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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

#951

Post by mike_hearn »

mrtedbear wrote: post #938
mike_hearn wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment above is wrong. Sorry, let me try to explain again. Let's put the whole fact that random bugs != stochastic modelling to one side. I don't quite understand why this is so hard to understand but, let's shelve it for a moment. ICL likes to claim their model is stochastic. Unfortunately that's just one of many things they said that turned out to be untrue. The Ferguson model isn't stochastic. They claim it…

I took a look at point 3. and that extract from the code check is correct. Assuming they did one realisation I was curious why. It would be unlikely to be an oversight. Luckily they published their reasoning on the number of realisations in the supplementary materials of a prior paper cited in report 9 (citation 5): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04795#MOESM28 "Numbers of realisations & computational resources…

The code check shows in their data tables that some variations were 10% or even 25% from the values in Report 9. These are not "small variations", nor would it matter even if they were because it is not OK to present bugs as unimportant measurement noise.

The team's claim that you only need to run it once because the variability was well characterized in the past is also nonsense. They were constantly changing the model. Even if they thought they understood the variance in the output in the past (which they didn't), it was invalidated the moment they changed the model to reflect new data and ideas.

Look, you're trying to justify this without seeming to realize that this is Hacker News. It's a site read mostly by programmers. This team demanded and got incredibly destructive policies on the back of this model, which is garbage. It's the sort of code quality that got Toyota found guilty in court of severe negligence. The fact that academics apparently struggle to understand how serious this is, is by far a faster and better creator of anti-science narratives than anything any blogger could ever write.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#952

Post by vasuki »

harpersealtako wrote: post #893
vasuki wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is misinformation because it is outright wrong. Follow Malone for a couple of weeks and you will see he has nothing else to share but: Vaccines are bad, Vaccines are killing people. - https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jan/06/who-robert-ma... - https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252... > As we prevent three deaths by vaccinating, we incur two deaths. > "Are we headed for the situation wh…

I listened to the podcast he did with Joe Rogan. 95% of what he talked about was fairly convincing and I agreed with it pretty strongly (or mundane and uncontroversial,). 5% was questionable and less convincing. Based on Malone's history (I think he had a strong, rare allergic reaction to one of his COVID shots that very nearly killed him) it seems likely that he argues in good faith. My prior here is that I already…

I have not responded without listening to what he said, I followed him for quite some time to see what exactly he had to say.

I do not like censoring by big tech as well, but when they take down outright lies which actually get viral and change people's opinions, I am no longer sure. Nuanced facts, data does not go viral. Tweets with controversial information do.

Serious side-effects, risk-benefit calculations, are very nuanced and take much more effort to bring up and share [1]. He presents a very one-sides story, every single day. That is not helpful.

He took very selective parts of news which aligns with his opinions and tweeted just that. Thanks to twitter's censoring, I can't even share those :facepalm: but you can look up archived data [2]. It is not even a single person, they have a pretty good group doing it every single day (Peter McCullough, I am sure you heard of him) [3] [4].

Also look at how viral this stuff gets [5].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749381

2. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/mrna-technology-...

3. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pilot-vaccinefalse...

4. https://twitter.com/P_McCulloughMD/status/148679283709416244...

5. https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1486792837094162442

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#953

Post by posterboy »

> Investing in lifelong information literacy – Education on digital literacy should not be limited to schools and colleges. Older adults are more likely to be targeted by, and be susceptible to, online misinformation.

Is this a prank, i.e. obvious misinformation?

The prior point that surveilance is needed, following that individual platforms shouldn't be relied on for censorship would also widely be considered plain wrong.

It's really questionable how science is to be defined, as soon as social aspects enter the picture.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#954

Post by posterboy »

alignItems wrote: post #814
finite_jest wrote: post #68

Based. Nullius in verba [1]. The whitewashing of censorship is accelerating the erosion of trust in the institutions, and it's refreshing to see a long-standing institution take a bold stance. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba

The problem is that we sometimes have to rely on other people. We can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment. What we can do is delegate the process. There’s a difference between saying “whatever X says is true, because X said it”, and “I trust what Y says because Y has explained the process and methods of how it was derived, and I don’t have reasonable doubt to assume Y li…

> The problem is that we sometimes have to rely on other people. We can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment.

Implying that anyone has to have expert knowledge.

> I trust what Y says because Y has explained the process and methods of how it was derived, ...

Doesn't that directly contravene what you said before?

> ... and I don’t have reasonable doubt to assume Y lied”.

