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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

royalsociety.org

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#751

Post by tealpod »

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 spent 6 years in a top 3rd unvieristy in US, working on Nanotech. My resepect for research is not same after that. I felt everybody runs after Science/Nature papers and funding.. I haven't found honest curiousity to discover new things. The funding organizations are also to be partially blamed, instead of funding a good idea / projects, they started influencing and interfering in the research for their interest.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#752

Post by kergonath »

ungamedplayer wrote: post #588
zrm wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps depositing a VM with everything ready to run. The danger then is that the VM has so much undocumented complexity that if anything goes wrong, or goes "well" when it shouldn't, no one can explain why. Which also reintroduces a vector to hide nasty tricks.

But you can at least figure that out. If U don't have it all results are suspect.

Results that haven't been independently replicated are suspect. There are just too many factors that can lead an experiment to give some results that are not transferrable or not relevant.

The worst aspect of this is the lack of will or funding to replicate, replicate, and replicate again all significant results that get published. Post-processed data can be altered, but a TB of raw data is meaningless as well if it hasn't been produced properly, has been obfuscated, or is weirdly formatted.

Data availability is a red herring for the vast majority of the science being made right now (almost everything that does not depend on a multi-millions dollars experiment). If data availability is an end in itself, we would just have moved the goalposts and have a data quality problem instead of a reproducibility problem.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#753

Post by mike_hearn »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #725
mike_hearn wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are ways to mitigate this, but since the model was collecting outcomes to create a statistical distribution, rather than a single deterministic number, it didn't need to." This is the justification the academics used - because we're modelling probability distributions, bugs don't matter. Sorry, but no, this is 100% wrong. Doing statistics is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for arbitrary levels of bugginess. Fi…

> To the extent the team generated confidence intervals at all (which for Report 9 I don't think they did), it was by running the app several times and then claiming the variance in the results represented the underlying uncertainty of the data, when in reality it was representing their inability to write code properly. Functionally, what's the difference? The output of their model varied based on environmental facto…

Argh.

Scientists are used to some level of unavoidable noise from experiments done on the natural world because the natural world is not fully controllable. Thus they are expected to work hard to minimize the uncertainty in their measurements, then characterize what's left and take that into account in their calculations.

They are not expected to make beginner level mistakes when solving simple mathematical equations. Avoidable errors introduced by doing their maths wrong is fundamentally different to unavoidable measurement uncertainty. The whole point of doing simulations in silico is to avoid the problems of the natural world and give you a fully controllable and precisely measurable environment, in which you can re-run the simulation whilst altering only a single variable. That's the justification for creating these sorts of models in the first place!

Perhaps you think the errors were small. The errors in their model due to their bugs were of the same order of magnitude as the predictions themselves. They knew this but presented the outputs to the government as "science" anyway, then systematically attacked the character and motives of anyone who pointed out they were making mistakes. Every single member of that team should have been fired years ago, yet instead what happened is the attitude you're displaying here: a widespread argument that scientists shouldn't be or can't be held to the quality standards we expect of a $10 video game.

How can anyone trust the output of "science" when this attitude is so widespread? We wouldn't accept this kind of argument from people in any other field.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#754

Post by BurningFrog »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #161

I see the root cause of all this debate as a failure in scientific communication. When it comes to complex scientific decisions with significant impacts on the public, nuanced and detailed justifications are required. Instead, we often get simple declarations written by PR departments at juvenile reading level. This spawns chaotic and poorly conducted debate in all walks of life. What is required is a robust and tran…

Is the CDC (1) a scientific institution or (2) a government agency enforcing regulations?

If you think of it as (1), you see failures in scientific communication.

If you think of it as (2), you see an authority expecting to be obeyed.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#755

Post by immibis »

EarlKing wrote: post #34
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…

> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. Hmm. I wonder how we got there...[1] [1] https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg

No post body was provided.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#756

Post by kergonath »

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…

Yeah. I can easily run FORTRAN code from my PhD supervisor's PhD supervisor, written way back in the 1980s, but I cannot run some of the Python scripts written by a post-doc 10 years ago. It's a mess of abandoned libraries and things that work only with some specific versions of some libraries, and compiled modules that rely on the dodgy behaviour of an old compiler. Perl seems to be better, if only because people used to rely much less on external libraries.

But properly running code is not the solution either. I can count on the fingers of one had the downloads of some of the codes we've published (easily compilable modern Fortran), and AFAIK nobody ever published anything using them. Having a multitude of codes available does not mean much if nobody runs them, assuming they can be compiled. And I would guarantee that none of the scientists who download these codes would be able to understand what they do in any detail.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#757

Post by immibis »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #282
jhallenworld wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I agree that there are actual valid arguments about priority, by which I mean the math works out- the costs are significant either way. Excess deaths vs. broader economic impact or even questioning how much economic benefit from allaying fear by an otherwise dubious activity (cloth masks..). But in the US, we have this extreme irrational vaccine skepticism where the math just does not work out. People believe th…

I personally think that a lot of vaccine scepticism comes from the perceived force involved. For example, via passports and mandates. I think once you get into the situation in which people think "I'm being forced to do X", you've created an impossible catch-22 and you've basically ensured that some % double down. It's hard for me to explain because it just seems intuitively obvious. I really enjoy a beer after work.…

> I personally think that a lot of vaccine scepticism comes from the perceived force involved. For example, via passports and mandates.

You would think that, and they promote that, but it does not. It is obvious when you consider that all the vaccine skeptics were also vaccine skeptics before there was any hint of force involved.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#758

Post by immibis »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #50
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…

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.

Should I be penalized if my interpretation of the Israel data is that Jews are dirty and should be exterminated? That would be a pretty outlandish interpretation! I would HOPE I would be censored for that!

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#759

Post by immibis »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #346
fragmede wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, to a large degree, we haven't had to before. If someone random person wants to believe the moon landing is hoax, it doesn't affect my life in the slightest. What's changed is that random person walking around with no mask and no vax. Now, a random person in a Target market a thousand miles away from me isn't literally a threat, but where that attitude is supported online and a random someone walks into my l…

Isn't the fact that we (as in, society) don't agree that it does affect your life an indication that it's actually a borderline issue, though? Everyone would agree that a person wandering around the street firing live rounds into targets is acting in a dangerous manner. No-one would agree that a person drinking a cup of tea in their own house is acting in a dangerous manner. But coronavirus isn't one of those things.…

There were people during every atrocity (e.g. genocide) who argued the atrocity didn't affect their lives. Did that make it a borderline issue? No, it did not.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#760

Post by immibis »

loceng wrote: post #46
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…

Edit to add: I found out what happens when you present a video testimonial strongly calling into question vaccine clinical trials - it gets downvoted. So what happens when you present a video testimonial like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ - and people just dismiss it, people not understanding that with clinical trials you're meant to keep track of and report all outcomes, and not only that - by l…

Anyone can make a video about anything. There are lots of videos explaining why the moon landing was a hoax. Was it?
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