It's not just an "appeal", it's a "belief". Not based in fact or logic but in faith. They seem to think that if scientists said it, it must be real, and anyone that tries to say otherwise is just wrong.
I think this observation is mostly overblown. I'm sure some people "worship" science to an irrational degree, whatever that means in each case, but it seems like in most cases what we're seeing is actually this: If you see two opposing opinions, and one is ostensibly derived in whole or in part by science, and the other isn't, then, prior to further information or extenuating circumstances, it makes sense to defer to the latter when making decisions or forming opinions. That doesn't mean you are sure it is correct, it means you are sure it is more likely to be correct than the alternative, which is far more reasonable. It might look like people are picking the ostensibly-science-backed choice with unthinking faith, when the majority of them are simply making the more statistically likely choice given the information available. In most cases, it's impossible to tell the difference, and this gives rise to a lot of political rhetoric that exploits that ambiguity.
To the extent a study has a political conclusion, it's not science, but relatively few really do.
(Some have conclusions that policy entrepreneurs find useful to support a political agenda, either because of what they actually say or because of what people can be deceived into understanding them to say, but that's a different thing than actually having a political conclusion.)
Is Plankton dying political? You would not think so but it definitely is.
Republicans would be quick to dismiss the article assuming it is another attack in economic success, global warming etc... Democrats would be quick to point to the article as support for reasons to support progressive policies.
I disagree that it's overblown. For every study that's utterly failed to replicate over the past however many decades, people have been "sure it is more likely to be correct than the alternative" and that's literally not the case. The word "science" has been invoked in a way that makes people believe that they have more information about the world than they do. Updating towards a study that wasn't properly conducted is worse than the study not existing, because it removes uncertainty that you should still possess, but it is touted as "science" in popular media all the same.
Especially in areas like psychology or sociology, where studies over the past few decades are more likely not to be replicable than they are to be replicable. Compounded with the disgusting state of pop "scientific" "journalism", it's probably a better heuristic at this point not to believe most scientific news to be correct.
Updating towards a study that wasn't properly conducted is worse than the study not existing, because it removes uncertainty that you should still possess, but it is touted as "science" in popular media all the same.
This is why I try to pollute as much as I possible can. "Science" keeps telling me that climate change is an important issue and that we need to curb pollution to fight it. As you just said, since it comes from a place that can't be trusted, the logical choice is to take the opposite stance.
I had an argument with an old friend a bit ago over the efficacy and possible nth-order effects of publicly-funded "safe shoot-up sites" for drug addicts. my point was that lots of progressive liberal ideas about policy come from a place of feelings about what the "morally right" thing to is ("give homeless addicts a place to safely use drugs, to prevent spread of disease etc."), while not necessarily thinking through possible nth-order effects that could result from such policy decisions, specifically with regards to factors of human incentives and motivations ("if you provide a taxpayer-funded safe drug use facility, how will this affect inherently dangerous & self-destructive intravenous drug use in the long term? decrease it, keep it roughly the same, or increase it?"). as a means of arguing his position ("safe shoot-up facilities are good and effective"), he referred me to a nearly decade-old study that was done over the course of three years, and to him, that was slam dunk proof that his position was the better one. I pointed out the questionable research methods ("drug dealers in the area didn't report higher sales in the three years after opening the facility"), the length of the study (three years), and the time that has passed since the study (an additional seven years), and asked if maybe this was cause for at least further investigation, but to him, The Science Was Settled, someone did a research project and published the results in some journal, so That's That, Everything Is Good, Confirmed.
I want to stress here that in this instance I may still be fully in the wrong and he may in fact be correct with regards to our assessments of the overall situation—my point is merely that my friend took the mere existence of a research paper in a journal with findings that affirmed his beliefs as if it were Gospel, because it's a Study in a Scientific Journal, you see. never mind that social sciences are far more fuzzy than hard sciences, never mind the methods used in the study, never mind following up and seeing if anything changed in seven years. no, a Study in a Journal asserted that his Beliefs were Correct, so that might as well be a Science stone tablet with Science written on it that some Scientists were directly told by Science God from Science Heaven to write.
this friend is, of course, an atheist, basically an anti-theist really, and the degree of Faith he places in the Gospel of Science (even Social Science!!!) being comparable to that which adherents to conventional religion place upon their holy books remains completely lost on him.
I don't think this is a particularly uncommon way of thinking these days.
In my experience I think it usually comes from a mistaken idea that all fields of science are equally predictive, which I think comes from a popular misconception that "science" = "physics".
I think we colloquially get drawn into thinking that science-as-in-physics is the same thing as science-as-in-biology is the same thing as science-as-in-economics, especially when it comes to what they all mean by "fact" and "proven". Media then takes advantage of this general misunderstanding to make "weather facts" sound like they are just as concrete as "fundamental physics facts" because it gets more attention. Then we find ourselves arguing about climate science with the same level of self-assured veracity we might argue about billiard balls on an ideal surface in a vacuum.
I'd say it's more that there is an increasing desire for science and science literacy, but those are expensive public goods that our current system has limited incentive to provide. That leaves the window open to interest groups and marketers do bad science or push pseudoscience that simply imitates the form and makes people feel informed and fact based again.
So science literacy is slowly increasing, but the amount of bullshit masquerading as science to nudge you to buy more Camel cigarettes or vote whatever policy the charlatan wants to push is increasing a lot faster
I highly doubt it and don't think you'd be able to quantify this claim. Poor science literacy is one thing, but the idea that producers or consumers of popular media were more scientifically literate in the past doesn't pass a basic sanity check. People were less formally educated, the resources to become informally educated were less accessible, the general push for statistical literacy and data-driven approaches to anything at all largely didn't begin until 10-15 years ago. Where would this greater scientific literacy of the past have come from?
Those concepts are too vague to draw conclusions from. If producers had higher bars for scientific/statistical literacy, and reasoned, unbiased reporting, then that's all you need for it to have been better in the past.
And in this particular case, even a less well known publication's lies can go around the world via social media sharing before the truth gets its boots on.
I remember Nietzsche had an argument that due to the success of Science that new things would be structured as if they were scientific, for example, that if a new religion arose it would pretend to be a form of Science. But that of course there are many things that cannot be scientific and these things would have to pretend to be while actually not being. As such Science would be subverted by the followers of its own success.
This memory is about 25-30 years old, so not sure how accurate it is.
Many, many people are forced/have chosen to 'believe' in science. (Just as, in the past, they 'believed in' whatever the prevailing orthodoxy was... with or without gods.) Being dogmatic is the easier path for those without the time/access.
Of course, professing 'belief' doesnt confer actual knowledge about that faith. EG. anyone who's ever said that science 'proved' something or other.
If this misstatement about phytoplankton is misleading (gee I hope so), if it gets people to start carrying that canary into the mines, that's a positive outcome. We probably aren't aware of all of the tipping points.
Definitely seeing a trend in decreased literacy in science. Voters are more easily manipulated, and proposed legislation increasingly has a misleading title and not enough voters can understand the details.
Things like the Florida governor banning state use of the term "Global Warming", as if that's going to fix the problems Florida faces. Or maybe the view that the USA government shouldn't back 30 year mortgages for places expected to be unusable in 30 years.
I had a little taste of this when my city's schools decided to kill off a major academic program based on a "peer reviewed publication". Parents were shocked, layoffs were made, the decision was made after normal meeting hours when the video recording was off. People asked for more clarification. Turns out a parent wrote up an opinion piece that boiled down to, if their kid didn't get in, they wanted the program gone. They showed it to a friend (the peer) who liked it. They thought that counted a "peer reviewed publication" and thought it was justification for killing off AIM/Gate, despite the success of the program and minimal cost (the AIM/Gate classes had the same teacher/student ratios).
Another sad case was a new development that set aside some land to make room for burrowing owls, after a year or two that land was sold to developers. The reason? They didn't think any owls actually lived there, it didn't occur to them that you'd only see the owls at night. I walked the perimeter every night with my dog and would often see the owls on fence posts.
Sure we should be skeptical. We should also be skeptical of this rebuttal though.
