Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

This is what a lot of students hit if they're ill prepared (this is not a bad thing on behalf of the student). I remember my advisor saying he saw it as his responsibility to shield the new students from something crazy controversial until we knew how to walk for ourselves, make plots quickly easily, understand the jargon and materials... aka until we were mid-way through, then we should be thrown to the wolves to form our own opinion on topics.

You're now falling for the daily mail mistake of 'big sensational headline in field X' therefore it must be false.

Just look through the nobel awards for understanding what directions and leaps fields of science are making and ignore the self-perpetuating egos that end up on the front of 'Nature' or the daily fail. We have cloned animals, we have perfected fiber-optics, we have discovered the nature of the Higgs Boson, gravity waves and I don't even understand enough about chemistry to understand why or how that field has advanced but it clearly has.

Unfortunately I'd suggest your supervisor failed to prepare you for your PhD.

Don't worry I can point to several papers which have maths flaws in that impact the result by 2-sigma, but nobody cares about those results because it doesn't change the over-all message. "We saw nothing after intensive scrutiny and looking for it." despite being on flaky mathematical groundings.

That 'rabble' of science deniers is growing very quickly (just look at the evolution diners in the US) and keep making arguments like. "you can't take the people of of science".

If the rabble gets big enough, politicians listen and then when politicians are listening to anti-science people on whatever topic, funding inevitably gets cut or re-directed and scientific research suffers.

Don't worry I'm not talking about types of research that supports raytheon by making bigger bangs, but research that cures cancer in babies and infirmity in adults and makes better and materials for the world...

So no, I don't think his random commentary is particularly relevant or reasonable to listen to, any more than Jaron Lanier's haterade @ the tech industry is relevant just because he was working on shitty VR in 1990. Some people are dinosaurs and just need to be ignored, it's not unusual for people to grow to hate the things that they worked on when they were young and get increasingly unhinged arguing against them.

I don't think Rogan should be censored, for sure, 100% and without any reservations - free speech should be absolute, I'm old-school in that respect. But I absolutely think anyone paying attention to this crap should be socially scorned as a dumbass, and TBH I can't get my chuff up too far over people trying to convince Spotify to boot Rogan over this, free markets are also sacrosanct and that's what this is (even if I also would vastly prefer that Spotify holds to a hardline free-speech ethos and leaves him up).

Sadly, no, it doesn't.

"Are people and organizations not losing their reputations, jobs, and income over this?"

They are not. The system doesn't actually self correct in any visible way. The people who fund bad science either can't tell the difference between good and bad science, or don't care, or both.

"Wouldn't e.g. Elsevier want to keep charging money for high quality content?"

You mean the companies that happily publish gibberish written by spambots as "peer reviewed science"?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03035-y

"Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers. Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal."

Assuming that that paper is not false, it highlights lots of areas/reasons why things can go wrong.

Nonetheless, flawed as it is, the 'scientific method' is the best we've got. "How do you get people to discover reliable knowledge without getting sidetracked by bias, bribes, career incentives, corporations or politics" is actually a very hard problem to solve. The cobbled together bunch of institutions, practices and traditions that we call 'the scientific method' needs to be understood for what it is - a patchy, error prone but just about servicable method for fighting our own biases and shortcomings.

Always good to look for ways to improve it I guess but overly cynical or overly optimistic takes on it don't help much. We need to have a realistic view of it.