I think one cause of this inability to tolerate dissent is how scientists and capital-S Science have functionally (and inadequately) replaced religion/ethics/philosophy for a sizable portion of society. Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study. Of course, they do this without understanding that this position is itself a philosophical position, the result of centuries of intellectual development.
The result: science, which is supposed to be a neutral process that encourages dissent, becomes a political game, where scientists are treated as the ultimate authority on non-scientific questions.
There is also an aspect where it goes from science to policy, and there is this step where certain parts of society simple state: "how dare you think you know better then x, who studied y for x amount of year, or this scientist".
It happens here too. During Covid, also here the lab leak theory was talked as a crazy non-scientific conspiracy.
Common sense proposed the lab leak. Was absurd and scary how easily it was dismissed in pretty much the entire Western media, not only the US. Even this forum got subjected to it.
It was not just “common sense”. I was reading in-depth articles about the GoF line of research and all the characters involved (Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, etc) back in March/April 2020. Basically the entire body of circumstantial evidence pointing to the lab leak hypothesis was known and reported within months of the start of the pandemic. Every in-depth article written since then has been mostly a rehashing of what various bloggers and alternative news sites had already published.
But the fact it was basically a recycling of several racist "those filthy foreigners are responsible for disease" tropes along with "scheming orientals" tropes.
It's not "potentially" racist. It was being spouted by racists and directly leading to violence against asians in America and elsewhere. When this behavior is seen, and with the standard lack of any nuance in both reporting and social media, making such claims publicly if you're less than 95% certain is irresponsible.
What makes you certain that there was less than a 1 in 20 chance that the lab leak theory was wrong at the time?
After all, percentage fbtou are going to wait for every theory to be 19/20 chance of being correct before you announce it as a theory, no theory would have been announced at all for COVID
You can't prove a negative. Again, you are ignoring my point - most science isn't trying to make claims already being used to incite violence. There is a higher standard before publicly discussing such things.
The lab leak theory was not being touted by the Black people who beat up Asians in droves the last 3 years. The idea that it was Trumpists was a conspiracy theory not borne out by stats
There is a huge reason to downplay it, especially in the USA, until things could cool around it or things could be worked out 100% factually and it is a science related - basic Psychology.
Even in my small town of 7000, an Indian lady was assaulted to "get back at those Chinese for giving us COVID (which doesn't exist and is just made up by the lame stream media)".
No this isn’t a good reason to shutdown actual scientific discussion and this whole thing felt like a red herring specifically played up to shut down dissent.
Anti-Asian hate crimes are a real thing, but both black and white Americans endure them at a higher rate[1]. Further, these types of attacks went up across the board during the pandemic however Asian based hate crimes represented only ~8% of these attacks with most other ethnic groups having way more attacks targeted at them[2].
Seems to me like an example of cherry picked statistics being used for political gain. Asian hate crimes being something that became way more common during the pandemic is simply not grounded in reality.
It must have been really obvious to all concerned that, by running to ground the lab leak theory, if it ever did get out (what they did) that it’d be a big net loss for trust in government and science.
So it follows that they must have been really (like really /really/) scared that it was absolutely necessary — damn the consequences.
But my guess it’s actually a feedback loop gone out of control. (We knew even then that this was no Ebola.)
At the same time, in the UK, right at the start, we have those now famous words: people were “made to feel more personally vulnerable”.
My guess is that the intended recipient of that initiative was us (i.e., gen pop), but the acute recipients (i.e., those most likely to hear, actively listen and be influenced) were those already involved in the campaign.
The volume could not be turned down (because it was assumed gen pop would otherwise not listen). But very stupidly, there also was no moderating mechanism for those “in charge”. So we have our loop.
(This doesn’t fully track, because later the British PM got seriously ill. And later still, the British PM also went back to partying. So, there would have been re-injected some non-trivial rationale to the severity worries, albeit only later. And there was also apparently a very effective moderating mechanism at least in central government. But as a simple model, it explains a lot for me.)
> It must have been really obvious to all concerned that, by running to ground the lab leak theory, if it ever did get out (what they did) that it’d be a big net loss for trust in government and science.
But a lab leak in itself would be a big loss of public trust in science. It exemplifies the worst fears of the uneducated regarding "God-playing scientists" who slice and dice the DNA like a Frankenstein, produce plagues for curiosity and "we were preoccupied with whether we could, but not whether we should"-style tropes. A real leak would validate these nutteries and play into the cards of the woo anti-science people (remember those times? Penn and Teller's Bullshit etc...). The fear around GMO etc. And this sort of research is international and wasn't localized to China and the Wuhan experiments aren't solely with Chinese involvement. So they thought better roll the dice and see if it gets out.
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Trust is a very feeble thing, and nobody wants to do an honest postmortem. The train is simply moving forward faster and faster. Erode public trust, then smear and name-call anyone who doesn't adhere to an ever narrowing band of acceptable beliefs, dismiss them all as everything-ist nutjobs. Never admit wrong, just crank the heat up steadily year by year. Because surely that will solve the problems.
I don't think we should reject reality just because we're concerned others can't handle that reality without reacting violently. The notion that we should downplay certain ideas because of crimes committed by people that misunderstand those ideas is not something I can get behind, sorry. Do you post on reddit a lot? The phrasing of your argument and the intermittent spacing has that reddity vibe to me.
GP didn't suggest to reject reality out of concern for others.
He said we should make sure to be 100% certain of what the facts are before asserting what reality is to the public, especially when it comes to sensitive subjects.
The alternative is to say that reality is A, have a lot of people face (just or unjust) repercussions, then say "Oopsie! Turns out we were dead wrong". The damage is already done by that point.
For being shutdown and canceled, the lab leak theory is and has been talked about a shocking amount for the past 3+ years. Rarely a day goes by here that it hasn't been talked about, especially in 2020.
Nothing in that condemnation is limited to claims of deliberate release. That article contributed to a false scientific consensus, which social media operators used to justify banning any account that suggested SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from a research-related accident. For example, Facebook did so until May 2021.
> I don't ever remember it being treated as a "crazy non scientific conspiracy
Consider that this treatment may have taken place in the editorial boards & newsrooms of the outlets you read before the debate ever had the opportunity to reach to your attention.
Perhaps epistemology is not just individual in scope, but societal.
Indeed, I also didn't remember it being treated in Jan-Oct 2020 as a 'crazy non-scientific conspiracy'. But we know today, (reference any journalist talking about origins on Twitter) that lab leak was being treated amongst themselves as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory
I also felt it was the most likely explanation from the first time I read about it (March/April 2020) but even if it was “just one hypothesis” here’s the thing: if true, it has profound implications for the future of humanity. It’s not like this is just an academic question about what killed the dinosaurs. It doesn’t matter whether it can be proven; the fact that we consider it in the realm of possibility means we need to figure out what can be done to ensure the next “hypothetical” leak isn’t even worse.
Does it really matter? I mean we did had deadly pandemics before biolabs were a thing.
Other than blaming China because that’s what Americans want to do now, I haven’t heard anything interesting about what to do if the lab leak hypotheses is right.
Thoreau made a similar argument after his carelessness started a major wildfire, stating that once he lost control of his campfire, it was "as if the lightning had done it". His neighbors weren't impressed, and I'm not impressed here either.
This thinking is just bizarre. ~20M people are dead. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident at the WIV, then those deaths were all avoidable, simply by not funding research that was already considered to be an unacceptable risk by many academics (Relman, Lipsitch, etc.) before the pandemic, and actually defunded until 2017. These were real people, mothers and grandfathers and friends. Would you not rather they hadn't died?
The WIV was funded by the American NIH, and used techniques first developed by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a research accident there, then the American government is in no position to blame China. On the other hand, that gives the American and Chinese governments a collective incentive to downplay that possibility, as seems to have occurred.
