> There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't.

The underlying problem isn't actually a problem with science, it's a problem with politics.

You need to hire some scientists to do your experiments. If they follow the scientific method, you get results using the best system we know how.

But if they follow the scientific method then the Republicans work to defund climate science research and the Democrats work to cancel any scientist whose results challenge the orthodoxy on race or gender.

And if politics interferes then it's not science anymore. If research leading to politically inconvenient results has its funding withdrawn or scientists are intimidated into self-censorship then it's all just selection bias and fudging the numbers.

Maybe what we need is to do something like the court system, where you have multiple research funding "judges" which have lifetime appointments and each get a given amount of research money to dole out every year, and their job is to decide how to spend it. Then they can spend it however they like and can only be removed for e.g. corruption, not for funding research somebody doesn't like.

This is the fundamental problem with "evidence led policy". As soon as science can reliably affect policy outcomes, people who want to change policy outcomes will corrupt the science.

Yup this. In much the same way as things like judging the productivity of software developers by the number of lines of code they write. It sounds like a good idea to the inexperienced, and it may even seem sort of true if you look at it in the right way. But we all know, as soon as you try to make consequential decisions based on it, it will immediately be gamed and not true anymore.

You raise an interesting hypothesis - that all interactions between science and policy making is subject to Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).

In as much as science deals with things that cannot be affected by policy (ex: stellar physics or nuclear fusion), the "law" doesn't apply I think, except maybe in perception (people may believe that a particular nuclear fusion technique doesn't work even though it's been demonstrated but policy forbade it to be implemented).

For some cases, we would want Goodhart's law to apply - ex: climate change. We'd want actions to be taken to reduce the impact on the planet as we gather and report climate parameters accurately. Similarly, we'd want accurate reporting of gender discrimination in society to result in the reduction of such discrimination. The question really is the way the change is effected. If "salary difference" is an indicator of gender discrimination for example, law makers can pass laws that fix it, thereby removing its effectiveness as an indicator .. but we're happy for even that at some level. That would be similar to a government sending teams to re-freeze melting glaciers because climate scientists are using it as an indicator of global warming.

True policy thinkers, though, would want to ask the "five whys" and work to fix the underlying problem.

It won't matter.

Eventually the governments who support technology will win - either via war or economic advantage.

How is that not mattering? So if China uses science and the US descends further into hyper-partisan culture war, that doesn't matter?

It matters kind of a lot whether the winner is a liberal democracy with free speech and civil liberties or a totalitarian communist dictatorship.

My point was that eventually the anti-science policymakers will eventually lose out. Societies that value technology and science will win in the end - they will have economic advantages and advantages in war.

> It matters kind of a lot whether the winner is a liberal democracy with free speech and civil liberties or a totalitarian communist dictatorship.

This is irrelevant to the conversation, but yes that is why we spend trillions on defense technology, so that if it comes to blows we don't lose out.

At the beginning (early March 2020) we were told that the lockdowns would last for at most a month or two, in order to "flatten the curve", at least that's what "science" was telling us. I know I believed in that, even though I'm no scientist.

One year on and that "prophecy" (because that's what that was, just a prophecy) turned out to be pretty damn false. Nevertheless, we still let the people/scientists who deceived us back in March 2020 to take "science"-based decisions that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions going forward. Nobody will be held responsible, apart from a few politicians.

"Flattening the curve" definitely worked, and you can see that in the data. However, what you're not accounting for is what happened AFTER the lockdowns were effective.

Experts worked on detailed plans for staged re-opening after the lockdown. I don't know about Europe, but the US did not follow such a plan. Different states reacted differently, and politics had a bigger say in how reopening was done than any epidemiologist.

I think you are very mistaken if you think that. Lockodwn appeared to work, but given that it takes at least 20 days from catching covid to dying, you can see in many countries that the curves for deaths were flattening off well before lockdown could have been the cause. Uruguay, Japan, Sweden, Belarus didn't lockdown, and don't stand out in any way for their numbers.

