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

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#491

Post by newbie789 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:07 AM UTC

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #486

newbie789 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This website is pretty easy to post on anonymously. It takes five seconds to make a throwaway and another three to post a name. While I agree that there are frauds out there in academia and elsewhere, I have no reason to believe that you’re not yourself some sort of fraud. You’ve essentially posted “I have direct knowledge of [unspecified academic fraud in which somebody claimed to have direct knowledge of [unspecifi…

> This website is pretty easy to post on anonymously. Correct me if I am wrong, but this website, and the owners are in U.S. of A. If so, an appropriate court order would force the disclosure of logs, IP addresses, accounts, etc. There are plenty of examples where sites had to disclose sufficient details to track an 'anonymous' writer down. With multi-million (billion?) dollar endowments on the line, I would be worri…

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#492

Post by murphyslab » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:11 AM UTC

ta988 wrote: post #489

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…

Now think about research on chemicals, everybody has a different source, different quality control (most academic labs do 0 qc on incoming chemicals). I have bought chemicals from major and minor vendors and I could tell you all kind of horror stories... Wrong molecule, inert powders added to increase weight, highly toxic impurities... Now you add that to assays and academics that have been optimized for years to scr…

This is absolute baloney. I've ordered numerous research grade chemicals from multiple suppliers and not once has any of them been the wrong one nor outside of stated purity grade — and I regularly checked, since it's standard practice. If a solid organic material is in a lower grade of purity it is typically recrystallized.

Now, yes, impurities — even minor ones — can have significant effects. But that tends to be in rare circumstances and chemists are quite aware of the need to check for it where it's most needed such as catalysis research.

No one is going to scream "I have a new drug" for something for which the composition is unclear.

I don't know what world you live in, but it isn't one of a typical North American nor European university research lab.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#493

Post by neartheplain » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

wumpus wrote: post #479

vba616 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Too bad his criticism comes from fantasy, instead of facts. The quoted passage specifically says his area of expertise is show business. Do you know of misinformation that he endorses or spreads on that topic?

His books all have a scientist doing evil because of their lust for grant money. "State of Fear" is a polemic against climate science. If all you read was the comment I responded to, then it's no surprise that you don't think I provided enough information to criticize his books. Read his books, then read my criticism.

>His books all have a scientist doing evil because of their lust for grant money.

How unrealistic. Scientists like Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance would never do anything evil or untoward, such as using grant money to perform dangerous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, demonstrably lying to the NIH about the scope of this research, and then misleading the public on the COVID-19 lab-origin theory while failing to disclose their financial and professional ties to the lab in question [0][1][2].

[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/25/one-perso...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak...

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#494

Post by vba616 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

wumpus wrote: post #479

vba616 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Too bad his criticism comes from fantasy, instead of facts. The quoted passage specifically says his area of expertise is show business. Do you know of misinformation that he endorses or spreads on that topic?

His books all have a scientist doing evil because of their lust for grant money. "State of Fear" is a polemic against climate science. If all you read was the comment I responded to, then it's no surprise that you don't think I provided enough information to criticize his books. Read his books, then read my criticism.

>it's no surprise that you don't think I provided enough information to criticize his books

I didn't say that.

My point is that your comment reinforces the point that is made by the much-quoted quote.

He said he knows show business. Calling his writing on climate science crap is consistent with the quote.

Can you see how your comment sounds paradoxical?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#495

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:17 AM UTC

wumpus wrote: post #329

chana_masala wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you r…

Great choice of critic -- who has written many books about scientists commiting fraud because of their lust for grant money. Too bad his criticism comes from fantasy, instead of facts. And of course he's a climate change denier.

[deleted]

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#496

Post by mrandish » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:18 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #440

judge2020 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it'd be like omitting the "methodology" section of the paper. There's no way to verify or prove wrong a paper if you don't know how they reached their conclusions.

Even more than sharing code, I think the key is to share raw data, postprocessed data and describe methods as exceptionally clear equations and pseudocode. Some well intentioned papers share code which is hard to run years afterwards. It's sometimes much simpler to reimplement things that to get the code to run if they are described accurately. Besides, some articles hide ugly things, nasty tricks and lies in the cod…

> Perhaps depositing a VM with everything ready to run.

Yes, this is hugely important. We need clearer requirements for what constitutes properly 'published' data, code and methods. It should include all raw data (both used and discarded) as well as complete snapshots of each preliminary and intermediate processing step in a time-stamped chronology.

This is an area where the expertise and best practices of software development, documentation and source control could help inform standards and tooling which would dramatically improve the quality of scientific publishing and replication.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#497

Post by mmsimanga » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:18 AM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #432

autoexec wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a ton of problems with how science is done and most of it comes down to the same root cause: greed. You have corporations buying off scientists (if not to rig experiments/falsify results, then to bury unfavorable findings), journals willing to publish any garbage with little (if any) meaningful review, then media companies willing to turn that junk science into a click-bait friendly press release for a comp…

> You have corporations buying off scientists (if not to rig experiments/falsify results, then to bury unfavorable findings), journals willing to publish any garbage with little (if any) meaningful review, then media companies willing to turn that junk science into a click-bait friendly press release for a company or industry. What reason does a corporation have to pay for science that they know will not work? That's…

With current Covid pandemic. I could be wrong but it seems most studies are looking at effectiveness of vaccines and little to nothing on effectiveness of natural immunity. I say this as someone who was one of the first to get vaccinated. Not that I am saying the pharmaceutical companies sponsored the studies. So to answer your question sometimes it is what is not funded that is probably more telling.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#498

Post by tasogare » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:20 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #87

Just 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…

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#499

Post by agonz253 » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:23 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #481

ummonk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s incredibly ironic to be recommending Brett and Eric Weinstein in a comment about fraudulent researchers.

I'm not familiar with their research. On which specific papers are you alleging fraud? Have journals retracted any of their papers?

What's fraudulent about them is not their papers (there are none of any relevance to speak of) but their character. They are both self proclaimed misunderstood geniuses who have been denied Nobel prizes in spite of their revolutionary discoveries (in 3 different fields, Physics, Economics and Evolutionary Biology). In actuality they are narcissistic master charlatans with delusions of grandeur.

For an expert's take on Eric's claims specifically, see https://www.cantorsparadise.com/eric-weinstein-how-not-to-fo...

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#500

Post by Brian_K_White » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 5:24 AM UTC

NmAmDa wrote: post #400

lstodd wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is done on purpose. The sad thing is that it isn't. It's just how the things are done. src: friends in HEP

Sharing source code for a HEP experiment is not that easy or possible at sometimes. A lot of stuff is done by different group and whole framework used and overall a lot of raw data collected and reconstructed involved. To analyze those even if available you willl need a lot of people with a lot of resources. So even it made available (which would be a lot of efforts itself) it wouldn't make much sense for replication…

So what? Tough shit! It's still simply the only way to replicate or audit something.

If it's hard or tedious... well so what? So is life. That's most of science is exactly that rigor.

You might as well say no one else can grow a potato because of all the work your farm had to do all year to arrive at your crop. Yes, any other farmer will have to do all the same stuff. It's an utterly unremarkable observation.