The main claim that this blogger uses before calling the article rubbish is that it had a sample size of 500. This is a good sample size. It vastly weakens the credibility of the blogger to imply this is insufficient.
It’s really problematic to have a reaction decrying the decline of literacy because some blogger said something was bad. If there is a decline of literacy, it ought to start with the blogger and the Hn poster here.
Scientific literacy is and always has been low. Armchair experts decrying its decline is just ironic.
David Johns, head of the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, describes it as "a literal drop in the ocean." Johns would know—the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey has been running since 1958 and has accumulated more than 265,000 samples.
The Continuous Plankton Survey has indeed cataloged a loss of plankton over the years—but nothing close to the 90 percent loss claimed by Dryden. "We have noticed long-term changes—northerly movements of plankton species as surface water warms, changes in seasonality in some taxa, invasives, etc.," Johns told Ars by email
Well johns’ framing is poor. Or at least the blogger’s presentation of it is. The drop in the ocean comment is wrong. That’s not how stats works. You may want to argue that your samples have superior collection methods, but don’t attack the size.
What’s worse, as far as I can tell the actual preprint doesn’t make the 90% claim. It’s referring to the risk of loss from ocean acidification in the next 20 years.
As far as I can tell it’s just bad science naive bloggers and journalists all around plus armchair experts criticizing each other.
If anyone is going to talk about skepticism and scientific literacy, step one should be ignoring pop summaries in the news.
People are right to trust science more than opinion.
However the media amplifies bad science to capitalize on narratives and make money.
Good news media is supposed to put things through a critical lens and explain to people things are currently a theory or just a small subset of a bigger picture... but they media has become click bait and unreliable.
They will take the tiniest shred of evidence and use that to make some wildly sensational claim.
A lot of people forget that science is "a process", rather than "a priesthood". There are plenty of grifters, cult leaders, and crazed street preachers benefiting from this.
I think the number of folks turning away from science or appreciating a scientific thought process or in simple terms logical thinking is increasing in this country. You cannot expect folks who look down on education or “educated folks” in general to appreciate the benefits of a scientific thought process. They might be in fact more prone to accepting disinformation and conspiracy theories that aligns with their worldview than listening to scientific facts that doesn’t align with their world view and accepting those scientific facts.
Is there any centralized place for all peer reviewed articles?
As a programmer (and not as an academic person), I have no idea how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources.
I wish it was like npmjs.com who provides me an audit tool for their Nodejs packages in the same npm CLI.
It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading.
Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.
Why not, though?
After all, I'm sure a large university like MIT has a lot to gain from a site like this that promotes them to the top of the list as someone who publishes genuine papers.
Although there are some journals that are "open access" and encourage mirroring their papers, most are not so and consider mirroring their articles to be piracy -- so until copyright law is reformed, there can never be a (legal) repository of the scientific literature, although projects like Sci-Hub exist just as things like Pirate Bay do.
And that the authors don't have conflicts of interest. It's a decentralized unregulated reader-beware system. Even the good journals, say like Nature, are still just private companies that make up and then follow their own rules which they could change or ignore at will. Good science happens all the time, but, BS also gets published and, sadly, often gets more attention than the legit stuff because its more sensational. Its a tough problem with no easy solution.
Don't see what trust you are talking about. There's no need to have "one thing". The important thing is that the research is public. If it lives in multiple repositories is irrelevant. Just have an aggregator query the 10 biggest of those and we're done. SciHub already achieves this without any support from institutions or universities, that ought to convince anyone that it's possible.
I don't use peer reviews as a proxy for paper quality. Many great papers had terrible peer reviews, and vice versa. Enough that it's not really a predictor of anything.
It's an imperfect measure to be sure (peer reviewers are humans), but it's the best criterion anyone has ever come up with so far. It certainly weeds out a lot of cranks (even if it on rare occasions mistakes a novel genius for a crank), and isn't that robust to deliberate fraud (peer reviewers generally look for errors in analysis or lack of needed controls rather than look for faked data).
> Is there any centralized place for all peer reviewed articles?
There isn't one, as far as I know, but supposedly one can turn to bona fide publications for peer-reviewed studies/reports etc; there are specialist journals about almost any science subject, however mainstream or niche.
However, the peer-review process is increasingly discredited/broken, according to articles such as this recent example [1] Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it.
It would also seem that many supposedly reputable journals often publish without due diligence, too. The site Retraction Watch [2] exists to draw attention to published papers subsequently having to be withdrawn. Reasons for retractions can be poor methodology, dubious authorship and lots more - which point to failings in the peer-review system.
> how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources.
This is a different problem than the issue of a central repository for all peer reviewed articles. Some journals allow you to see the trail of the actual peer review (questions raised by reviewers, responses & changes made by authors, etc) but this is far from the norm. The standard practice is to only offer the final version of the article, and to not release the trail of peer review to the general public.
pubpeer.com does allow people to raise concerns and discuss individual publications for technical issues/plagarism, and its typical for the authors to come on there and provide further information or clarifications. Pubpeer however is a third party site distinct from the peer review process that journals do before publication. It's also not uncommon to see papers pulled due to concerns raised on pubpeer.
At this point I believe almost 0% of “science” news I see. This headline so so insanely outrageous I knew it had to be wrong.
Between pre-prints, overly enthusiastic press releases, and reporters who often don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about it’s not worth it.
I’m not surprised an ever increasing portion of the public doesn’t believe in science. We’re practically conditioning them not to.
> an ever increasing portion of the public doesn’t believe in science
It's incredibly myopic to state first that you don't believe in the science news you hear, and yet somehow you (a) believe the news you hear about how much of the public believes in science, which itself would appear to be [social] science news, and (b) have apparently discounted the probability that the public just like you doesn't believe in science news.
Really, it's not myopic, it's xenophobic and bigoted.
I agree. They’re a site I trust much more than a random news site, and this isn’t the first “No, incredibly stupid science thing isn’t true” piece they’ve had to write lately.
Re-reading my comment it may be unclear what I meant. So to state it plainly it was the original claim I knew was bunk.
no, not only is that an irrational appeal to authority, but ars spent the last two years fearmongering over covid for clicks just like all the other news sites. this story is also fishing for clicks, just from a contrarian perspective (relative to their audience) to keep things fresh.
3.5M people died last year in the US. as usual, heart disease and cancer were the overwhelming leaders. covid claimed ~460K, but that's "deaths involving covid", not "from covid". there is no evidence of "permanent damage" from covid. a novel contagion of any kind will exhibit its highest mortality rates at the beginning of its epidemic incursion, and eventually reach steady state. from all indications, the steady state of covid will follow its coronavirus predecessors and settle at negligible death rates. heart disease and cancer will continue to kill millions into the foreseeable future.
that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.
Some of the EEG alterations found in COVID-19 patients may indicate damage to the brain that might not be able to be repaired after recovering from the disease.
note that EEGs are a very crude instrument relative the fantastic complexity of the brain. it's like putting a rock on the ground to try to understand geotectonics. it's not nothing, but it's not much at all. i wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years, it's viewed much like we now view leeching or lobotomies.
In 2020 602,350 people died of cancer[1]. Seems odd to use it as an example of a bigger threat when it's entirely comparable, especially when we can argue the "with not of" distinction there - they may have died of systemic failure while also having cancer.
It would be reasonable to say, today, that the dominant varieties of SARS-CoV-2 are basically similar to an average to not great flu season, particularly for the vaccinated, where there is still a mortality benefit. In fact, I was at a talk 2 weeks ago where Sir Jonathan Van-Tam said exactly this.
However. This is a long way from where things started.
*> that's not to dismiss the threat of covid’
Actually, I think what you’re doing is worse. As a doctor I’m happy to treat current covid as something we need to live with and get on with, but you’re actually dismissing the prior threat of COVID as well. Dismissing all the people who did die. Dismissing the 140,000 children who were orphaned in the US alone. Dismissing the real contribution of COVID to actual deaths - your distinction of ‘deaths from covid to deaths with covid’ is meaningless when excess mortality clearly shows that without the impact of covid the US population would be 1m higher than it is today.
