> Most of “what everyone knows” is true. Most of our knowledge as modern human beings is shared with many others. Everyone knows the capital of France is Paris, and it is true. Everyone knows how many letters in the alphabet, the color of stop lights, the shape of a rainbow. What everyone knows is usually correct. However, sometimes what everyone knows is wrong. Everyone knew humans could not fly, or build 100 stories into the air, or run a company renting out your extra bedroom. Turns out what everyone knows is sometimes wrong. But it is very hard to tell the difference.
The affirmative examples are all conventions. We know them to be true because it's within our power to make it so just by agreeing with each other.
The negative examples are not conventions. They are about what will happen in the future.
So it's not just "sometimes what everyone knows it wrong." More like, on topics involving observation, deduction, or prediction what everyone "knows" is more likely to be wrong than right. The history of science provides ample evidence. Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.
> Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.
No, they aren't.
Settled != correct. But what most crackpots fail to take into account is that if you want to challenge the scientific status quo you need an actual argument, i.e. you need propose a better alternative to the current-best explanation, one that either accounts for data that the current-best explanation does not, or one that has fewer free parameters. You can't just say, "Science has gotten it wrong in the past so it probably has got it wrong now, and therefore you should pay attention to my crackpot theory." The status quo is the result of a lot of hard work. It may not be right, but you have to at the very least understand how it became the status quo before you can seriously challenge it.
I mostly agree, but I think you are confounding two things here. The actual argument doesn't have to contain a better alternative than the current best explanation. It's enough to show the errors of the current explanation - as long as you are doing it using the scientific method.
I.e. it's enough to point out flaws in a scientific theory even if you don't have a better one yet. E.g. if talking about covid, it's indeed valuable to prove that the virus does not use the receptor, suggested by the status quo, to get into the cells. One could do this without identifying the actual receptor it does use (by showing that it can infect cells that lack the said receptors). Another example would be showing that a specific medication that is thought to work, actually does not. (Say hydroxychloroquine...)
> You can't just say, "Science has gotten it wrong in the past so it probably has got it wrong now, and therefore you should pay attention to my crackpot theory."
Now I fully agree with this. But where these guys go completely off the rail is that they try to discredit the scientific method by saying that it's wrong, because it provided erronous results in the past. And try to use this as an argument for why their suggested alternative solution doesn't need to pass the test of science.
And here is where they can be challenged with having to come up with a proven better alternative to the scientific method. (Which is kind of nonsense, because science is a self-improving/self-correcting system anyway.)
> It's enough to show the errors of the current explanation
Not if you want to argue in favor of a specific alternative.
I can point out the discrepancies between theory and observation, for example, with regards to the orbital velocities of the outer arms of galaxies. But that does not give me license to hypothesize that this is caused by leprechauns and expect to be taken seriously.
> it's indeed valuable to prove that the virus does not use the receptor, suggested by the status quo, to get into the cells
That's true. But again, you have to show some actual evidence that the current-best-explanation is wrong. You can't just proclaim it.
>> It's enough to show the errors of the current explanation
> Not if you want to argue in favor of a specific alternative.
Sure, but this is not what you actually said in your original comment. You said "if you want to challenge the scientific status quo you need an actual argument, i.e. you need propose a better alternative to the current-best explanation" and that's different. You can challenge the status quo by proving it wrong and that doesn't mean that you have to propose a better alternative.
Now what was happening with covid and the crakcpots you mentioned is where you would be right to say that they need to prove they have a better alternative. Because they did claim that but all they had was criticism for the existing solutions. E.g. "vaccines cause side effects, so let's use ivermectin". (Without proving that ivermectin works better than vaccines for preventing e.g. deaths.)
But in theory someone could come around and prove that vaccines "don't work" (i.e. not worth using) without suggesting a better alternative. They would just need to show the data/supporting evidence. And actually that's exactly what real scientists did with Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine: they have proven that neither of them work for any sensible endpoint.
> But again, you have to show some actual evidence that the current-best-explanation is wrong. You can't just proclaim it.
Sure. That's what I said too. (I even included it in the example how you would do it ;) )
The point about providing a better alternative and not just poking holes is very good and I actually agree with you but still, the people saying "the science is settled" are almost always trying to manipulate the public. In fact, I cannot recall hearing someone saying that when they weren't trying to manipulate the public.
And how do you know that these people were "trying to manipulate the public"? Do you draw a distinction between "trying to manipulate the public" and "trying to persuade the public of the truth"? What is it? And if you don't, what exactly is the problem?
The fact of the matter is that people who use the phrase "settled science" are almost always trying to persuade someone not to pursue a course of action that is almost certainly doomed to fail, either individually, or as a matter of public policy. You can call that "trying to manipulate the public" if you like, but this is disingenuous because it implies there is something sinister going on. There is nothing wrong with "trying to manipulate the public" to steer them away from charlatans and crackpots.
These people? as in those in authority. Those who have both the platform and power to manipulate the public.
Why are you so willing to vigorously defend them and deride opposing views as charlatans and crackpots? What have these politicians and media personalities done to deserve your undying loyalty and trust?
No, as in: the people saying "the science is settled".
