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Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

deevybee.blogspot.com

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Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#111

Post by cauch »

a-french-anon wrote: post #41
cauch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the RS doesn't expel people for their politics, then it doesn't make sense to expel Musk for, essentially, concerns about his politics. But the article does not talk about Musk's political opinion per se. The concerns would have been totally the same if Musk was acting the same way but involving himself with a different political ideology. The concerns seem to be: 1) Musk is aggressive towards his fellow scienti…

[flagged]

What is your point?

The article says that the letter specifically mentioned examples where Musk failed to act with scientific integrity. It details the situation, which happens to be linked with right-wing stuffs. It obviously does not say "Musk has used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements, which is perfectly fine, but it happens to be on an ideology we don't like", it says "Unlike other members that have the same ideology as Musk and for which we have no problem with them staying members of the RS, Musk did not express his view in a normal way, he has used is platform on X to act in a way that is very much incompatible with scientific integrity". The problem raised is the unjustified and divisive statements that prove that Musk is intellectually dishonest. (and even if we give credit to the very weak argument that Musk is some kind of split personality that is magically intellectually honest if the subject is more "science related", the history of his statements shows quickly that it's not the case).

The consultation with a lawyer was to determine if it breached the Code of Conduct, proof that, contrary to what you pretend, the first sentence does not imply that it has nothing to do with scientific integrity. If the first sentence implied that, why would they even bother paying a lawyer to check something that, according to you, is obviously not breaching a Code of Conduct that only talks about scientific integrity. (and, as explained, the layer concluded that there were risks of legal retaliation, but not that the code of conduct was not breached)

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#112

Post by tim333 »

tordrt wrote: post #83
seabass-labrax wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Elon Musk has not challenged scientific consensus by publishing revolutionary studies or conducting risky experiments, but rather by republishing inflammatory statements online. His actual achievements (including super-heavy rockets and electric cars) are largely independent from his unconventional views on vaccines, for instance. You can't compare him to figures like Newton and Hooke, who made…

Whats his unconvential views on vaccines? I am not convinced he has any. Could not find anything obvious at leadt

I'm not aware of any. I think the author misinterpreted him with:

>Musk tweeted: "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci", thereby managing to simultaneously offend the LGBTQ community, express an antivaxx sentiment...

Musk actually explained he wasn't in to the pronoun stuff and:

>As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.

ie. lab leak, not vax

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#113

Post by tim333 »

viraptor wrote: post #45
zosima wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elons statements were obviously not aimed at Faucis role in vaccine discussions, but in his much more dubious role in gain-of-function research and especially covering up the origins of Covid. While that is relevant to a scientific society, I think it's worth taking a good hard look on whether its wise to take a side on that, other than maybe denounce gain-of-function research.

Tweets without context are not "obviously" aimed at specific things. Prosecute/Fauci was both ambiguous and in bad taste.

He later clarified https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1602113254360162304

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#114

Post by tim333 »

roenxi wrote: post #8

I respect the author's principle-based approach but many of her arguments seem a little off. If the RS doesn't expel people for their politics, then it doesn't make sense to expel Musk for, essentially, concerns about his politics. And if you expel crotchety scientists for disagreeing with the scientific consensus there won't be any left. The RS motto is literally "Take nobody's word for it"; I don't see how Musk dis…

Their website has:

>Fellows - The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of many of the world’s most eminent scientists, engineers, and technologists.

Maybe he isn't a scientist but he is an engineer/technologist. If you put "greatest living engineer" into google you can guess who pops up.

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#115

Post by mike_hearn »

thewanderer1983 wrote: post #48

To quote him "Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion" Can someone please explain to me how we managed to get a whole generation of the western scientific thinkers who think the scientific method is consensus of scientific opinion? The author lists Isaac Newton, Hooke, Boyle . All of these prominent minds made scientific breakthroughs that didn't stick to the consensus views of the ti…

It's farcical. The Royal Societies motto is "take nobody's word for it", yet this particular author is so keen on the idea that science is people agreeing with each other that the highlighted research on her home page is a paper from nearly ten years ago titled "CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study."

What exactly is a "consensus study"?

