3 ms·

Something I've been reflecting on over the past couple of months is how the university system loudly claims to promote critical thinking and peer review, whilst

Something I've been reflecting on over the past couple of months is how the university system loudly claims to promote critical thinking and peer review, whilst it seems to me that it actually does everything possible to discourage it. If you look at the unfolding replication disaster in epidemiology, re: Ferguson and his totally non-replicable Report 9, it's really turning over the rocks on an academic culture in which: • Academics flat-out refuse to question each other across disciplines, practically as a matter of honour. • Nobody else being able to understand your research is something boasted about on Twitter and in the press rather than being a source of embarrassment. • Scientists routinely refuse to reveal their data and code, making a mockery of both peer review and replication as a process. • Anyone who does engage in critical thinking about their work gets shut down, censored, attacked as an "armchair epidemiologist" etc - often it seems by people with academic backgrounds. After years of non-stop hiring, tech firms are now flooded with naive post-docs steeped in academic culture, who appear to have totally bought into the notion that critical thinking about the output of "experts" is not only morally wrong but outright dangerous and needs to be suppressed. This has led to the absurd sight of Google/Twitter trying to delete anyone who disagrees with the WHO at a time when the WHO routinely disagrees with itself as of a few weeks ago, or where the WHO disgrees with the CDC, or where experienced doctors disagree with both, and it ends up being the doctors that get shut down because they are mere doctors and not "experts"! It feels like this whole conflation of academia with "expertise" is leading society to disaster; why should any of us believe universities when they say they teach critical thinking? Someone trained in critical thinking wouldn't just accept such a claim at face value, they'd demand a weight of evidence. But no such evidence is ever presented.

pjc50 6y ago
This situation has been exacerbated by the "barbarians at the gates": stepping outside the zone of people who are trying to do inquiry honestly, however badly, leads rapidly into the swirling internet drain of quacks and cranks who feel under no such obligation to try. Hence all the "miracle mineral solution" nonsense. The landmark of bad epidemiology is of course Andrew Wakefield, who almost single-handedly destroyed the effectiveness of measles vaccination. Experts are in trouble. Some of the "non-experts" are right. But as often as not it's the confidently extremely wrong who get promoted by the media and social networks.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Perhaps. I used to view things like that too. Over time it seems like the gap between the cranks and experts keeps closing. How cranky are these cranks, really? You mention vaccination. Anti-vaxxer has pretty much become a byword for dangerous quack science denier. It conjures up stereotypes of soccer moms who are certain their special snowflake child can't take the "risk". But vaccines are perfectly safe; doesn't everyone know that? A few weeks ago I got a reply to a comment of mine here on Hacker News that mentioned Pandemrix, a treatment I'd never heard of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22922864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22922864 DanBC, who I often end up debating with on these forums as we are somewhat different in political outlook, remarked "Pandemrix causes narcolepsy in 1 in 60,000 people who take it. (so, for the entire US that's about 5000 with a life long debilitating illness that requires constant care.)" At the time I replied that I'd not heard of this and without doing more research couldn't really comment. I took his claim at face value and didn't think much more of it, filing it away to look at later. Well, turns out this claim is both completely true and much more importantly, to my surprise Pandemrix is a vaccine developed for the swine flu: "In August 2010, The Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) and The Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) launched investigations regarding the development of narcolepsy as a possible side effect to Pandemrix flu vaccination in children,[5] and found a 6.6-fold increased risk among children and youths, resulting in 3.6 additional cases of narcolepsy per 100,000 vaccinated subjects" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix So, erm, yeah. About those anti-vaxxers. Who think vaccines might sometimes be dangerous for their children. And who get laughed at and shat on constantly. And shut down. And censored. And told they don't understand the science. About them. Damn.
  - 0xddd 6y ago
    This is a coarse mis-characterization of both sides of that "debate" if we can even call it that. Are anti-vaxxers mostly worried about proven risks, like narcolepsy in this case, or is a much larger part of their movement concerned with making paranoid claims like that the MMR vaccine causes autism? Are the experts guilty of denying the narcolepsy-Pandermix link, or are they spending more time trying to refute bogus statements because they'd like to see herd immunity maintained for certain diseases?
mattkrause 6y ago
> Academics flat-out refuse to question each other across disciplines, practically as a matter of honour. That's not really true. In fact, it's practically a trope that physicists and economists blithely wade into other fields; there's even an xkcd about it (https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/). However, it often turns out that people in the original field do actually know relevant stuff, which makes it hard to do this well. For COVID, I wanted people outside the field not to shut up entirely, but to tread lightly: before trumpeting a "cubic model" or "quadratic spread" from the rooftops, do some digging to see why this very simple solution hadn't occurred to anyone else.

