331–340 of 970 posts
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?
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> 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.
Well yes that’s the point. By literal definition the people who were so obviously wrong weren’t experts. But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.
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Much of this was told to me in confidence (via their lab-mates, etc) I’m not going to betray their trust.
Your first comment was effectively "Everyone knows this person is a fraud and no one is willing to stand up and put a stop to it". Your second comment was effectively "Well I don't know they are a fraud and I'm not going to be the one who upsets people by trying to put a stop to it". I don't say this as a criticism of you. I say this a defense of the people you are criticizing. Stopping people like this takes a lot o…
I don't recall where I first heard it, but the principle that it takes 10x the amount of energy to refute bullshit as it does to generate it certainly seems to apply in this case.
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I wasn't social media that eroded the trust in research and science, it was the introduction of politics. We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This…
I strongly protest the concept that the recent introduction of politics is making things worse than they used to be. If you ask anyone who was senior working in these institutions in the 1970s, things were far more dodgy back then. Corruption and bigotry were rampant. But it was far easier to cover up back in the day. Politicization is mostly driven by transparency . Politicization is not a new thing, it's a fact tha…
How are you using “conservative” here? The right certainly has no monopoly politicizing science.
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> Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. For the record I now know a professor at one of the premier institutions in the world, who is a total fraud. Their research was fraudulent in grad school. Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. Then they got a premi…
> I just throw out papers that don’t publish datasets and code There was an interesting research paper that claimed you could up your IQ with a computer game called dual n back and a lot of paper tried to replicate it, but my mind was blown when I realized none of them used the same code. None of them actually shared the code they used for their research and then they all claimed they were testing the same thing when…
Independent replication is inherently expensive, but also critical to the field at large. Some sort of code vault that releases the code and data after a period could be a solid compromise.
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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.
One of the critiques I hear about Academia these days, even in hard sciences, is that it is now significantly more dominated by the sons and daughters of elites (who don't have to take out loans and can afford unpaid research opportunities etc. etc.) So it might be on its way back to that.
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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.
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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…
It really is just people. Look at all the information about HIV in the 80's, long before social media. People believed some truly crazy, racist, and misinformed things about HIV and its spread.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/michelle-shock...
The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Be…
The interesting thing about trust is it takes much longer to build than to spend. Given the level scientific institutions have been spending trust over the past few years I'm not sure how this problem can be alleviated within our current framework.
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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 l…