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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

royalsociety.org

741–750 of 970 posts

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument he/she's making is that specific findings are being suppressed, so nobody has a full and accurate picture. Thus you cannot refute it with a statistical argument that assumes you do have the full picture.

That is the argument you are making, and I struggle to see in what world being published in Nature is "being suppressed". They make the claim "vaccines that pose 50% higher excess risk of myocarditis compared to an infection", and this is a misleading claim. The risk to an individual of taking the vaccine is more sensibly measured against what happens to somebody who isn't vaccinated, not what happens to somebody who…

Their study isn't an attempt to answer the holistic question of whether vaccines are saving lives or ending them in aggregate, and they never claimed it was, so I don't see what's misleading about it. The claim dannyw is making is about the studies and discussion that isn't being published in Nature, or at all.

Your counter-claim is that this alternative question is what they should have been discussing, and if they had been, it'd be misleading to focus on the risk of myocarditis alone. Which is correct, but then they'd also have to take into account injuries and deaths from other non-myocarditis vaccine side effects, the costs of medical care not given due to the spending of resources on vaccines instead, QALYs and so on. But the sort of institutions that fund such research don't want to know about vaccine downsides, so don't fund any research into it, and moreover expend considerable effort to suppress whatever little research does get done.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#742

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…

> Lockdowns had no impact on mortality. This is literally impossible, because viruses cannot teleport through walls. Unless there is confusion between the government calling for lockdowns, and people actually doing lockdowns?

The virus travels on the air, and spread has even been attributed to foul air leaking from sewage systems back into people's homes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

Also food and other required resources are similarly unable to teleport through walls, so the people involved in growing, transporting, preparing and delivering them to your door can't do "lockdown" like the minority who are able to work from home.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#743
post #696

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…

John Carmack, of computer games and graphics programming fame, had pretty positive comments on the Imperial College CovidSim model code: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1254872369556074496

He is unfortunately quite wrong, see below. I don't believe he could have reviewed the code in any depth because the bugs are both extremely serious and entirely objective - they're just ordinary C type programming errors, not issues with assumptions.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#744
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In theory the references and bibliography sections of published papers would be more than enough to construct a knowledge graph. Being able to construct a graph does not mean it's possible to check whether the claims are correct though..

This is how I learned (approximately) how GPT-2 worked. Start with GPT-2 and it's full of nonsense you don't understand. Follow the references, follow more references. Get to basic neural networks with one hidden layer like you learned about in college. Reverse the chain and build upwards.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#745

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…

The strength of science used to be that it was anti-authoritative - experiments not institutions used to be the ultimate source of truth.

Is it not still that way? There may be a bias towards believing trusted institutions, but that's because they have reputations for delivering truth based on experiments.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the one for people whose life expectancy was less than half the modern day? Who lived completely different lives?

Powhatan lived to 70, Opechancanough lived to 92 (when he was murdered), Massasoit lived to 80, Canonicus was 82.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier

You should make sure you understand what outliers are. The fact that you can name people from outside modern times that lived a long time is meaningless to the discussion.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#747
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why did the USS Mercy which was in New York during the beginning of the pandemic only ever treat 48 patients? 77 while she was in Los Angeles. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/military/infected-usn... https://news.usni.org/2020/05/15/usns-mercy-leaves-los-angel...

This is second hand from someone close, but not too close in the military, so details are off but the narrative is on track: The Mercy was deployed after some communication between New York hospitals, and the understanding at least was that it would mostly be handling emergency, trauma, and routine patients (what military docs are good are at as a stereotype), and free up capacity for the hospitals to deal with COVID…

That makes sense in New York but we knew more about the situation when she was in LA and when the USNS Comfort was in New York later on. (Also I put USS Mercy when it should be USNS Mercy)

"Another of the Navy’s two hospital ships, the USNS Comfort, was sent to New York City to treat non-coronavirus patients. However, after treating only a few dozen patients, the Comfort changed its rules to allow coronavirus-positive patients on the ship.

The Comfort had been docked in New York Harbor in Manhattan since March 30 but departed last month for its Norfolk, Va., home port after treating just 182 patients."

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/497987-usns-mercy-leaves-...

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#748
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outrage is only good in that it generate interest in the topic. There is a surplus of hot-headed illogical people bogging down any real constructive discussion. There is a shortage of people that understand the realistic challenges involved and working to come up with viable Solutions on either side of a given issue

The problem is that the only viable solution is for an entrenched elite with disproportionate power and money to lose much of that power and influence. It’s a struggle between the masses and the ruling class about who gets to make decisions in our society, not like lunch meeting where we can find common sense action items to agree on.

Outrage economy is about making the opposite decisions from the "ruling class" no matter what those decisions are

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#749

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…

> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. Hmm. I wonder how we got there...[1] [1] https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg

[deleted]

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#750
post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got not dog in the fight, but I've listened to some podcasts by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and compared to the absolute nonsense I see on TV today, it is a breath of fresh air. They're reading scientific articles, discussing implications in long form, and have been open and honest about their mistakes. I have not seen or heard of Eric Weinstein so I can't comment. I'm not sure what kind of bar you're usi…

> have been open and honest about their mistakes They really haven't. They continued to double-down on ivermectin and other COVID era flim flam as it came to light more studies were dodgy or outright fraudulent. It's pretend science theatre from a former small university lecturer who managed a couple research papers in 20 years. For example, telling the audience with a straight face that it doesn't matter if the stud…

Not sure why you're being downvoted: your comment is spot on.
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