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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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

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.

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.

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.

> count math as science

It's not. They're both offshoots of philosophy, but they're distinct from eachother.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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-...

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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!!!!)

> 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?

vermectin and hydroxychloroquine still are not correct treatment of covid-19 now.

>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

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.

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.

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

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