Good! The election is already stressful enough without any bleating over trying to prevent every legally cast vote from being counted.
242 karma · joined April 20, 2020
The system worked here and it's manufactured outrage from the conservative tabloid you linked to over some random academic drama. The academic organization laughed off the letter (which in reality was just a google doc signed by 600 unverified people, most of whom aren't even claiming to be serious scholars, but are like random students on the internet looking for a laugh) and literally nothing happened. The news here amounts to "so-and-so wrote an angry letter." Not really worth the pixels it was printed on.
> Likewise we don’t have to work hard to find gibberish accepted by the governing processes either
I don't think you fully understand the nuance of the "Grievance studies affair." I don't blame you because up until this year when I heard a really good explanation of it I was also rooting for the authors. However, now that I fully understand what happened and why the papers were accepted I completely understand the ire of academics who were upset at the media reaction to it. If you have time, please listen to episode 70 "Doubling-blinding dog balls" of the podcast "Everything Hertz" (the podcast is about how to fix the reproducibility crisis).
To briefly summarize: the reason the journals accepted the articles wasn't because their fields are so poisoned by ideological extremism that they will accept any crap that confirms their pre-existing beliefs. That's the political narrative of certain reporting on what happened. What really happened is that the reviewers recommended to accept because the papers contained useful DATA despite their batshit crazy conclusions. In fact, the reviewers that have since spoken out did criticize the questionable interpretation and often gave constructive criticism to broaden it, but recommended to accept because of the data.
Take the case of the "dog rape" study. The body of the work was that the authors (fraudulently) claimed that they had collected like 1k hours worth of observational data where they sat in a dog park and compared owners reaction to male dogs humping female versus male dogs humping male dogs as they looked at different cultural factors. If people really do have a statistically significant difference in how they respond to their male dog humping another male dog versus humping a female dog, could that tell us something about how human male-male relationships are viewed by our culture from the lens of animals being anthropomorphized by their owners? It's not my research interest, but especially with 100k hours worth of observation, that sounds like it could be some really useful data to somebody out there and is worth publishing. I think that it's worth publishing even with an interpretation that you object to because an expert in the field can come to their own conclusions.
The true irony, however, of bringing it up while claiming to pro-"diversity of thought" is that you should be applauding the journals in this instance. They disagreed with the the wacky interpretations that the authors provided, but published anyways because they felt that it wasn't their place to change it. The same would happen for whatever your favorite right leaning topic is they had also lied about legitimate and useful data on that article. Diversity of thought is exactly what happened here and you can't and ask for voices that you interpret as politically left of center to be censored unless "diversity of thought" is really just code for "make science agree more with my ideologies."
Also, journals aren't some sort of "governing body" for science. Science is decentralized and there like a million independent journals out there that publish what they want. There's also the preprint servers I was talking about with basically no moderation (outside of plagiarism and blatant fraud). You can also just go ahead and write blog posts about your science and if its valuable, then people will listen. This happens in CS and ML research.
> I certainty think they are subject to political bias
They really are not and that conflation between political interpretations of data and serious analysis are part of the problem. Right or left, everybody can agree whether 2 + 2 = 4. Your reporting of the output of your instruments doesn't depend on who you vote for. Even in cases of the wage gap (I don't have a horse in this race and so I'm not going to dive into details about it) everyone can agree that "x-analysis" on "y-dataset" gives "z-output". You can even agree that "x-analysis" has "M and N" deep issues that make it unsuited for this type of data in a consistent way that doesn't depend on how political the data you are dealing with is. It isn't up to debate and science has nothing to do with what you believe is and is not amplified by the media. If experts aren't going for your favourite analysis technique, then it probably has to do with serious flaws in the method and I'm going to guess that the reason you like that statistical technique has more to do with getting results you agree based on your biases with than performing serious science.
Look closely at what you perceive as scrutiny being applied unevenly. I'd hazard a guess that these "facts" are exactly the ones being pushed by partisan media (not scientists) with an agenda to push. You probably are seeing scientists constantly disagreeing your media outlets because its exactly those outlets that are choosing deeply flawed analysis techniques to support their ideological opinions and then getting criticized for it. Its all projection. These pundit-types know that if they were in the place of these scientists and were studying a contentious topic that they would bend and distort their analysis to fit whatever narrative they are trying to push. Probably because that's literally their day job. Because they know that they would bend the truth, they just assume with no evidence that this is what's happening in science and then complain on their shows that their conservative voices are being censored.
