[HN Gopher] Constructive and obsessive criticism in science
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Constructive and obsessive criticism in science
Author : fnubbly
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-08-12 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They are mostly focused on medical science, but they do mention
| the precedent from climate change. We seem to have moved past a
| lot of that, or at least into a new phase, but as far as I'm
| aware no-one has even been held accountable for the lies spread
| around that topic. Is there any mechanims to do so?
|
| All those scientists hounded for 'faking' climate change. Did
| they ever get compensated for that? If not then we've basically
| created a situation where it's fairly cheap to harass people who
| do science that will affect your bottom line.
|
| Given the recent Alex Jones ruling, I can't help notice a
| parallel there. Is an online mob of people with mental problems
| the best new way to censor information and discourage scientific
| oversight?
| fallingknife wrote:
| How much of this is actually criticism of actual science vs
| politics justified as "science?" I have seen very little of the
| former and a lot of the latter. And the massive jump in 2020 due
| to covid makes sense. Many decisions made by the government, and
| publicly justified as "science" were clearly politically
| motivated, and could not even be said to be scientifically
| supported. e.g. covid checks crossing borders when covid was
| rampant on both sides. And political leaders not only justified
| their decisions as scientific, but also implied that this made
| them unassailable by the public and even called for censorship of
| opposing views under the guise of "misinformation." e.g. the
| whole lab leak controversy. If our leaders continue to act like
| this, they can expect the "obsessive" criticism to continue.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > were clearly politically motivated, and could not even be
| said to be scientifically supported. e.g. covid checks crossing
| borders when covid was rampant on both sides
|
| Travellers are both highly motivated to lie about their current
| covid status (e.g. plane tickets, hotels, vacation days) and
| also very likely to be actively moving through and about
| multiple communities instead of quarantining on arrival. This
| should never have been a political issue because it's an easy,
| obvious testing checkpoint with clear scientific support.
| fallingknife wrote:
| But this is pointless when the virus is already endemic on
| both sides of the border. A few imported cases is an
| irrelevant drop in the ocean of domestic cases you already
| have.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| skymer wrote:
| It seems as though the authors of this paper were vocal critics
| of the government response to Covid-19, and faced the full
| "obsessive" wrath of criticism (although, unlike many others,
| they don't seem to have lost their jobs). The same thing happens
| to non-conformist scientists in other highly politicized areas
| like man-made global warming. I think it is similar to what
| happened to Galileo 400 years ago.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Vocal critics of which government response, and in which
| direction (too little or too much response)?
|
| All the way through I felt like they might have been talking
| about anti-vaxx 'scientists', especially when they mentioned
| 'cancelling' and cited someone who was very anti-lockdown, but
| they managed to keep it general enough I couldn't be sure which
| side they ware taking.
| skymer wrote:
| I think the authors feel the government response (lockdowns,
| vax mandates, etc) was too strong. But the article makes it
| hard to determine whose criticism of which scientists is
| considered "obsessive".
| bee_rider wrote:
| We likely disagree with them on the specific issue if that
| is the case (IMO the lockdowns were insufficient, not too
| strong) but I think we've all seen anecdotally that science
| is being drawn too much into the public debate. And their
| altmetric table seems to point to something quantifiable.
|
| Science should serve an advisory role in public decision
| making, not act as a load-bearing structure. Science
| involves argument, full consensus is never achieved, and
| "it's only a model, really." (maybe science-communicators
| need to start repeating this like investing companies --
| "investment involves risk, past returns don't guarantee
| blah blah blah...")
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| So you have to decide which tribe he's in before you can
| decide if you agree?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Things have context. Without that context you have no real
| idea what you are agreeing with or supporting. If someone
| is intentionally hiding that context then it's probably for
| a bad reason.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| As opposed to just responding to what they said. Or not
| saying anything, if it's incomplete. OK.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I think you are talking about inter-science criticism, where
| the entrenched science community is often hostile to the
| outliers in the science community.
|
| This article appears to be talking about the attack on the
| science community from outsiders, both political and otherwise,
| with or without support of members of the community.
| mortenlwk wrote:
| This is a condition of human social life. Tribes protect their
| area of interest, the domain in which they dominate is what
| provides them bread, butter, and prestige. But it is more than
| that nowadays, it is the primary identity marker for many. In
| some sense this is needed in a civilization to enable the
| scientific endeavour, but I feel like the gravitational pull that
| reverts to mean, has always, well yeah, reverted, is a function
| of the cost of information movement. Today crazy ideas can gain
| traction in days, rather than decades, and I fear that some of
| these narrative bubbles are beyond pulling back in.
| swatcoder wrote:
| For those interested in this topic but who would like to see it
| explored with greater remove from present controversies, there's
| a ton of great academic writing from the mid-20th century by
| historians and philosophers interested in looking at science
| primarily as a sociological phenomenon with cultural consequences
| rather than just as an epistemic tool for making inferences.
|
| Among many others, Thomas Kuhn makes for a great introduction to
| stepping back and looking at science from that sociological
| perspective, and Paul Feyerabend -- respected but controversial -
| anticipated exactly the sort of challenges we see surfacing
| today.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > the critics often lack field-specific skills and technical
| expertise
|
| > (in "diagnostic criteria") Lack of track record of field-
| specific skills and sufficient field-specific technical expertise
|
| So it's a closed club: "You're not one of us, so you're not
| allowed to criticize us"
|
| > (in "diagnostic criteria") Argumentum ad populum: claiming,
| without evidence, that most scientists disagree or believe the
| work is harmful
|
| Almost everyone on both sides seems to do this. Claiming that
| there's a "scientific consensus" usually only means that contrary
| views are refused by the leading journals.
