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Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

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Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#911

Post by s1artibartfast »

disambiguation wrote: post #903
s1artibartfast wrote: post #896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but I would consider a failure communication philosophy a subset of communication failure

Perhaps. I only see it as a "subset" in the sense of: many things have to go right for good communication to happen -- ethos being one of them. But its still "upstream" from communication. Philosophy informs action. Your original point is that our leaders need to get better at communicating nuanced issues. That's a non-starter if the people in charge see nuance as an obstacle and straight up adopt an anti-nuance atti…

I agree with pretty much everything you said, but feel compelled to point out that I think the virus origin is only a minor footnote in the communication failures. The topics of lockdowns and vaccination weigh much more heavily in my mind and I think have much greater relevancy for most people. Here the goal of informed consent was largely discarded in favor of manufactured consent. I would love to see the CDC or some authority have a transparent and reputable weighing of the tradeoffs involved.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#912

Post by henrikschroder »

jimkleiber wrote: post #310
henrikschroder wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most mindbogglingly dumb part about masks on planes is that there's still meal service on longer flights, at which point everyone takes off their masks at the same time to eat the food. Are we supposed to believe that the virus takes a little nap while everyone eats, and then only goes back to spreading itself when everyone has finished eating? Detailed rules always lead to insanity. The best way is always to be…

I would imagine if the flight is 5 hours long and the eating time is only 0.5 hours, then there would only be 0.5 hours of breathing virus into the air than 5 hours of it. That being said, yes, most would be unmasked at that time and likely to breathe it in, I guess I just see overall as limiting the total amount of virus breathed into the air by requiring masks most of the time.

Half an hour is long enough to get infected, we know this.

If masks work, they work on a mechanistic, physical, level. They filter air, and if you use your masks wrong, or take them off, they stop filtering air.

But if you look at how people are actually using their masks, they pay zero attention to the mechanics of it, and 100% attention to the appearance of it.

Someone who wants to wear an N-95 mask for the duration of the entire flight, and who won't remove it for eating, understands the mechanics of how they work. That behaviour is not theatre.

Someone who wears whatever because they're told to, crams it in their pocket now and then, removes it while eating, and still believes they work, do not in fact understand how masks work. And whoever is making rules and mask mandates that allow for this behaviour also clearly do not understand how masks work. It's all theatre. It's masks as make-belief lucky rabbit's foot talismans, and yet we're supposed to believe that the rules are based in science.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#913

Post by overgard »

TameAntelope wrote: post #287
overgard wrote: post #86

I think the US has caught this cancerous idea that the average person can't be trusted to think for themselves. The amount of condescension in that thought process is disgraceful. They think, someone has to tell the average person how to think. And the baffling thing is that supposed liberals think that thoughts should be policed by corporations, government, and self styled intellectuals (which seems so much against…

The entire country is founded on the notion that the average person shouldn't be trusted to decide any individual issue, and instead should elect trusted representatives to do the research to understand the individual issue and decide according to how the voter would have decided, if they had researched the issue. Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald; these are the cancers, not the concept of representative democr…

I've seen very little evidence that representatives have any special understanding of issues. Have you ever watched congress ask tech people questions? Taibbi and Greenwald do excellent real journalism and dive extremely deep into the topics they cover, whether it be wall street, nsa, etc. I can understand the backlash against Rogan to a degree because he's a comedian talking about things over his head at times, but I'm saddened by the way the woke mobs have turned on good journalism from Taibbi and Greenwald because they won't toe the party line. Ive yet to hear coherent criticism of those two other than an emotional "fuck those guys"

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#914

Post by lovecg »

chr1 wrote: post #909
lovecg wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then nothing would ever get done. We would debate endlessly whether declaring the war on Germany was a good idea, or whether going to the Moon is a stupid goal, etc. etc. There’s certainly no shortage of arguments against any decision. Once the decision is made, continuing to doubt it is often not helpful. I actually think this was one failure in our response to the pandemic. Take N95 masks or testing or what…

