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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

#61

Post by jdietrich »

naasking wrote: post #39
jdietrich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What if after a year of posting, you find an error in your study? You have just misinformed everyone for a year. How do you backtrack on that? 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…

> 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.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#62

Post by pjc50 »

DanBC wrote: post #55

I'm not sure you realise how fucking hateful you sound when you dismiss mental illness as "just in the mind".

That isn't actually what they said, they were making a much more specific claim, and you're doing the thing the article is complaining about.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#64

Post by leftyted »

These activists seem to be promoting an all-or-nothing approach to medicine. But attempting to alleviate symptoms seems like a valid - and common - medical approach. If physical therapy or talk therapy can improve the quality of life of CFS/ME sufferers, isn't that worth knowing?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#65

Post by ethbro »

cm2187 wrote: post #46
dragonwriter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the tabula rasa hold for truth What “partisans of the tabula rasa”? Activists of both the left and right seem more likely to be partisans of genetic determinism, though of which aspects of intellect, identity, and behavior varies between them.

Well a lot of our policies are based on the tabula rasa theory. Gender or racial imbalances between professions for instance are attributed to cultural bias and discrimination. It may be the case, I think only science will provide a definitive answer. And you are right, far right activists do assume full genetic determinism and they may also be proven wrong by advances in genetics. But they are kind of a smaller marg…

Or to restate, equality of opportunity and equality of... "ability" (in the sense of Phelps-ian genetic uniqueness) get conflated. As though admitting the latter differs somehow effects the righteousness of the former as a goal.

Agree that genetics v activism is going to get very ugly here.

We're already seeing it in health insurance: that's the essence of the pre-existing condition debate.

Should people bear the cost or accrue the benefit of their uniqueness, or should we share them as a community?

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#67

Post by Delmania »

gerbilly wrote: post #34
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…

> that the pain is real, it's just caused by processes in your brain, not the rest of your body. I was also helped by Dr Sarno's book, and for me the news that it was "all in my head" was encouraging. I can control my mind[1], and if my mind is the source of the problem, it's a lot easier for me to fix it that if I required surgery or medicine. [1] At least partially, the mind is a slippery thing too.

The more I learned the more terrifying that statement has become. The mind exerts incredible power of the body (and vice versa) and it's much harder to get rid of pain caused by a something in your brain than a cut or a broken leg.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#69

Post by sleepysysadmin »

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...

Over the last 5 million years temperature has been going down but also becoming more aggressive in the swing in temperature. If you look at the last 20,000 years we are in the standard rapid spike in temps and CO2 and we have NOT spiked any higher than you would expect.

The minor spike in CO2 in the last 200 years is a small fraction of the spike over the last 20,000 years.

If you look up the Eocene period(after the dinosaurs went extinct). It was 14celcius warmer than today's climate. Life was great back then; Canada/Russia wasn't a frozen wasteland.

Climate change is good.

Re: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say

#70

Post by ativzzz »

ayvdl wrote: post #20
beobab wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Need vs want. I don't NEED a computer at home, nor a mobile phone. But I want one. And I am allowed to have one. And someone else's dislike of my having those things does not stop me from being allowed to have them

I don't dislike people having Twitter, but to be on Twitter you need to have a thick skin, and if you don't then you shouldn't be there.

Instead of normalizing outrage and harassment, why not say the opposite: 'To be on twitter you should treat others with respect, and if you don't then you shouldn't on there'

Obviously that's not representative of Twitter right now, but why can't it be?

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