> Why are you so willing to vigorously defend them and deride opposing views as charlatans and crackpots?
Because the vast majority of people who challenge established science are charlatans and crackpots.
There are legitimate challenges to established science. All scientific progress starts that way. But mounting a legitimate challenge to established science is hard. It takes a lot of work. And most people I see doing it are just lazy bums who are not willing to put in the hours. They aren't even willing to put in the effort to learn what a legitimate challenge to established science even looks like, let alone actually mount one themselves. They just latch on to some fad and then bitch and moan about how "those in authority" are repressing them or some such bullshit.
In the meantime, there are a lot of hard-working actual scientists toiling away in labs around the world to do the research that actually advances human knowledge.
This isn't what I saw happening during the pandemic.
The (to use your word) 'crackpots' were proposing alternative solutions like Ivermectin and Chloroquine. The people who were shouting 'believe science' were trying to silence the debate.
I offer no opinion on either of those two alternatives, I merely point out that 'believe' isn't the verb that goes with 'science'.
> The (to use your word) 'crackpots' were proposing alternative solutions like Ivermectin and Chloroquine.
People can "propose" all they want. They were also proposing bleach, vitamin D, UV sunlight, and probably much more. It takes more than a bare proposal--you need to be able to show (with data) that your proposal is better than the current best theory.
In hindsight, the so-called crackpots were not all that invested in any particular alternative. They were invested in a general, vague contrariness: If the mainstream agreed with it, they were against it, for all definitions of "it". If, for instance, Chloroquine actually was found to be effective and Dr. Fauci got on stage and recommended it, the crackpots would have instantly abandoned it and pivoted over to a different proposal. They were more interested in simply being contrary to "the other side".
Proposing an alternative is not enough. Re-read what I wrote:
"... if you want to challenge the scientific status quo you need an actual argument, i.e. you need propose a better alternative to the current-best explanation, one that either accounts for data that the current-best explanation does not, or one that has fewer free parameters ..."
Ivermectin met none of those criteria and was therefore never worthy of serious consideration. It got some serious consideration nonetheless in the form of actual controlled studies, which it failed spectacularly and predictably.
Well, they weren't really proposing solutions, Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were really just suggestions, candidates. I.e. ideas for what might work. Now in both both cases there were no reasons why anyone would think they could work, but as far as I know, in both cases there were multiple trials. And those trials didn't show effectiveness (hence these were not solutions) and despite this, the crackpots did continue to push both for a while and then they silently dropped Hydroxychloroquine but the ivermectin delusion is still strong. (At least where I live, before most discussion was washed away by the war in Ukraine a few months ago, it was still being brought up.)
Now the thing about believing and science is that it's being told to people who don't do science (so most of us!) but have strong opinion and minimal knowledge about a specific topic. If you ask them, most of them will say they don't believe science or scientists. But what it means is not what you suggest, i.e. a lack of blind faith, but an active rejection of what science has to say about this topic without having the alternative explanations/solutions you're talking about. And I mean scientifically proven ones, of course.
So suggesting that laymen should believe (i.e. trust) science is actually a pretty adequate and reasonable advice. Since you basically have to sane options:
- believe/trust science (the knowledge gathered by those who work on a specific topic)
- work on that specific topic yourself (scientifically)
Why would a person untrained in science declare that Chloroquine is a cure to covid? That is a definition of crackpot: you are not offering an explanation or a minimally reasonable argument, you're just contradicting current scientific knowledge for the sake of it.
Thank god the (to use your word) ‘crackpots’ didn’t get away with such behaviours, back when polio was being eradicated. We once had a society that pulled together in tough times. Victory gardens, inoculations, charity. Kicking ass by uniting in our efforts.
The crackpot spectrum was unusually broad during the pandemic, far from the realm of vaccine deniers and flat earthers.
One professor of virology from a world renowned institution was soft banned on twitter behind some sort of click-though warning for pointing to public data about what we knew at the time that closing schools would lead to. Apparently because it fed into some bizarre American debate which was going on at the time.
Another is a professor of immunology that was heavily criticized for explaining why and how thoroughly a vaccine must be tested before mass vaccinations can occur, even if every day it can be deployed will save lives and labelled a "vaccine skeptic". Which is more than one kind of weird. Of course, the vaccine was tested exactly as described, and came out even better than most had expected.
But that makes it more than clear that many people who demands us to "follow science" more often than not could not be bothered to actually find out what science has to say. It is the new "think of the children". Science exists on its own merits, and we should be careful when the mob demands otherwise.
The society does not operate in the same way in the time of an acute crisis as during peacetime.
During a war, telling the truth to the wrong audience or in the wrong way may end up aiding the enemy, even if the speaker did not intend it. People generally agree that such people can be silenced, even if that violates their freedom of speech.
In a pandemic, the adversary is the nature, but the situation is similar. Speaking the truth the wrong way may kill people, because the audience may make incorrect conclusions from it. The society may decide that preserving those lives is more important than preserving someone's freedom of speech. After all, the situation may be dire enough that you must sacrifice one fundamental freedom anyway to preserve another.
