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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#681

Post by mrjangles »

unmole wrote: post #660
icare_1er wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

> who was part of the team who invented RNA-based vaccines. Yeah, no: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Is this comment satire? Robert Malone is the person Joe Rogan interviewed, and that everyone is up at arms about. He is literally the first name that appears in the first sentence of that article you linked.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#682

Post by mike_hearn »

tsimionescu wrote: post #653
mike_hearn wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The meta-study you cite has quite bizarre conclusions. It basically states that isolation behavior is highly effective at preventing Covid deaths, but that lockdowns were a bad predictor of such behavior in people. But, they still seem to attribute huge economic impact to the lockdowns, not the pandemic and natural response (voluntary behavioral changes) to it. Overall it seems that they would have been better served…

Are you sure it states that? Maybe you mean this paragraph:

"If this interpretation is true, what Björk et al. (2021) find is that information and signaling is far more important than the strictness of the lockdown. There may be other interpretations, but the point is that studies focusing on timing cannot differentiate between these interpretations. However, if lockdowns have a notable effect, we should see this effect regardless of the timing, and we should identify this effect more correctly by excluding studies that exclusively analyze timing."

"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

Many countries claim an improbably low level of COVID death. That doesn't mean their numbers can be taken at face value, although poorer countries do seem to be less worse hit simply because they have far fewer weak, obese and elderly people to begin with.

It's certainly not absurd to claim lockdowns don't work. You're attempting to refute a meta-analysis of studies looking at all the data with the example of a single country. That's meaningless. A single data point can falsify a theory but it cannot prove a theory. To prove lockdowns work there has to be a consistent impact of the policy.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#683

Post by hutzlibu »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #605
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…

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…

"We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people"

Well, as far as I remember - the root of that conspiracy has a true base - that Bill Gates really talked about the possibility of a health chip injected into peoples, as a vaccination certificate. So no chip coming with the vaccination, but a digital health certificate under the skin. But now it is framed, as if he never even spoke about chipping people and I cannot even find the original quote on reddit anymore.

"The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned."

And too many things are getting thrown into the same bucket. Because the mRNA vaccinations are not 50 years old, but brand new. I can very much understand, being sceptical of a cutting edge proprietary technology, to be injected into my system. And I cannot verify the build process. I have to trust government inspectors to do that.

And as a matter of fact, one of the scientists involved with the original mRNA technology Dr.Malone advises strongly against it.

And the process of getting the data for the safety, is not perfect either, as a whistleblower showed:

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

Now sure - when reading a bit about Malone, it seems he left the realm of science and entered crackpot area some time ago and the data scandal is not so bad as it sounds - but they are real events nonetheless.

Also despite it is being repeated as a mantra that the vaccines are totally safe - there are strong indications, that people died because of the vaccinations. Not because the vaccines are a poison, developed by shape shifting reptiles, but because some production facilites messed up and some production batches got contaminated with various rubbish, which can happen in the real world when people are in a hurry.

https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/comment/moderna-va...

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/protein-impurities-found...

So there is a chance, a vaccination does not help, but harm you as a individual. This chance might be very, very small and statistical speaking it probably still makes sense to get the shot. But the possibility exists. And is not really communicated this way, probably out of the fear that since people do not know statistics - they misinterpret.

But this is what fuels conspiracy theories. I mean, the flat earthers are out of the realm of reason anyway - but not everyone who is sceptical of the vaccination and the official data about them, is a crackpot tinfoil hat nuthead. Or am I?

Well, I know that I got angry beeing told by my doctor, that my vaccination (Astrazeneca) is totally safe - and only learned about the contaminations by chance the next day. Something the doctor should have known. So this was bullshitting me, which I do not like. Now I think I do understand the reasons for this bullshiting - because of negative placebo effect. Meaning if I would believe the vaccination is dangerous for me - it actually might be. I suspect many of the reported heart attacks as side effect, are showing just that. People got so scared and stressed that they developed real symptoms. While people being calm about it, have a better of not getting bad side effects.

So this is the problem as I see it. There are people who can handle real data and people who cannot. But we are all getting treated the same idiots. (And I believe people will never learn to deal with real data, when they are always only getting comfortable lies).

"So shut up and take the shot. The one we prepared for you."

I understand people getting upset with that as I do not like being treated as a sheep either. I am not a medical researcher, but I can read papers. And I would like to choose for myself, of whether I trust Moderna, Biontech, Astrazeneca, Sputnik or Sinopharm. But I do not get even that choice. For some reason BBIBP-CorV, the one from Sinopharm, which uses a very safe old school vaccination principal, of deactivating real virus - is not approved in EU, despite being in use worldwide and approved by the WHO. People being vaccinated with it, are recognized as unvaccinated here. Why is that? Is there some data, which is not shared? It is hard to tell for anyone not deeply with it.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#684

Post by Chris2048 »

ithkuil wrote: post #576
jhallenworld wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> otherwise they'll be criticized for being weak

politicians, sure, but public officials such as the EPA?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#685

Post by ironyholder »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #605
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…

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…

Several things that really truck me with this comment:

> consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice [...] being questioned

This is precisely what scientists should have been doing! I'm afraid having your work done for you by unqualified amateurs is a kind of punishment for skimping on it for too long.

