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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

#311

Post by pvaldes »

shadowgovt wrote: post #18
limecat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking an experimental prophylactic against a disease with a 99.9% survival rate. Probably higher if you're under 50. And we still don't really know how safe it is, because the 'gold standard' data (double blind testing) is absent, save for 2 months' of Pfizer data. Your benefit has apparently outweighed your cost. Fine. Mine hasn't. I like to read any and all opinions, regardless of 'bias'. We all have biases…

> I'm intelligent enough to figure them out. That's the epistemological problem with misinformation. How does one know one is intelligent enough if one is trying to evaluate from misinformation? Shouldn't the premise "garbage in, garbage out" apply?

It does not matter how smart we are, the virus is dumb.

As many other people realized too late, you can't negotiate with a virus. "I'm smarter than the scientists" is the wrong poker bet here (and you are risking your life for a small vanity ego boost, none less).

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#312

Post by fragmede »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #121
s1artibartfast wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world will always have heathens and heretics. Some people will always come to the wrong conclusion some of the time. Skepticism of any claims is a pretty good heuristic, but should be equally applied to counter claims.

Right. Why do we care so much if everyone agrees?

Thing is, to a large degree, we haven't had to before. If someone random person wants to believe the moon landing is hoax, it doesn't affect my life in the slightest. What's changed is that random person walking around with no mask and no vax. Now, a random person in a Target market a thousand miles away from me isn't literally a threat, but where that attitude is supported online and a random someone walks into my local Target, it causes me to need to care. Someone can chime in to question the underlying beliefs on the matter of Covid, but the point is this is an example of an issue where we care. There are extremist views like white supremacy or similar violent ideology that are a bit further outside the scope of discussion but are another example of why we care that enough everyones agree.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#313

Post by lmm »

pharrington wrote: post #169
AussieWog93 wrote: post #87

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…

In your opinion, when was most scientific research not flawed or "useless"? Remember, the Einsteins, Clarks, etc of the world were wildly exceptional outliers. Do you really think that if you were to look at most research done between 1897 and 1922, the overall quality would be higher? And that there would be less social factors competing with the integrity of work?

> Do you really think that if you were to look at most research done between 1897 and 1922, the overall quality would be higher?

I suspect yes, because the poor research was simply not be being done. Science was not a career, there was no pressure to publish, it was the pastime of an elite few.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#314

Post by mcnamaratw »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #291
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fun to complain about the lack of perfection in science, while posting on an instantaneous, free world-wide forum.

This forum and all the infrastructure that supports it was based primarily on hard science and conducted in the "hot path" of tech progress where inaccurate results are both unacceptable and quickly falsified: mathematics (Shannon, etc.), physics, chemistry, materials engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. There's a reason technology has changed the world significantly in the last 50 years and oth…

Are you saying that medicine hasn’t advanced much in the last 50 years?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#315

Post by jimkleiber »

toolz wrote: post #45
tempnow987 wrote: post #37

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…

Personally I don't think any kind of mask works on people who don't want to wear them. I hypothesize the reason general population shows little or no benefit with masks is because wearing masks effectively is significantly more tedious than just having one on most of the time where people require them. People who don't want masks aren't getting fitted properly for n95's, they aren't shaving, they aren't behaving cons…

Does it render masks "ineffective" or "less effective"? I think I see so much absolutist language whereas I wish we would use more relative language.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#316

Post by jmpeax »

> The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms

Sounds like we need more evidence, rather than accepting the null hypothesis. C'mon Royal Society, this is stats 101.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#317

Post by fr33d0m_ »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #87

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…

So how do you think this gets solved? What do you think some of the root causes are?

Semi-related, I was reading about the history of some of the "US greatest universities"; Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. were actually Christian Universities? Wasn't even Cambridge founded in the 1200's have similar history?

https://www.quora.com/When-did-Harvard-College-stop-being-a-...

I'm not sure of the complete validity, but it's an interesting perspective for sure.

I even remember reading Einstein working alongside Father Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest (Founder of Big Bang Theory) on some groundbreaking work?

I've always joked that maybe G-d gave us the computer as he felt pity on us for it took 4000 years for man to calculate several hundred digits of Pi, and who knows how many great minds dedicated to hand calculating only a more "perfect circle". Didn't even Archimedes die calculating Pi?

"Nōlī turbāre circulōs meōs!" a Latin phrase, "Do not disturb my circles!". It is said to have been uttered by Archimedes—in reference to a geometric figure he had outlined on the sand—when he was confronted by a Roman soldier during the Siege of Syracuse prior to being killed.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#318

Post by skissane »

amcoastal wrote: post #289
skissane wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are things "improving every decade" at a "vast rate"? What exactly is improving? Doesn't that depend on one's values as to what counts as "better"? Do you mean technological progress, economic progress, social progress? Perceptions of progress seem to depend a lot on (a) where in the world you are, (b) what things you value, (c) whether you choose to optimistically focus on the positive developments (from the viewpoi…

You can be philosophical about "improving", but in the context of the thread and the post, I think we are talking about technological improvement over the last few years as an example of tangible scientific improvement, even if a lot of papers that are published suck.

Okay, but that comes back to the point that some scientific fields are more relevant to technological progress than others.

Getting physics and chemistry right is really essential to technological progress. How can technology advance if your physics and chemistry are wrong?

But, what about "softer" sciences, such as psychology or the social sciences? It seems you could be moving in the complete wrong direction with them, and yet still be advancing technologically – because technology largely doesn't depend on them.

And even for the "hard sciences", technology generally only depends on certain areas of them. How much of the Standard Model of physics is actually technologically relevant? Technological progress is strong evidence you've got the technologically-relevant parts of physics right, but is compatible with serious error in low technological-relevance areas. What is the technological relevance of electroweak unification, for example?

We also don't know what we are missing out on. Neuroscience is an area of biological research in which many promises of clinical translation have thus far failed to deliver. Is that because this the brain is very complicated, and we just have to wait longer and invest more before we see more results? Or could it be that we are doing the science wrong, and we'd clinically be in a much better situation now if we were doing it right? How can one tell which of those two possible situations we are actually in?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#319

Post by jdminhbg »

cgrealy wrote: post #275
omosubi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best diet is the one eaten for 1000s of years by your ancestors

You mean the one for people whose life expectancy was less than half the modern day? Who lived completely different lives?

Pro or con the diet, the difference in life expectancy is mostly antibiotics.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#320

Post by alar44 »

toolz wrote: post #90
alar44 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how to respond to the overcrowded hospitals. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-... Hospitals have been jam packed the entire time. There is data everywhere to support this. Tons of procedures are not being done due to beds and ICUs being full. Ask anyone who works in a hospital. Call one if you'd like.

ICUs are at max capacity all the time pre-pandemic. In fact a study done in 2013 IIRC showed that you could pick any random date and any random hospital in the U.S. and there was a 16% chance it was at max capacity. So again, my question is this - if hospital capacity is truly a crisis, why have staffed beds been in decline since the beginning of the pandemic? Half a million healthcare workers have left their jobs si…

Thats just not true. I found the study you're referencing and it says in 2013 mean ICU occupancy was 68%. If you zoom out on the map you'll see the US avg is 83%. Did you even look at it? Some states are like 9/10 at 100% capacity.

Staffed beds are not in decline, and of course hospitals are trying to get more workers, they are offering crazy pay incentives right now.

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