We may interpret this as convenience... But the tragedy of the commons says that we can't even have science if someone isn't holding what it is we don't want to be holding... I'm not saying I didn't love science or not think it's super interesting or anything... Can we really say it alleviates suffering or does it displace it for one group of people until a new problem comes in and takes that one's place? How many people here will be holding the bag of shit tonight? USA numba 1!!!

They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people.

The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that.

The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.

The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children.

And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.

And that's before you take into account things like BLM rallies being encouraged during COVID while less politically correct gatherings were banned or decried as "super spreader events." [1]

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...

As far as the speed of revisions, my memory is the initial advice to wash your hands so much faded within months, as well as the wash your groceries advice. It took the US some time to notice how effective masks were in Japan, and push for masking. And now good air filtration for public spaces is gaining momentum, even as the deaths from COVID declined.

And you aren't a bit alarmed anytime a novel virus hits an immunologically naïf population, well you should be.

This is highly euphemistic. We were explicitly lied to for our own good, over and over again. Including about masks being ineffective early on (to save them for healthcare providers), about ventilators, about the effectiveness of the vaccine, about the vulnerability of normal populations as compared to older ones, the plausible origins of the virus itself, etc. It was over and over again. And again--that's without the injection of left-wing politics as noted in my previous comment.

> As far as the speed of revisions

We had kids out of schools for years. An entire generation is now significantly behind comparable cohorts, and the only reason we even stopped is because the opposition eventually made it untenable. We forced many small businesses to fail and gave out interest-free loans to many others that never need to be paid back. People were forced to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.

I feel like our response to COVID-19 (at least in the US) is like a litmus test for how well one accepts authoritarianism. If one lived through that as an adult, I don't know how one would trust what the medical establishment says next time around, except to trust that it's what they want the unwashed masses to think.

Were outcomes worse than they otherwise would have been? That’s an impossible question to answer. Are there serious studies on the impact of public health interventions?

And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.

Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me

Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you

Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions

It would have made more sense if the vaccines actually stopped catching it and transmission but they don't really, they mostly just seem to reduce the harm when you catch it. In terms of not spreading it to others you are better isolating than relying on the vaccines - I've had that as a practical issue with my late 80s mum who I visit. Although I've had 4 jabs I've still had it caught it twice since, and have avoided giving it to her by testing if I feel ill and staying away. Which is kind of to say some of the politicians views on it were heavy handed and a bit iffy scientifically.

-- Karl Marx

It’s like they watched Office Space and thought they’d “Milton” everyone.

> Freedom is about more than the individual.

The individual is what it starts with.

As far as the China lab goes, there were plenty of scientific papers that studied the China leak theory, though I personally don't know what they found.

There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period.

To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.

For example here restaurants were open, but they had to close at 19. So instead of spreading the clientele over more hours, they were always 100% full.

Also, they CUT ⅔ of public transport rides, so they were incredibly overcrowded. People with real jobs that can't be done from home still had to go to work. BUT they put stickers on the floor telling people to keep distance. Also hired people to be at crowded stops to spray hand sanitizers on who wanted it, and tell people to keep distance (while seeing them having to push their way in).

In general all the restrictions were about the "having fun" stuff, but not about the "go to work" stuff. Even companies had no obligation to let people who could work from home stay at home. Some companies kept having their offices full.

Oh and let's not forget the recommendations of staying home if you so much as sneezed. But you wouldn't get paid. How did they expect people to pay their rent?

I could go on for hours with this. The bullshit measures that were marketed as "what the scientists are telling us to do" did a lot of harm to the trust that the general population puts into science.

Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm.

Suspicion is often based on facts or experience.

People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge.

People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims.

People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe.

And look at Boeing.

No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements.

But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes.

There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).

This is just wrong and naive. You can be happy if a majority of people agree to this.

But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera).

And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it.

But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!

The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience.

This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science.

She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the government is doing something bad" to "earth is flat".

After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person.

But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it's true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).

Yes, that’s exactly what they are, upfront, allegations of a conspiracy. And some of them are correct,

If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc)

But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the same direction resulted in the supreme irony of an unserious sham cult spawning an unironic counterpart community which rapidly outgrew and ultimately succeeded it.

We used to forcibly quarantine people in their homes at gunpoint for measles. Smallpox? Even crazier.

Hell, we didn’t even shut down international travel until well after it was plainly obvious it had spread well past the point it would matter.

They don't need to intuit it; they're outright told not to trust the science, by the parasites who are criticised by other scientists. Like the asbestos industry.

Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it.

No, easier to gaslight the idiots

Not “This is bad because it undermines science, is lying, and unethical, regardless of what people think.”

Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn't take a critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud of being stupid and will shun anything they consider "intellectual".

On the other hand intellectuals have poor discernment too, they overly trust the literature and the interpretation of working scientists. These two phenomena are two sides of the same coin, and the flat earthers/antivaxx etc crazies are directly downstream of the "trust the science" bad behaviour, especially since the education system has taught them what good science is and they are rightly perceiving that good science is not being done.

This is a bad start to a post on HN. Less confrontational would be better.

> Because even the craziest of crazies are actually doing the scientific method.

I can name several conspiracy theories off the bat which I've heard repeated by people who have not tested the theories. The vast majority of them, at best, found a video of someone on the internet with "dr" in the username. The percent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" folks who have actually personally tested whether steel can lose structural integrity at such temperatures, is absolutely minuscule.

> They are arguably better scientists than "trust the science" folks because at least they are getting out there and moving atoms to test shit.

Reading something on the internet is moving photons and electrons at best, but I can't speak to whether a given Parler thread which convinced someone of a given conspiracy was read inside or outside.

To put this into context though:

Let's begin by supposing that fraud exists in all ventures where people stand to gain, which I don't think is controversial at all, especially not in this comment section.

In light of this assumption the fact that this all came out in the first place is proof that being a luminary does not make you immune from investigation. That this happens 'over and over again' simply means that eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce and verify is why these become public in the first place.

So on the contrary, it's not that nothing ever happens or nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this one in twenty years because there will still be fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be scientists working to verify their work.

It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.

The stuff on PCR test false positives went somewhat viral and got some attention from outside of academia but of course it was during COVID so it was ignored by the institutions.

The stuff on epidemiology and the history of Neil Ferguson was triggered originally by an article in the Telegraph. It went no further than that.

The fake lesion surgery got noticed on Twitter and I think it was eventually retracted but the perps still work for the NHS.

The paper mills and fake biology papers gets published about occasionally in mainstream press. But nothing happens.

So... no. Not really.

Sigh

That is because antibiotics, essentially

The mechanism by which antibiotics cause cancer is they stop you dying from bacterial infection, once a huge (biggest?) killer.

You still have to die of something....

Science is the name given to a few different processes, a body of knowledge and statements by designated spokespersons. Each of these have different flaws and failure modes in different environments and domains.

Exactly the kind of less bright people that I inferred about. People so devoid of common sense, that they utterly reject anyone who applies systematic thinking. Unreal.