Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online • Hacker News Board

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#511

Post by beerandt » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #411

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…

And yet scientific cancer treatments are miles and miles better than quackery.

Arguably it's scientific cancer treatments so frequently failing that lead the vast number of cancer quacks to quackery in the first place.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#512

Post by robotresearcher » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

nsainsbury wrote: post #126

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…

Yes, absolutely this. I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years. There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to…

> I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.

150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. Science is always a mixture of more and less wrong stuff. It's people doing work, for good reasons and bad reasons. Some of them are crazy, some are corrupt, and many are doing their best in good faith.

Unless you think we had a special good period in, say, the twentieth century that we've retreated from. It did seem to be an acceleration.

But there's at least some pretty amazing biotech going on this century.

I think most every activity sector has the phenomenon that 80-90% of the people/companies in it are a pointless waste of time and money. It's the price we pay for the 10-20% treasure.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#513

Post by vba616 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:48 AM UTC

wumpus wrote: post #505

vba616 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The original comment you made, which was downvoted (but I upvoted it) conveyed to me an emotion of angry refutation. (Which I'm not judging, so don't start about tone policing)

You seemed to be saying "don't pay attention to his quote because he's clueless about climate change", but the quote is about people who aren't, say, climate scientists, being gullible about the topic.

It's a self-referential quote. If you refuted it, does that mean that non climate scientists can judge climate science?

It seemed like an amusing paradox, and I guess I'm curious about your motivation.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#514

Post by p-e-w » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:02 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #512

nsainsbury wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely this. I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years. There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to…

> I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years. 150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. Science is always a mixture of more and less wrong stuff. It's people doing work, for good reasons and bad reasons. Some of them are crazy, some are corrupt, and many are doing their best in good faith. Unless you think we had…

> 150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism.

First, phlogiston theory was considered obsolete by the late 1700s, so you're off by a couple of decades.

Second, that's not even remotely comparable. While phlogiston theory is incorrect, at the time it was first proposed it seemed as good a guess as any other, and remained a viable explanation for how combustion worked until experiments proved it wrong. What's happening today is that respected researchers at reputable institutions publish results that they know are wrong or statistically meaningless, in order to game the academic system towards awarding them greater respect and influence. The problem is fraud, not ignorance.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#515

Post by e1g » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:05 AM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #207

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, Also the research could be downright fraudulent. A very interesting case is the Schön scandal, involving organic semiconductors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal There is an engrossing set of videos about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64

Thank you for sharing. I did not expect to watch the entire 1.5hrs, but this story was exceptionally well prepared and presented, educational, and surprising about how far a bit of fraud can go even in hard sciences. Also, why these systems work the way they do.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#516

Post by wizzwizz4 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:06 AM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #502

nextos wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 er…

Don't think COBOL; think Python 2.1 (not 2.2) with this specific version of PIL, and some of the code implemented as a CPython module (for speed) in C that only compiles properly with one specific EGCS fork that adds support for IA-64. Parts of the code are written in slightly-buggy inline IA-64 assembly, but it's okay because after a system call, that particular operating system makes sure those registers are zeroed each loop iteration, if Python's line-buffering its `print`s so that the system call gets consistently run.

Also, the Python script crashes on loading the data files unless there are two (but not more than two) spaces in its full file path. This is not documented anywhere.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#517

Post by autoexec » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:11 AM UTC

Smoosh wrote: post #403

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…

I suppose that over time, science changed from a hobby for the wealthy to a source of wealth for companies.

The sad thing is that there was always money to be made by having a greater understanding of our world and developing new technologies. Investing in research pays off very well, but it requires long term thinking. If you only care about next quarter's profits and growth you aren't going to make that kind of investment. Not when you can manipulate science today and get a lot of money right now. 3M and DuPont poisoned the world and even their own children with PFAS for decades after they knew it was harmful because they couldn't resist the money they'd make doing it. For a lot of people, no amount of wealth is ever enough.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#518

Post by autoexec » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:13 AM UTC

cgrealy wrote: post #397

autoexec wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even new research needs funding. The point is that you can't trust the findings of research to be accurate if it hasn't been proven to be reproducible. When it comes to science it doesn't do any good to fund research into X if you don't actually do the grunt work and part of that work needs to be seeing the initial results carefully reviewed, and then replicated. Right now, far too often "review" is a rubber stamp an…

Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. But again, this is an economic problem. In a perfect world, we'd have an infinite fund for doing science and you couldn't publish a paper until your results were reproduced. But we live in a capitalist society where incentives are profit-driven (mostly). That's a reality regardless of whether you think it's good or bad.

That's why we need strong regulation and oversight. We know humans are highly vulnerable to greed. We can't (and arguably shouldn't) change that. We can however put measures in place to limit the harm we do to ourselves because of it.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#519

Post by wumpus » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:14 AM UTC

vba616 wrote: post #513

wumpus wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The original comment you made, which was downvoted (but I upvoted it) conveyed to me an emotion of angry refutation. (Which I'm not judging, so don't start about tone policing) You seemed to be saying "don't pay attention to his quote because he's clueless about climate change", but the quote is about people who aren't, say, climate scientists, being gullible about the topic. It's a self-referential quote. If you ref…

My motivation is that I'm a scientist (before and after a long Silicon Valley career) who is annoyed by writers who write a bunch of novels where the villains are scientists corrupted by their lust for grant money. It's a trite complaint that is used in politics to claim 100% of scientists are biased, and plays a big role in the pushback against environmental and climate science.

Thanks for the upvote.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#520

Post by robotresearcher » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 6:14 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #514

robotresearcher wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years. 150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. Science is always a mixture of more and less wrong stuff. It's people doing work, for good reasons and bad reasons. Some of them are crazy, some are corrupt, and many are doing their best in good faith. Unless you think we had…

> 150 years ago we had phlogiston alongside Maxwell on electromagnetism. First, phlogiston theory was considered obsolete by the late 1700s, so you're off by a couple of decades. Second, that's not even remotely comparable. While phlogiston theory is incorrect, at the time it was first proposed it seemed as good a guess as any other, and remained a viable explanation for how combustion worked until experiments proved…

What's the basis to believe that this is worse now than other times in history, or on average?

I strongly suspect there's a survival bias, where the past fraudulent and otherwise incorrect stuff is forgotten in favor of the great stuff. So it always feels like today is the worst time ever.