> It’s no longer a theoretical discussion; Americans have lost their lives because they believed the politics, and to be able to articulate that is really threading a needle there.
> But others are real people tuning into Fox News every night who totally fall into the rabbit hole because they seem to worship these contrarians. The other piece to this is a lot of Nazi imagery and fantasies, a lot of antisemitism, because they know I’m a Jewish scientist. And that’s yet another dimension to all of this.
Watching Scientific Materialists trying to unravel metaphysical causality is a sight to behold.
Some critics of Hotez are antisemites. Therefore according to the principles of guilt by association, critics of scientism are generally antisemites. It follows that it is all hatespeech worthy of censorship.
>Baylor Professor Calls for Prosecution of Criticism of Fauci and Other Scientists as Hate Crime
>Yet, what is healthy debate to some is criminal dissent to others. Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine is calling for federal hate-crime protections to be extended to cover criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists.
Anti-semitism is an action conducted by human beings, thus it has underlying causality. A big problem is that both anti-semitism and observations of "it" are based on subjective perceptions that are typically perceived as objective reality.
Causality is kind of "culturally sub-perceptual" (depending to some degree on one's geographical location and cultural/metaphysical training), I like thinking of it like the water in this classic parable:
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?"
A large part is due to the "because science.." crutch used in order to stop any questions.
Also, it's the classic "Don't meet your heroes", because when the spotlight was pointed at the "scientific community" ( whatever that means.. ), the "plebes" saw a bunch of liars, fraudsters, careerists and also the complete opposite of scientific reasoning. Just like any other field...
In my opinion the main event is the removal of the pristine mask that covered the "scientists" and that's a good thing. However, most of those who "expose the lies" are 10 times worse than the exposed. The only good way forward is to "scientists" go back into doing actual Science and nothing more.
Social media is "just" a multiplier of things due to the networking effect, it can only increase something if the thing is not zero to begin with.
>the "plebes" saw a bunch of liars, fraudsters, careerists and also the complete opposite of scientific reasoning. Just like any other field...
To me it was "The plebs read a bunch of words that they don't understand, running the information through their everyday layman brain and coming to totally wrong conclusions"
This happens all the time. Remember "cell phones will fry your brain"? There is a large subset of the population who will never be able to understand the difference between a microwave oven, microwave communication, radiation, and ionizing radiation.
Which leads to situations where someone from that subset stumbles upon some internal AT&T memo's reads them and comes away with "Holy shit, internally they blatantly talk about building towers that emit radiation over the whole population. Literally building huge microwaves to radiate over massive population centers!"
More often than not, the scientists, engineers, big brains, whatever, have a good grip and the general population is fucking retarded.
There is a huge overlap between '5f panic', anti-vax, panic, and all kinds of other panics. A lot of people who wind up things like the Qanon cult end up there because they had some sort of technological or political anxiety, networked with other people who had similar uncertainties, and were drawn into a radicalization funnel. There is plenty of financial and political capital to be made by fleecing such people.
Flat earth nonsense is another example of the same phenomenon. If you go down that rabbit hole you find a warren of religious fundamentalism, built on the idea that earth ain't flat, space is fake, the Bible explains the stars are tiny lights mounted on a firmament, NASA is a satanic conspiracy, and it's time to take up arms against the forces of evil.
All radical funnels follow the same sort of pattern, which is derived from sales and marketing: goofballs > grifters > true believers > organizers> extremists > martyrs/terrorists. Of course, you can make similar observations about partisan politics, geopolitics and so on; institutions function as funnels for the production of future elites who maintain the status quo through increasingly coercive means. Radicalization funnels differ mainly in terms of transparency, accountability, visibility, and speed of transition.
The "plebs" have generally found a single scientific study which agreed with their preconceived notions, have ignored any data or argument which disagrees with them, and used that as a hammer against the scientific establishment--which is not actually the practice of science. It does reinforce your ego that you know more than the "liars, fraudsters and careerists" though.
Judging by some of the comments, the behavior and self-worth of the "enlightened" is just as reprehensible as your usual FoxNews dad parroting BS.
The "enlightened" should know better since they are.. enlightened. Yet, the "plebs" found out they have exactly the same vices and reprehensible atitudes, plus the usual dismissive attitudes towards everyone "beneath" them.
Many of the "not plebs" do exactly what you described and that's what "changed", the illusion of the benevolent white coat "egg head" was broken. And I think it's a good thing, just by principle. Highly educated people are just as nasty, flawed people as anyone else and if I make a statement, it should be judged by the statement's merits and not by who I am.
The practice of science is something it can be done by everyone, as long as they.. follow the scientific method. Not even scientists follow the scientific method all the time, because they are.. flawed, lazy, greedy, dishonest sometimes. Just like everyone else.
> The practice of science is something it can be done by everyone, as long as they.. follow the scientific method.
The actual scientific method requires some expertise though in order to determine if any given study is junk science or not.
Someone who hasn't spent their lifetime studying the subject will be at a significant disadvantage, and will generally be completely unable to tell you if a given paper is junk science or not.
And amateur can approximate this knowledge, but what they wind up doing is having read many scientific papers and arguments they have a good "gut feeling" over the skill of a paper, and then they seek out actual expert opinion to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the procedures and weigh any competing expert opinion, combined with literature searches for review articles. You can also do things like read books / watch video courses of at least undergraduate-level dispassionate introductions to subjects.
And since I don't have a scientific degree this is what I wind up doing all the time and I've practiced it for the past 30 years or so.
I rarely see anyone on the internet who is a scientific novice with that level of analysis. They usually stop with the fact that they've got a reference they can cite to try to win an argument and it stops there. The reality of science is that the evidence is always going to be a mess and a morass of conflicting results. You can tease out the actual truth out of there but it requires assembling evidence which is consistent and not contradictory and discarding results which are probably the result of e.g. experimental error and procedural artifacts and not real science. If you have no process at all to do that, then you're not following the scientific method, you're just making biased arguments with scientific-looking references.
And the scientific method ultimately requires trusting experts.
Period. Full fucking stop.
Nobody can possibly figure out all of science themselves, it is too vast, so actual scientists learn over time who and what to trust more or less. Anyone who rejects that approach entirely isn't doing science and most likely doesn't know what they're talking about.
And I rarely see anyone on the Internet who has gone beyond read opinion blogs and spent the hours necessary to just get exposed to the basics of field. With everything that is accessible on the Internet, nearly everyone has access to an undergraduate level education in just about anything. I rarely see anyone railing against scientists and medical professionals who have bothered to take advantage of the free information that is out there though (e.g. for virology basics I'd recommend sitting through all of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLgaHZpZS4 which is just a course on virology).
Is it not reasonable to recognize that the majority of popular references to science fall into the logical fallacy category of an appeal to authority, where literate people recognize this as a ploy, and therefore respond to it as the patronizing provocation it is?
We know that the official narratives of pandemic response included blatant and even malicious falsehoods designed to create social pressure and nudges for a percieved greater good, and do policymakers and scientists really think that this should come with impunity? Scientists and policymakers were wrong - a lot - and if they want to keep doubling down on antagonizing the people whose trust they have lost, they should probably game it out a bit first.
Sources welcome, and also can we please start criticising all those other people just trying to get shit done when in the middle of an emergency. I think those firefighters are doing shit jobs too, because you KNOW they could've put that burning building out better than they did!
It's more like. The building is on fire. The fire department denies it is on fire and calls anyone who claims it is on fire a liar. Then they admit it is on fire and pretend like they always said it was on fire. Then they point the water in completely the wrong direction, and call anyone pointing this out a liar. They use the fact that those same people were already known as liars as evidence, without mentioning that the 'liars' were in fact correct. Continue ad infinitum.
> also can we please start criticising all those other people just trying to get shit done when in the middle of an emergency. I think those firefighters are doing shit jobs too, because you KNOW they could've put that burning building out better than they did!
Do you mean stop criticizing?
Also, what an absurd proposition.
Should we not criticize George W. Bush & the US Government for invading the wrong country in the aftermath of 9/11?
After all, it was an emergency!
At what point does the response change from "it was an emergency!" to... jesus christ you people are incompetent. And you're attempting to censor all the competent people....
Insert some meaningless comparison to firefighters/other heroic profession
Fire departments funding isnt contingent of producing outcomes which agree with political or economic agendas.
Lets not pretend like "scientists" by virtue of their job title are moral paragons or even experts in their fields. Everyone on this website (or like 75%) is a "scientist" to some degree. If you are an educated adult with any sort of scientific background you are fully capable of adjudicating a research paper into the following catagories : utter garbage, a reasonable but unscientific paper, a solid paper, or a questionable but too outside my expertise to grok.
Im no chef but I can tell instant ramen from filet mignon.
The general public is not necessarily capable of this sort of discernment. Which is fine, but we ought not to let people get away with steamrolling people who are more educated and more reasonable by appealing to "science"
"Science" as it is used in popular parlance is a farce.
Do you know what the scientific method is, when you have no idea what to do? You try things until something sticks. I fully agree this is not palatable when your life depends on it, but as with this pandemic, people didn't know much at the beginning so they tried things. Some didn't work, indeed, but what was the alternative? Wait and let God sort them out? You had to "move fast and break things" because there was simply no alternative approach.
I agree to some extent, but Fauci et al telling people they don’t need masks, when the Chinese had figured that one out months before seems particularly egregious (and arrogant).
