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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

#761

Post by immibis »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #350

From a social psychology perspective, censorship is known to increase interest in whatever you ban or try to withhold. Censorship also interferes with educating people and helping them improve their understanding. People often learn their understanding is flawed by saying something "stupid" and getting a response to that. Censorship fosters a climate of fear where people are less likely to say the "dumb" thing and ge…

And what when the person ignores the explanation because they get paid to say stupid things?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#762

Post by immibis »

toolz wrote: post #20
tempnow987 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti mask, anti N95 masks with exhalation valve stuff has been the worst here I think. If you would let folks wear N95 with exhalation valves (highly comfortable) it just makes it easier for folks to protect themselves (and indirectly others). And for those who don't care, let's distinguish slightly between making sure those who want to protect themselves as much as possible can, and the need to force people down…

This is a bit of a tangent, but I don't understand generalized masking. At best they flatten the curve, which I think at this point I believe flattening the curve is dangerous. We have pretty well defined risk demographics and if we could have covid seasons come and go quickly I think it gives the high risk demographics the best chance of applying multi-layered defenses against a shorter season of risk. There is of c…

Generalized masking reduces R. R<0.8 and the pandemic ends.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#763

Post by throwawaylinux »

immibis wrote: post #739
throwawaylinux wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ones who are ignoring "the science" to push agendas are the ones currently without power and control, who wish they had it. Since they cannot earn it honestly through correctness, they try violence.

I see lots of power hungry people doing it, and they have varying amounts of power and control, many have a lot of power and a lot of control

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#764

Post by immibis »

bmc7505 wrote: post #59

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Regardless of where you stand on specific issues like censorship, public health and misinformation, I think it’s really dangerous how counter-consensus opinions cannot be expressed in the open without individuals facing intense public scrutiny. There needs to be some kind of correction mechanism in case the consensus opinion is misinformed. Maybe it would help to put in term…

It depends on the specific opinion. I don't think there's anything wrong with people not being allowed to express the opinion that minority groups should be systematically exterminated.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#765

Post by pharke »

rocqua wrote: post #738
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there are more places where this applies: > 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 w…

Isn't the simple solution to just not engage with comments on social media? Honestly, that's where the problem is aka trolls and partisan bots. Have face to face conversations between scientists and skilled interviewers, the scientist supplies the answers and the interviewer generates the questions and keeps the conversation moving along and interesting for the viewer. Publish the content on social media since that is really the only thing it is good for but don't read the comments. We have specialists in this area already, they're called journalists. All they need to do is make a phone call, set up the interview and record it.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#766

Post by toolz »

jimkleiber wrote: post #390
Laforet wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A LOT less effective, especially for filtering sub-micrometer aerosols. https://imgur.com/a/Of4rDAu Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00375

I appreciate you sending the source. I guess I still have the same argument. A LOT less effective does not equal ineffective. Or maybe I just see certain words like "ineffective" as binary words, either it works or it doesn't, and have a reaction to that. It may be a lot less effective to have facial hair while wearing an n95 compared to no facial hair and a properly fit n95, but is that still much much more effectiv…

ineffective is not binary - it depends on your endpoint, which is subjective.

If your endpoint is to not catch covid and someone ineffectively wears their mask such that they would not have caught covid if they wore it correctly - then the mask was ineffective even if statistically they _maybe_ had lower chances of catching covid than without wearing a mask at all.

and I say maybe very strongly here...we do not understand transmissible diseases nearly as well as many would like to think - there are plenty of observable datapoints that correlate mask usage with increased transmission...my gut feeling would be to explain those away with confounding variables, but my gut feeling is not science and no substitute for a testable understanding of the problem and solution

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#768

Post by icare_1er »

immibis wrote: post #727
icare_1er wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a proposal to make things easier: why don't you and your friends give us a list of people allowed to talk about ivermectine, or mRNA, or Israel/Palestine, so we can more easily put them all on one channel that will give us the Truth and make it easier to protect us from all of the other articles, podcasts, etc ? I've seen some regimes do that and it works much better.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#769

Post by immibis »

8note wrote: post #384

Censoring scientific information to me feels like a continuation of science's replication crisis. The tooling for all classical techniques seem to have been broken as of late, getting rid of critical thinking for free speech, and replication for science.

It's anti-scientific information that's being censored.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#770

Post by immibis »

henry_bone wrote: post #302

From the article: 'The report defines scientific "misinformation" as content which is presented as fact but counter to, or refuted by, the scientific consensus - and includes concepts such as ‘disinformation’ which relates to the deliberate sharing of misinformation content.' They define misinformation in terms of a "scientific consensus". That alone seems problematic[0]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles…

Why? Saying that the strength of gravity is proportional to the distance between two objects is misinformation.
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