It doesn’t matter in the sense that we just had to deal with the virus, no matter what.
But it does matter with regard to public trust in science and government.
Others have also pointed out that it matters because of it being a potential spark for racism (and that’s a reasonable concern no matter if you think the response wrong or right).
Also, I remember some concern that it may be a bio-weapon. And, although slight far fetched, it would be consistent. Ironically, I suspect the intent was to discount the possibility to prevent panic. (Though they were happy to spread lower grade fear, so go figure…)
Could you fill in the logical leap from "spiritual institutions are no longer credible" to "science is now political"? That is not an intuitive leap. There are many independent and more plausible explanations.
Also, the pretense of scientists not being good at science (i.e. cannot handle dissent) is a rocky one. Any scientist worth their salt is a person of science.
I think you can make a narrative something like this: traditional spiritual institutions lose their authority at the same time as technological-scientific ones gain in authority. Human beings are not good at following abstract ideas; they need other human beings to follow.
Hence scientists fall into the role of “wisdom-givers” previously held by village elders, religious leaders, etc. Seeing as scientists are not trained to care about “wisdom” or ethics beyond the basics, it’s a mismatch that results in the problems I mentioned.
Adding to this: the typical narrative is that scientific advances eroded spiritual authority, but many philosophers like Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) show that is a vastly oversimplified view of what happened.
>Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game
Well, "subjective" is the wrong word, but I get what you mean. However, aren't they just word games? It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real. They just investigate what can be deduced from specific axiomatic systems that are entirely divorced from reality. Theologians aren't even consistent, since they have dogmas that they'll contort around in order to avoid contradicting, even if that involves contradicting other parts of scripture.
I'll never forget the time I asked a philosophy undergraduate why he decided to go to university for philosophy rather than just reading the bibliography by himself, and he told me that by doing so he could teach philosophy. An academic pyramid scheme.
That might be the case for other disciplines, but it certainly isn't for philosophy. There are no special techniques, you just read what other people have said on the subject. What else is there?
Sure, but my question was about the purpose of studying philosophy in university. "It's easier than doing it by yourself" is not a purpose. There's still nothing you can do with what you've learned, other than become a professor.
I just want to point out that you haven’t made a good argument for this to be true at all. One person does not make a pyramid scheme. Someone into cooking and teaching could go to culinary school and tell you their dream is to be a culinary instructor. Doesn’t make it a pyramid scheme.
Philosophy has one of the highest average incomes of degrees, because of the number of graduates that go into law and business.
One thing you can do with a degree in philosophy is get into law school. After graduating from law school you can be employed as a lawyer. They’re not philosophy lawyers, just normal lawyers.
This isn’t some fringe thing. Play around with some Google searches like “what can you do with a philosophy degree?”, “best pre-law degrees”, “philosophy and law school” and you will see what else one could possibly do with a degree in philosophy.
That’s a pretty important qualifier. Most degrees don’t take something from impossible to possible. That’s pretty much only certifications. Is there anything you can do with a CS degree that you can’t otherwise, besides be a CS professor? Even really high level jobs will have people with other degrees.
> It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real.
That is a viewpoint. This is the exact fallacy pointed out upper in the thread. This is just a viewpoint of yours, however commonly held it may be in the society of today.
No, I'm not talking about something as banal as whether a god exists. I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture. That's not a point of view, that's what theology is. Regardless of whether magic exists, I think we can both agree we can't find out by reading Harry Potter.
The same for philosophy. I like to half joke that modern philosophy is what's left after taking out all the useful parts of ancient natural philosophy and putting them into either mathematics or science.
It's not really an apt analogy. Law is not a field of inquiry like science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology are. Lawyers do not push the boundaries of understanding, they're clerks. That aside, laws are not divorced from reality, they're agreements that members of a society enter into regarding how the society is supposed to function. To study law is to study the way society works. Yes, society is an artificial construct, which why law is not a field of inquiry, but it still provably exists.
What is my viewpoint? Exactly what that I have presented as if it was an objective fact is subjective? Please enlighten me, because I have no idea what you're trying to say.
>Very naive of you to think that religion, scripture, or existence of God are unprovable problems.
When did I say that? What I said was that society provably exists, and I said that to emphasize that the subject matter of law is something real, not to imply by omission that the existence of god/a god/gods is unprovable.
>Many people don’t agree with you on the both sides. Many think there is definitively no God and many think there is.
Cool. I'm not talking about the existence of a god nor about what people think about the topic. I'm talking about theology and philosophy as fields of study.
I’m a different person, but maybe I can help clarify.
> I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture.
This paragraph, especially the italicized portion, implies the statement “scripture isn’t real”.
That can be taken a few different ways. One is that scripture doesn’t exist. Obviously that’s not true, so probably not what you meant.
The other is that scripture is fiction or wrong or made up or not representative of reality or something in this general sphere of belief. Your clarifications, like mentioning Harry Potter, show that this is what you meant.
Stating that scripture is fiction is a viewpoint. You’re not even describing just Christian theology but theology in general. So you’re putting out that every claim that some text was divinely inspired is false. I’m not arguing with you on this, just saying it’s a viewpoint you’re putting out.
I don’t think you mentioned it explicitly, but theologians also study more than scripture. So to say theologians don’t study reality is to also say this is t real (although you didn’t say that explicitly).
This all adds up to you taking some position, having some viewpoint in the realm of metaphysics, ontology, theology, etc. You’re saying some things are and are not true about god, like the holy bible is not truth based on reality.
I agree with this. On top of what he said, I can add this just to clarify more:
> I'm saying theology doesn't study anything real. It doesn't have the tools to determine whether a god exists, because it doesn't study reality, it studies scripture.
Your viewpoint unshared by many others here is that we cannot determine the existence of god by studying scripture. I say 'unshared by others' to emphasize they are subjective.
Neil de Grasse Tyson’s academic output is exactly what you would expect from someone did a phd then left research science. He has a few first author papers that have a couple dozen citations and a few papers where he’s only a contributor. He hasn’t written academically since then. He’s not doing active research, which may mean he’s fallen behind on the cutting edge, but that doesn’t mean he’s not qualified to talk about astronomy with the public. He has the relevant training and knowledge.
Emil Kirkegaard, whose blog you linked to, is not a reliable or unbiased source for this kind of judgement for a wide variety of reasons.
The gist of this article seems to be that Tyson is "not much of an astrophysicist" because he has too many social media followers compared to the number of papers he has published.
Funny. That is what seemed to happen in reaction to covid. Data and science were routinely ignored and replaced by fear and tribalism. How else can you get people to sign up for insane never ending government mandates?
What do you mean with subjective? Both philosophy and religion are highly social topics. And past trivial instinctive moves, you need some languages and cultural framework to achieve anything that allows transcending individual limits.
Science names a lot of heterogeneous practices which all have in common to be constraint by human interests. So they are neutral only if you define neutral with this highly sociosubjective consideration.
By subjective I mean relative, I.e. there is no real difference between different options and it’s all no more significant than whether you prefer Pepsi or Coke. This is the attitude many people hold toward the topic.
Science as it is taught, is about the conclusions that scientists have come to over the centuries, it's about how they made their observations and how smart they were. It is taught as an orthodoxy, a settled thing that you can trust. This does not reflect science as a current work product.
A related phenomenon is the math problem on social media - what is 2 + 2 * 3 (or similar). A complete answer is "Using PEMDAS, the answer is 2 + 6 = 8". But instead of giving the complete answer, which includes your assumptions, people fight about the answer. It's GREAT for engagement.
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It's interesting to me that religion has evolved many times in many places. It must fulfil a human need. It would be a nice story to tell oneself that one has no need of a childish crutch from a bygone era. It's a much nicer story than realizing everyone needs crutches. (Not the person reading this comment, of course, you are beyond such things; Now tell me again, who is the object of your righteous anger?)
> religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study
Innit, though? The people who whine about 'scientism' tend to be selling a religious or political ideology. They reject the need to measure things because they don't want their shit tested.
No, it isn’t, and the fact that someone could seriously suggest that the entire field of philosophy and religious studies is some kind of elaborate grift is a great example of what my original comment said.
Slow down, pardner, you're the one conflating religious studies with actual, and sometimes useful, philosophy.
What your original comment said is that people are blindly deferring to the authority of scientists, when they should instead be blindly deferring to the authority of theologians and philosophers (and presumably only those of your preferred faction).
(In the spirit of the continental philosophers, I read between the text.)
Your comment is full of false accusations and has nothing to do with what I wrote.
Where did I say they should blindly defer to philosophers and theologians? I said these subjects should be studied more. Nor did I say people currently blindly adhere to scientists.
If you’re going to argue, at least bother to read the comment carefully first.
The only "practical" thing I learned from pure math (I'm not good at it) is that everything is more or less, "word game", and everything can be questioned.
Once you realize even the most obvious things, like "A < B || A == B || A > B" can be not necessarily true for real numbers, you really can't stop wondering if what authority says is so true...
The Reals are ordered right? Any two elements can be compared.
I'm guessing you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.
> you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.
Yeah. Since "uncountable infinite" has no real world meaning (maybe in some modern physics it does?), it's hard to say what the natural definition of real numbers is, and things like axiom of choice's true value is quite arbitrary.
But even at a less-abstract level, I don't think the comparability of real numbers is so obvious. For example if you just define a (irrational) real number as a non-repeating decimal,
or "a program on a Turing machine that prints digits and never halts"[1], then how do we know comp(A, B) halts or not?
It's not a proof of that real numbers are not comparable (since it just reduces comp(A,B) to halting problem, not vice versa), but at least for me it's telling that simple things like comparison is not always simple.
[1]: Of course it's ill-defined and can't cover all real numbers, since the number of programs on a giving Turing machine is countable.
You can encode halting of a program P as a comparison of a computable real number Q with a fixed number R by defining Q as 0.111..1 where each step of P adds one digit of 1 to Q’s expansion. P will halt iff Q is less than R=0.111…
Any subset of reals is ordered as it inherits the usual order from reals. The existence of well ordering (related to AOC) is difficult issue).
But the trichotomy of A>=<B does fail for a different but useful logic - remove the law of contradiction. There is a number e which is neither equal nor not equal to 0, with e^2=0. This leads to simplifications of concepts and proofs - you can define derivatives without limits for instance. This topic is studied in synthetic differential geometry.
But the real response to the comment ‘everything is just a word game’ is ‘just’ is not apt. You are free to fix rules of the game, once done you face questions which are possibly beyond your ability to answer. A person could run a program checking id Fermat equations had solutions in 1950’s. Only In 1990’s we know after great advances (like discovering a route between mountain ranges) that this program wont halt (or ZFC is inconsistent which would be even more surprising).
I couldn't agree more. Widespread belief in 'the science' is no different to any other cargo cult.
One should either know whatever-it-is because one has verified it, or one should be able to express one's assumptions re one's hypothesis. Social beliefs ought to have no part of it. Objective truth is not uncovered by consensus.
The problem is that nobody can verify the truth of every statement for themselves. Reality is too complex and no individual person has the time or the resources. For the vast majority of our beliefs, we have to rely on the consensus of experts, and that actually works really well. That doesn't mean science is perfect. But look at the theories that allow us to build a CPU with 50 billion transistors or a rocket that can go to the moon and tell me there isn't objective truth there.
«Hey, science community, look: I did an experiment and it disproves X, so everything you build on top of X is flawed too. Start from scratch, please!». Science community: «fck off».
For example: Michelson-Morley experiment — disproved by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.
> Hey, science community, look: I did an experiment and it disproves X, so everything you build on top of X is flawed too. Start from scratch, please!
This happened several times, for example when Einstein was proven right about the Theory of Relativity, showing that Newton's Laws of Motion were not precisely correct. The physics community eventually found out that Newton's Laws were a really good approximation of the better theory under conditions we experience on Earth (if you plug numbers at human scale to the Theory of Relativity, the equations actually approximate really closely to Newton's Equations which is truly remarkable - you can do it yourself as the Maths are not too complicated at all - I did this in Physics 101, first year undergrad Major in Physics), so they were not just dismissed, but continue to be used to this day as they are extremely successful in predicting the movement of bodies at human scale.
Your comparison with Michelson-Morley VS LIGO shows you don't really comprehend what you're saying, as all LIGO did was show that Gravitational waves can distort space-time to an extremely small degree (compared to astronomical measurements), which does not prove at all that light speed is not constant in all directions - and it boggles my mind why you think it does! You could make the same incorrect argument by mentioning how light speed is not the same in different materials?? The fact that space-time is distorted at places (including near large bodies as well - even ignoring gravitational waves) just shows that light can have different speeds when you consider such distortions - it feels stupid having to even say this out loud - but no, that doesn't prove light speed is not constant in a vacuum that is free of such space-time distortions!
This is nonsense. Spacetime is a concept intrinsic to both quantum field theory and general relativity, our best physical theories. Quantum fields are defined as a value for every point in spacetime. General relativity defines gravity as the curvature of spacetime. Show me a physical theory that makes the same predictions without spacetime, and you can probably win a Nobel prize.
Mountain is just excitement in heights field. There is no mountains: it just geometry, people just follows the shortest path. Heights field just warps space-time, mountain is just illusion. And other nonsense from «shutup and calculate» guys.
Switch from the model (heights field) to the physics (stone) language, please.
You are trying to sound smart, but your argument actually illustrates the point that "there is no mountains" pretty well... You think "stones" is the real physics, while quantum field theory (presumably what you mean by using the word field) is something silly scientists came up with (the shutup and calculate guys)!? This shows a high school understanding of physics... because if you want to be pedantic, yes, there's no mountain!! Our world is basically empty space, with lots and lots of tiny disturbances in the quantum fields (particles and virtual particles) being the only thing that we can consider to really exist when we look deep enough... a mountain is just an emergent property of the arrangement of those fields in this particular region. That's what physicists mean when they tell you you never really touch anything because the force of repulsion between the atoms in your hand and the atoms in other things is so strong the atoms remain at a considerable (in the quantum realm) distance. But you probably don't "believe" any of this, right?
Field is a mathematical therm. You are talking about model.
Look at hydrodynamic quantum analogs. You will see, that many quantum effects, maybe even all of them, can be explained by waves, in therms of Newtonian physics. For example, the double slit experiment can be explained by self-interference of then pilot wave.
When I can see quantum effects with my own eyes, all this mumbo-yumbo about waves of probability, half-dead cats, space-time bending, etc. don't work on me anymore. It's like tales about 4 elephants when I see round Earth in a porthole.
Michelson-Morley experiment found no changes in speed of light at all. Nothing. Zero fluctuations.
These fluctuations of speed of light were found much later, by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.
The flaw of Michelson-Morley experiment is that it was performed in isolated environment, but tried to measure an external effect.
Imagine that we want to measure atmospheric circulation in the same way: by measuring speed of wind in an closely isolated and insulated room: it's impossible.
However, Michelson-Morley experiment is one of corner stones for theory of Relativity.
> This incongruous result puzzled the physicists of the world until 1905 when Einstein published his theory of relativity. Viewed in the light of Einstein's revolutionary work, the null results of the Michelson-Morley experiment were not only predictable, but provided experimental confirmation of Einstein's theory.
I don't agree with this characterization. This is not to say that foundational studies are never invalidated: I just don't think MM was one of them.
> Michelson-Morley experiment found no changes in speed of light at all. Nothing. Zero fluctuations.
