. And we should have retrospectives on the effectiveness of the policies chosen so we're able to make better policies next time and be better prepared. It does seem there was maybe some overreach in some instances on what was being censored, maybe too broad strokes were taken.

I agree with all that. But had I been in charge of the policies, I'd have had to contend with all these considerations and also am not sure what I would have done better.

> I know your opinion is that you'd have accused China right then and there.

You don't know that.

"Don't lie" and "don't censor your own citizens calling you out on your lies" mean exactly what it says in the tin.

I didn't say "call Xi and tell him it's the lab!" I say don't force trusted institutions to lie for you, and if somebody posts a dissenting opinion on Facebook, you let them, or deal with the consequences (lack of trust in institutions for a few generations).

> I say don't force trusted institutions to lie for you

Now I'm confused what you're referring too. If we don't want to have them stir up the possibility of China having had a lab leak they're hiding, your institutions kind of have to keep quiet on that front no?

> if somebody posts a dissenting opinion on Facebook, you let them, or deal with the consequences

Has this actually been shown to have occurred without a doubt? That official government had content censored on social media? I have not seen definitive proof of this, but I'm open to the possibility, so asking if I missed something.

What I'm aware of is that some institutions did reach out to social media platforms to encourage them to limit misinformation and sometimes provided links to what they thought was misinformation or foreign interference.

But they did not compell them to take down material that I'm aware of.

That said, I do find it an interesting debate as if even asking for certain information to be taken down or limited, even if not ordered or enforced, as in, social media companies can refuse without consequences. If that we feel is too coercive, since they might feel more pressured to not refuse given it's the government asking, even if in theory they can, and we know in practice that they sometimes have.

You're playing with words to win an argument when the game is already over.

You want to claim no censorship happened because the TLAs with the monopoly on violence "only asked"? Ok. Cool. Still, after their shenanigans-which-are-for-sure-not-censorship, now fewer people trust science, medicine, government and media.

You claim it was the right decision in order to appease China? There was nothing to collaborate with them on, and if there was they didn't collaborate anyway, so no, I don't think it was the right decision even at the time.

>For example, it's probably best that we learn later that it actually was a lab leak from China

I think a lot of anti-mask people would have taken it much more seriously if they knew it was essentially a man-made bioweapon(gain of function research to make it spread more). So knowing it was a lab leak early would have helped the response quite a bit

My experience in physics was that dissidents were plentiful. It’s easier to poke holes in existing theories than it is to explain why a new theory explains all previous observations. I’m more worried about the reproducibility crisis than I am about scientific group think. Most scientists I knew, including those I disagreed with, were open minded people.

"Scientific dissident" is just another way of saying "Actual scientist".

| sed 's/scientific //g'

I believe that flat earthers are the balancing force of that lack of science dissident. Science has become a 9-to-5 job for most and they now have the wrong incentives for that pure "pursuit of Truth".

Everyone has the same incentives, their personalities and cultures give a different shade to them but the incentive of accumulating resources and self-propagation remain constant across people. No one objects to "the truth" per se, it's how we use reality or the perception of it to organize and conduct ourselves that matters to people. All this dissident stuff is giving me "what's the truth about gay genes and racial IQ differences" vibes.

on the lunatic bin that is sci.physics on usenet there one time was a cooperative effort making a list of topics (in any field) forbidden to research. I much regret not saving a copy. It was insanely long.

I want to say most of it was wrong but who am I to judge? One could say it was all wrong, it was the whole point of the exercise.

The discussion pretended everything was astrology. What is there to fear from researching the relationship between peoples personality and the position of the stars at their birth? Does it enrage you? What if they find something? Would you deny it foaming from the mouth? Based on what?

Astrology I would mostly be sad at the money and effort wasted. Also I would expect the research would be bad and claim positive results that were wrong but popular media would spread it and the world would become a little dumber. Which does have consequences, it isn't harmless.

> What is there to fear from researching the relationship between peoples personality and the position of the stars at their birth

That's not the core belief of astrology.

There very likely are correlations between personality and the season (or even month) of their birth, which for a given hemisphere will correlate strongly to stellar positions. Regular science would not be surprised to discover that (and maybe already has).

Astrology goes way beyond that, because it is fundamentally predicated on the idea that there is a causal link between stellar arrangement and personality, despite no mechanism being proposed, and despite the problem that the correlations in real life appear exceedingly weak (especially when considering northern/southern hemisphere issues.

There are volumes written on these topics (many of them a long time ago), but they bring up a lot of existential questions about - in this case in particular - free will, which quickly spreads to the more philosophical theologians and lawyers.

Scientists of the simpler sort (or who have a position to lose) tend to dismiss the implications of these big, controversial questions and put their heads down in the equations.

The only cure to these people in power suppressing free speech is by creating decentralized tools. All of these platforms have backdoors for governments to censor free speech.

They knew well ahead that this virus was spreading and did absolutely nothing to mitigate it early on. Even if this wasn't a lab leak, they still allowed it to spread by not shutting down airports early on (yet they knew where it was coming from).

People, please stop self censoring yourselves. These morons should be held accountable for the countless deaths they caused.

> The larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that.”

Totally.

I remember the madness.

The "litmus test" was very necessary because of the quantity of bullshit.

A lot of not BS got wrongly labeled, we could have done better, but there were a lot of loud voices all insisting on being heard. Many of them were outright lies. Many

As a scientist, this is such a dumb take. The incentive structures in science encourage novelty, and there's no shortage of scientists who would love to see their career take off.

Unfortunately, reality does not make the greatest dissident.

Like everyone else, scientists are so convinced of what they know that they won't listen to other opinions.

The problem is that scientists think their knowledge is truth because it comes from "the scientific method." They fail to internalize that the whole point of that method is that no knowledge is sacred and everything should be doubted to the degree at which evidence exists to the contrary.

A crackpot conspiracy theory with a single anecdotal source of data is sufficient to create doubt in the soundest of theories. Just not much.

When someone who refers to their monitor as "the CPU", and can't tell the difference between a programming language and an operating system, starts telling you how you should be doing your job because you've got it all wrong...

How much do you listen to their opinion?

(Unless of course that matches your manager to a T).

You smile and say, "I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason."

I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason.

Edit: oops, wait! I forgot to smile.

Good, keep doing what I do - that's what I want to hear.

Now that, at least, is probably true. Pathetic, but true.

Exactly. In the words of Mike Stonebraker, "stake out a controversial claim and prove it true" is pretty standard career advice for junior faculty who are trying to get tenure. (At least in Computer Science.)

Isn't the whole idea of the scientific method is that you don't prove things true? You just test things enough until you are not able to prove it false?

The specific example (computer science) coincidentally does allow for proofs, because it is mostly math, but I think they actually are just using the word prove informally here.

The incentives of science are often orthogonal to making a career in science.

> At least in Computer Science

Computer Science rarely intersects with politics.

If a scientist's novel claim (however well proven) offends a powerful group, their career is over.

Not if it's got strong evidence - there is still no strongevidence for the lab leak so it's a moot point.

Do you have something with strong evidence that ruined someones career in the last 50 years?

Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard in part for mentioning the greater male variability hypothesis. James Damore was forced out of Google for similar reasons.

This despite fairly strong evidence for that hypothesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis#Modern_...

Both made the mistake of citing research that contradicts diversity initiatives.

"Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he offered three reasons for the under-representation of women in science and engineering, including the possibility that there exists a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", in addition to patterns of discrimination and socialization.[8]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

I think we're quite far from "strong evidence" anyway if you want to argue that there's "less aptitude at the high end" of either gender.

I'm more thinking of something falsifiable maybe? You know, strong evidence?

Ps: He's still employed by Harvard, I'm not seeing a ruined career here.

Edit: "The company fired Damore for violation of the company's code of conduct.[2] Damore filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, but later withdrew this complaint. A lawyer with the NLRB wrote that his firing was proper.[3][4][5][6] After withdrawing this complaint, Damore filed a class action lawsuit, retaining the services of attorney Harmeet Dhillon,[7][8] alleging that Google was discriminating against conservatives, whites, Asians, and men.[9][10] Damore withdrew his claims in the lawsuit to pursue arbitration against Google.[11]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_...

This guy is not a scientist and was fired by a private company for his conduct - has nothing to do with the subject.

> A 2021 review investigating different hypotheses behind the discrepancy of sexes in STEM jobs summarizes the greater variability research with respect to this question. Given that research finds greater variability in males with in quantitative and nonverbal reasoning,[32] they hold that this can explain some, but not all of the difference seen in STEM occupations.[33] With regard to the question of whether these results are due to societal influences or of biological origins, they hold that the results showing greater variance at a very young age (for instance IQ differences in variability between the sexes is visible from a young age on [34]) lend credence to the theory that biological factors might explain a large part of the observed data.

It's certainly falsifiable. Research could have shown no evidence of the variability. That didn't happen.

What are you looking for? Evidence as strong as the evidence in physics? No one gets that in the social sciences.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5141512/

IQ tests are not reliable when not heavily weighted on the culture of the person taking them (and even then - the same people taking the same tests get different results). Translating a test induces a bias. Even in the same language, cultural differences can make questions more or less difficult to understand.

The simple fact of being in a "test" environnement is something that will be more comfortable to some than others - based on background.

Meaning if you even believe IQ tests are somewhat valid on an individual basis, it's ludicrous to draw conclusions on comparisons between groups; they have to take the same test to be comparable, but giving the same test to groups of different backgrounds will yield different results, because tests aren't weighted.

That's all separate from the current replication crisis in psychology and the fact that intelligence is not even a clearly defined trait (thus we cant test for it).

So yeah no - no strong evidence in sight.

You're looking for a level of evidence that doesn't exist in any social science.

So I suppose I have to concede your original claim (now that we've narrowed it down): if someone somehow established a level of evidence that revolutionized social science and rendered all previous work meaningless, then they probably could get away with offending powerful groups.

Until then, scientists are wise to tread carefully.

Hence why there is a replication crisis.

There are many claims can be proven that aren't social science, you're the one unable to show an example of a scientist that had solid evidence of something and ruined their career and artififially confining it IQ - one of the most contentious subjects you can look for. I'm sure there are falsifiable claims in social sciences too.

Maybe look into something like medecine or physics? Something falsifiable, following the sientific method.

> Hence why there is a replication crisis.

Also, perhaps, why politicians and activists have so much influence on science.

Which doesn't contradict what I said at all, but confirms it: they do have that influence.

Requesting "strong evidence" isn't much of a solution unless you have some concrete ideas about how to obtain that.

> There are many claims can be proven that aren't social science ... Maybe look into something like medecine or physics

Social science is the field where politics trumps science. It's what I'm talking about.

Politicians and activists don't care about physics and everyone wants people to have effective medicine, so there's no conflict in those fields.

I disagree - feel free to try and find an example of your claim

I've already cited examples. You dismissed them because they don't fit your arbitrary narrow criteria.

Want another? Stephen Hsu. Forced to resign for discussing research that found no racial bias in incidents of officer-involved shootings.

Another? After more than a decade at Harvard without complaints, Roland Fryer had several complaints filed against him shortly after he published research showing that Black and Hispanic Americans were no more likely than white Americans to be shot by police in a given interaction with police.

I'm sure you'll find reasons to dismiss these as well.

Edit: As I said, Roland Fryer was at Harvard for more than a decade without incident. It's more than a little suspicious that there was an investigation immediately after he published his research.

And are you just going to ignore Stephen Hsu?

Edit 2: "I gladly will not research your claims further"

I knew you wouldn't in the first place. You've been dismissing any evidence that contradicts your narrow world view.

Edit 3: "Feel free to eat bags friend". I see you've deleted that and all your other unreasonable comments. I'll leave the quotes here though, because you did say these things.

Edit 4: "why keep editing your comment?" Because HN admins don't like long threads like this and have set up a rule that says I'm "posting too fast".

Good point. Although this is changing now with AI and whatnot.

There's some nuance here. Research dollars get allocated in interesting ways that often reinforce the most mainstream approaches.

And once some start down an approach (and become invested in it) there can be various kinds of resistance to going a different path.

In fields that have social or political implications there are also strong forces pushing, as well.

I'm not saying these effects are always overriding the desire for novelty in all cases, but it certainly happens.

> The incentive structures in science encourage novelty

I would modify this statement somewhat.

The incentive structure in science today encourages following the money. Very little research these days is done just for the sake of research or discovery. Science is expensive, and scientists who want to have a job, like it or not, have to fish to where the fish are swimming (where the money is being spent), which typically means delivering the narrative sought by those who control the money.

The most salient examples of this today are saving the planet and electric everything (cars, trucks, planes, water heaters, stoves, etc.) --which are usually connected. The first of which is ridiculous beyond description and the latter is so unimaginably far from being attainable it might as well be labelled a fantasy. Yet, these narratives are pushed because they have political power through emotion that results in votes (you can divide people) and the only money being spent in research is in support of these narratives --not research, confirmation propaganda.

> The first of which is ridiculous beyond description

What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”?

> What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”?

A few things.

First, the planet will be just fine. It has endured much worse than any of the imaginary scenarios being tossed about these days.

Second. It is nothing less than hubris to think we can actually control something at a planetary scale. We are far more likely to kill everything in sight than to save the planet. The whole thing is laughable.

And, BTW, this isn't my opinion, this is a scientific fact that a 15 year old with basic math skills can confirm inside five minutes. Since there's no financial or political power in saying "we are sorry, this is all nonsense" the money keeps flowing in that direction.

Find just a single non-trivial funded program trying to refute the current narratives. You can't. Nobody wants to fund that research. No scientist wants to talk about it that angle because, in todays context, it would end their career instantly. People are making way too much money in an "Emperor has no clothes" utopia relentlessly promoted by industry, government and the media.

Here's a reality check:

Anyone who thinks we can control matters of planetary scale, kindly show how we immediately controlled and stopped the effects of the massive fires in Canada, the fires in Maui, etc.

I mean, seriously, can we have some intellectual honesty around this topic?

Just looking at the Canadian fires [0]. Just this year, over 132,000 square kilometers burned. These fires have already released the equivalent of a full year or Indonesia [1] burning fossil fuels (a country with nearly 300 million people).

And how about these fires [2][3][4]?

Let's show how we can control these events and then, maybe then, we can speak of regional control. Global control is a fantasy.

I mean, they are doing things like throwing billions of dollars at giant air sucking filtering machines. We have gone completely insane.

More?

OK.

Look out this chart:

https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/styles/original/p...

Now, let's magically erase China and USA from the planet. We have Star Trek beam everything on these lands into space, never to be seen on earth again. That removes 44% of CO2 emissions. That isn't even close to being enough. That isn't enough to STOP CO2 accumulation, much less REVERSE it.

If CO2 emissions went to absolute ZERO tomorrow, it would take somewhere between 50K and 100K years for atmospheric CO2 accumulation to come down by 100 ppm (this is a scientifically known fact). That's how ridiculous the "save the planet" narrative has become. It is so far away from attainable reality that anyone pushing it should be laughed off the stage.

I mean, removing all of humanity from the planet means 100K years for a 100ppm drop. And we are talking about fixing it in 50, 100 or 200 years...with electric cars and water heaters? Have we gone mad?

[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/here-s-a-look-at-what-s-happen...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/03/johnny-haglund-the-earth-is-on...

[3] https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years...

[4] https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/places-that-are-always-on...

>trying to refute the current narratives

That is not how it works. You don't try to do one thing or the other unless you're crooked. You are supposed to try to research it.

Not sure what you mean.

If all research is funded to support the idea that 1 + 1 = 4, where funding, profit and political power are centered around this being found to be true, you are not engaging in research at all. When powerful forces can --and will-- take you from being a funded researcher to being an Uber driver or stacking boxes at the hardware store, well, lots of people will find ways to find justification for 1 + 1 being equal to 4.

This happens in other domains as well. A pyramid sales scheme is one where early participants are aligned with the fraud because they need to both recover their investment and continue making money. My point is: People, under various types of pressures, will do such things.

When it comes to the range of matters generally wrapped around the "if we don't save the planet" fear mongering machinery, 100% of research funding is focused on promoting "1 + 1 = 4" ideas. Again, any researcher sticking their neck too far away from "The answer is 4" knows full-well they will suffer career/professional decapitation. You cannot say "Wait a minute, this stuff isn't right. We are nowhere near 4!". Well, you can. And then you are done.

This is conclusions-by-fear, science-by-fear, financial coercion, etc. Pick a name. They all apply in one sense or another.

Nearly everything being pushed today under the "save the planet" banner are lies. And the things we are being made to do and are planning to do under this manufactured narrative are between futile and down-right dangerous on many fronts.

The problem with the idea of scientific dissidents is that it isn't any different from someone going against a brutal totalitarian regime: Nobody speaks up because they know their life will be over when they do. The relative cost of speaking-up, when compared to praising the invisible clothes, is tremendously high. If you praise the emperor for the invisible clothes you get to keep your head and live whatever life you might be able to live.

That's the problem.

Doing science today means expanding on the known body of published work, and progress involves either (a) doing novel work or (b) overturning established work - which is why scientific debates are often contentious. For example, there was one a theory that tidal cycles controlled the climate but technical discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s pointed towards infrared-absorbing gases (mainly CO2) being the main factor, and plate tectonics came along and overturned the orogenic consensus.

It is true that some fields of science have large budgetary demands, like high-energy particle physics, relative to things like cold condensed matter physics, but climate science is hardly a budget-breaker, and much of the data is just archived weather data.

It's been an issue in some fields though - renewable energy development in the USA is lagging far behind China because China invested a lot of money in R & D in the sector, resulting in engineering victories like mastering monocrystalline silicon ingot production at scale.

Also, there are dozens of practical studies pointing to the ability to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix while maintaining and expanding overall energy production on a global basis.

> It's been an issue in some fields though - renewable energy development in the USA is lagging far behind China because China invested a lot of money in R & D in the sector, resulting in engineering victories like mastering monocrystalline silicon ingot production at scale.

The US is so busy with two political parties trying to destroy each other that we can't even build a train. And we are going to save the planet? Have we gone insane?

> Also, there are dozens of practical studies pointing to the ability to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix while maintaining and expanding overall energy production on a global basis.

Reducing and, on a very long time scale, eliminating fossil fuel usage is a worthy objective. Nothing wrong with that. However, pretending that this is going to save the planet is just fantasy. It isn't. Not even close. We can't control things at a planetary scale (other than make things worse).

Destroying an economy in support of something that is, at best, laughable, isn't good for anyone other than those using it to make money and gain power.

I don't think we could build a train regardless. And the CA HSR program was idiotic from the start, based on basically fraudulent premises of potential ridership.

> I don't think we could build a train regardless. And the CA HSR program was idiotic from the start, based on basically fraudulent premises of potential ridership.

Absolutely true on both points. The math supporting the justification for this train is a complete falsehood. Something that lends further support to what I was saying in my other comment about researchers not daring go outside the politically and economically favored narratives. Imagine someone daring to prove the CA high speed train was stupid beyond any doubt. Their professional life would be over instantly. And for what?

The point I was trying to make is that we actually have people talking about saving the planet in a few decades --a planetary scale problem-- when we can't build a train and we can't even control fires.

