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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

royalsociety.org

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#301

Just 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…

As a person working in science (long past PhD), I disagree. There are tons of problem in science: grant system, pressure to publish etc. Also everyone in science is still a person with standard people problems: ego, desire to be right, wanting recognition etc. Also some fields had more issues because of poor statistical methods etc. But the self-correcting nature of science is still its biggest redeeming feature. And…

Where can we find the official consensus statements and who is in charge of writing them?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#302
From the article: 'The report defines scientific "misinformation" as content which is presented as fact but counter to, or refuted by, the scientific consensus - and includes concepts such as ‘disinformation’ which relates to the deliberate sharing of misinformation content.'

They define misinformation in terms of a "scientific consensus". That alone seems problematic[0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2719747/

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#303
post #122

I 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…

> No, it’s that the average person cannot make decisions about complex subjects.

Can PhDs and Nobel Prize winners, the quintessential experts, make decisions about complex subjects?

If they could, wouldn't Long-Term Capital Management still exist today?

Would the IMF have said, months before the subprime crisis, that global economic risks were on the decline?[0]

Nassim Taleb's tweets are an endless source of examples of experts (PhDs, even!) being clueless, sometimes dangerously so.

Excessive trust of subject matter experts is a very real danger, and a significant one.

[0]: World Economic Outlook: Spillovers and Cycles in the Global Economy. Washington, DC: IMF, April, 2007

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#304

Just 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'm biased - I'm a researcher at a big research institution and finished my PhD 15+ years ago. Seeing how the sausage is made shouldn't cause one to become less "pro-science". It should give people perspective that the scientific process is a process performed by humans, with all their flaws (ego, ambition, competition, etc). Furthermore, science is all about making hypotheses and seeing how they work out - with the understanding that many are wrong for all kinds of reasons (bad idea, bad motivations to push known bad ideas, etc.).

When I hear people disillusioned with how science works, more often than not I see someone who is forced to see that the mental model they had of how it works doesn't line up with how it actually works. It's messy, and has always been messy. Just read some history books, and you'll see "scientific" ideas in the 19th and early 20th century that persisted for a long time simply because some people disliked specific other people with opposing ideas. You'll see horrible egos, non-scientific arguments to reject ideas, people scheming and trying to undermine each other, and so on. Basically, humans being humans to each other. There never was a time when science was performed in the idealized model that we sometimes wish it was done: it always involves people being people, flaws and all.

Plus, I don't know any working scientist who doesn't assume most scientific discoveries are complete bullshit (or, more likely, they aren't bullshit as much as they ultimately contribute no new knowledge or understanding). We all know how the game works and why people put ideas out there (especially with the increased volume of publications people are expected to have now). What keeps people like me going is that I know most ideas are dumb or flat out garbage, but good ones emerge from that churn too and push things along. I like to think that some of my dumb ideas, when I throw them into that churn, will also occasionally push things along.

Don't get me started in the "believe in the science" line. The fact that we've turned that phrase into a political cudgel is not helping the situation.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change the economic incentives in academia and research. If right now universities and researches are rewarded for publishing studies/papers no matter the quality, change the rules so that you're rewarded for quality, not quantity.

How do we change those incentives? Who gets to determine the quality threshold?

The journal editors have a lot of power. As a start they could devote at least half of their articles to reproduction studies instead of novel research.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#306

Just 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…

There are a ton of problems with how science is done and most of it comes down to the same root cause: greed. You have corporations buying off scientists (if not to rig experiments/falsify results, then to bury unfavorable findings), journals willing to publish any garbage with little (if any) meaningful review, then media companies willing to turn that junk science into a click-bait friendly press release for a company or industry.

The corruption of science into advertising and science by press conference is a huge problem, but it's not the fault of science itself. It's the institutions we've built around science that are responsible. The way we choose to handle funding, the universities, and the journals, these are all systems that were created and they are all systems that can be replaced or reformed. The underlying framework for scientific observation and testing are still solid and remains the best way to further our understanding the world we live in, but we need accountability and regulations in place to keep the output high quality.

It's the same issue we have with medicine. Not enough accountability and oversight has allowed for things like doctors taking kick backs from pharmaceutical companies (the opioid crisis was a good example, but it's been going on for ages) and people like Stella Immanuel who can tell her patients their illness is caused by demon sperm and alien DNA but she still gets to keep her license to practice medicine.

Without regulation and oversight every system is vulnerable to corruption and failure. It doesn't mean you should throw away the system, it means we aren't doing our job to keep it functioning.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#307
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. At least here in the United States there’s a full on collapse of trust in institutions and supposed expertise and for extremely good reasons. Over and over again those with authority have squandered it. An opioid epidemic devastated so many communities after doctors, health care executives, and McKinsey and Company said the new class of drugs were non-addicting. Our manufacturing sector evaporated after e…

> in a war all the experts said was necessary Just to clarify, many experts from generals to peacenik linguists to gonzo journalists predicted immediately that the wars would be an expensive and unwinnable series of atrocities. They weren't given airtime.

You've touched one of the real veins of this issue that very few really want to talk too loud about. There are still a handful of good journalists doing good work out there, but they seem to have been shoved over into "crazy man on a blog ranting" corner, making it much easier for propagandized coincidence theorists to shut down all discussion from them as crazy conspiracy theories.

I think a good analysis of the history and changing landscape of media is highly in order if we want to get to the bottom of this.

As for me, I like to remind people of Operation Mockingbird quite a bit lately, and rest assured the name just got changed after the Church Committee and given the explosion of the internet they are certainly extremely pervasive in the new system.

As CIA director William Casey said: "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#308

Just 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…

Where did you study, what was your concentration, and did you finish? I'm not sure whether anyone on HN ought to care about your opinion. I'm not convinced that the sausage factory you experienced was a hot dog cart.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the life of one innocent person an acceptable price for success?

Is the life of one innocent person an acceptable price for the lives of several innocent people? Note well: I'm not actually a consequentialist. I'm just pointing out what "for success" actually means, at least some of the time.

The answer we have generally come to is based on a psudo kantian interpretation of causality. One innocent can die due to inaction, but you can't actively kill one to save many.

We don't allow nonconsentual body snachers to harvest one person to save many. Alternatively we may allocate finite funds to save several lives instead of a single life. We may also choose not to spend the money to save a life

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue for me is I have elderly parents one of which does have a health condition (serious) that makes some breathing and other issues hard. They wanted to fly out to visit me. The absolute best way to avoid covid for yourself in my view is an N95 masks with a vent, because you can actually wear that thing for hours comfortably. I have friends who treated folks with covid wearing N95's and did not get covid. So I…

The most mindbogglingly dumb part about masks on planes is that there's still meal service on longer flights, at which point everyone takes off their masks at the same time to eat the food. Are we supposed to believe that the virus takes a little nap while everyone eats, and then only goes back to spreading itself when everyone has finished eating? Detailed rules always lead to insanity. The best way is always to be…

I would imagine if the flight is 5 hours long and the eating time is only 0.5 hours, then there would only be 0.5 hours of breathing virus into the air than 5 hours of it. That being said, yes, most would be unmasked at that time and likely to breathe it in, I guess I just see overall as limiting the total amount of virus breathed into the air by requiring masks most of the time.
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