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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#481

Post by NoPie »

srcreigh wrote: post #397
invisible wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read over both sides of this, and there is some editorializing going on in this medical journal that makes it less about facts. The title makes no mention of Ventavia, but instead mentions Pfizer. The headline doesn't specify that Ventavia managed 1/44th of the trial, nor anything factual (mostly speculation that the data integrity is questionable). > Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company…

I guess it's not so hard to believe you're getting downvoted by shedding light on a situation about censorship. The first question in everybody's head when reading this article is, "Were the vaccine trials legitimate or not?" BMJ does not even come close to truthfully answering this question. With their authority as a medical journal and a very limited amount of evidence, they give a clear and incorrect impression th…

>> The first question in everybody's head when reading this article is, "Were the vaccine trials legitimate or not?"

You are writing complete rubbish. BMJ does not question the legitimacy of the vaccine trials. With this sentence you are making very serious accusations to healthcare professionals. Most likely you don't even understand how clinical trials work or terminology used in the original article. If BMJ were not a serious journal, nothing in medicine would be serious including those trials.

BMJ is questioning some irregularities brought to the light by a whistle-blower. It shows some evidence confirming issues about one particular clinical research organization and lack of reaction from the FDA. These issues should be addressed and resolved to remove doubts that the data from vaccine trials can be sufficiently trusted.

Also FDA memorandum does not confirm that the FDA has investigated the sites. You probably don't even understand what the quoted professor meant by “oversight”. It definitely is not just checking and fully trusting the submitted paperwork.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#482

Post by Natsu »

chrisseaton wrote: post #460
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that not say more about the fact checker than it does the Babylon Bee? It's clearly a satirical site. It takes all of seconds to recognize it if you look at the site.

Maybe? Not sure it matters either way? I think the conclusion in both ways is: satire confuses people and it'd be good to mark it.

The Babylon Bee is like the Onion and is at least as well known.

While I agree that there are people who take ridiculous stuff seriously, they're beyond what a fact checker--or anyone else--can help.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#483

Post by joshuahughes »

r-w wrote: post #456
henrikschroder wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2020, talking about the lab-leak theory was labelled "misinformation" and brutally purged from social media by "fact-checkers". In 2021, major news outlets started talking about it, and then it suddenly became ok to talk about it on social media again, and the "fact-checkers" did a complete 180 on the issue. They're not checking facts, they're just enforcing the mainstream view. The mainstream view is often correc…

I think people kept it taboo for as long as they could because: people were literally dying due to low vaccination rates, which were caused in large part by such specious conspiracy theories. Fact checkers did not do a 180, it is still widely considered a conspiracy theory, and its very existence harms public health even if there's a remote possibility it's true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory…

This reads like a lot of mental gymnastics attempting to excuse the inexcusable.

You argue that blocking debate is a righteous act because the theory's "very existence harms public health". I'd counter that the gagging of a concerned public breeds distrust that is vastly more harmful than allowing debate would have been.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#484

Post by throwawayboise »

linuxhansl wrote: post #322

Let's please not throw out the baby with the bathwater and dismiss all fact checking as political, biases, or agenda-driven. Not agreeing on basic facts in the prime problem in our current political discourse. Disagreement is usually a good problem to have and leads to testing the complete problem space. What we are seeing now, though, is the absence of the problem space exploration. Instead any discussion is just di…

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#485

Post by throwawayboise »

gweinberg wrote: post #349
pwned1 wrote: post #53

Facebook themselves state that their "fact checkers" are not really checking facts, their work is opinion.

They shouldn't be called "fact checkers" then, they should be called "opinion police".

Thought police, then?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#486

Post by chrisseaton »

Natsu wrote: post #482
chrisseaton wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? Not sure it matters either way? I think the conclusion in both ways is: satire confuses people and it'd be good to mark it.

The Babylon Bee is like the Onion and is at least as well known. While I agree that there are people who take ridiculous stuff seriously, they're beyond what a fact checker--or anyone else--can help.

> they're beyond what a fact checker--or anyone else--can help

I'd disagree. I think a literal huge 'satire' flag on the post would help.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#487

Post by hpoe »

hedora wrote: post #226
goopthink wrote: post #46

In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presentin…

As the letter points out, in this particular case, fact checking is not hard. In fact, this is one of the easiest scenarios for a fact checker to handle correctly. The source is a reputable, top-tier peer-reviewed publication. Even an inexperienced (but competent) fact checker could check run literature searches on the journal, reviewers and authors. This would reveal that they’re working at reputable institutions, a…

Under that system a young German scientist who wrote about the photovoltaic effect would be ignored and classified as non-reputable. Just saying being part of the institutions doesn't make on right it makes one prominent.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#488

Post by cblconfederate »

Facebook can't moderate shit because they are afraid to become a publisher. "Fact checkers" are as horrible as it sounds, power hungry censors. Reddit's zero-paid moderators are worse. Twitter's employees are constantly high on their own drama flagging everything that doesnt suit their favourite flavor of wokism. How the hell did we end up with this situation?

I want forums and blogs back.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#489

Post by quinnjh »

killjoywashere wrote: post #237
xwolfi wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm French, live in China, so familiar from both countries with what you say. But I think I disagree a bit with your annoyance with agenda setting and journalist incestuous relationship with ideology or politics. Look I dont know how you're taught in Spain but in France we gave up neutral journalism centuries ago. Each newspaper is clearly categorized and we learn as children, around 7 IIRC all the links (le monde so…

> even a genius in his lab building a life saving cure will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good As a nerd in a building trying to build things to save lives from disease (“cure” is too strong a word), there are explicit ethics reviews my work has to go through, with an almost bizarre frequency, so I disagree with this statement specifically. Otherwise, I enjoyed your com…

For us to grow beyond entrenched binaries takes self awareness. Could you perhaps see how another doctor who hs caused harm before may have believed they were truly only doing good - and this could have been enabled by them being barraged with ethics reviews? "What do you mean i caused harm i have to do all these things to prove that i dont do harm" Meanwhile history shows clearly the sacrifices that were taken.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#490

Post by walterbell »

dang wrote: post #291
endisneigh wrote: post #22

Is fact checking that difficult? Imagine a forum that works in the following way: 1. You post similar to here. 2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim. 3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how wel…

It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social pol…

> Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.

Great point, which reminds me of 1960s "English Prime (E-Prime)", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

> a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms ... D. David Bourland Jr., who had studied under Alfred Korzybski, devised E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in the late 1940s. Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay ... Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-Prime when discussing psychological distress to encourage framing these experiences as temporary ... and to encourage a sense of agency by specifying the subject of statements.

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