Your rhetoric, and the practices you're advocating for, rightfully hurt the public's trust in scientific and public health institutions. As a layperson, I don't trust someone who lies to me, no matter that they say it's "for your own good!!". Their interests aren't aligned with mine.
"It's an emergency, so surrender your rights and give us more power over you!" Huh. Looks like Covid was a great opportunity for hedge funds and the expansion of government control. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
It wasn't rhetoric, and I wasn't advocating for anything. I was just explaining what actually happened in many places in early to mid-2020. There was a genuine emergency, societies switched to "war mode", and governments used similar (and sometimes even the same) emergency powers as during an actual war. And people generally supported it.
I remember being mildly amused how the early lockdowns in the US were often instituted by mid-level administrators such as county health officials. Similar measures would have required a constitutional amendment in Finland. It was like the aftermath of 9/11: when a crisis hits home, Americans don't care so much about freedom anymore.
Same in Norway, no lockdown because the constitution forbids it. There was a half hearted attempt to drum up support for an amendment but it didn't get any real support.
It's very sad that some people were keen to lump the denialists, antimaskers, or the Chloroquine people, with valid concerns about lockdowns or school closures.
> One professor of virology from a world renowned institution was soft banned on twitter
Reference?
> a professor of immunology that was heavily criticized for explaining why and how thoroughly a vaccine must be tested before mass vaccinations can occur
Reference?
> that makes it more than clear
The only thing this makes clear is that you have no compunctions about advancing an unsubstantiated argument as a response to someone who just explained to you that you can't do that if you want to be taken seriously. You may well be right, but that is beside the point. There is no way for someone reading your claims to verify them. You expect people to just take you at your word and accept your unsubstantiated claims and innuendo as fact simply because you have made the claims. And that is exactly the problem with all of the people who grouse about "settled science".
I do agree with you that it would be nice to have references here.
> There is no way for someone reading your claims to verify them. You expect people to just take you at your word and accept your unsubstantiated claims and innuendo as fact simply because you have made the claims.
Don't we all? The amount of people, myself included, that have 0% knowledge of the intimate details of Covid and virology, and how it spreads, and anything remotely close to scientific knowledge of this, have to be less than 1% of the world. This statistic is completely pulled out of my rectum, but intuition tells me that in a world of 70 billion people, you would be very hard pressed to find 70 million people who have studied this virus in depth and actually understand the details.
Sometimes, you have to accept that people will hold beliefs about stuff without knowing the implementation details, and that's OK. How many of us can hold a modern CPU's architecture in our mind at once? I would wager, nobody in the world has that capability. But we can build abstractions that help us reason at a higher level. How much scientific rigor is necessary for general conversation? How much is necessary for a debate? How much is necessary for a belief? These are tough questions and it doesn't do anybody any good to say:
> And that is exactly the problem with all of the people who grouse about "settled science".
The problem is we have to build abstractions about our infinitely complex universe at some point. How much abstraction is deemed too much abstraction to make an informed opinion?
> Sometimes, you have to accept that people will hold beliefs about stuff without knowing the implementation details, and that's OK.
That depends on what those beliefs are. Not all unfounded beliefs are false, and not all false beliefs are harmful. But some are. False beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (to cite but a few noteworthy examples) are particularly harmful. IMHO it is unwise to respond by throwing up your hands and saying, "What are you gonna do? Sometimes you just have to accept things like this."
> False beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (to cite but a few noteworthy examples)
Any statistics to back this claim? These are all heavily politicized topics. The truth is not being sought on either side of the spectrum. Both sides are seeking the narrative that will promote their political agenda.
> IMHO it is unwise to respond by throwing up your hands and saying, "What are you gonna do? Sometimes you just have to accept things like this."
I'm not. I'm saying it's stupid to go berate somebody on HN for not knowing exactly how the science behind Covid works, while at the same time, you possessing equally limited knowledge about the science.
You can find "experts" on both sides of the spectrums saying different things. IMHO it's unwise to accuse anybody who disagrees with you of being ignorant. When, the reality of the situation is, both sides are arguing based off of equally limited knowledge of the actual scientific details on hand. Both sides find the experts that agree with their presuppositions. I find it difficult to trust any political actor, because they are not seeking truth, they are looking to advance their own career.
I'm not berating anyone for not knowing exactly how science works. What I berate people for is casting doubt on the science while at the same time being profoundly ignorant of how science works, and in many cases acting as if this ignorance were actually a virtue, as if being ignorant made one somehow more authoritative than someone who actually makes their living doing scientific research.
> Any statistics to back this claim?
What claim? What I said was:
> False beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election (to cite but a few noteworthy examples) are particularly harmful.
That's not a factual claim, that is a statement about what I personally consider harmful.
> You can find "experts" on both sides of the spectrums saying different things.
Yes, if you put "experts" in scare quotes. But if you are talking about experts rather than "experts" then there is an overwhelming consensus with regards to vaccines, climate change, and the election.
> ...is that if you want to challenge the scientific status quo...
That is a bit of a straw man though, people who care to challenge the scientific consensus are extremely rare. The people claiming "the science is settled" are also adding in an unspoken and-therefore-we-can-overrule-your-choices rider on the end.
