Online activists are silencing us, scientists say • Hacker News Board

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#91

Post by lapinot » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #18

mc32 wrote: post #5

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…

I agree, it's a very sad state of affairs. I wish we could make decisions off of facts and what makes sense. I know many people that are very blind when it comes seeing how they react to news from one political side or the other. For instance, let's say they align with the right, there could be very logical legislation being put forward and if you said it was proposed by the right they would say it's a great idea, bu…

This is a problem about the propaganda architecture we have all around us, especially online but not only, which favors simplistic, cleaving and aggressive ideas and discourages critical thinking. These "people on both sides" are mere consequences. And there aren't two sides. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378688.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#92

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

maze-le wrote: post #71

5trokerac3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you are confusing 'activists' with 'agitators'.

Let’s just agree that “activist” covers a very wide spectrum and doesn’t mean much by itself.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#93

Post by beat » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

Treegarden wrote: post #76

onion2k wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dont really see your problem - and would counter with "we cant understand the world without data, but we also cant understand the world with data alone"[1]. With your firstly and secondly you are basically just making the normative-positive statement distinction: Sure, you cant prove normative statements, that's the point! But you can learn more about them with positive statements, which you can falsify, verify etc…

I think Rosling would argue it differently. It's not a problem of "science communication", because there is no way to spin plain facts, hypotheses, and theory refinement in a way to make it automatically palatable to someone who doesn't want to believe it. (fwiw, I think Factfulness is the most valuable and important book I've read in at least a decade, and I recommend it to everyone.)

Rosling points out that smart, well-educated, well-meaning people who believe in science also see the world incorrectly - so incorrectly that they perform worse than random chance on multiple-choice questions. That's fascinating, and it suggests the problem is far more fundamental than "science communication". When facts are at odds with our instincts or cultural biases, we tend to choose the instincts and biases.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#94

Post by wtdata » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

The most troublesome part of this and other similar news, is that this kind of behavior - predicted by some half a decade ago and outright dismissed as unsustained fear mongering - is now becoming the norm in Western society: "you are not allowed to expose ideas or even facts that contradict the present ideological narrative".

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#95

Post by mcv » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

nateberkopec wrote: post #10

Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…

> those without a clear physical mechanism, such as RSI or chronic back pain

But RSI has a clear physical mechanism. I don't know as much about chronic back pain, but considering how much physical stuff there is in our back, I'd assume it's similar.

Or does "physical mechanism" mean something other than it seems to mean?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#96

Post by dwaltrip » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #69

I feel like the topic of CFS is irrelevant to the story. Why is there such toxicity online creating these echochambers. If you point out anything that might question climate change for example, you will be called all kinds of names. Nobody looks at the points you are making. Let's test it right now. I'm sure I'll get downvoted and nobody will respond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... Ov…

I don't have time to research your contrarion claims right now. My priors suggest it isn't a good use of my time. But I have to ask:

Why haven't the climate change researchers figured out what you have?

Do they have rebuttals to these claims? If so, can you please link those rebuttals in the name of transparency?

P.S. You are being downvoted for being wildly off topic as well as a bit inflammatory.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#97

Post by dexen » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #43

mc32 wrote: post #5

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 don't always believe evidence even if it's there.

I frankly admit some of the "facts" [0] known to me are wrong [1]. I know that for certain, as some of the "facts" are conflicting with each other, however that alone doesn't help with telling which is the wrong one, and which ones to base decisions & judgements off of. This causes various headaches; I end up resorting to fallible heuristics to try to sort out the good ones in time to make the necessary judgements and decisions. I actively try to gather more facts, hoping to improve decisive power in time.

However there's also a meta aspect: the trustworthiness of any given "fact" we learn. It's common to see people acting vigorously on information that's high impact but low trustworthiness. Another common sight is, as you say, people refusing to learn a new "fact "because it is in conflict with the other "facts" they already know, with little regard whether the new one is more trustworthy.

Somewhere along the road we fail, or maybe even refuse, to associate the "facts" we know with how much trust we can put in them. This is matter of handling and processing meta information, and frankly our current education and upbringing curricula don't seem to help much with it.

I hold it to be generally immoral to perform high impact acts based off of "facts" that are known with only low trustworthiness. And as you say science helps us with obtaining ever better set of facts.

--

[0] scare quotes to differentiate between information as it is known vs. idealized truthful facts

[1] either running counter to the idealized truthful facts, or imprecise enough to be misleading

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#98

Post by beat » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

lapinot wrote: post #75

mc32 wrote: post #5

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…

You are blindly falling into a trap, just like this whole article. The article is using the so-called "online activists" to dismiss political opinion (not some , really the abstract idea of having social ideals) and once again depict science as an intrinsically unbiased source of knowledge (which is usually even extend to unbiased source of social order, cf the recurring mathematical "justification" of the liberal ec…

I didn't read it like that at all. The article was very specifically about online toxicity, not activism.

And you responded loudly and angrily online, through the lens of your own biases. See how it works?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#99

Post by daedlanth » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

We have a lot of work to do understanding complex symbiosis. The skew in this qaugmire is simple; everyone is wrong and everyone is right. One on one interaction with an intelligent, compassionate person goes a long way.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#100

Post by sctb » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

howiroll wrote: post #35

jshowa3 wrote: post #29

This is the problem when a society manufactures self-proclaimed experts on everything that do no actual research or scientific studies in the field they discuss. It's one of the many vices of the Internet.

Snowflakes everywhere.

If you won't start posting substantively we'll ban the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html