What I remember is Fauci saying that to be fully effective, protective needs to be fitted and fit-tested and that due to limited supplies, PPE supplies with high levels of protection (i.e. N95 and above) should be reserved for medical staff in order to keep hospitals functioning. There were also numerous experimental studies testing how much reuse of N95 masks was viable.
As supplies became more available, he moderated this position and recommended protective equipment for anybody likely to be exposed.
Spare me the excuses about PPE supplies-- even cloth masks would have helped, especially for original SARS-COV-2. Even if he had been concerned about supply issues (the popular excuse you suggest), he could have not lied to the public about effectiveness and asked (not to mention have the President order) for medical grade masks to be reserved for healthcare workers.
Volumes could be said about what we deliberately didn't try and what we deliberately didn't study. We shouldn't pretend that the venture into the unknown wasn't steered by the deep pockets of Big Pharma.
I asked you a good faith question that should have been easy for you to answer if what you said was true. You refused. What am I supposed to believe?
In simple terms, I asked you to put up or shut up, and your response was "no u." If you had an actual point, you should have been more than happy to have been asked to expound upon it.
In a snarky way, making it fairly clear what you thought, you asked me to spend time writing multiple paragraphs. That's not what I call "good faith." And the fact that you "ha gotcha" as soon as I asked for your time investment first, before I invested mine, just reinforces that. Further, you haven't responded to the person who did write the requested paragraphs, so what a waste of time that turned out to be.
OK. Assuming you are acting in good faith as well.
The two previous zoonotic coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS, had case fatality rates of nearly 10% and over 30% respectively. Before we had reliable clinical data to the contrary, it was reasonable to respond to the very real possibility that COVID had, or very quickly would develop similar lethality.
This risk led to a collaborative effort to sequence the COVID-19 virus and to develop vaccines as quickly as possible. In conjunction with this, there are very large studies evaluating existing drugs using in silico and in vitro efforts to try to find functional bindings. Subsequent to plausible candidates being identified, case studies and then RCTs were conducted on an expedited basis to further qualify candidates.
The result was multiple vaccines that had very high efficacy (the mRNA and a few adenovirus based ones) and several vaccines that exhibited much lower efficacy.
In parallel with this constructive work, there were quite a few charlatans who misconstrued limited clinical evidence or who simply started rumors based on nothing. From this we got people touting inaction, bleach inhalation, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and other bogus treatments with no effect on the disease and variable levels of lethality of the treatment.
Your turn now. You said that promising avenues were willfully ignored. Provide some examples.
EUA can only be used when no alternative treatment exists. As such, there was a huge coordinated effort to both discredit potential treatments ("horsey paste ahaha!!") or to just not study them. Any alternative would have meant no EUA, meaning no big vaccine contracts. We choose a path that favored the manufacturers, at the expense of alternative treatments. Treatment avenues were ignored.
0% liability for vaccine manufacturers, yet the public message that it's 100% safe. How is it possible for those two to exist and not cause cognitive dissonance? If it's 100% safe, then the manufacturers don't need any protection, and if they have 0% liability, then they have deemed that there exists a financial risk that they are not comfortable with. Otherwise it would have been "this is 100% safe and we back it by the life of our organization." Avenues to reinforce the public trust were ignored.
Why did the CDC stop tracking breakthrough infections in 2021? Shouldn't this be considered very important information to understand how our tools and the virus are performing? We're choosing to discard data instead of vacuuming it all up. Why? Relevant data was ignored.
We didn't try to take the debate, or even much acknowledge tradeofs. These were written of as "allow grandma to die", but if we accept that the period of 18-24 is crucial for adults to find themselves, then we essentially cut 1/3 of that time, which may have several decades of life impact, to add (maybe) a few more years to grandmas life.
I am not saying it wasn't the right choice. I am saying that anybody who disagreed were not offered a chair at the decision table (or zoom room), but were actively bullied and called science deniers. Needless to say that doesn't make them want to hear our arguments either.
Then there is the entire: no mask, masks maybe, masks are essential but you don't have to wear one that isn't made from simple cloth.
Finally it seemed to me that the WHO was more concerned with making sure China didn't get insulted than to deal with the dicease. Anywhere else it would have been called China flu, and there wouldn't have been a debate over it. Suddenly we had to talk about how this was not Chinas fault and we even had these stupid "hug a Chinese person" campaigns in the beginning.
I don't know why people say "we stole this time from kids" as if a pandemic let to roam free wouldn't be disruptive.
How many kids are without one of their parents now because of covid? It's a global emergency, there is no option that allows people to pretend nothing is happening.
For me an example would be the early “masks don’t work” rhetoric, but then simultaneously also telling the public not to buy masks because healthcare workers need them.
The early recode article mocking Silicon Valley for avoiding contact early on and “panicking” because it was “just the flu” and concern was anti-China racism.
Later on the repeated stories pushed by MSM about the lab leak hypothesis being a “conspiracy theory” when it remains if not the most likely source, still a probable one.
Science is about testing a hypothesis, updating, and discussing tradeoffs honestly - often “believe in science” types are not about science at all, but about authority and political partisanship/cognitive bias.
The tragedy is this erodes trust. Then when something important is actually true like the vaccines are very effective and people should take them they lie about that too (zero risks, 100% effective, etc.) vs. being honest about it (very effective, but not 100%, risks are rare and better on net than contracting disease etc.)
The dishonesty makes it easy for more harmful conspiracy to arise because they’ve lost trust of the public (for good reason imo). Most people that think independently outside of consensus will do it poorly.
Possibly, but there's a horrible elision going on there; you've listed a bunch of individual actions which range between simple error to negligence, taken by various governmental and media individuals and organisations, but then attributed them to "science" as a whole?
I’m not attributing it to little-s science, I’m attributing it to “believe in science” - people are using “science” to mean something different than the scientific method and following evidence where it takes you. It’s being used as a proxy for authority.
“Believe in science” was used to defend the (wrong) stuff in my comment, it’s a proxy for believe authority or believe media.
If we want people to understand the value of science we should share the evidence and explain what the hypothesis is with the nuance and uncertainty present rather than patronizingly play 3D-chess because we assume the public is too dumb to know what’s good for them.
Some people and institutions did this, but most did not.
Science as an institution is no stranger to this kind of bullshit either: radical mastectomy and halsted’s “theories” of cancer, skinner and behaviorism (really all of psychology due to the replication crisis), mendel’s peas being ignored for 40yrs, phrenology, etc. When it becomes believe the authority instead of about the evidence bad things happen.
You weren’t trying to imply that intellectuals are likely to cause violence against themselves by continuing to say the wrong things to the wrong people? Because it sure looked like that’s what you were implying.
I don't think the top comments was especially insightful, but let's not pretend that in some cases 'text on website' consists of exhortations to and instructions for violence. There is a non-negligible number of people who fantasize on the regular about widespread hangings of people they believe to be traitors. You can go on Twitter right now and find plenty of people tweeting about their desire to 'hang Fauci' just in the last week.
I don't understand, if one is upset at "popular references to science" (however you're defining that), then why would they be aggressive against "science"? Literate people would also understand that these are two different things. It seems like misplaced anger if this is the case.
This is a reasonable criticism. But it is primarily a criticism of science reporting and public health policy. Many people agree with what you are saying, but instead of deciding we need changes to the way the media and government handle science, they decide science is bullshit and we end up with a major and growing political movement based on proud ignorance.
Is this not a understandable (and even predictable) reaction to "trust the science" being used as a rally cry and cudgel by science reporting and public health policy?
No, choosing to live in a fantasy world and believing in provably false conspiracy theories is not an understandable response. If I grew up hating the way history was taught and communicated because of pro-Western biases and whitewashing atrocities and American exceptionalism, and my response is to decide history is bullshit and I'm going to believe instead in some gibberish I found on a blog or a podcast, that is not understandable. It's a dramatic and seemingly emotional overreaction that not only fails to solve the issue, but significantly undermines my own ability to effectively view and understand the world in other ways.
The difference of course is that anti-vaxxers and other anti-science types were and are literally dying due to their belief in nonsense and conspiracies.
Before disparaging all of these people, consider the "provably false conspiracy theories" in light of the public health approach taken by the government and major tech companies. The beginning of the pandemic, especially, featured a great deal of noble lies and "following the science". These things have yet to be acknowledged and there hasn't been an honest discussion and apology from those involved and there has been no indication that the right lesson has been learned.
> that is not understandable. It's a dramatic and seemingly emotional overreaction
I think what you mean is "rational" in some platonic sense of the word rational. It is entirely understandable that humans, as sometimes irrational and always emotional creatures could react this way. It is not all history that we're talking about, as your own example demonstrates, merely the "history" and the institutions that provided the history that you grew up with.
> The difference of course is that anti-vaxxers and other anti-science types were and are literally dying due to their belief in nonsense and conspiracies.
Plenty of innocent people died and had their lives ruined or negatively impacted because of the nonsense beliefs and decisions made by the "follow the science" crowd. Which science was being followed when hospitals decided they did not need a stockpile of masks? Which science was being followed when it was decided that schools must be closed? Which science was being followed when it was decreed that masking children would have no negative impact on their development?
> No, choosing to live in a fantasy world and believing in provably false conspiracy theories is not an understandable response.
A problem: you are falling victim to the very same phenomenon as the "people" you criticize: mistaking your perception of affairs to be an accurate representation of actual affairs.
You do not actually possess knowledge about what is going on in the minds of your outgroup members, you only have belief. If Normies could get their own affairs sorted out, maybe they could demonstrate by example how to think in a logically an epistemically sound manner, but until they do me and my fellow conspiracy theorists (as flawed as they are) will continue being a thorn in your sides.