In Australia I have been appalled by the treatment of my anti-vax neighbours. As far as I can tell they had their human rights suspended for an extended period for reasons that were totally wrong - them getting the vaccine doesn't protect others, everyone I know who had COVID was vaccinated. I still expect to get COVID eventually, nothing that has been done in the last 2 years has changed the basic calculus. It turns out that all we could do in hindsight was vaccinate the people who want to be vaccinated then let the virus go wild.
I don't particularly care what the science is, as far as I can tell there were no scientists involved in the decisions made that I disagreed with. The people claiming "the science is settled" and then pushing their agenda were just trying to short circuit the political process, overturn long established traditions of liberty and get the result they wanted. They weren't being intellectually honest. They may have been trying to help, but the damage they've done has been pretty extreme - a lot of Pandora's boxes have been opened politically, the economic damage is breathtaking and the world seems to be facing "unexpected" inflation, famine and war that is probably linked to the (global) knee jerk.
We'd have been better off ignoring them and sticking to old-established political norms that are well tested.
Australia was a special case. It became a victim of its own success, because it managed to avoid COVID so thoroughly and so long that there was no chance to determine which measures were cost-effective and which weren't. China is still in a similar situation.
In more interconnected parts of the world, the first waves were often really bad. Nobody really knew how to mitigate the spread, except by crude lockdowns. Hospitals became overcrowded and many people died, because doctors didn't know what was the exact problem and how to treat it. People also died from other preventable causes, because there was no one left to treat them.
The economy tanked, and not simply due to the lockdowns but also because of the disease itself and the voluntary actions people took. Facilities were shut down, because too many people were sick at the same time. The demand for some products and services crashed, because (for example) people started working from home. At the same time, there were shortages because the demand for other things increased but there was no way to scale up the production quickly enough.
Things started getting better by mid-2020. There was a better understanding of what worked and what didn't, what was cost-effective and what wasn't, and what was possible within the existing legal framework and what wasn't. People also started adjusting to the new normal instead of being afraid of the unknown. Different jurisdictions around the world made different choices based on their specific circumstances and the values of those in charge.
What statistics are you basing this on? NSW in Australia has a vaccination rate of somewhere in the mid 90%s [0] before opening up from lockdown. It did absolutely nothing to slow the spread of COVID [1], anyone who has an active social life got vaccinated, had a short break, then got COVID.
The evidence is pretty overwhelming at this point - vaccinations provided personal protection but failed to control the risk of infection. Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual. The R value for the January outbreaks got to about 5. The vaccinations did nothing to even slow that down. The case numbers were high enough that it was physically impossible for the unvaccinated to be the main issue in the story, it was clear vaccinated->vaccinated transmission.
In 2020 pre-vaccine it was obvious that everyone was going to get COVID sooner or later. Now, in 2022 post-vaccine, it remains clear that everyone is going to get COVID sooner rather than later and the vaccine didn't change that. The unclear part is whether suspending all those basic political freedoms on the way through made sense.
[1] https://chrisbillington.net/COVID_NSW.html - State population of around 8 million, the case number records broke down sometime in January and has probably gotten progressively less reliable as time goes on as people get sick of reporting it.
> > > them getting the vaccine doesn't protect others
> > Of course it does.
> What statistics are you basing this on?
I'm not basing it on statistics, I'm basing it on basic knowledge of the mechanics of infectious diseases. The more people in a population have immunity to a disease, the slower it will spread.
> Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual.
The people you talk to may think this is true, but there is no way anyone can possibly know this.
> The vaccinations did nothing to even slow that down.
Again, there is no way you can possibly know this. Without vaccines, the situation may have been much worse.
> The unclear part is whether suspending all those basic political freedoms on the way through made sense.
Yes, I agree that is unclear. But that is a completely different question than what is under discussion here.
> I'm not basing it on statistics, I'm basing it on basic knowledge of the mechanics of infectious diseases. The more people in a population have immunity to a disease, the slower it will spread.
Your understanding must be faulty, because that isn't how it has played out in practice. I've got an 8 million person state's worth of cases for evidence here. Very well vaccinated, fast and pervasive spread. Based on the official case numbers I can estimate about half the state has had COVID. Possibly more.
Follow the science, not your uninformed opinions, and all that jazz.
> The people you talk to may think this is true, but there is no way anyone can possibly know this.
It doesn't matter what they think, it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening We had one case in the newspaper of a vaccinated individual who managed to infect ~20 people at a party for example. Or maybe it was 100, I forget. that was early in the 2021-2022 outbreak when a superspreading event was still rare enough to make the news.
> Again, there is no way you can possibly know this. Without vaccines, the situation may have been much worse.
There most certainly is, the failure was so complete it can be observed from the high level statistics.
It can't, the number of cases is basically worse case - we're talking 2.5 million cases with a state population of 8 million. Those are official cases, the actual number of cases is higher. And the case count continues to slow burn/rise.
Now, noting that the vaccine claims a >70% reduction in cases on the Pfizer wiki page ... that suggests everyone in the state has been exposed to COVID. At face value there is literally no impact on slowing the spread from the mass vaccination program.