The fact that you choose to see the COVID information as having sowed division speaks more to the bizarre information landscape you have in the US. Many other countries found the last couple of years intensely frustrating but managed to forge a sense of national spirit in fighting it, and as a result have significantly lower excess deaths, significantly less orphaned children, and significantly lower societal scars to bounce back from.
so where are the heartwrenching anecdotes about heart disease or cancer deaths? otherwise you're just projecting a recency and availability bias. but none of that matters for how we, and especially the press, should have handled the topic.
no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it". every single person on earth will get covid at some point. at best, we've delayed that point a little bit for some people, not to mention some shifting of mortality. note that liver disease and chirrosis deaths rose last year - why aren't we making video montages and pouring one out for them, or their orphaned children, again?
Every untimely death is a tragedy.
That's why every country has widespread public health campaigns extolling the virtues of stopping smoking, healthy diets, exercise, maintaining a healthy weight. But these are background noise to most people, and most people don't change their behaviour anyway.
If your point is the news should be plastered with images of people suffering heart attacks or cancer wards, i'm not sure what the utility of that argument is. The hospital system has capacity for steady state burden of disease. If Heart disease and cancer patients were dying in hospital corridors, or at home unable to get to hospital, can you actually tell me with a straight face there wouldn't be widespread outrage?
>no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it".
This is simply not true. Countries that avoided early surges, avoided overrunning hospitals and were able to get their populations vaccinated and dealing with lower virulence covid strains have had lower overall deaths over the 2 and a half years of the pandemic.
Australia for example, had largely flat excess deaths in 2020 & 2021 (actually a reduction in 2020, due to no covid, reduced travel, no flu season). Australia started dealing with the actual burden of COVID in late 2021 and 2022, and has seen 10,000 COVID deaths so far. Excess deaths in 2022 is 17.5% above average for the year to end of May. [0, 1].
If the US had of been able to pull together, instead of, as you have, variously dismissing it as 'nothing more than the flu', 'no more important than Cancer and Heart disease deaths', or moving the goal posts and declaring that, essentially, the area under the curve will be the same but the timing will be different (which is at conflict with earlier points) - ie if the US had of been able to pull an Australia (or one of many other countries that didn't just totally shit the bed and hide their heads in the sand) than COVID deaths, scaled for population, could have been in the 150-200k range.
Or, to put it another way, if Australia had of shit the bed as badly as the US did, then Aus would have had 60,000 deaths.
death is often not as simple as "you died of dysentery". your liver might fail, and your lungs are full of fluid, and your arteries are clogged. you smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish, while eating like a recently unhibernated bear. how do you decide which caused the death, especially without some very detailed monitoring of all of the body's major systems?
"with covid" is the same. that's why co-morbidities are almost universally indicated in covid deaths. it's because the people dying of covid are pretty unhealthy already, and covid is not the primary cause of death, but a contributing one, often a minor contributor at that.
the distinction is also important because it has multi-faceted follow-on effects. in terms of treatment, a doctor could otherwise have focused more on treating a co-morbidity than covid. a researcher might focus more on other ailments than covid. the public might have been less fearful and tribal. public health guidance might have been different. it has lots of relevance actually.
That's why you look at excess deaths. Covid increased excess deaths significantly. In other words, those unhealthy people would still be alive without covid, enjoying a longer life.
That's less than 1% of the population. If you're not in the high risk category or living with someone at high risk, and you got vaccinated, then there isn't reason to be overly concerned. Take precautions as you feel the need, but otherwise, life goes on. This isn't the bubonic plague or smallpox.
Over a million people died with covid, not from covid. If after 2 years you haven't got this distinction, do you think possibly you're just severely confused on the topic and shouldn't be discussing it publicly for fear of spreading misinformation?
What exactly counts as fearmongering for you? It seems like +6.37M people have died from COVID so far, most of them being in the US (which has more deaths from COVID than India, which has a larger population than the US).
It makes sense for a lot of people in the US to be scared of COVID, it is a dangerous, infectious disease after all.
it makes no sense for "a lot of people" to be scared of covid. it makes sense for those at risk (the elderly and those with co-morbidities) to evaluate that risk and take concrete measures (principally vaccination), then move on. we did not need to be stuck in a fear cycle for over two years for what is a novel cold virus, not the black death.
This is a sensationalized study that only looked at COVID cases that were serious enough to end up on someone’s electronic medical record:
>The authors mined electronic health records identif[ying] 353,164 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 2020 and November 2021. They then matched each COVID-19 patient in a ratio of one to five with 1,640,776 control patients. All of the survivors and controls were monitored for at least a month and up to a year. Overall, 38.2 percent of COVID-19 survivors developed a post-COVID condition, compared with 16 percent of uninfected controls.
(Also note that the “post-COVID conditions” include things as minor as a persistent cough.)
The real headline should be "More than 1-in-5 COVID cases serious enough to be noted in medical records may result in long-term symptoms, greatly ranging in severity."
Upwards of 60% of the US had been infected with COVID as of April 2022 [0]. If serious long-COVID symptoms indeed occurred in upwards of 20% of COVID cases, that would mean >12% of Americans are currently suffering from debilitating long-term illness, which would be obvious on a societal level. We simply do not see this.
"fishing for clicks" from a "contrarian perspective" usually means "misinform the public for profit". Giving the best available reporting on what's currently known about a disease that has killed millions isn't "fearmongering", even if as we learn more some reporting needs to be revised.
Equating the two is just nihilism or solipsism, as if there's no reality, just people saying things.
news outlets literally put out millions of stories about covid over the past couple years. do you really believe that that was all factual, objective reporting--that millions of "facts" were being rationally delivered--or were news outlets taking advantage of an opportunity to keep people glued to their screens (and speakers)?
You complain about a fallacy and then use this argument? Ars is just one news outlet and didn't put out all those millions of stories, so they don't have to answer for them. If you object to Ars, object to Ars.
ars is part of a $2.5B media empire (advance publications). read any of their covid coverage, and it's pretty baldly fearmongering for clicks. they're not in this business for commonwealth, objective truth-seeking.
> "Ars Technica is pretty good, partly because so many of their writers are experts with advanced degrees."
passes the test for "real substance"?
read both, and any other favored news service. read a small sample of their coverage and their self-serving motives jump right out of the page and slaps you silly like a rubber chicken. it's that obvious. and it is their problem, by association, since you're trying to make a (unsubstantiated) claim on reputation.
GP made an argument regarding Ars being staffed by experts. You've said nothing at all specific to Ars and instead tried to imply a bunch of guilt by association, so absolutely the original post had considerably more substance than, if I can paraphrase, "lots of the media lies therefore Ars does too" and "they are a business".
It's not really irrational. Journalism is plagued with issues where journalists misconstrue a topic because they don't have the requisite background knowledge to adequately cover a topic. This becomes immediately obvious when you read an article on a topic you're knowledgeable about (see Gell-Mann amnesia effect). Expecting a site with more subject matter experts to have less of these types of errors seems perfectly rational.
no, that's literally falling for the appeal to authority fallacy. just because a journalist has some experience in a field tells you nothing a priori about how they evaluate other information in the field. you have to evaluate their ability to evaluate that information to get any insight into how trustworthy they can be.
no, i'm not. i'm saying that it doesn't matter a single iota. in the few domains where i can plausibly claim more than cursory knowledge, there are plenty of people who i give zero credence to, who otherwise claim "expertise".
and a science writer is often writing about science far afield of their narrow education/research. the author of this very article is the "automotive editor" at ars, not a marine biologist, or anything close to it.
"expert" is a normative (aka political) nominative, not a descriptive one.
Perhaps, but this is marine biology, which I expect is a bit different.
Not to mention that if you click through the author's article history, the most recent three pages of articles he's written (over 100 articles) are exclusively about cars, not science. (Ok, one exception, looks like he wrote an article about Disney's Obi-Wan series.)
While I wouldn't say he has no domain knowledge at all, I don't think it's fair to say he has "expertise in marine biology". And he doesn't even write about stuff related to his credentialed field, at least not recently.
> plenty of people who i give zero credence to, who otherwise claim "expertise".
At the risk of committing the sin of No True Scotsman, perhaps these people don't really have the expertise they claim.