> a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter"

This is essentially a class-ist argument: Someone who tells dirty jokes on netflix couldn't possibly, by the essence of their being, decide for themselves which scientist to talk to. What's particularly striking is that this comes after the author seemingly accepts the parent's premise that academia is borken. What I'm hearing is "Yeah, we haven't earned your trust, but at least we're not those people". This is not a winning argument, and certainly not a scientific one.

> We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people and that Covid is a hoax by the world government and no one has died

This too seems heavily influnced by class. When people believe "Bill Gates is inserting microchips" they are factually wrong but tentatively right. They are powerless in politics, while oligarchs, including foreign ones, have outsized influence. Wild conspiracies are how these feelings find expression in those that have no other way of doing so. By taking everything literal ("no, Bill Gates is not literally inserting microchips"), their enemies can avoid dealing with the issues a more charitable interpretation would be getting at.

> don't loose faith in science

To the extent that science is used as the underwriter of various political projects, I think people are perfectly fine losing faith in it. 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good, so what's the point? On the other hand, I'm not worried that people will stop using material science... By and large mistrust is very well placed.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#686

Post by sampo »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #605
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…

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…

> The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned.

(A) In some aspects, 50+ years of accepted medical science was wrong. "Droplet dogma" [1,2] was wrong. Now we know that respiratory viruses spread by airborne aerosols [3].

The epistemological tradition of modern medical science seems to be almost solely based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They think everything should be studied and verified the same way that new drugs are studied. We use a lot of physical safety measures, like seat belts and airbags in cars, hard hats in construction sites, etc. because they make physical sense, and their protective properties have been measured in engineering laboratory studies. Like using crash test dummies when crash testing cars. Engineering and physical sciences have methods to achieve and test knowledge, that are not an RCT with real people.

Now the topical topic is face masks. Engineers know respirator masks can filter over 95% of fine particles, but a sizeable part of the medical science still doesn't believe in face masks, due to lack of decisive studies using an RCT-based setup.

(B) But then we also have a surprisingly strong anti-vaccine movement. In this case, the consensus of medical science is correct, and vaccines work.

So we have A, where medical science was wrong and a bit stubborn to correct itself. Science as whole was not wrong: Engineers and physicists worked out the details of aerosol spread of the virus and the filtering properties of face masks. And then we have B, a genuine anti-science movement.

But what to do? If we didn't question the established dogma as used by the authorities, then we would still believe in the droplet dogma, and we would still think face masks are useless. But if we allow the questioning of the established dogma when the dogma is indeed wrong, the how can the general public know when the old dogmas are questioned for good scientific reasons (A), and when not (B)?

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2021.004...

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3904176

[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9149

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#688

Post by mrjangles »

cornel_io wrote: post #676
AussieWog93 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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". I would prefer that the general public take advice from scientific researchers with a grain of salt, with an understanding that the system is far from per…

That all sounds disturbingly like you kinda are okay with Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein spreading nonsense about how vaccines are killing people and how ivermectin is better than vaccination.

Joe Rogan doesn't spread anything. He interviews experts in the field and listens to what they have to say. Currently everyone is angry because he interviewed Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccines. You can read about Robert Malone's contributions here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Robert Malone's bio

"Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment."

Do you really think it is unreasonable to listen to what someone with this kind of a background has to say about mRNA vaccines?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#689

Post by Tomis02 »

iqanq wrote: post #642
mfer wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just this weekend I was reading that more than 60% of the research into cholesterol is funded by the egg industry. Research funded by industry overwhelmingly shows things in as positive light for industry whether it does or not. This kind of example is common. It tells me its worth questioning research and looking deeper at what ever is released. When someone questions research to look at the merits of what they say.

Exactly. The guy who is an "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter" doesn't have a conflict of interest, which makes him less biased and more believable.

Even if he isn't in a conflict of interest, that doesn't mean he has any kind of qualification on any scientific matter. Scientific debate should continue in the scientific community, not on podcasts and social media.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#690

Post by cornel_io »

huffmsa wrote: post #624
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only advice he gives is to stop being a fatty McFatty and try to be more healthy, which is exactly the right suggestion. Also routinely says not to listen to him, they're his opinions and probably wrong.

"fatty McFatty"

Good to see that the Rogan stans in tech are classy as fuck. Jesus...

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