pjc50 6y ago

This situation has been exacerbated by the "barbarians at the gates": stepping outside the zone of people who are trying to do inquiry honestly, however badly, leads rapidly into the swirling internet drain of quacks and cranks who feel under no such obligation to try. Hence all the "miracle mineral solution" nonsense. The landmark of bad epidemiology is of course Andrew Wakefield, who almost single-handedly destroyed the effectiveness of measles vaccination. Experts are in trouble. Some of the "non-experts" are right. But as often as not it's the confidently extremely wrong who get promoted by the media and social networks.

thu2111 6y ago
Perhaps. I used to view things like that too. Over time it seems like the gap between the cranks and experts keeps closing. How cranky are these cranks, really? You mention vaccination. Anti-vaxxer has pretty much become a byword for dangerous quack science denier. It conjures up stereotypes of soccer moms who are certain their special snowflake child can't take the "risk". But vaccines are perfectly safe; doesn't everyone know that? A few weeks ago I got a reply to a comment of mine here on Hacker News that mentioned Pandemrix, a treatment I'd never heard of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22922864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22922864 DanBC, who I often end up debating with on these forums as we are somewhat different in political outlook, remarked "Pandemrix causes narcolepsy in 1 in 60,000 people who take it. (so, for the entire US that's about 5000 with a life long debilitating illness that requires constant care.)" At the time I replied that I'd not heard of this and without doing more research couldn't really comment. I took his claim at face value and didn't think much more of it, filing it away to look at later. Well, turns out this claim is both completely true and much more importantly, to my surprise Pandemrix is a vaccine developed for the swine flu: "In August 2010, The Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) and The Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) launched investigations regarding the development of narcolepsy as a possible side effect to Pandemrix flu vaccination in children,[5] and found a 6.6-fold increased risk among children and youths, resulting in 3.6 additional cases of narcolepsy per 100,000 vaccinated subjects" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix So, erm, yeah. About those anti-vaxxers. Who think vaccines might sometimes be dangerous for their children. And who get laughed at and shat on constantly. And shut down. And censored. And told they don't understand the science. About them. Damn.
- 0xddd 6y ago
  This is a coarse mis-characterization of both sides of that "debate" if we can even call it that. Are anti-vaxxers mostly worried about proven risks, like narcolepsy in this case, or is a much larger part of their movement concerned with making paranoid claims like that the MMR vaccine causes autism? Are the experts guilty of denying the narcolepsy-Pandermix link, or are they spending more time trying to refute bogus statements because they'd like to see herd immunity maintained for certain diseases?

mattkrause 6y ago

> Academics flat-out refuse to question each other across disciplines, practically as a matter of honour. That's not really true. In fact, it's practically a trope that physicists and economists blithely wade into other fields; there's even an xkcd about it (https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/). However, it often turns out that people in the original field do actually know relevant stuff, which makes it hard to do this well. For COVID, I wanted people outside the field not to shut up entirely, but to tread lightly: before trumpeting a "cubic model" or "quadratic spread" from the rooftops, do some digging to see why this very simple solution hadn't occurred to anyone else.