I would expect a journalist who has actual, real expertise in a particular field to be able to sort out the junk from the newsworthy, at least most of the time. If not, then I don't think their expertise really exists. Sure, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but I would expect people with real expertise to be at least mostly reliable.
Serious question - how do you engage with new studies and find value? Or do you? I'm trying to rejigger what my info pipelines look like and I'm looking for ideas. I like hearing about new stuff, but you're right that I just can't trust a science headline.
Use the press article to get a general understanding. Ignore the part about how it will fix all the problems in the world. Take a look at Wikipedia.
Read the abstract of the research article and look for the most important graphic / table. Does it support the abstract of the article? Does it even support the caption of the figure? Ctr+F for some keywords, like "control group", "exclusion criteria", "almost statistically significant". Try to find out if they are using some "interesting" method to filter the data.
Use some back of the envelope statistic, like comparing the difference, variance and Sqrt(N). Count how many results are statistically significant and how many are reported. How many implicit results are not reported? Also, are there some results with an incredible small error?
There are just too many predatory journals and bad journals with a peer review that is a joke. Unless it's a journal in your area, just ignore the journal and look at the data. And even some serious journals publish bad articles.
Unless you made the observation personally, or personally know the fellow who made the observation, you should take such stories/studies with a grain of salt.
I’m positive that the person who downvoted has somehow misinterpreted my pithy statement so perhaps I should explain myself.
“Nullius in verba” is the original motto of the Royal Society, arguably the birthplace of modern science. It roughly translates to “take no one’s word” and encouraged an epistemological worldview based on empiricism. This was situated in a world where truth of all matters was primarily dictated by authority, even those of the natural philosophies.
The truths of science were to be experienced in the laboratory just as the truths of a cake recipe were to be experienced in the kitchen.
The person that I am responding to is lamenting the fact that there is a certain expectation that one must “believe in science”. This is in direct contrast to “nullius in verba”.
Please do not conflate "science" with "science media".
Honestly, since this is really just a shadow discussion of the same Reddit posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w2x10v/beware_of... and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w1ahrq/scots_tea...) we should all just come out front and say "A bunch of people overreacted to single non-science source of bad and un-peer-reviewed research". The fact it was debunked so quick is a credit to the science ecosystem. The fact that a bunch of dopes piled onto the original report without any due diligence is the problem. That is a problem worth unpacking - how information is distributed and our poor general education in critical thinking and evaluation of source materials.
I’m not. I understand this is purely a media issue.
I don’t think most people do.
And I don’t care if it was debunked in a day or two. It’s not 1980. It spread very far in that time. And given how outrageous the claim was (and the knock on effects we should be seeing if it was true) no outlet should have ever published it in the first place without further review.
But bad information or misinformation can't be debunked instantly, nor will they able to be. If we require that, we will have an unstable system. Therefor, we have to train people otherwise.
news consumers should be the last line of defense. Not the first.
If the police tell the media they shot someone in a robbery it gets reported. It’s reasonable to assume that’s not fake.
If police say they shot 5,700 people during a robbery at a McDonalds this morning, no one would report that uncritically. They’d look for some kind of confirmation because the story is so far out there.
That’s what I expect of science reporting. At least the most basic cursory check. I’m not asking for the media to duplicate studies themselves. But blindly reporting what someone tells you uncritically is likely to lead to obvious mistakes like this.
Yes, but this isn't "science reporting". It's a single site, the Scottish Sunday Post, that reported on a single pre-print paper with a small data set from a single research group on a boat doing some sampling and analysis in the Caribbean.
"Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.
Debunking also doesn't undo the original damage because most people will never see the debunking. For example, a while ago a paper about the oceans supposedly heating up much more than previously estimated hit a lot of news sites and HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 The article currently at that link is not what was there at the time, it's essentially a retraction that almost none of the HN readers who saw the original will have seen. That paper had an estimate of ocean warming that was much higher than that found using actual widespread physical measurements of ocean temperature, based on a weird indirect calculation from global CO2 and O2 levels in the atmosphere. It turns out they'd massively underestimated the error bars on their weird indirect estimate and it was just far too inaccurate to actually conclude that ocean warming was substantially higher than the direct measurements. (Which is not at all surprising really.) Now go and read the HN comments on that science at the time, they're quite something given the subsequent context...
You "just" need to find good science news outlets. Ars Technica is one of them. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast is another. I'm sure there are plenty more.
I feel like now that we're at this point the fight is all but lost. Trusting science on the one hand yet "never [trusting] a press release from a university" on the other do not go together well. We should be much much more harsh on overenthusiastic acience journalists, press releases, overly broad claims and bad research practices. That should in my opinion include consequences for the reputation of not just the individual journalists or scientists, but the whole information chain that is responsible for the publishing of rubbish science.
So after graduating High School with terrific math scores, I started realizing...I can't count. Now I could of course but I frequently erred, I was better at counting at 6 when I would spend all day counting to 100. One kid counted to 1000, that was cool. That was something we'd do, is count.
But the skill had atrophied.
I had to learn how to count again, practice counting, and cool thing is I can now count--with about the same level of error I had as in late high school--to 18, 20, 30, 32, 37 the way most people can count instantly when there's 6 or less. I made a game to practice.
But back to the point: yeah too many people blurt stat. They didn't count right. Just blurt stat.
The pessimist in me says it's because people want to cling to anything that lets them say "See, I knew it wasn't a big deal, I/we don't need to change our behavior", especially when it comes to climate change. I've seen this first-hand from relatives who are very quick to talk about "see the science wasn't right in this 1 instance" while ignoring everything that doesn't fit their world view.
That said, I'd argue the "news" agencies really should be the ones held to some account for printing whatever they are told (be it from scientists, the police, and everyone in between. Don't get me started on "printing" tweets as facts or wide-spread opinion). Also the "news" agencies love this kind of thing, they get to double dip all while acting holier than thou and taking no responsibility for the BS they put out.
Also, the claims made are so sweepingly apocalyptic -- we're all going to be dead in a few decades! -- that they're going to trigger not only the usual climate-skeptic suspects, but also those who are genuinely concerned about climate change. The magnitude of the crisis we're stumbling into is hard to fathom, but these sorts of claims are arguably counterproductive in that they could just cause many people to give up out of the assumption that it's too late to save the global food web.
I think it's because we all know the reprecutions of losing our plankton. That's a doomsday scenario and at 90% loss, that means our oceans should die off very quickly.
The author of this paper finally states:
" Dryden and his co-authors do identify atmospheric CO2 as the driver of ocean acidification, which they warn will result in the loss of 80–90 percent of all marine life by 2045."
Which essentially negates his own claim that the other article is rubbish. The current article is more rubbish than the original that author wants to critique.
Dryden is the same person who made the "90%" loss claim. The key part of that paragraph is this part:
he has appeared to blame the problem on microplastics
Because Dryden owns Dryden Aqua, a water treatment/filtration company. And its interesting that he makes bold claims like these, and places the blame on something he stands to benefit from, assigning lesser blame on what we know is likely the larger impact on plankton loss (global warming).
> Five hundred data points collected from 13 vessels sounds impressive, but David Johns, head of the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, describes it as "a literal drop in the ocean." Johns would know—the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey has been running since 1958 and has accumulated more than 265,000 samples.
That uh isn't how stats works. 500 data points is a significant amount if they were being taken in a proper (randomized) manner. Maybe Johns is being taken out of context (i.e. his point might be that the sampling methodology was poor) but this too sounds like BS.
The problem is that the ocean is not amenable to random sampling in the same way that, say, Twitter accounts are; phytoplankton are going to be differentially-distributed depending on where in the euphotic zone you're sampling, which latitudes, distance to land, time of year, and so on, which is why longitudinal biodiversity studies are carried out in specific areas. It's vanishingly unlikely that 500 water samples of unknown provenance (and I'm curious why they weren't sampling using the standard method of towed plankton nets) can demonstrate a global extinction event of all plankton, though it could indicate a loss of biodiversity in certain areas. God knows we're working hard to empty out our oceans, but I'm not sure that this paper demonstrates what they claim.
