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Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

reuters.com

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Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#301

Post by [deleted] »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #222
ddorian43 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See anyone who has touched "differences of iq between races".

Natural selection acts to increase the fitness of a species relative to its environment. In the human case 'race' is a misnomer. It simply refers to certain features of humans' external appearance, namely melanin. But this does not track any distinct genetic community, which primarily changes as a function of the total sum of environmental pressures, and not just in proportion to UV radiation (i.e. as is true of mela…

[deleted]

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#302

Post by nradov »

barry-cotter wrote: post #205
nathan_long wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, genetically, is a race?

One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from. That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease. > Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America > ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects fr…

All human ancestors came from the continent of Africa if you go back far enough. Which specific ancestors are you referring to?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#303

Post by elefanten »

lcall wrote: post #210

My doctor[1] says the PACE trial was very flawed in methodology and interpretation of results, and set back research significantly because it was seen to show "it's all in your head" (if I understand correctly), thus discouraging research into physical causes. She also says the only known effective treatment is to learn good pacing: careful budgeting of one's energy expense. But regardless of whether we agree medical…

What about the empirical evidence of thousands of patients who have had success with these therapies? Is it possible their experience shows it's not as simple as declaring PACE completely proves or disproves the psycho/somatic vector?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#304

Post by ColanR »

jayd16 wrote: post #247
ddorian43 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See anyone who has touched "differences of iq between races".

The conflict here is one side thinks this is some kind of political correctness scheme when in reality, IQ and race are just terribly unscientific social constructs. You'll get much less push back from something like "genetic marker found to influence spatial thinking in young children.

I think general terms are used frequently when having a broad discussion.

But, to grant your Argumentum ad dictionarium, it seems like even here (considering the downvotes) the point parent was making still stands. People don't like discussing the connection between "genetic heritage" and "commonly used markers of general intelligence".

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#305

Post by dqpb »

> The insufferable arrogance of Prof Michael Sharpe once again on show for all the world to see - Paul Watton

> You need to be as arrogant as men are to believe we changed the climate - Nicolas Sarkozy

I find this criticism - that you would have to be arrogant to believe scientific results - both fascinating and deeply disturbing.

I'm not sure if it's an ingenious thought-terminating troll hack - raising a social complaint (which humans instinctively fear) as a sigint to abort further thinking, or just profound idiocy.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#306

Post by naasking »

jdietrich wrote: post #61
naasking wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a paper turns out to be flawed, then you retract the paper. In order to retract it, someone needs to figure out that it was in fact flawed. Most scientists don't knowingly publish bad research, they just make mistakes that get missed in peer review. Keeping research hidden away in paywalled journals isn't going to improve the quality of science one iota. Except OP wasn't suggesting keeping silent, he was suggest…

The public discourse around science is dominated by non-scientists, many of whom habitually make grievous and blatant errors. Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse.

> Telling scientists to "stay in their lane" and avoid talking about their research in public isn't going to improve the quality of that discourse.

There's a difference between results that have been validated by multiple studies and replicated, and results that have only one or two studies backing them. I think the replication crisis clearly shows why.

Furthermore, there's also a difference between scientists making positive claims and scientists correcting improper interpretations of existing results.

I think my post was pretty clear about what scientists should not be writing about on social media. Writing about anything else is perfectly fine.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#307

Post by dwaltrip »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #277
dwaltrip wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "there is nothing to rebut" is not a response. You are claiming that the consensus view of climate change has literally nothing to say in response to your points? I find that very hard to believe. Have you done your due diligence and actually searched for any rebuttals?

We're talking facts here; and this data is from climatologists and backed up by studies. The conclusions are also not mine. What is there to rebut? This isn't the point I was making. Climate change doesnt matter. I was illustrating the point of the article. Nobody will want to discuss climate change if there is such hostility and alarmism. By definition creating climate deniers. If the climate change folks are correc…

> We're talking facts here; and this data is from climatologists and backed up by studies. The conclusions are also not mine.

> What is there to rebut?

The rebuttal would look something like: "The data doesn't mean what you think it does due to X, Y, or Z." Or "Yes, this is true, but you are ignoring these other 10 aspects of the situation, which demand another interpretation". And so on.

One piece of data doesn't mean anything by itself. It needs to be put into context and interpreted. This is the hard part, of course.

> Nobody will want to discuss climate change if there is such hostility and alarmism.