Have we actually gone insane or are people so numb to this stuff that they just checkbox everything and let it happen?

Maybe it is a matter of education. When a large number of the population needs an app to calculate tip at the restaurant, how could they possibly be equipped to critically evaluate anything? An uneducated population is far easier to control than one with real critical thinking chops.

If the planet actually needs saving, then inability to do so isn't any sort of comfort.

There are actually plenty of examples of environmental protection that were smashing successes, so I don't see why pessimism is warranted. The Clean Air Act returned value some 40 times its cost. The Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances was a huge win. SOx control in the US came in a factor of 6 cheaper than had been warned.

This is very different. I am not being a pessimist at all. Just being brutally realistic.

People are talking about "saving the planet" (in quotes because I think it is a ridiculous statement) in 20, 50 or 100 years.

If humanity ceased to exist on this planet. If we all evaporated tomorrow, it would take 100K years for a 100ppm drop in CO2 levels.

How the hell is installing solar panels or driving electric cars going to make that happen a THOUSAND times faster.

It's like claiming we can safely stop a semi truck in 0.5 feet (roughly the width of your hand) from 65 miles per hour (normal braking distance from that speed is about 500 feet) without killing everything in it, in close proximity, causing massive destruction and using unimaginable amounts of power and energy.

In other words, nice sci-fi fantasy, and that's all it is. Can't be done.

I know of one paper that set out to prove renewables could solve the problem. The researchers were stunned to learn they were wrong. I commend them for printing their conclusion. To paraphrase, they said something like this: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewable energy world wide, forms that have yet to be invented, the best of solar, wind and more, not only is atmospheric CO2 concentration not going to decrease, it will continue to grow.

If you look at a chart of the annual contributions of CO2 by country it is easy to see how this works. I posted a link in a prior comment. You could erase the entire US and China from this planet and atmospheric CO2 concentration will not drop any faster than 100ppm in 100K years. That's reality.

The incentive structures in science encourage publishing, not novelty, and the ones who are best at bringing fame to their institution (and thus grant money) are not the scientists early in their career.

Yes, science's incentives encourage novelty. That's actually part of the problem. It's how we got climate change denialism funded by Exxon, decades of bunk nutritional advice funded by competing food companies, Koreans faking human cloning, and Andrew Wakefield falsifying evidence of vaccines causing autism by giving small children colonoscopies.

The problem is that science is actually not that great at sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Better than chance, and better than science denialism, but not anywhere close to perfect. Many of the participants in the scientific process are malicious and they have sybils to obscure their identity and ballot-stuff meta-analyses. And scientists are not always willing to call out malicious evidence right away, because this is a community that runs on trust and understanding. So if anything, we have too many fake dissidents perfectly willing to make the entire scientific community chase their own tails.

Furthermore, the entire scientific establishment has an incentive to refute COVID-19 explanations that imply their research is socially harmful[0]. If COVID-19 is a lab leak then the explanation is simple and the preventative fix is a permanent ban on certain kinds of virology research. Nobody in the scientific community wants a repeat of George Bush's stem cell research ban.

But, if COVID-19 came from wet markets, then there's loads of research you can do there. You can sample viruses from sick animals to find precursor mutations for the original COVID-19 strain. You can hypothesize about mutation rates and evolutionary pressures.

Wet markets are novel. Lab leaks are boring - and a threat. And as always, more research is needed.

[0] I don't quite buy the idea that some have that China is deliberately trying to cover up the lab leak hypothesis because it makes China look bad. China looks bad regardless of where the virus came from. If it came from the wet markets, then China needs to shut them down. If it came from the WIV, then China needs to ban gain-of-function research. Either way it's China's fault.

This is a very simplistic statement that doesn't acknowledge the realities of how research funds are distributed in both government-funded and privately-funded research programs, or the other kinds of pressures that can be brought to bear by interested parties with deep pockets and political influence.

For example, research into novel uses of out-of-patent drugs is not incentivized in American academics because universities are eager to license new, patentable drugs to pharmaceutical corporations and thus earn a percentage of the profits from their sale, and this is reflected in NIH grant disbursements.

Similarly, DOE funds for renewable energy research have been miniscule for decades, resulting in few American universities having anything like a robust well-funded renewable energy R & D program - and that is due to pressures applied by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby. Scientists have to follow the funding, and only if such funding is available is novelty - in that specific area - rewarded by the incentive structure.

Additionally, as the article notes (emphasis added): > "Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view."

The most notable 20th century example is probably the plant breeding program controlled by Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, and while it may be normal to suppose 'that could never happen in the open American academic system', there have been some examples of this kind of thing, although people will also make false accusations of this happening as part of their effort to discredit reliable science.

For example, the basic science of CO2 and climate was established by 1980, and since then it's just been a question of fine-tuning estimates of the magnitude of the CO2 effect, but there was a multi-million dollar effort funded by fossil fuel interests for decades to overturn that concensus. In contrast, while there was an effort in the 1980s to claim that HIV (the virus) was not the cause of AIDS (the disease), that never got much traction against the broad consensus that the cause had been discovered.

The Covid origin case is a bit murkier; at first it was natural to assume that the virus had a zoonotic origin, based on previous events, but it does look like leading academics in the US in the virology field came to a deliberately false and misleading consensus on the zoonotic origin story early on for what are pretty clearly political reasons - even though they knew there was at least as much evidence in favor of the engineered lab origin theory. Now, if things were as bad in American academics as they were in Soviet Russia, proponents of the lab leak origin would all be sitting in a Siberian gulag, so I guess it's not as bad as all that.

Science does remain the only real tool we have to coming to a factual understanding of our physical world, but it's also subject to manipulation by government and private entities. Informed skepticism is required when it comes to interpreting and understanding scientific claims - faith and trust are not that advisable.

Some notable scientists like Freeman Dyson stand in contrast to your statement. He wrote an entire book around the concept -- which is by the way an excellent read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scientist_as_Rebel

I've followed the covid lab leak origins saga a bit and the incentive structures definitely do not encourage most scientists to speak out there. They'd probably be shunned and lose funding. One of the only scientist who is outspoken is Richard Ebright and he can get away with it because he has tenure and is high up in his hierarchy but most would have problems.

> The incentive structures in science encourage novelty

Former academic here. This may be superficially true, but it's always been "novelty within the established orthodoxy". Kuhn documents this quite well, but it's become even more true since the funding motivated push for peer review that started in the 1970s.

Academic publishing today strongly demands conformity for survival. Geoffrey Hinton has a great quote, that I can't seem to dig up, about having any truly ground breaking work dismissed by juniors who have no idea what you're talking about being a major problem in moving science forward.

The bigger issue is that we have very little space for actual dissidenters. For example there is lots to legitimately question about mainstream medicine, but it's hard to walk too far down that path without immediately getting thrown in with "vaccines cause autism!!!".

You're completely ignoring Thomas Kuhn's points.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Science today rewards novelty within the mainstream paradigm, but does not reward dissent.

Novelty != dissent!

Yes, incremental novelty of the sort where you go somewhat further down an apriori promising path and show some somewhat stronger results than the previous paper.

But I don't think any community ever has truly rewarded dissent. It's just that sometimes a truly valuable idea will push through in spite of the resistance to it. Case in point - around 2014 I knew CS/AI/ML profs who were very dismissive regarding deep learning and thought it to be a dead end and basically missed the boat and took them very long to get up to speed again. A few years before that, and it was difficult to get papers published that used neural nets. Everyone knew that the modern way was the theoretically well-founded kernel methods and similar techniques.

----

There's no overarching one thing called science. There have been over the last 150 years a few towering results that propelled our understanding of the universe and our technological capabilities forward immensely, on whose wind we are coasting today -- but many of them came before the current professionalized, job-ified massive system we know as "academia" today. Without peer review, in informal letters between gentlemen scientists persistently pursuing topics for their leisure, often with extreme concepts of "work-life-balance". We have no idea what exactly brought about those successes, and so we are building a cargo cult, somehow imitating it, LARPing it. Thousands of papers, salami-slice publishing, citation metric-chasing, quantification and metrification, incentives to hop from place to place, endless grant writing and documentation/administration. This is a very specific system that was mostly created and solidified over the last 50 years. It should not be equated with science itself, which was already a very productive endeavor hundreds of years ago, while being intimately intertwined with mysicism, alchemy, esoteria and theology. This particular utilitarian paper factory of today isn't equal to "science", even if it has taken over the buildings.

Do you mean ideally? Because obviously modern science and academia is mostly steered by external interests and public opinion. I know many scientists who entertain research projects from companies only because they're fully paid for, meanwhile they struggle with funding and publishing projects they want to do because there's so few opportunities available for funding. To then conclude that companies or government entities may want to do certain research according to what best serves them is not too hard of a stretch to make. It's happened numerous times before, especially within climate science, medicine, and tobacco.

I'm not saying one should distrust science, especially papers published by reputable sources, done by reputable labs, or otherwise have good methods and sensible conclusions. But that's the problem, right? One has to contend with what's "sensible". If someone published a paper tomorrow actually showing a strong causal effect between consuming fluoridated water and the calcification of the pineal gland, not only would it be seen by no one except weird fringe communities, but the scientists involved would be ridiculed. The area has been politicized, and in that case it's hard to see how it couldn't be, it's a ridiculous idea, but it does make a clear example of this politicization if you understand the context. Something similar happened with the origins of SARS-CoV-2, where the assumption is (from my personal experience) that only certain political machinations could convince someone to come to conclusions that SARS-CoV-2 origin could be a lab leak. Now maybe this isn't the case anymore. I haven't thought about this in like... a year, nor looked at public discourse for about that long either. But regardless I feel like public opinion is still largely the same, and judging by the article, the politicization of the topic is still in full swing. Thus, we're not only dealing with reality, but a manufactured reality as well.

Please explain the historic research priorities in Alzheimer's research and how they square with "encouraging novelty".

For extra credit, provide a brief synopsis of the history of stomach ulcer research and treatment.

It seems quite obvious that this novelty maximizing can be strongly curtailed by political and profit-seeking power, through various incentives and punishments that are then deeply internalized by scientists. Look at how fossil fuel industry scientists long knew about climate change and lead poisoning, or pick a range of examples from pharmaceutical or nutrition sciences. This is by no means unique to science (the influence is arguably much stronger in other domains like journalism) but there is no sense in arguing science operates on an orthogonal plane to power.

My critique of the piece is that half its length is devoted to dissent that turned out to be significantly incorrect or explicitly political or of very weak rigor, that seemingly had no censorship. The other half details some meaningful and concerning censorship and conspiracy to preemptively absolve players like Daszak, etc., and I think that's where the focus should lie, as we have not learned the appropriate lessons.

The idea isn’t unreasonable, but your idea of a scientific dissident is probably not mine. In this very comment section we have folks promoting literally any disagreement as valid dissent, up to and including social media DIY researchers, as a valuable voice in this space. I disagree with the bar for validity not only being lowered but removed entirely.

What do you mean by "valid"?

What kind of answer are you expecting? Your low effort comment deserves what it gets.

If I knew what answer to expect, I wouldn't have asked the question. I genuinely don't know what you want to communicate with that word.

I'm not sure that a serious discussion of this topic is even possible, but I will attempt it: isn't the consensus still that the virus has a zoonotic origin? That is mostly a rhetorical question, because unless I have missed something, it is. Why do so many folks want to pretend that this has been proven incorrect?

Perhaps I have a selective memory but I seem to remember that most of the pushback against the lab origin theory from people like Fauci was primarily intended to combat racial and ethnic tensions that were growing at the time. Especially when it came to the notion that the virus was purposely released.

I do not recall any reputable scientist completely discounting the lab origin theory; the public statements merely reflected the consensus at the time, which still seems to mostly be the consensus today. So what exactly is the problem here?

For those interested they found SARS in a bat cave (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 )but it took five years of hunting. Something similar will probably happen with Covid here in the future.

Like 9/11 conspiracies, it’s more comforting to think someone is in charge and in control when terrible things happen then that terrible things can happen from random and weak sources.

A lab leak would mean there was a lack of proper control.

A historic first.... or wait..

They're extremely common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

And keep in mind these are only the ones we know about.

You've misunderstood the article that you linked. Scientists found SARS-1 in civet cats and raccoon dogs within about a year of the first human outbreaks. We believe these are the animals that first transmitted SARS-1 to humans.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5241a2.htm

Much later, Dr. Zhengli Shi found viruses related to SARS-1 in bats. These bat viruses are more distant genetically from the human samples than the civet and racoon dog viruses were; but they're significant because of the prevalence and diversity of such viruses. This suggests that SARS-1 evolved mostly in bats (the reservoir hosts), then spilled to civets and racoon dogs (the proximal hosts) and evolved a little more, then spilled to humans.

SARS-CoV-2 is close enough genetically to SARS-1 that we knew immediately that the reservoir host was bats. The proximal host still hasn't been found, despite the much greater effort to search. This doesn't mean SARS-CoV-2 is necessarily unnatural, since the exact zoonotic transmission path is still unknown for other viruses that are certainly of natural origin (e.g. Ebola). It's different from both SARS-1 and MERS, though.

Exactly. The worry was that it would provide justification for violence against specific groups which is why it wasn't publicly entertained as a theory even if privately it was. Planting the seed of that thought in an armed populace already on edge is a recipe for disaster.

Was there ever evidence, or was it just something people were saying?

I remember that there was violence against asian-americans during the first two years of the C-19 pandemic. I could be wrong, but I remember that the violence was directed at them largely because of a right-wing conspiracy theory that the Chinese had purposly leaked the virus as a form of economic warfare.

that narrative was literally made up to get revenge on Trump for saying China virus

i kneel before your noble lies, my philosopher king

Covid death maps need to be corrected for population age and underlying health conditions such as metabolic syndrome or obesity.

If 90% of people agree to a position to appease a few people in power, then it's not really consensus, it's coercion. The topic of COVID's origin is so politically charged, that many people can't state their opinion (or even their facts!) without upsetting someone in charge. That someone may not even be in their own country.

As a random example, Australia was hit with punitive tariffs on tens of billions of dollars of exports to China for merely suggesting that it might be an idea to investigate the origins of COVID.

Similarly, there has been a whole lot of silence coming from the Chinese scientific community. The zoonitic origin theory is the position of the Chinese government, and hence, essentially by law, it is also the position of the scientific community.

The Chinese government doesn't have to bother with such trifles as evidence, facts, or even putting on the pretence of an investigation. They ruled, the matter is closed, there is now consensus.

If you want to know what real power looks like, look no further than this. We'll now never know where COVID came from definitively, and scientists in other countries are keeping their opinions to themselves, or risking their careers to speak up.

Please take a look at this analysis if you can.

https://youtu.be/hhMAt3BluAU

> The topic of COVID's origin is so politically charged, that many people can't state their opinion (or even their facts!) without upsetting someone in charge.

Except that it is stated, it is discussed, and it has been all along.

You want everyone who states any opinion to get a nice silk bag with some lovely gifts in it? Sorry, doesn't work that way.

Nothing has stopped lab-leak theorists from publically stating their case, both in general media and in scientific contexts. Some people are upset about that, because they consider their case to be bullshit, or at best just very unlikely to be correct.

It's not a 3 year old's birthday party. These are substantive questions, and the disagreements are going to hit hard. If you want kumbaya science, stay away from anything that involves (a) differences of interpretation and (b) real world implications.

> Nothing has stopped lab-leak theorists from publically stating their case, both in general media and in scientific contexts.

The “misinformation” policies of major social media companies did exactly that.

So how is that a majority of Americans believe the lab-leak theory?

>If 90% of people agree to a position to appease a few people in power, then it's not really consensus, it's coercion.

It's a pretty big assumption to assume that's the reason why scientists outside of China believe in a zoonotic origin, rather than it simply being the case that the weight of available evidence leans in favor of a zoonotic origin. That evidence includes the fact that the earliest confirmed cases clustered around the seafood market, and that there were two separate lineages of the virus found in humans, suggesting multiple zoonotic spillover events. We will never know with 100% certainty what really happened. The scientists working on this have always acknowledged that uncertainty and have never said the probability of a lab leak was zero. I just think the reality is a lot more boring than you're making it out to be.

> and that there were two separate lineages of the virus found in humans

The "two lineages" are two mutations (SNPs) apart, and SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transmission. So intuitively, it would seem near-impossible to distinguish two spillovers from a mutation during early, unsampled human spread. Pekar et al. built a complicated numerical model that purports to; but it's filled with arbitrary parameter choices, and no model of that form has ever demonstrated significant predictive value. See the criticisms at

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1

https://nitter.net/nizzaneela/status/1677583662836056065#m

> The scientists working on this have always acknowledged that uncertainty and have never said the probability of a lab leak was zero.

I've linked here to a Lancet correspondence where top scientists "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin". I guess that's not quite the same thing as "probability zero"; but isn't it even worse?

Sure, scientists can continue to debate the fine points of these issues. The evidence doesn't hinge on the two lineages argument. The following review paper lists a bunch of other reasons why a zoonotic spillover is more likely including genomic structure, similarity to other endemic coronaviruses which had zoonotic origins, epidemiological evidence surrounding the seafood market, etc.

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf

Notice that the review seriously considers the possibility of a lab leak, indicating that this wasn't some off-limits topic even back in 2021.

The Lancet letter cites evidence of a natural origin and condemns conspiracy theories. I think that's still largely consistent with the current consensus. Since none of the known samples at the WIV were related to SARS-CoV-2, by definition the truth of the lab leak hypothesis would imply a conspiracy and coverup. I don't think "strongly condemning" something is the same as suppressing public debate about it.

That article has biased interpretations of the data. It discounts circumstantial evidence of a lab origin, while foregrounding circumstantial evidence of zoonotic origin.

Neither theory has direct evidence. Nobody has found covid at WIV, and nobody found an animal reservoir that could prove zoonotic origin. All we have are two pieces of circumstantial evidence:

(1) Lab origin: Covid was discovered close to the WIV, while it was researching gain-of-function on coronaviruses.

(2) Zoonotic origin: Covid was discovered in a wet market, where past coronaviruses have been known to evolve and leap to humans.

Yet, that article completely discounts (1) as evidence, while calling the evidence of it occurring near WIV "a coincidence":

> There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin. There is no evidence that any early cases had any connection to the WIV, in contrast to the clear epidemiological links to animal markets in Wuhan, nor evidence that the WIV possessed or worked on a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic. The suspicion that SARS-CoV-2 might have a laboratory origin stems from the coincidence that it was first detected in a city that houses a major virological laboratory that studies coronaviruses

That is a biased interpretation.

Then it goes on to say that (2) does count as evidence, even though there's no reservoir animal that could make the direct connection:

> We contend that although the animal reservoir for SARS-CoV2 has not been identified and the key species may not have been tested, in contrast to other scenarios there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin.

Certainly, if you discount all the evidence coming from your opposition, and foreground all the evidence that agrees with you, it's going to look like your side is right.

It's not circumstantial evidence in the case of the market, there is direct evidence. You're ignoring the fact that contact tracing of early cases pointed to employees of the market and people who visited the market, and that SARS-CoV-2 was found in environmental samples from the market. On the other hand, there is no contact tracing and no biological sample that leads to the WIV or its employees.

