Not providing a platform for or promoting scientific misinformation is not the same thing as censoring scientific misinformation. The problems of science will not be solved by promoting pseudoscience or scientific information. That's just making a problem that is bad and making it worse.
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
571–580 of 970 posts
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#572Earlier 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…
> Along the way, everyone knew and when people tried to bring up concerns higher ups in the institution suppressed the knowledge. As you are doing here. I don't see a name or any specifics anywhere in your comment. Of course not including any names or specifics also means you could be making it up for a good story. We have no way of knowing.
Tbf, putting any names in that comment would almost certainly land HN with a lawsuit.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#573If scientists speak out they then get labelled as political. It's a lose-lose situation that scientists face.
Misinformation is like junk food. It triggers people's endorphins while scientific thinking is vegetables and fruits. It can never win.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#574Just 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, 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…
it's almost like our fav person Ayn Rand got that right [0]. Wat is pure science? It's little without a consciousness and there are a lot of perverse stimuli. For one, I found the requirement to publish (something "worthwhile", which is subjective) during my PhD so stupid. You can work hard and cleverly in science for 4 years yet only debunk stuff or not even find anything at all (but that by itself should be publishable!) or you can get lucky and publish a lot. All the publish-or-perish pressure does is force subpar stuff into the community. Like you two, I also got a bit disillusioned with non-applied science as we have it.
Edit: I don't want to say (like Ayn Rand, who can be pretty black and white) that it is all bad and we should do away with it, but it's something we should be very aware of and try to build in mechanisms to protect ourselves from these effects.
[0]: https://www.conservapedia.com/State_Science_Institute#Typolo...
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#575Just 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, but there is still hope. Not in the current academia (IMO rotten beyond repair) but in human nature.
Because have you noticed how when something "real" hits the science shelves, any honest research grounded in reality and careful thought, it goes like hot cakes? The research doesn't even have to be revolutionary: anything repeatable, or at least sanely executed. The bar is incredibly low.
Everyone is starved for real ideas… or at least real implementations. Anything authentic, in the sea of marketing BS.
Which I find a hopeful sign! As long as that human instinct persists, the truth bubbles up. People still "feel" wrong when lying, which is great. When that stops (a question of culture?), we're in real trouble.
Funny aside: The front page of today's national news: an elected university rector had to step down. Reason? Academic fraud!
https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/vojtech-adam-rezignoval...
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just that the CDC and other institutions of scientific authority 'said something wrong once.' I think most people understand and accept that science is not perfect. Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies . Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an ent…
EPA famously did the same during 9/11. It would have been better if they instead trusted us and said something along the lines of "the dust is full of dangerous asbestos, but we need heroes this day". https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wro... Instead they prefer messaging to achieve an outcome instead of direct truth.
This kind of failure happens as a consequence of an intellectual environment: the impossibility of carrying a nuanced message. This perhaps can be solved by "more education", in the broader sense. Until then it's hard to blame individual instances of public officials who try to do their best to distill a complex tradeoff in a public announcement where they either have to talk with an authoritative tone otherwise they'll be criticized for being weak if they don't or they will be criticized for being too paternalistic if they do. They are between a rock and a hard place and various figures are trying to carve their own paths without any rule book, and most of them will spectacularly fail.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Yes, I'm sure everyone has a home lab that they go to to verify when they read the newspaper. I'm not being snarky - these illustrates a core problem in epistemology, trust and social systems (in case the NIH/Fauci/Wuhan debacle already hasn't).
Witch exactly illustrates my point. You need to intelligently reason about what you have been told, understanding that you may not be a domain expert and that your conclusions will almost certainly miss something that the domain experts have taken into account.
When presented with a claim by authorities about a new virus and say it's going to be dangerous, do you think, authorities always lie about everything or do you think well virus are a thing, I know they can mutate because I know that if I get the flu this year, it's no guarantee that I will be immune from the version that will come around next year. You also have seen evidence that vaccines are generally safe and work because most people have had them and for the most part don't have people suffering from polio in the western world because of that.
You could say, nah, they lie, this is plot to force us to have genome altering vaccines that will install mind control chips that kill kittens. (yeah, over the top I know)...
Most people have a degree of trust (not faith, very different) until proven wrong that public health figures are actually their trying to improve public health.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#578Earlier 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…
> 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…
Re running the authors code with their data will likely just repeat any methodological issues they had (either accidentally or fraudulently).
In medical studies, one level is to reevaluate the data from the same set of patients to see if any bias or errors wasn't included, perhaps with a different or newer statistical idealogy. The best is for the study to be repeated with a fresh set of patient data to see if the underlying conclusions were valid.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#579Just 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…
you really think science is suffering that big of an existential threat or are you just pandering to the crowd here
Honestly, I'm still salty about my PhD experience 5 years later.
It's not just a case of it being a sub-optimal or there being waste here and there, the way a healthy but "real world" company might be.
The entire system really does work against you to make sure you don't achieve the goals that you're ostensibly aiming for.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea how to respond to the overcrowded hospitals. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-... Hospitals have been jam packed the entire time. There is data everywhere to support this. Tons of procedures are not being done due to beds and ICUs being full. Ask anyone who works in a hospital. Call one if you'd like.
Then why did the USS Mercy which was in New York during the beginning of the pandemic only ever treat 48 patients? 77 while she was in Los Angeles. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/military/infected-usn... https://news.usni.org/2020/05/15/usns-mercy-leaves-los-angel...
This is second hand from someone close, but not too close in the military, so details are off but the narrative is on track:
The Mercy was deployed after some communication between New York hospitals, and the understanding at least was that it would mostly be handling emergency, trauma, and routine patients (what military docs are good are at as a stereotype), and free up capacity for the hospitals to deal with COVID. The "normal" medical stuff promptly dropped in demand with lockdown, between fewer accidents and deferred care. So there wasn't much for the Mercy to do, the few covid patients sent over were about all of an "unknown air transmissible virus" (working theory at the time) that it was really equipped to handle, because that wasn't the mission they were expecting.