The picture here is painted and dried. Vaccines provide good personal protection but have had no impact on the spread of COVID cases. Unvaccinated individuals only posed a threat to themselves. Well meaning people - much like you - were saying things that have turned out not to be true.
> I've got an 8 million person state's worth of cases for evidence here.
But the only way you can draw any conclusions is with a control experiment, another country where the vaccination rates were lower but which otherwise imposed the same restrictions, and lifted them under the same initial infection conditions.
> it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated
I presume you meant "unvaccinated" here.
Look, no one disputes that vaccinated people can get infected and so can spread the disease. That does not change the fact that vaccinated people are infected less frequently and recover more quickly than non-vaccinated people, and so they don't spread the disease as efficiently as unvaccinated people.
> the number of cases is basically worse case - we're talking 2.5 million cases with a state population of 8 million
That's about 6.5 million cases shy of the worst case.
> Vaccines provide good personal protection but have had no impact on the spread of COVID cases.
Just because everyone who wasn't vaccinated eventually got or will get infected does not mean that the vaccinations had no impact. The rate of spread matters a lot. 2.5 million cases over two years is a lot different than 2.5 million case over two weeks.
> That does not change the fact that vaccinated people are infected less frequently and recover more quickly than non-vaccinated people, and so they don't spread the disease as efficiently as unvaccinated people.
Disease spread is an exponential process. That will delay the date that everyone has gotten COVID by for a week or two. Who cares?
> That's about 6.5 million cases shy of the worst case.
2.4 recorded cases is evidence that literally everyone was exposed to COVID. Worst case for what I could have predicted in advance (8 million residents, 70% reduction from vaccine-induced symptomlessness so people don't get teted, predicts around ~2.4 million cases expected if everyone is exposed to COVID. Which is about what happened.
High vaccination rates did nothing to delay the spread. The idea that it could has been debunked. It didn't.
> The rate of spread matters a lot.
That is a different argument, but the evidence I've seen is that that isn't true either - and I already have reason to believe you aren't cross-checking your assumptions against ground truths. The high vaccination rates basically meant that speed of spread was a non-issue.
The targeted attacks against unvaccinated people were unwarranted and have look even worse than expected in hindisight. I too was expecting the vaccine to do something about the spread. It just turns out it doesn't.
And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...
> Disease spread is an exponential process
Indeed. And because it is an exponential process, decreasing the rate of spread will not result in a fixed delay for all infections, it will result in a decrease in the exponent. Some people will get it a week later than they otherwise would have, some two weeks later, some three weeks... and if you reduce the exponent enough, the result will be exponential decay rather than growth, and some people will never get it at all. And even if you don't get to that point, reducing the exponent can make the difference between hospitals having enough capacity, and being overloaded and having people dying in the streets and having to rent refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.
Furthermore, vaccines are dramatically effective at reducing the rate of severe illness and death, so even if everyone gets infected and even if they get infected as quickly as they otherwise would have, you still have fewer people dying from covid, and you also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.
> > The rate of spread matters a lot.
> That is a different argument
Different from what? Your original claim was there is no societal benefit to vaccination, only an individual benefit, and that is just plainly false. One of the reasons it is false (but far from the only reason) is that lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself, even if everyone eventually gets infected anyway, and even if there were no other benefits, like reducing the risk of serious disease and death.
BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:
> Most people I talk to had COVID and caught it off a vaccinated individual.
Well, of course they did. That's because:
> it is impossible for it to be the vaccinated. There aren't enough of them and they've been locked out of a lot of places where superspreader events are happening
If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.
Honestly, the quality of your reasoning is comparable to a flat-earther.
> And how do you arrive at that figure? You cannot possibly have arrived at it by any principled means, because...
Trough to peak of the initial outbreak was 4 weeks, and the 2nd wave peaked after another 12 weeks. How quickly do you think the virus can spread? :p
Voila, the stats [0]. You need to ground-check your assumptions.
> You also have fewer people dying from other causes because the hospitals are overloaded with covid patients. That seems like a win to me.
We're two years in to this, we could have beefed up the hospital staff. I suppose strategies that are human-rights friendly are off the cards in Australia because they aren't exciting enough.
Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach. Ordinary flu season overwhelmed the hospital system. An ordinary day overwhelmed the hospital system. We do not go to extreme lengths to stop the hospital system getting overwhelmed. We certainly don't lock people in their houses, ban free association, ban people from working, or start forcing people to undergo what is effectively a medical procedure. Furthermore we had a lot of time to beef up the hospital system to cope as this pandemic has been a thing for more than a year by now. The argument is underdeveloped.
> lowering the rate of spread has societal benefits in and of itself
What are they and how are you measuring them? Because intuition hasn't been a good guide so far.
> BTW, there are more logical holes in your argument:
Point them out, I reckon I can patch them up with evidence.
> If you isolate all of your unvaccinated population, then of course all of the transmission is going to happen among the vaccinated. The vaccines aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they confer no public-policy benefits. They clearly do.
Well, they confer enormous benefits to people who get vaccinated. But Australia has been in human-rights-abuse mode for a while now and it makes me very uncomfortable. I'd rather people had been honest up front that the vaccine wasn't going to have any impact on the spread of COVID. A lot of people were saying they would and they've turned out to have ... charitably I might say an immeasurable ... impact on the spread.