You're not the victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy to warp reality to its will. The head of my research group is a deacon in the catholic church. I don't know his political opinions (because science is apolitical) but I'd hazard a guess that it leans more than a little bit to the right of center. There's no broad culture of suppressing your ideologies and the whole "conservative victimization" thing is a political narrative and is being pushed really hard right now because there's an election. Besides, if you really think there's a lack of conservative viewpoints in science then stop sitting around and complaining about it and just go do science. Nobody is stopping you and you can even publish on pre-print sites without affiliation.
It's all projection. You just can't imagine people adding reasonable context to contentious information because you know that if you were in that position that you would abuse it like with your misleading teacher claim. Nobody is out to get you and no you are not a victim of some sort of liberal conspiracy. It won't hurt you if you get an occasional dose of reality injected back into your brain if you decide to browse the Wayback Machine during the next Fox News commercial break.
There's a reason we trust experts. It's because they have worked on whatever problem you're trying to solve for like the past decade and have already discovered all of the wrong ways to attack it for you.
That is so wrong that I'm having a hard time finding where to begin.
First off, you are literally spouting off an existing political narrative which is intended to discredit decided science that opposes certain political viewpoints. IE, you shouldn't trust science because it's biased against your politics and conducted by people who are more concerned with not liking your political ideology than they are with propagating fact.
Have you ever gone through peer review or are you just spouting off something that appeals to your political sensibilities? I have published and peer review is the most formal and clinical procedure in the whole scientific process. It is usually conducted by three anonymous scientific rivals who have literally no incentive get your article through. Because of that, there are strict rules and norms about what is acceptable to say in these sorts of things (moderated by apolitical (I shouldn't even have to say that since this is science not politics) editors, plural for contentious topics). Any hint of political bias would get picked out immediately and the reviewer would get the boot. If you aren't satisfied then there is even a process to appealing to the editor's boss and so on. You're talking about like six strangers with competing interests that would all need to collude to force a political viewpoint into an article.
The peer review process is also just that: a process. The reviewers don't have ultimate power over you and if they make a bad faith claim for political reasons, then you get to call them out on it in your response. I actually know someone that was told he was too inexperienced to write an article (a pretty BS criticism). When he just wrote a terse reply telling the reviewer to not appeal to authority the editor accepted the paper and ignored the criticism. Imagine what would happen if you told the editor that they shouldn't accept the paper because it disagrees with politician so and so or something?
Even if your article gets rejected, there's typically like a dozen different journals that could equally well accept the article (but with less prestige possibly). It's not uncommon for articles that aren't about a politically contentious topic like masks to bounce from journal to journal until it's accepted on like the fifth submission. It isn't because of some sort of spooky political censorship, it's because sometimes there's legitimate criticism to be had with a manuscript.
If your article is so bad that you can't even get it included in lower ranked journal then nobody is stopping you from just releasing it. You can always dump it on a preprint server or even just host it from your own website and scientists can use it if they consider it acceptable. Nobody is censoring this information.
There is no such thing as an elite cabal of scientists who are suppressing political ideologies in peer review. This idea and the narrative that facts and science are something that are optional and have a political bias is IMO one of the most toxic ideas in today's politics.
That is literally what they are doing. They are literally linking to context and other articles.
People can make up their own minds about Wayback Machine's content. They added even more information to help make up your mind on content that expresses a contentious opinion. That super helpful since I want to see as many sides as possible! Why would you want to censor that context unless you want to manipulate people into believe blatantly false misinformation?
A more accurate comparison that controls for location, culture, political structure, economic situation, etc is between Sweden and the other Nordic countries where it had both higher mortality and worse economic outcomes than its sister nations. Carefully consider your preexisting biases when it comes to interpreting something as complex as the respond of entire nations to an unprecedented pandemic.
Maybe Argentinians just refuse to listen to their government? Maybe environmental factors or lack of infrastructure made it way worse down there and it would be even worse if it weren't for the lockdowns?
I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it and would caution people against confirmation bias (the article's tag-line is literally "as expected")
WHAT??? Looks like the writers decided to bring back a reference to two seasons ago.
[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/tucker-...
I am baffled by everyone here talking about algorithmic platforms like Facebook and Twitter as if they are a bastion of free speech. They are designed to promote only the most engaging content (IE most outrageous and in some cases literal misinformation meant to feed on your biases).
