How the pandemic is changing the norms of science

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

by phreeza • 5 years ago

74 86 5 years ago

ivoras• 5 years ago

Sigh. Some day I hope I can get this project funded: https://github.com/WOTvision/wot1

"This is a repository containing an implementation of a blockchain which supports an unique feature set: asserting trust of information organised in JSON documents.

The goal is to have a global public notary service, for people and corporations to issue signed statements which are globally recognized and verifyable, which are identified by a QR code, which the media and news channels can reproduce and which can be verified by the consumers of information (i.e. ordinary people). The vision is to combat fake news by using a thing blockchains are very good at: distributing reliable data, and by providing a low-tech user-centric interface to it, which everyone can use to verify random junk they hear on the media."

mrkramer• 5 years ago

For example you can already embed messages inside Bitcoin transactions and then crawl and index them all from Bitcoin's blockchain. Organizations can prove and verify their Bitcoin addresses using PGP.

amelius• 5 years ago

But how can the public know which submission to the blockchain is the ground truth?

yyyk• 5 years ago

What is the value in this project?

If the purpose is to let X make statement Y and prove did X said Y and only Y, there are at least five more prevalent standards to do so ranging from other blockchains to web sites/archiving, DNS records, various archives across the world, etc. We can make the QR example work today with a URL.

All these mechanisms are much more likely to survive longer than the suggested project, and are less subject to Proof-of-work energy waste.

That leaves the voting mechanism, which isn't very useful either - truth isn't subject to majority vote.

helmholtz• 5 years ago

When all you've got's a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Some software engineers seem to walk around with this belief that all of life's problems can be solved through software. It's so strange! No other field has this kind of thought process. Electrical engineers don't immediately start cabling wiring things, mechanical engineers don't fire up CNC lathes at the drop of a hat. Yet here we have a coder who thinks that blockchain will solve everything. That JSON will solve everything!

cblconfederate9• 5 years ago

Maybe scientific debate shouldn't be conducted in public. Scientists quarelling inside a conference is bad enough, but when they feel they can weaponize their hordes of followers, things turn nuclear and nuance is lost. This might be the first scientific crisis in which chemical substances were being judged by their political affiliation (HCQ), and in which scientists need to declare their politics before engaging, it was pathetic

jokethrowaway• 5 years ago

Not a crisis, but climate change was similar

dehrmann• 5 years ago

That just makes science easier to dismiss and feeds conspiracies.

derbOac2• 5 years ago

Exposing scientific debate to the public is a good thing in my opinion. My sense is the pandemic has only exposed and highlighted existing problems in science and how it is used.

cblconfederate9• 5 years ago

it did not just expose it, it engaged in it. I think the whole experience has proved that it 's a bad thing, nothing of value came from the hordes of idiots who peddle this and that drug/lockdown/masks/vaccinations because their tribe leader told them so. My bet is that, going forward, scientists are going to be very wary of debating crises in public. Science is not done by committee, and definitely not by popular vote

nickthemagicman3• 5 years ago

The nuance is lost by the news media. Not by the people.

Make the news media more accountable.

cblconfederate9• 5 years ago

people dont have the time and energy to follow nuanced arguments, they choose one of the two low energy binary options and stick with it. That's why politics and sports works

ptero3• 5 years ago

I think the opposite: current mass media approach turns science into a religion -- see the explosion of "I believe in science: (insert desired slogans)" posters. Allowing scepticism, including experiments to challenge widely held beliefs, is fundamental to science.

Seeing scientists disagree, debate and use repeatable experiments to settle disagreements could help bring the rational argument back, instead of the current "my science is stronger than your science" style of debate. My 2c.

Robotbeat• 5 years ago

The problem is the Internet did teach people that scientists disagree, but people didn’t use that to develop healthy self-skepticism (really the core of good science is to not fool oneself) but instead to weaponize science to fight in the culture war. The “skeptics” are not skeptical of their own, often inane ideas, but “skeptical” of everything on the other side of the culture war.

People LARP as scientists, but they only use that skepticism to avoid expert wisdom. Science is messy, scientists are fallible, and yet it’s better than any other process we’ve got. But people think that fallibility is therefore evidence that the fake certainty of chiropractic alternative medicine or conspiracy theories or woo is better.

