731–740 of 970 posts
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> 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.
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.
Being able to construct a graph does not mean it's possible to check whether the claims are correct though..
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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.
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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)".
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Well yes, but no. You want to avoid any systematic bias, which if you reuse tooling/instruments/code, you run the risk of, but source code is also something which can be peer-reviewed. Reproducing the code base from scratch just isn't going to be tractable for large scientific pieces of software (e.g. CERN). Better to have the source code and dig through it carefully as part of the review and replication than insist…
If it doesn't replicate on the same equipment with the same code, then there's no reason to worry about the rest.
Essentially, this would be like trying to reproduce a paper and starting by checking if their mathematical apparatus is correct. It's not useless, and it can help detect fraud or just plain bad peer review of course, but I wouldn't call that an attempt to reproduce their results per se.
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> You have corporations buying off scientists (if not to rig experiments/falsify results, then to bury unfavorable findings), journals willing to publish any garbage with little (if any) meaningful review, then media companies willing to turn that junk science into a click-bait friendly press release for a company or industry. What reason does a corporation have to pay for science that they know will not work? That's…
With current Covid pandemic. I could be wrong but it seems most studies are looking at effectiveness of vaccines and little to nothing on effectiveness of natural immunity. I say this as someone who was one of the first to get vaccinated. Not that I am saying the pharmaceutical companies sponsored the studies. So to answer your question sometimes it is what is not funded that is probably more telling.
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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…
> 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. I disagree. I think a big part of the problem is people having unreasonable standards of accuracy or consistency. On COVID, the CDC was never going have everything perfectly figured out in the beginning, and then consistently repeat the same me…
You may assume that "I" do not have sufficient education and training to interpret state-of-art publications, and/or assume that "I" would end up trusting dubious alternative theories, but you do not know. The "average" person may indeed be incapable of finding out the truth by themselves, but I'm really sick of "science-y" people giving blanket statements on what others should believe without actually checking whether they deserve the condescending remark in the first place.
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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". 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…
I too have worked in academia, and in partnership with them over 3 deacdes, so seen how the sausage is made. So I understand and recognise some of your points. Still we can and should be pro-science; but recognise that science in academia is extremely political, and increasingly bending to marketing pressures and industry influence. A big problem, as I see it, is the unwillngness of academia to engage in debate with…
> Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.
I think it is a really hard problem. Figuring it if someone is arguing in good faith is hard. And engaging with someone arguing from bad faith is really draining. Besides the difficulty, people worry that engaging with some people will draw even more responses, many of them being in bad faith. Certainly only responding partially often leads to "yeah you are responding to them, but what about X".
I think in the end, wading through all the abuse is just so painful that many people decide to ignore input. And doing anything that might cause more abuse to flood in is reflexively avoided, since that abuse actually hurts.
Solving this is going to require specialization. Because being able to wade through the abuse is not something everyone can do. It will also require proper incentives to actually do this, because the people who can handle the abuse aren't going to do so out of charity.
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…
You only need to look at the all "the science" which gets ignored by people pushing an agenda to know it's not about science it's about power and control.
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Yes. Exactly. Thank you for sharing what I was going to share. Corruption exists where it is allowed by the people who act out of cowardice. As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research. Now I w…
> There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it. The reasons for that can be myriad. Actual or false scientific success of the last 30 years is not necessarily it. Also, don't you feel the ship has kind of been slowly going down during the last 10 years, wealth-wise ?
Not for the rich, so the reasons are not that much to do with value-creation (it's value distribution that's rotten).