5 ms·

Great article. > Do you have it in you to ignore 800 epidemiologists, and is it actually good idea? Yes, I do, because I was tracking the wave of non-stop bul

Great article. > Do you have it in you to ignore 800 epidemiologists, and is it actually good idea? Yes, I do, because I was tracking the wave of non-stop bullshit coming from scientists closely throughout all of 2020, and got completely fed up. But I'm not the norm (yet), and no, it's not actually a good solution. We're in the beginning of the story of the boy who cried wolf. Eventually the whole town ended up like me: fully willing to ignore and oppose the mainstream information channels. When a real wolf came, the boy told the truth once out of 1,000 times, and the townspeople all ignored him and got their sheep eaten up. We need to find a way to crowd-source our trust mechanism if "trust the experts" starts to fail. My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. They can go on publishing in scientific journals and selling books, but their opinion should not be accepted by the general public anymore. The other solution is to keep ignoring the boy and start watching your own sheep.

cltby 6y ago
Many argue that the experts ultimately got it right (and are thus redeemed). I strongly disagree. Even when the public health types corrected course, their behavior left a bad taste in my mouth. There was no acknowledgement of having been wrong, no introspection on how their errors came to be, no discussion how they could be avoided in the future. Just aggressive enforcement of the new party line couched in appeals to authority. The whole enterprise reeks of blind dogmatism.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  > Many argue that the experts ultimately got it right (and are thus redeemed). Perhaps their opinion on that one matter they corrected was redeemed, but their general lack of understanding about the limits of their own knowledge was exposed, which is more damning for someone called an "expert."
  - TheTrotters 6y ago
    And in time-sensitive situations getting something "ultimately right" is akin to getting it wrong.
- ndiscussion 6y ago
  Spot on, a broken clock looks correct twice a day. I have zero confidence that they're actually correct this time.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Which experts got it right? The Swedish epidemiological team? The state of Florida epidemiological team? Both regions of whom had better outcome per capita with less Covid restrictions than numerous states who followed the mainstream 'experts' advice. How do you measure 'got it right'?
  - robocat 6y ago
    Cut n pasting the same comment[1][2] multiple times is rude IMHO. I believe that there is a lot of noise in the numbers, and a large numbers of causal factors. Florida or Sweden could easily be random outliers, or that the actual reasons could not be due to the cause and effect you are using as an “explanation”. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740965 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740976
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      There's a combined total of around 30 million people in those places. That's a decent enough population size to to make me wonder why places with a lot more draconian restrictions have worse covid outcomes. I don't know if noise is a sufficient explanation to me for 30 million people.
13415 6y ago
I'm baffled by your post because I honestly have made the opposite experience. I've been tracking expert advice on Covid and practically all experts have been right about almost everything related to the disease from the start of February until now. They even predicted the reactions of the population correctly over time, and the second wave in autumn in my region. There were minor disagreements about measures, but overall mostly agreement, and practically every expert has been and is still advising more stringent measures than the governments end up implementing. (Which is not surprising, given the different responsibilities at play.) I felt not only well-informed, I actually felt and still feel a bit over-informed about the topic. My country of residence handles the crisis relatively well, so it's kind of silly and depressing to me to continue to collect data and look at daily Covid figures. May I ask where you live? Maybe the US? Did you get your information mostly from print media, online media, or TV?
- tboyd47 6y ago
  > May I ask where you live? Maybe the US? How'd you guess? :)
  - 13415 6y ago
    That explains the different experiences, I live in continental Europe and mostly followed local expert interviews and journal articles. It seems to me that the topic was politicized early in the US. I've followed Fauci's meandering diplomacy from time to time, as well as disagreements between federal and local responses. Maybe some trade-offs were made. There is one complaint I had about experts in Europe, too, and that is that they resorted to a "king's lie" about masks at the beginning of the pandemic. Certainly none of them said you shouldn't wear a mask, but they downplayed their importance when there weren't enough of them yet for the medical staff. IMHO, they shouldn't have done that. Instead, governments should have regulated mask trade and distribution from the start like in some Asian countries.
    - tboyd47 6y ago
      > I've followed Fauci's meandering diplomacy from time to time, as well as disagreements between federal and local responses. It speaks volumes that you identified what country I'm from and the person I was really talking about just from a vague rant about "scientists." My rant may have been aimed at one or two people who appear to be compulsive liars at this point, but the author of the post is complaining about a problem with science in general. And it's not something you can attribute to anti-intellectualism or the perception of science; it really is a 'dereliction of duty" on behalf of scientists, and the madness of 2020 exposed these problems to the general public. More on that problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7leWXMr3ayk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7leWXMr3ayk As an aside, I would ask those people (not you) who blamed me for feeling this way if they really think browbeating people who speak out will fix the issue. Why do we all have to keep blaming each other? Why not work together to hold our experts to a higher standard?
tensor 6y ago