The MM experiment aimed to observe a predicted effect of the theory of luminiferous aether, which would have enabled measuring the Earth's speed relative to a canonical reference frame (the aether). It was sufficiently precise to observe that predicted effect but did not observe it, which provided strong evidence that the aether theory was wrong.
Finding that any variation in the propagation of light was too small to be detected by their instruments (and too small to be consistent with aether theory) is not the same as finding that it's exactly zero.
> These fluctuations of speed of light were found much later, by LIGO/VIRGO and NANOGrav.
It's not the same fluctuations though: these experiments found much smaller fluctuations than MM looked for, from a different effect. They're not even (understood to be) fluctuations in c, but in the shape of space.
> The flaw of Michelson-Morley experiment is that it was performed in isolated environment, but tried to measure an external effect.
The later interferometer experiments (LIGO and VIRGO) are conceptually very similar to the original MM experiment. The environment is not fundamentally different, and on the contrary LIGO and VIRGO are better isolated (against ordinary vibrations: we don't know any way to isolate an experiment from gravitational waves). They're just much larger and more precise, which is why they can observe the much smaller effect of gravitational waves.
> However, Michelson-Morley experiment is one of corner stones for theory of Relativity.
Yes, but the effects observed by LIGO and VIRGO are predicted by general relativity, which is what inspired scientists to carry out those experiments. As far as I know, they are consistent with GR to the extent that LIGO and VIRGO have measured them.
> The MM experiment aimed to observe a predicted effect of the theory of luminiferous aether ... which provided strong evidence that the aether theory was wrong.
MM failed to observe effects predicted by theory of STATIC luminiferous aether. It looks like there is no absolute aether frame (which will be strange to have in the infinite Universe).
> They're just much larger and more precise, which is why they can observe the much smaller effect of gravitational waves.
Yep. We can discard MM experiment now, because LIGO/Virgo is much better.
If we want to measure wind at high altitude, but we put our measurement tool deep and isolated it well, with high enough precision, we will be able to measure distant earthquakes and nuclear explosions. No luck with wind, of course.
To catch the wind, we need something like NANOgrav, but at much smaller scale at high orbit around Earth. Luckily, we have large number of GPS satellites with high-precision clocks in the sky: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10291-017-0686-6 . I see strong annual signal here.
> Yes, but the effects observed by LIGO and VIRGO are predicted by general relativity
This doesn't make GR unique. Other theories can predict this too. It's just waves in a medium. However, GR is abstract theory, which lacks explanation power. Lack of explanation causes lack of understanding.
Michelson’s experiments only proved there is no “Aether”, a supposedly invisible medium to carriers light. It also proved that the speed of light isn’t affected by (relative) movements. In some sense, yes one can say the speed of light of is constant. But in the context of the cosmos, it strictly doesn’t say anything about the speed of light in the past.
LIGO proved there is an aether and density ripples in it change the distance that light travels — as shown by a characteristic oscillation generated by dense objects colliding causing interference between the arms of LIGO.
The reason MM failed to show that light changes speed is because we’re not moving through the aether, but are ourselves aether stuff — and so our own perspective gets equally warped. Since us and the light both change with the relative motion, we can’t see the change.
However, LIGO, VIRGO, and NANOGrav experiments and observations proved that speed of light in vacuum is NOT constant, which makes Michelsons's experiment obsolete.
The LIGO/VIRGO experiments proved no such thing. You seem to have a fundamentally flawed understanding of these experiments.
That the speed of light is constant in vacuum is one of the fundamental assumptions of general relativity. The results of LIGO/VIRGO are so far fully compatible with GR.
The problem in this discussion is that you don't have an understanding of the concepts involved. You haven't properly understood the LIGO experiments and you clearly know nothing of general relativity. There really is no point in continuing this further.
It doesn't looks like you wanted to discuss flaws in GR with a dissident, who, obviously, too stupid to understand GR and SR. You told me that. You did the job. Now, «shut up and calculate».
You started this discussion saying "LIGO, VIRGO, and NANOGrav experiments and observations proved that speed of light in vacuum is NOT constant".
This is completely absurd, as anyone who works in the field will tell you.
I never said you're too stupid to understand. What I said, and maintain, is that you lack a basic understanding of the concepts involved. If you want to have a proper discussion, you need to first properly study general relativity, and refrain from making ridiculous assertions about things you are obviously not an expert on.
If we want to predict what the camera attached to a rocket moving along a complex trajectory at a speed close to the speed of light will see, we need a powerful theory that can predict the image and characteristics of other physical processes that this camera will observe. The Theory of Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity can predict these characteristics. However, the Theory of Relativity doesn't explain the «why» behind this happening.
If we consider the theory of the ether, the speed of light is the speed of wave propagation in the medium, which is itself determined by the speed of an interaction between particles in this medium (which is usually higher than the speed of wave itself).
In the case of experiments like LIGO/Virgo or NANOgrav, the speed of light changes because gravitational waves affect the medium.
If we take General Relativity (GR), the speed of light is the ultimate speed because Einstein stated so.
In the case of LIGO/Virgo experiments, the speed of light remains constant because the speed of light is the constant, as stated by Einstein, and space and time stretch in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th dimensions, which leads to light moving slower, although the speed of light itself doesn't change. :-/
That is complete rubbish. There are plenty of examples from East and West. In certain parts of China, rival monasteries would have a throwdown over theology, hold a debate, and the losing monastery would convert.
The difference is that Theology can take personal experience as a logical prior, and work from there. Often that is the grappling hook thrown over a chasm which allows a bridge to be built to a new level of understanding. A bit like the way that infinitesimals are used as a device in the derivation of calculus.
One of the great (if unfortunate) advances in human society was the discovery that “personal experience” is a very unreliable way to learn about the world.
How is this unfortunate? If you drawn conclusions about the world around you using your limited personal experience then it is unreliable. Relying on personal experience to learn about the world leads to faulty conclusions, more than data or experimentation would.
- I live in X city and I get robbed at gunpoint, is this city unsafe?
- I buy a new Toyota Corolla, it breaks down, does that mean the Corolla is a unreliable car?
- I go to Vermont and I decide to go hiking. The trail I picked is muddy, it's boring, and there are bugs everywhere. Is this a good place to hike?
Wrong conclusions but harmless you might say, how about:
I'm walking in a mall and I see a Black person steal a purse, it's the first crime I've ever witnessed. Are Black people dangerous?
My sister is raped by a Chinese person and my uncle tells me a Chinese person stole his mobile phone. Are Chinese people criminals?
Of course when it comes to situations that only involve you or your direct interaction with a unique situation that makes sense. Taste, smells, sexual attraction, friendship, even your relationship to God. However for most? situations it's not reliable.
And yet it mediates your entire existence. Without both objective (or analytical) science and subjective (or holistic) theology we're trying to understand the world with one hand tied behind our backs.
Personally I think understanding the story should carry equal (or greater) weight when compared to examining the letters and paint used to write it.
"Without both objective (or analytical) science and subjective (or holistic) theology we're trying to understand the world with one hand tied behind our backs."
One definition of science is "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation."
If you want to understand something about the world and you can do it using science why would you use any other method.
"Because it has meaning to me."
Excuse the bluntness but so? and why? This doesn't answer my question about the value and why you should use it.
The "mass media" is not one organization. I haven't seen any news reports redefining what science is, feel free to provide evidence of that. Finally it's not a game of definitions because science has a specific meaning. You can't just change that meaning (even if you add a captial S) then be critical about it.
You're critical because some organization in the government lied? Nothing to do with science
You're mad because some scientist committed fraud? Nothing to do with science.
Peer reviewers aren't properly checking papers, that's their fault and or their university/company. Nothing to do with science.
