Science is not a war. The old saying, "in a war, truth is the first casualty" shows how science, which is supposed to be about the truth, should be kept as far from warlike thinking and behavior as possible. Embracing the war metaphor destroys the possibility of objective, dispassionate inquiry.

It also creates a disastrous precedent for the future, since people will be reconditioned by having engaged in this warlike behavior.

How is highlighting that he hasnt fiished his Phd an ad-hominem in that context? He s attacking the methodological flaws in the first sentence and his media portrayal as expert in the second. This should not be off-limits. (Their flaws are extensively discussed in the paper btw)

He also attacked Theranos for their media portrayal and secrecy long before anyone else did. Was that an ad hominem too? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/21109...

> Of course that aside his predictions throughout the pandemic have been consistently terrible and undersold the threat, so I'm honestly not sure why we're still listening to the man.

Now you 're making an ad-hominem too (just like the tweet you linked)

> dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives.

You really can't say that. Years later, with hindsight we ll be able to assess how many lives were lost because of the rampant policy errors all around. The pandemic was in no way optimally handled

> How is highlighting that he hasnt fiished his Phd an ad-hominem in that context

Isn't discussing the author's credentials pretty much the definition of an ad hominem? It goes against the person and not the argument the person has made.

like i said the arguments are discussed extensively in multiple places in that paper. in this case he uses their lack of credentials to explain why they made such errors. it would be a fallacy if attacking them was all he did (and shows why twitter and decontextualized snippets are bad for any kind of in-depth arguments)

> in this case he uses their lack of credentials to explain why they made such errors

There is nothing extraordinary or wrong about people publishing articles while they "hasn't finished their Phd". Having published articles is practically required prior getting Phd. As such, it cant possibly explain anything. What Loanides is doing there is manipulating people who dont know how science works, how Phd is obtained nor know and how publishing works into thinking there is something lesser about author.

In the context of "scientific norms" this is egregiously bad behavior on Loanides side.

except he doesn't because the excerpt does not exist in the final published article. and he doesnt use twitter

Having an ad hominem alongside a different argument doesn't mean it's not an ad hominem in my book. Why not point out the errors without the additional ad hominem "explanation"?

You could -- but that's no reason to dismiss the whole paper. The linked tweet is using the ad hominem accusation to lie: the paper did address the flaws in their analysis - in fact he explains in detail why he thinks they were biased.

If you read the final paper (linked by bergstorm) it doesn't contain any of the excerpts that he screen-shotted. They probably existed in an early preprint of the paper, but they don't exist in the final paper! : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554

Nowhere did I say the entire paper should be dismissed. Having an ad hominem is a smell though.

It's good to treat it as a war in terms of policy, but that doesn't mean scepticism should be shot in science. I don't think it was though, that is an exaggeration in the article.

>A pandemic is a state of exception, and countries that acted swiftly, with utmost precaution in mind, dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives.

Prove it. I want definitive proof that the measures they took saved more lives than alternative measures that might have been taken.

tl;dr: Sweden's non-intervention killed 10x (!) more people (per 100,000), led to higher rise in unemployment, and a further shrinking economy compared to neighboring countries [1].

Of course it's impossible to "prove" which measures had which impact without running the same experiment 10000 times on 10000 different Earths.

But here's almost a (horrible) controlled experiment, as close to an apples-to-apples comparison we'll ever get:

Sweden, famously praised by some U.S. politicians for its non-intervention response to COVID, suffered significantly more both in terms of loss of human lives (10x (!) more people (per 100,000) killed than in neighboring countries), and economically (more , than its direct neighbors:

"Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway."

"Plus, Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%."

"Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...

Sweden isn't even in the top 25 for deaths. So, basically them doing nothing was still better than a bunch of 1st world countries with all sorts of strict lockdown measures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

You're cherry picking, and the country you're doing it with is pretty weak evidence.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

Here's a fun one. Explain why states with less strict mandates aren't worse.

'Apples-to-apples' is the keyword you need to read up on.

Not really since you're trying to use 3 Scandinavian countries, one of which is attached to the mainland of Europe and Finland which is an entirely genetically different group of people.

If you're going to group countries together in an attempt to prove the measures are working you should be able to take that same theory and do it all over the world. Except if you were to do that then it wouldn't up.

So, sure apples-to-apples buddy. Get to explaining why your theory isn't holding up in the rest of the EU or the states.