I would prefer that the general public take advice from scientific researchers with a grain of salt, with an understanding that the system is far from perfect and much of what is published either contains methodological flaws that lead to false conclusions or cannot be reproduced at all.
I also think a little bit of common sense would go a long way.
A big problem, as I see it, is the unwillngness of academia to engage in debate with the public. Whilst academics nowadays are supported and encouraged to engage in "outreach"; the nature of that is almost always in broadcast mode.
In the age of social media, science needs to learn how to communicate, and engage with non-tenured people asking good, evidence based, questions. Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.
Trust is breaking down in society. Is there any wonder, when trust grows from interaction?
> Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.
I think it is a really hard problem. Figuring it if someone is arguing in good faith is hard. And engaging with someone arguing from bad faith is really draining. Besides the difficulty, people worry that engaging with some people will draw even more responses, many of them being in bad faith. Certainly only responding partially often leads to "yeah you are responding to them, but what about X".
I think in the end, wading through all the abuse is just so painful that many people decide to ignore input. And doing anything that might cause more abuse to flood in is reflexively avoided, since that abuse actually hurts.
Solving this is going to require specialization. Because being able to wade through the abuse is not something everyone can do. It will also require proper incentives to actually do this, because the people who can handle the abuse aren't going to do so out of charity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
Robert Malone's bio
"Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment."
Do you really think it is unreasonable to listen to what someone with this kind of a background has to say about mRNA vaccines?
So no, I don't think his random commentary is particularly relevant or reasonable to listen to, any more than Jaron Lanier's haterade @ the tech industry is relevant just because he was working on shitty VR in 1990. Some people are dinosaurs and just need to be ignored, it's not unusual for people to grow to hate the things that they worked on when they were young and get increasingly unhinged arguing against them.
I don't think Rogan should be censored, for sure, 100% and without any reservations - free speech should be absolute, I'm old-school in that respect. But I absolutely think anyone paying attention to this crap should be socially scorned as a dumbass, and TBH I can't get my chuff up too far over people trying to convince Spotify to boot Rogan over this, free markets are also sacrosanct and that's what this is (even if I also would vastly prefer that Spotify holds to a hardline free-speech ethos and leaves him up).
Imagine this in any other field. It is not exactly reasonable to separately bring both a Nazi and a non-Nazi and claim to be impartial. In that scenario, most likely the normal person would sound relatively ambivalent, while the Nazi would be extremely agitated and emphatic that urgent action must be taken.
> consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice [...] being questioned
This is precisely what scientists should have been doing! I'm afraid having your work done for you by unqualified amateurs is a kind of punishment for skimping on it for too long.
> a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter"
This is essentially a class-ist argument: Someone who tells dirty jokes on netflix couldn't possibly, by the essence of their being, decide for themselves which scientist to talk to. What's particularly striking is that this comes after the author seemingly accepts the parent's premise that academia is borken. What I'm hearing is "Yeah, we haven't earned your trust, but at least we're not those people". This is not a winning argument, and certainly not a scientific one.
> We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people and that Covid is a hoax by the world government and no one has died
This too seems heavily influnced by class. When people believe "Bill Gates is inserting microchips" they are factually wrong but tentatively right. They are powerless in politics, while oligarchs, including foreign ones, have outsized influence. Wild conspiracies are how these feelings find expression in those that have no other way of doing so. By taking everything literal ("no, Bill Gates is not literally inserting microchips"), their enemies can avoid dealing with the issues a more charitable interpretation would be getting at.
> don't loose faith in science
To the extent that science is used as the underwriter of various political projects, I think people are perfectly fine losing faith in it. 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good, so what's the point? On the other hand, I'm not worried that people will stop using material science... By and large mistrust is very well placed.
This is so on the mark - too often we forget to focus on what someone is _really_ trying to communicate, and take their words at "face value" - which is not communication at all.
How else do you think scientists reached consensus, exactly? Maybe the problem lies with the unqualified amateurs, who are, well unqualified to do that?
Scientific consensus is reached gradually over the course of decades, after a theory stood the test of many many challenges. No scientific theory is absolute and final and challenges are welcome, but they should be scientific, i.e. based on real data and statistically gounded analysis. Yes, it's hard to change consensus, not only in science but in any kind of community. This does not mean everybody in that community is corrupt. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". If changing a consensus was easy, it would not be a real consensus.