>Twice a day, (if possible) we want you to take a 0.5 litre of sea water, put it through a GOES filter (developed by Dr.Jesus Ramon Barriuso Diez), count plankton, microplastics (fibres and beads) and any other particles which are over 20 microns.
I believe they went with this method because it's easier for non-scientists to contribute to their study.
They mention nets, but you're right in being suspicious in the method of collection. It does not seem like it uses best practices.
Not a marine biologist, but this seems like it would explain their entire findings. Yachts tend to hang out more around the tropics and less around murky waters in, say, the North Atlantic. Clear water, such as you'd find in the Bahamas, is clear precisely because of lower plankton populations[1]. By collecting data off of pleasure boats, they're corrupting the data right off the bat!
> I believe they went with this method because it's easier for non-scientists to contribute to their study.
Which should probably cast their study in an even more negative light. Even ignoring the fact that the samples were collected contrary to a standard method, we can't be sure the samples collected by random people were actually all done in a similar way as each other.
Climate change could not only affect the viability of plankton, but also shift ocean and air currents. Sampling at the same GPS coordinates could give very different results from one year to the next.
If the plankton counts suddenly shot up 2 orders of magnitude in a location, I expect that would cause a lot of questions to be asked that might result in more accurate results. But a decline or increase of 25% might just be assumed to be population fluctuations instead of a shift.
Here is another guy with a domain PhD, who had this to say
>Also "13 vessels and more than 500 data points" for a finding this sweeping in its assertions is enough to make any microbial oceanographer fall off their lab bench laughing.
The ocean is 41 million square miles. That's 82,000 square miles per sample, from only 13 ships, or over 3 million square miles per ship.
The accuracy of their model would have to be incredible, assuming those boats weren't jet powered racing boats.
It would be interesting to see the coordinates of each sample. I assume we'll see something unimpressive since, as the article points out, the data containing many times the samples does not agree, suggesting this did not use the appropriate statistical methods/sampling.
Yeah, I found it really fishy that they didn’t counter with their data. They weren’t like yeah, it’s only 40%. They just said we’ve collected more data, so they are wrong.
A lot of this is about shifting ecosystems. For example, less ice in the Arctic could actually increase zooplankton abundance in that region, although warming waters also tend to result in smaller-sized zooplankton. Think soupy northern seas vs. clear tropical seas.
> "“Loss of sea ice and sea ice algae will change the timing and the amount of production that goes into high-quality food. Everything might happen earlier. There might be a longer plankton season with more abundant plankton and some studies have suggested this may benefit the ecosystem,” said Kimmel. “The region is warming and it remains to be seen how the ecosystem will ultimately respond.”"
Media unfortunately runs one-sided clickbait, apparently because they think this brings more views and engagement. In-depth analysis and nuance isn't very popular, particularly when there are several opposed parties with agendas involved.
In practice...we have. The idea that our behaviour will somehow drastically improve is pretty optimistic to put it mildly.
In practice, it is almost a statistical inevitability that we will continue to overpopulate at this point and in that way there is nothing hyperbolic about the statement that, more than likely, they are as good as dead.
The other day I was arguing with anti-vaxer people I know on FB.. Upon checking their FB profiles (as I like to do to try to understand these people better) I saw they were also denying that there is actually a heat wave in Europe and it's actually all a big scam to keep us all scared, apparently it's the next thing for the media after they have used up Covid for this role..
This institutional disdain is all engulfing by this point, and unfortunately being used more and more by politicians and any party that is morally bankrupts enough and finds a way to exploit this.
Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together?
As different, presumably, to the gp, I commend you for being level headed and compassionate, even with people you disagree with, and especially around such big topics. That kind of universal kindness and empathy doesn't grow on trees, and takes sometimes hard work; I can tell by your tone you are like that and it gives me hope for our future. Thanks, truly.
Actually, I recommend you do the same. This has helped me to-
- find them more humain when I see these people in family gatherings and other life events
- find that we have some other ideological intersection (vegan, promoting donation to help animals etc..)
It's very easy to de-humanize someone on the internet, this has helped me to understand these are real people, and not "bots" who are paid to say things I find hard to believe anyone could believe in..
Therapy doesn't scale and the drugs just turn people into zombies. The only solution is to prevent it in the first place. Too bad all it takes is one traumatic event to push so many people over the edge into world of nonsense.
The new method of arguing is not to actually look at the person's argument but to instead investigate their background to find some other belief they have. Once you find a cancellable belief, you can use that to cancel them and then you can safely ignore their argument. If anyone asks you about their argument, you can just point to the other thing they believe without actually addressing their argument.
The reason for this new method of arguing is that arguing without fallacies is hard, and the other person may have a good argument, but then if you follow logic and don't use fallacies and somehow believe that argument everyone will cancel you and completely ignore everything you have to say because when they investigate your background they will find that you believe an argument that makes you cancellable.
This is just repackaged Lysenkoism where you stop questioning someone's theory because the whole rest of your life will get cancelled if you do.
"More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. "[1]
Then later on, Stalin, in "Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics" decided that he had made a mistake politicizing basic science and denounced people who attached ideological labels to science and language. That's because Beria was having trouble getting the nuclear bomb project finished because ideologues inside the party were trying to cancel scientists who believed in relativity.
People don't maintain different sections of their brains for "beliefs arrived at by dispassionate and factual study" and "beliefs that help me get through the day and give me power over my situation" and "weirdo beliefs that I got from the sewer of the internet".
All of the conspiracy theory people feel a loss of control over their lives or disconnection with society. They feel like traditional media is trying to invalidate their personal experiences. Lots of people are willing and ready to exploit that feeling by wedging in a conspiracy theory. Then these exploiters will either sell them something, or try to get them to vote for a candidate, or something. There are also some genuine crazy people, but don't assume that as the default.
So what can you do? I think you can only make a difference in a 1 on 1 conversation. You can't directly repudiate their weirdo beliefs. You have to acknowledge what they believe. You have to accept at the start of the conversation that you may not turn them around. If you really want to make a difference, have a tiny goal for each conversation - just connect with them. Let them feel like people from the mainstream world care about them.
Look up "High Demand Groups" (aka Cults). The resources for them also apply to people who believe in conspiracy theories.
I used to be optimistic that in the end the humanity would pull through and manage to keep global warming under +2°C.
After covid I've lost a lot of that hope. We've seen the masses unwilling to undergo the incredibly minor inconvenience of wearing a mask and getting a jab to prevent deaths of their neighbours.
How can we hope to together give up our comfort to the extent it will be needed to face the challenges that lay ahead?
My take on this is that those people lack fundamental understanding of science and how it works [1]. Their math is of the level of a sixth grader. If you do not understand something, it is easier to mistrust it and they are easier manipulated.
> Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together?
Help in Education. There are levels to this. Start with your children. Encourage and foster their curiosity. Help them to become critical thinkers. Be involved in their educational institutions. Asks if the kids could have a field trip to the local museum of science / natural history or the planetarium or astronomy observatory. Offer yourself to be a reading/literacy mentor and pick interesting books. If you really got a nack for it, get involved in the institutions themselves: Become a science educator, be it a school teacher, in a community college, or elsewhere.
This is the long game. Will take at least 18 years.
Change politics. Again there are levels. Become interested at first. Then become more involved. Bring your expertise to the table. Etc. It is a very very difficult path where we will often fail to succeed, but I think we should try. In politics we would have access to the biggest levers to enact changes.
A big problem is that science becomes politicized and corrupted to serve a certain agenda, see COVID response [2]. Or how big corporations can sponsor fake science (tabacco, oil, sugar industry) and use it to deter political decision.
===
[1] on a very basic level, like looking for patterns in empiric observations, of formulating a falsifiable theory, test it with experiments. That level.
[2] in the beginning the response was science based, but then an agenda kicked in and the measurements did not change when the science/dynamics of the pandemic changed. (Vaccines do prevent hospitalization, but not infection. They do not lead to herd immunity. They became ever less effective with newer variants. The variants became less lethal. Still the government was hell bent on vaccine mandates, when it was clear that it would really just only protect you and not others. There was never a study on the effect on long COVID. Children's response is overwhelmingly mild, ect.
