531–540 of 702 posts
I cannot believe that this guy was fired on the same day he leaked to the FDA. This means the FDA reported him to Pfizer?? He blew the whistle on the following: some staff were not blinded, potentially unblind recipients, quality control on the paperwork, the patients weren't followed up with. It just adds to my nihilism, tbh.
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Wouldn't it be a lot clearer if it were something like "issues at three sites doing Pfizer vaccine trials" instead of "issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial"? The singular "trial" in the headline implies that the flaws are in the trial as a whole rather than in a particular distinct subset of the trials.
Well, there are: The provable lack of regulatory oversight and demonstration of the existence of poor practices at the company. The argument that just because one of a company's trials are unsound doesn't mean that the rest aren't is not a good one, when the whole objective is to provide assurance in proving the safety of a product.
I can see room for misunderstanding no matter what. Emphasize the portion of sites where the problem was observed and it wrongly can be inferred that the other sites are fine even if they have no evidence either way. Emphasize the problem as a generic feature of the trials overall and it can be wrongly inferred that the whistle is being blown on some aspect of the trial that doesn't have any site-specific aspect.
The story that I'm hearing in all this is that the whistleblower brought out issues that were specific to certain sites in a way that has no direct bearing on other sites besides being a reason to scrutinize the rest of the sites as well.
Maybe an analogy would be helpful. If a whistleblower observed a disregard for safety protocols at a food processing facility, that's not a randomized sampling that indicates a high likelihood of the problem being throughout all similar facilities, but it doesn't indicate otherwise either. It opens the question whether this is a typical problem in such facilities or if that facility is an exception. If the facility was supplying brand X, there's at least some sense to criticizing a headline like "whisteblower reveals brand X unsafe food handling" instead of "whistleblower reveals unsafe food handling at facility run by brand X". The former implies wider issues, the latter errs toward not making that presumption.
1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cheer%20Pres...
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It’s pretty easy to opt out of corporate dystopia without being jailed or murdered. People love to brag about how they quit social media. This sounds like people want to have the benefits of these platforms without accepting the trade offs.
>It’s pretty easy to opt out of corporate dystopia >People love to brag about how they quit social media. Social media is the tip of the dystopic iceberg
They reflect common, primal human fears and are not indicative of insight. Just as my fear of heights does not provide wisdom against constructing/operating tall things - whether it be buildings, pyramids, or airplane flights.
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.
IMAO, they shouldn't try. They should say, "Facebook connects you to your friends and family, and you should expect the degree of validity of information shared by your friends and family to be similar to that of the information they share with you in real life. If you want good information in your feed, hold your friends and family accountable for what they say."
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…
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…
I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…
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I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…
> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu. Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which…
It's right in line with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[1].
> Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus.
This is a jump from objecting to "is" statements to making an "ought" statement. It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism", which I have the impression is a good chunk of why trust in the news is down.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
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I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…
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…
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I am not a fan of Facebook, but this is one reason they did not want to get into being the arbiter of what is true (Along with a lot of other less noble reasons). There are indeed things that are demonstrably not true, or presented in a very misleading manner, but there's a whole class of things that are in between. The scientific world in general is a community where research about things comes in, people digest it,…
If Facebook doesn't want to be arbiter, they should stop arbitrating. The moment Facebook chooses what to display, they own the content. And it just so happens that what Facebook chooses to display, chooses to recommend, are the lies, more often than not.