>> a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter" > >This is essentially a class-ist argument: Someone who tells dirty jokes on netflix couldn't possibly, by the essence of their being, decide for themselves which scientist to talk to.
No it's not. Getting all background knowledge and staying up to date with all pubblications in a given scientific field is very difficult and time-consuming. Expertise does exist, and takes year to build. Somebody who tells dirty jokes on netflix likely does not have the time or energy do to that. Maybe, but quite unlikely.
> To the extent that science is used as the underwriter of various political projects, I think people are perfectly fine losing faith in it.
What is the alternative? If no policy should be based on science, then what? Tea leaves? Crystal balls? Shamans? Prayers? Goat sacrifices?
> 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good.
You really need to elaborate here.
Please, please, please. Do not confuse science (the process of discovery) with scientific institutions (the groups of humans with all their defects).
I'm afraid you're lacking imagination. Also, the irony of these being historical examples rather than made up seems to be lost on you. Humans are strange.
On a more serious note, if you were interested in what a modern society looks like that is no longer guided by science, you could study Russia. It seems a cynical blend of religion, nationalism, and imperialism is what it is. I'm not advocating for this, I'm describing what it looks like.
>> 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good.
> You really need to elaborate here.
I specifically prefaced it with "as underwriter of political projects". Over that time, the #1 influence on policy has been economics, and besides covid all of the most pressing issues today are economic: Stagnation, deindustrialization, inequaliy, and inflation. People are asking, if policy over that period was built on such solid scientific foundation, how come we've ended up here?
>This is precisely what scientists should have been doing!
My reference was to the years since we've virtually eliminated the deaths from polio, TB, and measles and other diseases in countries that have used vaccines against them. There have been studies that have shown that some vaccines cause side effects in some people, but none have shown to be comparable to the millions of lives that have been saved from debilitating diseases.
> 5 decades of "belief" in science hasn't done much good.
Says the person writing a comment on HN through a network of hardware and software unimaginable 50 years ago that was at least partly made possible by scientists and academic researchers making real breakthroughs. My comments were to the poster who thought scientific research was a polished turd because of his experience in one part of academia
This kind of example is common. It tells me its worth questioning research and looking deeper at what ever is released. When someone questions research to look at the merits of what they say.
He’s in the industry of going against “mainstream [ie scientific] knowledge”… which provides him and endless stream of salesmen who cherry picked scientific papers that support their schtick… and a lot of interested listeners who get an excuse for everything they don’t feel like doing (“oh, this guy on Rogan said brushing destroys your teeth, so I guess I’m better off leaving them alone”)
This seems to be equally valid for basically any media (using brush and toothpaste is not news). Would you say that all media is in BIG conflict of interest? Or how is Joe Rogan fundamentally different?
We know that traditional media has analogous biases towards celebrity scandals, and towards FUD and polarization in politics, and that bottom feeder broadcasters with no ethics thrive on those.
... He does it with lifestyle / well-being specifically, inviting people that peddle diets, supplements, etc.
These snake oil salesmen have quickly cottoned on to the fact that they can take disenfranchised and usually uneducated groups and regurgitate them their own opinions with the air of authority, thus gaining an almost fanatically loyal following.
It's the new age televangelists, but instead of preaching salvation for tithe, they preach actually dangerous drivel that gets people killed. It feels like a low point in human evolution, where our tools enable sociopaths to mislead clueless masses on an industrial scale.
And do you know what is the worst aspect of this? That we can't ban them in good faith, because banning information is a slippery slope one way street that we mustn't take a single step on. The only way out of this quagmire is education, but it's a long slog that will pay off in decades time and only if we make a great effort now. It's literally the tree we have to plant and yet our current generation won't get to enjoy it's shade.
Being less biased doesn’t make one more true. Both can be wrong
Also routinely says not to listen to him, they're his opinions and probably wrong.
Good to see that the Rogan stans in tech are classy as fuck. Jesus...
2) The scientists who are involved are unusually politically motivated. Most of the scientists I can name off the top of my head are in government (the likes of Fauci in the States or Kerry Chant of Australia. These people are in a position of arguing that their opinion should be given emergency power to decide ... most aspects of the social sphere. This is an excellent time to be looking beyond credentialism to actual arguments and trade offs. Without the "noble lies", please, lets make policy decisions based on facts.