|
| Real consensus only emerges over years or decades. The big bang
| theory only became consensus when all the other theories had
| failed.
| lukeschwartz wrote:
| The title should be "Scientific harassment"; obsessively
| criticizing science is how we do science.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It took a while for the author to move from a very abstact
| concept to the concrete example, and that was Covid-19 (and only
| Covid-19). However, there's also a good argument that the
| scientific and medical experts flubbed certain aspects of the
| global response and investigation of the pandemic in many
| regards. Note also that failures and errors stand out more than
| successes do, that's just a common human social phenomenon.
|
| These problems can be plausibly grouped into (1) investigation of
| the origin, (2) effectiveness of masking, and (3) effectiveness
| of the vaccines.
|
| With respect to the origin, it's plausible that the Wuhan lab
| (funded in part by the US government via Ecohealth alliance) was
| the point origin of the pandemic. The natural zoonotic origin
| theory, however, was trumpted by the experts for months as the
| only possible explanation, and critics were silenced and targeted
| by the establishment media and leading academics in the field.
| Currently, lab leak theories are of three types: (a) the lab
| collected a wild-type virus from a remote region (southern
| China/border perhaps) and it escaped from the lab, (b) the lab
| cultivated that virus in bats and genetically modified mice,
| which increased its virulence via serial passage, and then it
| escaped, and (c) the lab modified the viral genome directly by
| inserting sequences into the cell-binding domain (the furin
| issue) using a CRISPR strategy (developed in the USA some years
| previously) which allowed it to jump easily to humans. Most
| rational people disregard claims that this was some deliberate
| release. Refusal to investigate all this immediately was a major
| failure of the scientific establishment. See the book 'Viral' by
| Ridley & Chan for a comprehensive discussion.
|
| With respect to masking, there was a lot of contradictory
| messaging along with a lack of any convincing studies on
| effectiveness, plus a lot of politicization of the issue. The
| most solid conclusion is that people infected with respiratory
| pathogens should wear masks to prevent infecting others. Note
| that for many years, this has been the social norm in, for
| example, Japan. Note also that handwashing is just as important
| for stopping transmission, but for some reason that never became
| a political 'red-vs-blue' flashpoint.
|
| Finally, the effectiveness of the vaccines was oversold. The
| rapid rise of mutations was certainly a confounding factor (i.e.
| the vaccines may have been more effective against initial
| strains), but they were promoted as polio/smallpox/MMR type
| vaccines, i.e. once vaccinated chances of getting infected and
| spreading the disease were supposed to be essentially zero. It
| turns out the vaccines are more like flu shots, only partially
| effective. Vaccinated people can be asymptomatic carriers and
| spreaders of Covid-19. This created quite a bit of distrust, and
| may have impacted the other issue, claims about prevalence and
| severity of side effects of vaccination (smallpox vaccine had
| more severe side effects, but was also much more effective,
| so...). There's also many suspicions about the profit motive of
| the vaccine manufacturers, particularly with respect to pushing
| the boosters and the necessity of vaccinating the under-18 and
| young-adult population. Additionally, the effectiveness of post-
| infection 'natural immunity' was never really examined in the
| context of the necessity of vaccination for such individuals.
|
| The scientific and medical response to Covid wasn't all bad, of
| course, people did a lot of hard work in an effort to stop it,
| but these failures and errors certainly stand out. There was a
| kind of paternalistic flavor to the public messaging as well, as
| if people were too stupid to handle the facts and complexities,
| which led to distrust. Also the 'stay in your lane' theme of this
| article is a bit offbase, you don't need to be a working expert
| in immunology and virology to be capable of seeing these problems
| (my working academic background is in microbiology and molecular
| biology, for example).
| acenes wrote:
| Ioannidis is just butthurt that he has been criticized for being
| wrong https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-
| to-j...
| sarcher wrote:
| Ya, he just can't stop being mad. He published another paper
| back in February about how twitter is the reason people don't
| like his ideas:
| https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e052891.responses
|
| I linked to the response sections instead of the paper because
| the paper is boring.
| trebbble wrote:
| Holy crap. The links from these couple posts incline me to
| believe the guy's fallen into "safe to ignore for the rest of
| his life" territory, whatever decent work he may have done
| earlier.
|
| I don't get what's with folks getting stuff related to covid
| very wrong--which is fine! Practically everyone was wrong
| about it at one point or another!--but then doubling down on
| their position when it's crystal clear they were wrong,
| instead of owning up to it and moving on. They do it to the
| point of completely wrecking their reputations and making
| having-been-wrong-about-covid-but-being-in-denial their
| entire public persona, as in this case. Why? Why do that?
|
| The bit where he was insulting the _appearance_ of a grad
| student, at length, _in a goddamn peer reviewed paper_ --I
| mean, damn dude, how do you not realize you're fucking up
| when you start heading down that path? What must be going
| wrong with someone for them to look back at that writing and
| go, "yep, nailed it, time to submit, this is definitely gonna
| convince people"?
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