These services are not a free marketplace of ideas, they are companies which are designed to make money. The more eyeballs on screens, the more money they make, and it is not well reasoned discussion with a diverse representation of viewpoints that keeps people glued to their devices.
Consider how you respond to someone making an incorrect statement on Twitter. You reply to them, and by replying to them you amplify the audience of the incorrect tweet. The fact that your correction causes misinformation to spread isn't a bug, it is exactly how the platform was intended to work, because it causes "engagement."
"The solution is more free speech" doesn't work here because the platforms don't have free speech and never did to begin with. All people are asking is for those platforms which currently promote outrage above organic content to sort themselves out. Not any of these strawmen about creating a "bureau of truth" or "state censorship boards" and certainly not notions of making an American KGB which I think I saw mentioned somewhere.
I have no idea of the best way to do this. Treat the negative effects of algorithmic platforms as some sort of externality? Develop strict regulation on what types of methods to keep people hooked on social media are considered ethical? Similar to how drugs or gambling are already regulated? Just straight up ban this type of business model?
It's going to be one of the big questions of the next decade. Even something like a user generated flag where if enough people press it, a tweet has a big warning over it saying "this is a contested matter" or something would be better than the current situation.
It makes having a well balanced discussion of the news difficult when articles that offend some political sensibilities have such a high barrier to entry in terms of how much they get flagged that they have no chance to survive in the first 50 posts (COVID related or otherwise).
To expand it further, I would argue stuff like Twitter and Facebook that optimize for engagement are already not free speech since they are designed for only the most outrageous (and likely false) content to flourish.
- Inflexibility in when people may vote; The types of jobs people have access to has a racial bias. Black people tend to have jobs where they literally aren't allowed to leave during they which means they can't stop by the polling location during off hours. This can make polling places deal with larger peaks in predominantly black areas.
- Partisan resource allocation; predominantly black regions tend to lean democrat and so in republican areas they may receive fewer resources to deal with voting.
- Voter ID laws; These also have a racial lean and can clog up regions where they are enacted. Minorities also tend to have a more difficult time gaining access to IDs for voting and so people may have to come back multiple times or be turned away.
- State voting laws; Regions vary with who has access to early voting, vote by mail, etc. These tend to have a racial bias as well.
Sadly, I don't see it happening without a change in our political landscape. The Senate has been actively blocking legislation to restore the voting rights act for the past 315 days [2]. This is the legislation introduced in the 1960's to prevent racial discrimination in elections at the height of the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, enforcement has been stripped out over the past few decades making it completely toothless. The tragedy, is that the legislation to restore its power isn't even being blocked because of discussions and legislative differences that can be worked through. It is being blocked by the majority leader just refusing to even hear or vote about it.
[1] https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/study-rac...
[2] https://www.axios.com/john-lewis-voting-rights-senate-5fb8d3...
The whole story is that this is Hunter Biden's laptop, but in reality some random dude dropped it off and the owner said that "he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it." [1].
Then, it gets passed off to Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani back at the start of the year when Guiliani is already trying to get Ukraine to stir up a story on Hunter Biden. They then sit on it for most of the year and release it 20 days before the election.
Something like this, even as absurd as it is, will take weeks to thoroughly debunk. Meanwhile, people are literally in lines voting and stuff like this has an effect. That's probably why it was released right now, because even though it's most likely false, by the time it has flown around the internet unimpeded the damage will have already been done.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
In normal circumstances, that doesn't matter. Talk about it, let it fly around the internet and then in a week or so we'll hear the authoritative rebuttal.
However, we are 20 days from the election. People are literally lined up and voting as we speak.
If this was published at any other time (and the material for the story has apparently existed since December) the public and the professional media would have had time to scrutinize it, discuss its shortcomings, etc.
But, as Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." We can't do that and being complicit in spreading misinformation in the middle of an election is, I'm sure, still a strong memory that social media companies have from the 2016 election.
My guess as to how this will go is that it will take a week or two to authoritatively discredit the article, but by then, if left unchecked, the article will have already done its damage. The cynic in me says that the originators of the article already know that there isn't much truth here and that this is the point of releasing it while people are voting.
Edit: and also the fact that it was written in collaboration with the President's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Just like there are good faith arguments for the proposal, there are also good faith arguments against it.