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Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

deevybee.blogspot.com

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Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#71

Post by tgma »

ben_w wrote: post #68
tgma wrote: post #20

I know who Elon Musk is and his contributions. My apologies, but I have never heard of the author and their contribution, and why should I fucking care what they (and 80 of their politically like-minded friends) think out of a thousand other members? Obviously the Royal Society's own relevance is hinged on picking who they should keep between two opposing members.

Fame isn't relevant. I've not heard of all bar one of Trump's new and previous cabinets combined, and the one I have heard of, I only know about due to the brain worms. Zero of Biden's, zero of Obama's. Possibly two of GWB's? I've only heard of two of the people who work at SpaceX, and that's Musk and Shotwell none of the rest; likewise none of those under Musk at X, TBC, Neuralink, Tesla, Starlink, Solar City. Someo…

> Fame isn't relevant.

Of course it is relevant. As your post admits the author's recognized in some community that led them to post such things. If it weren't for their relative fame, their letter would be ignored. My take is about the relative fame of them vs Musk. Both are members of Royal Society, so that credential is moot. What else does the author have to make their case? Why should one listen to them, and take their opinion seriously, over Musk, who is the first and only one in the world who has caught rocket boosters in the history of the world? What is the author's accomplishments?

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#72

Post by bjornsing »

roenxi wrote: post #61
bjornsing wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core of the OP’s argument as I see it is that the RS requires its fellows to treat other scientists with curtesy. Elon clearly doesn’t feel bound by that, but the OP does. This is something I’ve noticed more and more: there are essentially two very different ways to look at rules of various kinds (including laws). Some people focus on consequences, and have a mental model along the lines of “if I do X, Y could re…

Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour. One of the things that high-status people have to deal with is that they basically create the rules by their behaviour and actions. That leads to a certain disregard for what is written on-paper because they can write different things on it if they want to. I'd imagine the RS people actually probably tended more towards the former in the early days. There was m…

> Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour.

Interesting. You mean it’s high-status to disregard rules that don’t have formal consequences?

I guess I’m a bit confused, in that we clearly used to have a society that operated much more on rules without formal consequences. E.g. here in Sweden our law books are absolutely filled with them. Obviously there must have been high-status people that took them seriously in the past, otherwise we wouldn’t have been a well functioning society.

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#73

Post by shafyy »

a-french-anon wrote: post #62
shafyy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about that Musk disagrees with her political views, it's that he is being anti-scientific, pushing wrong scientific facts and so on to further his personal agenda, which happens to involve a lot of politics.

I took the time to read those Guardian links (sigh) and that's just misrepresentation. Vaccines: almost nobody refutes the scientific basis behind vaccines (not even talking about mRNA vs traditional), but trusting vaccine admission means trusting powers that have historically been quite evil (cf Tuskegee syphilis study, MKUltra, contaminated blood scandals in Europe and Japan, etc...). Elon's "meme" isn't about said…

Everything is ideological. But reading the excerpts from the RS Code of Conduct she posted, Musk's behavior does seem to go against it.

Also, you cannot deny that Musk has been amplifying conspiracy theories. Does not matter if he believes in them or just does it for the "lolz".

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#74

Post by tgma »

VMG wrote: post #33
cies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many doctors who express problems with the C19 vaccines. In some countries (most notably Japan) there are public hearings and parliament questions. In the west it seems this is not allowed. Fauci was close with the EcoHealth Alliance. He tried to hide gain of function research. There are a lot of criticism to this NGO, "including a joint letter signed by 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies." (Wik…

> and most likely did know that pregnant women in the trail had a lot of "spontaneous abortions" This is incorrect information https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152171/ Pregnant women are at higher risk of getting COVID which is liked to preterm birth

And if you were a scientist who was going to lead a study that could conclude otherwise, Francis & Fauci took extra care to make sure you were less likely to receive NIH funding.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/how-collins-and-fauci...

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#75

Post by mdp2021 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #42
roenxi wrote: post #8

I respect the author's principle-based approach but many of her arguments seem a little off. If the RS doesn't expel people for their politics, then it doesn't make sense to expel Musk for, essentially, concerns about his politics. And if you expel crotchety scientists for disagreeing with the scientific consensus there won't be any left. The RS motto is literally "Take nobody's word for it"; I don't see how Musk dis…

The thing is neither climate change nor vaccines are political opinions or views. They are hard scientific facts and you are absolute moron if you try to twist them into political views.

