[HN Gopher] We need scientific dissidents
___________________________________________________________________
We need scientific dissidents
Author : Georgelemental
Score : 328 points
Date : 2023-08-11 23:32 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chronicle.com)
| [deleted]
| vGPU wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| 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.
| tbalsam wrote:
| 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.
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| 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
| Loquebantur wrote:
| 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.
| b59831 wrote:
| [dead]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Hmm... try that on HN, even with sources and quoting verbatim,
| if you don't fall in the party ideological echo-chamber, you
| _will_ be flagged. Science be damned. Dissent be damned.
|
| This is the worst aspect of HN and the most ironic one. It's
| impossible to claim HN is a place for rational arguments.
| toomim wrote:
| Can someone explain why this article is being flagged?
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Ironic, isn't it.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| undefinedland wrote:
| [flagged]
| mdp2021 wrote:
| How can we instead defend the legitimacy of a submission?
| mauvia wrote:
| Users with high karma get access to a "vouch" button.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| You had me find an old post of Sam Altman as I searched
| information about "vouch":
| https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/two-hn-announcements/
| tptacek wrote:
| For comments, not for posts.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| toomim wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks.
| batch12 wrote:
| I think it's because people flag articles that start the same
| tired, tired arguments that we see everywhere else on the
| internet.
| claytongulick wrote:
| 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?
| batch12 wrote:
| Maybe these hypothetical people want to keep this site
| different? Or maybe I'm overthinking things again.
| claytongulick wrote:
| 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| nope, they flagged it overthere too.
| batch12 wrote:
| Maybe lots and lots of people are tired of the same
| arguments?
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| MrPatan wrote:
| No.
|
| You and people like you destroyed free speech and destroyed
| whatever trust was left in science, medicine, governments and
| media.
|
| It sure wasn't 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 you think you have a good reason to
| violate them, you're wrong.
|
| Don't break stuff that works, you're not smart enough to put it
| back together.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points within the site
| guidelines and especially please don't cross into personal
| attack.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| MrPatan wrote:
| Fair enough. Can't delete or edit this one anymore, ah
| well.
| [deleted]
| MrPatan wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| didibus wrote:
| > 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.
| MrPatan wrote:
| > 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.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >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
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| 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?
| jackmott42 wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > "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.
| finite_depth wrote:
| [flagged]
| metalspot wrote:
| Pharmaceutical Company: Vaccines are safe and effective
|
| Concerned Parent: Then why do you need immunity from product
| liability laws to sell them?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| By crackpot you mean tabloids which are then amplified by
| journalists as low hanging fruit for driving rage induced
| engagement.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| "Crackpot" in your situation is factually correct.
|
| I took the vaccine knowing the risks, I don't know why
| someone should be humiliated as a "crackpot" for voicing
| those concerns.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "voicing concerns" ... a variant on "just asking
| questions".
|
| The problem is voicing concerns in a way that deliberately
| sidesteps the efforts and explanations of the, if you like,
| mainstream scientific community regarding why those
| concerns are misplaced, wrong or simply exaggerated. You
| voice concerns, concerns are addressed in various way,
| someone else or you revoices the concerns.
|
| Now, of course, you can argue that your concerns have not
| been addressed. But that requires a new "voicing", one that
| takes into consideration the way that others sought to
| address your concerns. If you simply restate your concerns,
| you're not behaving in good faith, and after some point,
| "being humiliated as a crackpot" starts to look
| appropriate.
|
| It is true, for example, that an asteroid could hit earth
| at any time, and quite easily wipe out most life on the
| planet. That is an absolutely true statement. It is
| probably even worth doing a little bit to try to reduce or
| mitigate the risks associated.
|
| But continuing to insist that everyone needs to rearrange
| their way of thinking about life, the universe and
| everything based on this true statement, that this is the
| only way to think about asteroids and the risks of
| collision, that everyone who points out the demonstrable
| interval between planetary-scale asteroid collisions is
| hiding the truth - that's all pretty problematic.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| What are you hoping to accomplish by labeling someone you
| think is acting in bad faith to be deserving of
| humiliation?
|
| I've never met an irrational person that acts the way you
| describe. They'll usually go quiet (if you engage in
| debate and address all their points), shut down and then
| subsequently repeat the same affirmations.
|
| My reaction to someone being humiliated is to listen to
| them a lot more carefully than I would otherwise, because
| more often than not in history these are the people that
| could drive our morality in the future.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Sometimes you do indeed just want them to go quiet, at
| least in one or more particular contexts.
|
| And yes, many humiliations are unjustified and counter-
| productive. But so is a refusal to engage with an actual
| argument and/or a refusal to engage in falsification.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| You may never convince someone to be rational but you may
| convince the interlocutors.
|
| Otherwise you're creating martyrs. Everyone has a valid
| point, even flat earthers.
|
| https://youtu.be/f8DQSM-b2cc
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't agree with Sabine. What I do agree with are the
| scientists near the end of the flat earth documentary
| (the one where the flat earthers' own experiments fail,
| but they can't take it in) who say that we should be
| trying to harness and (gently) direct the clear
| _scientific_ curiosity that flat earthers have.
|
| That is, they have no point at all, but they do have
| curiosity, and we should welcome and nurture that.
| fasterik wrote:
| Because the concerns around vaccines are rarely
| proportional to the risks. For example, the likelihood of
| getting myocarditis from the vaccine is 1 in 15,000. That
| is roughly the same as the likelihood of being struck by
| lightning at least once during your life. You also have a 1
| in 10,000 chance of dying in a car crash in any given year.
| I doubt the people who are so worried about the vaccine are
| going around worrying about driving a car or being struck
| by lightning, and even if they were, it wouldn't be
| rational to do so.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| They still have not presented a lie or an irrational
| thought by pointing out these risks.
|
| I don't think it's productive to assume someone is
| irrational and stupid by association.
|
| Lottery tickets are an accepted fact of life despite
| being just as stupid.
| fasterik wrote:
| _> They still have not presented a lie or an irrational
| thought by pointing out these risks._
|
| That's not true. In the context of these discussions, the
| risks are almost always brought up as evidence that you
| shouldn't get vaccinated, or at least that we should
| seriously question the vaccines.
|
| To see why it's irrational, we just have to compare the
| probability of dying from the vaccine to the probability
| of dying from COVID unvaccinated. The data overwhelmingly
| support getting vaccinated.
|
| _> I don't think it's productive to assume someone is
| irrational and stupid by association._
|
| I never called anyone stupid. Smart people are irrational
| all the time. Irrationality means having beliefs that
| aren't in your own interest or that contradict your other
| beliefs.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| I concede this is a thought experiment that rarely
| happens in real life because yes, most people do use
| these data points to support something other than "risks
| exist".
| coding123 wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| Is "there was science on both sides" the new "there are very
| fine people on both sides?"
| zer8k wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| wesapien wrote:
| 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
| matt123456789 wrote:
| | sed 's/scientific //g'
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| toomim wrote:
| 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."
| logicchains wrote:
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| > 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| > "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)>>.
| saikia81 wrote:
| step one stop putting publicly funded studies behind
| paywalls. Or give journalists more access to the material.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| finite_depth wrote:
| 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.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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.
| gochi wrote:
| Why do you think they should be free of consequences for
| their actions?