Seriously, if 90% of plankton had been killed off there would be some very noticeable effects. Something like 50% of our oxygen is generated by phytoplankton. (50% is probably the floor - I see some estimates going up to around 70%) And plankton of all types is at the bottom of the food chain - if 90% disappeared there would be mass starvation in our oceans.
Well the headline did it's job, it scared the shit out of everyone that bought it. And even when they find out it was bullshit, there will still be a residual state of slightly heightened fear, just a little more on top of what we've been fed for decades.
The real figure, half a decade ago, was a loss of 50% over 70 years which is already very scary when you know that it constitutes 50 to 70% of the photosynthesis capacity of our world, and thus the ability to remove CO2 from the environment.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadEven bad information gives us a small sense of power and security.
If you agree with the political conclusion of a study then it’s science. If you disagree then it’s fake news.
(Some have conclusions that policy entrepreneurs find useful to support a political agenda, either because of what they actually say or because of what people can be deceived into understanding them to say, but that's a different thing than actually having a political conclusion.)
Republicans would be quick to dismiss the article assuming it is another attack in economic success, global warming etc... Democrats would be quick to point to the article as support for reasons to support progressive policies.
Literally everything is political today
This is why I try to pollute as much as I possible can. "Science" keeps telling me that climate change is an important issue and that we need to curb pollution to fight it. As you just said, since it comes from a place that can't be trusted, the logical choice is to take the opposite stance.
So as long as the shit is wrapped up better we should eat it?
I want to stress here that in this instance I may still be fully in the wrong and he may in fact be correct with regards to our assessments of the overall situation—my point is merely that my friend took the mere existence of a research paper in a journal with findings that affirmed his beliefs as if it were Gospel, because it's a Study in a Scientific Journal, you see. never mind that social sciences are far more fuzzy than hard sciences, never mind the methods used in the study, never mind following up and seeing if anything changed in seven years. no, a Study in a Journal asserted that his Beliefs were Correct, so that might as well be a Science stone tablet with Science written on it that some Scientists were directly told by Science God from Science Heaven to write.
this friend is, of course, an atheist, basically an anti-theist really, and the degree of Faith he places in the Gospel of Science (even Social Science!!!) being comparable to that which adherents to conventional religion place upon their holy books remains completely lost on him.
I don't think this is a particularly uncommon way of thinking these days.
I think we colloquially get drawn into thinking that science-as-in-physics is the same thing as science-as-in-biology is the same thing as science-as-in-economics, especially when it comes to what they all mean by "fact" and "proven". Media then takes advantage of this general misunderstanding to make "weather facts" sound like they are just as concrete as "fundamental physics facts" because it gets more attention. Then we find ourselves arguing about climate science with the same level of self-assured veracity we might argue about billiard balls on an ideal surface in a vacuum.
So science literacy is slowly increasing, but the amount of bullshit masquerading as science to nudge you to buy more Camel cigarettes or vote whatever policy the charlatan wants to push is increasing a lot faster
And in this particular case, even a less well known publication's lies can go around the world via social media sharing before the truth gets its boots on.
This memory is about 25-30 years old, so not sure how accurate it is.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view.
He is well aware which side of the bread the butter's on.
That said, the scientific method is not without its gargantuan biases and filters. It looks through a pinhole.
Of course, professing 'belief' doesnt confer actual knowledge about that faith. EG. anyone who's ever said that science 'proved' something or other.
If this misstatement about phytoplankton is misleading (gee I hope so), if it gets people to start carrying that canary into the mines, that's a positive outcome. We probably aren't aware of all of the tipping points.
Things like the Florida governor banning state use of the term "Global Warming", as if that's going to fix the problems Florida faces. Or maybe the view that the USA government shouldn't back 30 year mortgages for places expected to be unusable in 30 years.
I had a little taste of this when my city's schools decided to kill off a major academic program based on a "peer reviewed publication". Parents were shocked, layoffs were made, the decision was made after normal meeting hours when the video recording was off. People asked for more clarification. Turns out a parent wrote up an opinion piece that boiled down to, if their kid didn't get in, they wanted the program gone. They showed it to a friend (the peer) who liked it. They thought that counted a "peer reviewed publication" and thought it was justification for killing off AIM/Gate, despite the success of the program and minimal cost (the AIM/Gate classes had the same teacher/student ratios).
Another sad case was a new development that set aside some land to make room for burrowing owls, after a year or two that land was sold to developers. The reason? They didn't think any owls actually lived there, it didn't occur to them that you'd only see the owls at night. I walked the perimeter every night with my dog and would often see the owls on fence posts.
The main claim that this blogger uses before calling the article rubbish is that it had a sample size of 500. This is a good sample size. It vastly weakens the credibility of the blogger to imply this is insufficient.
It’s really problematic to have a reaction decrying the decline of literacy because some blogger said something was bad. If there is a decline of literacy, it ought to start with the blogger and the Hn poster here.
Scientific literacy is and always has been low. Armchair experts decrying its decline is just ironic.
David Johns, head of the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, describes it as "a literal drop in the ocean." Johns would know—the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey has been running since 1958 and has accumulated more than 265,000 samples.
The Continuous Plankton Survey has indeed cataloged a loss of plankton over the years—but nothing close to the 90 percent loss claimed by Dryden. "We have noticed long-term changes—northerly movements of plankton species as surface water warms, changes in seasonality in some taxa, invasives, etc.," Johns told Ars by email
What’s worse, as far as I can tell the actual preprint doesn’t make the 90% claim. It’s referring to the risk of loss from ocean acidification in the next 20 years.
As far as I can tell it’s just bad science naive bloggers and journalists all around plus armchair experts criticizing each other.
If anyone is going to talk about skepticism and scientific literacy, step one should be ignoring pop summaries in the news.
https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=327083003119119...
However the media amplifies bad science to capitalize on narratives and make money.
Good news media is supposed to put things through a critical lens and explain to people things are currently a theory or just a small subset of a bigger picture... but they media has become click bait and unreliable.
They will take the tiniest shred of evidence and use that to make some wildly sensational claim.
As a programmer (and not as an academic person), I have no idea how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources.
I wish it was like npmjs.com who provides me an audit tool for their Nodejs packages in the same npm CLI.
It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading.
Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.
That's overly pessimistic. There's lots of effort making publicly funded research more accessible.
You won't get universal consensus on authority. That's not pessimism; that's an odd kind of optimism, really...
There isn't one, as far as I know, but supposedly one can turn to bona fide publications for peer-reviewed studies/reports etc; there are specialist journals about almost any science subject, however mainstream or niche.
However, the peer-review process is increasingly discredited/broken, according to articles such as this recent example [1] Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it.
It would also seem that many supposedly reputable journals often publish without due diligence, too. The site Retraction Watch [2] exists to draw attention to published papers subsequently having to be withdrawn. Reasons for retractions can be poor methodology, dubious authorship and lots more - which point to failings in the peer-review system.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frus...
[2] https://retractionwatch.com/
This is a different problem than the issue of a central repository for all peer reviewed articles. Some journals allow you to see the trail of the actual peer review (questions raised by reviewers, responses & changes made by authors, etc) but this is far from the norm. The standard practice is to only offer the final version of the article, and to not release the trail of peer review to the general public.
pubpeer.com does allow people to raise concerns and discuss individual publications for technical issues/plagarism, and its typical for the authors to come on there and provide further information or clarifications. Pubpeer however is a third party site distinct from the peer review process that journals do before publication. It's also not uncommon to see papers pulled due to concerns raised on pubpeer.
Scientists are shocked
Google: principles of ecology: "distribution in mosaic"
Between pre-prints, overly enthusiastic press releases, and reporters who often don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about it’s not worth it.
I’m not surprised an ever increasing portion of the public doesn’t believe in science. We’re practically conditioning them not to.
It's incredibly myopic to state first that you don't believe in the science news you hear, and yet somehow you (a) believe the news you hear about how much of the public believes in science, which itself would appear to be [social] science news, and (b) have apparently discounted the probability that the public just like you doesn't believe in science news.
Really, it's not myopic, it's xenophobic and bigoted.
