651–660 of 970 posts
I always think about this. If you can't trust people with the ability to see or hear certain information, how can you even trust them to vote?
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…
When you say you are no longer highly 'pro science' would you say that you would rather people take advice from scientists or from people who have a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter". Because that's the level we're at at the moment. The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice…
2) The scientists who are involved are unusually politically motivated. Most of the scientists I can name off the top of my head are in government (the likes of Fauci in the States or Kerry Chant of Australia. These people are in a position of arguing that their opinion should be given emergency power to decide ... most aspects of the social sphere. This is an excellent time to be looking beyond credentialism to actual arguments and trade offs. Without the "noble lies", please, lets make policy decisions based on facts.
3) I still haven't found anyone who can argue why the vaccine mandates aren't human rights abuses. We're talking the really basic stuff like right to work, right to assemble, right to religion, etc. I don't care who we listen to as long as they are arguing on the side of those basic freedoms. If Joe Rogan is arguing for those things, I'd rather people listened to him. Those concepts have a better track record than technocrats. We can worry about run-of-the-mill stupidity after we've dealt with the real risks here.
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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 un…
"Re running the authors code with their data will likely just repeat any methodological issues they had" Yes, but that's useful too. COVID-19 lockdowns largely kicked off in the west due to an epidemiological model from Imperial College London, written over a period of many years by the now notorious Professor Neil Ferguson. When his team uploaded a pre-print of his paper and started sending it to government minister…
Overall it seems that they would have been better served by adding lockdown compliance to their models, which would likely explain much of the difference. It's absurd to claim that lockdowns don't work when a country like Vietnam (100 million people, first detected cases of COVID-19 community spread outside China) had <100 total COVID-19 deaths in 2020. Strict targeted lockdowns, strict isolation requirements after every identified case, for contacts up to the third degree ( contact of someone who was a contact of someone who came in contact with a patient) - these all must have played a role, and any study that fails to explain such extreme success is simply flawed.
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GP here - I honestly think we're honestly mostly in agreement! It's obviously not a completely worthless institution - there have clearly been some impressive discoveries despite all of the bullshit. I think the main source of distrust comes from the jarring disconnect between the way that the institution is presented to the public vs. the way it actually functions in real life. "Messy" is a beautiful way to describe…
The problem here is that your initial post, critical of how academia is presented, reads as very black and white to me. I get the feeling that you claim that it is all fraud and lies, and that those who disagree can see no wrong with it at all. Then someone responds with a nuanced reply, something that I, as someone who lives in a university town in Sweden, have the impression that almost everyone in academia actuall…
I think this happens all the time - popular opinion swings far in one direction, criticisms then go in the opposite direction as disillusionment and problems get exemplified, again too far, back and forth, rediscovering the lessons of the past and settling down.
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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…
> Perhaps depositing a VM with everything ready to run. The danger then is that the VM has so much undocumented complexity that if anything goes wrong, or goes "well" when it shouldn't, no one can explain why. Which also reintroduces a vector to hide nasty tricks.
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It really is just people. Look at all the information about HIV in the 80's, long before social media. People believed some truly crazy, racist, and misinformed things about HIV and its spread.
It really was crazy. Back in 1985 Neil Young apparently thought that he could catch HIV if a homosexual clerk handled his groceries (obviously nonsense and highly offensive). https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/michelle-shock...
The Clown Timeline might have been the last Cold-War era weapon, a doomsday weapon.
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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 un…
"Re running the authors code with their data will likely just repeat any methodological issues they had" Yes, but that's useful too. COVID-19 lockdowns largely kicked off in the west due to an epidemiological model from Imperial College London, written over a period of many years by the now notorious Professor Neil Ferguson. When his team uploaded a pre-print of his paper and started sending it to government minister…
But there is a valid reason for this to happen, and it doesn't mean bugs in the code. If the code is run in a distributed way (multiple threads, processes or machines), which it was, the order of execution is never guaranteed. So even setting the seed will produce a different set of results if the outcomes of each separate instance depend on each other further in the computation.
There are ways to mitigate this, depending on the situation and the amount of slowdown that's acceptable. Since this model was collecting outcomes to create a statistical distribution, rather than a single deterministic number, it didn't need to.
The fact the model was also drawing distributions also will be why different runs produced possibly vastly different results. Those results would be at different ends of a distribution. Only distributions are sampled and used, not single numbers.
Regarding the GCSE level comment, my concern was the opposite, that the model was trying to model too much, and that inaccuracies would build up. No model is perfect (including this one) and the more assumptions made the larger the room for error. But they validated the model with some simpler models as a sanity check.
My view on criticisms of the model were that they were more politically motivated, and the code takedowns were done by people who may have been good coders, but didn't know enough about statistical modeling.
Here's John Cormack's take on the model, he saw and cleaned up the original version before it was released. https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876...
The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Be…
But it's the only correct way, if credible studies contradict an official agency (more often it's the degree of the opinion where there is disagreement, not the opinion itself), my advice would be to trust the studies. For instance MRI contrast agents: the EMA banned most of them while the FDA did not, which is not the advice one would form by reading studies on the matter.
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When you say you are no longer highly 'pro science' would you say that you would rather people take advice from scientists or from people who have a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter". Because that's the level we're at at the moment. The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice…
It's not JRE i'm listening too, it's his guests. In that instance, a doctor who was part of the team who invented RNA-based vaccines. Any problem with that ?
Yeah, no: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w