> Frankly, the idea that this response was needed because COVID patients would overwhelm the hospital system is a bit of a reach.
It is hard for me to imagine that anyone with internet access could be so profoundly ignorant, but there were actually bodies being stored in refrigerator trucks [1] and critically ill patients housed in tents [2] in many parts of the world before vaccines became widely available. It's not a reach, it was the actual situation on the ground for months.
It also stands out to me that the negative examples are ahistorical.
Even into modern times, plenty of people did indeed believe that flight was possible through spiritual practice or mechanical means, had no intuition about maximum construction heights at all, and well.. personally operated boarding houses across the world and throughout history.
I think the article is trying to make an argument that’s worth attempting, but is relying on some examples that don’t help it do so.
Religious tyrants, crusaders and all sorts of dictatorial rulers down through history used this exact same logic. How are current leaders any different using the same reasoning and language?
Thanks for saying. I couldn't even read the complete article based on the lack of consistency as I don't know what rules of logic apply given the examples. I did skim further and see something about a project at Google and another bad example COVID.
The main point that's off isn't that we haven't built good communications for consensus but rather the dominant information flows we've built actively diverge from concensus.
No we don't include all those other things. Meaning, we don't include them in Alphabet books, in Alphabet songs, in the ASCII code ranges between a-z or A-Z. The Wikipedia page for "English Alphabet" starts [1] "The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters". If you ask a random native school-educated English speaker to tell you the alphabet they will most likely tell you 26 letters and will not tell you diacritics that were used in older English writings to indicate the syllables. When you open a standard English dictionary there will be no section for words starting æ or wynn or &. If you put ö and é in a test of alphabet letters you would be marked wrong, even if you were then marked correct for writing "coöperation at the café", even if that's inconsistent.
You're nitpicking to try and score ackchually points, but it doesn't matter because everyone knows the English alphabet has 26 letters by some ratio like millions of speakers to 1.
That's because names aren't restricted to strings of English alphabet characters, not because there's any meaningful uncertainty about what characters the modern English alphabet contains.
I smiled at this when I read it also - I knew for a fact there were 26. Until I moved to another country. I think it kind of helps make Kevin's point though.
Yes, because you're only seeing half of it. Seen from above (or some other perspective in some cases), it's a full circle. This was my point. Most people don't objectively know the shape of a rainbow.
> Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast
Yes, you use your individual judgement and go with that; updating as you can.
"consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility. Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own.
In the wider civilization context; a society that unites behind one approach to a problem is more likely to fail big than to succeed big. "A free society pulls all kinds of different directions," as Pterry put it. Often the best solutions are only recognized after some crazy shit is tried, but they are recognized as best in part because the crazy shit was tried.
>"consensus" here is an appeal to avoid individual responsibility. Embrace the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own.
The problem with hyper-individualism is that some systems only work if everyone is bought in (either willingly or by force). You can't have public schooling without forcing those without kids to pay; and therefore you need people without kids to pay taxes to send kids to school. Likewise you can't build a corporation without achieving some kind of consensus with the people in your organization.
That was the problem with COVID. Lockdowns were effectively meaningless if they couldn't be enforced. On a global scale this meant that someone in China who "embraced the possibility of being wrong (or right) on your own" could fly to Italy and wipe out 100,000 people.
> You can't have public schooling without forcing those without kids to pay; and therefore you need people without kids to pay taxes to send kids to school.
What, no, you definitely can. We already have infra to tax people differently depending on the number of kids they have. There isn't the political will to rest the entire tax burden of supporting public schooling to people with kids, and obviously that would require raising taxes on those with kids to compensate for loss of tax revenue from people without kids, but there's no actual incompatibility here.
>There isn't the political will to rest the entire tax burden of supporting public schooling to people with kids,
It seems like you are just repeating my comment, but just being overly technical. "You definitely can nuke New York City, we already have the infra to do so. There isn't the political will to nuke New York City".
And just because the infrastructure exists, doesn't mean such a scheme would be successful. If you decided to burden parents with the tax bill for public schools and then they subsequently failed due to budget concerns, I don't consider that a "definitely can". That said, we don't need to speculate ; there was already a time when burdened parents with the cost of sending kids to school and in those times not every child went to school. What you are describing isn't a political will to have parents pay for schooling, its political will to remove children from the education system.
> Yes, you use your individual judgement and go with that; updating as you can.
Seems very self-centered. I remember February 2020 I was sure COVID was no big deal and would blow over within a few weeks (ha!). Imagine I had travelled in that time under that assumption, and returned home to my grandmother, potentially passing on a deadly virus. Since I am young and most likely not at serious risk of death, why should she have to pay for my miscalculation?
The article reminds me of one of Clarke's Three Laws:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.
> Artificial intelligence is a very fast-moving frontier and what (and who) to believe about it is hard for a non-expert to decide. Crypto is another example of a big field that seems to contain conflicting experts. For the lay public it is very hard to know who to believe.