The majority of scientists believed something through experiments that were faulty or limited data then later turned out to be wrong? That's how it works, science isn't perfect but what's the alternative?
If you aren't an expert in a field or willing to put massive amounts of time in researching something but you have to make a decision doing whatever the majority of people in a field say is the most logical course of action
You're conflating two separate things - science as a concept, and the scientific establishment. As a concept, sceince obviously works and can't be changed. The scientific establishment is a bunch of people and institutions, and it's practices may or may not match with the concept of science, and may change with time.
To imagine an extreme case, Nature could start publishing theology papers instead of physics and biology - in that case, an important part of the scientific establishment would have stopped doing actual science. But, based on reputation, many people would keep believing what Nature prints and would still point to the new theology articles as "scientists have discovered that [...]".
This is what people mean when they say science is becoming a religion: not that the concept of what science is changing, but that certain parts of the scientific establishment are not doing science per se but that their conclusions are still regarded as scientific based on past reputation.
A specific example would be someone like Michio Kaku. He is nominally a scientist, and is often interviewed as a scientist and many believe he is there to present what science says. But he is in fact just some public speaker/sci-fi author who last practiced science decades ago and now revels in speculation and exaggeration. He is essentially a priest of scientism.
This isn't a thing. There's no unified organization of science, therefore making generalizations about it ss wrong. It would be just as wrong as saying "Fast food restaurants need to..", "The media always ...", "Black people should stop...".
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This is what people mean when they say science is becoming a religion: not that the concept of what science is changing, but that certain parts of the scientific establishment are not doing science per se but that their conclusions are still regarded as scientific based on past reputation.
That's not the fault of science that's the fault of either the SPECIFIC establishments or the person. Reputation is based on past actions like truthfulness, admitting fault, etc. Not only the specific of what they did. If a company made pizza and had a reputation for quality then decided to sell bagels is it wrong of me to trust the quality? If Nature had a good reputation with scientific papers and started publishing theology papers, then why is it wrong to trust them?
* the new theology articles as "scientists have discovered that [...]".*
I don't even get this example. If a theology article starts with that sentence then that's kinda weird, I would have to read more but say the article is just fraudulent or uses "science" to justify something. That's the fault of Nature for publishing it and the author for writing it. It has nothing to do with "science" (a process) or other "scientific establishments" (since they aren't a single organization).
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A specific example would be someone like Michio Kaku. He is nominally a scientist, and is often interviewed as a scientist and many believe he is there to present what science says. But he is in fact just some public speaker/sci-fi author who last practiced science decades ago and now revels in speculation and exaggeration. He is essentially a priest of scientism.
According to Wikipedia he seems to have done a great deal of scientific work -
"Between 1970 and 2000, Kaku had papers published in physics journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.[13] In 1974, Kaku and Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University co-authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.[14]
Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory. An explicit description of the second-quantization of the light-cone string was given by Kaku and Keiji Kikkawa.[15][16]"
Is there some expiration on calling yourself a scientist? It looks like this was his life's work. Like if stop researching physics for a month then spoke on a podcast where I was called a physicist is that deceptive? I could understand if someone never did any research and was being presented as a scientist but hasn't this person earned that title? Finally if someone is a scientist and a person trusts them explicitly because of that then that's wrong but that's the fault of the person.
now revels in speculation and exaggeration
I don't know anything about him, these are subjective assessments, but assuming they are true: If he speculates as part of a discussion and it's obvious or he makes it clear that it's speculation that's not a bad thing. If he exaggerates then he shouldn't, that's a personal flaw that doesn't reflect on "science" or "scientific establishments"
He's also not a priest. The definition of a priest:
"a person whose office it is to perform religious rites, and especially to make sacrificial offerings."
You are trying to take words related to religion, generalize them, then using that more general definition apply it to a scientist to claim that science is a religion. Yes, we all like to spice up our sentences : "I worship pizza" "He's the priest of this fraternity". Is the fraternity a religion now? Is Pizza my new God? (it is actually) Taylor Swift isn't a religion because her fans worship her and go to mass gatherings where she performs """rituals"""
Mostly I feel like you are trying to show that incorrect usage of terms, personal flaws, and companies that misuse titles and/or reputation make science a religion because there are people who explicitly trust science, like some do with religion. Let's address that:
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"Trust the science"
Let's say you need to answer a question or make a decision about something you can research. Unless you are an expert in that field and/or are willing to put massive amounts of time learning and doing your own research, you should just trust what the majority of the people in that field agree on (i.e. trust the science). Why? Because what's the alternative?
If you want to call this worship, fine, but don't claim it's like a religion. Religions don't test their truths/claims and they don't think you should test them. They want you to have faith AND faith is the only option.
So you might say something like "oh but you have faith those scientists had the right data, weren't lying etc etc"
You can do your own research, read their papers, run your own tests if you wanted to. Yes it's difficult and for many nearly impossible but the point it the information exists. The evidence to backup scientific claims exists. If someone makes a claims but lied about the evidence, that's not science. If they want you to believe their claim, have no evidence, and there's no way to test the claim, that's a religion.
> The "mass media" is not one organization. I haven't seen any news reports redefining what science is, feel free to provide evidence of that.
You really want to tell me that you never heard something along the lines of "Science says ..." or "the science"? Not buying it. The usage of science in mass media is a different one than the one you want to hammer home.
> Finally it's not a game of definitions because science has a specific meaning. You can't just change that meaning (even if you add a captial S) then be critical about it.
This is mostly self-soothing I suppose. Just denying reality outright.
> You're critical because some organization in the government lied? Nothing to do with science
Motte and bailey. You just mean the hard definition. As long as you deny that a soft definition exists, it's a bit hard to argue with you.
> You're mad because some scientist committed fraud? Nothing to do with science.
You should look up motte and bailey maybe. You seemingly don't know it, but you're playing that fallacy. (Also: stop projecting)
> Peer reviewers aren't properly checking papers, that's their fault and or their university/company. Nothing to do with science.
So you want to tell me that the actual scientific process in action has nothing to do with science.
> If you aren't an expert in a field or willing to put massive amounts of time in researching something but you have to make a decision doing whatever the majority of people in a field say is the most logical course of action
Who makes the election of what the majority of people in a field say? That's where the mass media (that is not one organization) comes into play. This is basically The Science™ meme in action.
> You're critical because some organization in the government lied?
I’m critical because it’s systemic. And made in the name of science. For all intents and purposes, this is the science we’re subjugated to.
> You're mad because some scientist committed fraud?
Again, critical because it’s systemic and people have lost their jobs, entire families had to move regions because the father expressed doubts about a scientist, to be later revealed that doubts were correct. The amount of harm done over this science is unbearable to see.
Science can be perfectly faked. Mostly happens when people get over the top about it.
Trying putting uppercase “You guys killed 1.2m people, you murderers”. If I find a single bike accident among the number you shamed me with, then all your accusation falls in shambles.
Stop screaming numbers at people as if they were true. What you’re doing is not science, it’s screaming.
"Stop screaming numbers at people as if they were true. What you’re doing is not science, it’s screaming."
Even if 50% of those deaths are incorrect the number is massive. I'm relaying stasticis by saying I'm screaming you're trying to counter my argument with an unrelated attack.
"Science can be perfectly faked"
Yes it can, is that happened here? Did doctors around the county all decide to lie for the purpose of?
This is a non sequitur, which is ironic, given the rant.
For one, there are entire disciplines about ethics and philosophy of science.
Also, the number of scientists that have been legitimized outside their area of expertise, in the context of public discourse, is orders of magnitude lower than pretty much in any other career.
The discussion is about some specific area of science (epidemiology, sources of disease, ...) that inherently has social and political impact/interaction. There is no decoupling and decisions based on science there are political in nature, potentially trading off science vs social/political objectives. Typically, science cannot answer those trade offs easily (or at all sometimes).