> If I grew up hating the way history was taught and communicated because of pro-Western biases and whitewashing atrocities and American exceptionalism, and my response is to decide history is bullshit and I'm going to believe instead in some gibberish I found on a blog or a podcast, that is not understandable.
To what degree is this actually happening though? If you cannot question the accuracy of your beliefs, why should the members of your outgroup?
Also, note that "not understandable" has a dependency on your abilities as well.
> The difference of course is that anti-vaxxers and other anti-science types were and are literally dying due to their belief in nonsense and conspiracies.
And taking others with them!
Best put on our thinking caps and figure out what's actually happening if you ask me.
Maybe we should talk about "science communication" rather than science.
This is an entirely different category, and SC not mirror science e.g in it's process following scientific processes/principles, despite the dependencies between the fields.
For post talks about what "policymakers and scientists really think" - it doesn't matter what scientists think (in this context), this is about policymakers and science-communicators (who may or may not also be scientists, or have such a background).
TLDR, scientific authority has been "weaponised", and the backlash is as much against the weapon as the wielder. Not a surprise the true wielders are scapegoating "scientists" as the instigators.
The proud ignorance risk I agree with, as those movements have prominent historical precedents, but they didn't form from mere ignorance. They were rejections and reactions, from the bolshevik condemnations of the imperial "Whites" in Russia to fascists attacking so-called decadence with slogans like "I don't care." I grew up in Toronto with a lot of immigrants whose families fled both fascist (italy, greece, portugal) and communist regimes (poland, former soviet states, vietnam and cambodia, etc.) and unless you were from New York, or maybe Chicago, these diaspora stories about movements like this probably weren't formative, and I would argue there is a naivety among the current generation of scientists and educated people in general about 20th century history.
My own naivety is that I believed an education obligates one to have intellectual courage. When actual scientists align with people whose best arguments are to chant slogans like "denialists!", "source!", "pandemic of the unvaccinated!", "misinformation!", "hateful!" they are complicit. The scientists who went along to get along did so at the cost of betraying their fellow citizens who lost their jobs and livelihoods over matters of principle, and indeed some of their lives to the consequences of pandemic policy.
It's quite serious. A scientist or doctor mouthing talking points for attention on twitter is an expression of that betrayal, and worse, a contempt that is difficult to reconcile. I hope people are unnerved enough by it to reflect a bit more deeply.
Sorry, but your criticism is misguided. Hotez is talking specifically about the anti-vaccine movement, which was literally dead wrong about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID vaccines. You are equating that to (presumably) quibbles about effectiveness of masks and quarantines, where most governments erred on the side of caution.
Those are simply not the same things. The government response was calibrated based on what the scientific consensus was at the time, and whoever followed those guidelines (including vaccination) had a much lower chance of suffering and dying in the last two years. The other "side" was trying to convince people to try hocus-pocus medicine and avoid the only effective strategy for prevention.
They're not the same things _to you_ but I don't think there's a distinction to the type of person who's planning to storm the Capitol, or those who support that level of ... Whatever it is ...
The calculator for evaluating truthiness in those people is missing functionality, or at least it's operating on a different set of rules.
To "those people" there are certain lines, which after being crossed, make it impossible to recover any ground.
More people are going to be skeptical post 2020 because these "trust the science" morons were/are putting their crazy in plain view. Same crowd as "Why I hope to die at 75" and "You'll own nothing and and be happy".
It's not hard to connect the dots of corporate profits and policy. If readers think eugenics is a barbaric relic of the past, I have a sweet lullaby to whisper in your ear.
Would you mind toning down the ad hominem attacks here?
I, for example, suggested to a number of non-scientifically trained friends that the scientific consensus about vaccines was pretty strong, that the vaccine studies were well conducted and that they should trust this scientific view of vaccines. Essentially, "trust the science" as opposed to "trust people trying to make political hay by fear-mongering".
You are saying that I am a moron. In fact, I am not.
Sorry, It was not directed at you dude. I believe trusting the science in this case was "jumping the gun" and a little bit of "blind faith". Now that the dust has settled, hopefully trust can be rebuilt.
The majority of popular science content defers to expert opinion because most people do not want to trudge through heaps of scientific detail and dry statistical language. You might be falling into the trap of projecting your own interest in science and technology onto the population at large.
Because the pandemic pushed a lot of people toward videoconference etc, hardcore medical knowledge is actually more accessible than ever before. People who were really, truly interested in what medical scientists and public health experts thought about COVID-19 could go to youtube channels like the UCSF grand rounds and get the straight dope from doctors at the leading edge of policy and research, talking to an audience of other doctors and getting down into the weeds of cellular biology, DNA base pairs, and statistical significance.
I've never seen any of the 'do your own research' crowds cite any of this work. When they cite something, it's wrapped in 17 layers of confirmation bias. If you complain about fallacies from people who are generally trying to simplify things for an audience that demands simple explanations, and then ignore that fallacious arguments coming from their intellectual or ideological opponents, are you wandering off into fallacy yourself?
Not only that, but the people who do want to trudge through heaps of scientific detail are often "motivated reasoners" who don't really have backgrounds in the field or know how to qualify a research report, as we saw with the ivermectin fiasco, which included some very credible-looking meta sources that were very clearly treating obvious garbage research reports as important data points that they could aggregate with others.
Remember, half of america can't even read at a highschool level. How can they possibly expect to actually understand a research paper, and have the knowledge in statistics and probability to see when a paper has massaged the conclusion. I've taken stats and probability and I still don't feel like I have a strong enough grasp on stats to properly judge papers.
How the hell is steve the plumber supposed to be able to independently interpret research papers that require a stats understanding, some calc, some background knowledge in chemistry etc, to actually understand? These papers are written by people who have been steeped in extremely tiny segments of their field for a decade. A layman cannot understand that.
Arguments that reduce to labeling something as a conspiracy theory are destructive to truth seeking and an adulteration of discourse - but they are consistent with the fear of criticism that they are intened to target and leverage.
We can't launder poor arguments through complexity/uncertainty boxes like the USC grand rounds videos and say, "well, unless you understand this granular level, you can't disagree with this lateral and aggregate policy one." I wonder if on a basic level the people who argue like that aren't engaged in discovering truth, but actuated by merely avoiding criticism and seeking to align to something symbolic that protects them. This may be the crux of the disagreement.
If I have an ideological position, it is that I believe my opposing team is engaged in the neutralization of discourse because for them to prevail in their power struggles they only need for principled people to do nothing. This is perhaps the divide. There are people aligned to an ideal of truth that originates in religious cultural beliefs, and people aligned to a fear of criticism that originates in a more materialist ideology.
This scope shift from an "appeal to authority" to reframing it as a "deference to authority," in the counter argument doesn't counter my original point, which was that scientists may feel they are under seige because they have been exploited in appeals to authority, and feel blowback from some people who understood that ploy and rejected it. They are orthogonal concepts.
Sure, media defers to experts, they tell stories that include them, but the variations like "this is true because authority says so", "authority said: do this or become a hate figure," and "you are suffering because of these non-believers, just ask these authorities" were disingenuous rhetorical devices employed by media and policymakers with no objection from actual scientists.
Maybe these scientists would feel less threatened if they had less fear of criticism and more intellectual courage.
Outside of COVID can you give some examples of this "majority of popular references to science fall into the logical fallacy category of appeal to authority".
Note that appeal to authority isn't a logical fallacy- because scientific arguments are not pure logic. Instead, we use priors (authority) to evaluate the quality of statements. |
I don't agree the pandemic response was filled with malicious falsehoods; the public health officials acted in good faith. I think most people haven't benen public health officials during a global emergency and fail to appreciate the challenges of threading all the needles simultaneously.
I think there are a lot of social-science topics, where claims are made that are supposedly "backed by science", but looking into that yields stuff less solid,
such as dubious methods, lack of replication or claims based on surveys or non-academic studies, inappropriate or overreaching conclusions e.g. specificities derived from generalizations, etc.
I think the clearest example is IAT (implicit bias testing), which has dubious foundations, but seems to have taken off as a "scientific" thing, at least in the corporate world. Sometimes accompanied by a motte-and-bailey where the results of the test, and the correct conclusions of the results, are left vague; or what a "bias" is left undefined so you can easily be lead to believe it equates to e.g. racism.
I'm not including social science, sorry, I should have pointed that out. I am including physics (excluding string theory), chemistry and biology; all quantitative things with falsifiable experiments.
I agree entirely that social science news reporting is crap. I should have been much clearer about that.
Here's a question - is it "correct" that health officials should lie if they believe it will lead to net positive outcome? Is this still good faith?
To what extend should net population outcomes compete with individual outcomes? e.g. downplaying risks of the vaccine, such that individuals with complications are essentially sacrificed in favor of the larger number of people without.
Me personally, I believe it is correct for health officials to be not entirely transparent if they have knowledge that doing so would lead to net-negative outcomes for society as a whole. Is that good faith? I suppose it's arguable from a philosophical perspective, but since I see them as operating rationally to achieve a goal with no intent to harm individuals, I see it as good faith.
Remember, the health officials promoting vaccines now lived through the antivax movement that occurred pre-COVID. That movement greatly overhyped vaccine risks in a way that convinced large numbers of people to not get vaccinated. How would you, as a good faith public health official, respond if your opponents are extreme liars with no scientific basis?