The hostility and alarmism is only unjustified if they are wrong about the facts of the matter and how to interpret them, and if the contrarian arguments brought forth are ignored without good reason or in bad faith. So, the particular details do actually matter. It is about climate change. Or whatever other specific topic.

In my personal experience, the majority of contrarian arguments for climate change that I have seen have been put forth without due diligence or an understanding of how the argument fits into the broader picture. Which is what you would expect if the reality is that there isn't actually a strong opposing case.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#308

Post by logifail »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #290
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 meas…

> Placebo doesn’t actually help you

What?

The first definition of the placebo effect I found was this:

"a beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment"

My highlight.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#309

Post by djsumdog »

nabnob wrote: post #127

This is also happening with research on detransition - >Bath Spa University is conducting an internal inquiry into claims that it turned down an application for research on gender reassignment reversal because it was “potentially politically incorrect” and would attract criticism on social media. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/sep/25/bath-spa-u...

I find this so problematic. There are a number of psychologists who are being pushed heavily by social and transrights groups to always suggest transitioning as an option. This goes against one of those classic staples of what we teach people growing up: "You need to be okay with who you are."

Helping someone be okay with their own gender shouldn't be an ethically questionable treatment to offer. After all there are risk from hormone replacement therapy. Transitioning can also be an option for adults, but I feel as if it's pushed too heavily for adolescence today. These are reasonable questions, but they're often met by activists as being "anti-trans."

In a way, it's another example of what the article describes; the bullying against psychologists from giving their actual views and opinions. There are two really excellent Wrongspeak podcast episodes dedicated to this:

https://soundcloud.com/wrongspeak/3-too-young-to-transition

https://soundcloud.com/wrongspeak/8-gender-dysphoria-101-wit...

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#310

Post by yznovyak »

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…

Where I'm from (Ukraine) RSI is pretty much unheard of, and I only learned about it when I moved to the US (when I was 21). Interestingly not long after learning about it I've started experiencing pain in my wrists and started to get really worried about getting an RSI. One of my coworkers recommended Kinesis Advantage keyboard, so I bought it off ebay and started using it and the pain disappeared. Interestingly I've seen this keyboard quite a lot, off top of my head I think something like 5% of engineers were using it.

I'm not saying that RSI doesn't exist, but I'm now positive that in my case all those RSI-like symptoms were all in my head -- some kind of a nocebo (an anti-placebo) effect. When I was 27 I had to do an MRI of my hand for an unrelated reason (boxing injury), so naturally I asked them to do an MRI of my wrist since they'll be immobilizing my hand anyway [1]. So either my wrist was healed in those 6 years, or it was fine all along -- can't tell because I didn't have a "before" picture. Just in case, I explicitly double checked with another doctor if he was sure about my wrist and he said that my MRI could be used as a textbook example of a healthy wrist joint.

I am now wondering if all those "mental-health awareness" things could have an adverse effect. I wonder how many hypochondriacs self-suggested themselves an OCD or an ADHD, and while marinating in those thoughts they somehow turned those thoughts into an actual condition (self-fulfilling prophecy?). Like ... you guys already have tidy people joking about having an OCD, and people who like to wash hands are joking about being a germaphobs.

edit: I think I've seen an article "willpower is limited only if you believe so" posted somewhere here on HN, but I can't find it now. Anyway here's another link: [3], and here's the Stanford study they cite [4]. This can be another example of people self-suggesting themselves a handicap.

[1] There are a lot of posts on HN talking about healthcare costs in the US, so I'll share my anecdote too. I did an MRI in Ukraine and the whole thing was like $80: $50 for the hand and extra $30 for the wrist. The machine was 1.5 Tesla one, but there are other clinics that have 3 Tesla machines too (a little bit more expensive). Scheduling an appointment was done by a phone a couple of days in advance and didn't require any doctor referral. There are many small private clinics offering imaging services (MRI/CT/Ultrasound/...), and all of them are very easy to Google and all of the prices are available online, for example: [2]. After the procedure they give you a CD with the info, a print-out on some largish transparent plastic, and their staff doctor's conclusion. You usually take those results to your specialist doctor of choice.

[2] For example: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... all prices in UAH, to get rough USD estimate divide those numbers by 25 (or 26.75 to get exact number as of 2019-03-13 if you're OCD).

[3] https://lifehacker.com/your-willpower-is-only-a-finite-resou...

[4] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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