Completely different issue, same problem though. Reformulated by sylogism, you are basicly saying "I trust that I don't have reasonable doubt, because we can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment.", which is really a definition for what you might consider reasonable. It's a recursive definition at second order when "What expert X says is true, because they do not have reasonable doubt. They sometimes have to rely on other people. We can’t all be experts in everything. We can’t all reproduce or witness every experiment." Whereby the default case for the recursion is "I don't trust X, because Y said they's an ass" or something like that where being an arse can come in many coloures.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#955

Post by overgard »

TameAntelope wrote: post #917
overgard wrote: post #913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ther…

You say this with zero examples or evidence, and yet having read their reporting for many years they always have good evidence and examples. So frankly, I find them a lot more credible than you.

I'm not suggesting removing representative democracy, you're creating a strawman there, I'm saying that starting at the assumption that everyone is a moron that must have their information stream managed is bad for democracy; and that your average representative has more blind spots than we care to admit.

Besides, frankly your average representative doesn't actually do that much research into most topics, they either take the party line or do whatever their biggest donors ask them to do. So in essence you're not generally represented by Jim Bob, you're represented by oil companies or insurance companies or hedge funds etc..

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#956

Post by overgard »

gbjw wrote: post #429
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…

What is 'representative' democracy in the age of weekly/(daily?) polls that break down your constituents' views on every last issue? The blind leading the blind...

For all his massive faults, I think Trump demonstrated that trying to appease people rather than having a strong point of view is a losing game. I live in a red state, so I've talked to quite a few Trump voters, and the one thing I've noticed is that a lot of them really sharply disagreed with a lot of his policies, but they liked that he didn't back down or equivocate. I'm not saying this with any love for Trump of course, but I think he demonstrated how modern campaigns tend to be pretty badly run.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#957

Post by harpersealtako »

vasuki wrote: post #952
harpersealtako wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to the podcast he did with Joe Rogan. 95% of what he talked about was fairly convincing and I agreed with it pretty strongly (or mundane and uncontroversial,). 5% was questionable and less convincing. Based on Malone's history (I think he had a strong, rare allergic reaction to one of his COVID shots that very nearly killed him) it seems likely that he argues in good faith. My prior here is that I already…

I have not responded without listening to what he said, I followed him for quite some time to see what exactly he had to say. I do not like censoring by big tech as well, but when they take down outright lies which actually get viral and change people's opinions, I am no longer sure. Nuanced facts, data does not go viral. Tweets with controversial information do. Serious side-effects, risk-benefit calculations, are v…

I find it difficult to create a censorship model that can distinguish between "nuanced counterfactual take" and "contrarian falsehood". I think a lot of people already know this is a problem (e.g. censorship of the Wuhan lab theory).

I am fairly biased though -- I would rather 100 dangerous falsehoods get shared (even if it results in a lot of people believing wrong things) than a even 1 true fact get censored and that puts me in the weird position of often defending people and takes I disagree with and dislike.

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#958

Post by walleeee »

immibis wrote: post #934
walleeee wrote: post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science as I know and love it offers no basis for labeling anything "pro-" or "anti-scientific", although "unscientific" seems like fair game

Anti-scientific would be actively opposed to the discovery of truth through the scientific process.

Agreed. Science itself has nothing to say about that though, and I fear castigating everyone to "believe the science" and censoring antiscientific opinions are two deeply counterproductive activities, in that they give people the impression that that is indeed what science is about

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#959

Post by berdario »

tripletao wrote: post #884
jazzyk wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What to do when you have two very different opinions coming from experts: - Anthony "I am The Science" Fauci or - Dr Malone (mRNA inventor)? Who to believe? Difficult to say, but these days, sadly, the first (and prudent) thing to do is to follow the money . While credentials matter, the first thing I check when I read a paper/publication is who funded the work.

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…

> I'd rather tolerate false information from the contrarians than risk a false mainstream view that can never get corrected. That doesn't mean contrarians are automatically (or even usually) right, though

I don't. I think it's reckless to tolerate contrarian information (and in fact, it's causing a much higher death toll during this pandemic) in public.

I agree that specialists should still be allowed to discuss contrarian information, via papers, peer review and the overall scientific process.

But should Software Engineers (like most of us here) really be warranted a platform, a listening audience on their ideas about virology?

Re: Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online

#960

Post by berdario »

tripletao wrote: post #919
imbnwa wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mainstrea…

We know how the pandemic originated, let's stop spreading FUD and propaganda

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/

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