There's no question that the market was a major cluster, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily the point of introduction. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced to other continents at airports or seaports, but that's not where the first major clusters were found there.

SARS-CoV-2 has relatively low IFR, and symptoms easily confused with other respiratory illnesses. This means that even with advance warning and good surveillance, many generations of cryptic spread are possible before someone gets sick enough to get tested. I've seen many fine-grained geographic arguments, both for and against unnatural origin, but would generally consider them to be noise given that early under-ascertainment.

As to the environmental samples, virus was definitely present in the market, since infected humans were present. A few samples with raccoon dog DNA were found with a few SARS-CoV-2 reads; but almost all the SARS-CoV-2 in that market must have come from infected humans, and there's no evidence those reads didn't too. The correlation between SARS-CoV-2 presence and raccoon dog presence is negative, and that correlation is most positive for non-susceptible animal species; so I again think that's noise. This is from Jesse Bloom's analysis at

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v1

That's direct evidence that covid was in the market, but only circumstantial evidence for where it originated.

The market was both (1) close to the lab and (2) a place where nature contacts humans.

The lab origin theory says it originated in the lab, and then an infected WIV employee came to the market for lunch or dinner and created a super-spreader.

The zoonotic theory says an animal brought it or a precursor to the market, where it possibly mutated and jumped to humans.

The existence of covid in the market provides circumstantial evidence for both theories.

> (1) Lab origin: Covid was discovered close to the WIV, while it was researching gain-of-function on coronaviruses.

COVID-19 was discovered by Chinese scientists because they were studying this virus and were familiar with it, whereas in other countries, this virus was overlooked as a complication of a common cold. Research on virus strains shows that the COVID-19 epidemic began 2-3 months before the epidemic in Wuhan. Therefore, the evidence for the virus's laboratory origin should look like this:

(1) The virus's high adaptability for human transmission indirectly indicates human intervention in its evolution.

(1) Studies indicate that the global spread of the virus started from the World Military Games in Wuhan, indirectly pointing to the involvement of the military or a military laboratory.

(1) Research shows that the virus's spread began two to three months before the start of the epidemic in Wuhan, indirectly suggesting the involvement of the Russian «Vector» laboratory in Novosibirsk, which experienced a serious security incident (explosion and military incursion) during this period.

(2) Zoonotic origin: Covid was discovered in a wet market, where past coronaviruses have been known to evolve and leap to humans.

None of this makes much sense. SARS-CoV-2 was discovered in Wuhan when local doctors noticed the unusual volume of sick and dying patients. The WIV's specialized knowledge wasn't necessary for that. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first published not by the WIV but by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052966/chin...

There's no evidence that the Vector Institute in Novosibirsk had any role in this. SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, and the WIV had the world's biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses sampled from nature, plus an unfunded proposal (DEFUSE) to engineer in a furin cleavage site. The Vector Institute had no significant coronavirology work.

«Vector» is the largest depository of viruses in the world. Of course, «Vector» has SARS CoV in their depository. Nobody knows what they did with it. However, «Vector» was first in Russia which started to perform testing for SARS-CoV-2, so they had experience with some variant of that virus. Moreover, «Vector» started to develop 2 vaccines for Covid-19 almost immediately.

There was epidemic in Russia in November-December 2019 with up to 700 cases per week of pneumonia in some regions (thousands of cases in whole Russia), which is at Covid level.

Quote 1tv.ru, Nov 19 2019:

> Weekly, around 300 cases are recorded in the region. 10 schools have already been placed under quarantine. Earlier, students in the Vladimir, Samara, and Orenburg regions, as well as in Rostov-on-Don, Ulyanovsk, and Krasnoyarsk, went on forced vacations. How can you protect yourself from the disease and what should you do at the first signs of discomfort?

> The number of pneumonia cases is growing across the country. Schools in Chelyabinsk are being closed due to quarantine.

> "This year, considering the rise from the previous year, we are particularly attentive to this infection. When the incidence rate became sufficiently high, we suspended the educational process," said Tatiana Sofiikina, Deputy Head of the Department of Epidemiological Surveillance at the Rospotrebnadzor office for the Chelyabinsk region.

> More such patients have also appeared in Rostov-on-Don. Often, pneumonia develops after the flu or acute respiratory viral infections (ARVI). However, not only viruses cause pneumonia. During the cold season, our lungs become more susceptible, and we easily catch any infection on the go. Moreover, the disease often progresses asymptomatically. A person only feels mild discomfort, unaware that a catastrophe is developing within their body.

That still makes no sense. The original SARS virus from 2002 is too distant genetically from SARS-CoV-2 to derive the latter from the former in any known way; even RaTG13 is far enough that it's not clear whether e.g. accelerated evolution during serial passaging could result in SARS-CoV-2. The coincidence that makes many people suspect a research accident is that:

1. The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a major program to collect novel sarbecoviruses (viruses different from but related to SARS-1) from nature. No other lab in the world was known to have a comparable program. They'd also proposed to create artificial recombinants of those viruses with a furin cleavage site. Such a site is uncommon among related natural viruses, but present in SARS-CoV-2.

2. SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in Wuhan.

The first point does not apply to Vector, or to any other lab outside Wuhan.

Information about blast at «Vector» BSL4 lab is state secret now, I cannot find information about internal situation at «Vector».

My guess: perhaps the virus was being kept alive in living organisms (deliberately or accidentally).

Then the sequence of events looks as follows:

* September 16, 2019 - Explosion of a gas cylinder at the territory of the "Vector" laboratory in Kol'tsevo, Novosibirsk.

* Military personnel arrive to conduct fire inspection (breaking doors in each laboratory room searching for fire traces), without proper biological protection.

* During the fire inspection, the military take away some property from the laboratory (captured on video) and likely get infected with the virus from animal carriers.

* October 11, 2019 - Joint training of Chinese and Russian special police in Kol'tsevo, Novosibirsk, 40 Chinese policemen arrived.

* October 16, 2019 - First report of a sudden increase in cases of atypical pneumonia in Krasnoyarsk Krai, in Siberia - 700 cases per week. («Arguments and Facts on the Yenisei» No. 42, 2019)

* October 18, 2019 - Military World Games begin in Wuhan, attended by servicemen from Russia, from which the virus likely started spreading worldwide.

* November 2019 - Schools are quarantined due to an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in Krasnoyarsk, Rostov-on-Don, Orenburg, and Samara regions.

* November 2019 - Russian armed forces begin «training» to blockade infected regions of Russia.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20191011162034/https://www.nsktv....

> Notice that the review seriously considers the possibility of a lab leak, indicating that this wasn't some off-limits topic even back in 2021.

I don't think you've been following this debate for very long? The authors of the paper you've linked have worked aggressively and prolifically to destroy the reputations of anyone who suggests that SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from a research accident. One of them described Yuri Deigin's early summary of the evidence for that as a "Turner Diary-esque manifesto". (The Turner Diaries is a novel popular among violent white supremacists, notably including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.)

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13462322082063810...

Their paper includes a strawman of that evidence in order to refute it. If you've mistaken that for serious consideration, then I can't believe you're familiar with the people involved here.

Is there a specific piece of evidence for zoonosis that you consider strong, and would be willing to discuss? You mentioned the "two lineages", and I explained why I thought it was weak; but then you dropped it, and mentioned many other pieces of evidence. If we change the topic with each response then this just becomes a Gish gallop, which isn't productive.

> I don't think "strongly condemning" something is the same as suppressing public debate about it.

Perhaps you don't, but Facebook did--articles like that Lancet correspondence were the justification for the ban that they applied until May 2021. Without the tremendous reputational risks taken by a small number of scientists (Yuri Deigin, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright, etc.), that false consensus could easily have held.

I have no doubt you're more immersed in these debates than I am. I'm just a casual bystander who (admittedly, maybe too credulously) accepts the mainstream view on the topic. However, given that you're primarily citing Twitter threads rather than scientific papers, my heuristic alarm bells are going off. Has anybody published a good summary of the case for the lab leak in any reputable journal or biorxiv that I can take a look at?

I linked to Alex Washburne's criticism of Pekar (the "two lineages" paper) on biorxiv above, and I believe that's generally sound. (Note that he's got a different preprint alleging genomic evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was assembled using BsaI and BsmBI, which I believe is quite wrong.) That Twitter criticism is from a pseudonymous account, but it's clearly some kind of relevant academic.

Prominent journals have been unfortunately willing to publish low-quality work in support of natural zoonosis; I assume you don't think pangolins are the proximal host, but it took Nature more than a year to correct "Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins". David Relman published a note back in 2020, which doesn't say much but does refute the arguments of "Proximal origin":

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2021133117

There's no more recent summary that I'd recommend. The most notable development since then is perhaps the absence of notable developments; there's still very little evidence on either side, and these arguments often devolve into whether the PRC is covering up a research accident or covering up zoonotic origin. If SARS-CoV-2 did arise from a research accident, then the evidence confirming that may be an intelligence matter (like a leaked document) rather than new science. For example, the Sverdlovsk anthrax incident wasn't confirmed to be a lab accident until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Alina Chan's book is written for a popular audience, but well-referenced into the scientific literature. Jesse Bloom does excellent work, but his papers address particular narrow questions, nothing like a summary.

> I've linked here to a Lancet correspondence where top scientists "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin". I guess that's not quite the same thing as "probability zero"; but isn't it even worse?

I remember conspiracy theories that it had been designed and deliberately released, so no it's not really the same.

Is there anything in that article that makes you think their condemnation is limited to theories of deliberate release? I don't see it, and I don't think e.g. Facebook did either--they justified their ban with the (false) scientific consensus established by papers like that Lancet correspondence, and their ban applied to accidental release too.

>evidence includes the fact that the earliest confirmed cases clustered around the seafood market

That's a debatable point. Michael Worobey produced a paper appearing to show that but that was based on case data effectively supplied by the Chinese government who seem to have gone to some lengths to avoid implicating their labs.

There is another dataset of people who called a helpline early on with covid symptoms and that shows them clustered on the other side of the river away from the market and towards the WIV lab.

So if you are going with trust the government stuff then the cases are clustered around the market. If you don't trust said government then they are clustered towards the lab.

It's an interesting question if the government data is genuine why they show different epicenters.

There is no consensus.

> I do not recall any reputable scientist completely discounting the lab origin theory

Here's The Lancet in Feb 2020:

> We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The authors are in positions of considerable influence, both scientifically and directly on funding (e.g. Farrar at the Wellcome Trust). So if those don't count as "reputable", who would?

> isn't the consensus still that the virus has a zoonotic origin?

There is no conclusive evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2. All past pandemics of novel[1] viruses have been of natural origin; but the technology to engineer a novel pathogen didn't exist until recently, so that past tells us nothing about the relative risks of natural spillover vs. a research accident.

1. I say "novel" to exclude the 1977 flu pandemic, which near-certainly arose from a research accident and killed ~700k people. No one seems to care, and I'm not sure why.

> isn't the consensus still that the virus has a zoonotic origin? That is mostly a rhetorical question, because unless I have missed something, it is. Why do so many folks want to pretend that this has been proven incorrect?

There is no such consensus. That is one hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 was the product of gain-of-function research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There have been a number of papers published arguing for either hypothesis. Interestingly, it was recently discovered that the authors of one of the papers arguing against the lab leak hypothesis had privately expressed the opinion that the lab leak hypothesis was almost certainly correct.

> Perhaps I have a selective memory but I seem to remember that most of the pushback against the lab origin theory from people like Fauci was primarily intended to combat racial and ethnic tensions that were growing at the time. Especially when it came to the notion that the virus was purposely released.

That doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it. The uptick in violent crime against Asian-Americans started in the summer months alongside the more general uptick in violent crime. Furthermore, the official narrative essentially blamed the pandemic on Chinese people buying unsanitary exotic meat from wet markets. To me, that seems far more likely to incite ethnic hatred than simply pinning the blame on the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

> I do not recall any reputable scientist completely discounting the lab origin theory

At one point, the lab leak theory was considered “misinformation” and censored by social media companies, supposedly based on the guidance they received from public health authorities.

> The other hypothesis

That is one other hypothesis, not "the other" hypothesis.

Here's another: Accidental leak of a natural virus. "Lab leak" encompasses both.

There is no such consensus. It remains an open question and will probably never be resolved.

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...

> isn't the consensus still that the virus has a zoonotic origin?

It's all very well to speak of a "scientific consensus" when that consensus is based on good, peer-reviewed research. But when the evidence is weak, then any "consensus" you might find is indistinguishable from an opinion poll among ill-informed folk. It's not a "scientific consensus", it's just an opinion that's popular.

It depends who you ask and what evidence you look at but I'd guess it most likely came from manipulation in a lab.

Until recently you get banned from forums etc for saying that, indeed I was censored, and one of the reasons behind that was a letter to Nature from some respected scientists saying it was almost certainly not from a lab.

But it's recently been exposed they were basically lying. In private conversations said thought it probably was a lab leak but changed it for probably political reasons. (here's a fun graphic with some stuff they said https://twitter.com/JamieMetzl/status/1682816578872565761/ph...)

You won't see that said much by career scientists because doing so could still quite likely muck up their career.

Funnily enough the most recent information seems to lean towards it being from one of the most conspiracyish things - an accidental release of a product of a chinese bioweapons research program - see https://archive.is/DSbF2

The problem is that too many in the US define "scientific dissident" as "Willing to extol my positions even in the face of a mountain of contrary evidence."

Which would be fine, except for the fact that these people can do great harm.

For example, measles was declared gone from the US in 2000. And now it's back because "anti-vax" is considered a valid "scientific dissent" (and note this is not just MAGAs--the Marin dippy-hippies are just as bad). Even in spite of the fact that the people involved in the anti-vax movement were exposed as charlatans.

The scientfic community learned the hard way from anti-vax that if you don't stomp the ever living shit out of the charlantans hard, fast and immediately, you will wind up stuck with the aftermath.

So, now they immediately circle the wagons and start attacking any time something gives off even a whiff of heading into the wingnuts.

> "anti-vax" is considered a valid "scientific dissent"

Anti-vaxers are against science in general. First, it's part of Russian disinformation campaign:

> This week, we also heard that Ukrainian authorities are too stupid to deal with the measles outbreak in their country. The epidemic allegedly threatens not only the lives of children in Ukraine, but also the country’s visa-free regime with the EU. Thus, the disinformers helpfully suggest using Russian-made vaccines. The European and American vaccines, especially those available in Georgia, were reported as unreliable, since they might be manufactured in the infamous Lugar lab (the very same one that brought you the toxic mosquitos). But Georgians, according to pro-Kremlin sources, have even bigger things to worry about, as the UN and its partner organisation are deliberately spreading HIV in the country and planning for Georgian genocide.

See https://euvsdisinfo.eu/fatal-distraction (2019).

However, this disinformation succeed because science is opaque, so general population cannot verify claims, any claims. General public MUST BELIEVE to an authority. We need to make science more accessible to general public, for example, by utilizing AI to explain complex topics in simple enough terms and charts. However, it should not be like «hey, you, stupid, eat this, because you cannot understand what we are doing anyway». It should be accessible form of the same content, not a separate content. Something like: «Hey, AI, I cannot understand this paragraph, formula, or chart, so rewrite it to make it accessible for me (and translate it to my native language)».

step one stop putting publicly funded studies behind paywalls. Or give journalists more access to the material.

I haven't seen anti-vax being considered "scientific dissent."

Science is about evaluating theories; not being "for" or "against" anything.

Any group that is "pro-X" or "anti-Y" is not a scientific group—it's a political group. Anti-vax is a political group. Not a scientific dissent group. Scientific dissent is when people say "X is not true" or "Y is true."

Anti-vax isn't a term anti-vaxers came up with themselves, it's a term pro-vaxers came up with as a pejorative term for anyone who questions the safety of any vaccine. People who only questioned the covid vaccine and were fine with other vaccines were still smeared as anti-vax, even though the COVID vaccines were qualitatively different from all other vaccines in practically every way possible.

> it's a term pro-vaxers came up with as a pejorative term for anyone who questions the safety of any vaccine.

Anti-vax predates Covid and goes back at least to the fraud committed by Wakefield. It certainly was discussed back in the 2015 measles outbreak in Marin. I'm not letting you getting away with revisionism.

What you also selectively omit is "questioning the safety of the vaccine" at the same time as promulgating things like "taking of horse dewormer"--which is actually more dangerous than any side effects from any vaccine (kidney failure is one of the ivermectin side effects, for example). In addition, it wasn't "not take the vaccine but also take precautions" like the immunocompromised did; it was "ignore the vaccine and any and all precautions and restrictions."

The only difference with Covid anti-vax vs MMR anti-vax was that your own personal actions had a not small chance of coming home to roost directly rather than only on your children. Covid anti-vax eventually became a self-correcting problem. So it goes.

Ah, yes. the tragedy of modern academia, turned into yet even more tools of imperilistic control out of USA (but culturally, as English as the new Latin) against the world through physics spiraling out of the real world version of the events around the manhattan project; but backed by deep mind researchers out of the British academies (the same ones handing out completion certificates)

that academia pushes away the kind of novel creative thinkers that it needs.

that the role of preservation of knowledge has completely overtaken the role of creation of,

that somehow 'industry' (research conglomerates) together with 'academia' (rent-collecting bureaucrats of old knowledge) have failed us all?

or maybe it's just millennial (the burnt out generation) find ourselves hopeless and without real vision for any future in the time when we should be taking on the leadership roles of all these institutions?

academia started as a branch of the church and retains the same institutional structure to this day. the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

the church started as the government and this is sometimes very confusing.

> very confusing

or very clarifying when you realize that the same institutions will do the same things no matter what name you put on them.

In the case of Covid, people were scared. If you know anything about social psychology, taking control of information etc. in this fashion is typical behavior when people feel intensely threatened as a group.

This seems to be overlooked. Scared people make poor decisions.

Every country on Earth, even supposedly "good" ones, lied, dissembled, covered up, or otherwise failed to govern fairly and transparently during this crisis. Every one! Even in places world renowned for lack of corruption and correct functioning, systems were put in place to hide the scale and scope of the disaster.

There is a lesson here.

> failed to govern fairly and transparently during this crisis. Every one!

Isn’t that a sign of coordination in conspiracy rather than “scared people make bad decisions”?

Every country didn’t take erratically bad decisions. It was not random. It was coordinated. Coordinated towards the bad.

Groups of humans are stupid in very predictable and reproducible ways.

No need for conspiracy.

> scared

Doing the opposite of what one should be doing under threat: remaining lucid and further sobering up.

Ref.:

> When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout

~~~ Walt Disney (through Donald Duck)

and

> Come on, guys. Nobody wants this. We're supposed to be fucking professionals!

~~~ Quentin Tarantino (through Mr. Pink)

"Fear is the mind killer."

-- some book you may have heard of

>remaining lucid and further sobering up.

That's easy for yourself but not for a population that considered Trump's advice to inject bleach. In such a dynamic a lab leak would have been interpreted by some as bioweapon attack.

And I didn't see much fear of Corona among the scientists, but despair about the reaction of the population.