I suppose we are at a huge impasse as a society then. Because someone like me holds the opinion of non-experts as having zero value. I will not respect and do not want any policy being set by people with your attitude. I will continue to follow the science, and if I feel that people like you who ignore it are threatening my life, then I will do everything I can to stay far away from you and keep you far away from me. I'd be totally for splitting society into those who respect science and experts, and those who don't. I have no desire to live in your world.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Why is the answer to make me the enemy just because I spoke my mind?
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Because your considered opinion leads to poor results.
  - tensor 6y ago
    Society is a social contract. I participate in it because I think we are stronger, safer, and better off together. But if your idea of a social contract is to disregard experts and the accumulated knowledge that we've worked centuries to obtain, then I don't think we are better together. In that case I think you are a net negative on the social wellbeing, and on my wellbeing, and I do not want to be in a social contract with you. Working together and benefiting from each others hard work is not an innate right. It's a right bestowed by joining into a particular social contract, be that a national one, or a local one. You are saying to me that you will not pull your own weight. In fact worse, you will work against the common good. Thus I do not want to work together with you.
- cltby 6y ago
  > I'd be totally for splitting society into those who respect science and experts, and those who don't Science not as a search for knowledge, but as a search for daddy figures to respect and obey. Nothing is as harmful to progress as this blind devotion to expertise.
JadeNB 6y ago
> My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. That will lead to one of two things: (1) information paralysis, where no-one authoritative is willing to speak in public for fear of making a mistake (and so the public sphere is ceded to the ignorant); or (2) constant churn, where experts are constantly removed from the public sphere (because everyone makes mistakes), and so we only hear from the people who haven't yet had enough experience to make a mistake.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
moonshinefe 6y ago
So what main issues are you talking about that were "bullshit" advice from scientists in general exactly? You make a lot of super vague arguments with no specifics, and while it's nice to agree with children's fables like the boy who cried wolf, unless we agree on facts that happened, it's kind of a rhetorical argument with no real bearing in reality. Also, I've got to say, "cancelling" anyone who's ever wrong from being an "expert" in the public sphere sounds like a really poor idea. Everyone is wrong sometimes and that's a crazy standard which would have tons of its own perverse incentives, probably even worse than the ones scientific journals and the like have now. Do you want scientists on the record terrified of saying anything besides the most vague and unfalsifiable statements? It's an untenable situation if you bring it to its logical conclusion. I do agree with you that there ought to be more consequences for scientists willingly spreading bad science though, beyond what there is now--but the solution won't be simple. Given the vagueness of your post I'm not sure why you have the perspective that scientists produced a "non-stop wave of bullshit". From my perspective, I saw a bunch of demagogues and populists cynically manipulating a major demographic for personal gain while sidelining and ignoring the broader scientific advice and recommendations in the country the entire time, while over 350000 people died.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
c1ccccc1 6y ago
I have a more positive opinion of scientists than you seem to, and I'd like to explain why. A big part of the problem here is selective media reporting of science. All fields have good practitioners and bad practitioners. ("bad" here can mean overconfident or bad at stats or outright fraudulent) As the parent article points out, in fields where objective feedback is less easily accessible, it becomes easier and easier for bad practitioners to survive. Many media sources will report only the opinions of scientists that support the positions they agree with. And the fields with the least objective feedback are often the very same fields that the media has strong opinions about, meaning that they can easily find somebody supporting their position. Even well-intentioned media sources can have difficulty with mistranslating the results or misinterpreting the confidence level of some piece of research. I think the reason I have a more positive opinion is because I more often tend to look at primary sources: papers, or at least blog posts by researchers. That kind of stuff is often linked on HN, which is a big part of the value of this place. Looking at primary sources makes it harder to tell what's important, and what's just minor details, but the advantage is it allows you to see more of what's actually going on, instead of just getting the media's view of "the scientific consensus". Of course you still have to watch out for the replication crisis and all that, but it's easier to tell if the scientists did their stats right when reading their paper than to try and guess based on a journalist's write up of the results. I guess the problem I have with your "permanent cancellation" proposal is that it doesn't allow for uncertainty. Have a groups of people try to predict the outcome of 7 coin flips in a row, and less than 1 percent will remain, along with maybe Persi Diaconis. You need to have some way for people to say "there's a 50% chance of heads", without getting fired. I agree that we should still keep track of people's predictions, and stop listening to them when they've been confident and wrong many times. That kind of "prediction checkup" is important, and I wish that it was more mainstream to publish checkups of that kind. Expecting people to keep track in their heads means that most of them won't bother, and will end up listening to the same doofuses over and over.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
spaetzleesser 6y ago
“My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. “ Why only experts? Would other people be allowed to publicly say wrong things?

cltby 6y ago

Many argue that the experts ultimately got it right (and are thus redeemed). I strongly disagree. Even when the public health types corrected course, their behavior left a bad taste in my mouth. There was no acknowledgement of having been wrong, no introspection on how their errors came to be, no discussion how they could be avoided in the future. Just aggressive enforcement of the new party line couched in appeals to authority. The whole enterprise reeks of blind dogmatism.