3) I still haven't found anyone who can argue why the vaccine mandates aren't human rights abuses. We're talking the really basic stuff like right to work, right to assemble, right to religion, etc. I don't care who we listen to as long as they are arguing on the side of those basic freedoms. If Joe Rogan is arguing for those things, I'd rather people listened to him. Those concepts have a better track record than technocrats. We can worry about run-of-the-mill stupidity after we've dealt with the real risks here.
The latter is pretty much moot.
You do have to understand that when people say "I got banned because I said COVID may have leaked from a lab" they don't actually mean "I got banned because I said COVID may have leaked from a lab". It's significantly more likely that they got banned because they said COVID definitely leaked from a lab funded personally by Dr Anthony Fauci to create bio-weapons against America to aid the spread of communism with Chinese characteristics because he is secretly an illegal immigrant from Kenya.
That's a strawman. He's interviewing doctors, scientists etc. He's not putting forward his own views, apart from when he recounts his own covid experience.
It's like saying the left gets all their news from John Oliver.
No, that is the strawman world constructed by the mainstream media. The microchip story is actually: https://news.rice.edu/news/2019/quantum-dot-tattoos-hold-vac...
Human bar code tattoos financed by the Gates Foundation. Opponents are discredited because they get an insignificant detail wrong.
We see the same thing in the reporting of the Canadian trucker protests. There are 10,000+ peacefully protesting people, the media find three with a swastika flag (which could even be a literal false flag operation), and reports "right wing protests".
They also report the "desecration of an unknown soldier's memorial", which was a single woman basically walking on the monument. Compare that with "mostly peaceful" BLM protests, where whole cities were burning and monuments were actually destroyed.
(A) In some aspects, 50+ years of accepted medical science was wrong. "Droplet dogma" [1,2] was wrong. Now we know that respiratory viruses spread by airborne aerosols [3].
The epistemological tradition of modern medical science seems to be almost solely based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They think everything should be studied and verified the same way that new drugs are studied. We use a lot of physical safety measures, like seat belts and airbags in cars, hard hats in construction sites, etc. because they make physical sense, and their protective properties have been measured in engineering laboratory studies. Like using crash test dummies when crash testing cars. Engineering and physical sciences have methods to achieve and test knowledge, that are not an RCT with real people.
Now the topical topic is face masks. Engineers know respirator masks can filter over 95% of fine particles, but a sizeable part of the medical science still doesn't believe in face masks, due to lack of decisive studies using an RCT-based setup.
(B) But then we also have a surprisingly strong anti-vaccine movement. In this case, the consensus of medical science is correct, and vaccines work.
So we have A, where medical science was wrong and a bit stubborn to correct itself. Science as whole was not wrong: Engineers and physicists worked out the details of aerosol spread of the virus and the filtering properties of face masks. And then we have B, a genuine anti-science movement.
But what to do? If we didn't question the established dogma as used by the authorities, then we would still believe in the droplet dogma, and we would still think face masks are useless. But if we allow the questioning of the established dogma when the dogma is indeed wrong, the how can the general public know when the old dogmas are questioned for good scientific reasons (A), and when not (B)?
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2021.004...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3904176
Or shutdowns of discussion that some health authorities, like Sweden, have (IMO correctly) judged that there is no clear benefit to vaccinating kids under 12 against COVID [2].
The issue I see is less on the fringe 'microchips' but more around the complete shutdown of discussion of complex topics are not binary.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0/figures/2
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...
That is to say that there is a selection bias for people who did not die, and this is a significant oversight in your interpretation.
They make the claim "vaccines that pose 50% higher excess risk of myocarditis compared to an infection", and this is a misleading claim.
The risk to an individual of taking the vaccine is more sensibly measured against what happens to somebody who isn't vaccinated, not what happens to somebody who isn't vaccinated and also didn't die.
This is like comparing injuries in people who survive jumping out of a plane with and without a parachute. How important is it if people without a parachute break their arms less often?
Your counter-claim is that this alternative question is what they should have been discussing, and if they had been, it'd be misleading to focus on the risk of myocarditis alone. Which is correct, but then they'd also have to take into account injuries and deaths from other non-myocarditis vaccine side effects, the costs of medical care not given due to the spending of resources on vaccines instead, QALYs and so on. But the sort of institutions that fund such research don't want to know about vaccine downsides, so don't fund any research into it, and moreover expend considerable effort to suppress whatever little research does get done.
If everybody else takes a vaccine it is almost always far safer for you not to take it. Vaccines help society by stopping illnesses spreading, they just need enough people to collectively accept the personal risk for the good of everyone else - the same was true for Polio, TB, measles.
