Joe Rogan and Dr. Robert Malone podcast. is it misinformation? Dr. Malone certainly have the credentials that none of us have and yet he is censored. is science only one voice? whoever express different opinions should be censored even if that person have the credentials to speak on the matter?
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
191–200 of 970 posts
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#192Notable blurb from the report itself ---
"However, whilst this approach [content removal] may be effective and essential for illegal content (eg hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material) there is little evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach for scientific misinformation, and approaches to addressing the amplification of misinformation may be more effective. In addition, demonstrating a causal link between online misinformation and offline harm is difficult to achieve [25, 26], and there is a risk that content removal may cause more harm than good by driving misinformation content (and people who may act upon it) towards harder-to-address corners of the internet27."
I'm happy that this point has been raised in this report. Lot of understandable hand-wringing and fear about online misinformation about over COVID, but it was never clear to me that online misinformation is a variable that explains differences in vaccination rates across countries, or to what extent it affects an individual's decision not to vaccinate. Turns out that this is hard to measure.
The CDC messaging was really bad and problematic on several counts right from the get go. Its not like the US is incapable of messaging about the link between individual behaviour and societal good in the long term (for instance, there were initial protracted battles, but we eventually agreed largely on condoms and HIV, or smoking and lung cancer risk) or in the short term (as in the lifestyle sacrifices that WWII engendered for wartime production). I wonder what went right in those situations (if they did go right) that went wrong in the messaging this time around.
Over and above the masking, some observations --
1. Transmission risk, I think, was never the primary end-point of vaccine development, but rather, to prevent hospitalization. But the messaging from CDC and others on the vaccine implied that transmission would keep declining with increasing vaccination rates, which turned out to be true only to a limited extent.
2. The early messaging was that this would be one wave of infections, and that one round of vaccination would end it all. This was tough to defend given what happened with the flu. I understand that telling people that "Well, the vaccine may not give long-lasting immunity and still leave you susceptible" is not going to promote vaccination, but perhaps emphasizing that vaccine-immunity is controlled and safe than an infection that might hit all organs, would have been a better way out?
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#193[flagged]
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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#194Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
I also disagree. Nobody documents or publicizes the small labs doing small "useless" stuff. The kind of stuff that seems irrelevant but that slowly piles into a mountain of new information. As a PHD myself, many times I thought to myself: "this research is quite insignificant" and what we found was truly small potatoes, but I can only hope that, in the aggregate, all of us that did small stuff during that period advanced science in significant ways.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#195I think the US has caught this cancerous idea that the average person can't be trusted to think for themselves. The amount of condescension in that thought process is disgraceful. They think, someone has to tell the average person how to think. And the baffling thing is that supposed liberals think that thoughts should be policed by corporations, government, and self styled intellectuals (which seems so much against…
No, it’s that the average person cannot make decisions about complex subjects . This is not a new development: the boundaries of scientific knowledge - across all fields - have required a large amount of specialization for a while now. The barrier to entry is a PhD, and even then you’re only an expert in a small part of your field. If you suddenly decide to jump in without context and make judgements about topics you…
I don't know, I think we trust people to make decisions about complex subjects all the time when it comes to their personal lives.
I think the problem is this, in a reasonable society we would say: here are the relevant facts, here's the supporting data, make up your own mind. In reality what our society now does is says "_you must accept conclusion X, and if you don't you're an idiot_" with absolutely no real justification.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if one were to assume that every single scientific discovery of the last 25 years was complete bullshit, they'd be right more often than they were wrong. Has that maybe been true since the beginning of 'natural philosophy'? Perhaps things seem (much) worse now because we have survivorship bias, the same way classical music seems higher quality than pop, because the 90% crud[0] has been long forgotten. [0] https://e…
> Has that maybe been true since the beginning of 'natural philosophy'? Unlikely. In its infancy, science -- aka "Natural Philosophy" as it was called at the time -- had to establish its credibility. It did so by delivering results.
Maybe only one person in ten delivered results - then you'd have both results and 90% crud.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really was social media. Tell an algorithm to optimize for engagement and it will promote the content causing the most engagement: novelty, conspiracy theory, outrage, surprising "revelations" and all sorts of clickbait. If we removed Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok and reverted YouTube to the pre-algorithmic (subscription based) era, we'd still have free speech on the internet but probably a lot less bullshit. Note…
Social media (especially short-form ones like Twitter and TikTok) is just a natural evolution of media trends that were already present in society. TV replacing radio/text and tabloid newspapers are just two examples off the top of my head. If Twitter/Facebook/TikTok weren't there, other alternatives would've been there to fill the void.
Just like we recognized tabloids for what they were, we need to recognize social media for being the same phenomenon disguised in a "grassroots" cloak (i.e. crowdsourced tabloids)
There is nothing organic about the speech that happens on YouTube. Veritasium explains the shift that happened when youtube switched to an algorithmic model from the subscriber model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 - you need to carefully manipulate people to click your thumbnail based on the picture and the video title.
Making outrageous but believable shit up to sensationalize your content is a well known tactic of tabloids (which does continue today to some extent). YouTube and other social media incentivise exactly that.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you protect science from idiots? Is science going to stop working if some people think that bacon cures cancer?
No, but science won't have the opportunity to work when people are passing up vaccines for invermectin.
Science is a tool for falsifying hypotheses, not dictating policies or individual choices.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#199Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
> The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselves.
You're correct, in that what you describe isn't a threat to the ivory towers of 'science'.
Unfortunately, here in the real world, outside of academia, those people's unassailable belief in all flavors of bullshit has quite a negative effect on the quality of life of the rest of us. But at least I can sleep soundly, knowing that 'science' isn't being harmed by them.
When, say, the planet burns down around us, because of inaction on climate change, I'll take solace in knowing that the science behind climate change was never in any real danger - unlike the rest of us.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#200Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
Really interesting research isn't done because of the risk of a negative result that can't be published.