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| A lot of people are in this situation.
| stonogo wrote:
| 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?
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| It is definitely life-destroying if one is wedded to a
| specific industry or academia. Certainly career ending
| for some jobs.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "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".
| hotdogscout wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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."
| passwordoops wrote:
| What's the problem with how the author brought up Kuhn?
|
| Just because others might invoke him improperly makes Kuhn
| taboo now?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "taboo" is your word.
| passwordoops wrote:
| 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?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| [flagged]
| Vecr wrote:
| Why do you think mentioning Thomas Kuhn is "ritual" and
| "cliche" at all? I don't think I've ever heard that name
| before, and even after searching the text of the article
| for it I don't understand the issue. You write quite
| rationally on risk so I know you can explain the context
| of your statements if you want to, why did you not do so
| this time?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What do you expect me to say? Stanford:
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
|
| calls his book "one of the most cited academic books of
| all time."
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008716514576
|
| Maybe you're not tired of reading his name and don't
| consider it lazy writing. I do though.
| agentgumshoe wrote:
| Gee if only we hadn't just spent the COVID years telling everyone
| not to dissent on The Science.
| keikun17 wrote:
| Is it just me or the is article not loading? The page loads fine
| along with the title but nothing below the top fold.
| defrost wrote:
| Not just you, I assumed content was blanked due to detecting
| uBlockOrigin ad blocking.
|
| The top comment archive.is link works.
| ta988 wrote:
| And the top link with the archive link is a cloudflare loop for
| me.
| david_van_loon wrote:
| It is also a Cloudflare loop for me. I stopped attempting to
| exit the loop for fear of getting blocked.
| ta988 wrote:
| It works with google DNS
| thedailymail wrote:
| I think there was an article recently about the Archive site
| refusing connections that go through the cloudflare 1.1.1.1
| DNS.
| shadowban1111 wrote:
| 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.
| lasc4r wrote:
| Experimental gene therapy huh? Go back to 4chan friend.
| learntoread wrote:
| [dead]
| esalman wrote:
| Where I'm from, in the 1960, the child mortality rate was
| ~225 per thousand. If you had 4 child, one was almost
| guaranteed to die before the age of 5. My grandparents had
| 7 children. 6 survived. It was the reality for literally
| every household.
|
| Today the rate is ~25 per thousand. Look up the definition
| of vaccine in the dictionary and you'll know why.
| finite_depth wrote:
| Most vaccines do not wholly prevent the disease they
| vaccinate against. A few - like the rabies vaccine - do,
| mostly because they're slow-moving diseases that the body
| has plenty of time to mount a defense against, but many do
| not. In fact, the namesake of vaccines - the use of cowpox
| to vaccinate against smallpox - didn't confer immunity,
| just resistance.
|
| Is the covid vaccine effective at reducing the chance of
| contracting, and the severity of cases of, covid? Yes. And
| that is what vaccines typically do. As for stopping its
| spread: the original vaccine came very close to herd
| immunity against Alpha, yes. What it didn't stop (but did
| mitigate) was Delta, which evaded some of the proteins it
| targeted and which was so much more contagious that even
| substantial protection wasn't enough for R << 1.
|
| As for the word "vaccine": a vaccine is a deliberate
| exposure of the body to an infectious agent or a component
| of such in order to sensitize the immune system against it.
| The covid vaccine, which exposes the body to a protein that
| is a component of covid (an infectious agent) qualifies.
| The delivery method is novel, but the principle - using a
| component of an infectious agent to sensitize the immune
| system - is the same.
| conception wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > 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.
| doktrin wrote:
| 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.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| What do you mean by "valid"?
| doktrin wrote:
| What kind of answer are you expecting? Your low effort
| comment deserves what it gets.
| kneebonian wrote:
| [flagged]
| toomim wrote:
| "He's racist!"
|
| It's sad that this term has lost so much meaning these days,
| thanks to people like you who just throw it around at anyone
| you disagree with.
|
| Whenever I hear someone say that now, my immediate reaction is
| to think "this is a low-IQ nutjob" and I stop listening.
| passwordoops wrote:
| >No we don't, and questioning settled science is usually a
| racist dog whistle.
|
| Yeah, just like McClintock was known for her wildly racist
| views. Along with Watson and Crick - that whole "DNA is
| important" was just a ruse to get the redliners out. And who
| could forget Einstein? Only tools know the Theory of Relatively
| has anything to do with physics.
|
| And anyone who uses the term "settled science" doesn't
| understand what science is
| kneebonian wrote:
| [flagged]
| justinhj wrote:
| What about Newtons laws of motion? Settled science? Was it
| racist to come up with a more accurate model?
| brigandish wrote:
| Is this satire or just Poe's law at work?
| passwordoops wrote:
| I've met people IRL with these views... "Science
| Fundamentalists" who replace their lost religious dogma
| with Science and who have no concept that everything we
| know right now is the best possible explanation with the
| data we have available, and that it could fall apart with
| a single new data set or proof. The "racist dog whistle"
| is new though, so I hope you're right about the satire
| justinhj wrote:
| Calling something a racist dog whistle is just a way to
| bully people into silence
| goatlover wrote:
| Indeed and I have no idea what it has to do with
| questioning "The Science". Is that like "The Truth" or
| something?
| teh64 wrote:
| It is "satire", because no one actually talks like this
| on the left wing. Its very obviously a right winger who
| thinks this is what the left sounds like.
| zer8k wrote:
| > No we don't, and questioning settled science is usually a
| racist dog whistle.
|
| Woah, a claim this bold is gonna need some more explanation
| bub. Science is quite literally never settled. Even gravity
| gets new developments every once and while.
