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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#881

Post by brutusborn »

hnfong wrote: post #732
brutusborn wrote: post #728

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..

It's less about checking whether claims are true but about how they are rationalized. E.g. the claim could be a node "masks should be mandatory" with connections to reason, "masks reduce spread of virus" and papers supporting this policy. These would also need to be connected to nodes showing values, e.g. "reducing hospital admissions is more important than freedom of choice".

In this way it would be more obvious why policies are choosen and provide a way to express current knowledge. As more nodes are added to the graph, the policy prescriptions would change which would prevent mistrust that is based on "health department said do x, now they say don't do x".

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#882

Post by RedBeetDeadpool »

klabb3 wrote: post #597
RedBeetDeadpool wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen anything like mass formation psychosis until now. It truly is astonishing to see how many people can be so easily hypnotized with the right application of fear and hope.

Member the post 9/11 psychosis? I member.

I was still a rule following shepherd led church loving schoolboy back then. So no. I was the zombie back then, so I never formed those memories to member.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#883

Post by jpeloquin »

wildrhythms wrote: post #421
dayvid wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally know two people who left Ph.D. programs because of fraud from their professors/departments in research. I think a lot of it stems from working out an experiment or theory for years and finding something that invalidates it. They then cover it up or embellish data to keep funding and not lose all the work time.

At the heart of the issue, as you arrived at, is that our researchers are constantly under pressure to meet some funding goal, constantly looking for their next grant to continue work. This pressure should not exist. It is my belief that, in absence of that pressure, whatever 'fraud' is happening will no longer need to exist. Of all things, researchers should not need to be worried about funding.

As a researcher, although I love the idea of a pressure-free job, I'm also keenly aware that I'm being paid by tax money and therefore should be accountable for my productivity (or lack thereof). I would rather have more robust review of research activities, and reliable consequences for misconduct, than freedom from financial pressure.

I am also somewhat skeptical that removing funding pressure will reduce fraud. It may reduce the amount of show publications, i.e, work that doesn't really make any progress but isn't wrong either. But in my experience outright falsification of results comes from entitlement. A fraudster feels that they entitled to a certain level of achievement and recognition for it, and are willing to make something up when they're not getting that recognition. I believe that the pressure that drives a person to commit fraud is internal, not external.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#884

Post by tripletao »

jazzyk wrote: post #846
alignItems wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we sometimes have to rely on other people. We can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment. What we can do is delegate the process. There’s a difference between saying “whatever X says is true, because X said it”, and “I trust what Y says because Y has explained the process and methods of how it was derived, and I don’t have reasonable doubt to assume Y li…

What to do when you have two very different opinions coming from experts: - Anthony "I am The Science" Fauci or - Dr Malone (mRNA inventor)? Who to believe? Difficult to say, but these days, sadly, the first (and prudent) thing to do is to follow the money . While credentials matter, the first thing I check when I read a paper/publication is who funded the work.

All claims I've seen that Malone is "the" inventor of mRNA vaccine technology trace back to Malone himself. He possibly has some real claim to be "an" inventor, among the top dozen or so contributors of early advances that ultimately enabled the present vaccines. It's also possible that the contribution he's claiming as his own was basically his supervisor's idea (Felgner's), and Malone is just the one who did the lab work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Either way, I'm pretty sure Malone's claims about vaccine safety are dangerously wrong. After literally billions of doses of mRNA vaccines, the adverse effects he's been warning about simply haven't materialized. The rate of those effects isn't zero, and surveillance at mass scale has identified adverse effects that the original trials weren't powered to detect; but for now, the risk/benefit ratio for the vaccines looks highly favorable. Malone's baseless assertions otherwise are causing real harm.

That said, please don't take anything above as a defense of Fauci or of censorship. While I'm pretty sure that Malone is dangerously wrong, this pandemic has repeatedly demonstrated that the mainstream consensus can also be dangerously wrong--so like the Royal Society, I'd rather tolerate false information from the contrarians than risk a false mainstream view that can never get corrected. That doesn't mean contrarians are automatically (or even usually) right, though.

"Follow the money" may sometimes be a useful standard, but I don't see the relevance here. Fauci appears to get his money from the government, where he's the single highest-paid employee but still earns less than countless anonymous tech workers. This seems more to me like a matter of prestige, ego and power for both men.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#885

Post by stronglikedan »

azth wrote: post #870
stillbourne wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm not a Christian, but how life emerged is not something that experimental science will ever be able to answer. It's literally outside the domain of science.

Is it though? https://www.npr.org/2021/12/01/1060027395/robots-xenobots-li...

