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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

royalsociety.org

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#721

Post by rhaksw »

> The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.

Let's move towards reviewable moderation.

I'm happy to see this issue recognized by research. I believe secret removals, where authors of content are unaware it's been removed, are the primary problem. Removal in and of itself might not be a big deal if we could all review what's been removed.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#722

Post by guerrilla »

lettergram wrote: post #113
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…

> 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…

> Most cs work is equally useless. It’s all a farce.

Hey careful there, it must depend on the area because all the type theory and functional programming research comes with and always came with proofs and working code. It couldn't be more rigorous and useful.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#723

Post by immibis »

cm2187 wrote: post #648
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…

So is the choice between “covid is a hoax and Bill Gate’s microships” and “follow the official guideline whatever it says”? What happens to opinions in the middle, “like vaccinates people at risk, not those who already had covid”? Or “covid may well have leaked from a lab”? In which of those categories do they fall?

The former is universally an excuse to not get vaccinated. If we had very reliable vaccines it would be reprehensible for so many people to refuse to do their part to immediately end the pandemic, but given current data it is not so clear.

The latter is pretty much moot.

You do have to understand that when people say "I got banned because I said COVID may have leaked from a lab" they don't actually mean "I got banned because I said COVID may have leaked from a lab". It's significantly more likely that they got banned because they said COVID definitely leaked from a lab funded personally by Dr Anthony Fauci to create bio-weapons against America to aid the spread of communism with Chinese characteristics because he is secretly an illegal immigrant from Kenya.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#724

Post by immibis »

mAritz wrote: post #637
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're also living in the world where certain governments are mandating vaccines that pose 50% higher excess risk of myocarditis compared to an infection[1]. If everybody else takes a vaccine it is almost always far safer for you not to take it. Vaccines help society by stopping illnesses spreading, they just need enough people to collectively accept the personal risk for the good of everyone else - the same was tru…

This is also a simplification. If the vaccines are creating sterilizing immunity, this might be true. For example the measles vaccine does that. But for all current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines we have we don't get sterilizing immunity. So it can still make sense to get vaccinated even if society at large is vaccinated.

What is sterilizing immunity?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#725

Post by wizzwizz4 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #671
mrtedbear wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The model generated totally different output every time you ran it, even with fixed seeds." - I remember seeing code takedowns of the model from anti-lockdown people who repeatedly cite this issue. 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 guaran…

"There are ways to mitigate this, but since the model was collecting outcomes to create a statistical distribution, rather than a single deterministic number, it didn't need to." This is the justification the academics used - because we're modelling probability distributions, bugs don't matter. Sorry, but no, this is 100% wrong. Doing statistics is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for arbitrary levels of bugginess. Fi…

> To the extent the team generated confidence intervals at all (which for Report 9 I don't think they did), it was by running the app several times and then claiming the variance in the results represented the underlying uncertainty of the data, when in reality it was representing their inability to write code properly.

Functionally, what's the difference? The output of their model varied based on environmental factors (how the OS chose to schedule things). The lower-order bits of some of the values got corrupted, due to floating-point errors. In essence, their model had noise, bias, and lower precision than a floating point number – all things that scientists are used to.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#726

Post by hnfong »

pfortuny wrote: post #549
sega_sai wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person working in science (long past PhD), I disagree. There are tons of problem in science: grant system, pressure to publish etc. Also everyone in science is still a person with standard people problems: ego, desire to be right, wanting recognition etc. Also some fields had more issues because of poor statistical methods etc. But the self-correcting nature of science is still its biggest redeeming feature. And…

Sorry but the self-correcting nature of science is similar to the “all bugs are shallow”. People have done lots of harm (burning money is doing harm) with crap science. That is totally wrong and harmful. What may happen later is not a solution.

I agree, but it's not even that.

I don't think most people really try to argue against "science" as is, or even the scientific process in the large scale. The gripe we have is against people who first do bad science (or popularize them), refuse to admit they're wrong, then patronizingly tell the public to trust them anyways, and still have the audacity to reassure us that "it will all work out (50 years later)".

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#727

Post by immibis »

icare_1er wrote: post #716
unmole wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, this article confirms indeed that Dr. Malone is one the 50 or so people in the world, who has the highest legitimacy speaking of that topic.

It says he discovered a way to put mRNA into human cells. We don't even know that, really - we know he ran an experiment doing so.

It does not say he knows anything about the things he talked about on JRE: hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or anything about the specific mRNA being delivered to fight COVID (unless you are suggesting that ALL mRNA insertions kill people), or anything about immunity at all, or anything about Israel/Palestine, or anything about epidemics, or anything about monoclonal antibodies, or anything about mass formation psychosis (except to the extent he is trying to make it happen).

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#728

Post by brutusborn »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #9

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…

What if the scientific proof chain was published as a knowledge graph? This could be easily followed and all questions by skeptics could theoretically be automatically answered.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#729

Post by immibis »

j7ake wrote: post #555
porcoda wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Noise is one thing. There are plenty of instances where humans have had to pick out signals from seas of noise.

The anti-pro-sciencers are claiming there is not just noise, but a sea of deliberately fabricated conspiracy theories concocted over many decades with an ultimate end goal of putting tracking chips in them.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#730

Post by mike_hearn »

immibis wrote: post #715
mike_hearn wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eff…

It is completely absurd. "Lockdowns" is shorthand for "people not coming into contact with other people in a way that spreads the virus". Because the virus cannot teleport through walls, lockdowns necessarily prevent transmission.

This is the sort of mis-use of logic that has led to so many problems.

"Lockdowns" is shorthand for "people not coming into contact with other people in a way that spreads the virus"

It's shorthand for a set of government policies that were intended to reduce contact, not eliminate it, because "not coming into contact with other people" is impossible. People still have to go to shops, hospitals, care homes, live with each other, travel around and so on even during a lockdown.

Your belief that it's "completely absurd" to say lockdowns don't affect mortality is based on the kind of abstract but false reasoning that consistently leads epidemiologists astray. Consider a simple scenario in which lockdowns have no effect that's still compatible with germ theory - you're exposed to the virus normally 10 times per week every week. With lockdowns that drops to 5 times a week. It doesn't matter. Everyone is still exposed frequently enough that there will be no difference in outcomes.

"Because the virus cannot teleport through walls, lockdowns necessarily prevent transmission"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/18/i...

Viruses can in fact teleport through walls: "The SARS virus that infected hundreds of people in a 33-story Hong Kong apartment tower probably spread in part by traveling through bathroom drainpipes, officials said yesterday in what would be a disturbing new confirmation of the microbe's versatility."

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