I’m not sure it has been a net good at all to teach about skepticism but not going all the way to instill self-skepticism.

tchalla3• 5 years ago

Seeing scientists disagree, debate and use repeatable experiments to settle disagreements could help bring the rational argument back, instead of the current "my science is stronger than your science" style of debate. My 2c.

In order to do that, there has to be a framework. The framework currently used is a peer reviewed publications. Currently, the disagreements are being settled not based on experiments in but on opinions in mass media, Twitter threads and Facebook posts. That's not the agreed upon framework.

I know that "peer review is fallible" but that's the current agreed upon framework. None of the others are ideal, it's the best we have at the moment unless we come up with another one.

syshum• 5 years ago

The core of the problem here is not so much politics and science, it is the fact that this science is directly tied to people living or dying. That ramps up the emotional load to 11 and when that happens logic and reason often take a back seat.

This is a big flaw in human psychology

Emotion is where cults live, and we have science worshipers that attach themselves to an "Expert" like one would attach themselves to a Cult Leader, instead of being rational actors looking at the data the experts are presenting and using their own rationality and logic to understand the situation

marcus_holmes2• 5 years ago

I think that if the actual debate was done in public, it might work. Two scientists actually arguing with each other in public hasn't been a thing, and maybe it should?

The instinct has always been to hush up any disagreements and present a united front on all matters that the public are interested in, even if this means that the "front" then has to change later as better evidence emerges. But that instinct doesn't actually help - the change in position is seen as "not knowing what they're doing", or "can't get it right". The question is asked "why should we believe you now when this is different from what you said last time?".

Actually having the fight in public would at least show that science is an ongoing discussion and exploration, rather than a fixed set of answers. Of course people will pick sides and favour one argument over another, but they do that anyway. I think the age of allowing scientists to quietly conduct research in academic journals or conferences is over.

cousin_it• 5 years ago

Most of these controversial questions contain more nuance than can be covered in a debate, though. You could say "simplify them", but simplifying a scientific topic is very difficult and time-consuming work at which scientists themselves often fail. And it's comparatively very easy to present an inaccurate simplified version, to make your opponent look wronger than they actually are.

My view on this is kind of pessimistic. The mindset of science, based on curiosity, feels to me like a small boat which can only sail when seas are relatively calm. But politics is a storm. The waves are too tall. Maybe the boat just cannot sail in this storm.

cblconfederate9• 5 years ago

i like the intelligence^2 public debates, but note that the audience doesnt send likes and comments while it s happening

Barrin92• 5 years ago

Pointing to a toxic culture in science coming from Ioannidis is ironic given that he engaged in a fairly nasty ad hominem attack on a grad student just a few months ago.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1376080062131269634?...

Of course that aside his predictions throughout the pandemic have been consistently terrible and undersold the threat, so I'm honestly not sure why we're still listening to the man.

Another point on the war/science claim in the piece

"When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear. "

It's more than reasonable, on the policy front at least, to treat a real biological agent who is killing your population as an enemy. A pandemic is a state of exception, and countries that acted swiftly, with utmost precaution in mind, dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives. A war is exactly what it is, and treating it like an abstract academic issue to engage in intellectual contrarianism to elevate one's own profile, while being consistently wrong at that, is a good way to lose it.

cblconfederate9• 5 years ago

How is highlighting that he hasnt fiished his Phd an ad-hominem in that context? He s attacking the methodological flaws in the first sentence and his media portrayal as expert in the second. This should not be off-limits. (Their flaws are extensively discussed in the paper btw)

He also attacked Theranos for their media portrayal and secrecy long before anyone else did. Was that an ad hominem too? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/21109...

Of course that aside his predictions throughout the pandemic have been consistently terrible and undersold the threat, so I'm honestly not sure why we're still listening to the man.

Now you 're making an ad-hominem too (just like the tweet you linked)

dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives.

You really can't say that. Years later, with hindsight we ll be able to assess how many lives were lost because of the rampant policy errors all around. The pandemic was in no way optimally handled

phreeza4• 5 years ago

How is highlighting that he hasnt fiished his Phd an ad-hominem in that context

Isn't discussing the author's credentials pretty much the definition of an ad hominem? It goes against the person and not the argument the person has made.

phreeza4• 5 years ago

It's good to treat it as a war in terms of policy, but that doesn't mean scepticism should be shot in science. I don't think it was though, that is an exaggeration in the article.

neonate• 5 years ago

Science is not a war. The old saying, "in a war, truth is the first casualty" shows how science, which is supposed to be about the truth, should be kept as far from warlike thinking and behavior as possible. Embracing the war metaphor destroys the possibility of objective, dispassionate inquiry.