Just look how some don't take COVID serious but think of the vaccines as either mond control or mass execution device. Some even belief nobody died of COVID but the hospital killed people and claimed Corona. Some also wonder what evil motives are behind the fact that unvaccinated people die more often from COVID. Is it to punish them for their disobedience?

It's the same with climate change, the problem isn't necessarily the science or the technology but the people refusal to act accordingly.

At some point you either need to give up or enforce action.

Scientific dissidents exist. The problem is that we live in a world where we're being manipulated into believing that there isn't, or that the dissidents are bad guys. Conspiracy theorists.

Nobody much cares about insider vs outsider science with just theoretical consequences.

It's the intersection with society and government action which motivates people. Sometimes yes, outsider science "matters" because what it's doing is confronting decisions of consequence.

In classic left-vs-right politics, it's almost always about something other than the science part. Nobody pushing bleach into their veins was dissident scientist as I see it.

Is it just me or the is article not loading? The page loads fine along with the title but nothing below the top fold.

Not just you, I assumed content was blanked due to detecting uBlockOrigin ad blocking.

The top comment archive.is link works.

And the top link with the archive link is a cloudflare loop for me.

It is also a Cloudflare loop for me. I stopped attempting to exit the loop for fear of getting blocked.

It works with google DNS

I think there was an article recently about the Archive site refusing connections that go through the cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS.

There is no scientific movement that is more "cancelled" than the Intelligent Design movement. I am of the opninion that they have the far better argument, but they have absolutely been silenced.

Nobody is stopping them from testing their hypothesis and putting forward the evidence.

That is why the movement is slowly but surely winning over adherents.

Where is the best example of that argument? Surely they have published their own books, mounted their own websites?

The only real argument I've seen from Intelligent Design has been along the lines of "We can't explain complex stuff, therefore there must have been a designer".

"Darwin on Trial" by Phillip Johnson is an eye-opening and surprising read. I recommend it. You can also read "Signature in the Cell" and "Darwin's Doubt" by Meyer.

The argument is the "argument from design" -- just like you would be able to recognize the existence of a paper-airplane-designer if you noticed a piece of paper folded into the shape of a paper airplane, so we can recognize the results of intelligence throughout the natural world.

The question of the origin of life is alone enough to establish the existence of God.

Recognize that we need scientists as much as scientific dissidents. These days both seem in short supply. The dissidents are routinely "cancelled", e.g., during the COVID era. Big Science has been corrupted by government money worldwide. And as soon as one hears "scientific consensus" you know you're listening to a political statement not a scientific one. And that applies to climate change. Science is never conclusive. There's always the possibility of a different answer. The history of science illustrates that clearly. When the answer is "final", science is no longer the ongoing motivation.

The entire Covid years and the way government and society responded was the most cynical thing I have ever witnessed in my life and it completely altered my worldview and the way I see government, society and people in general. Some reckoning on this is in the future is small catharsis.

Same here. I don’t think we’ll see any reckoning until all the people involved are long dead…

Seriously: why? We had things like conscription before but the Covid response was the one that altered your view?

Maybe the person wasn’t alive during conscription. They lived through Covid.

We've had government suppression of dissent before - that "fire in a crowded theater" case was about anti-war advocacy - but it's been a while since anything really big and the Internet makes it much easier to watch happen in real time.

The cold war had some "red scares" etc.

Yep. My faith in both specific institutes and "society" in general cratered, and it wasn't due to some Facebook meme telling me to arson a 5G tower. It was from watching the horse's mouth in full good faith and instead seeing brazen attempts to manufacture consent, "gaslight" last week's claims way, and spin the scientific method as "anti-science". And then the disappointment at seeing just how easily large amounts of society could be (gladfully) whipped into supporting almost any level of authoritarianism, up to and including literally celebrating the deaths of their "opponents", all while claiming to be the compassionate side concerned about public safety, and mostly from the political wing that claims to be our only line of defence against that sort of thing

Government money? Seriously? Would you rather Exxon, Phillip Morris and Pfizer fund the research? Private funds by Musk and Besos?

And there is always the possibility of a different answer. But there's also the vast majority of evidence (with some political motivation) vs a striking lack of evidence (also with some political motivation). I'm going to err on the side of -- most people who dedicate their life to study something are honest about their study of that something.

See this is exactly what the other poster means. Your gut reaction is to shut down any dissent.

He's not shutting down anything, just pointing out the ludicrousness of the comment he was responding to.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvFlBAvWsAA72Tq.jpg

What's the difference?

What YOU did was an attempt to shutdown descent by attacking the poster instead of actually debating the issue

You're confusing me with some one else.

it's palpable to the rest of us to see how quick the discussion jumps to feigned confusion, a lack of charity to understand what others are saying and to immediate dishonesty when trying to shut down conversation

they're 'confusing' you for the parent poster of the comment chain you directly replied to in the discussion that you inserted yourself into, something understandable from anyone who spends time on sites that have parent/child discussion chains.

the confusion is solely yours alone, but for any other new users to the site you're taking up the role of continuing the discussion by commenting on reply chains inside that discussion, so having a reply to your comment that mistakenly mentions "your" previous post can be immediately understood in this context as the parents post and not as a misdirected attack that needs to be personally identified before continuing casual discussion.

do you need any more context to respond with honest intentions?

You're throwing accusations of dishonesty purely because I pointed out that I'm not the original poster?

FCOL, I didn't even make a point/take a side, I genuinely want to know what the difference is between "shutdown a conversation" and "dismiss opposing argument without consideration".

That post was the first post I made on this story, and I'm supposed to accept that prior to posting that I was shutting down discussion?

> it's palpable to the rest of us to see how quick the discussion jumps to feigned confusion, a lack of charity to understand what others are saying and to immediate dishonesty

With all respect to you, that's rich.

My pet peeve is people interpreting "that's a stupid argument, here's why" as a conspiracy theory.

Interesting that you would twist some simple observations into an accusation that I am trying to "shut down any dissent". Maybe not everything follows your world view. I'm happy with anyone who wants read all the comments... So the "we're so persecuted" arguments are wearing transparently thin.

> ... some simple observations ...

It seems like your "simple observation" is referring to the false dichotomy of stating that there are only money from Exxon, Phillip Morris and Pfizer (and the likes?) as an alternative to governmental money?

There is a plethora of way to finance any projects besides either be financed by the government or large corporations – and luckily much research is funded in other ways.

Can you elaborate on these other ways? I genuinely haven’t thought too much about how research has been financed historically.

Independent fonds would be a big one. Otherwise, independent researchers that finance their own research (In the case of the LK-99 research many lists had independent researchers names with Twitter links where they publish their research).

I am sure one can easily think up more ways to figure financing of (scientific) projects.

Where does the money in the funds originate from? Who set the original goal of the fun and the research direction?

when research is independent self funded, the direction is set by yourself.

When financing come from an independent fond, the board of that fond according to the purpose.

But where does the money in both cases come from?

Either you need to need to be indipendently wealthy or follow the desires of who or whatever gave the funds to the foundation.

> There is a plethora of way to finance any projects besides either be financed by the government or large corporations – and luckily much research is funded in other ways.

Do you believe this money doesn't carry any obligations?

The entire premise of the Scientific Method is dissent and skepticism. Fallacious claims that "big science" is effectively an arm of the government because of research grants and other funding is not dissent, it is a feeble red herring.

1. People dedicate their time to stupid nonsense all the time. They mostly all honestly believe in said nonsense, and are probably in consensus with others sharing the same nonsense. That doesn’t mean it’s real! See: alchemy, lysenkoism, or the UFO stuff we keep seeing.

2. All science that does not internally generate revenues must rely on a patron, be that a person, corporation, or government. Funds from these orgs is limited, so scientists must justify why they should get money. This introduces a huge bug in science as a truth cremation mechanism because seeking truth may not be in a patron’s best interest. As the sums of money get larger, this effect becomes more intense.

> truth cremation mechanism

love that typo

> Would you rather Exxon, Phillip Morris and Pfizer fund the research? Private funds by Musk and Besos?

Actually Exxon just bought the $5B Denbury CO2 pipeline. While I am on the fence about CO2 actually being a problem, we need to recognize that companies that may be viewed as opposed to something may be part of the solution.

If someone works out a super-efficient algael biofuel that is commercially viable at a national scale, I fully expect the oil multinationals will move to growing it everywhere.

Is this why Exxon is the leading manufacturer of Li-ion batteries?

https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/who-we-are/technology-and-c...

That CO2 project is for enhanced oil recovery from aging oilfields, it's really not a viable mechanism for continuing to burn fossil fuels in electricity plants while capturing and burying the CO2 emitted from those plants. Fossil fuel carbon capture and sequestration does actually have all the hallmarks of a fraudulent science program; it would take roughly all the energy produced by a power plant to capture and sequester the fossil CO2 molecules emitted by that plant. Exxon and Chevron are promoting it only because it's the kind of false claim that they can use to prevent moves towards replacing fossil fuels with renewables.

Denbury is moving into sequestration

> In addition, we are building a portfolio of properties for carbon sequestration, in close proximity to our CO2 pipelines

There isn't enough information available to understand if this is permanent sequestration, or a longterm reserve to supply their oil uses.

However, moving CO2 from plants to oilfields does seem to be better than just venting it into the atmosphere.

Enhanced CO2 extraction works by pushing the CO2 through the oilfield as a carrier of the oil, so what you get out of the extraction borehole is a mix of CO2 and oil, and the CO2 just vents back to the atmosphere during refining. Some fraction is left in the oilfield, but it's fairly minor.

The cost of the CO2 injection system is thus offset by the profits from the oil recovered; if this were to go to zero then the corporation would abandon it as an unprofitable exercise.

Seriousl question: why is this "enlightened centrism" pessimistic viewpoint so popular on hn

Because when you get away from the center, you've often chosen a "team." Choosing a team clouds your judgment.

And extremely highly paid lobbyists will keep pointing to this to let their bosses continue doing whatever they want. So.. when do you pull the lever for action?

This is a very hyperbolic statement, and makes the common mistake of framing science as built around a central corpus of knowledge, defended by personalities. Whilst science is a human endeavour, and individual scientists suffer all the same shortcomings that human beings exhibit, this is not how it is practised. Scientific consensus is a thing - you can literally gather N scientists in a room, and have them agree on principles and results. There will always be differences of opinion; for example, there are a huge number of interpretations of what a measurement means in quantum mechanics. But, good science is practised with an eye towards the limits of our understanding. For example, the standard model of physics explains nearly everything that we can observe, whilst we also know that there are some things that it can't. We also know that physical theories often seem to be simple, whereas the SM is complex - it likely is an effective theory. Knowing both of these things does not break the concept of consensus. Much of physics research is currently dedicated to figuring out how to break the standard model theories, despite the fact that it works so well.

When you hear "consensus", no one is saying that each scientist would write down an identical essay on the subject. Rather it means broad-scale agreement, and a common understanding.

Just like you, I think the above commenter points out that scientific consensus is not a scientific construct, but a political one.

> politics: social relations involving intrigue to gain authority or power

You need politics when working multiple people together. But in particular in scientific communities, you need to be able to superseede political, or institutional, ideas. This is what the original post talks about.

The core scientific constructs is stuff like falsification, occam's razor, etc.

The "mistake" seems to be a juxtaposition of science and the scientific community.

Science is fundamentally about convincing other scientists that you are doing good science. The scientific method is just a garbage in, garbage out process. If you don't get other people to challenge you, you can't tell the difference between doing science and fooling yourself. No matter how much you try to question your judgment, you are always the easiest person in the world to fool.

convincing other people that you are right is fundamentally politics. Not science.

good science has objective criteria and does not require political justification.

I didn't say anything about being right. You have to convince others that you are doing good science. The alternative is convincing yourself, which would mean that anyone who believes they are doing science is doing science.

I've never heard of those so-called objective criteria. There are some procedures that could be described objectively, but they are garbage in, garbage out. The tricky part is in the details, in the assumptions and interpretations you make. Get them subtly wrong, and the sacred rituals of cargo cult science will simply lead you astray.

science is not just the analysis. it is also about carrying out experimentation, designing and a. plethora of other thing.

i dont entirely know where the garbage in, garbage out comes from? it sounds like a data scientist who thinks there is no more to science than analysing the data they are provided.

if garbage goes in, then you designed your experiment poorly. which is not good science.

convincing is not science, but politics.

Experiment design is largely about those assumptions and interpretations I was talking about. What do you consider to be the established truth? Which aspects you should take into account and which you can safely ignore? What do you expect to happen when you perform the experiment? What is the connection between the observations you make and the outcome of the experiment?

Many of those answers will likely be based on your interpretation of the scientific consensus.

so, you use the scientific community and consensus to lead your experimentation efforts? sure, why not.

luckily, not everybody does that,otherwise we would not have superseded the Newtonian era.

which is what the main post is about: we need to break out of the community and consent.

Anyways, this reenforces the idea that we should distinguish between science and scientific communities.

Often we aren't worried about the consensus surrounding specific results but the prescriptions they are motivating from a totally different group of policy makers. Science comprehension is poor by politicians and words and meaning are often twisted to suit a need tangential to the original scientific finding. So when we see people fighting against a scientific result it is often because it is myopic and will be used to motivate poor policy.

> For example, the standard model of physics explains nearly everything that we can observe, whilst we also know that there are some things that it can't.

The elephant in the room, Gravity, would like to have a discussion with you :)

We can argue about what "nearly" and "some" mean in this context ;)

Probem is, at least in terms of the climate debate, climate alarmism and mainstream media says that there's scientific consensus, but at least when I read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 5th report in 2015, they didn't even predict how much doubling atmospheric CO2 would warm the planet (as they had in their previous reports)---and that with no clear explanation. However, following their footnote to the scientific detail report, they noted a lack of consensus between the computer-based models ("catastrophe immenent!") and the latest observation based models.

When I combine that with prominent climatologists like Judith Curry changing her position when presented with observation-based evidence that countered her climate predictions[1], it leaves me deeply skeptical of any and all alarmists.

I haven't taken time yet to read the IPCC's latest report, but I've heard that it has the same lack of consensus between the computer models (full of alarmist assumptions in how they were programmed) and observation-based studies.

I firmly believed we must follow observational data above computer simulations... Its just better science.

[1] https://reason.com/2023/08/09/this-scientist-used-to-spread-...

Creating and following the data is science.

When we arrange the science to fit the narrative we deny science in whole and corrupt the scientific method. And unfortunately, when funding is tied to donors or programs this is exactly what we incentivize.

Science is only as good as the freedom of the scientists to ask unencumbered questions.

Judith Curry is interesting case-in-point; most science should not be conducted in such a manner as to associate it with a particular science; the cult of personality should by virtue of a preference for rationale treatment of evidence be avoided in favour of the facts. This includes a systematic treatment and discussion around uncertainty, something that she is criticised for abusing. It should be noted that she is a > prominent climatologist

precisely because she is a contrarian, i.e. it is not the case that she represents dissent from a prominent researcher. It is to be expected that she is prominent given that it is hard to find many scientists who agree with her thinking. Politically, she is one of the few people available to provide credibility to climate-denialism (even if "credible" does not apply within her own field).

I really want to engage with you on this, because there is an alarming trend in the alt-media to try and depict scientific communities as a cabal of politically minded sell-outs. But the reality is pretty far from this. It's not perfect; peer review needs to be more accessible, journals should be open-accessm, etc., but to depict it as a cult is deeply misrepresentative.

The source you referred to (https://reason.com/2023/08/09/this-scientist-used-to-spread-...) has all the hallmarks of this. It writes as though "establishment science" (which I would be interested in having the authors define) is a person you can speak to, and receive a single opinion. I've seen a number of these kind of "free speech" publications pop up recently, but from what I can see, they are really just contrarian outlets; they seem more interested in being "other" than actually pursuing a particular theme with any kind of rigour.

Part of the problem is of course science communication. The media is problematic in the UK (at least) because of its poor treatment of complex issues like Brexit, climate change, economics, etc). In general, the media tend to fail in communicating how science is conducted, what risk looks like, and how uncertainty is described. You can see this in cinema; science is portrayed as esoteric experts who defy the establishment in some good-wins-out triumph (see Oppenheimer). But, that's really, that's just good entertainment.

We know that computer models aren't perfect. No-one would take you seriously if you gave a modelling result without a description of the uncertainty and how it was derived. But they're also the best thing that we have besides "wait and see", where we walk without agency into whatever future awaits us.

Observational data can disagree with models without invalidating their conclusions; it depends upon the questions that you ask. A specific example; the nucleus is often modelled as a bunch of protons and neutrons moving around independently. We can answer some really interesting questions about why some atoms have very long half-lives using this model. But, if you want to know why a particular nucleus shows vibrational behaviour, the shell model can't help you. Despite this, the shell model is considered one of the most successful theories in physics.

Since is never conclusive that is true, but some conclusions are closer to the truth than the other. Just because the earth is not exactly a sphere, doesn’t mean the scientific consensus that the earth is round is wrong. Same way just because we don’t understand everything about climate change, doesn’t mean we can disregard the consensus

To Wit, the CDC now says it’s okay to use [doctors to prescribe] Ivermectin to treat sars-cov-2 whereas before they denounced its use and the mainstream media derided it as horse paste.

Where did the CDC say that? The CDC doesn't even publish COVID-19 treatment protocols; those come from the NIH. And none of the large scale clinical trials have found ivermectin to be effective.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/

https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/o-t-lounge/ot-docs-the-f...

That’s not the CDC recommended the use of ivermectin. It is a court case stating that doctors are legally allowed to prescribe human safe variants if they so choose.

It doesn’t have anything towards the effect of ivermectin on Covid.

Saying that doctors have the “authority” to prescribe is not the same as recommending it. Additionally a lawyer’s statement taken out of context does not necessarily represent the organization’s stance or advice. It seems like the post you provided is making some unjustified assumptions.

Source please. I don’t see anywhere that they recommend ivermectin.

To that end, the problem was never ivermectin anyway. The problem was people buying horse dewormer from vet shops and self medicating.

You guys take “hey, maybe don’t self medicate with medication meant for horses cause we don’t even know if this works, let alone what sorts of dosage or anything is safe and adequate” as a personal attack, and then go off the rails over it.

The pushback from the CDC was very strong as well as the media and social media. Physicians were being censored and bullied for saying it was okay or for prescribing it.

The problem is that you’re just taking opportunistic stances.

>Big pharma is bad, and we should not be pushing drugs that were rushed through approvals

This is your position when talking about vaccines, despite the fact that vaccines actually work, and the “rushed” actually just means it skipped months of wait times.

>big pharma is good, and we should be needlessly pushing drugs that have not been through efficacy studies just cause

This is your stance on ivermectin

You’re taking two different stances on the same position depending on what your political hero said.

Then you’re posting lies, and when called out on the lies, post more lies.

You say that physicians were “being bullied”. But they weren’t. They were being told not to push unproven drugs. That’s not “being bullied”.

Physicians were rightfully “being censored” when stating unsubstantiated claimed of efficacy, as the studies don’t support them.

Even today, different studies on ivermectin alone produce different results. Yeah. There are studies showing a positive benefit mild cases. But there are also studies showing no difference, and more studies showing zero preventative benefit for becoming serious.