| brigandish wrote:
| > Here's the problem is that people who oppose The Science have
| fundamentally shown themselves incapable of listening to reason
| or being educated they have willfully chosen ignorance
|
| And the solution to that is to silence them, yet that is not
| considered a form of incapable listening and wilfully chosen
| ignorance by those who are _so wise_ as to know the difference
| between good and bad information?
|
| "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one
| person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more
| justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the
| power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
|
| J. S. Mill, On Liberty
| jstrong wrote:
| greatly enjoying your humor
| the-mitr wrote:
| 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-...
| throwoutway wrote:
| It's a little unclear to me what happened in Halton's case? Was
| he disregarded by his peers?
| dmbche wrote:
| 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]"
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| 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?
| metalspot wrote:
| 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.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| the church started as the government and this is sometimes
| very confusing.
| metalspot wrote:
| > 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.
| iamthepieman wrote:
| 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
| passwordoops wrote:
| 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
| iamthepieman wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| What if they _are_ crackpots?
| iamthepieman wrote:
| 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.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| 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
| dav_Oz wrote:
| > _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
| frankreyes wrote:
| 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".
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| > 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Groups of humans are stupid in very predictable and
| reproducible ways.
|
| No need for conspiracy.
| [deleted]
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _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)
| croes wrote:
| >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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| "Fear is the mind killer."
|
| -- some book you may have heard of
| [deleted]
| Blackstrat wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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?
| pstuart wrote:
| Consensus on hand washing was not without challenges:
| https://www.history.com/news/hand-washing-disease-infection
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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")
| dahart wrote:
| 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?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| convolvatron wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Unfortunately, once scientists become politicians, they
| open themselves up to that.
| convolvatron wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| A better example would be "antibacterial" soap containing
| triclosan, on which the consensus has shifted fairly
| recently
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| findalex wrote:
| Here, here. Science = the scientific method. It should be
| nothing more.
| chrischattin wrote:
| 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.
| euix wrote:
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Same here. I don't think we'll see any reckoning until all
| the people involved are long dead...
| didntcheck wrote:
| 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
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Seriously: why? We had things like conscription before but
| the Covid response was the one that altered your view?
| shwaj wrote:
| Maybe the person wasn't alive during conscription. They
| lived through Covid.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| 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.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The cold war had some "red scares" etc.
| agoose77 wrote:
| 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.
| madsbuch wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| madsbuch wrote:
| convincing other people that you are right is
| fundamentally politics. Not science.
|
| good science has objective criteria and does not require
| political justification.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| madsbuch wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > 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 :)
| peteradio wrote:
| 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.
| jkepler wrote:
| 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-...
| happytiger wrote:
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > 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.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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.
| edgyquant wrote:
| See this is exactly what the other poster means. Your gut
| reaction is to shut down any dissent.
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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
| lelanthran wrote:
| What's the difference?
| aCoreyJ wrote:
| What YOU did was an attempt to shutdown descent by
| attacking the poster instead of actually debating the
| issue
| lelanthran wrote:
| You're confusing me with some one else.
| zen928 wrote:
| 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?
| agoose77 wrote:
| My pet peeve is people interpreting "that's a stupid
| argument, here's why" as a conspiracy theory.
| ryneandal wrote:
| 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.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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.
| madsbuch wrote:
| > ... 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on these other ways? I genuinely
| haven't thought too much about how research has been
| financed historically.
| madsbuch wrote:
| 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.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Where does the money in the funds originate from? Who set
| the original goal of the fun and the research direction?
| madsbuch wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > 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_?
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Is this why Exxon is the leading manufacturer of Li-ion
| batteries?
|
| https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/who-we-are/technology-
| and-c...
| aCoreyJ wrote:
| Seriousl question: why is this "enlightened centrism"
| pessimistic viewpoint so popular on hn
| growingentropy wrote:
| Because when you get away from the center, you've often
| chosen a "team." Choosing a team clouds your judgment.
| srackey wrote:
| 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.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > truth cremation mechanism
|
| love that typo
| tonmoy wrote:
| 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
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| chrischattin wrote:
| No. Consensus is not how science works at all.
| jamilton wrote:
| 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).
| chrischattin wrote:
| No. It's the opposite. All it takes is one single result
| to show a theory or body of "consensus" is in error.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| > 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!
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| 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?
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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/
| mc32 wrote:
| https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/o-t-lounge/ot-docs-
| the-f...
| wredue wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| 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.
| wredue wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| wredue wrote:
| 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".
| aCoreyJ wrote:
| 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.
| raarts wrote:
| I can tell you that in The Netherlands doctors could be
| (and still can be) fined up to EUR150.000 if they
| prescribed HCQ or Ivermectin.
| sab24 wrote:
| You can find multiple articles online about this recent
| event, one example:
|
| https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fda-drops-ivermectin-
| bomb...
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| The article suggests that the FDA has approved ivermectin
| as a COVID treatment, which is absolutely false.
|
| A judge ruled that the FDA cannot interfere with the
| authority of a physician to prescribe medication to a
| patient. They could be prescribing aspirin to treat
| COVID, and the ruling would still apply.
| sab24 wrote:
| You seem to be right about that the FDA does not yet
| recommend it as a treatment. However large studies do
| suggest its effectiveness like for example the study
| here: https://www.cureus.com/articles/111851-regular-use-
| of-iverme...
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I have several issues with that study, starting with the
| fact that they left out 63% of the participants for no
| clear reason, which is even more damning given the fact
| that the cohort controlled by the authors themselves.
| Furthermore, their positive results are based on 280
| individuals, not the initial sample.
| wredue wrote:
| You should immediately be suspect of any "study" that
| random ass just throws half the people out of it. It's
| clear that this was a "fudge the numbers" scenario
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2801827
|
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9308124/
|
| In fact, I cannot find a double blind that supports the
| use of ivermectin to treat Covid.
| GTP wrote:
| 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.
| feldrim wrote:
| Came here for scientific comments, found US politics -again.
| dobin wrote:
| 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?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The vast majority of human beings don't even go to grad
| school, believe it or not.
| christophilus wrote:
| I did science in middle school, and still do it today as an
| adult. What's grad school have to do with anything?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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.