It also creates a disastrous precedent for the future, since people will be reconditioned by having engaged in this warlike behavior.

CountDrewku6• 5 years ago

A pandemic is a state of exception, and countries that acted swiftly, with utmost precaution in mind, dealing with an unknown threat, saved countless of lives.

Prove it. I want definitive proof that the measures they took saved more lives than alternative measures that might have been taken.

bernulli8• 5 years ago

tl;dr: Sweden's non-intervention killed 10x (!) more people (per 100,000), led to higher rise in unemployment, and a further shrinking economy compared to neighboring countries [1].

Of course it's impossible to "prove" which measures had which impact without running the same experiment 10000 times on 10000 different Earths.

But here's almost a (horrible) controlled experiment, as close to an apples-to-apples comparison we'll ever get:

Sweden, famously praised by some U.S. politicians for its non-intervention response to COVID, suffered significantly more both in terms of loss of human lives (10x (!) more people (per 100,000) killed than in neighboring countries), and economically (more , than its direct neighbors:

"Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway."

"Plus, Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%."

"Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

I don't really understand what this is trying to say.

I feel like I agree in isolation with almost everything he says (science should share more data, corporations shouldn't be trusted to generate science that affects their bottom line, science is a complicated business with lots of opinions).

But sprinkled into it he seems to be attacking some technocratic elite of pundits and I'm not sure who he's talking about. (There's another article from the same magazine recommended as related that tries to define who these elites are and what they are up to, but if anything I'm less sure what they're talking about after reading it.)

America’s Smug Elite Is Harming Our Kids The push to decouple skepticism from science turns schoolchildren into victims by Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/americas...

Googling smug and elite brings up a lot of weird articles.

edit: found this enlightening:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...

tchalla3• 5 years ago

Your edit is indeed enlightening and I want to focus on one part of the article from March 2020 written by the author of the OP

Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?

So much for "science fiction". In my view, Ioannidis is a person who can't function without data. However, there are many situations in life where one doesn't have data to make a decision. In many cases, there are more than one options for decision making to achieve similar goals. Ioannidis doesn't get it.

bjt2n3904• 5 years ago

So often, I see people lamenting how people are untrustworthy of science. They are quick to attribute it to their favorite bogeymen: Fox News, disinformation, Facebook, Twitter. Look in the mirror! You are the one causing people to not trust science!

First, the truth is being stretched to hyperbolic proportions. Anyone can see it. "The vaccine is 100% effective, and has no complications!" slowly became "It might wear off in five months, and has a cardiac risk."

Second, we are attaching moral judgements to a technical problem. When choosing whether to use NodeJS, Python, or Rust -- there may be a better fit. But if you choose NodeJS, it does not make you a bad person. If you do not get the vaccine, "the science" crowd will label you as a morally bad person.

The emperor is naked, and I'm tired of being told only idiots and bigots say that.

neogodless2• 5 years ago

"The vaccine is 100% effective, and has no complications!"

Source? Who claimed this?

If you do not get the vaccine, "the science" crowd will label you as a morally bad person.

This has nothing to do with the "science" crowd. The vaccine reduces the spread of infection. Infection causes harm. Taking the vaccine reduces the statistical probability of you spreading infection to others, and others suffering the consequences of infection. That's a moral issue.

lordloki• 5 years ago

Natural immunity also reduces the spread of infection. The fact that we don't account for the natural immunity of those who have already been infected means that we are not following science but political dogma.

shadowgovt4• 5 years ago

You are quite correct that people are making moral judgments too broadly. There's a lot of unknowns during a rapidly-moving pandemic. It's understandable... If our moral systems aren't related to avoidance of death and needless suffering, what are they even for? But I think people should remember that there are a lot of things that we won't know until the pandemic is under control. Humility should be the order of the day, all the way around.

bernulli8• 5 years ago

Yeah, but picking Rust over Python won't get others killed.

baja_blast• 5 years ago

Unless it's a Boeing 737! I kid, but yeah I agree with your point.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