That is to say that even today, we don’t have conclusive evidence that ivermectin works. So doctors who declare that it does are lying, and absolutely should have those statement “cancelled”.

No they were being censored and bullied if they believed or led their patients to believe it is an effective treatment.

My Uncle had a patient dying yelling he didn't have Covid whose family doctor's only "treatment" was to prescribe them ivermectin.

It's not illegal, but I don't want that doctor.

I can tell you that in The Netherlands doctors could be (and still can be) fined up to €150.000 if they prescribed HCQ or Ivermectin.

The story about Ivermectin is much more complicated, I suggest you to read this: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t... It also talks about why different people might develop different view in the case of Ivermectin and similar situations when you have many data points, close but not enough to reach statistical significance. And the process of science in general.

What do you mean? There is scientific consensus that washing hands between medical procedures makes them safer. There is scientific consensus that the earth is round and is not the center of the solar system. These are not political statements.

> Science is never conclusive. There’s always the possibility of a different answer. The history of science illustrates that clearly.

What do you mean, can you give some examples? Which scientific conclusions might change? Do you mean that the earth might be flat after all? Or that your doctor not washing her hands before operating on you might be good for your health? Is non-zero ‘possibility’ being used as a justification to ignore the actual probability of a dissenting idea, even when almost all scientists agree? A small possibility is exactly that: unlikely, no?

Okay, maybe there's "consensus" in your mind about "washing your hands', but it's not clear what that means. We need people questioning what is the best way to clean your hands. Maybe soap is good. Maybe soap poisons a few patients. Maybe isopropyl alcohol is good. Maybe some other kind of alcohol is better. I could go on. The point is that there could be some cases where a traditional application of soap and water is actually worse for the patients, the doctors, the nurses or someone else.

A better example would be "antibacterial" soap containing triclosan, on which the consensus has shifted fairly recently

This is making the same mistake that @Blackstrat made; the existence of subtleties doesn’t change the primary high level outcome. There is pretty much absolute consensus on whether doctors should wash their hands. We have lots and lots and lots of evidence that using any reasonable disinfectant cut hospital mortality rates by multiples compared to what they were before hand-washing was protocol, while soap poisoning in hospitals today is extremely rare and difficult to find (and BTW doesn’t even mean soap is the problem, it more likely means the doctor didn’t follow the rinse protocol.)

What disinfectant product to use does have a minor effect on the margins of the outcomes, sure, and there is still some side-discussion about that, but there is no discussion about whether to wash hands. If you’re going to challenge the idea that there’s consensus, you must present and examine the magnitudes of the effects of each decision. I do not buy the argument that a sliver of a marginal effect challenges the primary outcome - and I especially don’t buy the argument that because you imagine there “could be” some cases, then consensus isn’t clear enough. One person in a million dying of soap poisoning has no real bearing on whether doctors should wash their hands, and doesn’t change or challenge the scientific consensus that doctors should wash hands.

So you pick the most extreme cases (hand washing, round earth) and equate them to "COVID is not a lab leak, case closed, you are censored if you try to argue it!"

The article lays out many cases where "consensus" was, indeed, a political construct and not really a scientific consensus at all.

It's a staple part of these sorts of conversations, we've had these arguments so many times you can pretty much script out in advance the various talking points one can expect to see per topic.

I believe this is #3 in the phases of Denial:

1. It's not true

2. It's true, but it's not important

3. It's true, and it's important, but I already knew it.

(A variant of #3 is "it's old news")

Agreed....I'm more so suggesting something along the lines of having an AI ingest HN comments, and then using that to construct virtualizations of the participants here....with that, you could then theoretically generate a system that can predict the responses (in general, or individual members) of people in this (or other) forums for any topic of discussion.

Even without a technical solution like this, it is not terribly difficult to draw lines around 75%++ of comments and produce decent theories about what motivates each individual to say the (particularly incorrect) things they say...and it is even easier to predict what their responses will be if their claims are challenged (the algorithm/workflow seems amazingly simple, there are perhaps ~20 distinct categories of responses that cover ~90% of scenarios).

Interestingly: humans are able to easily see this phenomenon clearly when they are dealing with children, but if the same suggestion is made regarding adults, opinions tend to change, and amplify in strength of belief (particularly among relatively intelligent people in my experience).

Note: I am pulling these numbers out of my ass, as humans do! But the underlying idea is fascinating to me, and I will make a bold prediction: humanity will be grappling with these ideas within 20 years, likely less.....I think it is unavoidable now that AI is in the wild.

I really question the utility engaging in debate with people who have absolutely no knowledge of virology, Chinese (or other) bioweapon research, lab safety protocols, or even China. forget politics for a moment, its just a waste of time if you are just defending something you heard on the internet because you think its likely true.

Unfortunately, once scientists become politicians, they open themselves up to that.

its true. I don't have a good answer. but trying to create policy based on which uniformed faction shouts the loudest is clearly a crap strategy.

Well, I guess that’s the problem with choosing to use words like “never” and “always” in your argument, and trying to overgeneralize, no? It makes you easily susceptible to proof by contradiction.

Why do you think hand-washing or the shape of the earth are “extreme” examples of scientific consensus? I think they’re both great here because they both had huge political debates, and scientific consensus eventually prevailed. There are many many more examples of basic scientific consensus that nobody argues and that demonstrate the claims of comment I replied to are false. Are you asking for more examples? BTW hand-washing was the opening example in the article. Doesn’t that make it absolutely fair game in this context?

If you want a hard-and-fast definition of "consensus" you won't find one. There are still people who'll argue against evolution, but that pretty much IS a consensus.

On the other hand, lab-leak was NOT a consensus. It was a Party line. A real consensus doesn't emerge in just a few months. There isn't time for contrary evidence and arguments to emerge.

Exactly, I agree with that. We have scientific and apolitical consensus on lots of things, and it very much is consensus for all practical purposes, regardless of whether there is a strict definition or a few loud contrarians. The Covid lab leak idea/debate was always a political and obviously nationalistic argument, not really a scientific one. And I agree there hasn’t been enough time or evidence for it to settle into a scientific consensus yet. There might be scientists who participate in the politics (or there might only be politicians pretending to be scientists and/or putting words in the mouths of scientists), but I’m not arguing whether there’s consensus about the lab leak. I only interjected to counter @Blackstrat’s over-generalizing claims that consensus always means politics, which is untrue, and that all science is corrupt and there’s “always” the possibility of a different answer. The whole notion that science is corrupt and untrustworthy is a talking point of the culture-war political party line of the far right, and the agenda is to distract from discussing real policy. Unfortunately, it’s actually working on the lay-public, and too many people now think ‘science’ is a bad thing even though there is no alternative that can get us to truth faster than science. It scares me that so many people choose to believe in conspiracy everywhere and don’t seem to understand what science is.

There IS no alternative, and the scientists have the responsibility to keep the public's trust. Which they failed.

All scientists failed?

Consensus on hand washing was not without challenges: https://www.history.com/news/hand-washing-disease-infection

Exactly! That’s why it’s a good example here; scientific consensus was hard-won, but the debate is now settled, right? Nobody believes the answer might change, and saying so is not a political statement; we have too much evidence now. The earth being flat was also challenged too, and was a nasty political debate. But scientific consensus now on these topics is not a political debate, contrary to the top comment’s claim, scientific consensus is just the historical artifact of truth eventually bubbling to the top.

Yeah, but is there say... Scientific consensus that "safer" for the procedure is safer for the species? I mean, we don't really have a predefined goal, right? And I'd posit we're increasingly distancing ourselves from any consensus there - which to a large extent is how the domain of knowledge is circumscribed. The powers disbursing research funding want results that would ostensibly yield benefit in some system in some formulaic calculation as to where we should be going - but the human species is so far away from consensus on that.

For instance lot of contemporary issues can be tracked back to the effects of population and the infrastructure and logistics necessary to maintain it. Suddenly economists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, demographers, et cetera... There's suddenly manifold complications once you stop looking at it in a vacuum and under a microscope, and thus consensus ceases. Importantly, we must consider the resolution at which policy is informed by inputs from these various intersecting fields and what should be given precedence and also important is the practicality and the means of application. Most importantly of all, I think, is that autonomy be granted to individuals and communities to conduct the experiments of life as this forwards the goal of truthseeking rather plainly. And with that the flow of ideas and experience.

> And as soon as one hears "scientific consensus" you know you're listening to a political statement not a scientific one.

Sure, but not in any sinister way. Politicians have to make decisions somehow. If everyone who's studied the problem says essentially the same thing, that's a good hint as to the right decision.

Climate change can hardly be called a science by the way. To be a science you need to make falsifiable claims. Without the ability to experiment, all you are doing is fitting some gigantic models to some historical data, and we all know how bad this can go.

So, astronomy is not a science? Because we can't do experiments on stars and galaxies.

Astronomy is not only a science, it's the science that kicked off the scientific revolution in the 1600s.

You don't need to be able to experiment to do science, you just need to be able to observe. Theories are tested against future observations. "Natural experiments" where something new happens are useful for this. An example in climate science was what happened after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.

> Climate change can hardly be called a science by the way. To be a science you need to make falsifiable claims.

It certainly does.

- The increase in global average temperatures is correlated to water vapor - The increase in global average temperatures is correlated to methane - The increase in global average temperatures is correlated to CO2

Another example: - "there has been an increase in global average temperature"

These are all falsifiable assertions and have been given due attention. I would be really skeptical of a perspective that claims climate change makes no falsifiable claims.

> Without the ability to experiment, all you are doing is fitting some gigantic models to some historical data, and we all know how bad this can go.

Fitting a gigantic model to historical data is a form of experimentation. A hypothesis is in some ways the act of creating a model to fit data and then to use that model as a tool for predictions. Fitting a gigantic model to historical data and seeing how it goes is exactly an experiment!

Scientific consensus is literally how science works. If there is no consensus yet, then the area is in development and you can't tell much conclusive about it.

Which is valid stage of knowledge progress. But it does not mean no area should ever be considered mostly settled.

No. Consensus is not how science works at all.

It is to some degree, isn't it? People don't personally replicate every study they cite and build off, they cite and build off studies that they believe to be trustworthy, part of which is determined by opinions of peers in the field (even if there's not a clear consensus one way or the other).

No. It's the opposite. All it takes is one single result to show a theory or body of "consensus" is in error.

No it does not. Science is full of contradictory results, that is why it is super easy to cherry pick studies.

You can't tell anything until it is in scientific consensus stage, precisely because a single study rarely means that much.

I'd argue that's more a characteristic of the publishing and peer review process in academia, not actual science.

Here, here. Science = the scientific method. It should be nothing more.

Yes, exactly.

I get irrationally angry when people say things like "believe the science". No! They entire point of the scientific method is I don't have to believe anything. I can replicate and verify the results for myself.

> Recognize that we need scientists as much as scientific dissidents.

What's a "scientific dissident" to a "scientist"? Because a scientist may be a dissident, but a dissident is not necessarily a scientist.

> And as soon as one hears "scientific consensus" you know you're listening to a political statement not a scientific one.

This is false.

Let's take the recent news about that new room temperature superconductor. "Scientific consensus" means validity and reproducibility. Achieving results that validate the primary hypothesis is not a "political statement".

> When the answer is "final", science is no longer the ongoing motivation.

You have a warped view of what science is. History hasn't proved that science is "not conclusive", but that it is continuously evolving, adding layers to previously simpler answers, e.g. the newtonian concept of gravity hasn't been discarded by contemporary theories, just extended.

It drives me mad when people talks about science like a series of revolutions that break with everything taken for granted until that point. This is not what happens. If anything, new science supersedes old science.

What you describe is what happens when science collides with quackery. And yes, that applies to climate change deniers.

Great article but I have a critique:

It's odd to put the introduction of hand washing at hospitals in 1800s Vienna and doubt over mask effectiveness against the spread of covid19 in the same category. They seem like opposites to me.

Sure they're both going against the scientific consensus of the time but there are some key differences.

In both cases, people don't want to change their behavior, but questioning masks is on the side of doing nothing.

There are no downsides to wearing a mask. When there's a new disease and we're not sure how to slow it's progress, but we have something that might help with no downside i.e. mask wearing, might as well try it right? And in retrospect it's pretty clear it was effective.

During the pandemic, I'd rather see scientists coming up with new more effective measures than squabbling over whether the existing measures are effective.

I don’t know. It can be difficult to breathe for some people, it can be itchy, hot, build up bacteria, fog up glasses… you also have to carry enough of them wherever you go. So it’s not exactly doing nothing.

"Babies are on average interacting with fewer people (and seeing fewer faces because of masking) than they did before the pandemic." https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/pandemic-challenges-may-...

> There are no downsides to wearing a mask.

I’ll never understand why people keep repeating this. I know multiple people who seriously struggled with the mask. Ranging from basic stuff such as “it fogs up my glasses so I can’t see well and it gives me a headache” all the way to “I get a panic attack if I wear one for longer than 5 minutes”.

These people all pretty much stayed in the house for as long as the mask mandates lasted. That’s a long time to look at the same four walls!

There's downsides to wearing pants, too. Nonetheless almost everyone is wearing them.

Maybe because to them the upsides are more important than the downsides, including because it would be illegal to go out without pants in their country. I don't think wearing clothes should be required by law.

And for kids to not see each others faces, honestly even adults, has implications for communication and empathy you have for others. You are “anonymous” in your mask. For kids it really impacts development for them not to see each other.

There is no reliable evidence that the masks most people used were effective. For the most part it was a waste. The notion that we should do something just because it might help is ridiculous. I'm certainly not willing to put up with that nonsense.

https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6

Do you reject most medical treatment then as it usually only has some probably of success (it might work, but need not)? What about seat belts? Presumably your position is a lot more nuance than your wording?

I think you just missed the nuance.

GP said "the masks most people wore", which is not to say all masks, but rather suggesting that the majority of masks that real people were really using and how they used them amounted to nothing.

> What about seat belts?

If it helps (though I never met an analogy that wasn't rotten on the inside once dissected in debate) an inadequate or improperly worn seatbelt can be more dangerous.

The conclusion to that paper is telling:

    The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.

aka: We can't decide whether masks (or other interventions, including hand washing, etc) worked as all the examples we looked at were a clusterfuck of many people pulling in opposite directions preventing any clear conclusion from being drawn.

     Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.

Sufficient clean data is lacking.

Further:

    There is a need for large, well‐designed RCTs addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness, especially in those most at risk

ie. They don't believe the matter is settled by any means.

The most interesting part is the selection criteria.

Looking at the section Characteristics of included studies it appears some effort was made to trawl two decades of global trials in order to find those least likely to have any good conclusion.

Many of the trials look at the effectiveness of low level encouragement to try an intervention at a time and low location with relatively low risks, leading to intermittent uptake and noisy data.

Not only that, but the mechanism of respiratory transmission is so widely known, that the use of masks to reduce it is an idea soundly backed by an accepted theoretical framework.

When Covid started I stopped getting sick in the winter. Before the pandemic I had gotten sick at least twice per year with some virus: sore throat, fatigue, sneezing, all that. It started again when the measures were relaxed. Of course this doesn't qualify as evidence for mask effectiveness, but I wonder if anyone had the same experience as me?

Solely addressing the mask use part of your reply, I've found that it greatly helped reduce the number of times I fell ill ( even mildly ) from things you list like colds, coughs, sore throats & fatigue.

I can't believe that there are no substantial studies that have studied the ability of consumer grade surgical masks ( and/or N95s) in preventing common illnesses, very reliably when used regularly.

Why aren't these things conclusively studied, beyond any degree of doubt?

Most likely because it's hard to orgainze a controlled, large-scale trial, and there are many variables that influence real-world outcomes, and the measurement of the mask variable is not accurate based solely on historical real-world data.

I experienced very little illness, winter or otherwise, during the coronacrisis. I had two fevers that lasted on average 4 days. I had a case of mild bronchitis that lasted 3 or 4 weeks. On average, I tend to have more cold/flu/rinopharyngitis in normal winters and often a bit of bronchitis. I'm a light smoker. I wore a fake mask poorly when I was forced to. I took a number of parapharmaceutical prophylatics like zinc, vitamins C and D and quercetine. Regular intense sport but less overall physical activity. Diet with tons of animal fat and a fair amount of cooked vegetables. Drank surely too much alcohol. No vaccines or medical procedures except regular dental care. I worked from home 60% of the time but literally jumped on every opportunity to socialize with like minded people. If I had to bet real money: the rather favourable outcome was due mostly to home office and the reduced stress.

Yes.

I used to get really bad colds 3-5 times a year, for as long back as I can remember (afaik, I never got Covid, though). Now, it's been longer than a year since I last got sick.

However, I only wore a mask when forced to, as mask usage was generally only recommended and almost never mandatory during the pandemic.

Rather than masks, I think the most likely reason is that people who get sick nowadays are much more likely to stay at home, and probably also that everyone washes their hands more often.

Many had the same experience, including those who went without masks. I imagine social distancing + people self-quaranteening for all of those symptoms you mention can explain most of it.

> There are no downsides to wearing a mask.

You can't see people's full facial expressions. I wouldn't be surprised if the toddlers in daycare during 2020-2021 end up with deficits in social perception. For adults who already have a hard time inferring other people's emotions, masks make it worse.

You can't identify people as well if they're wearing a mask.

Aerobic exercise and hard physical labor are difficult or impossible wearing a mask (try breathing through a mask once it's saturated with sweat, blocking the airflow).

It fogs up glasses.

I'm sure there are others, but you get the point. Wearing masks has real downsides that need to weighed against the protection they offer.

> There are no downsides to wearing a mask

Except for wearing a mask, which is inherently a downside compared with not wearing a mask.

Pollution. Disposable masks litter the streets and end up in waterways.

When masks are mandated in general settings, workplaces and anywhere usually unmasked, there are downsides. Even in aged care, the faces of visiting family and friends are now obscured. Residents in many cases would not see the unmasked faces of their own family again.

Washing your hands is an inherent downside to washing your hands. Its tedious, annoying, and many people get dry skin or are allergic to commonly used scented soaps. There is no evidence that that how regular people wash there hands is effective.

Washing your hands doesn't require your hands remain soaped up as you go about your day. "Washing hands" takes a few seconds, then it's over. Your analogy doesn't work.

Nobody knows you washed your hands 2 minutes ago, but everyone knows you put a mask on 2 minutes ago because your face is covered, and your words are muffled.

There are no downsides to wearing a mask.

They cost money and require effort. Therefore, there are downsides.

Defining a set of actions as literally cost free is a logical fallacy. Nothing is ever cost free. The moment you do this you're obliged to engage in that action 24/7 for the rest of your life, immediately and indefinitely, as any possible benefit would justify doing it - even imagined benefits that exist only in the realm of future hypotheticals. Worse, once someone makes this error, they start to believe everyone else is irrational because why would they not engage in this completely downside-free behavior too?

it's pretty clear it was effective.

The article mentions the Cochrane Review which rigorously concluded the opposite. However you don't need a meta-study. Community masking was justified on the claim that it would create a downward inflection in the case numbers. Go to ourworldindata and select COVID case graphs for a few countries you're not familiar with, then try to figure out when they imposed or removed mask mandates by searching for the inflections. You won't be able to because no such inflections were ever created. So mask mandates had no impact when judged by their own (stated) goals.