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#886

Post by lovecg »

chr1 wrote: post #874
lovecg wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we got there by mixing up science and policy. In an emergency (like a pandemic) you can’t have an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty in decision making - someone have to make the tough calls and stand by them. Unfortunately we don’t have clear delineation between “science” (what and how we know, and how certain we are) and “policy” (what should we do based on this information) in the public discourse - the s…

Why can’t you have an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty in decision making? Doubt is always better than false certainty. Public figures lying during pandemic have only prompted more people to be distrustful of science and the official policy decisions.

Because then nothing would ever get done. We would debate endlessly whether declaring the war on Germany was a good idea, or whether going to the Moon is a stupid goal, etc. etc. There’s certainly no shortage of arguments against any decision. Once the decision is made, continuing to doubt it is often not helpful.

I actually think this was one failure in our response to the pandemic. Take N95 masks or testing or what have you. There’s been so much back and forth on how well things work and changes of messaging - often driven by real studies, thus reflecting the uncertainty we’re talking about! - and I think that’s the cause of some distrust you’re talking about. In an alternate reality CDC would came out on day one to say “N95s are obviously good, and so are widely available rapid tests so let’s make a ton of them” and stay on this message. It’s the uncertainty and doubt that creates distrust, not the other way around.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#887

Post by azth »

stronglikedan wrote: post #885
azth wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Christian, but how life emerged is not something that experimental science will ever be able to answer. It's literally outside the domain of science.

Is it though? https://www.npr.org/2021/12/01/1060027395/robots-xenobots-li...

> using frog cells

Yep. Not to discredit their work obviously. Hopefully some good can come out of it for medicinal purposes.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#888

Post by immibis »

mike_hearn wrote: post #852
immibis wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're exposed to the virus normally 10 times per week every week. With lockdowns that drops to 5 times a week. In this scenario, lockdowns work fine, but are insufficient! Perhaps with stringent use of N95 masks during contactless food ration delivery it can be reduced to 0.05 times per week. Then the pandemic ends and we go back to normal. Also, if you only go out half as often, that's not exactly a lockdown either…

You don't appear to realize that food gets to your front door via a large and complex supply chain that involves many people doing things physically together at almost every point. Your definition of a lockdown is physically impossible even for cave men to sustain, let alone an advanced civilization. It isn't merely a matter of "works but insufficient". This kind of completely irrational reasoning is exactly why lock…

Ah, the good old "assume my opponent is an idiot" line of defence. 2% of the time it works every time.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#889

Post by kortex »

Retric wrote: post #383
kortex wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Suppose someone decided to build another LHC, but to save money they would use exactly the same design, constriction crew, and code used to build the first one. Would you consider that a perfectly reasonable choice or would it seem risky? That said I am all for peer reviewing code, but that’s not where this ends up. People are going to reuse code they don’t bother to dig into because people are people. The obvious ne…

It's not reasonable, but for different reasons. Building a carbon copy of LHC would not add anything new in the way of science. A better example would be LIGO. Adding another gravity wave detector of the exact same spec but halfway around the world would be fantastic, because it increases our triangulation ability, and keeping the engineering, hardware, and software the same reduces cognitive load of the scientists running it. Yes that means any "bug" in the first is present in the second, but that also means you have a common baseline. In fact there will inevitably be discrepancies in implementation (no two engineering projects are identical, even with the same blueprint), and you can leverage that high degree of similarity to reduce the search space (so long as subsystems are sufficiently modular, and the software is a direct copy).

The original comment was with respect to some n-back training program. There's so many other potential places of bias in an experiment like that, that you'd be foolish not to start with the exact same program. If an independent team uses a different software stack, and can't replicate, was it the different procedure, software, subjects, or noise?

The first step in scientific replication is almost always, "can the experiment be replicated, or was it a fluke?" In this stage, you want to minimize any free variables.

It's a matter of (leaky) abstractions. If I'm running a chemistry replication, I don't need the exact same round bottom flask as the original experiment; RBFs are fungible. In fact I could probably scale to a different size RBF. However, depending on the chemistry involved, I probably don't want to run the reaction in a cylindrical reactor, at least not without running in the RBF first. That has a different heating profile, which could generate different impurities.

Likewise, I probably don't need the exact same make/model of chromatograph. However, I do want to use the same procedure for running the chromatograph.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#890

Post by immibis »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #789
immibis wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objective reality gets to determine.

What's the objective reality on the lab leak theory? Effectiveness of cloth masks? Has that objective reality changed? Has the perception of that objective reality changed? Where do you get your objective reality from and how is it infallible?

We don't know, but what we do know is that the truth of the lab leak theory is irrelevant to whether we should stop the virus, and is primarily only mentioned as a distraction from that.
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