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

Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

royalsociety.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 970 posts

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#561

Post by mach1ne »

beerandt wrote: post #468
emilsedgh wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment makes it sound like there's an agenda in some entity consciously misrepresenting how acamedia works. But academia is really accessible to public nowadays. The problem, in my opinion, is how external entities treat science. Some examples: * Media reporting low grade papers as "Science" which constantly contradict each other. "Scientists found out $something causes cancer", then a year after that "Scientis…

Even when something in academia doesn't have an agenda, it will be interpreted by everyone else as if it does. Despite all the brilliant minds and appearance of professionalism and pride and campus pageantry... it's easily a much more insecure, drama-filled, immature, and petty social dynamic and environment than most high schools. That seems imo to be due to a combination of academia itself and a govt (or govt style…

I don't remember where I got the quote, but it fits: "Competition in academia is so dirty and brutal because the stakes are so low."

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#562

Post by Broken_Hippo »

beerandt wrote: post #511
im3w1l wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet scientific cancer treatments are miles and miles better than quackery.

Arguably it's scientific cancer treatments so frequently failing that lead the vast number of cancer quacks to quackery in the first place.

Sounds like someone pushing quackery, honestly. "Science-based medicine is flawed and sometimes make you feel bad! Obviously, you need quackery!"

This also paints a too-simple picture, since there are obvious things like the promise of quick recovery if you do simple stuff (cancer being a big one) and the alternative medicines seeming cheaper than regular medicine (It may be the only treatment you think you can afford in the US). Not to mention the dismal state of "Health classes" - I'm a little over 40, and those classes mostly just told you about the parts of the body, the food pyramid, and that sex was bad and would probably kill you through disease unless you only had sex with another virgin.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#563

Post by megapolitics »

wumpus wrote: post #487
thetopher wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read State of Fear, and I agree that Crichton isn’t a great source for scientific facts. But this quote isn’t really a criticism of science. It’s a criticism of journalism. I think most people here on HN agree with his premise regarding the quality of science journalism. I’m not so sure about his conclusion that all journalism should be treated with the same suspicion.

The background of the critic matters, and that was what I was addressing.

It doesn’t actually, because the point stands on its own.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#564

Post by skinkestek »

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.

All the time those fact checkers are provably biased (haven't seen none of them fact checking the early statements that masks were useless) they are useless.

If however fact checkers were a pain in the butt for mainstream media and politicians as well they would be much easier to listen to.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#565

Post by mandmandam »

CPLX wrote: post #165
mandmandam wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a war all the experts said was necessary Just to clarify, many experts from generals to peacenik linguists to gonzo journalists predicted immediately that the wars would be an expensive and unwinnable series of atrocities. They weren't given airtime.

Well yes that’s the point. By literal definition the people who were so obviously wrong weren’t experts. But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.

> Lawmakers knew from the beginning the shakiness of the Bush administration’s case for going to war with Iraq, and Biden not only went along with it, he championed it.

- https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/15/20849072/...

> [Biden] was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position.

- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-bi...

More?

> Iraq in 2002 was devastated by economic sanctions, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was known by even the most pro-war experts to have no missiles that could come close to the United States. The idea that this country on the other side of the world posed a security threat to America was more than far-fetched. The idea that the US could simply invade, topple the government, and take over the country without provoking enormous violence was also implausible. It’s not clear how anyone with foreign policy experience and expertise could have believed these ideas.

> Senator Dick Durbin, who sat on the Senate intelligence committee at the time, was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said.

- Also from the Guardian link.

And that's just war. We were lied to about sugar; about margarine, about recycling, about oil spills, about agricultural pollution, about public transport. We were lied to about trade, espionage, healthcare. Repeatedly, barefacedly. Lies are the most bipartisan issue in America.

In the face of all this, we're told the enemy is distrust itself, told to trust the science, told to believe that Biden and the Dems are fighting for us. We're told anti-war news outlets and comedians are secretly communist, Russian funded. It's all such utter wank.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#566

Post by [deleted] »

porcoda wrote: post #304
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…

I'm biased - I'm a researcher at a big research institution and finished my PhD 15+ years ago. Seeing how the sausage is made shouldn't cause one to become less "pro-science". It should give people perspective that the scientific process is a process performed by humans, with all their flaws (ego, ambition, competition, etc). Furthermore, science is all about making hypotheses and seeing how they work out - with the…

[deleted]

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#567

Post by slickrick216 »

Nitrolo wrote: post #524
WalterBright wrote: post #75

I remember when the government and scientific consensus informed me that margarine was good for me. For decades. Who knows what damage that has done to my internals.

I'm out of the loop here apparently, is margarine bad now? What's consequences does long term use have?

It turns out it’s been a long term indicator of covid as those that eat it have no sense of taste.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#568

Post by slickrick216 »

cgrealy wrote: post #275
omosubi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best diet is the one eaten for 1000s of years by your ancestors

You mean the one for people whose life expectancy was less than half the modern day? Who lived completely different lives?

I have been thinking a lot about this exact point lately. Very interesting but hard to answer.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#569

Post by nyc111 »

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…

I think the reason for this is that what is called “science” is really academic scholasticism.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#570

Post by rini17 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #516
3pt14159 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some well intentioned papers share code which is hard to run years afterwards. Umm, not really? How many years are we talking about here? Because even Cobol is runnable. Sure some OS related quirks may need changing but getting the raw source is much more likely to expose a subtle flaw in the researcher's method than just the equations. For example, an incorrect negative check (to string vs < 0) or an off by one er…

Don't think COBOL; think Python 2.1 (not 2.2) with this specific version of PIL, and some of the code implemented as a CPython module (for speed) in C that only compiles properly with one specific EGCS fork that adds support for IA-64. Parts of the code are written in slightly-buggy inline IA-64 assembly, but it's okay because after a system call, that particular operating system makes sure those registers are zeroed…

So? Nothing a CS grad couldn't manage, that sounds like real problems they grapple with. Still a notch better than no code.
Post reply on HN