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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

#421

Post by wildrhythms »

dayvid wrote: post #260
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…

I personally know two people who left Ph.D. programs because of fraud from their professors/departments in research. I think a lot of it stems from working out an experiment or theory for years and finding something that invalidates it. They then cover it up or embellish data to keep funding and not lose all the work time.

At the heart of the issue, as you arrived at, is that our researchers are constantly under pressure to meet some funding goal, constantly looking for their next grant to continue work. This pressure should not exist. It is my belief that, in absence of that pressure, whatever 'fraud' is happening will no longer need to exist. Of all things, researchers should not need to be worried about funding.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#423

Post by TimTheTinker »

mcnamaratw wrote: post #314
TimTheTinker wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, just that the rate of change is much lower than that of tech. We haven't had any penicillin-level breakthroughs recently.

Admittedly, part of the reason for that is that what's left in medicine is the "long tail" of as-of-yet relatively neglected conditions.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#424

Post by kingkawn »

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…

Another corrupt priest class with hollow ideals leeching off the society

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#425

Post by BurningFrog »

WalterBright wrote: post #398
jdminhbg wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> the difference in life expectancy is mostly antibiotics Life expectancy made huge gains throughout the century before antibiotics.

If you look at life expectancy graphs, they mostly correlate with GDP per person.

You can't really see the invention of antibiotics clearly in the curves.

The way I think of it is that of course penicillin increased life spans, but the discovery and industrialization of it was highly correlated with rising GDP.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#426

Post by JamisonM »

tstrimple wrote: post #382
s1artibartfast wrote: post #161

I see the root cause of all this debate as a failure in scientific communication. When it comes to complex scientific decisions with significant impacts on the public, nuanced and detailed justifications are required. Instead, we often get simple declarations written by PR departments at juvenile reading level. This spawns chaotic and poorly conducted debate in all walks of life. What is required is a robust and tran…

> I see the root cause of all this debate as a failure in scientific communication. How can you have scientific communication without nuance? We know nuanced discussions can't happen at scale. Is this even solvable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128061

I would dispute the idea that nuanced /messaging/ can't happen at scale (discussions are a different thing altogether). While I understand that everyone is up in arms about COVID-19 communications these days there are lots of instances around the world of effective communication that in the end had to be fairly nuanced.. most populations understand that vaccines are useful and effective but not perfect, most populations do understand that their particular risk is low but population-level risk is quite high.

I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#427

Post by rurban »

Retric wrote: post #383
kortex wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but no. You want to avoid any systematic bias, which if you reuse tooling/instruments/code, you run the risk of, but source code is also something which can be peer-reviewed. Reproducing the code base from scratch just isn't going to be tractable for large scientific pieces of software (e.g. CERN). Better to have the source code and dig through it carefully as part of the review and replication than insist…

Suppose someone decided to build another LHC, but to save money they would use exactly the same design, constriction crew, and code used to build the first one. Would you consider that a perfectly reasonable choice or would it seem risky? That said I am all for peer reviewing code, but that’s not where this ends up. People are going to reuse code they don’t bother to dig into because people are people. The obvious ne…

For that reason a special multimedia sharing tool was created, which is now called WWW. So the international physicist community could share their code, papers and CAD designs for the LHC experiments. Quite a success for them, but academia is still resistant

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#428

Post by kristopolous »

Infernal wrote: post #333
slg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Stopping people like this takes a lot of work and often some personal risk. 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.

And often it doesn't actually matter. How many times have you seen people who use citations and references get harassed by some bloviating hoard?

Reality is almost irrelevant in the face of ideology, dogma, and all the other forces that keep counterintuitive or uncomfortable reality out.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#429

Post by gbjw »

TameAntelope wrote: post #287
overgard wrote: post #86

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…

The entire country is founded on the notion that the average person shouldn't be trusted to decide any individual issue, and instead should elect trusted representatives to do the research to understand the individual issue and decide according to how the voter would have decided, if they had researched the issue. Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald; these are the cancers, not the concept of representative democr…

What is 'representative' democracy in the age of weekly/(daily?) polls that break down your constituents' views on every last issue? The blind leading the blind...

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#430

Post by steelstraw »

ransom1538 wrote: post #241
maximus-decimus wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"To me, refusing to share the source code to a program that could be used to replicate your research seems like a big middle finger to science itself." It is done on purpose.

Why?
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