Therefore it will always contain politics. Just like everything humans do. Just like software engineering. But that doesn't mean the technical aspects of software aren't also important. All the political insights in the world won't tell you how to make a webpage or how to build a telescope.
Tell me there's politics involved and I still have no idea what goes on in your research lab or your software team.
These sort of reductive, absolutist claims only sound wise when you're young. They basically never tell you anything useful about how to act in the world. Years ago a friend of mine would rant at length to anyone who would listen about how everything in human society is based on economic incentives. He's right! But I could easily make the same argument about all sorts of things. Everything in human society is also about status. Or politics. Or the myths we tell about ourselves (like religion and science). Everything can be explained by evolutionary biology. Or the tribe, or the individual. Or how children are raised. And so on.
There are so many important perspectives to have. But if you really want to know what goes on amongst scientists, there's no alternative but to spend time talking to them. You're so much more right, and more wrong than you think. The details are, also, everything.
In some sense sure, but that doesn’t imply that scientists ought to function as political actors - especially when doing so puts the actual practice of science at risk.
What can’t be helped? Your comment is too vague for me to understand what you’re getting at.
As I said in my original comment, I think scientists are being put in political positions because of a failure of culture/people/society to care sufficiently about philosophy and religion.
Two, individuals are political therefore their politics bleeds into science.
If you think there is an obvious solution then you are most assuredly incorrect. Understanding power dynamics is part of philosophy, not something that is separate from it.
The entire intellectual history of the past 3,000+ years has been shaped by “religion”, which as a separate concept is a fairly recent phenomenon. Everything from individual rights, the value of Truth, the concept of secularism, and a million other things can be directly traced to conflicts and developments of religion. Part of the problem that I alluded to is the refusal of many intelligent people to recognize this.
Secondly, there is a major difference between scientists having political beliefs and scientists being put in political positions where they make decisions for society at large. These are not the same thing.
Thirdly, the obvious solution was to make people care more about philosophy and religion and not continue to put scientists into a political position where they are incentivized to quash dissent.
We look at the movements of body in the sky, we find that they are pretty clearly expanding, and given that if we assume that this has been going on for a long time (and there's very little reason to believe otherwise given what we know about physics), we can clearly see that there must have been a moment in time where everything was much closer together, up to an infinitely small point... this is basically what Big Bang says. Can you please tell me what religious origin there may be in this??
Big Bang model was originally formalised by Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics Georges Lemaître.
Expansion of our local group of galaxies is coincidence. We are falling into Big Attractor, which falls into Shapley attractor, so our local group of galaxies is stretched.
> Expansion of our local group of galaxies is coincidence. We are falling into Big Attractor, which falls into Shapley attractor, so our local group of galaxies is stretched.
Wow that's some really shady stuff... you're talking about the actual Local Group, part of the Virgo Cluster? Do you know that the Local Group is not actually expanding?? It's predicted it'll stick together in the far future, while other parts of the visible Universe shift away from us. It's even been calculated that the Virgo Supercluster's enormous gravity slows down recession of the Local Group from the cluster by approximately ten percent[1].
No, it's not about Local Group. It's about Local Supercluster, Perseus–Pisces Supercluster, and so on, which are attracted by Shapley attractor, but stretched into different directions.
Humans are curious. We've always wanted to know what those little dots of light in the sky are.
We used to make up stories to explain them... but now we don't have to, we can figure it out using our knowledge of matter and physics, make predictions to check whether those are correct, basically the scientific method... religion is not necessary to explain why we look at the sky, nor why we feel we have to be decent people for that matter, or why we would like to know where everything came from and where we're going. Simply being consciuous and rational and curious is enogh for all that.
Sure there are. "Is the universe really billions of years old, or did it pop into existence three seconds ago in its current state including all of your memories?" It's impossible to answer this question scientifically because no empirical test could ever possibly be devised.
Also known as Last Tuesdayism, where the universe happened last Tuesday. I and other intellectuals consider this ridiculous. It was in fact last Thursday.
Science has come against its own limits many times.
Hume's problem of induction shows you that every scientific conclusion is a leap of faith. Scientists try to make it as small as possible of a leap, but it is still a leap.
Chaotic systems require more percision than physics allows, making many systems theoretically unpredictable. Having accurate models is useless. If you have a model that's theoretically accurate but requires more accuracy than the universe actually has then what does that even mean? Where does that information come from?
Qunatum mechanics was basically the end of causality as we know it. Forget correlation does not imply causation. There is no causation.
Godel's incompleteness, Turing's halting, prove that formal systems have limits and that even logic itself cannot go everywhere.
Any single player (scientist) cannot be purely objective. Which is exactly why diversity of thought is essential for science (the process) to work. Scientists with different points of view can then challenge each other on the basis of evidence. When you take viewpoint diversity away this process breaks down and you are left with mere ideology pretending at science.
I am not a positivist, so that statement is quite okay for me to make. I can judge a process that aspires to be scientific by how likely it is to result in an approximation of objective truth.
Metaphysics and ethics in philosophy are non-scientific. And these are extremely important things. Religion, which is folk metaphysics and folk ethics, is, to billions of people now living on this planet, more important and relevant to their daily lives than science is.
I feeling like this whole science has replaced religion is just right wing cope because science doesn't represent their feelings.
Also because people are becoming less religious, its an argument to prop up religions by saying: don't quit your current religion, all those "atheists" are just upholding different religious ideas, so they it is the same as switching to something like buddhism.
"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."
Dude, scientists (in my experience) handle dissent just fine. The idea that scientists have problems with dissenting opinions is mostly propagated by assholes with some other agenda, whose scientific ideas have already had a fair hearing, who are just trying to prolong the public discussion for reasons typically unmotivated by genuine scientific interest.
I've spent most of my career around scientists of one stripe or another and I've literally never met a scientist committed to even their pet ideas at some kind of ideological level.
Are scientists perfect? Hardly. Have their been scientific paradigms or ideas that have persisted longer than they should have? Definitely. Scientists are human beings. There are limits to how rational they can be, especially in groups, but to suggest that science is somehow intolerant of dissent is a straw man cartoon ass argument.
I don't think the problem here is the actual scientists. The problem is the "I Follow The Science™" laypersons. A scientist can speak on a subject with some degree of authority, and be perfectly open to dissent if it's followed with sufficient rigor. However, their layperson followers may go on to parrot a claim made by said scientist, proclaim it to be an absolute truth, and shun anyone who might casually question it. A situation not unlike religious zealotry. In general, science is great; scientism isn't.
I mean, sure, but literally every avenue of human endeavor endures ignorant and/or contrarian criticism. Science certainly isn't spared from this, but it generally doesn't prevent good science from getting done.
However, the premise of this thread is that scientism's blind dismissal of dissent _does_ impede the process because it turns a fluid search for truth into an ossified political position, which can, in turn, provoke actions that chill dissent.
So there's dumb dissent and smart dissent, but if there's a large contingent of scientism zealots who are indiscriminately dunking on _all_ dissenters, then that's a problem.
That does rather depend on whether the scientism zealots have any influence on the practice of science (I'm really not sure why ignorant people who agree with the mainstream consensus would be any more likely to prevent good science from being done than ignorant people who dissent from it, especially since the latter often hold political power too). And for that matter what the net impact is, given that being a dissenter is a route to outsized fame and influence as well as outsized criticism on many topics.
I mean, I don't think it was members of the public endorsing the scientific consensus that ossified the divide between mainstream medical professionals and homeopaths, or added political implications to debates on anthropogenic global warming. And whilst
lots of laymen shouted at each other over whether Invermectin was a miracle cure that Big Pharma were trying to suppress or an unproven Covid remedy most loudly promoted by quacks and anti-lockdown politicos, lots of studies on its efficacy were carried out and I suspect the career implications for those developing world doctors who carried out studies on their patient base, found some benefit and continued to prescribe it even after other studies suggested it was not a cure for COVID symptoms[1] were generally very positive.
