71–80 of 421 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What nonsense is this? I know many activists and they are dedicated, smart, passionate, clued up people with a social conscience to be envied.
In my experience, sane people volunteer for a cause they believe in. "Activists" grab a megaphone and disrupt any gathering of people who disagree with them on said cause, because they've convinced themselves that they are morally superior for their beliefs.
Another field where science is on a collision course with online (and offline) activists is genetics. As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of tabula rasa hold for truth. And unless the political climate evolves, in a power struggle between activists and science, I wouldn't bet on the scientists.
It has become way too easy to bully people into submission with tools such as Twitter, but not only, too easy to create harassment brigades against anybody over manufactured outrage.
I'd like to comment here that this is primarily about chronic fatigue syndrome. There are other handwaving statements towards vaccines, global warming, and GMO, but none of those statements have a clear factual outlay. It's particularly interesting to me that it was implied that the activism against physical exercise/CBT to treat (not cure) chronic fatigue had done damage to the motivations of scientists to perform f…
> There are other handwaving statements towards vaccines, global warming, and GMO It's not entirely clear from the layout, but that bit of content is a kind of "info box", a bit of extra information that in a printed magazine you'd find in a box alongside the main article, meant more as context than as a substantial article on its own. That explains why it merely points out these other cases where activism might clas…
2. Yes, it would be different and I think it's very interesting that the broad journalistic investigation "is research influenced by activism?" does not reach to the most prominent topics that come to mind of "topics that have a lot of controversy, for which there are claims that research in this sphere is influenced by activism". The fact it covers CE as an example, and not race or gender could imply that there isn't research that states differently than activism, whereas CE does have this split.
EDIT: The claims that I'm mentioning have already been populated in this discussion thread as a whole, so I'm pointing out that there doesn't appear to be evidence in this article that politically "leftist" politics is suppressing academic research, but is focused quite specfifically on CE/CFS, which doesn't appear to fall into a clear leftist/rightist deliniation of beliefs.
1) People advocating alternative therapies stirring up trouble
> "The campaigner and doctor behind MAIMES, Sarah Myhill, has posted YouTube videos setting out her views: “I liken it to child abuse,” she says in one that has been viewed more than 8,000 times. “This amounts to a form of abuse, because these people” – CFS/ME patients – “do not have the energy to defend themselves.” Myhill has published several books advocating what she calls a “naturopath’s” approach to treating symptoms of CFS/ME – one using a tailored combination of nutrition, rest and medicines. She hasn’t published peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of her approach."
This is highly suspect, like the group of quacks that started pushing "vaccines cause autism". It would be different if they were participating in the scientific process themselves.
2) People who have been denied treatment or disability accommodation because "it's all in your head".
To them, someone arguing that there is a psychological cause is not facilitating them getting the right treatment, it's someone preventing them getting treatment.
Given the interaction with disability benefits, having your disease declared to be in your head may result in the money you need to live being withdrawn. It's very high stakes.
3) Random internet cranks.
There are a lot of these, and someone who is unable to work and not very mobile and in constant pain is the ideal candidate for self-radicalising into a hate campaign. They have nothing else to do.
This is sad. Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic. It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental conseq…
Don't get me wrong, i'm a scientist myself (theoretical cs) and i do believe in the value of scientific method. But i do believe that (1) this problem here is about the "online" part, not "activist" and (2) every scientific field gets explored in the context of a society thus its choice, its means and its dominant approach will always be biased (which most of the time isn't any "bad", it's ok french cs community leans towards ocaml/coq but uk is more towards haskell/agda). To expand on (1), it is now long known that twitter and other ad-based plateforms favor stupid/bigot/simplified/aggressive interactions because that's what captures more attention.
So please stop mistaking social-media activism for normal activism and using this to simplistically and superficially discredit non-dominant political opinions (and push dominant propaganda forward like "left and right all extremes are same", everybody even the dominant liberals are stupid and angry on twitter, this is all irrelevant). So i don't know about this chronic fatigue whatever thing, but this argumentative trap comes up over and over, i'm kinda tired, so please folks when someone is talking about " is doing online", the problem most likely isn't with but with "online" because it most likely means "attention hijacking plateform based on control and manipulation".
This is sad. Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic. It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental conseq…
Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it. Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale beh…
People not accepting evidence is kind of not really a problem of science, but of science communication. But yeah, its also becoming an increasingly severe problem with examples such as climate change denial and anit-vaxxers on the rise
[1] hans rosling - factfullness
I think that ME/CFS will go the same way as MS. Once upon a time, not long ago, MS sufferers were deemed "hysteric", "crazy" etc, until there was technology that could show physical evidence of the damage caused by MS.
As an aside, IBS sufferers usually aren't sensitive to gluten (unlike with celiac), but fermentable sugars that always occur alongside gluten.
Another field where science is on a collision course with online (and offline) activists is genetics. As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of tabula rasa hold for truth. And unless the political climate evolves, in a power struggle between activists and science, I wouldn't bet on the scientists.
"behavioural genetics" and something else I will not even talk about for fear of being hunted and bullied by an angry mob on the internet. These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist. It has become way too easy to bully people into submission with tools such as Twitter, but not only, too easy to create harassment brigades agai…
Another field where science is on a collision course with online (and offline) activists is genetics. As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of tabula rasa hold for truth. And unless the political climate evolves, in a power struggle between activists and science, I wouldn't bet on the scientists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the pain is real, it's just caused by processes in your brain, I don't find this particular statement very revolutionary. We have known for a long time that physical pain is manufactured by the brain as an evolutionary tactic to help us prevent further harm to ourselves. If we didn't "feel pain" when we were on fire, we would burn to death.
"I don't find this particular statement very revolutionary." It depends on how you read it, since the short 12-word summary could be read dozens of different ways. There's ways in which trivially, of course, duh, pain is in the brain, where else would it be? But there's also ways in which it stands in stark contrast to what most people implicitly believe. Take your (you, the reader, not kimmy1 specifically) beliefs a…
Actually nociceptive pain is by definition not in the brain and is fundamentally somatic. However somehow it is privileged by society: it’s “real” pain while those others are “all in your head”.
The sad thing is that the scientist is validating these phenomena yet the critics don’t understand that.