Not just outside of COVID. There were a few very notable cases early in the pandemic where the messaging was completely mis-managed. What has spread to nearly every corner of the debate around COVID is that since they clearly mis-managed a few things they must have mis-managed everything and the presence of a single biorxiv preprint which agrees with you means that the bulk of professional virologists and epidemiologists are all wrong.
Instead of a litany of examples, I would refer you to "bad science journalism" as a search term, and to ask any scientist about how they feel research is represented in media. The results may be shocking.
Regarding intent and threading needles, I spent the pandemic working in a public health system, after over a decade in health information privacy policy and systems, so I lack this comment's uncertainty about malice. Anyone who worked in health and thought or even said anti-vaxxers were hateful and better off dead was not providing honest service. In healthcare and in particular public health, I'd argue that's not a mere opinion, it's something much darker and more culpable. G-word level questions arise.
If we are dealing in truth, we are dealing in logic, and the last best empirical result is not exempt from that standard unless we actively dispense with it. Science is practiced, it is not litigated, or worse: advocated.
Evidently you cannot tell the difference between scientists & policymakers being "wrong" because science is self-correcting and actively seeks out its prior wrong/less-right answers, vs people actively and knowingly spreading deliberate lies as part of campaigns for personal scams or political aggression.
There is no "appeal to authority" here; Hotez IS one of the worlds leading authorities on both vaccines and anti-science aggression, which is exactly what it is.
Of course, you are free to believe the liars over the people who are actually doing the hard work of figuring out the real science.
But do not pretend that you are doing anyone any good. I'm sure you feel all self-righteous "sticking it to the man" and aggressively countering a leading expert, and partaking of (pseudo-)"knowledge" that is exclusive to you (self-)select insiders. This is a known and scientifically studied part of the attraction of conspiracy and junk science. While you pride yourself to not being a slave to the "authorities", you are merely a slave to the scammers and hucksters.
It is not your belief in some "contrarian" tropes that makes you a free thinker.
What would make you a free thinker is the ability to look at evidence and science and freely adjust your beliefs accordingly.
"Scientists" came up with a safe and effective vaccine to the most important pathogen in the past century, in less than a year. Whoever took this vaccine reduced their chance of ending up dead or in the hospital significantly. The jury is still out on whether mask use and quarantining was effective (several studies suggest so, others don't). A large reason of why we in the West can come out and live life normally is because the vaccines worked.
It seems odd that you point fingers at some of their perceived failures without acknowledging how many hundreds of thousands of people owe their lives to these scientists and policymakers.
The public trust is fragile thing.
Once that trust is broken revolutions are inevitable.
I fear the whole tech idea "move fast and break things" bled into society, and has caused a lot of irreversible damage.
At my firm, the executive class are extraordinary distrustful of every expert lately from economics,finance, tech, and even science. These are people with multiple high level degrees like mba, phds, and masters!
This happened with the last year, which is the surprising part.
Maybe we'll call this the decade of mistruth. What really sucks is soon, we won't be able to tell in forums such as this, who's interests are on the other side of the text generator / click farm. I hope we can come up solutions to have trust again.
I have a PhD in Transportation and am amazed at the ridiculous consensus of my peers. It's almost as if they produce the research that will keep their grants coming in rather than what is logical and correct.
Have you talked to those peers? Have you attempted to falsify any of their research? You not liking what they are finding provides no view into whether they are correct or not.
Researchers operate on money. They write grant proposals to get funded. Those grants typically specify their objectives in such a way that the outcomes are limited to a range that is satisfying to the funder. If you take grant money and come up with results that the grant maker does not like they will not give you anymore grants. This creates a feedback loop in which compliant researchers are fed and independent researchers are starved. The peer review group then gets dominated by those who are good at making the relatively small pool of major grant makers happy.
I work in tech now. I see orders of magnitude more honest debate in software engineering than in academia. On a tech team a Linus or a Steve Jobs can win, even though they may have some personal imperfections, they deliver major products. Winners in academia tend to be those who are best at working the social and administrative game. Questioning the herd is not a viable career strategy.
Seems like we’re mostly finished with denial and we’ve moved on to anger. After that comes bargaining, then depression, then acceptance.
(Whether for good reasons, evil reasons, or stupid reasons, the public trust in “public health” has been broken, and the public health institution is naturally going to grieve that loss)
I'm not sure that will be the way it's going to go. These companies and their respective lobby groups have a lot of power. The public is dependent on them, not the other way around.
“Because science” is a deeply anti-scientific and epistemologically-unsound view. Science is about observing natural phenomena in accordance with an established paradigm, creating hypotheses and accepting or refuting them from empirical evidence. A new empirical observation has the potential to change the whole paradigm and unlock a new framework for understanding.
Yes, but you either have to do science or respect science. You don’t get to treat a single personal anecdote as equivalent to a body of peer reviewed studies.
Why should personal anecdotal evidence be worthless per se? A unifying scientific theory usually explains stuff by using a hierarchy of abstract models, detached from a concrete local environment.
The subjective experience defines a plethora of factors which are hard to fit into a general theory. If you live in a high-crime neighbourhood, you'd better trust your anecdotal evidence instead of relying on nation-wide sociological evidence.
Me: a personal anecdote does not have the weight of a body of peer reviewed articles.
You: why are personal anecdotes worthless?
Binary thinking is too transparent. You seem to be using binary thinking to suggest that if anecdotes have any value, they must be treated as having equal value with any other source of data, including rigorously designed and executed studies.
Yes, but that's only true if peer review is functioning as intended. Peer review has been gamed and is broken. Science is a career and an industry and individuals have figured out how to protect their fiefdoms within it.
The financial incentives in pharmaceutical research are particularly corrupting due to their size.
"Peer review" is not limited to the preprint proofreading most journals do. That is just a minimal filter to verify a paper doesn't have any clear or obvious mistakes. That's why actually fraudulent papers still get printed.
The actual "peer review" is when people try to make similar observations to what you did (replication) or when people try to build on your work and fail to. This is why we know the amyloid hypothesis isn't very good even though it regularly passes "peer review" and gets into journals: We can't build on it and things it predicts don't happen
When Galileo "discovered" that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than everything revolves around the Earth - it was not just him against the Church, as is often framed. It was him against the entirety of scientific knowledge and other scientists of the day. And he didn't really have any precise proof. In fact his ideas were mostly wrong. He made a large number of incorrect assumptions (such as requiring perfectly spherical orbits) that resulted in his entire concept having more holes than swiss cheese. And it was easily picked apart by other scientists of the time, which many readily did.
He had utter disrespect for the science of the times, and held his own hamstringed ideas above all. Yet he was able to express them. And eventually he would get to play his small part in the advancement of the knowledge of humanity. And this is precisely how science operates. In science one does not HAVE to do anything. Had Galileo instead been determined that e.g. Jupiter is the center of the universe, and spent an equally feverish amount of energy trying to demonstrate such, then we wouldn't know his name today - but his work and ideas would have been no less scientific - but merely wrong.
All true and well said. But my crazy aunt repeating falsehoods she read on Facebook is most certainly not sciencing even up to the imperfect standards of Galileo.
Just because some legit scientists were dismissed as quacks does not make every quack a scientist.
>it was not just him against the Church, as is often framed. It was him against the entirety of scientific knowledge and other scientists of the day
It really really wasn't. There were already models of the solar system that had the sun as the central element. Often they just weren't as good at predicting the movement of the stars because the prevailing mathematical models were very overfitted to the (bad) data, so it always looked closer. Really it had just been refined very well.
Some things to keep in mind: The scientific method didn't exist, the idea of representing the world as mathematical models to predict things and understand physics was barely there, and the primary purpose of the mathematical models of the solar system was to make astrology better. Nobody really cared about whether the world was helio or geo centric, because the idea of deferring to mathematical models was not considered the gold standard we have today.
Somewhat tangential, but I feel like a neat children's story could be written in a similar vein as "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" but replace Christmas with "Science", and the various things stolen being scientific implements, demolishing peer-reviewed journal institutions, deleting research data/past knowledge etc.
I upvoted this, but now I'm just going to flag it off the front page because exactly the same thing is happening here.
(I know at least one scientist who no longer dares post about their work on social media, because it's immunology. Not even anything to do with COVID, just immunology as a field!)
People aren't anti-science, no one cares about a bunch of papers saying vaccines are / aren't effective, people care that you aren't allowed to go to a restaurant without you're vaccination papers or mask, that's not science, that's politics / policy.
Also, it turns out that many of the risks of the vaccine were understated or unknown. That's also not science. And it's especially not science when the "anti-science" people proposed a theory that turned out to be right. Namely, that the risks of the vaccine are not known / being understated.
And yes, a lot of the anti-vax activists also publish a whole bunch of non-scientific bs.
I like vaccines, I got vaccinated, and it pisses me off that the anti-vax people we're right about the risks being unknown / understated. I dunno if I'm still pro-COVID vaccine, but I never thought it was right that people who didn't want the vaccine couldn't enjoy the same rights as those who did. My thoughts were I'm vaccinated, I'm protected, if you want to get COVID without a vaccine, that's your business.
I cite its approval. Again, "the science" mostly revolves around policy, instead of you know, science.
"The science" as presented popularly regarding the COVID vaccines was that the risks were low and it less risky for anyone of any age group to get vaccinated rather than risk COVID, that turned out to be false. For some age groups, especially young people its less risky to get COVID, especially omicron, than to get vaccinated. The messaging still hasn't really changed in this regard.
Either way no matter the risk of COVID, the lockdowns, and vaccine passes, and mask mandates were ridiculous and very unscientific.