Re-reading my comment it may be unclear what I meant. So to state it plainly it was the original claim I knew was bunk.
that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.
There is some evidence. But as you said, it's a novel disease and still being studied.
https://www.bcm.edu/news/what-eegs-tell-us-about-covid-19-an...
Some of the EEG alterations found in COVID-19 patients may indicate damage to the brain that might not be able to be repaired after recovering from the disease.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
However. This is a long way from where things started.
*> that's not to dismiss the threat of covid’
Actually, I think what you’re doing is worse. As a doctor I’m happy to treat current covid as something we need to live with and get on with, but you’re actually dismissing the prior threat of COVID as well. Dismissing all the people who did die. Dismissing the 140,000 children who were orphaned in the US alone. Dismissing the real contribution of COVID to actual deaths - your distinction of ‘deaths from covid to deaths with covid’ is meaningless when excess mortality clearly shows that without the impact of covid the US population would be 1m higher than it is today.
The fact that you choose to see the COVID information as having sowed division speaks more to the bizarre information landscape you have in the US. Many other countries found the last couple of years intensely frustrating but managed to forge a sense of national spirit in fighting it, and as a result have significantly lower excess deaths, significantly less orphaned children, and significantly lower societal scars to bounce back from.
no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it". every single person on earth will get covid at some point. at best, we've delayed that point a little bit for some people, not to mention some shifting of mortality. note that liver disease and chirrosis deaths rose last year - why aren't we making video montages and pouring one out for them, or their orphaned children, again?
>no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it".
This is simply not true. Countries that avoided early surges, avoided overrunning hospitals and were able to get their populations vaccinated and dealing with lower virulence covid strains have had lower overall deaths over the 2 and a half years of the pandemic.
Australia for example, had largely flat excess deaths in 2020 & 2021 (actually a reduction in 2020, due to no covid, reduced travel, no flu season). Australia started dealing with the actual burden of COVID in late 2021 and 2022, and has seen 10,000 COVID deaths so far. Excess deaths in 2022 is 17.5% above average for the year to end of May. [0, 1].
If the US had of been able to pull together, instead of, as you have, variously dismissing it as 'nothing more than the flu', 'no more important than Cancer and Heart disease deaths', or moving the goal posts and declaring that, essentially, the area under the curve will be the same but the timing will be different (which is at conflict with earlier points) - ie if the US had of been able to pull an Australia (or one of many other countries that didn't just totally shit the bed and hide their heads in the sand) than COVID deaths, scaled for population, could have been in the 150-200k range.
Or, to put it another way, if Australia had of shit the bed as badly as the US did, then Aus would have had 60,000 deaths.
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-... [1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...
Unless they all would have died at that time regardless, in the absence of COVID, isn't this a distinction without relevance?
"with covid" is the same. that's why co-morbidities are almost universally indicated in covid deaths. it's because the people dying of covid are pretty unhealthy already, and covid is not the primary cause of death, but a contributing one, often a minor contributor at that.
the distinction is also important because it has multi-faceted follow-on effects. in terms of treatment, a doctor could otherwise have focused more on treating a co-morbidity than covid. a researcher might focus more on other ailments than covid. the public might have been less fearful and tribal. public health guidance might have been different. it has lots of relevance actually.
Add in how overly sensitive the tests were, especially pcr, testing for the virus and not for actual proof of infection... It's all a joke.
It makes sense for a lot of people in the US to be scared of COVID, it is a dangerous, infectious disease after all.
there is active research on the topic but no conclusive evidence that it's any more than a form of negative hawthorne effect and/or hypochondriasis.
>The authors mined electronic health records identif[ying] 353,164 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 2020 and November 2021. They then matched each COVID-19 patient in a ratio of one to five with 1,640,776 control patients. All of the survivors and controls were monitored for at least a month and up to a year. Overall, 38.2 percent of COVID-19 survivors developed a post-COVID condition, compared with 16 percent of uninfected controls.
(Also note that the “post-COVID conditions” include things as minor as a persistent cough.)
The real headline should be "More than 1-in-5 COVID cases serious enough to be noted in medical records may result in long-term symptoms, greatly ranging in severity."
Upwards of 60% of the US had been infected with COVID as of April 2022 [0]. If serious long-COVID symptoms indeed occurred in upwards of 20% of COVID cases, that would mean >12% of Americans are currently suffering from debilitating long-term illness, which would be obvious on a societal level. We simply do not see this.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220426/almost-60-percent-i...
Equating the two is just nihilism or solipsism, as if there's no reality, just people saying things.
> they're not in this business for commonwealth, objective truth-seeking.
This is an attempted attack on motives, and again, not on any real substance.
> "Ars Technica is pretty good, partly because so many of their writers are experts with advanced degrees."
passes the test for "real substance"?
read both, and any other favored news service. read a small sample of their coverage and their self-serving motives jump right out of the page and slaps you silly like a rubber chicken. it's that obvious. and it is their problem, by association, since you're trying to make a (unsubstantiated) claim on reputation.
and a science writer is often writing about science far afield of their narrow education/research. the author of this very article is the "automotive editor" at ars, not a marine biologist, or anything close to it.
"expert" is a normative (aka political) nominative, not a descriptive one.
The author has a PhD in Pharmacology. Biology is an integral part of Pharmacology.
Not to mention that if you click through the author's article history, the most recent three pages of articles he's written (over 100 articles) are exclusively about cars, not science. (Ok, one exception, looks like he wrote an article about Disney's Obi-Wan series.)
While I wouldn't say he has no domain knowledge at all, I don't think it's fair to say he has "expertise in marine biology". And he doesn't even write about stuff related to his credentialed field, at least not recently.
At the risk of committing the sin of No True Scotsman, perhaps these people don't really have the expertise they claim.
I would expect a journalist who has actual, real expertise in a particular field to be able to sort out the junk from the newsworthy, at least most of the time. If not, then I don't think their expertise really exists. Sure, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but I would expect people with real expertise to be at least mostly reliable.
Abstract and conclusions. The middle if it seems interesting, followed by looking for related research to confirm the conclusions.
Most people don't have the skills to do this, we need better science journalism.
(We also have an incentive problem for science, but that is another problem.)
Read the abstract of the research article and look for the most important graphic / table. Does it support the abstract of the article? Does it even support the caption of the figure? Ctr+F for some keywords, like "control group", "exclusion criteria", "almost statistically significant". Try to find out if they are using some "interesting" method to filter the data.
Use some back of the envelope statistic, like comparing the difference, variance and Sqrt(N). Count how many results are statistically significant and how many are reported. How many implicit results are not reported? Also, are there some results with an incredible small error?
There are just too many predatory journals and bad journals with a peer review that is a joke. Unless it's a journal in your area, just ignore the journal and look at the data. And even some serious journals publish bad articles.
I use a modified version of the crackpot index were the article starts with +5 points https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
In god we trust, all others must bring data.
It's the sane approach.
“Nullius in verba” is the original motto of the Royal Society, arguably the birthplace of modern science. It roughly translates to “take no one’s word” and encouraged an epistemological worldview based on empiricism. This was situated in a world where truth of all matters was primarily dictated by authority, even those of the natural philosophies.
The truths of science were to be experienced in the laboratory just as the truths of a cake recipe were to be experienced in the kitchen.
The person that I am responding to is lamenting the fact that there is a certain expectation that one must “believe in science”. This is in direct contrast to “nullius in verba”.
Believing in whatever is said by a random person claiming to be a scientist is less solid.
Believing in what is reported in general news media as being the discovery of said random people is rather gelatinous.
Honestly, since this is really just a shadow discussion of the same Reddit posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w2x10v/beware_of... and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w1ahrq/scots_tea...) we should all just come out front and say "A bunch of people overreacted to single non-science source of bad and un-peer-reviewed research". The fact it was debunked so quick is a credit to the science ecosystem. The fact that a bunch of dopes piled onto the original report without any due diligence is the problem. That is a problem worth unpacking - how information is distributed and our poor general education in critical thinking and evaluation of source materials.
I don’t think most people do.
And I don’t care if it was debunked in a day or two. It’s not 1980. It spread very far in that time. And given how outrageous the claim was (and the knock on effects we should be seeing if it was true) no outlet should have ever published it in the first place without further review.
