People like you is why this is not, and never will be, a serious forum. It's the mid-quality one that you grow out from because for anyone with some common sense, its exhausting.

Flags, karma and upvotes are fundamentally flawed and only allow the quality to reach a local maximum. For those inside the echo chamber, it's seemingly great. For those outside, it's useless. And we never hear from the dissenting voices because they are flagged/downvoted to oblivion.

It's a serious forum for a range of topics with many people contributing serious comments.

You're correct that this is not a serious COVID forum, nor a particularly serious biochem forum and that's OK.

Surely there is some other site where you can hear these dissenting voices loud and clear.

Polls show trust in academia is collapsing rapidly, by the time your son graduates it will be much lower still. The verdict is in, but the Bari Weisses of the world are on the winning side. It's all taking a lot longer than it should though, partly due to the craven attempts to stop people exploring these topics.

You could respond to this situation by talking about it with your son openly, encouraging him to uphold the highest standards of scientific honesty and rigor, to try and stand out from the rest and blow the whistle if necessary. Be honest with him that grad school will be full of fraud and intellectual corruption. But by taking your current stance you're going to flee unpleasant information for years and both ended up be blindsided when you realize that biomedical grads are less trusted than journalists. You can't flag reality.

I don't think you understand the difference between a public health official and a biochemist. He cares what proteins think about his work, not what Bari Weiss does. It's not a persuasion job.

Anyways, my point is: we have subject matter experts on virology on HN. They tend not to participate in COVID threads, which are invariably overheated and Weiss-ian.

Congratulations on your son becoming a biochemist! A wonderful achievement.

Surely his middle school biology teachers had something to do with it. You should pay them a visit. Maybe ask them how many genders there are and see their faces contort in horror.

Please note that on this, covid, and whatever other such... things.. I offer no opinions of my own. I don't actually care very much about those topics and also, perhaps similarly to you, am put off by the far-(right|left) fanatics obsessed with them.

My peeve is with what it did to good public discourse and good people.

Perhaps if you see it on the faces of your sons teachers, who no doubt have had a rather increasingly stressful job in the not so many years since he left them, and to whom he owes at least a modicum of his no doubt bright future - you will understand my objection to your behavior of drumming out people in this fashion.

> How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more

So do so! Nobody forces you to click on the Bari Weiss stuff. There is no doubt an evil twilight zone tptacek who flags the other way. And you both think you're great sheriffs clearing the joint from scum.

How much would I rather the thread you linked on daunting papers. How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than "you-are-wrong-about-my-sacred-cow, flagged!" remarks.

In my opinion you should just let people be wrong (see, no snarky air quotes from me! I hope you understand my tone and where I'm coming from) in the covid threads, leave each other alone and it won't boil over to more interesting threads. It's weird adults teach this in kindergarten but on a fancy I so smart forum we can't bring ourselves to rise above.

Flags don't cancel each other out, so me and twilight-zone me get along just fine.