Japan has a far different culture than the US, people wear masks in normal times there.

And Sweden wasn't exactly a success, and has done far worse than their nordic neighbors, say, Norway. The numbers do not lie here.

Belarus had a very effective plan - they tested far earlier and more often, and have far more hospital beds per person.

Straight up country comparison is just a fool's game. We will have to learn from this as best we can - what worked, what didn't work, where, and why. If everyone wore masks properly, was lockdown necessary? We need time to study and find answers.

Sweden was very average for Europe without any tyranny from government. I would say that is success. Here in Spain we had many more of our rights taken away and still had more deaths with corona.

> Sweden wasn't exactly a success, and has done far worse than their nordic neighbors, say, Norway

> Straight up country comparison is just a fool's game

This idea of 'flatten the curve' is pretty easy to prove false with a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Like: how many people that simultaneously have corona can the hospitals support? From that it follows how much time it takes for everyone to get corona. When I did that calculation back in March I found that it was a few years. So, the consequnce of 'flatten the curve' is a few years of lockdowns. A very bad conclusion....

The story told to the general public was obviously not the story to be closest to scientific truth, but instead the story that was thought to lead to the least severe outcomes. Nobody really knew the real fatality rate last year, the numbers could range from more than 10% to about 0.1%. If they turned out to be about 10%, quarantene would be essential in stopping the spread of the infection. Also, higher fatality rate would mean that the infection rate would be relatively low (as the number of dead were known), meaning that it would be realistically possible to exterminate the virus. On the other edge of the spectrum, the fatality rate might be near 0.1%, but the infection rate would be much higher. If this held true, flatting the curve would actually be a good strategy. Finally, if the true fatality rate would be around 1% (roughly the real number), the one would "flatten the curve" until a vaccine could be provided, as if hospitals had been flooded way behond what has happened, the fatality rate could easily be 2-4x higher. In the case of the US, that could mean around 10 million dead by now, if no lockdown or social distancing had been attempted.

Of course, had no action been taken to slow it down, and millions had died last spring (in the US alone), the public opinion would strongly demand a lockdown, as well as become so scared that they voluntarily self-isolate.

This doesn't work because this assumes no learning takes place.

As you can see we now have vaccines - it would not have been a few years of lockdowns.

I'm not sure I understand.

New Zealand did lockdowns for a month or two and became completely Covid free.

China did lockdowns for a month or two and became almost Covid free.

Most European countries did lockdowns for a month or two and were quite open over the summer.

So either it was a different prophecy in the rest of the world or the prophecy was correct after all.

>completely Covid free.

not any more https://time.com/5939502/new-zealand-covid-19-lockdown/

It's 3 cases and they are already implementing a city-wide lockdown.

Other 100+ countries did the lockdown as well and didn’t have the same results as NZ, science would thus tell us that what happened in NZ was the exception/statistical anomaly.

Okay, so you are saying that lockdowns do work, albeit in exceptional cases.

Then how did the lockdowns work in say New Zealand or Australia, or Singapore, or China? What is the mechanism of action?

Through severe restrictions on travel, people coming in the country and invasion of privacy.

I know Australian people in Europe who haven't been able to visit home in a year. I know second-hand that in China if you had multi-stop flights you needed to quarantine at every stop. I don't know what test and trace measures the AU and NZ governments decided on, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't like them if I knew.

And it's easy to say 'well, good, people shouldn't travel now' - but this is not just about holiday. These restrictions keep families apart, make it more difficult for people to care for each other. Imagine someone close to you is in distress and you can't go help them because of this, how would you feel?

I don't know about you, but I would not want to live in China, even it gets to zero covid. And I wouldn't particularly like being isolated in AU or NZ either.

Completely agree, would not want to live in China either.

My comment was a response to parent, who feels betrayed by science, because lockdowns were supposed to work.