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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.
| doublespanner wrote:
| 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.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| US politics is global politics. Some government policy might
| start wars, other policy might end wars. Wars that are
| overseas, somewhere close to you
| xereeto wrote:
| US domestic culture war bullshit is decidedly not global
| politics.
| lodovic wrote:
| 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.
| rusk wrote:
| 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.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| 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.
| toomim wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| vore wrote:
| As they say, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.
| stavros wrote:
| Is this because America isn't obeying the mask rules? I don't
| get this analogy.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Because America leads the world, it has a lot of influence
| over it for better or worse.
| tamimio wrote:
| 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..
| User23 wrote:
| We need scientific dissidents now more than ever, do we?
|
| Do we need vaccine harm advocates, anthropogenic climate change
| "deniers," people who claim life begins at conception, dark
| matter "deniers," and big bang "deniers," just to name a handful
| of heterodox positions?
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| 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.
| finite_depth wrote:
| 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".
| kneebonian wrote:
| 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.
| brigandish wrote:
| > people who claim life begins at conception
|
| You mean, biologists and zoologists? Yes, we need those people.
| eimrine wrote:
| > 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| I think vouch only shows up when it's [flagged][dead] or
| [dead], not when it's only [flagged]
| User23 wrote:
| 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.
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| 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.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| "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.
| Infinity315 wrote:
| > 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?
| brigandish wrote:
| > 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| zer8k wrote:
| > 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.
| Infinity315 wrote:
| > 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?
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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"?
| skepticATX wrote:
| 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?
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| 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.
| kneebonian wrote:
| [dead]
| goatlover wrote:
| Sarcasm? The science isn't settled regarding whether there
| was a lab leak.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| It just baffles me how people are shamed, and basically
| accused of attempted murder, and excluded from society in
| terms of public events, air travel, immigration, etc. when
| they make a _choice_ about what to do with their _own
| bodies_ in a medical situation. Do people in a free nation
| enjoy the _right to choose_ treatment for our _own bodies_?
| Don 't come at me about potential harm or risks that are
| measured in single-percentage-points. Vaccination is not
| the be-all, end-all of infection control.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| > _Vaccination is not the be-all, end-all of infection
| control._
|
| For many diseases, it is, and we're better off for that.
| E.g., measles.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create
| accounts to break HN's rules with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| albedoa wrote:
| What are you doing. This account is way way _way_ more
| dangerous and all over this comment section:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=toomim
| whatshisface wrote:
| Was there ever evidence, or was it just something people were
| saying?
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| that narrative was literally made up to get revenge on
| Trump for saying China virus
| metalspot wrote:
| i kneel before your noble lies, my philosopher king
| toomim wrote:
| [flagged]
| finite_depth wrote:
| [flagged]
| kneebonian wrote:
| [flagged]
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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-...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So how is that a majority of Americans believe the lab-
| leak theory?
| fasterik wrote:
| _> 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| >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.
| tripletao wrote:
| > 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?
| IanCal wrote:
| > 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.
| tripletao wrote:
| 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.
| fasterik wrote:
| 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.
| toomim wrote:
| 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.
| fasterik wrote:
| 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.
| tripletao wrote:
| 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/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336
| v1
| toomim wrote:
| 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| > (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.
| tripletao wrote:
| > 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/13462322082063
| 810...
|
| 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.
| fasterik wrote:
| 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?
| tripletao wrote:
| 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.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Please take a look at this analysis if you can.
|
| https://youtu.be/hhMAt3BluAU
| tripletao wrote:
| > 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.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Covid death maps need to be corrected for population age and
| underlying health conditions such as metabolic syndrome or
| obesity.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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/JamieMetz
| l/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
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| There is no consensus.
| conception wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| goatlover wrote:
| A lab leak would mean there was a lack of proper control.
| Izkata wrote:
| They're extremely common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis
| t_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
|
| And keep in mind these are only the ones we know about.
| 6510 wrote:
| A historic first.... or wait..
| tripletao wrote:
| 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.
| olalonde wrote:
| 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.
| drapado wrote:
| 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 :)
| olalonde wrote:
| 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.
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| agoose77 wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| 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)
| batch12 wrote:
| > 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?
| logicchains wrote:
| >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.
| transcriptase wrote:
| It's an especially weird field to make that claim about,
| given every major prediction to ever come out of it has
| been wrong.
| callalex wrote:
| 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.scientifi
| camerican.com/observations/scientists...
| the_third_wave wrote:
| 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.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| ciwolsey wrote:
| You mean like drug abuse?
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| zbentley wrote:
| Why not?
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| You've answered your own question by posting that response.
| gedy wrote:
| "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."
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maximum economic output isn't the ultimate "good" most
| people are aiming for.
| zbentley wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| I would rather not have the government tell me how to
| live my life even if it means I die young.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Yes, this is true, but then who actually takes the decisions?
| Someone who isn't an expert on anything at all.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| 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.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Luckily, scientists don't make these decisions - policymakers
| do.
|
| This is a non issue.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Anecdotal.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Anecdotal.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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...
| soundnote wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > 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....
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| 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.
| soundnote wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > Adults sacrifice for their young. Not the other way
| around.
|
| Kill them grandpas, I want to go to the bar. Am I right?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| /s ?
|
| Ackshually, plenty of policymakers have no clue about the
| topics they decide on, and that's a big issue.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > 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.
| Gud wrote:
| 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.
| ThomPete wrote:
| 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.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| When? WTF are you talking about "when we fully defer"? It's
| deeply hilarious that you've picked COVID response and climate
| change as the exemplars of "times we fully deferred to
| scientists"
|
| If we actually cared about child development we would still be
| much more serious about controlling the virus. We would still
| wear masks. Millions of people have died. Millions more have
| some version of a permanent disability. Kids are developing
| diabetes at an accelerated rate after contracting the disease.
| Western countries with more stringent controls saw faster
| economic growth.
|
| And it would be a fuckin' dream to have a nuanced policy debate
| about how to respond to climate change. Instead, we've just
| gone through the standard denialism playbook:
| 1) It's not real, so we can just keep doing what we've been
| doing 2) It might be real but the cost of mitigation is
| too high, and would be better spent on other programs >
| We're here now 3) It's real and it's too late to do
| anything, so we can just keep doing what we've been doing
|
| We've never fully deferred to scientists, but as a scientist:
| yes. Don't fully defer to me. But maybe listen a little
| sometimes, as a treat.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Look at you being a prime example of an "expert" thinking we
| should enact his politics because he said so. Exactly the
| kind of thing GP is saying.
| vGPU wrote:
| > If we actually cared about child development we would still
| be much more serious about controlling the virus. We would
| still wear masks.
|
| "[Masks] had a significant effect on the children's emotion
| recognition accuracy" along with causing a decline in
| language processing ability.