The "lay public" doesn't care in the first place. They don't have the time to read various studies and journals to compare conflicting points of view. What they do have time for is news media, and a whole lot of it
> But sometimes experts are wrong. And very often, there’ll be another expert who has a different, even contrary, professional opinion on the same subject. So non-experts are left having to decide which expert we want to believe.
The non-experts aren't concerned with who to believe, they're concerned about what should be done. Believing something is true != thinking something should be done (ref Hume's is-ought problem).
I'm convinced that the author of this isn't complaining that the public has read various conflicting scientific studies and is unable to make a decision, they're complaining because the public is split on what should be done, which is the real source of disagreement
What should be done is a moral question that's independent of the results of any single experiment. To propose that a group of experts "decide" what's moral for the rest of society would be analogous to establishing a public religion
Except that information-causality flows both ways. There are those who have a strong self-interested opinion on "what should be done" that would be imprudent for most everyone relative to the factual reality. To convince more people of their preferred action, they work to undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality. So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant.
> There are those who have a strong self-interested opinion on "what should be done" that would be imprudent for most everyone relative to the factual reality. To convince more people of their preferred action, they work to undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality. So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant.
You mention a "factual reality" in an area of disagreement but there is no such thing prior to the establishment of a consensus. The phrase "undermine everyone's belief in the factual reality" is misleading because it assumes that there is already some established consensus that is being undermined prior to its own establishment. But of course, one of the ways to establish a consensus is to talk about it as if it were already established and legitimate
> So talking about what the public believes, independent of any proposed course of action, ends up being quite relevant.
I think that talking about consensus can be useful, but I've yet to find an example of anyone discussing what the public "believes" in complete disinterest and without some implicit course of action
> Is there a way to arrive at a proto-consensus fast — without leaving out the real contingent that everything we know is wrong?
possibly some form of prediction market? explicitly reward (give more power to) individuals who are repeatedly correct about the future, and over time such people gain more influence and the overall predictions become more reliable.
there have been small-scale prediction markets throughout covid (“what will be the daily case count on 1 August 2022 as reported by CDC?”). that naive approach has some obvious conflict of interest/opportunity for exploitation. but it sounds worthwhile for someone to explore how quickly the various prediction markets have converged throughout their relatively short history, to see if there’s anything there.
And then there's things that everyone knows and that are wrong. Like famous movie quotes. "I am your father, Luke". Known as the Mandela effect [1].
A fast-mode consensus has a high probability to create lasting wrong "truths", that will be difficult to dispell later.
The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information, but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do for most normal jounalists.
> The proper way would be to attach probabilities to information, but that would be too much for most readers, and impossible to do for most normal jounalists.
some scientific reporting takes the approach of defining certain words to represent confidence (probability) ranges: “we are weakly confident”… “moderately confident”… etc. they often explicitly define the range, too. that’s the case e.g. in IPCC reports, which is technical material that way more people i know than normal read.
i don’t think qualifiers like ”weakly”/“strongly” get in the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually are. people don’t always share information out of altruism. frequently, information is shared in an attempt to persuade. and so there’s selective pressure for writing which makes a situation seem more black/white.
if you want quality communication at scale i’m not sure if your bigger priority would be introducing probabilities, or rather aligning everyone using the communication channel to value truth. Wikipedia does a far better job at presenting good information than most of the press, despite lacking probabilities.
> i don’t think qualifiers like ”weakly”/“strongly” get in the way, but they do show just how uncertain most effects actually are.
"Most" seems to caused by selection bias.
There is new areas where knowlegde has to be established first. Theories can be created, and experiments defined to confirm or reject them. But it takes time. That's the realm of fast tracking results the original article is about. The temporary results will be replaced later. Covid is such a case (even if ethics may get in the way of some experiments). "Most" of science is like this.
Then there's areas that cannot be verified by experiment. Probabilities are useful there, too, even more so, because they will persist long-term, even if there is consensus. Main examples are climate (no control group of earths to conduct experiments on) and cosmology (no control group of universes).
This overstates the difficulty of crowd-sourcing expert consensus. Even if two percent of experts are saying "!X" about the pandemic, then yes, that's still a lot of people and it's easy to find one to counter mainstream opinion "X". However, if you filter inept science journalism, populist narrative, etc., and listen to experts in relevant fields, it's pretty easy very early on to identify the 98%-ish consensus.
The 2% of "everyone" who doesn't know the earth is round, doesn't really impede the reliability of everyone knowing the world is round. Likewise, the "what every expert knows" (maybe not futurist prophesying, but at least about what is true today) is accessible, useful and pretty up-to-date.
Our developed society is commanded by experts too much. If we make decisions on information, that are given to us and forget to confront that information with reality around us, we are lost as free human beings. Conformity behaviour based on science is real threat for democracy.
this is another post that I wish went beyond the idea it is proposing and gave some researched stances on that idea, like who was more right at the beginning of covid and how they are different from people who were less right
Ouch, I think nobody will like the answer to this.
It's just my impression, obviously, because I haven't done any formal research on this, but looks like the actual experts know how much they know and how much they don't know, and were quite fine since the start.
Also, every single channel that turns their opinions into advice or policy is noisy by an absurd level. So much that what experts think isn't even relevant to predict their results.
That first advice about masks, when every expert expected them to work was a bit damning but not all of the problem.