In an editorial on STAT published March 17, 2020, Ioannidis called the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic a "once-in-a-century evidence fiasco" and wrote that lockdowns were likely an overreaction to unreliable data.[14] He estimated that the coronavirus could cause 10,000 U.S. deaths if it infected 1% of the U.S. population, and argued that more data was needed to determine if the virus would spread more.[28][5][14] The virus in fact eventually infected far more people, and would cause more than 600,000 deaths in the U.S.[29][28][5] Marc Lipsitch, Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, objected to Ioannidis's characterization of the global response in a reply that was published on STAT the next day after Ioannidis's.
…In March 2021 Ioannidis estimated the global infection fatality rate from COVID-19 at 0.15%, in an article in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation where he also wrote unusual ad hominem criticisms against a co-author of a higher estimate who had criticized his work on Twitter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis

hoseja• 5 years ago

You're a second person trying to cancel the author, under such an article. Funny.

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

I'm not trying to "cancel" anyone. I just posted an excerpt from and link to wikipedia, I didn't even provide a judgement. (I also haven't downvoted anyone's comment in this thread because I disagreed with it, not even yours, which perhaps could be called an attempt to 'cancel' the comment...)

I thought he made some good points in the OP, and also some weird points.

I think science as actually practiced is a human endeavor in which at it's best the humans involved try to use systems and procedures to neutralize the inevitable biases and interests of the individual humans involved, but this is a goal that we (at best, and we're not always at our best, including lately) approach asymptotically. I think this understanding is compatible with Ioannidis own framework for understanding science, and he'd largely agree with it. I think this perspective tells us that it's not irrelevant to look at the personal context and interests of someone participating in the discourse with an opinion piece like this (unlike Ioannidis famous "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", this piece is an opinion piece, not the report of scientific research. It's true that I could have included the context that he's the author of that well-known-on-HN piece too; I did link to the wikipedia article where anyone can read more).

watwut7• 5 years ago

Claim that "this author produced some crappy science under pandemic" is not a cancelling. Especially since it is under article about "scientific norms during pandemic".

epistasis• 5 years ago

Though the term "cancel" is need the concept is not and has been going on in science since it's very beginning. And if there were ever a good case for it, now is the time. Unfortunately, fame is a powerful protectant against dishonest behavior in science.

See also RA Fisher and his bad analysis of smoking and cancer. Fisher was famous enough that his celebrity overrode his terrible analysis during one of the most crucial questions of his time.

N1H1L• 5 years ago

Pointing out legitimate flaws in someone's work is not canceling.

AndrewBissell• 5 years ago

0.15% turned out to be a lot closer to the real number (something like 0.3% or 0.4%) than the IHME models used to justify lockdowns (which were putting out numbers like 3.4% around the same time), but somehow no one ever brings up their wildly off-base forecasts as a reason to dismiss everything they have to say in perpetuity.

watwut7• 5 years ago

Because that was "worst case scenario" model, in order to anger "worst case scenario estimation" question.

jsnell• 5 years ago

0.3% clearly can't be the real IFR, given there are places with significantly higher PFRs. E.g. 0.6% of the entire population of Peru died.

Please show a source for that claim about a 3.4% IFR in the IHME. As far as I know, nobody serious ever made such a claim. The serious IFR estimates from very early on were roughly 1% plus minus a little (e.g. the Imperial models were assuming a 0.9% IFR), and it looks like those initial estimates were spot on.

The exception to that is Ioannidis, who early on was claiming that the IFR would be two orders of magnitude lower than that. He predicted there would be only 10k dead in the US when there were 120 deaths. Three weeks later, there were 20k. He staked his reputation on absurd claims, and has been doubling down on borderling fraudulent research since then to support those initial mistakes.

native_samples• 5 years ago

The Wikipedia page is a hit job. I looked at these supposedly "ad hominem" criticisms. Basically they are about a guy on Twitter ("Health Nerd") and boil down to these claims:

- He calls himself an epidemiologist but is actually a student (no PhD) who has barely published anything.

- The guy's criticisms of Ioannidis' work aren't technically valid.

- He is a columnist at the "American Council of Science and Health" but doesn't report that as a conflict of interest.

Despite this, Ioannidis goes out of his way to say nice things about the tweeter, like "The Twitter account has interesting, smart content with strong advocacy, often supporting worthy causes".

