> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud.
Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.
In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel.
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.
I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant.
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).
As written, possibly.
Taken literally, it's full of holes.
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!
You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.
This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.
The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.
We weren't told it was the best guess to save lives. We were told it was the science, and this science was very fast to adapt to alarmist narratives while being incredibly slow (sometimes taking years) to adapt to reality.
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]
Public health also studies the most effective communication strategies for sharing public health info even in the face of uncertainty. I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time, but that is why they didn't say it. The field started out with a person breaking the handle to an invented ell, not even using communications but taking physical actions to stop the spread.
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.
> I bet they will be more explicit about uncertainty next time based on the last time
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.
I’d just like to add that the epidemic wasn’t stopped at all. Everyone still caught COVID.
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?
I saw one study of relative death rates that concluded if all US has followed California standards, about 800,000 fewer people would have died. And remember "flatten the curve"? The goal isn't to stop everyone getting the virus but to slow it down enough that the health care capacity is sufficient. A quick google finds this study and a few more recommended: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31709-2 even the way the virus isn't killing as many vulnerable people as we get it the Nth time after M vaccinations is a success if the lower the curve strategy.
Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months.
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.
It's like paid clergy of old, except we now call them scientists. Sometimes they reveal truths. Most of the time, and most of them are kind of useless. It's self serving bullshit, served by ever growing bureaucracy.
I attended the opening talk of a local science festival.
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).
This actually may be true although somewhat indirectly with respect to at least one well-known conspiracy belief.
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.
It's not that it was heavy handed. But it was completely nonsensical.
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.
A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians power tripping in the name of The Science and later having to roll things back, either because of public backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially telling the public that masks were ineffective, then tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its efficacy).
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.
Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed.
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.
Wrong they did that to me. Not a small company either. Yeah you can play games with “we won’t fire you, we’ll just stop paying you and won’t allow you to work”.
It’s like they watched Office Space and thought they’d “Milton” everyone.
My point as a Brit was it seemed a bit heavy handed in the US. In the UK we didn't really have that and still got most people vaccinated.
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.
From a philosophical perspective, I don't see how the vaccine mandates for public jobs is appreciably different than vaccine requirements for public school that already exist.
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.
The difference between the vaccines you're talking about lies in their development time: The one in school have been (tested) around for decades before getting mandatory.
The COVID vaccines have now been around for 4 years now, and there is no evidence they are appreciably more dangerous than those other vaccines that took longer to develop.
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.
I try to distinguish between "the scientific process" and building scientific consensus. As rigorous as the scientific process may be, building consensus is always a messy and human thing.
Why? Some guy writing an op-ed saying how frustrating it is that science is full of fraud is a great argument for the scientific method? There have been people writing articles like this for over 20 years if not much longer about all kinds of fields. Nothing ever happens, nothing ever improves, it never goes beyond people saying "tut tut how terrible". This sort of thing is entirely predictable and will keep happening, over and over again. On the current course, there will be articles just like this one being discussed in another twenty years from now.
I don't think Derek Lowe is frustrated that "science is full of fraud", this is likely editorialization on your part. It seems that it stems specifically from Masliah, who is common across all papers in the dossier. Granted, Masliah appears to be prolific, so this is admittedly a large issue in the peer review and verification structure in this field.
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.
I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent being caught would yield a constant stream of such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of them have ever been retracted or even had any of the problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere.
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.
Took a quick look at your blog. Some of those examples are quite bad, similar to the fake gels in the Science article. Do you know if any of them gained particular attention?
There was a paper written by a couple of Germans on the Botometer stuff. The first version of the paper cited me, they spent a year or two trying to get a version published and it was eventually cut down and got into obscure social science journal and ignored. Nothing ever came of it really.
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.
I'm not sure the two uses of "science" in your post are using the same meanings of the word.
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.
The problem is simplifying into the same word "science" both the scientific method (with a pretty good track record, though it does have some blind spots), and groups of people claiming to engage in it (the tendency of which is to become corrupt, the faster the more powerful they are).
Culture of being proud of ignorance is on full display in the replies to my comment, btw.
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.
> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science"
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.
A lot of people are working to fix the K-12+ educational system which is the root cause of many stupid people, but beyond that, it's objectively hard to fix stupid.
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".
This is a bad take. Because even the craziest of crazies (the flat earthers) are actually doing the scientific method by running experiments to test their crazy conjectures. What makes them crazy is that they have a poor sense of discernment about when it's worth it to trust authorities and when it's not; they're not dumb, and education is not really failing them (in the sense that they "aren't being taught what science is"). They are arguably better scientists than "trust the science" folks because at least they are getting out there and moving atoms to test shit.
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.
Let go man. Science is rotten. I spent a decade doing science. You wouldn't know unless you were there (and half the people who were are so wrapped up in the holiness of science as part of their identity that they can't see the rot).
All science does is show us how to move a whole bunch of piles of shit over into one big pile of shit, off in the corner. Or perhaps on to an unsuspecting group of poor people because, the burden demands to be he held and somebody has to hold the bag of shit. Right?
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!!!
Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.