If the vaccines are creating sterilizing immunity, this might be true. For example the measles vaccine does that.
But for all current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines we have we don't get sterilizing immunity.
So it can still make sense to get vaccinated even if society at large is vaccinated.
In that instance, a doctor who was part of the team who invented RNA-based vaccines. Any problem with that ?
Yeah, no: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
It does not say he knows anything about the things he talked about on JRE: hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or anything about the specific mRNA being delivered to fight COVID (unless you are suggesting that ALL mRNA insertions kill people), or anything about immunity at all, or anything about Israel/Palestine, or anything about epidemics, or anything about monoclonal antibodies, or anything about mass formation psychosis (except to the extent he is trying to make it happen).
1. Things that are false, whose dissemination regardless creates significant harm to society.
Right, because there is no way a 5000 word article could in anyway clarify or add context to a specific claim once it mentions a name.
Well, as far as I remember - the root of that conspiracy has a true base - that Bill Gates really talked about the possibility of a health chip injected into peoples, as a vaccination certificate. So no chip coming with the vaccination, but a digital health certificate under the skin. But now it is framed, as if he never even spoke about chipping people and I cannot even find the original quote on reddit anymore.
"The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned."
And too many things are getting thrown into the same bucket. Because the mRNA vaccinations are not 50 years old, but brand new. I can very much understand, being sceptical of a cutting edge proprietary technology, to be injected into my system. And I cannot verify the build process. I have to trust government inspectors to do that.
And as a matter of fact, one of the scientists involved with the original mRNA technology Dr.Malone advises strongly against it.
And the process of getting the data for the safety, is not perfect either, as a whistleblower showed:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
Now sure - when reading a bit about Malone, it seems he left the realm of science and entered crackpot area some time ago and the data scandal is not so bad as it sounds - but they are real events nonetheless.
Also despite it is being repeated as a mantra that the vaccines are totally safe - there are strong indications, that people died because of the vaccinations. Not because the vaccines are a poison, developed by shape shifting reptiles, but because some production facilites messed up and some production batches got contaminated with various rubbish, which can happen in the real world when people are in a hurry.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/comment/moderna-va...
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/protein-impurities-found...
So there is a chance, a vaccination does not help, but harm you as a individual. This chance might be very, very small and statistical speaking it probably still makes sense to get the shot. But the possibility exists. And is not really communicated this way, probably out of the fear that since people do not know statistics - they misinterpret.
But this is what fuels conspiracy theories. I mean, the flat earthers are out of the realm of reason anyway - but not everyone who is sceptical of the vaccination and the official data about them, is a crackpot tinfoil hat nuthead. Or am I?
Well, I know that I got angry beeing told by my doctor, that my vaccination (Astrazeneca) is totally safe - and only learned about the contaminations by chance the next day. Something the doctor should have known. So this was bullshitting me, which I do not like. Now I think I do understand the reasons for this bullshiting - because of negative placebo effect. Meaning if I would believe the vaccination is dangerous for me - it actually might be. I suspect many of the reported heart attacks as side effect, are showing just that. People got so scared and stressed that they developed real symptoms. While people being calm about it, have a better of not getting bad side effects.
So this is the problem as I see it. There are people who can handle real data and people who cannot. But we are all getting treated the same idiots. (And I believe people will never learn to deal with real data, when they are always only getting comfortable lies).
"So shut up and take the shot. The one we prepared for you."
I understand people getting upset with that as I do not like being treated as a sheep either. I am not a medical researcher, but I can read papers. And I would like to choose for myself, of whether I trust Moderna, Biontech, Astrazeneca, Sputnik or Sinopharm. But I do not get even that choice. For some reason BBIBP-CorV, the one from Sinopharm, which uses a very safe old school vaccination principal, of deactivating real virus - is not approved in EU, despite being in use worldwide and approved by the WHO. People being vaccinated with it, are recognized as unvaccinated here. Why is that? Is there some data, which is not shared? It is hard to tell for anyone not deeply with it.
The current climate we're in means that consensus science from 50+ years of research and medical practice around the world is being questioned. Not some BS CS paper on a performance improvement in something that will be read and forgotten about, or that some new medication/fruit/treatment has some miracle cure that others can't duplicate.
We're in a world were people think that Bill Gates is inserting microchips into people and that Covid is a hoax by the world government and no one has died. Academia may be broken - but don't loose faith in science.