[1]it probably helps that, being scientists rather than campaigners, they might have been capable of reaching agreement with the scientific invermectin-sceptics that it quite possibly was only protecting against parasite-related comorbidities, but that still meant it made sense to prescribe to their at-risk patient group
I really seldom ever see them though. Like the vast overwhelming majority of people who reject what may be the broad scientific consensus these days will not outwardly claim to be rejecting "the science", they'll say they believe some alternate source who also claims to be doing "the science"
There are a whole lot of rants about "scientific establishments", "naturopaths" etc that suggest otherwise.
Whether "the science" is the correct label for broad scientific consensus is something of a moot, semantic point anyway. Either way you have a bunch of laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they trust the scientific consensus and a bunch of ignorant laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they don't agree with the scientific consensus [because someone else who may or may not be a researcher says some other thing]... but unless the evidential value of the weight of research that results in "scientific consensus" is on average worthless, the "trust the science" blind followers of scientific consensus followers have the better heuristic than the blind rejectors of scientific consensus.
Uhm... It depends on the scientist. I've met a more then a handful of the "it has to be this way" types. The kind who thinks that being correct and being a brute are interchangeable words. Maybe the real problem is they feel the need to be correct about the unknown? Unclear.
Good scientists are what you describe. But they seem to be becoming more rare.
Like I've found a lot of people thinks medical doctors are scientist. A doctor has learned the knowledge at the time they were in school. Now practices medicine, maybe keeps themselves up to date a little, but can often be very biased in their ways, because they're used to some practice and will use their anecdotal experience during their practice as truth.
You could say they are "experts" or "professionals", but they'd not be actively applying the scientific method or even keeping themselves up to date on all the relevant and related studies about a subject.
I would be a bit cautious with that statement. Sure, your local general practitioner may not be a scientist, but quite a lot of medical doctors attached to major research hospitals and medical schools are both physicians and scientists who not only treat patients but also conduct research on the efficacy of treatment and publish papers on this.
For sure, most of the ones I know are pretty honest with a high degree of integrity.
But it's also not hard to see there's an increasingly lot of politics involved in "science", the further up you go in the hierarchies, not to mention among public figures.
There is a bunch of examples of extremely influential theories that were dismisses because of authority figures, I don't know if you count math as science, but for example set theory was extremely controversial.
And yet set theory is now regularly employed. It used to take humans hundreds of years to adjust major ideas. Now dummies complain if an idea takes a decade to gain acceptance. Science is still probably the most flexible and adaptive social milieu in the history of the human race.
Every one of the CoVID examples given there is obviously wrong, even with hindsight:
* The "Great Barrington Declaration," if followed, would have likely doubled America's already extremely high death toll. Which countries did the best in the pandemic? The dreaded zero-CoVID countries, which got all the way to vaccines with extremely low death tolls, often with a much greater level of normalcy in everyday life than the US (see: Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). The idea of letting all controls on viral spread drop (which is what the GBD effectively was) before vaccines were developed was just a plan for everyone to get the virus without the benefits of vaccination, with the ensuing high death toll.
* Mask mandates supposedly useless: challenging the idea that proper masks (N-95s or equivalent) do not dramatically reduce spread of the virus is like challenging the idea that parachutes break falls. They do, for very simple mechanistic reasons.
* Young people being vaccinated: The risks of vaccination are far lower than the risks of CoVID in all age groups. The worst side-effects of the vaccine (which are extrememly rare) are actually far more prevalent after infection than after vaccination.
According to this UK government data which lists the number needed to prevent one serious case — which are higher than the number at which we’d expect one serious side effect.
You're comparing two different things: prevented cases and side-effects. The rate of those very same serious side-effects is far higher from CoVID itself than from the vaccine. You're literally increasing their frequency by refusing to vaccinate.
If you don’t prevent at least one serious case per serious side-effect caused, your treatment is a negative contribution. That’s what QALY negative means — that you’re doing more harm than good.
This government information clearly says that the number of immunizations needed for young people to prevent one hospitalization is far above the number at which we’d expect a serious side-effect, eg myocarditis.
Please stop denying government health data to promote your kook theories. You’re hurting people with misinformation.
> If you don’t prevent at least one serious case per serious side-effect caused
Severe cases and serious side-effects are not the same thing. In the document you linked, a "severe case" is classified as one in which you end up on ventilation in the ICU. You don't even state where you're supposedly getting your information about serious side-effects, or how "serious side-effect" is defined (I think the technical term is actually "severe adverse event"). You just assert that "severe cases" and "serious side effects" can be compared 1-to-1, and then pull a statistic on "serious side effects" out of nowhere.
> Please stop denying government health data to promote your kook theories. You’re hurting people with misinformation.
The government report you cited doesn't make the claim you attribute to it. It says nothing about vaccine side-effects. You're stringing together various bits of information that you don't fully understand to make major claims, and then accusing others who don't buy it of misinformation.
What you're doing is worse than providing no data. You're posting links that you claim support your argument, but which on inspection do not actually support your claim, partly because you don't understand what the statistics mean (e.g., you think that a "serious side-effect" and a "serious case" are 1-to-1 comparable, even though they're very different things; partly because you don't pay close attention to what you're posting, such as your latest study, which is about vaccine side-effects "in adults"). And then you're making broad claims (childhood vaccination reduces QALYs) based on your uninformed interpretations of the data.
This is a study specifically about safety of the mRNA vaccines in children.[0] It looked for 23 likely severe side-effects. The children covered by the study collectively received 250k doses of Biotech/Pfizer or Moderna. The side-effect rate is small enough that the study was unable to detect any increase at all in side-effects in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children.
All of your examples hinge on the idea that killing or infecting people is bad. You have to broaden your mindset to consider that some groups and people see those outcomes as okay.
I agree with both of you, and I think a distinction is to be made around the "genre" of the dissent.
The reason I have to pick a somewhat awkward word is because awareness to the level of discussion and labeling of this concept does not yet widely exist, so I have to invent it here.
Is the dissent something which reinforces the money, power and people of my field (which, wherever in said field I am placed, I benefit from and aspire to ascend) or is it something that undermines (or is perceived to undermine) these vital field pillars?
TL;DR - Is the genre of dissent something the field can roll with, or does it threaten (or seem to threaten) to upend it?
To paraphrase Michael Douglas, scientists are like horses: easily spooked. If something smells like bad news for the field, then...woosh (sound of scientists galloping towards stability).
The reason it appears both as if: "dude, scientists handle dissent just fine" and "[scientists have] this inability to tolerate dissent" is because in case of each, the genre of the dissent differs (for that field).
Now would be a good point to chime in with some concrete examples, but you need to be an expert to really do that, and I'm not, so I'll probably get the example that supports my thesis wrong. My example:
In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing).
In conclusion, I think scientists handle one genre of dissent (including but not limited to specific technical dissent), just fine, and in so doing are performing the normative work of their field: interrogating theories through measurements; but, I think they have an inability to handle another genre of dissent (including but not limited to field-upending dissent), which makes step-change field-evolving progress glacial slow.
Depending upon which side you come down you will likely declare: "Well, that's as it should be!" or "That's exactly the problem I'm talking about!"
Perhaps that's why scientists, like horses, need some form of management, that is--well...--"unscientific". They do the work, but "management" (comprised of non-scientists) sets the priorities. I know, I know, awful...just unspeakably awful: But unless we can "train" scientists to embrace what threatens their daily bread, the ideal of science will be chomping at the bit of the restraints of its implementation structures for the foreseeable future...
