5 ms·
Ask HN: Why are Covid-related peer-reviewed articles flagged down?
I'm talking about this article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/) which seemed legit, from a relatively well-trusted and official source. The discussion that got flagged down can be found in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22662574
- 6nf 7y agoCovid overload
- TeMPOraL 7y agoProbably raised a "conspiracy theory-prone discussion" red flag in enough HN-ers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Lewton 7y agoThe one you were linking to was probably flagged for the flamebaiting title Which is great, because misleading titles is one of the bigger problems here on HN, made worse by 90% of people not reading anything but the title and the comments
- throwanem 7y agoThe article is fine. But it's unrelated to the current crisis, and has proved a fertile basis for conspiratorial confabulation among people anxious to find someone to blame for the coronavirus. Specifically, the paper does not describe the construction of a novel virus from HIV and SARS, as has been claimed by such scientifically literate publications as the New York Post. The paper describes the assembly of proteins from the SARS coronavirus and some of its close relatives, as a way of testing whether such recombination in vivo, as occurs in coinfection of a single host by multiple strains, would be likely to enable a strain previously not infectious to humans to become so. The only way such a constructed protein can in any way affect human cells is in a plate, with extensive lab support. The protein isn't a virus, and cannot become so. It's the biological equivalent of a unit test, rather than of application code. The trouble is that you need to be able to follow the paper to understand that this is the case. If you can't, and you're already frightened enough to be foolish - or inclined to tendentiousness for some other reason - then it's very easy to incorrectly conclude, based on the 10% of the words in the abstract that you do understand, that the current pandemic is the result of, at minimum, an accidental release of a pathogen deliberately created in a Chinese laboratory for some negligent or nefarious reason. To be painfully clear, that is false. Everything about that is false, and the paper supports absolutely none of it. But a lot of people are pointing to it as though it did, and that probably explains the flags.
- paganel 7y agoWhen all this will be said and done people/international organisations will have to look at this with fresh eyes. Just look at this Rai3 reportage from 2015 [1] (RAI is the Italian national television), where starting with minute 5 you can see a piece on Chinese scientists "playing" with that horseshoe bat coronavirus mentioned in the study, trying to combine it with another animal's not deadly yet "polmonite" (pneumonia in English). Again, this is not fake news, and we're talking about the Chinese scientists still giving it a go 8 years after that first study I was linking to and 5 years before a global pandemic that consists in the exact two things they were studying (coronavirus + pneumonia), originating in the exact same city where those scientists were based. Saying that all this is just a "coincidence" or "paranoia" or a "conspiracy" is pure lunacy. [1] https://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-5e3275ba-475c-4cf4-b402-1e27dc47565b.html#p=39 https://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/programmi/media/ContentItem-5e32...
- jerome-jh 7y agoFrom what I can see there is a flagging epidemic on HN. I have seen valid statistics about flu (from the CDC or equivalent, I am not a US citizen) being flagged, on the ground of being conspiracy inspired. But knowing the actual numbers is not conspiracy. I too had my "ahah" moment when learning about the flu statistics. Some subjects simply cannot be discussed: there is a Paul Graham's blog post about it. That is a bit sad that the moment, however urgent, dictates what can talked on a pretty harmless forum.
- throwanem 7y agoThere is a misinformation epidemic on HN and lots of other places, and part of that has been the use of flu stats to tendentiously argue everything from "the current measures are an overreaction" to "REX-84 FEMA black sites New World Order". It's possible you are mistaking flags on such tendentious claims for flags on raw data presented without interpretation - the latter of which, I'll admit, I haven't really seen anywhere lately.
- DrScump 7y agoIt's live here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663029 Sometimes people see the older article second and flag it as the dupe.