What I will say though is that there is no win scenario. It's lose-lose, either way. A non-Covid world does not exist anymore. Lockdowns come with exactly the downsides you describe. No lockdowns come with an overload of the health care system and high death tolls. Light lockdowns are a combination of both.

Both proponents and opponents share the same motivations by the way - to be able to see relatives, meet other people etc.

> Lockdowns come with exactly the downsides you describe. No lockdowns come with an overload of the health care system and high death tolls.

Please stop pushing the unproven narrative that lockdowns stop the healthcare system being overloaded. It's morally wrong to push for such a destructive policy without good supporting evidence.

Sweden, Japan, Uraguay, South Korea. No lockdown. No problem for any of those healthcare systems. It can be easily shown that curves were flattening before lockdown had a chance to take effect.

This is about as close as we will get to a controlled trail on lockdowns.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.28.20248936v...

You are absolutely right, lockdowns are just a proxy, the real factor is behaviour. If everybody behaves lockdown-like, lockdown can be avoided.

You don't need lockdowns to stop the healthcare system from being overloaded, if everybody wears masks, socially distances, agrees to track, trace and isolate programmes, there is mass testing, no incentives for people to come to work sick, etc. One year on we have a pretty good estimate how each behaviour/measure influences the reproduction rate of Covid-19.

> Please stop pushing the unproven narrative that lockdowns stop the healthcare system being overloaded.

I don't understand what exactly is unproven. Lockdowns correlate with behaviour. The Chinese healthcare system was completely overwhelmed, even with CCP spin on things. In Bergamo, Italy, the dead were carried away in army trucks. Look at fatality rates for both countries at the time.

> If everybody behaves lockdown-like, lockdown can be avoided.

Speculation without evidence.

Lockdowns are apolitical decision, not a scientific one. Lockdowns can be avoided if governments choose not to implement them. But most seem to be relishing in the emergency powers given to them.

Fine but this isn't evidence that lockdowns don't work, they clearly do work, it's just that in many places people put their freedom above other people's chance of getting sick and dying in Covid. If it was a higher risk of death I think that calculus would change.

>Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected.

But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people?

One prime example is last years long and detailed study on how there was no "gay gene". In effect, homosexual activity and inclinations could not be shown to be the result of any specific gene expression after many trials and searches for such.

The scientists, worried about how this result would look to the public, worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups to shape how the paper would be released to the media and explained to the public[1].

Now, a sizable portion in HN's demographic will feel this is all well and good, but how far should this go? The uncomfortable truth here is that people are not "born gay" as we have been told so often. And that has been a very important talking point in the past two decades when debating about gay rights. Many people were convinced to support gay rights for this reason alone (however we might feel about that, it's true). They very well may feel duped by scientists and no longer "trust the science". How far should scientists go to shield the public from uncomfortable truths? And how much will the public continue to trust them when such veiling of the truth is made known to them?

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6

The problem I have with your comment is likely the reason the scientists were worried about how best to communicate their results:

"sexual orientation is not the expression of any one gene" is not the same as "people are not born gay".

It may be a complex genetic interaction or it may be some other effect at play, but whatever it is, it doesn't contradict that people don't choose their sexual orientation.

Since people have justified all sorts of atrocities based on the misconception that being queer is a choice for people that they could just not make, I can understand scientists who want to make sure their research doesn't fuel that again.

While you appear to suggest that reference [1] is a bad thing, or even a slippery slope, there's not really any indication that these consultations had an adverse impact on the quality of the results.

Communication is an incredibly tricky thing. Even when the science is sound, shortsighted approaches at communication can have serious repercussions, even potentially causing deaths (think public health guidance being misinterpreted, misunderstood, or decontextualized, for example).

Being conscious of this doesn't dilute the truth of the message, and being respectful/mindful of others doesn't mean we need to compromise on the science either.

For clarity: this is not a response to any part of your comment other than the reference to the nature article.

> But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people?

That isn't a problem with science. It is politics .. as @AnthonyMouse noted.

It's generally cheaper to buy a scientist than to buy a politician.