I find it just a little surprising that the former Twitter COVID 'misinformation' policy prohibited sharing details concerning the different vulnerabilities between the young and the old. I'd think that an analysis of what information this 'misinformation' policy disallowed would figure into discussions of how the social media sites can aggressively pursue an anti-science through prohibiting the transmission of scientific information.
I know this was only posted here an hour ago, but yikes… the comments here just add even more credibility to the assertion that anti-science sentiment has really spread like a disease.
Even here, where I expect at least a semblance of thoughtful discussion on topics that are based on data and evidence, the comments are littered with Twitter-level reactionary nonsense.
Here’s some data that might explain why some people are so upset. And since most people are unaware of these things and the media ignored/suppressed them, they dismiss such sentiments as “anti-science.”
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-ori...
> I’m constantly surprised at how much of an anti-science, anti-technology undercurrent there is on HN.
I doubt anyone here is anti-science, you can't just cherrypick science results which suit your agenda and call other side anti-science because they see also different results.
As for anti-technology, it's perfectle understandable people who are more familiar with technology than majority of the society are also more aware of potential risks, so they have problems with some new technology which brings new problems.
Again, I really doubt there is anyone denying there is climate change, which is natural phenomenon going continously for millions of years.
The difference between people is some claim it's caused by us, while others claim it's natural and we are actually in cooler period now, so it's no big deal if planet will get warmer to levels seen before which are beneficial for development of life. I would be somewhere in between, of course going by butterfly effect we are contributing to it and maybe accelerating it, but I don't really see it as a bad thing.
I'm anti-science in that I strongly believe that focusing most of our attention and funding on hard science (to the detriment of things like psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, etc) has contributed to the production of the substantial percentage of comments in threads like this that are excessively reductive and heuristic in origin, but not realized as such.
If we had invested more of our resources into understanding people, perhaps we wouldn't be having so many problems (many of which are substantially imaginary) with people.
On the brighter side, there's a popular proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
People here are infected with some dumbness because you disagree?
Here is how I look at it…
If you went through the last three years, and have not come out a least a little more skeptical skeptical of government and our institutions, regardless of intentions; you will want to set the screen down.
The CDC and the WHO being stupid and having more than just public health on the mind when they made decisions changes nothing about the immunology community being fairly consistent and correct in their claims
I'm quite shocked as well. Faced with a criticism of anti-vaxx movements (unequivocably wrong), people are trying to bring up "other side" mistakes as if this is a political debate.
This shows up in a number of areas and I think a major contributing factor is the loss of shared media: 40 years ago you had strong anti-science tendencies (e.g. that's when Exxon started funding climate change-denial, the tobacco companies were at the height of their power, etc.) but there was a limit to how effectively you could promote those narratives without alienating readers / viewers because there wasn't a cost-effective way to produce radically different broadcast programs or newspaper versions and get major advertisers on-board.
That certainly wasn't perfect but it feels like we went from the flintlock musket era of propaganda to automatic weapons around the turn of the century when an increasing fraction of people started getting their news largely from hyper-partisan sources, especially ramping up after 9/11 when things like the warblogs started getting significant traffic numbers and zero editorial restraint.
The biggest reason for concern I have here is that this isn't evenly distributed: it's basically the same people denying climate change, COVID, vaccination, etc. and that means that there isn't a great way for them to come back to a more objective reality without admitting that they were wrong on many issues and, in most cases, rather vicious to people who they used to consider friends. That's a hard pill to swallow and I don't imagine many of them will do it.
> flintlock musket era of propaganda to automatic weapons
Can't wait for the AI propaganda era. The other day on Twitter someone was calling out a protest photo in which a cop's globe had the characteristic six fingers of an AI-hallucinated photo.
We can now manufacture "proof" with photos and audio - and soon video - of anything we want! Isn't this great?
What a fun trope. Hiding behind "this is Science!".
Science is dynamic and ever-changing. It does not stay still. The reality is during the COVID crisis "scientists" who touted only one side of the public risk debate were given the podium and everyone else was shut out. The public won't forget about this.
But even Bill Gates is now saying that it’s just like a cold and only risky for the very elderly. And the virus did leak from a lab? Two of the three points you’re trying to straw-man are rooted in obvious fact.
It's simple: "Science" has lost a lot of its credibility in the past year or two:
Here are some reasons
- Purposeful public misleading of the populus regarding vaccine side effects
- Shaming and censoring of serious, critical voices
- Self-censoring of scientist communities by avoiding publishing of truths that oppose a particular narrative (we have seen evidence of this in the concurrent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34724174)
- Scientists self-censoring for fear of political repercussions
- Heavy public discouragement and shaming of critical thinking that goes against what certain approved "scientists" say
Over the past year alone I have come across several examples for each of these. The bottom line is the public has been, and still is being misled.
You have been fooled regarding science.
Edit: I forgot the classic silent downvoting of course! Best example for what I just said. Constant attempts to silently suppress differing views. Thanks for proving my point.
If the downvoters were scientifically well versed they would at least attempt to make a fool out of me by countering my arguments with better ones, but alas ;)
On the other hand, considering that the downvoters are unable to vocalize their angry reaction to me, I simply consider my argument/observation reinforced.
It certainly illustrates my wider point: When it comes to critics, most people opt to censor (yes, downvoting is a form of censoring) rather than engage, then wonder why the notion that there is something sinister going on is becoming more rather than less accepted.
The anti-vaccine movement is one of the most dangerous mind-viruses in the world. After Covid exacerbated it, we now see lower levels of vaccinations for all types of disease in the West. Millions will die or be physically impaired due to their inability to process information.
As we can see in this thread, unfortunately many (presumably) educated people will end up victims as well.
Another "scientist" to throw in the bin of dogmatic ideologues. If you can't refute opposing claims with evidence then as a scientist you should shut the hell up.
That is what happens when doctors and scientists play politics. A minority of them actively supported the agenda through disinformation, but the vast majority of them sat quietly and offered no pushback - presumably out of fear for being blacklisted. I remember one testifying before Congress that he knew there were clear indications pointing to gain of function tampering, but said nothing because it might influence the upcoming election... Any attempt to garner sympathy from the public, who as a result were coerced into deciding between taking an experimental drug or being fired, will be fruitless.
During the early days of the pandemic I has in a heated discussion on social media about face masks with other scientists (private group of 20k scientists).
I was in favor of using face masks. Most of the comments were by other scientists against using face masks.
Two days later the Surgeon General of the US turns around and openly on YouTube asks for the general population to use face masks. Until this days some people are still using face masks.
Appealing to authority is exactly the opposite of what science stands for.
I feel like I should take a shower after I watch a Peter Hotez interview. I'd probably do the opposite of whatever he said just based on the vibe I get from him.
Science is just a rigorous process for the investigation of natural phenomena. I have no problem with that, for the record.
You will recall that the skepticism about RNA in COVID vaccines was not a sudden break in public health discourse, but was preceded by many years of 'vaccines cause autism!!' arguments and the like, and that a decline in public confidence about vaccine had led to the re-emergence of measles outbreaks in recent years, reversing the long-term trend of declining hospitalization and mortality for well-understood diseases.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] thread> But others are real people tuning into Fox News every night who totally fall into the rabbit hole because they seem to worship these contrarians. The other piece to this is a lot of Nazi imagery and fantasies, a lot of antisemitism, because they know I’m a Jewish scientist. And that’s yet another dimension to all of this.
Watching Scientific Materialists trying to unravel metaphysical causality is a sight to behold.
Some critics of Hotez are antisemites. Therefore according to the principles of guilt by association, critics of scientism are generally antisemites. It follows that it is all hatespeech worthy of censorship.
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/08/04/baylor-professor-calls...
>Baylor Professor Calls for Prosecution of Criticism of Fauci and Other Scientists as Hate Crime
>Yet, what is healthy debate to some is criminal dissent to others. Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine is calling for federal hate-crime protections to be extended to cover criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists.
Causality is kind of "culturally sub-perceptual" (depending to some degree on one's geographical location and cultural/metaphysical training), I like thinking of it like the water in this classic parable:
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?"
Also, it's the classic "Don't meet your heroes", because when the spotlight was pointed at the "scientific community" ( whatever that means.. ), the "plebes" saw a bunch of liars, fraudsters, careerists and also the complete opposite of scientific reasoning. Just like any other field...
In my opinion the main event is the removal of the pristine mask that covered the "scientists" and that's a good thing. However, most of those who "expose the lies" are 10 times worse than the exposed. The only good way forward is to "scientists" go back into doing actual Science and nothing more.
Social media is "just" a multiplier of things due to the networking effect, it can only increase something if the thing is not zero to begin with.
To me it was "The plebs read a bunch of words that they don't understand, running the information through their everyday layman brain and coming to totally wrong conclusions"
This happens all the time. Remember "cell phones will fry your brain"? There is a large subset of the population who will never be able to understand the difference between a microwave oven, microwave communication, radiation, and ionizing radiation.
Which leads to situations where someone from that subset stumbles upon some internal AT&T memo's reads them and comes away with "Holy shit, internally they blatantly talk about building towers that emit radiation over the whole population. Literally building huge microwaves to radiate over massive population centers!"
More often than not, the scientists, engineers, big brains, whatever, have a good grip and the general population is fucking retarded.
There is a huge overlap between '5f panic', anti-vax, panic, and all kinds of other panics. A lot of people who wind up things like the Qanon cult end up there because they had some sort of technological or political anxiety, networked with other people who had similar uncertainties, and were drawn into a radicalization funnel. There is plenty of financial and political capital to be made by fleecing such people.
Flat earth nonsense is another example of the same phenomenon. If you go down that rabbit hole you find a warren of religious fundamentalism, built on the idea that earth ain't flat, space is fake, the Bible explains the stars are tiny lights mounted on a firmament, NASA is a satanic conspiracy, and it's time to take up arms against the forces of evil.
All radical funnels follow the same sort of pattern, which is derived from sales and marketing: goofballs > grifters > true believers > organizers> extremists > martyrs/terrorists. Of course, you can make similar observations about partisan politics, geopolitics and so on; institutions function as funnels for the production of future elites who maintain the status quo through increasingly coercive means. Radicalization funnels differ mainly in terms of transparency, accountability, visibility, and speed of transition.
The "enlightened" should know better since they are.. enlightened. Yet, the "plebs" found out they have exactly the same vices and reprehensible atitudes, plus the usual dismissive attitudes towards everyone "beneath" them.
Many of the "not plebs" do exactly what you described and that's what "changed", the illusion of the benevolent white coat "egg head" was broken. And I think it's a good thing, just by principle. Highly educated people are just as nasty, flawed people as anyone else and if I make a statement, it should be judged by the statement's merits and not by who I am.
The practice of science is something it can be done by everyone, as long as they.. follow the scientific method. Not even scientists follow the scientific method all the time, because they are.. flawed, lazy, greedy, dishonest sometimes. Just like everyone else.
The actual scientific method requires some expertise though in order to determine if any given study is junk science or not.
Someone who hasn't spent their lifetime studying the subject will be at a significant disadvantage, and will generally be completely unable to tell you if a given paper is junk science or not.
And amateur can approximate this knowledge, but what they wind up doing is having read many scientific papers and arguments they have a good "gut feeling" over the skill of a paper, and then they seek out actual expert opinion to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the procedures and weigh any competing expert opinion, combined with literature searches for review articles. You can also do things like read books / watch video courses of at least undergraduate-level dispassionate introductions to subjects.
And since I don't have a scientific degree this is what I wind up doing all the time and I've practiced it for the past 30 years or so.
I rarely see anyone on the internet who is a scientific novice with that level of analysis. They usually stop with the fact that they've got a reference they can cite to try to win an argument and it stops there. The reality of science is that the evidence is always going to be a mess and a morass of conflicting results. You can tease out the actual truth out of there but it requires assembling evidence which is consistent and not contradictory and discarding results which are probably the result of e.g. experimental error and procedural artifacts and not real science. If you have no process at all to do that, then you're not following the scientific method, you're just making biased arguments with scientific-looking references.
And the scientific method ultimately requires trusting experts.
Period. Full fucking stop.
Nobody can possibly figure out all of science themselves, it is too vast, so actual scientists learn over time who and what to trust more or less. Anyone who rejects that approach entirely isn't doing science and most likely doesn't know what they're talking about.
And I rarely see anyone on the Internet who has gone beyond read opinion blogs and spent the hours necessary to just get exposed to the basics of field. With everything that is accessible on the Internet, nearly everyone has access to an undergraduate level education in just about anything. I rarely see anyone railing against scientists and medical professionals who have bothered to take advantage of the free information that is out there though (e.g. for virology basics I'd recommend sitting through all of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLgaHZpZS4 which is just a course on virology).
We know that the official narratives of pandemic response included blatant and even malicious falsehoods designed to create social pressure and nudges for a percieved greater good, and do policymakers and scientists really think that this should come with impunity? Scientists and policymakers were wrong - a lot - and if they want to keep doubling down on antagonizing the people whose trust they have lost, they should probably game it out a bit first.
Do you mean stop criticizing?
Also, what an absurd proposition.
Should we not criticize George W. Bush & the US Government for invading the wrong country in the aftermath of 9/11?
After all, it was an emergency!
At what point does the response change from "it was an emergency!" to... jesus christ you people are incompetent. And you're attempting to censor all the competent people....
Insert some meaningless comparison to firefighters/other heroic profession
Lets not pretend like "scientists" by virtue of their job title are moral paragons or even experts in their fields. Everyone on this website (or like 75%) is a "scientist" to some degree. If you are an educated adult with any sort of scientific background you are fully capable of adjudicating a research paper into the following catagories : utter garbage, a reasonable but unscientific paper, a solid paper, or a questionable but too outside my expertise to grok.
Im no chef but I can tell instant ramen from filet mignon.
The general public is not necessarily capable of this sort of discernment. Which is fine, but we ought not to let people get away with steamrolling people who are more educated and more reasonable by appealing to "science"
"Science" as it is used in popular parlance is a farce.
What I remember is Fauci saying that to be fully effective, protective needs to be fitted and fit-tested and that due to limited supplies, PPE supplies with high levels of protection (i.e. N95 and above) should be reserved for medical staff in order to keep hospitals functioning. There were also numerous experimental studies testing how much reuse of N95 masks was viable.
As supplies became more available, he moderated this position and recommended protective equipment for anybody likely to be exposed.
On March 8, 2020, Fauci said "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask," according to Reuters
https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-said-masks-not-really-effecti...
Spare me the excuses about PPE supplies-- even cloth masks would have helped, especially for original SARS-COV-2. Even if he had been concerned about supply issues (the popular excuse you suggest), he could have not lied to the public about effectiveness and asked (not to mention have the President order) for medical grade masks to be reserved for healthcare workers.
In simple terms, I asked you to put up or shut up, and your response was "no u." If you had an actual point, you should have been more than happy to have been asked to expound upon it.
The two previous zoonotic coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS, had case fatality rates of nearly 10% and over 30% respectively. Before we had reliable clinical data to the contrary, it was reasonable to respond to the very real possibility that COVID had, or very quickly would develop similar lethality.
This risk led to a collaborative effort to sequence the COVID-19 virus and to develop vaccines as quickly as possible. In conjunction with this, there are very large studies evaluating existing drugs using in silico and in vitro efforts to try to find functional bindings. Subsequent to plausible candidates being identified, case studies and then RCTs were conducted on an expedited basis to further qualify candidates.
The result was multiple vaccines that had very high efficacy (the mRNA and a few adenovirus based ones) and several vaccines that exhibited much lower efficacy.
In parallel with this constructive work, there were quite a few charlatans who misconstrued limited clinical evidence or who simply started rumors based on nothing. From this we got people touting inaction, bleach inhalation, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and other bogus treatments with no effect on the disease and variable levels of lethality of the treatment.
Your turn now. You said that promising avenues were willfully ignored. Provide some examples.
EUA can only be used when no alternative treatment exists. As such, there was a huge coordinated effort to both discredit potential treatments ("horsey paste ahaha!!") or to just not study them. Any alternative would have meant no EUA, meaning no big vaccine contracts. We choose a path that favored the manufacturers, at the expense of alternative treatments. Treatment avenues were ignored.
0% liability for vaccine manufacturers, yet the public message that it's 100% safe. How is it possible for those two to exist and not cause cognitive dissonance? If it's 100% safe, then the manufacturers don't need any protection, and if they have 0% liability, then they have deemed that there exists a financial risk that they are not comfortable with. Otherwise it would have been "this is 100% safe and we back it by the life of our organization." Avenues to reinforce the public trust were ignored.
Why did the CDC stop tracking breakthrough infections in 2021? Shouldn't this be considered very important information to understand how our tools and the virus are performing? We're choosing to discard data instead of vacuuming it all up. Why? Relevant data was ignored.
We didn't try to take the debate, or even much acknowledge tradeofs. These were written of as "allow grandma to die", but if we accept that the period of 18-24 is crucial for adults to find themselves, then we essentially cut 1/3 of that time, which may have several decades of life impact, to add (maybe) a few more years to grandmas life.
I am not saying it wasn't the right choice. I am saying that anybody who disagreed were not offered a chair at the decision table (or zoom room), but were actively bullied and called science deniers. Needless to say that doesn't make them want to hear our arguments either.
Then there is the entire: no mask, masks maybe, masks are essential but you don't have to wear one that isn't made from simple cloth.
Finally it seemed to me that the WHO was more concerned with making sure China didn't get insulted than to deal with the dicease. Anywhere else it would have been called China flu, and there wouldn't have been a debate over it. Suddenly we had to talk about how this was not Chinas fault and we even had these stupid "hug a Chinese person" campaigns in the beginning.
How many kids are without one of their parents now because of covid? It's a global emergency, there is no option that allows people to pretend nothing is happening.
For me an example would be the early “masks don’t work” rhetoric, but then simultaneously also telling the public not to buy masks because healthcare workers need them.
The early recode article mocking Silicon Valley for avoiding contact early on and “panicking” because it was “just the flu” and concern was anti-China racism.
Later on the repeated stories pushed by MSM about the lab leak hypothesis being a “conspiracy theory” when it remains if not the most likely source, still a probable one.
Science is about testing a hypothesis, updating, and discussing tradeoffs honestly - often “believe in science” types are not about science at all, but about authority and political partisanship/cognitive bias.
The tragedy is this erodes trust. Then when something important is actually true like the vaccines are very effective and people should take them they lie about that too (zero risks, 100% effective, etc.) vs. being honest about it (very effective, but not 100%, risks are rare and better on net than contracting disease etc.)
The dishonesty makes it easy for more harmful conspiracy to arise because they’ve lost trust of the public (for good reason imo). Most people that think independently outside of consensus will do it poorly.
“Believe in science” was used to defend the (wrong) stuff in my comment, it’s a proxy for believe authority or believe media.