> The article mentions the Cochrane Review which rigorously concluded the opposite.

Do you mean this one?

"Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.

It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people's risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses."

https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...

This is a hard one... the parent commenter mentioned that there should be some indication about when people were told to wear masks in the charts that show the spread of the virus in at least some countries. That's difficult to see anywhere... the study you link to says that they were simply unable to show whether masks are effective because of "the high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies".

Let me give a little anecdote about that... Brazil was one of the worst affected countries, despite having made it mandatory to wear masks. Sweden, on the other hand, only made it mandatory to wear masks in a few very limited situations (e.g. public transport), and even then, only after the pandemic was already dying down, much later than most countries. And Sweden seems to have had a below OECD average rate of deaths due to the pandemic.

I know it's a difficult comparison to make: Sweden's healthcare system is likely more "competent" than Brazil's (because it can afford much more, but both have free or nearly free healthcare available to everyone) and people in Sweden tended to be less skeptical of the virus (personal experience, not sure this can be shown by data) - that makes a big difference as people in Brazil would often wear a mask just because they were forced to, and hence wore it incorrectly and didn't really try hard to make it effective, while in Sweden people did it by their own accord (for the longest time, Sweden only recommended to wear, but did not make the mask mandatory) and were much more likely to have done their research about how to better make use of the mask to avoid getting infected.

Also, it has been shown that most deaths in Sweden occurred early on, among the elderly living in nursing homes where employees (who are almost always foreigners with a very different culture and hence, I suggest, less likely to properly wear masks and follow government recommendations to contain the spread of the virus, like completely avoiding meeting people who are not living in the same household) were the main source of infections - so if you take that into account, the fact that people in Sweden were mostly not wearing masks at all for most of the pandemic should show that, at the very least, wearing masks was not the most effective way to keep the virus under control.

My takeaway is that masks may help, but only if you actually believe it will help and take sufficient care to wear a proper mask and do it properly... and that other measures, like voluntary social distancing, turned out to have been more effective than just wearing masks.

> foreigners with a very different culture and hence, I suggest, less likely to properly wear masks

What does culture or nation of origin have to do with being able to wear a mask properly?

The answer is right there in the quote you decided to cut short for some reason.

Culturally, Swedes trust their government a lot more than people do in other countries.

Yes, that one. From the "We need scientific dissidents" article this thread is about:

When Tom Jefferson and his group published a report saying “We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed,” the editor in chief of Cochrane apologized for the wording, even though subsequent surveys showed the language was standard for Cochrane given the nature of the evidence.

The incoherent attempt at walking back the study findings by Cochrane administration is the type of problem the article is discussing. It came after a pressure campaign by a social media influencer [1] and the New York Times [2], not due to any actual problem with the review (which AFAIK remains unaltered).

The actual study authors stand by their conclusions. But consider something else: the statement on their website is nonsensical, asserting that it's wrong to accept the null hypothesis in this case despite a large multi-study failure to find significant results. But that's not how science works. You start by assuming the null (community masking/mandates don't work), and then try to disprove it. If you can't then you stick with the initial belief that there's nothing there, you don't assert that anything failing to find what you want is "inconclusive" - that's starting from a conclusion and working backwards.

[1] https://twitter.com/thackerpd/status/1644306405942255617?s=2...

[2] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/13/the-new-york-times-is-su...

The thing is people elide the correct conclusion of that study to "masks don't work" which is not what the study says, and it is actually a hypothesis that has been roundly disproven... there are numerous studies showing the efficacy of mask wearing for preventing the spread of infectious diseases. They apologized for the wording for a good reason, which is that people took it out of context to suggest something that is not only not what the study said but contradicts a variety of other research.

There are downsides. Face recognition is not as reliable with masks on.

> There are no downsides to wearing a mask

this is objectively false. it is generally accepted in the scientific community that wearing masks for an extended period of time is dangerous and leads to respiratory illnesses.

No it isn't.

There's also little if any evidence masks were effective at stopping spread. Maybe in idealized conditions, but the mandated use likely did nothing.

No, n95 and better masks have been proven conclusively to protect against it. If your mask isn't fitted right it wont work obviously and surgical masks are not effective. If you are going to be in a poorly ventilated space with someone for an extended period of time an n99 may be better. But otherwise n95s are very effective.

I'm not familiar with any country that mandated or adequately supplies n95s to their citizens.

There's a the question of whether masks can be effective (even without a study, common sense says they are against a respiratory virus) vs. the question of whether they are effective, given actual use.

There's a good argument that idealized use of masks would have been beneficial, but actual use was likely neutral, or even counter productive (caused more unintended harms than prevented infections).

Source?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/approximately-zero

I suspect this is the study being mentioned.

Keep in mind this is at slowing population level spread. On an individual level masking may be different.

The idea is that covid is so contagious in unexposed population that any precautions against spread are futile.

I think your mistaking which comment I replied to.

If you don’t think there are any downsides to wearing masks, you probably don’t have children and maybe you haven’t tried to speak to people with masks on :)

The best was showing ID while masked. Yes, I have sunglasses, long hair, and a face mask; the short haired fellow in the picture is absolutely me.

> There are no downsides to wearing a mask.

Besides the obvious effort required and the monetary costs, as somebody who wears glasses and commutes by bike and train I can name a couple others. After biking to the train station my breath is heavier than normal, and having to put a mask on when entering the train made my glasses fog up, so I would usually wear it under the nose (even those with a valve, because they still made it hard to breathe after biking, although a little easier). Otherwise I would be unable to use my phone nor laptop and I would have nothing to do for most of the commute. My glasses would also fog up when entering indoors locations during the winter, so I would have to clean my glasses and mess around with the mask to make the air come out from the bottom. There's also no clear upside for me given that I rarely get sick, the last time I had a fever was in 2022 and the time before that was 2017.

ah another covid origins article to distract ppl from mitigating an ongoing pandemic

There was plenty of dissent but it was censored on pretty much every platform.

Yeah we need open venues for discussion more than ever would be a better take. Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through. Dissent is irrelevant because it has almost nowhere to go, and gets branded as "denialist" or whatever by the mob anyway.

> Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through

Never in history has it been easier for someone to create their own media publication, present alternative views and make it available to anyone in the world. But rather than do that what those people prefer to do is rant, rave and demand that other publications carry those views.

Concentration of power in media and online is because the majority of people simply don't want to listen to the type of views that are typically censored. And since the media is a business the owners understandably listen to those people.

You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

Did you hear about Parler? AWS cancelled their service for violating their terms of service. This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook.

Also apple pulled their app from the marketplace when they were trending.

'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.

Almost all of the people who were involved in Jan 6 have gone to jail. It was a serious crime.

And you can't expect companies to be wilfully complicit in criminal acts by allowing services like Parlor which you admit partly facilitated the Jan 6 event.

That said you can run internet services without AWS or Apple. Build a web app and host it on your own infrastructure.

In this context, if genuine, this seems odd to me. https://twitter.com/ChuckCallesto/status/1689484345281478656

Not to be outdone, if you've not seen it in the UK we've had this much smaller rebellion: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/extinction-rebellion-pr...

>This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook.

"mostly planned on Facebook" doesn't mean "not at all planned anywhere else." There was a whole data dump of content from Parler showing that yes a lot of planning was done there. Here[0] is a Slate article about it.

>'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.

Weird, because Parler was recently acquired and will presumably be relaunched, Gab still exists, and Rumble and Truth Social and plenty of other "alternative" platforms are still active as far as I know. How is it that an entire ecosystem of platforms to serve the conservative and right-wing market has popped up if it's impossible to build alternatives to mainstream services?

I mean, for all of the censorship supposedly going on, the "dissenters" don't seem to be hindered in getting their message out at all.

[0]https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/parler-jan-6-capitol-fa...

If I'm not wrong, Gab was cut off by pretty much all payment processors and had to launch its own to survive. There was a moment in which, if you wanted to give money to Gab, you had to either mail them a check or do a bitcoin payment to their wallet. They technically survived, but dissenters were - and are - greatly hindered at every step.

Correct, it's called Gab Pay.

>'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.

You can do it today very effectively. Many platforms exist today that don't rely on any of the major conglomerates. It's really not difficult, you just don't get the niceties that the big players have the experience in providing.

It's really hard to exist without a payment processor, and it's overwhelmingly hard to set up one.

I downvoted you and I want to explain why.

The public square, and the communication around it are controlled by BigTech, BigMedia, and are heavily beholden to Govt & BigPharma which means pushing provax, esg, and various other uniparty narratives. That means publications, and new sources, as well as social media, forums, instant messaging, IMs, email and many others are all censored. It is hard to reach eyeballs if all communications are controlled&censored too.

It is nonsense that all forms of media and online sites are censored.

It is simply the ones that are popular that have and will enforce their own terms of service.

And that is because there is a proven, strong relationship between sites that do this and sites that are popular. Because again. Most people simply aren't interested in hearing the type of views that are typically censored.

He never said these platforms don’t feature any amount of censorship, or that certain types of content don’t face unique hurdles that other types do not.

The fact is, it’s still vastly easier today to disseminate your ideas — no matter what they are — than at any other time in history. Do you really think radio, newspapers, tv stations, and book publishers weren’t just as influenced by large corporate and political interests?

I seriously doubt IMs and email are being censored. You sound like someone who gets their information from grifters that complain about censorship despite having huge audiences captured by masses of lazy thinkers.

Please do not discount my experience.

On a high karma Reddit account I was warned by an admin about banning for a specific story they wanted suppressed, and the post was deleted.

On Facebook I have been blocked from sending specific links from 3 different URLs in IMs, the last of which was because it had a contrary position about the Ukrainian war (the website Southfront which is Russian govt affiliated) when I was talking with a friend of mine that happens to have a Ukrainian wife. We were talking about stories in the news in the West vs East and what was the actual story.

I didn't downvote you, because I prefer just refuting your argument. I do believe you made the argument in good faith.

But it's completely absurd. Was there a degree of platform moderation to attempt to reduce covid disinformation, or at least label it as such? Yes. But was there anything remotely resembling effective "censorship" that made it at all difficult to reach "eyeballs" with bogus antivaxxer narratives? No. Of course not. The claim is ludicrous on its face. We were all bombarded with BOTH sides throughout the pandemic.

> You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

I don't mean you in the specific, but I am deeply alarmed by what seems like a coordinated regime effort to re-define free speech into what you describe above. Perhaps the WEF-affiliated Twitter CEO put it best on CNBC the other day: "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach".

So in effect, for the regime censors, freedom of speech now means freedom of expression + censorship. That is, as long as the censors allow you to put the words on paper, you have "freedom of speech" in their eyes, even if that paper is immediately thrown into a lead bottle and into the Mariana Trench. As long as your Tweet is not outright and immediately deleted, you have "free speech", even if the algorithmic censors immediately ensure that no one but you will ever see it.

This will not end well.

You make an interesting point but I think there are two separate issues.

Freedom of speech does not mean a requirement for people to listen or to have your ideas broadcast.

In general nobody should be compelled to promote your ideas. With Twitter and others, the issue is that they are monopoly platforms, and so by refusing to carry some ideas they are effectively censoring them and denying free speech. It would be like saying you can say whatever you want in a public square but some people need to wear soundproof masks when they do it.

All that to say, the issue imo is we need better laws around monopolies that include common carrier type rules that prevent their interference, not because companies shouldn't be allowed to censor, but because monopoly platforms shouldn't.

I think that's not true actually, freedom of speech absolutely implies a requirement for broadcast. Speech is in itself a broadcast, the intent is that you're supposed to be able to be heard - otherwise it would be called freedom of thought and everyone would naturally agree that that is not good enough.

We can quickly end up in a world where your ruler tells you that you have full freedom of speech just as long as this speech remains firmly inside your cranium and never leaves it.

The problem here is that the philosophical position is a bit more complex: Issues of decorum and harassment and spam exist, requiring limits on broadcast and so someone always has to judge what the true intent of your speech is. We now live in a world where people readily judge that the other side never has good intentions, therefore their speech can be forbidden. It's an intellecutal and moral problem, some people are simply incapable or unwilling to understand the other side's position or moral values to such a high degree that they reject any allowance for speech.

The core of the problem is that many many people no longer believe in a culture of free speech. They think that, as long as it's not the government doing it (and even sometimes when the government is standing right over there, waggling its eyebrows and flexing its muscles), it is both acceptable, and in many places good for people to be punished for nothing but speech.

The first amendment is absolutely just a governmental restriction, but the concept of free speech itself absolutely must be more broadly protected. The new social media era of algorithmic content makes these waters murky. Because these platforms aren't just hosting content, they are picking and choosing who it gets shown to. It's a complex situation that isn't as black and white as some free speech advocates would like to admit, but before we can address any of those complex factors, I think it's vital to argue vehemently that free speech is a more broadly important value than just the first amendment.

> it is both acceptable, and in many places good for people to be punished for nothing but speech

I think part of the issue is that the internet is practically only speech. Spam is just a lot of speech. Doxxing is just speech of a specific privacy. Advocating violence is just a form of vigorous . Rape threats and revenge porn… It’s all basically just speech.

It’s difficult to say we should have a free speech culture when we also have spam filters.

You should have a spam filter. I should have a spam filter. We, the collective we, should not. A ton of things should be done to prevent spam - a vast majority of spam is also fraud, and should be tackled that way much quicker than it is. The delegation to the government (or large enterprises) to "fix the spam problem" has resulted in our current state of innundation.

Well now we’re back at that the right to speech isn’t the same as the right to listen.,, which is what the original poster was protesting

They’re missing the whole point of free speech. The purpose of it is to protect the type of speech people despise and don’t want to hear. This is important because the most evil form of censorship comes from examples like those quoted in the article above. The “limit reach” people effectively are explicitly targeting the very types of ideas that free speech was designed to protect. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. This is basic free speech 101 that is, or at least used to be, taught in high school.

> You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

You can't demand that everyone has to listen, but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you. People that don't want to listen to you can use that channel too, without opting in to follow you. Nobody is forced to listen, nobody is forced to be silent.

What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

> What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

Well said.

In many cases, it's not because you're (the general "you") being "suppressed". It's just that you're tiresome.

A few weeks ago someone was ranting about something (some movie he claimed was being given the woke treatment). I told him that he shouldn't get so worked up about it. In hindsight, his response should've been predictable. "Oh, so I'm not allowed to have an opinion?". I told him it was fine to have an opinion and share it, but that I thought he should just skip watching the movie and not get worked up about creative choices he disagreed with. I wasn't trying to "suppress wrongthink", I just found it very tiresome.

Edit: granted that wasn't about science, but I find the dynamic is often similar.

Yeah, this happens on both sides. You just need to mention you disagree with creative use of pronouns, or with certain categories of sexuality, or with the unhealthiness of clinical obesity, or the understanding of privilege, and you're met with accusations of genocide.

Neutral channels don't exist, never have never will. So the demand doesn't make any sense. By operating, the channel must make self-preservation decisions, these decisions cannot be neutral.

Do you think telephones and email should be censored?

Both already are.

They shouldn't be; Everyone should have an equal chance to expose themselves as idiots. Censorship denies this.

Yes they do, in the law:

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1003/neutrality...

This has nicely summarized my biggest complaint with how a lot of the fediverse seems to be intended to work.

Mastodon etc seem to mostly be designed with the intention of having a lot of large nodes that can federate. This results in the same issues as mainstream social media on those nodes. This also reflects in the lack of meaningful discovery tools.

Of course this is resolved by setting up ones own server, and there is at least a corner of the fediverse of truly free speech nodes. But this just makes me feel that the design should have always been towards a large network of small nodes, with associated discovery tools.

> Nobody is forced to listen

This is an overly reductive take on how social media would work with no moderation (no censorship). Recommendations that show up on my Home timeline aren't all voluntary, I'm often reading things that I would prefer not to read. I don't have complete power to curate my feed. What a lot of people want is not more censorship per se, it's for this recommendation system to be changed in order to deemphasize polarizing and toxic content and promote less polarizing content. Basically, many of us want to alter the social dynamics (which were arbitrarily chosen in the first place) in a healthy direction, rather than ratchet up the censorship.

> but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you

Rumble exists, so even if they were censored on Youtube, they still have a "neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen".

> What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

Pretty much yes, but this is a euphemistic/strawman take on the fears of those you're arguing against. I am indeed "afraid" that people will "decide they like" extremist content, thereby becoming radicalized and committing a terrorist attack or voting in someone far worse than Trump. It's not them liking the content that I'm afraid of. It's the secondary consequences of that liking. I want to stop those consequences from happening. Ultimately, the objective is to protect our freedoms, even if it means sacrificing a little freedom (of speech) in the here and now.

> Recommendations that show up on my Home timeline aren't all voluntary

This is an orthogonal problem; I absolutely agree that recommendations are bad. Incidentally, many people "on the other side" (the ones you want to silence) agree with this, as they're constantly shown content they wouldn't otherwise consume, which in their case is mainstream and all-pervasive. This is exacerbated by the fact that, if they try to set up their social media, they get deplatformed by cloud providers, payment processors, etc.

> I want to stop those consequences from happening.

We have a law system to stop these consequences from happening. The moment an extremist acts with violence, they are stopped with violence by law.

> Ultimately, the objective is to protect our freedoms, even if it means sacrificing a little freedom (of speech) in the here and now.

And you get to decide which speech is dangerous and which speech is not, which ideas are dangerous and which ideas are not, from the height of your moral superiority, I guess.

> from the height of your moral superiority, I guess.

It is not about moral superiority, it is about wanting to prevent a bad outcome that will negatively impact me and my family. That's it, self-preservation. It's a realist and ideology-free perspective on the actions that I need to take to stop certain bad outcomes from happening. I've read enough history to know what happens when hate speech is allowed to fester and spread. The marketplace of ideas is an empirically bankrupt concept. Bad ideas are contagious and will spread and infect a population if they're allowed to. The downstream consequences of that are dystopian and we've seen enough speech-caused genocides to know this. Really, you are the one on your moral high horse. You feel moral outrage at someone wanting to moderate speech because it violates a sacred and untouchable value that is part of your moral system. Even though, ironically, you probably support libel laws and other current restrictions in America's current sociolegal conception of free speech. As long as the speech that's banned isn't hate speech, I suppose that's all fine and dandy.

I am not arguing from an ideology here, unlike you. This is a purely realist perspective. Free speech is a good value to have -- one of the best -- all the way up until it isn't. Just like any other freedom we have.

> And you get to decide which speech is dangerous

There are no easy solutions. The alternative is that the government decides, and that carries its own obvious risks. Although, maybe that would be better since it can be democratic. What I do believe is that the risks of your proposal (unfettered hate speech and the consequences of that) are higher than the risks of my proposal.

> We have a law system to stop these consequences from happening. The moment an extremist acts with violence, they are stopped with violence by law.

