221–230 of 329 posts
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If all someone can come up with are "standard stances" in their capacity as a scientist, they are a worse-than-useless scientist.
Science is an incremental march. Behind every revolutionary discovery are a thousand necessary results that are the result of a standard process.
How can you ever falsify anything if you only take the standard stance.
What else should scientists do than challenging the status quo? Bret (Eric's brother, biology PhD) had a 2h long conversation with Pierre Kory (MD) and it was taken down by YT. One of the things they talked was the recommendations of WHO and other organisations to focus on supportive care only (supporting the patient while their organism fights the disease by itself). They insist on not using other treatments outside…
> What else should scientists do than challenging the status quo? Sure, and I rather suspect there are all sorts of venues that scientists could use to communicate scientific reasons challenging the status quo, ones in which there'd be a process of discourse with other domain experts capable of independently evaluating claims. YouTube is significant mass media. But the idea that it's a crucial early stage link in the…
Rather than have ideological gate keeping at every level, I believe we in tech should advocate for a plurality of viewpoints discussed in the open. Probing, reasonable discourse is the best antidote to propaganda and confusion.
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"Puberty blockers are fully reversible and their long-term effects are safe and well-understood" is dangerous medical misinformation too, but YouTube doesn't take those videos down.
I'm sure they would if it were national news that they weren't. Just because they haven't taken it down doesn't mean that they approve of it. You're just resorting to whataboutism. "You didn't catch my mate Dave when he murdered that guy so I don't see why you should care about this little stabbing here..."
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> When you deal in mass distribution, the dynamics and responsibilities are different than when you're in conversation/process with other domain experts. Why? Is the implicit assumption here that people are too stupid or irresponsible to handle hearing information & coming to their own conclusion on it? This seems like a distressingly common viewpoint nowadays...
> Is the implicit assumption here that people are too stupid or irresponsible to handle hearing information & coming to their own conclusion on it? At risk of being flippant, have you been on Facebook lately at all in the past 5-6 years?
This is a very condescending and authoritarian position that I would hope those of us who care about free discourse would eschew.
Based on YouTube’s reply, seems they took his video down for promoting dangerous medical misinformation. If that’s what happened, I don’t see an issue.
And how exactly do they determine whether something is "dangerous medical misinformation"? I'm guessing it's probably based on WHO guidelines, which means a very large number of things are off limits.
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The company has another upcoming drug they want to push rather than ivermectin: https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1402647948371005441 E: To add, I'm not a doctor but Brett Weinstein seems adamant that ivermectin is a very safe drug for humans. One point he has made is that because ivermectin is safe for consumption, there's no (Or very little) downside to taking it in an attempt to prevent or help with COVID.
So you are asserting they don't want to benefit from both?
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> insist on not using other treatments outside clinical trials That signals they may have conflict of interest. For example accidentally finding a treatment that works, could mean huge loss for vaccine business. (Just to be clear, I am not anti-vax. I got vaccinated myself and I believe there is no better option right now, however, trying to limit doctors in finding other means sounds extremely fishy)
Telling doctors to not randomly experiment on their patients outside of a controlled studies seems perfectly reasonable. Most medical groups tend to view uncontrolled human experimentation as very unethical and have for a long time.
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Sorry, what exactly do you think is wrong with shutting down cranks and conspiracy theorists? You may hope we live in a happy world where everyone can evaluate information fairly and detect nonsense perfectly but I'm afraid we don't. Go and have a conversation with my aunt who thinks that the government (there's only one I guess) created Covid in order to kill all the old people and save money on state pensions. Gues…
If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove. If it's more complicated then that, then you shouldn't be so confident you're the smart guy in the room.
I might have agreed with that a few years ago, but crank conspiracy theories have gotten mainstream traction like I have never seen previously.
"Prove" and "disprove" are never fully black and white. It isn't easy to disprove the theory that the Chinese engineered Covid (i.e SARS-CoV-2) and its spike protein RNA so they could insert arbitrary genetic code into non-Chinese people via the inevitable mRNA vaccine they knew would be created (which itself contains genetic code directly copied from the virus itself). Maybe they want to control our minds, or make us susceptible to some future engineered virus that will take out everyone on the planet that was vaccinated.
I can't disprove that. Maybe someone can.... but whoever they are, they will hardly be able to communicate this to average internet users and YouTube consumers being as it is extremely technical.
But I can make a rational, reasonable analysis of this, and conclude it is unlikely enough that getting a vaccine is a good idea.
And by the way, it's not a matter of determining that you are the "smart guy in the room," it's really more a matter of determining what is the general consensus of many smart people in the room. Obviously that is getting harder to do.
While ridiculous, Eric Weinstein is a bit over the top with his accusations from time to time. For example Blaming the physics community for not looking in to his personal “unity” theories more.
Sounds like the physics community wrote him off without actually considering his ideas because he didn't fit the charlatan-leftist mold of your typical physicist academic. Per Wikipedia[1]: The paper qualifies that the author "is not a physicist" but an "entertainer", and it has received strong criticism from the scientific community [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein#