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The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

scientificamerican.com

81–90 of 127 posts

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#81

The antivax movement is ridiculous and hopefully the necessity of covid vaccinations will destroy it as should have happened years ago. Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors. But the lockdown scepticism I can kind of understand as it is more of a political issue - the cost/benefit of lockdown and depe…

> Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors.

That's exactly my position, except the opposite. Anyone who claims that "the world is ending, give us money" is anything but a scam, shamelessly copied from the Catholic Church, is not an honest actor.

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#82
post #4

It's odd that the author only traces the political aspect back to 2015, when climate change denial has been a political issue since the turn of the millennium: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_policy_of_the...

Climate change is a political issue and has basically nothing to do with science.

The unusualness of 2015 is because that's when Obama lost control. Republicans had control of senate and house. Then also paved way for making Trump presidents just a couple years later.

Let's just assume for a second climate change is the equivalent to 4-5 hiroshima bombs per second. Which is the political assertion that we are about to go extinct every 12 years. The problem with politicization of climate change is that if it's true, we cannot act in time anymore. Then again Al Gore(politician) made a ton of claims in his movie that were quite false. According to Al Gore florida is pretty much entirely under water right now.

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#83
post #27

This conflates "official positions of authorities" with "science". It's like a modern religion, with three tenets: (1) science made everything around us (iPhones and airplanes!) (2) we speak for science (3) therefore you must believe our conclusions. But in fact, that's the opposite of a proper scientific attitude, which always admits doubt, and believes experiment over authority. As for why authorities are increasin…

The mask thing was a Noble Lie to prevent PPE shortages: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-experts-will-lie-to-yo... I agree that that erodes trust, but it was for "a reason".

Same as the "now you should wear 2 masks" bullshit, right? Tell them to wear 2 because that means they'll at least wear 1, right?

These "white lies" are why I'm done with it.

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's real science, you would expect advice to change as more data comes in, so perhaps you should find a better example.

Can you share an example of real science where advice changed as more data come in?

The answers to this are so numerous and the logic so obvious that we as citizens may be to close to even see them.

Pretty much every bit of advice in the health sciences has been changing over multiple generations (lead and xrays are two easy examples from over 50 years ago)

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#85
What has me most worried is that in Germany the anti-since movement is undermined, used, pushed, financed?? by more or less all problematic/extremist right wing movements (ultra conservatives, Neo-Nazis, Reichsbürger, all not the same but often with a lot of overlap).

Worse may people getting swept up in the movement due to mistrust in the government and health system often don't realize this, starting to repeat right wing propaganda while position themself as everything but right wing.

Noticeable is also that as far as I can tell there are organized people spreading this misinformation using expertise about how to best manipulate people. For example thy intentionally take easy to misunderstand since "results" related to Covid and twist them using "broken" (i.e. outright wrong) statistics which for a person not knowing anything about statistics "seem ok/valid". While there are some cases which might have been mistakes many clearly are not. Furthermore the way "fake news" pop up indicates (for me, I didn't to to deep research) that this people do understand exactly what they do. I.e. they look for the best ways to disproof they content and then pre-empty create "fake news" to discredit the sources which would be used for this arguments. Or at least this is how I perceive it.

At the same time the established media does a horrible job, instead of properly factual reporting about this problems they put the people tricked in the same pot as the people tricking them and the people taking advantage of the situation. By discrediting all the involved people as extremist right wing and similar they denounce and discredit many people which just have been tricked pushing them further into it and loosing more trust. Especially there is a large amount of "moderate" people which have/had reasonable alternative ideas about how to approaches to handling Covid (like actually reasonable, potentially better then what the government did, especially around fall last year). But this people are repeatedly tricked in some but not all of there arguments by "fake news" and now, the press they already don't trust much discredit all they say because supposedly they are Nazis. (They are not, but they let themself be manipulated by them.)

Through in every case I looked into the press was noticeable more honest then alternative sources.

But more honest sadly doesn't mean fully honest.

The fact that especially some of the state payed (but supposedly independent) press has a record of not fully honest (and sometimes outright deceptive) reporting doesn't help. Similar is true for the non state payed press but in other ways (e.g. their involvement in the copyright reform which offended many young people).

For example one of the first larger demo against the covid measurements taken in berlin consisted of the demo moving through the city followed by an announcement. The press reported the lowest estimate of people involved by the moving demo but made it look like it is the number of all of it and also didn't say they took the lower estimated. But on the demo announcement probably twice to thrice of the amount of people had been involved. So not very honest. But the people behind of the demo where worse as they overestimated the amount of people by a factor of 10 or more and used the reasoning "that the press numbers are clearly wrong" to trick people into believing it. Then they took certain events related to the police out of order and represented a moderate reasonable action of the police as something completely different, using this to further undermine the credibility of the government.

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#86
post #71

The antivax movement is ridiculous and hopefully the necessity of covid vaccinations will destroy it as should have happened years ago. Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors. But the lockdown scepticism I can kind of understand as it is more of a political issue - the cost/benefit of lockdown and depe…

How is china shows lockdown can work ? They may simply reacting and just try to do 'something'. By that logic sweeden, florida, south dakota, shows lockdown doesn't make significant difference.

Because they went from the disaster in Wuhan to zero cases, with no vaccines.

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#87
post #76

I’ve been pro science all my life but heavy censorship on coronavirus made me change my mind, perhaps blame is on the censorers a bit, no? If it is truly science, why censor the ideas of others?

Exactly. It pissed me off to no end when at the beginning of the pandemic the health minister of my country mindlessly parroted WHO in their initial "masks do not help" stance. How can anyone treat what we are being told seriously when instead of telling us the truth (masks help, but please don't hoard them because we need them for first responders) they choose to lie in the simplest things. Same thing with real numb…

Well the last paragraph is (I think) due to medicines approach if you do not have evidence you claim it is not happening (or you say 'there is no evidence...'). And sometimes this just means there was no data.

Re: The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

#90
The trouble with appeals to science is that anyone can make empirical observations. Like if you can still smell VOC's through a mask (e.g. farts), that is empirical data to cast some doubt about their efficacy against airborne droplets, and about how much economic harm or social restriction you're going to tolerate based on that. If you make these policies about science instead of authority, it's just another lie with a short half-life, and you're going to lose when it comes out.

Trusting science on the mask and lockdown policy issue means rejecting the official policy direction. On mRNA therapies it means examining FDA approval and human trial results. Trusting science on curve flattening means rejecting that Ferguson epidemiological model used to justify lockdowns. So-called science should inform policy, but it is not a sound justification for it. To say that your political policies have the authority of "science," as though they were discovered truths is as sound as saying they were divinely revealed, because it comes down to trusting the people who are telling you that.

A scientific policy is also necessarily not a democratic one, or one based in any policymaker accountability, because it is founded in the views of a few unaccountable initiates. When elected representatives forfeit their responsibility to un-elected experts and just do what they are told, they are renouncing their authority and giving it to people who don't get fired (or worse) for being wrong.

The conflict is that policymakers have basically asked "what is the exception we can use to suspend all these legal constraints on us so that we can wield power to do what we think is the right thing for humanity?" and they have settled on a medical crisis. If only pandemic policy were based on science, we would be in much better shape, but it's based on leaders avoiding responsibility and blaming "science" for their unwillingness to produce democratic policy that preserves the foundations of their societies, arguably, because their agenda is to destabilize and un-moor them.

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