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They are wrong because their trans is certainly a take. It's not a good take, and it's bigoted and the definition of an ad-hominem, but I guess that's what hiding behind throw away accounts is for.
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
551–560 of 970 posts
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#552Just 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 which field you studied, but I think that in physics it's not quite that bad. There might be some research published that's just wrong or fraudulent, but not that much. I think it's because in physics, outside maybe high energy particle physics, it's usually feasible to check other people's experiments. In theoretical physics it's certainly common to work through other people's results before extending them.
However, I would say there's a lot of pointless research. Lots of graduate student and postdoc working hours are spent to produce results that no-one could possibly think are interesting or useful just because papers need to be produced.
I think it's the reduction of the system into a career mill (PhD for students, tenure for postdocs and grant money for professors) that ruins it. Science is inherently too unpredictable to be reduced into an algorithm that just about anyone can use to produce knowledge.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#553Odd how there's no study on reducing the massive manipulation being done for the greater good.
The pandemic has really shown how weak and sleazy all institutions are.
Any while 'scientific misinformation' means there's at least a modicum of science in place, wait until you see what people are really sharing privately!
The disaster that will come is well deserved to all governments and institutions.
There used to be a time when transparency was seen as important. Well, no transparency if it's for the greater good!
From what I see people are not stupid. And I suspect they are getting better at detecting manipulation too. In the end, what the state / institutions say will be seen as just noise. A sort of advertisement with no real information.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hypothetically: Let’s say you manufacture Volkswagens, and your small engine diesels include a defeat device that allows your cars to pass emissions tests by enabling pollution controls only during emission tests. When the world learns of your treachery, you sponsor scientific research in which monkeys are exposed to your modern VW diesel tail pipe emissions and also model year 1990s Ford diesel fumes, to show that y…
Are we allowed to mention pharmaceuticals in this context or not?
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#555Just 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'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…
I agree. One can be sceptical of the system while still working in the system and trusting that there will be a small number of winners that compensate for the sea of noise.
I feel the HN community might resonate with how startups are seen currently. Most of them fail, some are outright fraud, but a few completely change the game.
The model to assess the scientific enterprise should be similar to a VC. Most will fail but the few big successes will more than compensate for the losses.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you say they’re charlatans
One claims to have discovered a Theory Of Everything, putting forth a paper riddled with mathematical errors and with the caveat that it is a "work of entertainment". The other claims to have made a Nobel worthy discovery that revolutionizes evolutionary biology. I recommend this podcast for a complete breakdown of the Weinsteins. https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/eric-and-bre...
I wouldn't use the word 'charlatan' as leniently. Without commenting on the validity of their work, the 'mainstream opinion' about them is most certainly negative. Yet instead of pivoting elsewhere, they stick by their convictions. They might be right or wrong on their opinions, but they are hardly doing it to win any favours. And it's certainly not wrong to stand by something you believe even if the mainstream discredits you; time will tell who was right.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’m going to be upfront and say I don’t understand your position You seem to be making a number of questionable assumptions: 1) That people would blindly reuse code to the harm of science, including on a multi-billion dollar project like an LHC. That’s not likely to ever happen. 2) That rejecting those who plagiarize others’ code in a peer-review process is somehow excessive or problematic. I can’t begin to understan…
I'm not sure if I have exactly the same concerns as the person you're replying to, but I've definitely noticed problems coming from this form of "replication" through just re-running existing code. I don't think that means code shouldn't be released, but I think we should be wary of scientific code being reused verbatim too frequently.
If existing code is buggy or doesn't do what its authors think it does, this can be a big problem. Even if the idea is correct, whole swathes of downstream literature can get contaminated if authors didn't even attempt to implement an algorithm independently, but just blindly reused an existing docker image that they didn't understand. I consider that poor practice. If you claim that your work is based on Paper X, but what you really mean is that you just ran some Docker image associated with Paper X and trusted that it does what it says it does, instead of independently reimplementing the algorithm, that is not replication.
In older areas of science the norm is to try to replicate a paper from the published literature without reuse of "apparatus". For example, in chemistry you would try to replicate a paper using your own lab's glassware, different suppliers for chemicals, different technicians, etc. Analogies here are imperfect, but I would consider downloading and re-running an existing docker image to be dissimilar from that. It's more like re-running the experiment in the first lab rather than replicating the published result in a new lab. As a result it can, like re-running a chemistry experiment in the same lab, miss many possible confounds.
Of course, you do have to stop somewhere. Chemistry labs don't normally blow their own glass, and it's possible that the dominant way of making glass in your era turns out to be a confound (this kind of thing really does happen sometimes!). But imo, on the code side of things, "download and rerun a docker image" is too far towards the side of not even trying to replicate things independently.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#558I was always taught that information is the product of data and bad data will yield bad information. With this in mind, I feel that the terminology of `misinformation` is perhaps not the best choice of words in some way. Though in the context of science, we have data, information and finally facts. So with that in mind, I appreciate what the Royal Society is getting at and in effectively addressing a form of non-platforming per se.
With that, the debate is what is and has been the due process of much great science and yes, science learns more from its mistakes than any unattainable being 100% right all the time.
For without the ability to question and debate things that for some may appear as facts, we stifle innovation and creativity. Which is the crux of advancements' of science for by its very definition, sits on the edge of fact or false.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#559I 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…
Science communication is a curriculum and career nowadays, and with that comes a lot of mediocrity.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's not nice but what should be done after the "natural" vaccination rate had been reached by rational argument alone?
I mean, the only reason for me to care if someone else is vaccinated is to the extent that I care for their wellbeing. To me it's analogous to like, telling one of my overweight friends to go on a diet so that I can pay less for the NHS or something. They don't want the advice, it feels rude more than anything else (even explaining this feels a bit ick!) If it was shown that we could eliminate sars-cov-2 via herd imm…
> If it was shown that we could eliminate sars-cov-2 via herd immunity I'd probably be a bit more keen to encourage it but I still don't think I'd support mandates unless we had some crazy ebola mutation and people started dying in massive numbers.
Triple vaccinated and completely in agreement.
An argument can always be made that they fill up hospitals, but that same argument can be made against parachuting, being overweight, racing (or driving in general), all alcohol etc.
If choice is to meaningful it includes bad choices.