If we want people to understand the value of science we should share the evidence and explain what the hypothesis is with the nuance and uncertainty present rather than patronizingly play 3D-chess because we assume the public is too dumb to know what’s good for them.
Some people and institutions did this, but most did not.
Science as an institution is no stranger to this kind of bullshit either: radical mastectomy and halsted’s “theories” of cancer, skinner and behaviorism (really all of psychology due to the replication crisis), mendel’s peas being ignored for 40yrs, phrenology, etc. When it becomes believe the authority instead of about the evidence bad things happen.
The difference of course is that anti-vaxxers and other anti-science types were and are literally dying due to their belief in nonsense and conspiracies.
> that is not understandable. It's a dramatic and seemingly emotional overreaction
I think what you mean is "rational" in some platonic sense of the word rational. It is entirely understandable that humans, as sometimes irrational and always emotional creatures could react this way. It is not all history that we're talking about, as your own example demonstrates, merely the "history" and the institutions that provided the history that you grew up with.
> The difference of course is that anti-vaxxers and other anti-science types were and are literally dying due to their belief in nonsense and conspiracies.
Plenty of innocent people died and had their lives ruined or negatively impacted because of the nonsense beliefs and decisions made by the "follow the science" crowd. Which science was being followed when hospitals decided they did not need a stockpile of masks? Which science was being followed when it was decided that schools must be closed? Which science was being followed when it was decreed that masking children would have no negative impact on their development?
A problem: you are falling victim to the very same phenomenon as the "people" you criticize: mistaking your perception of affairs to be an accurate representation of actual affairs.
You do not actually possess knowledge about what is going on in the minds of your outgroup members, you only have belief. If Normies could get their own affairs sorted out, maybe they could demonstrate by example how to think in a logically an epistemically sound manner, but until they do me and my fellow conspiracy theorists (as flawed as they are) will continue being a thorn in your sides.
> If I grew up hating the way history was taught and communicated because of pro-Western biases and whitewashing atrocities and American exceptionalism, and my response is to decide history is bullshit and I'm going to believe instead in some gibberish I found on a blog or a podcast, that is not understandable.
To what degree is this actually happening though? If you cannot question the accuracy of your beliefs, why should the members of your outgroup?
Also, note that "not understandable" has a dependency on your abilities as well.
> The difference of course is that anti-vaxxers and other anti-science types were and are literally dying due to their belief in nonsense and conspiracies.
And taking others with them!
Best put on our thinking caps and figure out what's actually happening if you ask me.
This is an entirely different category, and SC not mirror science e.g in it's process following scientific processes/principles, despite the dependencies between the fields.
For post talks about what "policymakers and scientists really think" - it doesn't matter what scientists think (in this context), this is about policymakers and science-communicators (who may or may not also be scientists, or have such a background).
TLDR, scientific authority has been "weaponised", and the backlash is as much against the weapon as the wielder. Not a surprise the true wielders are scapegoating "scientists" as the instigators.
My own naivety is that I believed an education obligates one to have intellectual courage. When actual scientists align with people whose best arguments are to chant slogans like "denialists!", "source!", "pandemic of the unvaccinated!", "misinformation!", "hateful!" they are complicit. The scientists who went along to get along did so at the cost of betraying their fellow citizens who lost their jobs and livelihoods over matters of principle, and indeed some of their lives to the consequences of pandemic policy.
It's quite serious. A scientist or doctor mouthing talking points for attention on twitter is an expression of that betrayal, and worse, a contempt that is difficult to reconcile. I hope people are unnerved enough by it to reflect a bit more deeply.
Those are simply not the same things. The government response was calibrated based on what the scientific consensus was at the time, and whoever followed those guidelines (including vaccination) had a much lower chance of suffering and dying in the last two years. The other "side" was trying to convince people to try hocus-pocus medicine and avoid the only effective strategy for prevention.
The calculator for evaluating truthiness in those people is missing functionality, or at least it's operating on a different set of rules.
To "those people" there are certain lines, which after being crossed, make it impossible to recover any ground.
It's not hard to connect the dots of corporate profits and policy. If readers think eugenics is a barbaric relic of the past, I have a sweet lullaby to whisper in your ear.
I, for example, suggested to a number of non-scientifically trained friends that the scientific consensus about vaccines was pretty strong, that the vaccine studies were well conducted and that they should trust this scientific view of vaccines. Essentially, "trust the science" as opposed to "trust people trying to make political hay by fear-mongering".
You are saying that I am a moron. In fact, I am not.
Your description fit my own actions pretty accurately.
Or, maybe, you could just be less insulting as opposed to going for the highly nuanced position of being less indiscriminately insulting.
Because the pandemic pushed a lot of people toward videoconference etc, hardcore medical knowledge is actually more accessible than ever before. People who were really, truly interested in what medical scientists and public health experts thought about COVID-19 could go to youtube channels like the UCSF grand rounds and get the straight dope from doctors at the leading edge of policy and research, talking to an audience of other doctors and getting down into the weeds of cellular biology, DNA base pairs, and statistical significance.
I've never seen any of the 'do your own research' crowds cite any of this work. When they cite something, it's wrapped in 17 layers of confirmation bias. If you complain about fallacies from people who are generally trying to simplify things for an audience that demands simple explanations, and then ignore that fallacious arguments coming from their intellectual or ideological opponents, are you wandering off into fallacy yourself?
How the hell is steve the plumber supposed to be able to independently interpret research papers that require a stats understanding, some calc, some background knowledge in chemistry etc, to actually understand? These papers are written by people who have been steeped in extremely tiny segments of their field for a decade. A layman cannot understand that.
You can’t ask the avg Joe to trust if you abuse that trust with policy decisions that just happen to benefit a political ideology.
We can't launder poor arguments through complexity/uncertainty boxes like the USC grand rounds videos and say, "well, unless you understand this granular level, you can't disagree with this lateral and aggregate policy one." I wonder if on a basic level the people who argue like that aren't engaged in discovering truth, but actuated by merely avoiding criticism and seeking to align to something symbolic that protects them. This may be the crux of the disagreement.
If I have an ideological position, it is that I believe my opposing team is engaged in the neutralization of discourse because for them to prevail in their power struggles they only need for principled people to do nothing. This is perhaps the divide. There are people aligned to an ideal of truth that originates in religious cultural beliefs, and people aligned to a fear of criticism that originates in a more materialist ideology.
This scope shift from an "appeal to authority" to reframing it as a "deference to authority," in the counter argument doesn't counter my original point, which was that scientists may feel they are under seige because they have been exploited in appeals to authority, and feel blowback from some people who understood that ploy and rejected it. They are orthogonal concepts.
Sure, media defers to experts, they tell stories that include them, but the variations like "this is true because authority says so", "authority said: do this or become a hate figure," and "you are suffering because of these non-believers, just ask these authorities" were disingenuous rhetorical devices employed by media and policymakers with no objection from actual scientists.
Maybe these scientists would feel less threatened if they had less fear of criticism and more intellectual courage.
Note that appeal to authority isn't a logical fallacy- because scientific arguments are not pure logic. Instead, we use priors (authority) to evaluate the quality of statements. |
I don't agree the pandemic response was filled with malicious falsehoods; the public health officials acted in good faith. I think most people haven't benen public health officials during a global emergency and fail to appreciate the challenges of threading all the needles simultaneously.
such as dubious methods, lack of replication or claims based on surveys or non-academic studies, inappropriate or overreaching conclusions e.g. specificities derived from generalizations, etc.
I think the clearest example is IAT (implicit bias testing), which has dubious foundations, but seems to have taken off as a "scientific" thing, at least in the corporate world. Sometimes accompanied by a motte-and-bailey where the results of the test, and the correct conclusions of the results, are left vague; or what a "bias" is left undefined so you can easily be lead to believe it equates to e.g. racism.
I agree entirely that social science news reporting is crap. I should have been much clearer about that.
There is a spectrum of science.
In the middle there are the hard verifiable objective things. And on the ends are subjective or unprovable theories.
The goal is to increase that middle band over time.
Science, scientific papers, scientists, universities have always been subject to weaponizing in the past. Tell me... Are eggs good for you or not?
Here's a question - is it "correct" that health officials should lie if they believe it will lead to net positive outcome? Is this still good faith?
To what extend should net population outcomes compete with individual outcomes? e.g. downplaying risks of the vaccine, such that individuals with complications are essentially sacrificed in favor of the larger number of people without.
Remember, the health officials promoting vaccines now lived through the antivax movement that occurred pre-COVID. That movement greatly overhyped vaccine risks in a way that convinced large numbers of people to not get vaccinated. How would you, as a good faith public health official, respond if your opponents are extreme liars with no scientific basis?
Regarding intent and threading needles, I spent the pandemic working in a public health system, after over a decade in health information privacy policy and systems, so I lack this comment's uncertainty about malice. Anyone who worked in health and thought or even said anti-vaxxers were hateful and better off dead was not providing honest service. In healthcare and in particular public health, I'd argue that's not a mere opinion, it's something much darker and more culpable. G-word level questions arise.
If we are dealing in truth, we are dealing in logic, and the last best empirical result is not exempt from that standard unless we actively dispense with it. Science is practiced, it is not litigated, or worse: advocated.
There is no "appeal to authority" here; Hotez IS one of the worlds leading authorities on both vaccines and anti-science aggression, which is exactly what it is.
Of course, you are free to believe the liars over the people who are actually doing the hard work of figuring out the real science.