But people were debating about all these things, war on Germany was not declared for a very long time, war in Vietnam was abandoned not sure if consider that good or bad. The initial stance on masks was to lie that they are useless so that people don't buy masks that were needed for doctors, so if CDC was to stay on message it would stay on that message not the one that masks are good. Your proposed approach of a few…

I’m not sure how the discussion got to this place. Please allow me a reset. My point is only that ideally people in charge of policy should be upfront that they’re making decisions based on imperfect information, and it should not require people “believing in science”. This would have the effect leaving the science, with all its messiness, to scientists, and will be better for everyone involved.

A sidenote on CDC, the null hypothesis is institutional inertia: there were no mask mandates during many recent pandemics so CDC was simply following the long standing policy. This doesn’t require lying: if you believe that a policy is useless and will actively harm supply of masks it makes sense to come out strongly against it. I’m open to evidence to the contrary though.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#915

Post by sebastianconcpt »

immibis wrote: post #772
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #401

When any kind of censorship, including self-censorship, total or partial, goes into a publication or its silencing, it will transform a piece of knowledge in ammunition of technical-propaganda instead of science. PS: same happens with true art.

Ah yes. So you cannot censor me saying the keyword to declare a read-only variable in C++ is `final`

You shouldn't be. Are you anxious to censor Brainfuck for example? [1] When you censor, you make the case for an argument to become weaker not stronger. You are hiding the knowledge to show another way in which something is invalid. The end result invariably will be that you make what initially could be science, to become propaganda. The natural selection of paradigms do not require censorship anyway. Reality will reveal itself and always win in the long run. Propaganda is always an epoch phenomena that doesn't pass the test of time. It's like a counterfeited wannabe classic posing as timeless but always revealing itself as some kind of fraud in the end. And without unconditional love to truth and reality you make impossible to do true philosophy, hence true science.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#916

Post by loceng »

immibis wrote: post #760
loceng wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you telling me you watched that video and that you're claiming the mother is lying?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#917

Post by TameAntelope »

overgard wrote: post #913
TameAntelope wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire country is founded on the notion that the average person shouldn't be trusted to decide any individual issue, and instead should elect trusted representatives to do the research to understand the individual issue and decide according to how the voter would have decided, if they had researched the issue. Joe Rogan, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald; these are the cancers, not the concept of representative democr…

I've seen very little evidence that representatives have any special understanding of issues. Have you ever watched congress ask tech people questions? Taibbi and Greenwald do excellent real journalism and dive extremely deep into the topics they cover, whether it be wall street, nsa, etc. I can understand the backlash against Rogan to a degree because he's a comedian talking about things over his head at times, but…

Both Taibbi and Greenwald are not good reporters. The facts they report are not accurate and often intentionally misleading, the predictions they make don't come true, they're terrible at overcoming their own biases, they prefer to say inflammatory things over saying truthful things, and they've been ostracized from the larger journalism community for these reasons, not their refusal to toe any given party line.

There are plenty of other people who do all of the things you seem to like about those two, but who are also good at journalism and haven't otherwise fallen victim to their own greed through moral turpitude.

And you may think representative democracy doesn't work, but I think you need to understand that it's more or less all the West has going for it. If you throw out representation, you throw out more or less every modern democracy in the world, and I'm personally not willing to do that. The alternatives are ghoulish and chilling to think about.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#918

Post by toolz »

tqi wrote: post #872
c-cube wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on principle. But in practice it'd have led to a massive shortage and more dead nurses / doctors. Panic buying is a terrible thing.

They essentially decided to borrow against future trust in order to achieve a desired near term outcome. That may have been the option which led to the fewest deaths, or maybe vaccination rates would be ?% higher if they hadn't undermined their own credibility. It was (and still is) impossible to know, but I don't think thats the kind of call we want scientists to be making.

