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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

#451

Post by l33t2328 »

kingTug wrote: post #160
lettergram wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Incredible that you cite Brett and Eric Weinstein as credible sources of information. Those guys are charlatans through and through.

What makes you say they’re charlatans

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#452

Post by Aeolun »

dragonsky wrote: post #417
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…

> Educated" people can say what they want about how important it is to believe in the science and have faith in our researchers and the institutions they work for. This comment shows the problem in the argument. Science does not require belief or faith. In fact the idea of faith is the antithesis of science. Science is about the hypothesis supported by evidence and remains current knowledge until a hypothesis that is…

Unfortunately, my knowledge is insufficient to question. So I’m forced to have faith that the researchers are not bullshitting me.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#453

Post by agentgumshoe »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #191

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?

It's not. There's a heap of research behind their statements too, but all that research is also 'wrong' because the authorities say so.

There's currently more people per capita in hospital fully vaccinated than not in a lot of places. That's interesting, but I don't see a single part of 'the consensus' investigating this, just dismissals.

Saying science is only the consensus is dangerous. A lot of the studies published as the 'peer reviewed science' have poor errors/data (E.g. excluding groups that negatively affect the outcome our using relative risk as high significance against low absolute risk), but that's fine, science working properly when it's wrong that way because science changes as we learn, except if it says what we don't like.

And that's the strangest thing, the science has changed the whole time (covid isn't airborne- then it is, masks don't work- then they do, then only N95 do, vaccine will stop it dead (yes Fauci said this)- then it will reduce spread- then it just reduces hospitalization and death- then it's better than nothing- then we're working on a new one because the old ones don't work. All the while refusing to even be curious about the side effects because the greater good and then vaccinating children because 'the risk is not zero' even though the risk of side effect including death is not zero'

But hey, shut up Rogan etc, they make us feel uncomfortable about our accepted 'truths.'

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#454

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #158
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly did they bring up? Against whom?

> What exactly did they bring up? Academic misconduct. > Against whom? I don't know, which puts me exactly where I was ten minutes ago. They have no control over the situation, and if they hadn't posted I would know even less, so it's not suppression.

> They have no control over the situation

They have complete control over how complicit they are in preserving the coverup of acts they allege to know are definitely true.

> and if they hadn't posted I would know even less

The reality is that right now you know exactly as much as before they posted because what they posted was unsubstantiated. They may as well have said that their name is Princess Peach and that they're pregnant with the mustached child of a certain Italian plumber for all the good it does you.

One of three things must be true:

1) They have real firsthand knowledge that the claims are true and they're actively deciding to protect the identity(ies) of a conspiracy of rampant fraudsters whose actions are so egregious that they tarnish the very essence of the scientific academy itself.

2) They don't have any real knowledge that the claims are true, and the story is rumormongering.

3) I swear I had a third one, but now that I've written those two I can't think of what it was. I'll leave this placeholder here in case it comes to me.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#455

Post by l33t2328 »

subsection1h wrote: post #447
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…

> Most research is flawed or useless [...] 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. If this were true, then you could easily provide numerous examples of discredited papers published in journals like those of the AAAS and National Academy of Science, and yet you didn't. Your comment is worthless.

Do you suspect that most research is published in the National Academy of Science?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#456

Post by mostertoaster »

sega_sai wrote: post #111
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…

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…

What’s weird is it makes sense to trust scientific consensus, even though scientific consensus is also kind of territorial and protective.

It always fights against anything new, and will try to be opposed to anything against the status quo. It is so confident it is right it actually feels like it is doing the right thing by trying to suppress ideas opposed to the establishment.

Kind of like Galileo I guess, and the religious leaders of hus day are like the intellectual elitists of our day.

Thinking about the copernican revolution it made sense the establishment was opposed to it, not because it wasn’t factually correct, but it was like knowledge people aren’t ready for. And it was too unpredictable what it would do if the idea became dominant.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#457

Post by everyone »

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…

What other areas have you experienced? What you're describing is just human nature, every field of human endeavour is like that, because they're run by humans. Despite this, we have made unimaginable scientific progress over the last few 100 years, and we are continuing to progress at and even faster rate.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#458

Post by NL807 »

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…

The optimistic outlook is that science is an integral part of human progress, technological or otherwise. The implication is here is that even if there is a lot rubbish papers out there, they will be weeded out, because progress demands practical concepts that actually works. So dodgy work of "scientists" that rort the grants system will be ultimately discarded and forgotten.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#459

Post by matthewdgreen »

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 don’t know what is going on in this thread. Did science sneak into your house(s) and kill your pet cat?

I don’t know what Universe you all live in, but I’m in my 40s and scientific research has made incredible strides just in my lifetime. This includes academic research, industrial research, both together or looked at separately. We have made amazing progress in understanding the human genome, the internals of living cells, devising incredibly powerful semiconductor devices, probing the mysteries of the Universe, developing useable machine learning technology and other areas. We have a goddamn space telescope at L2. Even the “controversial” areas are incredibly successful. In the aggregate, climate change papers from the 1980s and the 1990s broadly predict the warming we can measure today, and COVID research (despite being about two years old) has gifted us vaccines that provide enormous measurable benefits and were delivered on a timescale that previous generations would be amazed by.

Yes, at the micro level there are some individual bad results as there have always been and a few fields have had difficulty with replicating small-effect-size experiments, but even there we only know about these issues because scientists pointed them out and began improving their techniques. In the vast majority of sciences, if you pick a point 20 or 40 years ago and look at the tangible progress we’ve made, it’s enormous and more impressive than anything we have accomplished in any other area of human endeavor. I’m not sure if people here are angry at the world, or if they’ve just raised their expectations to unattainable heights, but it’s awfully depressing watching people ignore this progress.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#460

Post by pvarangot »

beerandt wrote: post #449
porcoda wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>aren't bullshit as much as they ultimately contribute no new knowledge or understanding How else do you define bullshit?

So in science the game is never be caught lying, and they usually define bullshit as lying. I’m with you in that getting payed to write two six page papers that contain absolutely no new information per year is bullshit. Not because what’s on the papers is a lie, but because pretending society needs to invest in you so that in the future we are all more productive or happy or wise is a lie. Science itself is not bullshit and most papers are not bullshit, what’s bullshit is that we need to have so many useless science just in the from within it some useful discoveries will emerge, which is a strong underlying premise under which a lot of scientists get payed.
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