But do not pretend that you are doing anyone any good. I'm sure you feel all self-righteous "sticking it to the man" and aggressively countering a leading expert, and partaking of (pseudo-)"knowledge" that is exclusive to you (self-)select insiders. This is a known and scientifically studied part of the attraction of conspiracy and junk science. While you pride yourself to not being a slave to the "authorities", you are merely a slave to the scammers and hucksters.
It is not your belief in some "contrarian" tropes that makes you a free thinker.
What would make you a free thinker is the ability to look at evidence and science and freely adjust your beliefs accordingly.
It seems odd that you point fingers at some of their perceived failures without acknowledging how many hundreds of thousands of people owe their lives to these scientists and policymakers.
I fear the whole tech idea "move fast and break things" bled into society, and has caused a lot of irreversible damage.
At my firm, the executive class are extraordinary distrustful of every expert lately from economics,finance, tech, and even science. These are people with multiple high level degrees like mba, phds, and masters! This happened with the last year, which is the surprising part.
Maybe we'll call this the decade of mistruth. What really sucks is soon, we won't be able to tell in forums such as this, who's interests are on the other side of the text generator / click farm. I hope we can come up solutions to have trust again.
I work in tech now. I see orders of magnitude more honest debate in software engineering than in academia. On a tech team a Linus or a Steve Jobs can win, even though they may have some personal imperfections, they deliver major products. Winners in academia tend to be those who are best at working the social and administrative game. Questioning the herd is not a viable career strategy.
(Whether for good reasons, evil reasons, or stupid reasons, the public trust in “public health” has been broken, and the public health institution is naturally going to grieve that loss)
As well as the loss of a lot of lives.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/five-fallacies-of...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/20170...
The subjective experience defines a plethora of factors which are hard to fit into a general theory. If you live in a high-crime neighbourhood, you'd better trust your anecdotal evidence instead of relying on nation-wide sociological evidence.
You: why are personal anecdotes worthless?
Binary thinking is too transparent. You seem to be using binary thinking to suggest that if anecdotes have any value, they must be treated as having equal value with any other source of data, including rigorously designed and executed studies.
The financial incentives in pharmaceutical research are particularly corrupting due to their size.
The actual "peer review" is when people try to make similar observations to what you did (replication) or when people try to build on your work and fail to. This is why we know the amyloid hypothesis isn't very good even though it regularly passes "peer review" and gets into journals: We can't build on it and things it predicts don't happen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
He had utter disrespect for the science of the times, and held his own hamstringed ideas above all. Yet he was able to express them. And eventually he would get to play his small part in the advancement of the knowledge of humanity. And this is precisely how science operates. In science one does not HAVE to do anything. Had Galileo instead been determined that e.g. Jupiter is the center of the universe, and spent an equally feverish amount of energy trying to demonstrate such, then we wouldn't know his name today - but his work and ideas would have been no less scientific - but merely wrong.
Just because some legit scientists were dismissed as quacks does not make every quack a scientist.
It really really wasn't. There were already models of the solar system that had the sun as the central element. Often they just weren't as good at predicting the movement of the stars because the prevailing mathematical models were very overfitted to the (bad) data, so it always looked closer. Really it had just been refined very well.
Some things to keep in mind: The scientific method didn't exist, the idea of representing the world as mathematical models to predict things and understand physics was barely there, and the primary purpose of the mathematical models of the solar system was to make astrology better. Nobody really cared about whether the world was helio or geo centric, because the idea of deferring to mathematical models was not considered the gold standard we have today.
*P = 0.005
Science is a method. Science is a method humans use in order to create a repeatable experiment, with repeatable outcomes. That's it.
As our tools improve our measurements, those measurements lead to a greater understanding of the world around us.
That is science. It's why science seems to change, because our tools improve, our measurements improve, and our data gathered becomes more refined.
Science is simply a tool used to garner truths.
(I know at least one scientist who no longer dares post about their work on social media, because it's immunology. Not even anything to do with COVID, just immunology as a field!)
Also, it turns out that many of the risks of the vaccine were understated or unknown. That's also not science. And it's especially not science when the "anti-science" people proposed a theory that turned out to be right. Namely, that the risks of the vaccine are not known / being understated.
And yes, a lot of the anti-vax activists also publish a whole bunch of non-scientific bs.
I like vaccines, I got vaccinated, and it pisses me off that the anti-vax people we're right about the risks being unknown / understated. I dunno if I'm still pro-COVID vaccine, but I never thought it was right that people who didn't want the vaccine couldn't enjoy the same rights as those who did. My thoughts were I'm vaccinated, I'm protected, if you want to get COVID without a vaccine, that's your business.
"The science" as presented popularly regarding the COVID vaccines was that the risks were low and it less risky for anyone of any age group to get vaccinated rather than risk COVID, that turned out to be false. For some age groups, especially young people its less risky to get COVID, especially omicron, than to get vaccinated. The messaging still hasn't really changed in this regard.
Either way no matter the risk of COVID, the lockdowns, and vaccine passes, and mask mandates were ridiculous and very unscientific.
Even here, where I expect at least a semblance of thoughtful discussion on topics that are based on data and evidence, the comments are littered with Twitter-level reactionary nonsense.
I doubt anyone here is anti-science, you can't just cherrypick science results which suit your agenda and call other side anti-science because they see also different results.
As for anti-technology, it's perfectle understandable people who are more familiar with technology than majority of the society are also more aware of potential risks, so they have problems with some new technology which brings new problems.
That's anti-science
The difference between people is some claim it's caused by us, while others claim it's natural and we are actually in cooler period now, so it's no big deal if planet will get warmer to levels seen before which are beneficial for development of life. I would be somewhere in between, of course going by butterfly effect we are contributing to it and maybe accelerating it, but I don't really see it as a bad thing.
If we had invested more of our resources into understanding people, perhaps we wouldn't be having so many problems (many of which are substantially imaginary) with people.
On the brighter side, there's a popular proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Here is how I look at it…
If you went through the last three years, and have not come out a least a little more skeptical skeptical of government and our institutions, regardless of intentions; you will want to set the screen down.
That certainly wasn't perfect but it feels like we went from the flintlock musket era of propaganda to automatic weapons around the turn of the century when an increasing fraction of people started getting their news largely from hyper-partisan sources, especially ramping up after 9/11 when things like the warblogs started getting significant traffic numbers and zero editorial restraint.
The biggest reason for concern I have here is that this isn't evenly distributed: it's basically the same people denying climate change, COVID, vaccination, etc. and that means that there isn't a great way for them to come back to a more objective reality without admitting that they were wrong on many issues and, in most cases, rather vicious to people who they used to consider friends. That's a hard pill to swallow and I don't imagine many of them will do it.
Can't wait for the AI propaganda era. The other day on Twitter someone was calling out a protest photo in which a cop's globe had the characteristic six fingers of an AI-hallucinated photo.
We can now manufacture "proof" with photos and audio - and soon video - of anything we want! Isn't this great?
I am anti-rape, but I am not anti-sex.
Science is dynamic and ever-changing. It does not stay still. The reality is during the COVID crisis "scientists" who touted only one side of the public risk debate were given the podium and everyone else was shut out. The public won't forget about this.
The other side being 'it's just a cold/flu', 'only the unfit will die', 'statistics are fake', 'muh Chinese bioweapon' etc.
Edit: you know it's true. 'touting' suggests bad faith, and ignoring the existence of bad faith discourse in the opposite direction is facile.
Here are some reasons
- Purposeful public misleading of the populus regarding vaccine side effects
- Shaming and censoring of serious, critical voices
- Self-censoring of scientist communities by avoiding publishing of truths that oppose a particular narrative (we have seen evidence of this in the concurrent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34724174)
- Scientists self-censoring for fear of political repercussions
- Heavy public discouragement and shaming of critical thinking that goes against what certain approved "scientists" say
Over the past year alone I have come across several examples for each of these. The bottom line is the public has been, and still is being misled.
You have been fooled regarding science.
Edit: I forgot the classic silent downvoting of course! Best example for what I just said. Constant attempts to silently suppress differing views. Thanks for proving my point.
If the downvoters were scientifically well versed they would at least attempt to make a fool out of me by countering my arguments with better ones, but alas ;)
You are not entitled to a response just because you are angry about something.
On the other hand, considering that the downvoters are unable to vocalize their angry reaction to me, I simply consider my argument/observation reinforced.
It certainly illustrates my wider point: When it comes to critics, most people opt to censor (yes, downvoting is a form of censoring) rather than engage, then wonder why the notion that there is something sinister going on is becoming more rather than less accepted.
As we can see in this thread, unfortunately many (presumably) educated people will end up victims as well.
Now we have a population and climate crisis.
If idiots want to end themselves by not vaccinating maybe we should stop fighting them?
I am still 99% immune against the Cov,
and I am 100% immune against vaccine side effects.
Who is the idiot now?
As Bill Gates said, "to get zero GHG's one of those has to go to zero".
I was in favor of using face masks. Most of the comments were by other scientists against using face masks.
Two days later the Surgeon General of the US turns around and openly on YouTube asks for the general population to use face masks. Until this days some people are still using face masks.
Appealing to authority is exactly the opposite of what science stands for.
Science denial is a self inflicted wound.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Science is just a rigorous process for the investigation of natural phenomena. I have no problem with that, for the record.
You will recall that the skepticism about RNA in COVID vaccines was not a sudden break in public health discourse, but was preceded by many years of 'vaccines cause autism!!' arguments and the like, and that a decline in public confidence about vaccine had led to the re-emergence of measles outbreaks in recent years, reversing the long-term trend of declining hospitalization and mortality for well-understood diseases.