This dispute seems fairly typical of the science world. Things are in one moment totally unacceptable and terrible, like "armchair epidemiologists" commenting on things they aren't specialists in, and in the next moment pointing out some rando on Twitter isn't a qualified epidemiologist is "unusual" and an unacceptable ad hominem attack.

bernulli8• 5 years ago

The "article" is conflating two completely different things: science, and battling a pandemic. Both have very different standards, methods, and goals.

"Scientific skepticism had to be shot" is the comment you get when you try to compare fighting a pandemic with scientifically studying a pandemic. When the firefighters rush in, they will not wait for the fire scientist to first finish all the measurements, write it up, have it peer reviewed, and published. You try to save lives, learning as you go along, that's necessarily messy but the best we have.

Were mistakes made? Surely - but what would have been the alternative? The primary goal was/is to beat COVID and save lives, not to completely understand it before doing something about it.

Also, the disparagement of automotive engineers hits needlessly close to home ;-) -- the simple fact of the matter is that there is a whole field that studies injection, sprays, aerosols. These are experts with decades of experience in how droplets form and propagate through the air. I'm not giving carte blanche, but this seems like knowledge and experience that could be usefully tapped in this case.

CountDrewku6• 5 years ago

When the firefighters rush in, they will not wait for the fire scientist to first finish all the measurements

That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled. They know exactly what will happen when you do X to a fire and they know how to stop it fast and efficiently. They know what the consequences of spraying water on a fire are and when you won't be able to put one out etc.

It's quite different to run in and say we need to mask, lockdown, close businesses/schools, produce a vaccine and distribute it immediately. Ok why? Are you sure this will save lives? They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction. You can partially justify these things when they didn't know how bad COVID was going to be but then they continued with them for 2 years with very little evidence to back up their decisions. At some point you have to back off and say "hey we don't have a damn clue what the best course of action is". If your fix is worse than the problem you might need to re-evaluate and wait for the actual science on it.

I think people make the assumption that you HAVE to do something immediately when bad things happen, sometimes doing nothing and observing is the better option. There are multiple examples of the choice to do something being worse than doing nothing during this pandemic (e.g. governor sends infected persons into nursing homes) and as time goes on I think we're going to see more fallout from some of these choices.

shadowgovt4• 5 years ago

Ok why? Are you sure this will save lives?

Yes, the CDC models out pandemic responses in advance between panedmics. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/rr/rr6601a1.htm

One obvious weakness of the options they have to do this is they're preparing for diseases we've seen, not novel diseases we haven't seen yet. But in the case of COVID-19, it's an airborne pathogen so the flu containment protocol was the best tool in the toolbox. Masks, hand-washing, and lockdowns didn't come out of a vacuum; they're part of the standard process (which most people perhaps didn't know because unlike, say, fire-fighting, we don't have regular TV shows about pandemics).

bernulli8• 5 years ago

There are very few things settled in the science of fire, but that's beside the point.

I'd say the science is settled on what the most effective thing was to eliminate COVID: complete and total shut down, as soon as possible: New Zealand has the lowest casualties of any OECD country and held sporting events in full stadiums when the rest of the world was hoarding toilet paper.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

No, firefighting is not trivial from a decision making perspective. Deluges cause severe water damage, even in the best circumstances where they ultimately save the day. Firebreaks have a moderate failure rate and can even help propagate fire if the wind is wrong. Backfires literally fight fire with fire. They all involve heavy tradeoffs and severe uncertainty, but as a culture we accept that these are necessary aspects of firefighting, and that even with such inherent uncertainty we want timely action rather than "wait forever and see."

It's actually a good analogy, it just points to exactly the opposite conclusion from the one you drew.

watwut7• 5 years ago

That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled. They know exactly what will happen when you do X to a fire and they know how to stop it fast and efficiently.

That is not quite true. Where science is not available firefighters go by experience and best guesses. The same goes for cops and even doctors.

Not everything we do has good science behind it. Instead, science is coming pretty often much later, simply because actual science takes a lot of time.

stonemetal12• 5 years ago

That's because the "science" on firefighting has already been settled.

For this specific fire though? /s

COVID isn't the first Virus in the world. There is a good quantity of science on combatting viruses. Sure, we need to figure out where COVID falls in our overall knowledge of viruses but claiming "They had no idea, it was just a knee jerk reaction." is far from the actual situation.

logicchains• 5 years ago

The "article" is conflating two completely different things: science, and battling a pandemic. Both have very different standards, methods, and goals.

