Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online • Hacker News Board

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#371

Post by coliveira » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #335

maximus-decimus wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just throw out papers that don’t publish datasets and code There was an interesting research paper that claimed you could up your IQ with a computer game called dual n back and a lot of paper tried to replicate it, but my mind was blown when I realized none of them used the same code. None of them actually shared the code they used for their research and then they all claimed they were testing the same thing when…

Sharing code and data can be as harmful to science as it is beneficial. You don’t want to reuse the same instruments that conducted the last experiment to validate it. Independent replication is inherently expensive, but also critical to the field at large. Some sort of code vault that releases the code and data after a period could be a solid compromise.

The only person who really understood how to do independent validation. Of course the code MUST be different.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#372

Post by rgrieselhuber » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #351

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be willing to bet that most people with the gall to do their own research will look beyond the first result that appears on the SERP... It’s fundamentally an epistemological question: what is the ontological basis for thinking we know something?

>I’d be willing to bet that most people with the gall to do their own research will look beyond the first result that appears on the SERP... Once again this is thinking that doesn't go beyond the first layer. If this situation is possible for the first link, it is possible for the second and the third and everything on the first 5 pages. However deep this hypothetical researcher is willing to go, if there are enough…

It goes far beyond the first layer, to the ultimate layer: what is the basis of our presuppositions about knowledge? How do we authenticate what we think we know?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#373

Post by Laforet » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

jimkleiber wrote: post #315

toolz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't think any kind of mask works on people who don't want to wear them. I hypothesize the reason general population shows little or no benefit with masks is because wearing masks effectively is significantly more tedious than just having one on most of the time where people require them. People who don't want masks aren't getting fitted properly for n95's, they aren't shaving, they aren't behaving cons…

Does it render masks "ineffective" or "less effective"? I think I see so much absolutist language whereas I wish we would use more relative language.

A LOT less effective, especially for filtering sub-micrometer aerosols.

https://imgur.com/a/Of4rDAu

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00375

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#374

Post by autoexec » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #175

throwaway22032 wrote: post #9

The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Be…

Well the trust has to be earned by a history of proven visibly good outcomes. Never forget that there is a long history of cases where the established scientifically accepted ideas were actually harmfully wrong, particularly in the medical arena. In the USA in particular, medical practice is far from a benign charity, so people are right to question. One example: I had a tonsillectomy when I was a kid. No actual evid…

> t there is a long history of cases where the established scientifically accepted ideas were actually harmfully wrong, particularly in the medical arena.

This isn't actually a problem so long as those past errors were caused by the limits of what we knew at the time and efforts are made to help prevent similar issues in the future when it's possible. It's inevitable that as our understating of science and medicine evolve we're going to discover that what made sense before is no longer a good idea.

The problem comes when we weren't wrong because of what we didn't understand, but because people who knew better just thought they could get more money if they manipulated results or outright lied. We had the tobacco industry pay off scientists to lie about the cancer risks the industry knew to be a problem. The resulting rise in people with lung cancer wasn't a mistake. We had doctors pushing opioids on people at insane doses because they were paid kickbacks if they did. That wasn't a mistake either.

What we need is strict regulation and oversight so that when science and medicine do get it wrong, it's because we couldn't have known better given what data we had at the time. That'd be a huge step up from where we are now.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#375

Post by flavius29663 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:40 AM UTC

c-cube wrote: post #105

limecat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking an experimental prophylactic against a disease with a 99.9% survival rate. Probably higher if you're under 50. And we still don't really know how safe it is, because the 'gold standard' data (double blind testing) is absent, save for 2 months' of Pfizer data. Your benefit has apparently outweighed your cost. Fine. Mine hasn't. I like to read any and all opinions, regardless of 'bias'. We all have biases…

Your bias shows heavily. Where's the double blind trial for covid effects and death rate (which seems to be more around 1%), not to ignore the very present long term effects that affect more people? Why put such a high level of doubt on the vaccine which billions of people took, but not on the disease that prompted its creation?

that's the thing. You can freely talk about covid death rates and long term effects, but you can't do it about the vaccine.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#376

Post by gruez » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:40 AM UTC

librarianscott wrote: post #82

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people draw their own conclusions and don’t censor or otherwise penalize them for questioning one interpretation of data vs another. Encourage people to do their own research and investigate who is funding the sources used for that research. There is no need for conspiracy theories when financial incentives exist.

But people should be helped to draw their own conclusions with annotations where every time some crazy idea is repeated it is automatically flagged with "This idea has repeatedly been debunked by 37 national societies of medicine and 19 meta analyses of 2,000 peer-reviewed studies with a quality deemed high or superb," etc.

>every time some crazy idea is repeated it is automatically flagged with [...]

This is basically "fact checking". In theory it's good, but it inevitably degrades into a farce with stuff like [1] or [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/msnbc/status/785299708730339328

[2] https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#377

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

kortex wrote: post #349

Retric wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharing code and data can be as harmful to science as it is beneficial. You don’t want to reuse the same instruments that conducted the last experiment to validate it. Independent replication is inherently expensive, but also critical to the field at large. Some sort of code vault that releases the code and data after a period could be a solid compromise.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#378

Post by strangeattractr » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

librarianscott wrote: post #82

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people draw their own conclusions and don’t censor or otherwise penalize them for questioning one interpretation of data vs another. Encourage people to do their own research and investigate who is funding the sources used for that research. There is no need for conspiracy theories when financial incentives exist.

But people should be helped to draw their own conclusions with annotations where every time some crazy idea is repeated it is automatically flagged with "This idea has repeatedly been debunked by 37 national societies of medicine and 19 meta analyses of 2,000 peer-reviewed studies with a quality deemed high or superb," etc.

This is a commonly suggested solution that fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Most of these people aren't believing falsehoods because they don't have access to better information. It's because they don't trust the institutions that they believe drive science. Additionally, as these annotations only represent an opinion and are subject to change when they aren't correct they likely cause even greater distrust.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#379

Post by skybrian » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

maximus-decimus wrote: post #154

lettergram wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. For the record I now know a professor at one of the premier institutions in the world, who is a total fraud. Their research was fraudulent in grad school. Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. Then they got a premi…

> I just throw out papers that don’t publish datasets and code There was an interesting research paper that claimed you could up your IQ with a computer game called dual n back and a lot of paper tried to replicate it, but my mind was blown when I realized none of them used the same code. None of them actually shared the code they used for their research and then they all claimed they were testing the same thing when…

Ideally you would re-implement the code to the same spec and compare the outputs. This, too, is a form of replication.

If the results are sufficiently different, then look at the source?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#380

Post by flavius29663 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 2:45 AM UTC

tempnow987 wrote: post #4

ozfive wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I'm very curious about the folks pushing vaccines 6,000 scientists signed the John Snow Memorandum which states “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html The CDC director is a signer here. This is so obviously likely totally false it's mind boggling. We've been told by experts that a) masks don't work - despite th…

The gaslighting is so bad:

they: we don't recommend people stick with just the natural immunity because we don't know how fast is wanes.

also they: We do recommend vaccines for everyone, even though their efficacy is 50% after 2 months - because we know exactly what the effect is.

me: But ...but....natural immunity is better all around, even if it's not "known" how much better.

I'm watching the news and opinion pieces and I just don't understand why we're being gaslighted like this, and why people are ok with it.

disclaimer: vaxxed and boosted.