5 ms·

What an absolute shitshow. I fear for our future if scientists can be made to look the fool like they did this year.

roenxi 6y ago
Science is not the process of figuring out a new thing in 2 months. For January-April it was possible for a smart layman to outperform the scientists on basic "what is going on" questions - because neither had any data and everyone was guessing what the terrifying signals out of China meant based on political knowledge and quality of the rumours feeding back. Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article. Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus.
- mistermann 6y ago
  I think there's a subtle miscommunication going on here (and my intuition is that this is an extremely common phenomenon, and not limited to only the topic of Science). Whereas you are talking about Science, as practiced by scientists, person_of_color is talking about "Science", as it is perceived by the general public. Science vs "Science". And not to be overlooked are the layers between these two as well: the communication/information ecosystem. This may seem like a subtle, unimportant difference (or not noticed at all in normal(!), realtime cognition), but that's just an impression...perception - the actual importance is the systemic consequences in the world. We can wag our fingers all day at the idiots who "don't understand/listen to The Science", but if actual science (Science vs "Science") isn't actually communicated to the public, and also done in a manner such that it both(!) lands and sticks in these people's minds, we will then enjoy the suboptimal consequences that result. We can then (choose to) proceed to assign blame (enjoying the psychological/emotional pleasure that often comes with that) as to whose "fault" this is all we want - the current systemic consequences are what they are (however: the future consequences may be influenced by this blame assignment process). So says Science (or more precisely, would say, if we could be bothered to study such things, with the same depth and rigour that we study the hard sciences [1]). > Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article. Is this article Science, or "Science", or a hybrid (in general, and also from this perspective of Systemic Consequences)? I would personally classify it as being far more towards the "Science" side of the spectrum. > Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus. In most respects surely, but all? And again: might even seemingly completely innocuous statements like this possibly have Systemic Consequences? [1] How Much Does It Cost To Find A Higgs Boson? https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-does-it-cost-to-find-a-higgs-boson/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d... > The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN - about $286 million annually. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year. > The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion. That's a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that. The money itself is provided by the CERN member countries, and a little over 70% of the annual budget is provided by Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and Spain. The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia.
  - tacitusarc 6y ago
    This is part of the exoteric versus esoteric communication problem.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      Very much so, and it receives little attention, while the consequences receive a massive amount, and are often targeted as what needs addressing, rather than the underlying problem.
tsimionescu 6y ago
I think it's good to occasionally remember that, for all the marvels of medicine - and there are true marvels to behold, no doubt about that - we're still just scratching the surface, and barely even that for many domains of medicine. Biology is extremely complex, and doesn't yield very easily to the methods used in physics to alleviate complexity, since biological systems are extremely inter-connected (whether at the social level or internally) and hard or impossible to separate into clean functions.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > we're still just scratching the surface I think the same can be said of just about any field, but with medicine it's more clear to people who aren't experts in the field, compared to a field like physics. As I understand it, for all of modern medicine's many marvels, it can't do much about the common cold, or tinnitus. I suppose that's analogous to how we have software that can beat any human chess player, but text-to-speech is still a work in progress. Our systems have a harder time moving the pieces than picking world-class chess moves.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    I believe (though of course it could well turn out to be wrong) that physics is much closer to understanding the universe than medicine is to understanding the human body. There are big open problems in physics, absolutely. But in the domains where our theories currently apply and that we can experiment on, we can actually use them to predict with extreme accuracy how things will behave, and we have been able to exploit this to create marvels of technology like nuclear reactors, microchips, the LHC, MRIs and many others - all with essentially 100% accuracy in everything they do. In medicine on the other hand, we barely have one drug that works or doesn't work predictably in every person; we're not sure what to measure in someone to understand what potentially impacts any particular disease; we are still discovering entire organs in the human body every year; we have only recently realized that the trillions of bacteria that naturally live in our bodies have more than minor impact on our organism, but we still have little idea of what their effects actually are; and if we start looking at psychiatry or neuro-science or nutrition, we're not even sure we're asking the right questions, nevermind giving any of the right answers. Hell, there are some signs that we may have a microbiome in our brain[0], long thought to be essentially aseptic in healthy humans. [0] https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-microbiome https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-m...