|
| Try again.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637007/
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Covid was appeals to authority all the way down. The whole
| plot rested on "shut up, disengage your brain and listen to
| these people we decided to label as 'experts'".
|
| Experts don't get to make policy decisions. Ever. That isn't
| their job. Our reaction to covid was living proof of why that
| should never, ever happen.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > Experts don't get to make policy decisions.
|
| And they didn't.
|
| Sadly, policymakers in the US didn't listen to them too
| closely either, and prefer to use COVID as a weapon for
| their tribalist wars, so here we are, with over a million
| death.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| We would have had a million deaths no matter what we did.
| Covid wasn't going anywhere. The idea we could control or
| contain it was a fantasy.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| How exceptional is the US, compared to other countries?
|
| Many other developed nations had better outcomes with
| stricter measures, and here you are, arguing that it
| doesn't matter because, _whatever_?
| aCoreyJ wrote:
| 100s of thousands more died in the US because of how little
| we listened to experts. That's just fatalities, not other
| negative consequences . Our vaccination rates are
| abhorrent.
|
| Even if you just look economically, the US set itself back
| massively with supply chain and labor issues we will be
| dealing with for decades because of it.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| The US set itself for supply chain and labor issues for
| hysterically enacting crazy mandates that gave the
| appearance of dealing with exactly one specific illness
| to the exclusion of every other problem in the world.
| This myopic fixation on covid and only covid is what we
| will be dealing with for decades.
|
| Our numbers are basically the same as any other country
| on earth. The truth is you can't contain or control a
| highly infectious respiratory virus no matter what "The
| Experts" or politicians claimed. And even if we could
| have, that doesn't make any of the draconian mandates
| okay. Even if we did absolutely nothing the numbers would
| have been basically the same, only we wouldn't have
| destroyed our schools, government institutions, our local
| communities, the elderly, the or working class.
|
| But hey, who cares about the costs of the mitigations.
| Only covid mattered. Worrying about anything else made
| you a grandma killer subject to all kinds of verbal
| abuse.
| ericfr11 wrote:
| The "interesting" part (as in, interesting to study for a
| psychological and social angle) was the aversion of some
| people to understand the situation (which was complex)
| and be a good player. Lots of people have a hard time to
| extend their view of the world, and play in their own
| bubble
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Worse still was the tendency of the control-measure and
| lockdown theatrics to later extend into a strange
| national version of Goodheart's law, in which the measure
| of cases (not deaths but just cases, even after the virus
| became milder) became a target and fixation for pursuing
| continued control measures that by almost all estimates
| didn't work much at all.
|
| I can think of only one large country exception to this,
| which was China for a time (though their numbers can't be
| trusted) and at least as far as i'm concerned enacting
| those kinds of measures is unacceptable in any context
| for a virus that eventually would end up causing more or
| less the same mortality effects either way.
|
| Much of the highly biased, often irrational lockdown
| obsession in the U.S (and other countries) was a deluded
| technocratic attempt to impose pseudoclinical fantasy on
| a reality that didn't conform.
| nradov wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous. COVID-19 was never a serious risk to
| children. It's less dangerous to them than RSV which has been
| around forever, and we never forced people to wear masks
| because of RSV. And there is no reliable evidence that masks
| were even effective anyway.
|
| https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
| aCoreyJ wrote:
| "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."
|
| There have been other studies that have found
| effectiveness, and basically all agree on no downside.
|
| https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-
| conditions/coronavirus/i...
|
| As far as children, there are a lot more negative effects
| that can happen that aren't fatal. There is a lot we don't
| know still
| kbelder wrote:
| >If we actually cared about child development we would still
| be much more serious about controlling the virus. We would
| still wear masks.
|
| If you are a scientist, don't willfully evade evidence you
| don't want to accept.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > 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!
| __loam wrote:
| > 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.
| ciwolsey wrote:
| 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.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| de facto vs de jure
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| Loquebantur wrote:
| "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.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > I suspect you greatly over-estimate how much politicians
| listened to epidemiologists during covid as well.
|
| It's wild to me that after American saw a crazy amount of
| deaths and then dismantled most of its pandemic response and
| monitoring, people are still claiming "wow, politicians
| really were too cautious in listening to scientists." Has
| everyone just memory-holed stuff like when they slashed
| quarantine times at the peak of one of the most deadly surges
| "because the economy?"
| __loam wrote:
| It's also fun to see people here pretend there's not a huge
| field studying public health and the effect of these
| policies on things like the economy. Yeah, social
| distancing was bad for the economy. Having millions more
| deaths due to Covid and the total collapse of the
| healthcare system in this country would have also been bad
| for the economy.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Sure but if those experts were so smart, wouldn't they
| have been able to foresee the second order effect of
| crappy messaging and prevent conspiracy theories from
| taking hold?
|
| Or foresee the effects of labeling things that aren't
| conspiracy theories as conspiracy theories and ruining
| their own credibility?
| ImaCake wrote:
| They did. The reason for going hard and fast on
| quarantine and lockdown is to make them as quick as
| possible. A reminder that _this worked_ really well in
| Australia, Nz, South Korea, China, Vietnam, etc etc.
| ta8645 wrote:
| > A reminder that this worked really well in Australia,
| Nz, South Korea, China, Vietnam, etc etc.
|
| Even excluding all the confounding variables, your
| assertion can not be stated so unequivocally, considering
| there has not been time to do long term studies on the
| outcomes overall. There may have been an initial success,
| but will it be maintained overall with all factors
| considered? How will it look 5 and 10 years later?
| __loam wrote:
| Trying to address every insane rant on social media is
| completely impossible. Also, do you have any actual
| examples of them mislabeling "conspiracy theories"? I
| think the public health establishment did a fine job
| given the challenge they faced. It was never going to be
| perfect. The fact that we got a vaccine as quickly as we
| did, organized a mass vaccination campaign and all that
| did end the pandemic is proof that all the policies
| succeeded, not that they failed.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| There was a concerted effort to label the lab leak as a
| conspiracy theory (there is email documentation of this
| effort) even though pretty much every biochem/bio PhD I
| know who has lab work experience... Myself included...
| was pretty certain it was a lab leak early on.
|
| The crappy messaging I'm referring to was the "don't get
| a mask"/"now masks are mandatory" flip flop. Literally
| anyone could have predicted what happened next.
| lamontcg wrote:
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| What?
| [deleted]
| ConorSheehan1 wrote:
| 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.
| sneed-oil wrote:
| > 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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
| RandomLensman wrote:
| 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?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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 :)
| Tao3300 wrote:
| 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.
