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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

> You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.

No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.

The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.

Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.

All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.

You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.

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> The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.

See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".

If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?

I guess if you think the very idea of science is invalid, the idea that people can study and learn a lot about a topic and discuss it using their knowledge, then perhaps your comment makes sense.

Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?

If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.

Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?

That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."

Everyone has the right to question scientific findings.

If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.

Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.

Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.

*: not "you" personally; the general "you"

Yeah, I agree that sucks. If you go back to my first reply in the thread, I said:

Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.

Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients.

Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it".

I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.

Wegener was technically a meteorologist but his PhD was in Astronomy and he had lots of training in physics. He (among others) noticed that the shapes of landmasses seemed to complement each other. He had a great deal of observational evidence. and he really wasn't this lone figure crusading for drift- that's partly because when we write narratives of science, people like to hear about lone rangers who overturn paradigms, when really, most scientific paradigms are overturned by a large number of people collecting evidence that supports the new theory.

We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else.

There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).

Your comment wins the internet, as they say, and as far as I'm concerned. Your three examples of scientific tenacity are wonderful. We all benefited from these heroic efforts in the face of dogmatic establishment Science. And your comment reminds us of how valuable that lone "voice from the wilderness" can become.

I can add one even more pertinent example:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/after-being-demoted-a...

A lot of lives were saved during the pandemic because of the efforts of a biochemist (Katalin Karikó) and an immunologist (Drew Weissman), despite their research not being embraced or encouraged by the scientific establishment.

The Trump 1.0 CDC, NIH, and private industries did an amazing job delivering the Covid vaccines in time to save millions of lives.

The Trump 2.0 CDC/NIH is a farcical rebound romcom which I can't watch. It's not romantic. It's not tilting at windmills. It's not funny at all.

Kids playing doctor with our country.

I'm not saying I agree with them. I'm saying that they're not the ones committing the original sin, and that I can empathize - I understand why they feel betrayed.

And these are the examples people bring up eeeeevery time they want to claim that we must listen to the cranks and the nutjobs! Think of all the amazing, important science we would be missing if we didn't!!!

But that's poor logic.

Those few instances are, by far, the exception. They're the ones you know about because they are so exceptional. But they are one in a million. Literally. Possibly even rarer.

And, frankly, your argument doesn't even hold up if they were more common. Because what's the common feature of those, that you yourself highlight? They were mocked. They were ignored. They were laughed at.

And yet, their ideas still caught on, because they were right. Only because they were right.

What this tells me is that, even if we do fully shut the cranks and the conspiracy theorists out of the scientific conversation, the one in a million (or hundred million) that actually find something real will get heard, because their ideas will prove to be right. They may not get credit for them—they might, instead, be credited to an actual scientist in the field who heard it two years later, from a friend of a friend of a friend with no clear attribution, tried it out, and found that it worked—but the truth will out.

I don't even know how to understand the latter part of your reply. I don't understand how you can argue that we should FULLY (and I take that word from you) shut out those who appear to be cranks because, through some magic, their argument will win out because it has some magical property that will make it heard despite the only one speaking it being gagged.

> See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".

> If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?

If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood.

It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."

If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian.

Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.

My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.

But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...

Whatever else I might be arguing about here, let me first express how much I HATE those headlines and video titles with "destroys", "obliterates", etc. I'd much rather see something about "coming to a common understanding".

So yeah, I hate those guys. But consider this in a completely abstract framework, stripped of all practical issues. Picture the debate as a number line, so any given proposal can be represented as a line going off in opposite directions. The origin represents the status quo, and the proposed policy is some point off to the right (or the left, if you like that better). As a simple matter of mathematics, then if we only consider answers in the interval [0, proposal], then we will only ever move in the direction of the proposal; perhaps slowly, but inevitably. And that will happen even if the proposal is dead wrong.

The only way to guard against that inexorable pull in what's potential bad territory is to entertain conversation in the whole interval of [-proposal, proposal] (or at least some degree in the negative direction, anyway).

We must always entertain the possibility that not only is the proposal wrong, but is fundamentally contrary to what's really needed. Failure to do this leads to what we see in our modern regulatory regime: a host of rules that are actively digging the whole deeper, even while we tell ourselves that we're fixing the problem. (There are countless examples, but I hesitate to cite any specifics because I want to keep the argument abstract and not get hung up in other partisan bickering.)

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