Unfortunately, the expression 'hard scientific facts' does not represent general reality. Academically. (I.e.: "things are not that simple".)

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#76

Post by GJim »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #44
card_zero wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By thinking, or by spending money?

Bezos has tossed a lot of money towards space and did not get as far. Elon has absolutely earned his reputation.

> Elon has absolutely earned his reputation.

I think you will find that is exactly what the Royal Society have concluded!

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#77

Post by waihtis »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #66
quonn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is he within scope? At best he might have contributed to advancing engineering science, but is that really the case? Has he not rather merely financed engineering science and perhaps not even engineering science but just engineering practice?

This is the salient point. Musk is not a "science" person. He is no Einstein or Newton. He has many good qualities, amongst them a broad appreciation of engineering, commerce and motivating people. He is ambitious. But Musk neither holds a PhD (I imagine he'd lack the patience and focus) nor has any notable specialism. Like Gates and Zuckerberg who both dropped out of their computer science degrees to make money, Mus…

> This is the salient point

No it's not lol. you just decided to ignore the criteria for membership and invent your own, like a phD being requisite (it is not.)

Also, to call Musk a "businessman" is reductive as hell. I know a lot of people have pressure to hate him because of political reasons, but be real for once.

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#78

Post by VMG »

tgma wrote: post #74
VMG wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and most likely did know that pregnant women in the trail had a lot of "spontaneous abortions" This is incorrect information https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10152171/ Pregnant women are at higher risk of getting COVID which is liked to preterm birth

And if you were a scientist who was going to lead a study that could conclude otherwise, Francis & Fauci took extra care to make sure you were less likely to receive NIH funding. https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/how-collins-and-fauci...

just look at the table of the studies that were included and the countries where the studies were performed

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#79

Post by ben_w »

didntcheck wrote: post #54
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is neither climate change nor vaccines are political opinions or views. They are hard scientific facts and you are absolute moron if you try to twist them into political views.

Science informs policy, but it doesn't create or judge it. Science can help you predict the effects of vaccinating every adult in a population, but it can't say whether you should mandate that This is hopefully incredibly obvious stuff, but unfortunately during the covid era "trust the science" was used to mean "my particular policy views are objectively correct and above criticism", and "antivax" targeted at people…

> And is it still controversial to say that the efficacy of covid vaccine was a lot more disappointing than we were basically all expecting?

As "controversial" means "prolonged public dispute or debate", necessarily so.

But I think also incorrect compared to the scientific discussion at the time. Not necessarily false compared to the political discussion or the newspapers etc., but the actual researchers themselves, who understood the reports and didn't get all their information from misleading summarised headlines like the rest of us:

"""What that means is if you had a hundred people who got coronavirus, this vaccine would have prevented 95% of them. So if that same 100 people had been vaccinated, only five of them would have got coronavirus. And that's the number that I really look for to start off with.

Now, when all of these studies were being designed, they said that they wanted to be able to get a vaccine that had a vaccine effectiveness of greater than 30%. That was the number that they were targeting. If they had a vaccine effectiveness of greater than 30%, then this would be a good result.

And to have a vaccine effectiveness of 95%, that's huge. That's so much more than we ever could have hoped for. And it's such a big result. And the other studies have also had really good vaccine effectiveness estimates.""" - https://www.numberphile.com/podcast/jennifer-rogers

> Or that the apocalyptic predictions of lockdown-lifting were just a tiny bit overstated

You reckon?

Emergency breaking is unpleasant, but it means you don't hit something that will decelerate you even harder.

This is the UK inquiry after the events, obviously the US is going to have had a different situation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9py388z17o

Re: Why I have resigned from the Royal Society

#80

Post by nextlevelwizard »

didntcheck wrote: post #54
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is neither climate change nor vaccines are political opinions or views. They are hard scientific facts and you are absolute moron if you try to twist them into political views.

Science informs policy, but it doesn't create or judge it. Science can help you predict the effects of vaccinating every adult in a population, but it can't say whether you should mandate that This is hopefully incredibly obvious stuff, but unfortunately during the covid era "trust the science" was used to mean "my particular policy views are objectively correct and above criticism", and "antivax" targeted at people…

If you don't take vaccines you are a fucktard
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