You live in a world where causality is simple. Person picks up gun and pulls trigger; person to blame. Reality doesn't work that way. That person was motivated by something. An ideology, perhaps. That ideology came from somewhere. Dylan Roof doesn't exist in a vacuum. Dylan Roof logs online and consumes speech. That speech motivates him to kill people. No doubt he also has mental issues, but it's the interaction of the speech and those issues that causes the outcome. That speech was as much to blame for the deaths as Dylan Roof was. It is all a part of a long chain of causality, and just placing the moral and legal blame at the very end of that chain will do nothing to fix the problem or prevent the next genocide from happening.

Freedom to listen is a good right and arguably better than freedom of speech but you don't understand how it works. Freedom to listen means the censors don't get in the way. Facebook censoring a post from reaching someone who wants to see isn't "people not wanting to listen", it's facebook getting in the way of two consenting adults who want to communicate to eachother.

Freedom to listen requires freedom of speech, but also requires good blocking and filtering tools on the individual level. If the tools are not on an individual level, and you cannot choose to unblock or unfilter "dangerous" views, you don't have freedom to listen. By the way, we have this on hacker news, this is how the post flagging and dead systems work, you can just choose to see what's being moderated.

what you’re calling “censored”, on my forum (and even here on hackernews) and on countless other forums, we simply say “deleted.” and move on with our day.

from irc to bbs’, from forums to discord rooms, here on hackernews, from our own living rooms to restaurants/bars, if the person running the show finds someone obnoxious, they delete the comments or remove the person. this isn’t new, it isn’t surprising. it’s been happening since the beginning days.

are you looking for publicly owned internet infrastructure or something? if it’s a private space, how can you demand they host people they find obnoxious? how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time.

i get publicly owned spaces, i really do. free speech and all that, but i can’t imagine doing anything but laughing at someone if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” at the top of their lungs, then screaming “censorship” as the owner removes them.

> how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time.

Demanding that cloud providers and payment processors act as neutral channels doesn't seem that hard to me. The problem is not the bar owner removing the person, the problem is the person being effectively barred from opening their bar.

> if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!”

Well, that's an extreme example. Normally, what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying things like "we don't want to use your pronouns" or "we don't think your theory of privilege is credible" or "we don't think make athletes should compete in women's sports".

the post i was responding to was specifically talking about facebook and social media sites “censoring” people, in other words, deleting posts and removing users. my post had nothing to do with payment processing. if someone comes to my site, countless other sites since the beginning of the internet, including hackernews, and just like always, if they are obnoxious, they’re banned, it’s not new. it’s not shocking.

and again, no one would think it was weird for a restaurant or bar to remove some weirdo. in fact, we’d think it was pretty hilarious if they were screaming “censorship” while being removed.

> Normally what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying “we don’t want to use your pronouns” or…

i disagree. you can’t open a major social site and not see someone crying because some random person they’ve never met prefers “they/them.” it isn’t clear to me anyone can claim discussion of this is being “censored” when it is quite literally a massive amount of discussion a certain group of people are obsessed about. it’s trending regularly. censored?

unless by “censored” you mean, “people are using their own free-speech to talk back to me.” if this is waht you mean, we're at a fundamental disagreement on what "censored" means. i only ask because so much of the "they're censoring us! they're canceling us!" crowd, a large chunk (not all) but a large chunk of what they're crying about is just that people talk back to them, and since they're not used to being talked back to, they don't know how to assess whats happening. again, not all instances, but a surprising number of the instances i've seen.

if you want to discuss payment processors and infrastructure, then sure, id probably be on board with at least discussing the idea of nationalizing some of the critical infrastructure. removing privatization of critical infrastructure would certainly remove much of the private company discussions surrounding free-speech, and after some testing in the courts, we would likely end up with some strong neutrality and privacy clauses. for example, payment processing would likely no longer be able to remove payment processing from legal sex workers, which is probably one of the most (if not the most) attacked group of people online by payment companies.

but again, social media sites, forums, or basically any gathering place online, if you expect different behaviors than you get in “the real world”, such as when a restaurant removes a wild nutbag for screaming at their diners, if you expect any gathering place to be different, you’re setting yourself up to be let down. like it or not, online exists in the real world, complex human behaviors still exist there. like it or not, if a gathering place is full of real humans, whether online or offline, this will come with all of complexities and expectations that implies.

Censored and then "rationalized"

Gustave Le Bon was a French scientist who wrote extensively on crowd psychology. He left behind a number of important works, being the first writer to thoroughly investigate the psychology of socialism. For a long time, noted Le Bon, psychologists regarded belief as voluntary and rational….” But a shocking discovery was made. Psychologists discovered that mass belief is an unconscious process, “under the influence of mystical and affective elements independent of reason and will….” We do not fully understand why people believe irrational things, noted Le Bon, but they do.”[36]

According to Le Bon, the decisive role of the unconscious means that the decisive factors in belief are: “prestige, affirmation, repetition, suggestion and contagion.” These factors sway the mind independent of reason. “The power of these influences on the genesis of beliefs” is “proved by their effects on the actions of even the most cultivated men,” noted Le Bon. Man is not so much the “rational animal” as he is a “rationalizing animal” whose irrationality is supported by seemingly logical arguments. Le Bon wrote, “We have arrived thus at this important philosophical law: Far from presenting a common intellectual origin, our concepts have very different mental sources and are ruled by very different forms of logic. From the predominance of each … are born the great happenings of history.”[37]

https://jrnyquist.blog/2023/07/23/about-the-s-word-a-polemic...

How is it then that a majority of Americans believe the lab leak theory?

a majority of americans believe the opposite of whatever the "experts" tell them. they are not always right but it is a good heuristic.

This is beyond foolish, and untrue, and if it were true, it is a relatively new phenomenon.

People do not believe the opposite of what experts tell them unless encouraged to do so, and given a set of plausible reasons.

While sometimes this has merit (because experts are not always right), it is almost always done by people who having something to gain from a public discordance with expert opinion.

In addition, "experts" have been made much less visible in our society than they once were, largely due to the democritization of communication technology but also the concomittant rise of self-promoters. A lot of the reactions to "experts" are actually just reactions to noise.

Finally, the single most important issue with public/expert interactions IMO is the media-driven lack of tolerance for nuance on the part of the public. People are much less willing to accept actual expert answers, which tend to be of the form "well, it could be X, but it could also be Y, we probably won't know until we do Z". Consequently, a secondary stream of not-actual experts emerges, who provide the handholding answers like "It's X", and this is then used to disparage actual expert opinion when it turns out to be Y.

There are fields where "expertise" is hard to establish and of limited utility, and the expression of opinion there is primarily a statement of ideology and desire. I think that severe skepticism is warranted there, even more than the general skepticism one should apply. But FFS, it is what "experts" know and do that has bought us so much power, agency and comfort in the world, and the idea that believing the opposite of them is a good heuristic is just nuts.

Useless if censored. Censored people have to resort to the same channels and tactics that crackpots do if they truly believe in their discoveries and that just exacerbates the problem.

But censorship of unpopular opinion has always been going on. I don't believe there's a technical/service solution to this. The solution is a societal and political one and those are harder to come by than the next big technical innovation.

Edit - spelling

I hate to say I agree. I'm almost feeling motivated enough to teach high school so I can make David Deutsch mandatory reading. At least Chapter 1 of Beginning of Infinity

Your comment says a lot with few words. I agree, it starts with or at least includes education. You know how hard this is? It's not school, it's parents. Let your kids disagree with you, be respectful of people you obviously disagree with in their presence. Read them opinions or books that make you uncomfortable and then explain why. School can help, but the environment at home can so easily override that.

What if they are crackpots?

Well, that's why I said it exacerbates the problem. In a bipolar societal environment, you're either right or a crackpot. We need a finer grained filter than that.

There are really well spoken proponents of ESP (extra sensory perception) and even "studies" that prove it exists. But they are not reproducible and there's no company/government/commune producing extraordinary results that point back to it.

"Truth is the First Casualty of War" - Quote Investigator

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It's interesting to me that many of the same people who do not trust the vaccine, also do not want the FDA to complete their review process of medications. Those are opposites! The 'Expert' is well and truly dead.

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We do NOT need scientific dissidents, we need everyone in a position of responsibility to be clear about the line between knowledge and belief. We need scientists to say "We don't know that". We need journalists who accept that answer and ask "How can we find out", instead of just finding a scientist who will answer an impossible question.

We need a better informed and more skeptical public. We should not accept something as a final answer just because it's interesting or satisfying. We need to be prepared to be unsatisfied.

For instance, we do not now and will never know how contagious the virus is to a naïve immune system. To know that we have to perform 'challenge trials'. It is unethical to perform a challenge trial without effective treatment, so we did not do any early in the pandemic. Now everyone is vaccinated or exposed, or must be considered to be exposed; so any evidence now would only answer questions about a post-pandemic world.

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Writing a serious article about a "lab leak" without clarifying what exactly you mean is irresponsible to the point of professional negligence. Lab Leak means many things: 'It walked out of the lab on someone's shoe', 'Secret Research', 'Illegal Research', 'Malicious Research', 'Modified Virus', 'Man-Made Virus', etc...

So a scientist says "I think it's likely that the virus came from the lab" - which do they mean? The audience is free to assume that the scientist supports their pet theory.

If a lab in China was doing anything nefarious, what would you actually do about it?

Consider that the human mind really loves conclusions. Consider that we look for motivations at a less-than-conscious level.

When people say "conspiracy theory", I hear "motivation theory", as in, I think this group has a motivation to cause this disaster.

So here's my motivation theory: Chinese officials are VERY sensitive to embarrassment. I think they are highly motivated to destroy any evidence that might embarrass them.

That includes the 'liquidation' of the wet market where viral traces of Sars-Cov-2 have been found. It might also include any research related to Sars-Cov-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It's most likely that the virus was not modified by humans, but I do hold a place in my reasoning for the idea that it might have been.

I'm reminded of the Oppenheimer movie - people don't like it when you have a complex view of a moral question, and the question of the lab leak is heavily moralized by many people.

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It is clear to me that individual people can make masks work to prevent the spread of contagious disease; in much the same way as individual people can live off-grid. In both cases it's more work than most are willing to do, or it's in some way beyond our capabilities.

I saw a woman wearing a mask, but with it pulled below her nose - the 2020 Karen/Ken classic look. But I saw this in 2022, WELL after masking orders were over. Entirely of her own volition, she was wearing a mask, but without any care for actual function. Was it misunderstanding? Was it moral signaling? Was it habit? People are hard to understand.

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Too bad they had to do the ritual, cliche mention of Thomas Kuhn. Totally unnecessary.

Steven Colbert covered himself with slime there, and so did a lot of "scientists."

What's the problem with how the author brought up Kuhn?

Just because others might invoke him improperly makes Kuhn taboo now?

"taboo" is your word.

Fantastic engagement, this is really worth everyone's while.

Now instead of snark, can you please explain what is so offensive about someone mentioning Kuhn?

My comment yesterday on a thread [1] about "Dreams of new physics fade with latest muon magnetism result" and how the same story was headlined elsewhere [2] with opposite conclusions:

>It's curious timing that I have stumbled on this story (spun both ways), a Sean Carroll 4hr rebuttal that there is a problem of physics caused by not opening up to new ideas two weeks ago, and Sabine Hossenfelder on YouTube with an episode this week pouring cold water on 'new physics'. I very loosely keep tabs on a thin sliver of popsci so seems like some wider coordinated theorist - experimentalist friction given my sample size. Maybe it's 5 year budget allocation time and I never noticed before but just seems odd.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37090864

[2] BBC News - Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66407099

>a Sean Carroll 4hr rebuttal that there is a problem of physics by not opening up to new ideas

Indeed he likes to indulge in his solos (that's what they are for) but after almost 4 hours of reviewing the status quo[0]; he goes on to accurately describe the problem of actually choosing the set of possible ideas/theories to follow through.

Which basically boils down to who gets the funding (and by extension: tenure) and who not. As a part of that system (he sat on a committee) he seems to be aware of the flaws. Because of the incentive to be "effective" with the funds "popular ideas" (what resonates with the community) with a "high probability" of succeeding get chosen, a negative feedback loop if you will.

Interestingly, he sees that problem quite divorced from today's state of physics itself which is too successful (it's hard to come up with new ideas and with today's instruments (energy levels) very little "new" to find) in describing the physical reality.

My personal take: The "effective"/"pragmatist" mostly American wrap up of two obscure subjects from the Old Continent has hit a wall. With String Theory - once also obscure - being comfortable in the platonic realms (Witten winning the Fields Medal) it's time to wrap it up and be more heterogeneous again let the small science do its brewing.

Yes, at first it will open up the most feared floodgates of crackpottery but after awhile it will subdue and finally slip into obscurity, most will jump the boat to whatever hype is the new hype and the one's left will hopefully have very weird ideas with high rigor devoid of most incentives to cheat/conform for a career; 99,9..% will fail of course but at least they will have a fun ride instead of clinging fiercely onto their careers.

[0]https://youtu.be/MTM-8memDHs?t=14354

Can we change the title of this article to "We need scientists"? Clearly this guy was a scientist and changed the world for the better. He was a dissident at the time because we didn't know about "germs". Now we do.

We really need people to be more open-minded about using science as a general approach to life (especially where it matters like in health).

No.

The whole point is that they're telling you stuff you disagree with or don't like to hear, but we shouldn't censor them, not that they're wearing a lab coat.

No, that is not science.

Setting aside your political beliefs, looking at the data, and coming to a conclusion based on evidence is science. There is no need for dissenters or a devil's advocate. The grandparent is correct. We need scientists.

This is what I think of when I hear the word science:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

Not idiots who can't be arsed to wear a mask at the movies.

Can someone explain why this article is being flagged?

Ironic, isn't it.

Usually when the [flagged] marker appears, it's a combination of users who feel that the story is offtopic for HN (perhaps because it has already led to a lot of repetition and flamewars), and users who disagree with the article for ideological or political reasons.

How can we instead defend the legitimacy of a submission?

Users with high karma get access to a "vouch" button.

You had me find an old post of Sam Altman as I searched information about "vouch": https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/two-hn-announcements/

Ok, I notice the '[vouch]' button now. Also, I found info about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I must have been confused as I thought you should vouch against "flagged", not to revert "dead".

For comments, not for posts.

It is also for submissions, T. It becomes apparent when you enable the "showdead" option.

If you think something valuable has been improperly flagged, you can mail hn@yc. What you shouldn't do is complain on the thread that it's been improperly flagged, because the meta argument you'll start by doing that will just make the story drop faster. Front page real estate is scarce, and the site is rigged to find every reason to push things off it to make way for the next valuable story.

More specifically, HN relies on a "flamewar detector", which signals overheated conversations where there are > 40 comments and the ratio of comments to upvotes is > 1.

Long digressions tend to push stories toward that threshold.

Interesting. Thanks.

I think it's because people flag articles that start the same tired, tired arguments that we see everywhere else on the internet.

nope, they flagged it overthere too.

Maybe lots and lots of people are tired of the same arguments?

Because it somehow makes sense to flag a conversation so that others who may want to participate can't do so, because the flagger is tired of it?

Instead of the flagger just reading something else?

Maybe these hypothetical people want to keep this site different? Or maybe I'm overthinking things again.

That's a valid reason for flagging political flamebait stuff, sure. There are guidelines here.

But just because you're tired of a subject?

Others aren't all the same age and experience, and maybe haven't had a chance to discuss or explore what our hypothetical flagger is bored with.

Does someone have this article in a format that will work on Firefox with uBlock Origin?

https://archive.is/6vnq0

Disable js and css and it works fine.

It's harder to be a dissident than ever because everything has been politically weaponized and the public discourse is absolutely saturated with bad faith argument.

I have a lot of opinions but I have to post them anonymously or my life’s work will be destroyed. I’m hopeful that once I retire and move all my income-generating assets to a trust that I can advocate more for my opinions. People in my city have had their retail businesses destroyed for donating to Republicans. It’s just a very dangerous world to say anything so you have to be very careful.

Why do you think they should be free of consequences for their actions?

In a world where there are only 2 political parties, and supporting the wrong one is life-destroying, the only way to win is not to play. It is unfortunate.

A lot of people are in this situation.

Are we talking about the same country? Supporting a specific party is "life-destroying"? Tell me, is it the one in control of the House or the one in control of the Senate?

It is definitely life-destroying if one is wedded to a specific industry or academia. Certainly career ending for some jobs.

"I want to work in field X, and I believe Y"

"But most people in field X believe that Y is crazy talk, and there's literature going back 127 years explaining why they have come to that conclusion"

"Sure, but they won't be nice to me if I try to work in field X"

"Right, but that's because they believe, and can explain why, they think you're crazy"

"They are destroying my life".

You greatly exaggerated how rational leftists or religious people are. (DAE do "cancelling"?).

I've attended classes as a listener where the professor was lecturing about how attempts to go to space are just modern equivalents of racist White Colonialism. I don't think there's a limit to how stupid people in supposedly high positions in society can be.

It's not the contents of a belief that makes it ridiculous.

It's the behavior of the person espousing the belief.

I can imagine an entirely rational and quite deep argument regarding whether or not attempts to go to space are just modern equivalents of White Colonialism. And I might not agree with one or all sides of such an argument, but they are not prima facie ridiculous.

What makes them ridiculous is a failure to engage with counter-points, a failure to grapple with reasonably established facts that conflict with the stated position, and a failure to engage in falsification (i.e. "well, if X and Y, then clearly my position would be wrong").

Someone who can do those things on behalf of their stated position deserves respect, but someone who cannot deserves much less.

This is the real underlying problem.

Discussion is a commons. It relies on trust and symmetric cooperation. When those things are betrayed, the commons breaks down.

Came here for scientific comments, found US politics -again.

US politics is global politics. Some government policy might start wars, other policy might end wars. Wars that are overseas, somewhere close to you

US domestic culture war bullshit is decidedly not global politics.

I'm afraid it is - For example, the gender debate leads to other countries introducing draconian laws against the LGBT communities. Some days it's all they talk about on Russian TV. Same for the race debate, it seems some politicians don't know which society they are fighting for. There were people in Sweden demanding government action because of the George Floyd incident. US domestic culture wars do spread globally because of the dominance of US media.

Well yes, politics is why there's one party line with the alternatives all buried (and yes there are occasional stories showing that this scales down to internal department politics), and the US is big and influential and cares about all the big hotbutton issues.

As they say, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.

Is this because America isn't obeying the mask rules? I don't get this analogy.

Because America leads the world, it has a lot of influence over it for better or worse.

I am perplexed too. Is the word "science" being redefined in the US? Why does it appear that most people discussing here are so... helpless? Needing someone to tell them the truth? Did no one in here ever do any science at all?

Often yes, it's now not defined as simply a description of a process it's "The Science"... An editorilised summary of work that supports some policy or initiative.

It's often not really possible to contradict or contribute to The Science as an outsider, as access to the equipment, samples, and raw data is not available.

The vast majority of human beings don't even go to grad school, believe it or not.

I did science in middle school, and still do it today as an adult. What’s grad school have to do with anything?

I've gone to grad school and only after a lot of years of self study afterward have I really begun to understand what science is, how it actually functions, what the fundamental ontological and epistemological commitments my field makes, etc etc etc. In my opinion graduate school allows the student to _just barely_ touch something like actual knowledge of some specific thing. I think you're just vastly over estimating the actual substance of middle school science education.