"Our goal in this study was to use an online Delphi technique to see whether it was possible to achieve consensus among professionals on appropriate criteria for identifying children who might benefit from specialist services"

"These responses [from experts] were synthesised by the first two authors, who then removed, combined or modified items with a view to improving consensus ... The resulting consensus statement is reported here"

This is what she thinks of as her best scientific work! It's not even science at all, just emailing a bunch of people trying to get them to agree to things and anytime someone doesn't agree she "synthesizes" them out of the picture.

No wonder she hates Musk. The Royal Society is far better off without people like this. It's not like Musk would care if it booted him out anyway!

https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/dorothy-bishop

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#116

Post by thewanderer1983 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #99
thewanderer1983 wrote: post #48

To quote him "Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion" Can someone please explain to me how we managed to get a whole generation of the western scientific thinkers who think the scientific method is consensus of scientific opinion? The author lists Isaac Newton, Hooke, Boyle . All of these prominent minds made scientific breakthroughs that didn't stick to the consensus views of the ti…

> People interested should look at People, evidence is, should be better educated in the History and Philosophy of Science (and in Mathematics and in Logic). It should be part of the mandated curriculum.

How do you determine what is scientific evidence and what isn't? That is done via the scientific methods.

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#117

Post by thewanderer1983 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #115
thewanderer1983 wrote: post #48

To quote him "Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion" Can someone please explain to me how we managed to get a whole generation of the western scientific thinkers who think the scientific method is consensus of scientific opinion? The author lists Isaac Newton, Hooke, Boyle . All of these prominent minds made scientific breakthroughs that didn't stick to the consensus views of the ti…

It's farcical. The Royal Societies motto is "take nobody's word for it", yet this particular author is so keen on the idea that science is people agreeing with each other that the highlighted research on her home page is a paper from nearly ten years ago titled "CATALISE: A Multinational and Multidisciplinary Delphi Consensus Study." What exactly is a "consensus study"? "Our goal in this study was to use an online De…

This is called Argument from authority and is a logical fallacy.

To steal a good part from wikipedia: Scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority[13][14][15] as authority has no place in science.[14][25][26] Carl Sagan wrote of arguments from authority: "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#118

Post by roenxi »

bjornsing wrote: post #72
roenxi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour. One of the things that high-status people have to deal with is that they basically create the rules by their behaviour and actions. That leads to a certain disregard for what is written on-paper because they can write different things on it if they want to. I'd imagine the RS people actually probably tended more towards the former in the early days. There was m…

> Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour. Interesting. You mean it’s high-status to disregard rules that don’t have formal consequences? I guess I’m a bit confused, in that we clearly used to have a society that operated much more on rules without formal consequences. E.g. here in Sweden our law books are absolutely filled with them. Obviously there must have been high-status people that took them se…

Being high-status means someone can just ignore rules and frequently avoid consequences. Generally that seems to be true and historically it has been very true. Happens all the time if you keep your eyes peeled; and the converse - on sometimes formal consequences are forced on someone with high status regardless and they are shocked and confused because that has never happened to them before and they didn't realise that it was an option.

The formal consequences or lack thereof are often not a factor for people with very high status because they operate on the assumption that they can just ignore the consequences should they exist. That doesn't mean they ignore the rules - frequently the high-status types are the ones writing them so they typically agree with them in principle. But laws without formal consequences are about as effective as laws with formal consequences because the consequences aren't the major factor. Loss of status would be though, so things that are technically allowed can have major consequences (which IMO is part of why high status means someone eventually starts ignoring the rules - power corrupts as they say - the rewards and punishments are just different for someone with high status and eventually the feedback causes them to orient to that truth).

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#120

Post by whywhywhywhy »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #65
thewanderer1983 wrote: post #48

To quote him "Whereas previously he seemed to agree with mainstream scientific opinion" Can someone please explain to me how we managed to get a whole generation of the western scientific thinkers who think the scientific method is consensus of scientific opinion? The author lists Isaac Newton, Hooke, Boyle . All of these prominent minds made scientific breakthroughs that didn't stick to the consensus views of the ti…

The difference is that Elon Musk has not challenged scientific consensus by publishing revolutionary studies or conducting risky experiments, but rather by republishing inflammatory statements online. His actual achievements (including super-heavy rockets and electric cars) are largely independent from his unconventional views on vaccines, for instance. You can't compare him to figures like Newton and Hooke, who made…

> publishing revolutionary studies

Just because you put it in PDF doesn't make it something more.

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