Science isn't just a game scientists play for fun; the scientific method is the correct method for making inferences and predictions. If you don't have enough information to make a scientifically/probabilistically sound prediction, you can't make an accurate prediction.

Sure the goal is to save lives, but if you don't have a robust, falsifiable and tested scientific model of what you're doing, you have no idea whether it will really save lives or not. For instance, the science suggests that harsh lockdowns did not in fact reduce mortality (did not save lives): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... . They did however contribute to significant excess deaths in under-65s; in Canada's case, more than the number of under-65s that died of covid: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210712/dq210... .

bernulli8• 5 years ago

Again, those are two different things, as I discussed in my post.

But let's run with your argument for a minute: So what you're arguing is that we should kick out of our hospitals anyone with cancer, ALS, HIV/AIDS, heck, the cold and the flu - because if we don't know how to heal it, we clearly don't have enough data yet. How about letting people drive cars even though we haven't been able to solve 'accidents'?

shadowgovt4• 5 years ago

Firefighting is probably the best analogy I've seen on this topic.

If you've ever seen the aftermath of a successful large-scale firefighting operation, you know the building is generally left uninhabitable. And this is preferable to the alternative, which is an uninhabitable building full of dead people (or a larger swath of dead people and damaged buildings).

The time to perfect the art of fighting fires is in the downtime between fires. During the fire, you rely on your training and preparation and you act. Not all those actions will be optimal; maybe, in hindsight, you didn't have to crush that wall or hose that room full of artwork. But unlike regular times when cautious action is preferred, neither a fire nor a pandemic will wait patiently while the optimal path to fighting them is found.

bernulli8• 5 years ago

To be fair, I was without doubt influenced by one of these 'This is fine' memes, but instead with the line 'But what are the long-term effects of fire extinguishers?'.

h2odragon• 5 years ago

"The consensus is clear, there's no time to consider nuance or correct (surely negligible!) errors, we must act immediately and with our full exertion to counter this imminent, grave threat."

COVID's not the first time such sentiments have been called "science". It might just be the most successful wave yet.

sebastianconcpt• 5 years ago

That's how bad software engineering is done so imagine social engineering consequences.

garden_hermit• 5 years ago

The author raises some very good points about the dangers of science in the public sphere, particularly how scientific debates can be co-opted by pundits and cause social media outrage.

However, I simply can't read the article without recognizing the context of its author: John P. Ioannidis.

For those who don't know, Ioannidis was widely criticized early in the pandemic for his studies on the effects of lockdowns [1]. This essay seems, in part, a response to that criticism. But contrary to his writing,

1. He was widely criticized for his work by peer scientists [2], not just the public, not just for the rigour of his work, but also for his personal conduct.

2. He made the choice to share his ideas on Fox news, essentially entering the public debate himself [3], and willingly exposing himself to public scrutiny

3. His work has not been censored. It remains in major scientific journals and is highly-cited! He quotes "organized skepticism" like he just read Merton the night before, acting like it has somehow vanished during the pandemic, and yet his actual scientific work remains firmly within the scholarly discourse, its the public scrutiny that he doesn't like.

So I am not sure exactly what his point is. The "science" seems to be working as well as it ever did, with a wide variety of research and viewpoints being published. Public controversy reaching scientists is its own issue and one that I'm sympathetic towards, but I feel that Ioannidis is a poor spokesperson for this issue, and his personal grievances bleed into his writing.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

[2] https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lan...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioan...

shadowgovt4• 5 years ago

The norms shouldn't change because the pandemic isn't normal, but by the same token we don't address the pandemic using a normal seasonal flu protocol.

Fundamentally, due to the urgency of the problem, the certainty / urgency tradeoff has been shifted for this disease specifically; there isn't time to exhaust the space of understanding how masks, hand-washing, etc. impact this virus while people are dying from it right now. A practice that is low-cost and 50/50 likely to help with low chance of harm is worth doing.

This isn't the way we treat most diseases because most diseases aren't this virulent and deadly.

popcube• 5 years ago

science work good, it just works slowly, this is normal way that science work. the problem is people do not understand how it work, if new results can overthrow old one, scientists just accept it, but people will trust that he lie. scientists revoked their article, people still use it to debate, usually if protocol is correct, scientists even do not withdraw their article...

How the pandemic is changing the norms of science

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