Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

I’m not sure there is a fix here. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al can be used as powerful tools to conduct organized harassment and coordinated bullying. And the bullying is remarkably visible and thus easy to report on so we also hear about it all the time.

And yet this is ultimately just normal human behavior, amplified. There have always been crackpots who lead frustrated and scared people into mob behavior of blaming some specific opinion or type of person rather than confronting their problems head on. When your problems seem unsolvable you’re very likely to fall for this sort of trap.

This specific issue with CFS research is just one microcosm among thousands of others, all the way up to the world of national governments and international relations, which suffers from all the same behaviors and toxicity. It’s amplified more now, but no different than it has ever been.

strain.

If you didn’t read the article, these activists are digging through research papers, finding the researchers’ contact info, and harassing them directly. On Twitter when they are on Twitter, but also on the phone and through the mail, and via their employers. This has nothing to do with whether or not the researchers themselves are on Twitter. The mob that’s harassing them uses social media to organize and recruit.

I used to feel the same way, until I read Sarno’s book. The way he explained what psychosomatic means completely changed my perspective over it.

I think the main problem with many doctors is the fact that the patient tends to feel blamed when told that their minds are causing the problem. This is not Sarno’s approach at all, since he states that chronic pain can be seen as a defense mechanism against deep negative emotions.

I see where you are going with your statement:

> Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale behind them. They're moral judgements. For example, if you want to go looking for scientific evidence for why the death penalty is a terrible idea you won't find any. You'll only find ethical and moral rhetoric about why killing innocent people by mistake is bad, or why the economics of keeping people in prison for decades when you could just kill them is irrational. Science has nothing to say. Science doesn't judge.

I wanted to talk more about your example of the death penalty.

However, if you do look into the death penalty, you'll find:

- in places that lock people up for life instead of killing them, sometimes people are later proved to be innocent and then released.

- in places where the penalty is death, a jury that would've sent a person to life in prison will often choose to release the person instead of kill them, as they aren't 100% certain and the consequence is irreversible.

I think science absolutely has some things to say about this. You could take my two statements as hypotheses and do tests to see if they are true. (This would be a lot like medical tests, but it wouldn't be ethical to have a test group and a control group; you could, however, create a regression model between two similar societies (or the same one at different times) and control for various differences, the chiefest being 'uses death penalty' or not, and answer these questions ("prove"/"disprove" the hypotheses) with some confidence.)

I agree that while you could do a study to see if people are happier and economies fare better in societies with capital punishment ["science"], that the rational and the outcome have nothing to do with science. It is a lot like in the Ted talk "Teaching kids real math with computers"[0] where the speaker explains that math has four steps:

1. Posing the right questions

2. Real world -> math formulation

3. Computation

4. Math formulation -> real world verification

If step 3 was 'Do Science', then it becomes obvious that the other steps lie outside the domain of science, but it does not become obvious that we can't use the tools of science to reason about problems that people disagree on, including moral quandaries.

[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_...