If lies slow down the progress of society and progress continues curing disease and saving lives - there isn't an argument as to whether you save move lives, obviously you save more lives with trust if we agree on the axioms that trust is necessary for progress and that progress will increasingly save lives over time.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#919

Post by tripletao »

imbnwa wrote: post #904
tripletao wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All claims I've seen that Malone is "the" inventor of mRNA vaccine technology trace back to Malone himself. He possibly has some real claim to be "an" inventor, among the top dozen or so contributors of early advances that ultimately enabled the present vaccines. It's also possible that the contribution he's claiming as his own was basically his supervisor's idea (Felgner's), and Malone is just the one who did the la…

What exactly is the "false mainstream view that can never get corrected"? I'm likely out of the loop to some extent, but WRT, e.g masks, that was retracted and corrected; vaccines prevent transmission/reception, that was retracted and corrected. What else am I missing, or is it simply that people don't like "flip-flopping", which is strange cause there wasn't massive outrage at the way "cigarettes don't give you canc…

In the two examples that you give, I don't think there was significant censorship of the initially-contrarian viewpoints ("masks are likely enough to protect against SARS-CoV-2 that they're worth a try", "the vaccine is highly effective against death and serious illness but much less so against infection long-term"). Perhaps in part because of that open discussion, those viewpoints indeed quickly became the mainstream.

I was thinking more of stuff like the origin of the pandemic. It's far from proven, but I believe it's entirely possible that (a) the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic originated from reckless virological research; (b) if this research continues, then new pandemics will occur by similar means in future, with similar or worse mortality; and (c) the only force likely to prevent that is public outcry against continued funding of such research. For about a year, discussion of this possibility was grounds for a ban from Facebook. It's only thanks to the huge reputational risks taken by a small number of researchers that this topic has now entered the mainstream. Without those few dozen people, we could easily have landed in a world where that topic remained forbidden indefinitely.

Closer to the Malone case, the BMJ published an article alleging improper conduct by a contractor that conducted some of Pfizer's vaccine trials. (For emphasis, they're not saying that any of these allegations, even if true, would mean the vaccine is unsafe. The point is to expose and correct localized procedural failures before they become patient safety failures.) Facebook marked this as "partly false information", and indicated that users who shared the article would see their posts deprioritized. This has been widely publicized, and Facebook hasn't changed its position.

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/376/bmj.o95.full.pdf

So if the vaccine were actually dangerous, then would I ever find out? (Again, I strongly believe the vaccine is safe; but I'm asking this hypothetically.) I think I still would for now, because the censorship on the major platforms isn't complete, and I spend enough time on other platforms that they don't have total control anyways. It's not a comforting trend, though.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#920

Post by kortex »

mrtedbear wrote: post #900
kortex wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The model generated totally different output every time you ran it, even with fixed seeds." - I remember seeing code takedowns of the model from anti-lockdown people who repeatedly cite this issue. But there is a valid reason for this to happen, and it doesn't mean bugs in the code. If the code is run in a distributed way (multiple threads, processes or machines), which it was, the order of execution is never guar…

I reckon the PRNG seeding in such a case might be used during development/testing. So, run the code with a seed in a non distributed way (e.g. in R turn off all parallelism), and then the results should be the same in every run. Then once this test output is validated, depending on the nature of the model, it can be run in parallel, and guarantees of deterministic behaviour will go, but that's ok. I didn't develop th…

My understanding is the bugginess is due to* unintended* nondeterminism, in other words, things like a race condition where two threads write some result to the same memory address, or singularities/epsilon error in floating point calculations leading to diverging results.

Make no bones about it, these are programming faults. There's no reason why distributed, long-running models can't produce convergent results with a high degree of determinism given the input state. But this takes some amount of care and attention.

> So you might want to change the seed on every run to protect yourself from such nasty phantom effects.

That's a perfect example of what I mean where a seed is actually worse. If you know you can't control determinism, then you might as well go for the opposite: ensure your randomness is high quality enough such that it approximates a perfect uniform distribution. Adding a seed here means you are more likely to capture the true distribution of the output.

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