| kubb wrote:
| 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?
| wozniacki wrote:
| 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?
| kubb wrote:
| 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.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| 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.
| Thiez wrote:
| 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.
| VK538FY wrote:
| 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.
| salmonellaeater wrote:
| > 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.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| [dead]
| metalspot wrote:
| > 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.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| Source?
| barbacoa wrote:
| 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.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| I think your mistaking which comment I replied to.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| No it isn't.
| wddkcs wrote:
| There's also little if any evidence masks were effective at
| stopping spread. Maybe in idealized conditions, but the
| mandated use likely did nothing.
| jacob171714 wrote:
| 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.
| wddkcs wrote:
| 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).
| exodust wrote:
| > 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.
| jacob171714 wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _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.
| shiftingleft wrote:
| > 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...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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/164430640594225561
| 7?s=2...
|
| [2] https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/13/the-new-york-times-
| is-su...
| lukeschlather wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > 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?
| depressedpanda wrote:
| 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.
| mypastself wrote:
| 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_.
| alfnor wrote:
| "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-...
| skrebbel wrote:
| > 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!
| almostnormal wrote:
| There's downsides to wearing pants, too. Nonetheless almost
| everyone is wearing them.
| sneed-oil wrote:
| 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.
| mjparrott wrote:
| 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.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| There are downsides. Face recognition is not as reliable with
| masks on.
| csours wrote:
| "Truth is the First Casualty of War" - Quote Investigator
|
| ----
|
| 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.
|
| ----
|
| 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 naive 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.
|
| ----
|
| 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.
|
| ----
|
| 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.
|
| ----
| finite_depth wrote:
| 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.
| toomim wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| > 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...
| toomim wrote:
| 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...
| defrost wrote:
| 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!
| finite_depth wrote:
| 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.
| tobiasSoftware wrote:
| 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.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| 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?
| slater wrote:
| [flagged]
| toomim wrote:
| Here's the echo chamber in action!
|
| Close your ears to dissent, children. Preserve the echo
| chamber!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| No. The dissent has been aired. The points have been
| discussed. Over and over and over. There's no echo
| chamber.
|
| The problem is that some people don't want to accept the
| consensus view that emerges from the social practice of
| science. They want to keep asking the _same_ questions,
| ignoring rebuttals, demanding answers, assigning blame.
|
| You don't have to accept the consensus view. But you do
| have to accept that the consensus view, and you being
| ignored by those that do accept it, doesn't happen in 10
| minutes. There was no echo chamber, dissent was tackled,
| and now those particular dissents are handled with
| disrespect, _maybe_.
|
| That's life, or least that's the social practice of
| science. And guess what, every once in a while, the
| minority report is correct!
| slater wrote:
| It's not worth listening to "dissent" if it's coming from
| the "I do my own research" crowd.
|
| Whom should I believe, folks who've gone through rigorous
| university education and have dedicated their lives to
| providing scientific progress?
|
| Orrrrrrr some dildo who read some clickbait nonsense on
| HealthTruthFauciSux.net?
|
| Choices, choices.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Ignoring the appeal to authority, do you do research?
|
| I've yet to meet someone that does and doesn't see
| scientific institutions as flawed and human with results
| often driven by interpersonal and political pressures.
|
| What's your expectation of "rigorous university
| education"? I attended the best University of South
| America and I rarely see research be conducted to
| standards I would call rigorous.
|
| [ I personally do think it's extremely important to
| listen to the "I do my own research" crowd because that's
| what the scientific process demands. Sadly "science" for
| the left is like "freedom" for the right, a big fat
| jingle. ]
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > "I do my own research"
|
| This suffers from the same issue as people calling blogs
| or whatever "journalism" (or worse, "reporting") when its
| nothing more than reading what other people wrote and
| commenting on it. Actual reporting involves going into
| the field, collecting information at the site, from
| people and devices that are there.
|
| And so it is for research, not always, but quite often,
| and almost always when it really matters. You don't do
| "research" by reading around, certainly not in biomedical
| fields. You need a lab, you need samples, you need
| hypotheses, you need experiments.
|
| Yes, yes, I know that sometimes meta-analysis turns up
| something interesting. It's useful, but it's not the
| rule, and its not "research".
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Pointing out flaws and inconsistencies in studies can be
| done by individuals and are a relevant contribution to
| the scientific process, for example.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| In a broad sense, I agree.
|
| But in the narrow sense, another Medium or Substack on
| why Missener et al. (invented names) haven't done their
| homework (let alone tweeting about it) is not a useful
| part of the scientific process.
|
| Science faces a bit of a quandry: on the one hand, it is
| now more and more difficult to be an actual expert in
| more than a tiny sub-niche of a knowledge domain; on the
| other hand, changes in communication and distribution
| make it possible for many more people to have some
| awareness of things going on in science, and to point out
| errors or raise questions, at a level that the research
| teams cannot sensibly respond to.
|
| Nevertheless, I still see a profound distinction between
| the well funded and semi-organized attempts to discredit
| research and knowledge that raises problems for the
| interests of wealth and power, and good faith
| acknowledgement of the many problems with the social
| practice of science and the reproduceability crisis.
| [deleted]
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Trust isn't only about credentials (or competence which
| credentials are supposedly meant to be a proxy for), but
| also _honesty_.
|
| Get caught lying (or being generally sus, like say trying
| to hide conflicts of interest) enough times, and it
| doesn't matter if you're actually competent (or
| credentialed).
| defrost wrote:
| > or being generally sus, like say trying to hide
| conflicts of interest
|
| Good point.
|
| It's worth reminding all that the vast overwhelming bulk
| of vaccine and COVID disinformation trafficking on
| twitter and social media could all be traced back to
| about 12 individual sources who were SEO'ing madly to sow
| distrust and sell their own brands of snake oil.
| toomim wrote:
| It's not worth listening to people who ... think?
|
| You only want to listen to people who regurgitate what
| the authorities tell them to think?
| slater wrote:
| Yep, that's exactly what I said. In that same vein, TIL
| scientists don't think.
|
| Good grief, I should've taken my own advice further up in
| this thread.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| 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.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| [dead]
| throwme_123 wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Does someone have this article in a format that will work on
| Firefox with uBlock Origin?
| brigandish wrote:
| Disable js and css and it works fine.
| Blahah wrote:
| https://archive.is/6vnq0
| tehjoker wrote:
| ah another covid origins article to distract ppl from mitigating
| an ongoing pandemic
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| 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.
| tensor wrote:
| 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.
| _delirium wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| 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
| MrPatan wrote:
| If you don't let some information out in case it changes
| The Science, what then?
| themitigating wrote:
| 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.
| MrPatan wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| 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?
| nradov wrote:
| The public health measures used against the original SARS
| were _not_ effective. They did almost nothing. The disease
| burned out largely on its own.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| "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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| strken wrote:
| 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.
| mcny wrote:
| 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?