Science is not the process of figuring out a new thing in 2 months. For January-April it was possible for a smart layman to outperform the scientists on basic "what is going on" questions - because neither had any data and everyone was guessing what the terrifying signals out of China meant based on political knowledge and quality of the rumours feeding back. Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article. Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus.

mistermann 6y ago
I think there's a subtle miscommunication going on here (and my intuition is that this is an extremely common phenomenon, and not limited to only the topic of Science). Whereas you are talking about Science, as practiced by scientists, person_of_color is talking about "Science", as it is perceived by the general public. Science vs "Science". And not to be overlooked are the layers between these two as well: the communication/information ecosystem. This may seem like a subtle, unimportant difference (or not noticed at all in normal(!), realtime cognition), but that's just an impression...perception - the actual importance is the systemic consequences in the world. We can wag our fingers all day at the idiots who "don't understand/listen to The Science", but if actual science (Science vs "Science") isn't actually communicated to the public, and also done in a manner such that it both(!) lands and sticks in these people's minds, we will then enjoy the suboptimal consequences that result. We can then (choose to) proceed to assign blame (enjoying the psychological/emotional pleasure that often comes with that) as to whose "fault" this is all we want - the current systemic consequences are what they are (however: the future consequences may be influenced by this blame assignment process). So says Science (or more precisely, would say, if we could be bothered to study such things, with the same depth and rigour that we study the hard sciences [1]). > Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article. Is this article Science, or "Science", or a hybrid (in general, and also from this perspective of Systemic Consequences)? I would personally classify it as being far more towards the "Science" side of the spectrum. > Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus. In most respects surely, but all? And again: might even seemingly completely innocuous statements like this possibly have Systemic Consequences? [1] How Much Does It Cost To Find A Higgs Boson? https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-does-it-cost-to-find-a-higgs-boson/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d... > The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN - about $286 million annually. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year. > The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion. That's a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that. The money itself is provided by the CERN member countries, and a little over 70% of the annual budget is provided by Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and Spain. The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia.
- tacitusarc 6y ago
  This is part of the exoteric versus esoteric communication problem.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Very much so, and it receives little attention, while the consequences receive a massive amount, and are often targeted as what needs addressing, rather than the underlying problem.

tsimionescu 6y ago

I think it's good to occasionally remember that, for all the marvels of medicine - and there are true marvels to behold, no doubt about that - we're still just scratching the surface, and barely even that for many domains of medicine. Biology is extremely complex, and doesn't yield very easily to the methods used in physics to alleviate complexity, since biological systems are extremely inter-connected (whether at the social level or internally) and hard or impossible to separate into clean functions.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> we're still just scratching the surface I think the same can be said of just about any field, but with medicine it's more clear to people who aren't experts in the field, compared to a field like physics. As I understand it, for all of modern medicine's many marvels, it can't do much about the common cold, or tinnitus. I suppose that's analogous to how we have software that can beat any human chess player, but text-to-speech is still a work in progress. Our systems have a harder time moving the pieces than picking world-class chess moves.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  I believe (though of course it could well turn out to be wrong) that physics is much closer to understanding the universe than medicine is to understanding the human body. There are big open problems in physics, absolutely. But in the domains where our theories currently apply and that we can experiment on, we can actually use them to predict with extreme accuracy how things will behave, and we have been able to exploit this to create marvels of technology like nuclear reactors, microchips, the LHC, MRIs and many others - all with essentially 100% accuracy in everything they do. In medicine on the other hand, we barely have one drug that works or doesn't work predictably in every person; we're not sure what to measure in someone to understand what potentially impacts any particular disease; we are still discovering entire organs in the human body every year; we have only recently realized that the trillions of bacteria that naturally live in our bodies have more than minor impact on our organism, but we still have little idea of what their effects actually are; and if we start looking at psychiatry or neuro-science or nutrition, we're not even sure we're asking the right questions, nevermind giving any of the right answers. Hell, there are some signs that we may have a microbiome in our brain[0], long thought to be essentially aseptic in healthy humans. [0] https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-microbiome https://www.colorado.edu/lab/neurodegeneration/there-brain-m...