Have you noticed that the public still doesn't know that surface cleaning isn't relevant? Or that masks on open spaces were deemed essential until the policy just shifted to agree with the public actions, without the gained expertise being used at all? (They are useful in crowds, and useless outside of one.) Or that ventilation is essential in closed spaces?
But it didn't stop on that. There was just no useful communication of how crowd immunity worked, just some shit from the crazy "let's kill people" ones, and how it related to vaccines. The result is that the public was surprised by it going down when it did, and in a larger way by the shape of the omicron spread.
And on the subject of vaccines, there was no communication at all about the safety of them... what is unsettling, because they are safe to a nearly absurd level (all the ones used on the West, including the one that got suspended everywhere due to unexpected risks.)
Overall, if we had the same pandemic again, the public would be none the wise on how to protect themselves, or what expect from it. No information reaches the people, ever.
I remember most predictions (by "real" experts, at least the ones I paid attention to) were right except one: it will take two years to create a useful vaccine. It was more like six months.
Actually I don't remember who they were, I got the impression that there was a consensus, unlike what happened with politicians.
You don't need to identify who is an expert and who is not by yourself: experts (scientists) compete with and cross validate each-other. I.e. experts themselves will self-select who qualifies as experts. And since there are a lot of them and there is also a pretty strong competition it's pretty unreasonable to say that there is somehow a large conspiracy because it should have to involve basically everyone.
And not just in one field! E.g. sometimes climate change denialists say that climate science is not even real science and that these people are just self proclaimed scientists. But the thing is that all fields of sciences (at least all natural sciences, engineering and mathematics) are interrelated. All of these have boundaries touching each other and all fields will have at least some scientists working on these boundaries with people from another field. So no field can simply fake it. In other words, basically everyone who has published in the past few decades will have a finite Erdos number :).
Also, not only you can trust the experts, but you don't really have any other sane/viable choice.
> I've seen this play out in companies; businessmen in positions to promote technical people, often making some very poor decisions.
This is true. What I say to people (small business owners or startup founders) is that you can't pick a co-founder, a tech lead or even a good subcontractor without having the technical knowledge yourself.
But that's pretty a different issue. First of all, here you need to pick a specific person for a specific role where you'll then have (want) to trust all (most) of their decisions and you don't have anyone to compare these to. Also, it's many decisions based on a small amount of data.
While what we are talking about is listening to experts who mostly say the same thing (the scientific consensus) and it's a very few decisions based on a huge amount of data (research, experiments). There are, of course, times when the consensus has not settled, when experts won't agree, but then you know that they don't know enough yet.
Which is pretty rare and the reason you know they are wrong is because science proves them wrong - later. The thing most people don't get is that if you want a pick viable strategy, then it's not enough to simply criticize one of the candidates (candidate strategies), in this case the "listen to science/experts". You have to evaluate the alternatives too. Because you have to chose something, because you will pick and follow one strategy.
I've already suggested a lot of people to come up with an alternative but I'm yet to see one. Of course, you'd have to explain why it works better.
They aren't wrong because the science proves them wrong, though- they're wrong because they happen to not be right.
Sometimes, the scientific or quasi-scientific institutions we have just aren't sufficiently uncentivised to align themselves with the truth! Modern Researchers are beholden to grantwriters, and grantwriters are biased in what sort of peojects they'll give money to. Specifically, low prestige problems are underfunded.
An example I heard about was light-boxes for SAD. There were some studies with a few lights that helped a bit; nobody had done studies with a ridiculous number of lights to see if it solved the problem completely; one guy did, and it fixed his wife's SAD. In absence of data, anecdata rules.
Alternatively, entire fields can be compromised when they're politicised. The soviet union's physics was good- the scientific method worked there, and if you wanted your ideas about physics to match up with reality, you could do a lot worse than copying the most popular soviet physics world-model! Just don't do it for biology, or genetics, or sociology. (Actually, you probably shouldn't trust western sociology, either.)
One person shouldn't be able to outperform the scientific institutions of the world, but it can happen when they're unhealthy.
On two, completely separate occasions, I have had very long, very mind-numbing arguments with supposedly college-educated people that tried to assert "in their day" the alphabet had only 25 letters. I have been accused of vandalizing Wikipedia by these people.
In my opinion, a fair evaluation of "expert" opinion, at least over the last decade or so, would conclude experts are almost worthless. I have no doubt there are true experts in the world, who's analysis and predictions do much better than monkeys throwing darts, but the landscape is so littered with grifters, and there is such a lack of fair scorekeeping, that identifying true experts is impossible. Most certainly that is true when it comes to politics, and unfortunately just about everything, including a lot of science, is just politics pretending to be otherwise, whether it be covid, global warming, economics, what have you.
The affirmative examples are all conventions. We know them to be true because it's within our power to make it so just by agreeing with each other.
The negative examples are not conventions. They are about what will happen in the future.
So it's not just "sometimes what everyone knows it wrong." More like, on topics involving observation, deduction, or prediction what everyone "knows" is more likely to be wrong than right. The history of science provides ample evidence. Those claiming that "the science is settled" are trying to manipulate the public.