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| kanbara wrote:
| several countries in asia have done this for decades--
| it's basic safety and politeness
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| strken wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| jack_pp wrote:
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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?
| brigandish wrote:
| All of your claims are false:
|
| 1. The virus was not eliminated in any country, at any
| point in the pandemic. Moreover, why do you believe
| anything that comes out of China at this point?[1]
|
| 2. Your examples:
|
| > New Zealand,
|
| Low but not eliminated until late 2021 when cases surged
| exponentially[2]
|
| > Australia,
|
| Low until summer of 2021. Surged exponentially in winter
| of 2021 [3]
|
| > Vietnam,
|
| Same story as Australia[4]
|
| > Singapore,
|
| 2020 disn't start well but settled down until summer of
| 2021 [5]
|
| > Taiwan
|
| Low until Spring of 2022 when cases surged
| exponentially[6]
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/23/china/china-covid-
| infecti...
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/new-
| zealand
|
| [3]
| https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/australia
|
| [4]
| https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/australia
|
| [5]
| https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/singapore
|
| [6]
| https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
| someNameIG wrote:
| Australia is a big place with the major population
| centres isolated from each other by hundreds of KMs, you
| can't just look at overall numbers. Here in Melbourne we
| successfully eliminated 2 covid outbreaks, and then we
| were able to control the spread until most had been
| vaccinated.
|
| As a proportion of the population only a very small
| amount of us have been exposed to covid with a naive
| immune system; not being vaccinated.
| jmopp wrote:
| 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.
| abwizz wrote:
| locking everything down is impossible because ppl would
| start to starve within a week or so. specialisation and
| compartmentalisation of labor has a price
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| jmopp wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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).
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the stated goal was not to
| eliminate Covid, but to "flatten the curve" to prevent
| hospitals from getting overwhelmed
| didntcheck wrote:
| [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
| [deleted]
| bryananderson wrote:
| 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".
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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
| base698 wrote:
| 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.
| didntcheck wrote:
| 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
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| 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.
| dm319 wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > 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.
| jjallen wrote:
| 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).
| MrPatan wrote:
| 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.
| mcny wrote:
| 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.
| pella wrote:
| https://archive.li/6vnq0
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Complete with "believers" and "non-believers." Which has no
| place in the actual scientific process.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| _" Trust the science."_, which I recall was often preached
| during covid lockdowns, is about as religious as it gets.
| jquery wrote:
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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?
| mnky9800n wrote:
| 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Did he ever do anything worth mentioning?
|
| He sounds like a bureaucrat that just climbed the
| hierarchical ladder.
| apienx wrote:
| 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...
| bglazer wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| The fame x paper sequence chart was telling:
|
| https://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/images/20100719_ast
| ron...
|
| and, as noted, Dr Brian May is completely off the chart
| (fame - wise) with relatively few astro papers (just his
| doctorate?).
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| There are no non-scientific questions, are there?
| keiferski wrote:
| Little more complicated than that. Here's a good example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
| xereeto wrote:
| 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.
| theelous3 wrote:
| Also known as Last Tuesdayism, where the universe happened
| last Tuesday. I and other intellectuals consider this
| ridiculous. It was in fact last Thursday.
| austinjp wrote:
| 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
| seventhtiger wrote:
| 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.
| lliamander wrote:
| You just asked one.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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.
| _0ffh wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| > Proper science is value neutral.
|
| Is that supposed to be a neutral scientific statement?
| HKH2 wrote:
| Right. Science can't stand on its own. It can never be
| purely objective.
| _0ffh wrote:
| 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.
| _0ffh wrote:
| 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.
| willis936 wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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!
| wredue wrote:
| [flagged]
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| toshk wrote:
| 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.
| gilbetron wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jquery wrote:
| 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
| tripletao wrote:
| 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.
| growingentropy wrote:
| 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.
| ricksunny wrote:
| > 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
| jkhdigital wrote:
| 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.
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| 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.
| dent9876543 wrote:
| 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...)
| tripletao wrote:
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Actual scientists proposed the lab leak early on before they
| were prompty shut down by the Fauci establishment and the
| fake Lancet
| toshk wrote:
| 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.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Well it's potentially racist to some, so common sense has
| to go out the window.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The fact that labs exist in other countries with people
| of different ethnicities is not racist
| Nasrudith wrote:
| But the fact it was basically a recycling of several
| racist "those filthy foreigners are responsible for
| disease" tropes along with "scheming orientals" tropes.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Seems more like you projecting some racist stuff no one
| else was thinking of.
| didntcheck wrote:
| As opposed to the "approved" knowledge that it came from
| foreigners with poor hygiene eating strange animals?
| jkhdigital wrote:
| No the argument is nonsensical on its face. A lab leak
| supposedly recycles those tropes but _emergence from an
| unsanitary wet market_ does not?
| Arainach wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| 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
| Arainach wrote:
| 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.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| jkhdigital wrote:
| 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.
| wait_what wrote:
| 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)".
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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...
| dent9876543 wrote:
| 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.)
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > 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.
| joenot443 wrote:
| 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.
| Shugarl wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| So basically all of the politicians who enacted crazy covid
| mandates for three years?
| crawsome wrote:
| Why is it a bad thing that science has replaced superstition?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| How could one firstly measure science and superstition in
| such a way that this question would be answerable?
| MC68328 wrote:
| > 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| MC68328 wrote:
| 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.)
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| paradox242 wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Science is a human endeavour and therefore it's always
| political.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| It cannot be helped.
|
| Is always takes precedence over ought.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| > 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| >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...
| ekianjo wrote:
| Oh astronomy and black holes influence everyday policy? Do
| you enjoy blanket statements much?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| They influence funding grants, which is public policy.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| The process of studying those subjects is very strongly
| political.
|
| Stop assuming bad faith and stick to the point.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Counterpoint: No it's not.
| oneshtein wrote:
| <<Big Bang>> model of Universe evolution has religious
| origin. It's politics.
| brabel wrote:
| 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??
| ModernMech wrote:
| Why are we looking at the sky in the first place?