If the police tell the media they shot someone in a robbery it gets reported. It’s reasonable to assume that’s not fake.
If police say they shot 5,700 people during a robbery at a McDonalds this morning, no one would report that uncritically. They’d look for some kind of confirmation because the story is so far out there.
That’s what I expect of science reporting. At least the most basic cursory check. I’m not asking for the media to duplicate studies themselves. But blindly reporting what someone tells you uncritically is likely to lead to obvious mistakes like this.
"Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.
But the skill had atrophied.
I had to learn how to count again, practice counting, and cool thing is I can now count--with about the same level of error I had as in late high school--to 18, 20, 30, 32, 37 the way most people can count instantly when there's 6 or less. I made a game to practice.
But back to the point: yeah too many people blurt stat. They didn't count right. Just blurt stat.
That said, I'd argue the "news" agencies really should be the ones held to some account for printing whatever they are told (be it from scientists, the police, and everyone in between. Don't get me started on "printing" tweets as facts or wide-spread opinion). Also the "news" agencies love this kind of thing, they get to double dip all while acting holier than thou and taking no responsibility for the BS they put out.
he has appeared to blame the problem on microplastics
Because Dryden owns Dryden Aqua, a water treatment/filtration company. And its interesting that he makes bold claims like these, and places the blame on something he stands to benefit from, assigning lesser blame on what we know is likely the larger impact on plankton loss (global warming).
That uh isn't how stats works. 500 data points is a significant amount if they were being taken in a proper (randomized) manner. Maybe Johns is being taken out of context (i.e. his point might be that the sampling methodology was poor) but this too sounds like BS.
Because the GOES Foundation use volunteer yachts to collect the data:
https://www.goesfoundation.com/citizen-science-project/
>Twice a day, (if possible) we want you to take a 0.5 litre of sea water, put it through a GOES filter (developed by Dr.Jesus Ramon Barriuso Diez), count plankton, microplastics (fibres and beads) and any other particles which are over 20 microns.
I believe they went with this method because it's easier for non-scientists to contribute to their study.
They mention nets, but you're right in being suspicious in the method of collection. It does not seem like it uses best practices.
1: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-some-beaches-have-clear-...
Which should probably cast their study in an even more negative light. Even ignoring the fact that the samples were collected contrary to a standard method, we can't be sure the samples collected by random people were actually all done in a similar way as each other.
If the plankton counts suddenly shot up 2 orders of magnitude in a location, I expect that would cause a lot of questions to be asked that might result in more accurate results. But a decline or increase of 25% might just be assumed to be population fluctuations instead of a shift.
>Also "13 vessels and more than 500 data points" for a finding this sweeping in its assertions is enough to make any microbial oceanographer fall off their lab bench laughing.
https://twitter.com/wang_seaver/status/1548751068640686080
The accuracy of their model would have to be incredible, assuming those boats weren't jet powered racing boats.
It would be interesting to see the coordinates of each sample. I assume we'll see something unimpressive since, as the article points out, the data containing many times the samples does not agree, suggesting this did not use the appropriate statistical methods/sampling.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/climate-drives-...
> "“Loss of sea ice and sea ice algae will change the timing and the amount of production that goes into high-quality food. Everything might happen earlier. There might be a longer plankton season with more abundant plankton and some studies have suggested this may benefit the ecosystem,” said Kimmel. “The region is warming and it remains to be seen how the ecosystem will ultimately respond.”"
Media unfortunately runs one-sided clickbait, apparently because they think this brings more views and engagement. In-depth analysis and nuance isn't very popular, particularly when there are several opposed parties with agendas involved.
In practice, it is almost a statistical inevitability that we will continue to overpopulate at this point and in that way there is nothing hyperbolic about the statement that, more than likely, they are as good as dead.
But have killed the ability to tell propaganda from facts in 90% of people.
This institutional disdain is all engulfing by this point, and unfortunately being used more and more by politicians and any party that is morally bankrupts enough and finds a way to exploit this.
Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together?
Im not sure what 'chortle' is?
Actually, I recommend you do the same. This has helped me to-
- find them more humain when I see these people in family gatherings and other life events
- find that we have some other ideological intersection (vegan, promoting donation to help animals etc..)
It's very easy to de-humanize someone on the internet, this has helped me to understand these are real people, and not "bots" who are paid to say things I find hard to believe anyone could believe in..
The reason for this new method of arguing is that arguing without fallacies is hard, and the other person may have a good argument, but then if you follow logic and don't use fallacies and somehow believe that argument everyone will cancel you and completely ignore everything you have to say because when they investigate your background they will find that you believe an argument that makes you cancellable.
This is just repackaged Lysenkoism where you stop questioning someone's theory because the whole rest of your life will get cancelled if you do.
"More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. "[1]
Then later on, Stalin, in "Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics" decided that he had made a mistake politicizing basic science and denounced people who attached ideological labels to science and language. That's because Beria was having trouble getting the nuclear bomb project finished because ideologues inside the party were trying to cancel scientists who believed in relativity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
All of the conspiracy theory people feel a loss of control over their lives or disconnection with society. They feel like traditional media is trying to invalidate their personal experiences. Lots of people are willing and ready to exploit that feeling by wedging in a conspiracy theory. Then these exploiters will either sell them something, or try to get them to vote for a candidate, or something. There are also some genuine crazy people, but don't assume that as the default.
So what can you do? I think you can only make a difference in a 1 on 1 conversation. You can't directly repudiate their weirdo beliefs. You have to acknowledge what they believe. You have to accept at the start of the conversation that you may not turn them around. If you really want to make a difference, have a tiny goal for each conversation - just connect with them. Let them feel like people from the mainstream world care about them.
Look up "High Demand Groups" (aka Cults). The resources for them also apply to people who believe in conspiracy theories.
After covid I've lost a lot of that hope. We've seen the masses unwilling to undergo the incredibly minor inconvenience of wearing a mask and getting a jab to prevent deaths of their neighbours.
How can we hope to together give up our comfort to the extent it will be needed to face the challenges that lay ahead?
> Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together?
Help in Education. There are levels to this. Start with your children. Encourage and foster their curiosity. Help them to become critical thinkers. Be involved in their educational institutions. Asks if the kids could have a field trip to the local museum of science / natural history or the planetarium or astronomy observatory. Offer yourself to be a reading/literacy mentor and pick interesting books. If you really got a nack for it, get involved in the institutions themselves: Become a science educator, be it a school teacher, in a community college, or elsewhere.
This is the long game. Will take at least 18 years.
Change politics. Again there are levels. Become interested at first. Then become more involved. Bring your expertise to the table. Etc. It is a very very difficult path where we will often fail to succeed, but I think we should try. In politics we would have access to the biggest levers to enact changes.
A big problem is that science becomes politicized and corrupted to serve a certain agenda, see COVID response [2]. Or how big corporations can sponsor fake science (tabacco, oil, sugar industry) and use it to deter political decision.
=== [1] on a very basic level, like looking for patterns in empiric observations, of formulating a falsifiable theory, test it with experiments. That level.
[2] in the beginning the response was science based, but then an agenda kicked in and the measurements did not change when the science/dynamics of the pandemic changed. (Vaccines do prevent hospitalization, but not infection. They do not lead to herd immunity. They became ever less effective with newer variants. The variants became less lethal. Still the government was hell bent on vaccine mandates, when it was clear that it would really just only protect you and not others. There was never a study on the effect on long COVID. Children's response is overwhelmingly mild, ect.
- Covid isn’t real
- and if it is real, it’s not that bad
- and if it is that bad, it’s not as bad as the vaccine
- and if it is worse than the vaccine, it’s fine because I already had it in 2019
source: Real conversations I had with a family member.
Seriously, if 90% of plankton had been killed off there would be some very noticeable effects. Something like 50% of our oxygen is generated by phytoplankton. (50% is probably the floor - I see some estimates going up to around 70%) And plankton of all types is at the bottom of the food chain - if 90% disappeared there would be mass starvation in our oceans.
But also more skeptical of even legitimate science.
AFAIK, the trend hasn’t changed.