The scientific method can be understood by a middle schooler. A rigorous and independent way of thinking can be taught to middle schoolers, too. Understanding the primary causes of bias, both psychological and methodological is also something a middle schooler could be taught, (though I was never really taught it even in university).

Deep understanding of a particular field is something altogether different, and is not what I mean when I talk about capital-S “Science”. For that, you need either grad school or a lot of study.

Graduate school taught me to respect how little detailed knowledge I have of a specific topic compared to experts who have deeply read the literature. It did not teach me the scientific method.

Science is much, much more than the scientific method. I'm glad people get exposed to the idea in grade school or whatever but just being able to list the steps in the scientific method doesn't make you scientifically literate or able to appreciate how knowledge and knowledge generation actually works.

Did someone close to you growing up do science? Many people do not have someone like that. Many people were raised in an area without well-funded education.

My family was very scientifically minded, and it has also taken me many years to realize what 'science' is.

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Your comment sounds to me like "I've won the lottery and I don't understand why everyone else hasn't". Yes it is possible to understand a lot of things about science at an early age; however I do not think very many people have a deep enough understanding of sociology to understand all the implications of public discussion of science.

To be fair, this is more global than US politics. China's got a huge role, along with the WHO, and most European countries.

But yes, it makes me extremely sad how politics has gotten in the way of science. I can now tell what politics a scientist has by which covid origin theory he believes. Things shouldn't be this way, but this is what happens when political entities get involved in the evidence.

When in history has politics not got in the way of science?

Now don't say it was religion before, because that is just a form of politics itself.

In fairness, this is a US site, that does promote a particular kind of political ideology. It’s run by VC firm after all.

The trick with HN is to skip past the top comments.

Wonder what the overlap is between the lab leak people and the people that were shitting on expert opinion that the LK99 authors looked kinda like amateurs.

What?

> “The larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolutes and litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that.”

I miss Jon Stewart.

I really don't see how anyone can look at how covid proceeded and come to the conclusion that we need less trust in experts. "Thinking for yourself" was an excellent way to die of covid and to produce much longer, much higher peaks in your region of residence than you would otherwise have had.

Places with populations that shut up and listened suppressed covid nearly entirely until the rise of the much-more-contagious Delta and Omicron, neither of which would have realistically arisen at all if the whole world had applied suppression of that magnitude. New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea, and China remained open for business throughout most of the pandemic precisely because they had strong institutions and because they successfully enforced expert consensus.

Even within the US, the map of covid deaths is practically an electoral map, which is itself practically a map of trust in institutions. San Francisco had a death rate of 134 per 100k. King County (Seattle), 158. And less you think it's an urban/rural thing, rural Vermont sits in the 150s. Meanwhile, almost nowhere in the South or Great Plains is below 400 per 100k, and almost everywhere that is is a blue island amidst a sea of red. Raleigh-Durham, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and St. Louis are all visible clear as day on a map of death rates.

Even if we assume that expert consensus got covid's origins wrong - a fact that is far from demonstrated - I will happily take a temporary error in a relatively unimportant fact about the virus' origins over hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and years of shutdowns that could have been avoided with better coordination any day. Experts are sometimes wrong, but from an outside-view, probabilistic standpoint, a person betting against expert consensus is almost always going to lose, especially if they are not themselves an expert.

The experts began by saying "Don't wear masks." The CDC and the Surgeon General told all Americans to stop wearing masks.

I was one of the few people who thought for myself, read the studies, saw that all evidence in Korea and China pointed to this being an airborn pathogen, and learned how the electrostatic field in melt-blown fabric attracted covid particulates to it and filtered them from the air.

I was one of the few people wearing masks, staying safe, back in February when everyone looked at me crazy for wearing masks, because I was going against what the experts said.

I don't see how you can go through that period where the experts are telling you the opposite of the truth, and then continue to believe them.

That was, what, like one month at the very start? Masks were a fixture in my household by April or May, as I recall.

Again, "beating the experts one time" does not mean that betting against them is a good bet. For every person that fits your description there are a hundred not getting vaccinated because they've "done their research". The literal comment right below mine is some anti-vax nonsense right here on HN, in a community that is overwhelmingly better-educated than the public at large.

The CDC was recommending against KN95 and N95 masks even after Omicron, so it was more like 2 years, not one month. I was also someone who wore proper masks against the advice of experts.

I agree that going with the experts is the best course of action for the general public. We need to be able to disagree with experts, but we need to be able to do it in an informed manner, with proper research to back up the ideas. However, most of the general public is unable to do so.

Beating the experts? They knowingly lied about medical science in a matter of life and death with a straight face to millions of people. And you line up and kiss the ring and say thank you for the nudging, may I have another?

Sorry, what did they lie about? Not sure I follow (and don't have access to the article or the archive links, it seems..)

"The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material."

"And given that that's the case, now when we're talking about vaccinated people being indoors in settings where you don't know what the status is, particularly in an area, as you mentioned correctly, that has a high degree of protection, the recommendation is that you wear a mask even indoors, even if you're vaccinated."

The only thing that changed was that people were vaccinated en masse and the virus had become even more transmissible. So that whatever infinitesimal effect the mask had before, against the delta variant it was now beyond useless.

I could sit here all day and list more and more deliberate falsehoods, but they're well-documented and no serious person denies that there was extensive lying by experts for political and social purposes under the guise of dispassionately relaying the most credible and up-to-date medical information.

> The experts began by saying "Don't wear masks." The CDC and the Surgeon General told all Americans to stop wearing masks.

Yes. Not because masks didn't work, but because they were in short supply and medical and emergency personnel needed them more. And because the level of transmissibility was underestimated at first.[1]

March 2020, CDC: “Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers."

April 3, 2020: "After insisting for weeks that healthy people did not need to wear masks in most circumstances, federal health officials change their guidance in response to a growing body of evidence that people who do not appear to be sick are playing an outsize role in the COVID-19 pandemic."

US coronavirus hospitalizations are going up again. There's been a low the last three summers, and then it picks up again.[2] Time to stock up on N-95 masks. Don't bother with anything less.

[1] https://archive.is/69Pmz#selection-2157.0-2183.1

[2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklyhospi...

You're whitewashing when you say "Not because masks didn't work." Here's a direct tweet from the U.S. Surgeon General on Feb 29, 2020 telling people that masks don't work:

> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

Here's a quote from him saying masks increase your risk:

> You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider. Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...

It seems that yourself and Animats are in essential agreement.

As was said above:

    Not because masks didn't work, but because they were in short supply and medical and emergency personnel needed them more.

I'm outside the US - I recall the US Surgeon General making those statements at the time and it seemed very clear that logistics and pragmatics were being discussed rather than the "science of masks".

At that time most of the US had no general spread of COVID - the midwest buying up all the masks wasn't doing anything useful other than making those few places that actually needed masks there and then more dangerous.

As your quote states:

    if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

The entire point is that artificial consensus destroys trust. There's never such thing as "unified front" on any sort of remotely debatable topic. Instead that front is often just created by unfairly shutting down dissenting voices which has a paradoxical effect of elevating those very voices, even if not entirely deserved - something directly adjacent to the Streisand Effect.

> the much-more-contagious Delta and Omicron, neither of which would have realistically arisen at all if

Omicron was an offshoot of Wuhan or Alpha, most likely jump back from an animal reservoir to humans (rats being the best theory) - even though it came after Delta, it was not a descendant of Delta. Even if we'd completely wiped out the virus in humans by the end of 2020, it could still have happened.

Deer, minks, cats, rats, and I'm sure I'm forgetting more - it was clear these animal reservoirs existed in 2020 and once we knew that, it was obvious to everyone except the experts that we can't eliminate this virus. There'd just be another spillover later.

Oh, and a note on the "more contagious" part - Delta wasn't more contagious than what came before it. It's the common line but only works because the previous variants were revised downwards to make room for Delta.

The earliest R0 estimate back in like Jan/Feb 2020 was 5 or 6, which was almost immediately revised downwards to 3 or 4 because that was seen as too high. Mid-year the estimate went back up to 5/6 for a short time, then at the end of the year when Delta was identified (but not yet named Delta), they gave the 5/6 range to Delta and put the previous variants back at 3/4.

Support that but not that easy, when big platforms are censoring actual scientists while amplifying others who align with some narrative, it gets tricky. Just a couple weeks ago about the whole LK99 thing, a barista on Twitter was leading the discussion..

Direct evidence, mountains of it, of government coercion of media and tech, we have the emails, they are public records, and people sre still trapped in their bubble of propaganda (or are paid shills).

The experimental gene therapy that was all but mandated, clear coercion, clear violations of informed consent, clear emails of fauci lying under oath concerning government funding gain of function research -- and it just goes on and on, the evidence is voluminous, and yet there are still people here ignorant (at best its ignorance) of all this evidence and still peddle petty lies that what happened didn't actually happen.

Completey, 100%, disgusting, immortal, unethical, outrageous behavior. And ill be the one silenced. HN commentators... look in the mirror and own up to the truth.

Experimental gene therapy huh? Go back to 4chan friend.

If you are referring to the vaccine as “experimental gene therapy”, it places you in the crackpot territory for anyone knowledgeable about immune vaccine research. Who knows if the rest of your “mountains of evidence “ exist when you lead with nonsense.

Er, no, they're right. These were the first ever mRNA vaccines, the technology wasn't even safe to use in 2018 (IIRC there was some sort of breakthrough fix to the lipid nanoparticle in 2019 that dealt with its toxicity).

Even the adenovirus-vector vaccines are very new, the first time that technology was ever successfully used as in an Ebola vaccine created in 2015. I think the covid ones were the second time it was successfuly used.

> Er, no, they're right.

Er, no, they are wrong. It's not a gene therapy, and it being the first large-scale application doesn't make it experimental.

In the case of Covid, unlike handwashing in Vienna, the disinformation was organized.

China didn't want to admit the leak occured at their lab, and the US (and Fauci in particular) didn't want to admit they funded precisely that lab for research that could be dual use.

[flagged]

You are bunching dark matter 'deniers' in with anti vaxxers? Really?

Also there really isn't much of an anti vaxxers movement if you separate people opposed to vaccine mandates vs people who think vaccines are unsafe. Separating those camps isn't often preferred for politically convenient reasons, but they believe very different things.

Personal choice and body autonomy should be something we all support. The covid vaccine works, those who get it are protected. Unprotected individuals aren't undoing the protection vaccines provide to the people who get vaccinated.

"Anti-vaxxers" generally refers to people claiming vacccines cause autism/magnetism(?) etc. Most people support bodily autonomy (though most also think that choosing not to get vaccinated should come with additional responsibilities/restrictions so those who partake don't fuck everyone else over).

For my 2c on the comparison, anti vaxxers do more harm, but dark matter deniers are annoying as hell, because (IMHO) they debate with straw men. There's no church of LCDM, its just the current best set of theories until something else comes along. Alternate theories are routinely considered, attempts are being made to falsify or constrain LCDM all the time, and precisely nobody who actually knows anything claims we have any sort of comprehensive understanding of what's going on.

Seeing a bunch of armchair skeptics bash the theories as if they were mindless dogma is annoying AF.

> Unprotected individuals aren't undoing the protection vaccines provide to the people who get vaccinated.

This was never the main argument pro-mandate people had. The argument for mandates was that herd immunity would be compromised if a sufficient number of people chose to not to vaccinate thus risking the population which would not be able to get vaccinated such as the immunocompromised.

> Personal choice and body autonomy should be something we all support.

I think this is true up to a point, where that point is is what should be argued. I think if a disease were sufficiently deadly and had a long incubation period such that it would allow itself to spread rapidly, we'd all argue that vaccine mandates should be enforced.

For example, consider the following hypothetical. Suppose a reliable vaccine existed for virus X with similar side-effects to current COVID vaccines. Virus X has 95% mortality for children and is as infectious as COVID, i.e. very infectious. In this scenario, would you still be opposed to vaccine mandates? Even if it had a 100% mortality rate for children and/or were even more infectious?

> In this scenario, would you still be opposed to vaccine mandates?

There are no circumstances in which I would give up my right to bodily autonomy. You could simply tell me those data and I would stay away from others all on my own, like an adult, as was observed of most people in the UK during a pandemic which was not nearly as deadly, with vaccines not nearly as efficacious, nor as safe, nor with an at risk population as important (sorry, granddad) as in your example. Mandates are unnecessary and unjust.

> as was observed of most people in the UK during a pandemic which was not nearly as deadly

And in the US, there was a page (seemingly taken offline sometime in 2021, I haven't been able to find it since) that graphed cell phone mobility data over early 2020 and showed a sudden drop about a week before any lockdowns began. Those orders had no effect (there was no additional drop), people were already doing it on their own.

> I think this is true up to a point, where that point is what should be argued. I think if a disease were sufficiently deadly and had a long incubation period such that it would allow itself to spread rapidly, we'd all argue that vaccine mandates should be enforced.

I see your point. If we are talking theoreticals w.r.t. your following disease/vaccine combination I would like to add the following:

It only works when the vaccine has no side effects long or short term.

Suppose that the scenario happens and a vaccine is in place at light speed. We skip all the normal trials (through cutting them short, whatever) and begin issuing it. We find it to be very effective at what it does and we force everyone to get under penalty of law, placement in a camp, whatever. Pick your poison. What happens if the pharma companies make exactly one mistake?

Now, we can name the drug. Let's call it Thalidomide. Is it worth causing, for example, horrendous birth defects to preserve herd immunity? Now you have to choose between saving people now versus saving people in the future. We have no idea what effects mandatory vaccination will have in 10, 20, or 30 years. That is a very scary proposition given how widely issued it was. It's also strange the FDA said it would take 70 years to release all the data. I think it's naive to think that there won't be any effect. Perhaps not as extreme as thalidomide - but how do we know today?

If someone doesn't want to take a vaccine they should be allowed to not take it. They are not immune from consequences. Such as, barring from PRIVATE non-tax-funded establishments. But bodily autonomy should go unquestioned. No matter which way you cut it vaccine mandates are a strike against civil rights.

> It only works when the vaccine has no side effects long or short term. ... Now, we can name the drug. Let's call it Thalidomide. Is it worth causing, for example, horrendous birth defects to preserve herd immunity?

Which is why I specified side-effects which are similar to the COVID vaccine.

> What happens if the pharma companies make exactly one mistake? ... Let's call it Thalidomide.

Do you think existing modern medical regulations would permit such an incident? Can you name a more modern example?

> We skip all the normal trials (through cutting them short, whatever) and begin issuing it.

Suppose we impose the same requirements as vaccines on the past. I.e. trials go through normally.

> I think it's naive to think that there won't be any effect.

Can you name examples in which side effects were demonstrated in vaccines up to past a year? Vaccines are metabolized, the effects are only apparent as long as the vaccines contents are within the body.

> Such as, barring from PRIVATE non-tax-funded establishments. But bodily autonomy should go unquestioned. No matter which way you cut it vaccine mandates are a strike against civil rights.

Do you agree that bodily autonomy only extends up to the point at which harm could befall another individual?

To further examine your beliefs, suppose we create a simulation which can perfectly replicate the effects of a drug or vaccine on the human body. We can prove demonstratively that a drug will have no negative side-effects and that it will stop virus X. Are you still against vaccine mandates in this case?

> Do you agree that bodily autonomy only extends up to the point at which harm could befall another individual?

Hmm what would be the consequences of accepting that principle?

Yes. That's what dissidence means.

The problems arise when liars and the deluded adopt the label, but censoring can never be the answer - who decides "The Truth"?

I don’t know where your stance is but AFAIK dark matter is not an established fact. In fact, nobody has ever proved the existence of dark matter, not to mention describing its properties or even seen it. Very recently, a research paper made the round with the claim that in very low acceleration, the gravity force works more like MOND and not as Newton or Einstein described. One consequence of such observations is the inconsequence (no need) of dark matter, but the need for a new/modified law of gravity. Would you call such authors “denier”?

The very essence of science is to (able to) denied itself, once discrepancies between theory and observation appear. Every scientific theory in history has been and will be proved wrong, making place for a better one. Every! And that’s science. Otherwise, I’ll call it doctrine or religion.

I’m very much for fighting the climate change (and consequently believe in its anthropogenic cause). But I welcome anyone who can scientifically disprove it, meaning with facts, logic and falsifiable theory.

And so does the scientific community. Don't confuse "we need to express the current best consensus when speaking to a public that is not sufficiently well-versed in the subject for fine nuance" with "we're not willing to consider alternative theories".

Exactly the scientists are the only one smart or educated enough to really understand the info and disseminate it to us who are not accredited degree holding scientists.

> people who claim life begins at conception

You mean, biologists and zoologists? Yes, we need those people.

> vaccine harm advocates

At least we need a honest discussion instead of obviously biased propaganda. I did no vax because of just biasness on any type of mass media, and now the vax is just not needed any more for anything. But I am totally OK about other vaccines which discussion is not so greedily (I mean not just sources with 1M+ of subscribers but proably 100+ ones too) are being controlled by big brother.

> anthropogenic climate change “deniers”

They do it because of money, we can not ban them because it means banning most of our economy.

> people who claim life begins at conception

We can not ban them because this is what average Joe thinks. And average Joe's average teachers.

> dark matter “deniers,” and big bang “deniers,”

This is too complicated topic to be understandable by masses but the opposite is to ban people who are honestly wrong.

PS I clicked to your post to vouch it, because I consider your point as important too, but all I can not do is just upvote, somehow a vouch option is not available here for me.

I think vouch only shows up when it's [flagged][dead] or [dead], not when it's only [flagged]

I asked a rhetorical question and tried to make it balanced by giving a wide range of examples. Unfortunately that just made most people who read it upset. But I'm glad some readers agree it's worth thinking about.

Gee if only we hadn't just spent the COVID years telling everyone not to dissent on The Science.

The downvotes are interesting here, it's amazing the cognitive dissidence that was created by the mass belief of being on 'the righteous side' of an issue: agreeing that dissidence in science is needed, but not if it's covid related, even though the same distrusted actors are involved.

crazy, aint it?

Tribalism is a hell of a drug.

This is the wrong take. There was science on both sides. The side that "wins" has the political backing. More news organizations need to back of the politics and debate the science.

Is "there was science on both sides" the new "there are very fine people on both sides?"

It's not conspiracy to note many actual qualified scientists were barred from making any claims contrary to the official stance. As we witnessed in late 2021, 2022 these same scientists went from pariahs to the tip of the spear when the government let up it's censorship program. There are cases being heard right now against major social media companies on their collusion with government officials to push a narrative. Unfortunately, these scientists could only be heard on legitimate conspiracy platforms, thereby undermining their credibility further with the public despite the USG promoting it's own flavor of misinformation via the 4th branch.

For all of 2020 "science" was "agreeing with the dominant viewpoint" rather than "questioning everything, gathering evidence, and presenting contrary views".

You'd have to have had your head in the sand the last few years to miss how quickly the narrative opened up. It was dizzying. It would appear once the media found a new darling (the Ukraine war) the silencing of dissent in science slowly let up as well.

There are dissidents but power corrupted the scientific community. There's no price to being wrong for powerful people.

Recent relevant take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Ve8PnHHT4

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