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's not necessary, but seems to be sufficient for many,
| maybe most people.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Big Bang model was originally formalised by Belgian
| Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician,
| astronomer, and professor of physics Georges Lemaitre.
|
| 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.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [dead]
| raincole wrote:
| 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...
| greysphere wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| > 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.
| enugu wrote:
| 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).
| poszlem wrote:
| "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."
| teh64 wrote:
| 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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.
| TotalCrackpot wrote:
| 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| 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.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _count math as science_
|
| It's not. They're both offshoots of philosophy, but they're
| distinct from eachother.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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_.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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/uploa
| ds/...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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!
| nathan_compton wrote:
| "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.
| jpk wrote:
| I don't think the problem here is the actual scientists. The
| problem is the "I Follow The Science(tm)" 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| They're wrong an awful lot less often than the "The Science
| Conflicts With My Strongly Held Opinions So I Reject It"
| laypersons though.
| advael wrote:
| 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"
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| MightyBuzzard wrote:
| [dead]
| jpk wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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
| thumbuddy wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| samuell wrote:
| 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.
| noam_compsci wrote:
| 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.
| rusk wrote:
| 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.
| chrisan wrote:
| > 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| noam_compsci wrote:
| > 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.
| someNameIG wrote:
| > 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!!!!)
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 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?
| felipeerias wrote:
| 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.
| jquery wrote:
| >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-...
| brabel wrote:
| > 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.
| melagonster wrote:
| >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.
| felipeerias wrote:
| 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.
| chrisan wrote:
| 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
| felipeerias wrote:
| 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
| magicalist wrote:
| 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.
| civilitty wrote:
| _> 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?
| bigger_inside wrote:
| 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.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| >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.
| josephg wrote:
| A quick google search disagrees:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-439365261885
| lol768 wrote:
| 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
| kuhewa wrote:
| > 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
| RandomLensman wrote:
| 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.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| 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.
| verisimi wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| Define "Social beliefs"
| fasterik wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When I worked on the design of the 757, we knew it was
| going to fly.
| oneshtein wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| > 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!
| oneshtein wrote:
| > 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?
| fasterik wrote:
| 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.
| i_no_can_eat wrote:
| > For example: Michelson-Morley experiment -- disproved
| by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.
|
| Care to elaborate?
| oneshtein wrote:
| 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.
| less_less wrote:
| 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| > 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.c
| om/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.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| However, LIGO, VIRGO, and NANOGrav experiments and
| observations proved that speed of light in vacuum is NOT
| constant, which makes Michelsons's experiment obsolete.
| i_no_can_eat wrote:
| 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| ^ This is the problem we are looking for in this
| discussion.
| i_no_can_eat wrote:
| 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| 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>>.
| i_no_can_eat wrote:
| 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.
| oneshtein wrote:
| (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. :-/
| i_no_can_eat wrote:
| ^ This is just a load of rubbish. It makes absolutely no
| sense. Thanks for proving my point.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| 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
| eastbound wrote:
| > 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| "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.
| eastbound wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| "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?
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| > 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(tm) meme in action.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| b800h wrote:
| > 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| b800h wrote:
| 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.
| themitigating wrote:
| 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?
| b800h wrote:
| Because it has meaning to me.
| themitigating wrote:
| Does God exist? Maybe?
|
| Theological differences are interpretations.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| 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).
| jjallen wrote:
| 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.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| >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.
| maksimur wrote:
| 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.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| 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?
| jamilton wrote:
| Discussions and having a peer group seems like it would
| be helpful for learning philosophy.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| 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.
| bluescrn wrote:
| That was the idea in the past.
|
| University now teaches you precisely what to think, and
| makes clear the consequences of 'wrongthink'.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| > 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.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| 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.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| 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.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| > 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.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If you think this way you must also think lawyers don't
| study anything real because they study laws.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| 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.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _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.
| csours wrote:
| 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?)
| epgui wrote:
| 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.
| trhr wrote:
| 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.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| 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).
| trhr wrote:
| 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."
| olddustytrail wrote:
| 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.
| lincon127 wrote:
| 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > 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!!!".
| toomim wrote:
| 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!
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| 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.
| eirikbakke wrote:
| 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.)
| izzydata wrote:
| 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?
| fwungy wrote:
| The incentives of science are often orthogonal to making a
| career in science.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| chmod600 wrote:
| 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.
| leereeves wrote:
| > 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.
| dmbche wrote:
| 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?
| leereeves wrote:
| 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#Mode
| rn_...
|
| Both made the mistake of citing research that contradicts
| diversity initiatives.
| dmbche wrote:
| "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_Ec
| ho_...
|
| This guy is not a scientist and was fired by a private
| company for his conduct - has nothing to do with the
| subject.
| toomim wrote:
| Good point. Although this is changing now with AI and
| whatnot.
| robomartin wrote:
| > 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.
| beowa wrote:
| > 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"?
| robomartin wrote:
| > 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...
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| robomartin wrote:
| > 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| waihtis wrote:
| 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
| dundarious wrote:
| 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.
| poorbutdebtfree wrote:
| There was plenty of dissent but it was censored on pretty much
| every platform.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| How is it then that a majority of Americans believe the lab
| leak theory?
| metalspot wrote:
| a majority of americans believe the opposite of whatever the
| "experts" tell them. they are not always right but it is a
| good heuristic.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| houseatrielah wrote:
| 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...
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| > 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.
| tenpies wrote:
| > 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.
| mjparrott wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| Nathanba wrote:
| 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.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| 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.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > 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.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| 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.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 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
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > 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.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > 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.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > 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.
| version_five wrote:
| > 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.
| jpmoral wrote:
| 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.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| 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.
| gochi wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| Do you think telephones and email should be censored?
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| They shouldn't be; Everyone should have an equal chance
| to expose themselves as idiots. Censorship denies this.
| gochi wrote:
| Both already are.
| toomim wrote:
| Yes they do, in the law:
|
| https://www.mtsu.edu/first-
| amendment/article/1003/neutrality...
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| 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.
| gochi wrote:
| >'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.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| It's really hard to exist without a payment processor,
| and it's overwhelmingly hard to set up one.
| threeseed wrote:
| 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.
| vixen99 wrote:
| 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...
| krapp wrote:
| >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...
| curtisblaine wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| Correct, it's called Gab Pay.
| LightHugger wrote:
| 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.
| toofy wrote:
| 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.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > 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".
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| 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.
| Bud wrote:
| [dead]
| danem wrote:
| 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?
| lasc4r wrote:
| 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.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 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.
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