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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

#501

Post by whatshisface »

overgrownzygote wrote: post #347
nsainsbury wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science does eventually self-correct, but unfortunately it takes far too long to do so. One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continu…

This seems to be a particularly salient issue in the area of medicine, since many practice but may not actually “do science” unless they’re affiliated with a university or research hospital. Most doctors are more like engineers than physicists.

They're more like airplane mechanics than engineers. Few doctors design treatments or procedures but they're very careful about performing them according to the right practices.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#502

Post by 3pt14159 »

nextos wrote: post #440
judge2020 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it'd be like omitting the "methodology" section of the paper. There's no way to verify or prove wrong a paper if you don't know how they reached their conclusions.

Even more than sharing code, I think the key is to share raw data, postprocessed data and describe methods as exceptionally clear equations and pseudocode. Some well intentioned papers share code which is hard to run years afterwards. It's sometimes much simpler to reimplement things that to get the code to run if they are described accurately. Besides, some articles hide ugly things, nasty tricks and lies in the cod…

> Some well intentioned papers share code which is hard to run years afterwards.

Umm, not really? How many years are we talking about here? Because even Cobol is runnable. Sure some OS related quirks may need changing but getting the raw source is much more likely to expose a subtle flaw in the researcher's method than just the equations. For example, an incorrect negative check (to string vs < 0) or an off by one error.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#503

Post by Crye »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #454
Dylan16807 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The third is right out malice towards the institute they criticize and are using this platform to spread misinformation.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#504

Post by nlitened »

ketzo wrote: post #438
overgrownzygote wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a particularly salient issue in the area of medicine, since many practice but may not actually “do science” unless they’re affiliated with a university or research hospital. Most doctors are more like engineers than physicists.

I just got the horrifying image of a lead engineer who refuses to move on from Java 9 because "it's all you need," but they're working on human bodies. Yeesh.

I just got the horrifying image of a lead engineer who jumps onto a newest JS framework of the day because "it's exciting," but they're working on human bodies. Yeesh.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#505

Post by wumpus »

vba616 wrote: post #494
wumpus wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His books all have a scientist doing evil because of their lust for grant money. "State of Fear" is a polemic against climate science. If all you read was the comment I responded to, then it's no surprise that you don't think I provided enough information to criticize his books. Read his books, then read my criticism.

>it's no surprise that you don't think I provided enough information to criticize his books I didn't say that. My point is that your comment reinforces the point that is made by the much-quoted quote. He said he knows show business. Calling his writing on climate science crap is consistent with the quote. Can you see how your comment sounds paradoxical?

No. It makes your comment seem a non-sequitor. Perhaps you could have worded it more clearly.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#506

Post by toolz »

alar44 wrote: post #320
toolz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/

The mean capacity doesn't disprove what I said in the slightest.

https://i.imgur.com/s8RRK76.png

the dark gray represents ICUs in the studied time window (which wasn't 2013, it was a study done in 2013, the study measured ICUs from 05-07)

Here's an interesting fact[1]. 2020 hospital capacity in the US after the start of the pandemic never even got up to the projected capacity as projected using data from 2015-2019. So no, I don't believe these scary-tale anecdotes I've been reading the entire pandemic. They are not backed in data they are backed, at best, in bullet points without context designed to scare the ignorant.

[1]https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/trends-in-overa...

Here's a really good breakdown in canada of capacity with ventilators - you'll note almost every single graph shows higher numbers in 2019

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1479547900598366220.html

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#507

Post by toolz »

jimkleiber wrote: post #315
toolz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is this "it" you're referencing specifically? I'm not sure which point you're asking about, but any of the points aren't like to have great data. Not many masking studies go outside of modeling and the lab and the ones that do aren't that detailed (that I can recall).

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#508

Post by 3pt14159 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #473
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably OP does not have hard evidence and is only relating an anecdote. There isn’t much of an incentive to waste time and resources fighting for academic integrity or some other high minded concept like this. Baring those incentives we’ll be left with anecdotes on forums and a continued sense of a diminished trust in academia.

Op sounded very confident that the persons allegedly involved _are_, in no uncertain terms, not just definitely total frauds but also definitely engaged in a giant fraud conspiracy that definitely goes all the way to the top. If what they meant was "someone told me once that..." they could have said that instead, but they've chosen to word things very very differently. At best they've drastically overstepped reasonab…

Yes. Exactly. Thank you for sharing what I was going to share. Corruption exists where it is allowed by the people who act out of cowardice.

As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research.

Now I went to a premier university and I'm friends with some smart cookies, but I don't buy for a second the overall theme of this comment chain. There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#509

Post by nradov »

agonz253 wrote: post #499
nradov wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with their research. On which specific papers are you alleging fraud? Have journals retracted any of their papers?

What's fraudulent about them is not their papers (there are none of any relevance to speak of) but their character. They are both self proclaimed misunderstood geniuses who have been denied Nobel prizes in spite of their revolutionary discoveries (in 3 different fields, Physics, Economics and Evolutionary Biology). In actuality they are narcissistic master charlatans with delusions of grandeur. For an expert's take o…

Then the comment by ummonk above is off topic because there is no credible claim of scientific fraud. Lots of people are blowhards with odd opinions. So what?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#510

Post by autoexec »

mlindner wrote: post #432
autoexec wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

> 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. What reason does a corporation have to pay for science that they know will not work? That's…

> What reason does a corporation have to pay for science that they know will not work?

Profit. The only reason a company does anything. You see it when companies pay for research so that they can get "X product may reduce risk of cancer" in the headlines, or when they want to put "Scientifically proven to Y" on their product labels. Even if it takes funding 100 studies to get the results they're looking for they can just bury the results of the first 99 that contradict their soundbite or ad copy.

The tobacco industry paid off scientists to lie about the cancer risks of their products so that they could continue profit from killing their customers. DuPont did the same thing. The company knew about the dangers of PFAS for decades, but they went around funding research on it and pulling that funding the minute research showed results that their product was harmful. They also paid off a scientist whose job was peer review to protect their interests while hiding his ties to the company.

There are a ton of ways lies disguised as actual science can make money for those with no morals and corporations don't have morals, just shareholders.

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