Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 421 posts

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#281

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

nateberkopec wrote: post #10

Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…

Your comment reminds me of the sensation I get in my legs when I watch someone jump from a significant height and land on their feet. It's the same feeling I felt when I jumped from more than 4 feet or so and landed on my legs as a child on the playground. Not really a pain, but a sharp jolting sensation that ran from my feet up my legs. Decades later, it still happens when I am sitting still in a theater and I watch a character jump and land on their feet in a similar manner. It's a real sensation.

There is a mind-body connection and the mind can induce nervous system sensation when no physical cause is present.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#282

Post by dlivingston »

edoo wrote: post #215

Randoms leaving mean messages on your public social media isn't silencing you. The truth always comes out. You have real science or you don't.

The determination of what's real science or not should be largely left to domain experts. Randos online should have little to no say. This is how anti-vaxxers and creationists have such a huge presence.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#283

Post by sleepysysadmin »

webXL wrote: post #271
dwaltrip wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have time to research your contrarion claims right now. My priors suggest it isn't a good use of my time. But I have to ask: Why haven't the climate change researchers figured out what you have? Do they have rebuttals to these claims? If so, can you please link those rebuttals in the name of transparency? P.S. You are being downvoted for being wildly off topic as well as a bit inflammatory.

How is this wildly off-topic if the subject of the article is online harassment of scientists, and climate change is specifically mentioned? The implied direction of the harassment might not be what the OP was talking about, but it's certainly related to the topic. As for the inflammatory bit, you might have a point there, but the kind of climate change that enabled humans to evolve might garner that fabled 97% of ba…

I will admit it was inflammatory but I had to pick the most contentious subject such that this forum will have the appropriate echo chamber response.

If I brought up Michigan state politics, virtually nobody would care.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#284

Post by hisnameisjimmy »

ethbro wrote: post #263
jayd16 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that considered psychosomatic, though? I don't think this fits the topic at hand.

It's a blurry line. If I've caused permanent damage to my back because I've been subconsciously holding it incorrectly for decades, is that damage psychosomatic?

If you go with the Sarno theory though, the damage is very unlikely to be permanent, and any lingering pain is still based in repressed, stressful emotions.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#285

Post by joejerryronnie »

magduf wrote: post #266
btilly wrote: post #246

Here is a simple rule. Any condition that can be improved with a placebo, has a possible psychological component that can either be a cause or a contributing factor. This is not to say that it is all in your head, or that all people with it have it due to psychological reasons. But some of the people have at least some of their symptoms worsened by psychological factors. Anyone who finds this controversial has psycho…

>Anyone who finds this controversial has psychological issues with reality. Isn't that something you can say about much of the population though? It seems to me that humans, in general, have psychological issues with reality.

But who’s to say which group’s reality is real and which group’s reality is false? In the end it boils down to politics and public perception - or in today’s world, whichever group is more effective in leveraging the large online platforms to their advantage.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#286

Post by 0-_-0 »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #158
cm2187 wrote: post #31

Another field where science is on a collision course with online (and offline) activists is genetics. As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of tabula rasa hold for truth. And unless the political climate evolves, in a power struggle between activists and science, I wouldn't bet on the scientists.

If people are interested in exploring this topic, I would highly recommend Robert Sapolsky's course "Human Behavioral Biology" from stanford. The lectures are all available on YouTube and I learned so much from them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

I can second that recommendation, I'm watching that lecture series for the second time it's so great.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#287

Post by candybar »

onion2k wrote: post #43
mc32 wrote: post #5

This is sad. Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic. It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental conseq…

Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it. Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale beh…

I general support workplace diversity and mechanisms to promote it but you're making it sound like it's settled science based on some PR piece by a consulting firm promoting a a white paper that almost certainly wasn't rigorous enough to meet any reasonable standards - how do you properly control for confounding factors and how do you define "better" decision? That's miles away from being published in a peer-reviewed journal, which in isolation is also miles away from settled science. This is a microcosm of the political climate we're in - we're too eager to accept what we want to believe, while setting impossible standards for claims that we're disinclined to believe.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#288

Post by prepend »

subcosmos wrote: post #166

I can understand why so many chronic fatigue patients are reacting this way. My doctor once told me that during his medical training, he was taught that people claiming to be suffering from this are bonkers and must be treated as if they are psychotic. Nowadays, the evidence is stacking up that there are metabolic, viral, and neurological factors involved, and while all of these can effect alertness, they are not eve…

What percentage of patients are bonkers? What percentage would benefit from psychiatric treatments rather than non-psychiatric?

It’s really hard with some conditions to get a good diagnosis and course of treatment?

Being called bonkers doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to act bonkers (tweetharras someone).

It’s kind of like that narcissism test where narcissists just respond that they are.

I think non-bonkers people should be able to work around the frustration of being considered bonkers by a polite and civil doctor. It’s a real pain to navigate the health system and I think terrible things happen because of it, I fear there are deaths because it’s so hard to see healthcare workers and get useful outcomes.

So being “royally insulted” is pretty typical. Trying to shut down a researcher’s life work means there’s something wrong with the insulted, not the insulter.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#289

Post by sleepysysadmin »

vectorEQ wrote: post #225
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #69

I feel like the topic of CFS is irrelevant to the story. Why is there such toxicity online creating these echochambers. If you point out anything that might question climate change for example, you will be called all kinds of names. Nobody looks at the points you are making. Let's test it right now. I'm sure I'll get downvoted and nobody will respond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... Ov…

it's not good nor bad. that's an opinion, and opinions have no place in the realm of science. that being said. climate change is natural, and has been going on without humans, and will do so after we are long gone

There are many things which are scientifically bad. How about all the science that was pro-leaded gasoline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

This guy created fake science; would this not be scientifically bad?

For the record, climate change is not the subject of my post. It was hostility; which the responses to my post proved this.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#290

Post by doctorpangloss »

btilly wrote: post #246

Here is a simple rule. Any condition that can be improved with a placebo, has a possible psychological component that can either be a cause or a contributing factor. This is not to say that it is all in your head, or that all people with it have it due to psychological reasons. But some of the people have at least some of their symptoms worsened by psychological factors. Anyone who finds this controversial has psycho…

It’s way more complicated than that. The diagnostic criteria changes over time, for many diseases with psychological components, in ways that make formerly pathological behaviors now healthy and vice versa.

Placebo doesn’t actually help you, obviously, despite what the outcome you’re measuring suggests. It represents a slack (something not quite an error, but not quite a useful measurement) in the outcomes based measurement regime. It’s a “cosmological constant” as a side effect of the limitations of enumerating causal and contributing factors.

People believe acupuncture is a placebo, and in an evidence based medicine regime it seems reasonable to prescribe it. But it depends what you’re calling pathological. Today, a population of video game players versus a control will score better on many psych outcomes. Tomorrow, they’ll change the tests, subtly, to account for “factors” better, and the results will reverse. The USMLE study book in 2018 pathologizes “video game fixation” (they can’t call it an addiction) before such a test change has occurred. The simple rule is that whatever society determines to be pathological will trickle down to the field of medicine, and placebo effects are the loudest signal of the limitations of an otherwise most superior way to administer therapies.

Post reply on HN