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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.
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
921–930 of 970 posts
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#922Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough, but I would consider a failure communication philosophy a subset of communication failure
Perhaps. I only see it as a "subset" in the sense of: many things have to go right for good communication to happen -- ethos being one of them. But its still "upstream" from communication. Philosophy informs action. Your original point is that our leaders need to get better at communicating nuanced issues. That's a non-starter if the people in charge see nuance as an obstacle and straight up adopt an anti-nuance atti…
Listen to Lux Friedman - episode 254 with jay who professor the medical department at Stanford. It’s entitled the case against lockdowns.
‘ Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.’
-Bertrand Russell
Edit: lol, little disinformation quip of my own. He’s just a professor, doesn’t head the department after a quick google search.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#923Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You miss the point. "Scientists" literally lied about the nutritional issues, as well as the smoking. They were "bought off" by companies. Now, I'm sure you have 100% confidence that the "current administration" is 100% by the book and honest in all of their dealings. While, you might have had less than 100% confidence that the previous administration was. My point? You trust one group, but not another. I might trust…
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#924I see the root cause of all this debate as a failure in scientific communication. When it comes to complex scientific decisions with significant impacts on the public, nuanced and detailed justifications are required. Instead, we often get simple declarations written by PR departments at juvenile reading level. This spawns chaotic and poorly conducted debate in all walks of life. What is required is a robust and tran…
It's simpler than that. It's accountability . Whether you communicate, or do without communicating, there needs to be accountability . When there's no accountability, it boils down to power games, which is what we've always had, because as soon as you start playing accountability, you have to justify why you have power and I don't, and that makes people in power extremely nervous, because most of them are really not…
Maybe one mitigation is to make public figure / media accountable to the avoidable damage their speech end up causing? E.g., if I listen to your anti-vax radio program and consequently decide not to get vaccinated, before catching the disease and dying, then my family can sue you for damage as long as it can established that you have purposefully misled / failed to assess the potential harm.
After a few class-action lawsuits like this, public figure & media will probably be more careful when they want to spread misinformation.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#925Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#926Just 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…
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…
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#927Earlier quoted context omitted.
I reckon the PRNG seeding in such a case might be used during development/testing. So, run the code with a seed in a non distributed way (e.g. in R turn off all parallelism), and then the results should be the same in every run. Then once this test output is validated, depending on the nature of the model, it can be run in parallel, and guarantees of deterministic behaviour will go, but that's ok. I didn't develop th…
My understanding is the bugginess is due to* unintended* nondeterminism, in other words, things like a race condition where two threads write some result to the same memory address, or singularities/epsilon error in floating point calculations leading to diverging results. Make no bones about it, these are programming faults . There's no reason why distributed, long-running models can't produce convergent results wit…
I saw the John Cormack review which suggested there was nothing overly troubling in the code, https://mobile.twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/125487236876...
The other takedown reviews focused on the fact that there was non-determinism despite a seed, without understanding that's not necessarily a problem.
Agreed on the second point about not having a seed, but I added the "assuming you have used a seed" caveat because sometimes people do use the seed for some reproducible execution modes (even multi-thread/process ones), which are fine, and it's just easier to randomly vary the seed generation rather than remove it all together when running in a non-deterministic mode.
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#928Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps. I only see it as a "subset" in the sense of: many things have to go right for good communication to happen -- ethos being one of them. But its still "upstream" from communication. Philosophy informs action. Your original point is that our leaders need to get better at communicating nuanced issues. That's a non-starter if the people in charge see nuance as an obstacle and straight up adopt an anti-nuance atti…
In history, every time you set up an institution it becomes an entity in its own right. Company’s, orgs, religions, federal entities and countries all vie for power at their own level and within their own space. The problem with an ‘information-control/censorship/verification’ is… it’s exactly that, the age old ‘we are controlling information for the common good’. Every major nation in history eventually evolves to t…
However, the way the quote ends paints a slightly different picture:
`The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine.`
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#929Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would dispute the idea that nuanced /messaging/ can't happen at scale (discussions are a different thing altogether). While I understand that everyone is up in arms about COVID-19 communications these days there are lots of instances around the world of effective communication that in the end had to be fairly nuanced.. most populations understand that vaccines are useful and effective but not perfect, most populati…
>I guess we can quibble about the definition of "nuance" but the idea that vaccine science and hospital capacity management is very direct doesn't hold much water with me, maybe others disagree, IDK? This is what I am getting at. If we claim these decisions are science based, communicate the science! e.g. if X% more people are vaccinated, we will have Y more hospital beds, and Z more elected procedures. make an hones…
But the problem there is you are not asking for nuance, you are asking for.. lies? The answer is that more vaccination means more hospital beds and elective procedures but no one could credibly argue any specific numbers - it was just not possible to make that calculation without enormous error bars, you can only make the nuanced argument that vaccination produces reduced case counts and hospitalization, and that the public has to understand that this will allow for better services against an unvaccinated baseline. The good news is that a huge majority of people do understand that!
Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online
#930Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the noble lie the parent is talking about has to do with the CDC's lie about masks early on in the pandemic. Are you talking about the "don't buy masks" thing? Because when I dig up the actual early communications, they're not lies: https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473 > CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive action…
Uncertainty and especially admitting when something is not yet known is perhaps the most important part of science. The point is to do experiments and actually test things to get closer to the truth. One must admit epistemological uncertainty until the actual experimentation. The CDC still has not performed or directed any large-scale experiments of any kind. They are a political institution, not practitioners of sci…
> Saying something definitive like 'Masks are NOT effective in preventing #Coronavirus' before the evidence is in is quite anti-scientific.
1. The statement you quote came from the Surgeon General, not the CDC. The Surgeon General is a political appointment, and as far as I know, the CDC does not report through him.
2. IMHO, the CDC's problem was actually the opposite of what you are complaining about. It was too scientific. Science is slooooooow, so if you rely on it too heavily then your problem will get "inside your OODA loop" and you won't be able to act quickly enough to tackle it effectively. The CDC has multiple hats, and it needed to push its science hat back in order to wear its crisis leadership hat in front.
Science is not the right tool for every job. It works great for things that change or move slowly (like physical laws) and very poorly for things that change or move quickly. It's an error to expect/demand every problem be solved with science