Main criticism: "but the daily bread of science is constantly interrogating through measurement field upending dissent, that's literally science!"--I agree, but science as 'it should be', not, how 'it is'.
Second criticism: "well maybe in other fields, but not in my field". Fair enough! Maybe you can teach the rest of us how you manage it so well!
"In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing)."
Yes, but in point of fact there is a lot of dissent of all sorts in this field and very little commitment among experts to the idea that our fundamental approach (QFT) doesn't require some kind of conceptual revision. Even among people proposing major revisions (strings, lqg, etc) I've never detected any powerful suggestion on the part of most scientists that their pet theory is clearly and obviously correct and should just be accepted without evidence.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter and widely felt to be inadequate explanations but major revisions in this ontology haven't manifested in the field because no one has proposed any effective ones.
It is extremely easy in hindsight to say "this theory should have been more readily accepted," but that view ignores all the incorrect revisions which a field rejected because of due diligence and a reasonable expectation that new theories require good evidence.
Covid debunks all your claims. I’ve taken all my covid jabs and boosters so I’m not coming at this as some alt right antivaxxer, but the systemic and systematic shut down of any dissent against mainstream science and scientific organisations was/is disgusting.
Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.
There were routine talking about alternate therapies among the scientists/doctors/researchers about these topics. You can search for the UCSF Covid Grand Rounds on youtube and watch the history of their open discussions as research was routinely presented from all over the globe on the various items.
I code for a living and have no idea about this stuff, but my wife's goal is to make patients better and she would watch the grand rounds (or similar) every time and I'd listen from another room. Not a single alternate treatment wasn't discussed and evaluated.
Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.
People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit.
Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.
The WHO only declared COVID-19 to be airborne in December 2021.
There were many articles at the time describing this failure. It’s interesting how quickly it has faded from memory.
I’m on my phone, so this is just an example from a quick search. Again, there are many like this:
“Public health organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) initially declared the virus to be transmitted in large droplets that fell to the ground close to the infected person, as well as by touching contaminated surfaces. The WHO emphatically declared on March 28, 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne (except in the case of very specific “aerosol-generating medical procedures”) and that it was “misinformation” to say otherwise. […]
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States followed a parallel path […]
“The very slow and haphazard acceptance of the evidence of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by major public health organizations contributed to a suboptimal control of the pandemic, whereas the benefits of protection measures against aerosol transmission are becoming well established.”
> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.
There was certainly mainstream belief that covid was limited to droplet transmission (though I remember much discussion of that as well) but the idea that Western medicine didn't think any viruses were airborne is nonsense.
Another comment brought up measles, which is a great example, and known for many decades.
>Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.
"Healthcare authorities" are not necessarily scientists, they are professionals. Nor am I aware of them ever making this claim in the first place, at least never in any kind of coordinated way. Please provide a source.
If you're talking about masks for Covid, that was because the Trump administration bungled the mask situation so badly that we were critically short on masks[1]. It was decided that to minimize causalities, focus would be on making sure health care professionals got masks first.
But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.
> Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief.
Regardless of whether this particular "belief" was actually held by anyone (it probably wasn't as others point out), science is fully based on evidence. If what you say is actually true, what those people claiming that were doing was not science by definition. You cannot claim something which you can't back up with data and plenty of evidence and call what you're doing science.
You were living in an echo chamber if you think that is true. I dare you to question any covid crap in front of your parent or (former) friends and relatives. Wait until they call you every awful thing in the book.
Criticism or intellectual curiosity was absolutely not tolerated.
the scientists are not the problem here, PUBLIC science and public institutional structures were, are, and will be.
The media takes a scientist, who has a strong tendency to say "this may work, we can't be sure" and "under some conditions, we believe that it might" and turns it into "we know!"... for institutional media reasons. Some scientists like the attention and are willing to play along, to an extent.
Public institutions need "certainty rhetoric" for legal and PR reasons. The reason Ivermectin was so clubbed to death wasn't because it ddn't work, it was because the legal process of emergency certification of the vaccine required that there are no working cures, so that could institutionally not be pursued. No evil intention is needed here; "we want to help and this is a legal hurdle", on the one side, meets "we want to sell this thing and need the certification" on the other.
Scientists will always say "wait a minute, were not sure". Institutions and their structures leave little room for this, so scientists get translated to certainty rhetoric, and the gullible public who often has a quasi-religious view of science swallows it, as that's how the media makes it for them.
Your wife’s colleagues are not the scientific community at large. Organisations such as WHO and numerous government regulators flat out lied to the public throughout the pandemic.
Take the UK. Our health watchdog swore that masks were not needed and people shouldn’t wear masks at the start of the pandemic. This was specifically to stop hoarding of masks needed in hospitals. 3 months later mask mandates were a legal obligation with fixed penalty notices given for not wearing them.
Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.
And yes. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine etc.
Finally. Vaccine safety. There is a lot of evidence that there was not informed consent on the full impact of taking the combine vaccine. Like I said, I took all the doses. I’m not an antivaxxer. But the scientific community destroyed careers of anyone that tried to say otherwise.
> Take the lab leak theory that WHO and many many governments said was a Hoax. Pretty much widely known to be correct now.
A possible lab leak was never ruled out, just most of the evidence does not point to it. It was never 10% ruled out during the pandemic and now.
I'm a biologist, have friends who also biologists and work in connected fields. Unless you think a possible lab leak is the same as someone posting "100% proof covid is a CCP bioweapon!!!!)
>Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients.
In my jurisdiction at least it was hijacked for business purposes. I believe that all the lockdown stuff was necessary but after a while certain actors started to take advantage of it, for instance supermarkets selling a broad range of stuff while all regular stores had to stay shut. Hurdur supply chain.
Then there was the stockpiling of PPE, hand sanitizer. The dismissal of masks unless they were “very good” (totally ignoring collective benefit vs individual) and self testing (again ignoring aggregate benefit vs individual). As soon as particular commercial interests got their positions covered these things all of a sudden became “okay”.
Again, like I say the Covid outbreak was real. We did need to do what we could not least to safeguard medical services.
But boy did the schemers go to town once they figured out a way to get rich from it.
Still waiting for that windfall tax on the supermarkets.
Not sure the claim is true in the strong form, but that aside: was the approach wrong as far as policies and social outcome are concerned? Would a more nuanced approach have worked better and by what metric? Just being unhappy about what happened isn't enough for things social.
I think this is a tricky one. Certainly I wasn't particularly impressed with how the science was communicated in a few areas:
- The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics
- The WHO's position on airborne transmission of Covid-19, and the way in which understanding in this area was misrepresented to the public
I took part in a vaccine clinical trial myself, and there was a much more in-depth discussion as to what was known about the candidate vaccination, its side effect profile - and, more importantly, the limits of our knowledge given the small population it had been tested in when I volunteered.
We didn't see much of that nuance during the height of the pandemic.
At the same time though, some may argue that trying to combat misinformation requires over-simplifying some things, such that they can be effectively communicated to the public.
> The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics
This is more of a matter of public health than science though. It would be nice if they were the same thing but it's like asking for people to be perfectly rational and well-informed actors like in those economics models
Modernity is when you pilot society using science. See: EPCOT and Disney’s vision in the 1950 of building entire cities with everything perfectly entirely planned.
So when you control science, you control the laws. And you can’t control science, but you can control the press around science, and how people talk about science.
Oh boy, a good old fashioned science versus religion brawl is about to go down. I haven't had a good one of these since the Atheist Crusade of the early 2000s.
I don’t really think my comment suggests that. I am saying that people should study philosophy and religion more, because it’s an extremely influential topic, especially when it comes to science. The framing of science and philosophy/religion as antagonistic is part of the problem.
The result: science, which is supposed to be a neutral process that encourages dissent, becomes a political game, where scientists are treated as the ultimate authority on non-scientific questions.