tboyd47 6y ago
> Many argue that the experts ultimately got it right (and are thus redeemed). Perhaps their opinion on that one matter they corrected was redeemed, but their general lack of understanding about the limits of their own knowledge was exposed, which is more damning for someone called an "expert."
- TheTrotters 6y ago
  And in time-sensitive situations getting something "ultimately right" is akin to getting it wrong.
ndiscussion 6y ago
Spot on, a broken clock looks correct twice a day. I have zero confidence that they're actually correct this time.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
Which experts got it right? The Swedish epidemiological team? The state of Florida epidemiological team? Both regions of whom had better outcome per capita with less Covid restrictions than numerous states who followed the mainstream 'experts' advice. How do you measure 'got it right'?
- robocat 6y ago
  Cut n pasting the same comment[1][2] multiple times is rude IMHO. I believe that there is a lot of noise in the numbers, and a large numbers of causal factors. Florida or Sweden could easily be random outliers, or that the actual reasons could not be due to the cause and effect you are using as an “explanation”. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740965 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25740976
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    There's a combined total of around 30 million people in those places. That's a decent enough population size to to make me wonder why places with a lot more draconian restrictions have worse covid outcomes. I don't know if noise is a sufficient explanation to me for 30 million people.

13415 6y ago

I'm baffled by your post because I honestly have made the opposite experience. I've been tracking expert advice on Covid and practically all experts have been right about almost everything related to the disease from the start of February until now. They even predicted the reactions of the population correctly over time, and the second wave in autumn in my region. There were minor disagreements about measures, but overall mostly agreement, and practically every expert has been and is still advising more stringent measures than the governments end up implementing. (Which is not surprising, given the different responsibilities at play.) I felt not only well-informed, I actually felt and still feel a bit over-informed about the topic. My country of residence handles the crisis relatively well, so it's kind of silly and depressing to me to continue to collect data and look at daily Covid figures. May I ask where you live? Maybe the US? Did you get your information mostly from print media, online media, or TV?

tboyd47 6y ago
> May I ask where you live? Maybe the US? How'd you guess? :)
- 13415 6y ago
  That explains the different experiences, I live in continental Europe and mostly followed local expert interviews and journal articles. It seems to me that the topic was politicized early in the US. I've followed Fauci's meandering diplomacy from time to time, as well as disagreements between federal and local responses. Maybe some trade-offs were made. There is one complaint I had about experts in Europe, too, and that is that they resorted to a "king's lie" about masks at the beginning of the pandemic. Certainly none of them said you shouldn't wear a mask, but they downplayed their importance when there weren't enough of them yet for the medical staff. IMHO, they shouldn't have done that. Instead, governments should have regulated mask trade and distribution from the start like in some Asian countries.
  - tboyd47 6y ago
    > I've followed Fauci's meandering diplomacy from time to time, as well as disagreements between federal and local responses. It speaks volumes that you identified what country I'm from and the person I was really talking about just from a vague rant about "scientists." My rant may have been aimed at one or two people who appear to be compulsive liars at this point, but the author of the post is complaining about a problem with science in general. And it's not something you can attribute to anti-intellectualism or the perception of science; it really is a 'dereliction of duty" on behalf of scientists, and the madness of 2020 exposed these problems to the general public. More on that problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7leWXMr3ayk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7leWXMr3ayk As an aside, I would ask those people (not you) who blamed me for feeling this way if they really think browbeating people who speak out will fix the issue. Why do we all have to keep blaming each other? Why not work together to hold our experts to a higher standard?

tensor 6y ago

I suppose we are at a huge impasse as a society then. Because someone like me holds the opinion of non-experts as having zero value. I will not respect and do not want any policy being set by people with your attitude. I will continue to follow the science, and if I feel that people like you who ignore it are threatening my life, then I will do everything I can to stay far away from you and keep you far away from me. I'd be totally for splitting society into those who respect science and experts, and those who don't. I have no desire to live in your world.

tboyd47 6y ago
Why is the answer to make me the enemy just because I spoke my mind?
- mcguire 6y ago
  Because your considered opinion leads to poor results.
- tensor 6y ago
  Society is a social contract. I participate in it because I think we are stronger, safer, and better off together. But if your idea of a social contract is to disregard experts and the accumulated knowledge that we've worked centuries to obtain, then I don't think we are better together. In that case I think you are a net negative on the social wellbeing, and on my wellbeing, and I do not want to be in a social contract with you. Working together and benefiting from each others hard work is not an innate right. It's a right bestowed by joining into a particular social contract, be that a national one, or a local one. You are saying to me that you will not pull your own weight. In fact worse, you will work against the common good. Thus I do not want to work together with you.
cltby 6y ago
> I'd be totally for splitting society into those who respect science and experts, and those who don't Science not as a search for knowledge, but as a search for daddy figures to respect and obey. Nothing is as harmful to progress as this blind devotion to expertise.

JadeNB 6y ago

> My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. That will lead to one of two things: (1) information paralysis, where no-one authoritative is willing to speak in public for fear of making a mistake (and so the public sphere is ceded to the ignorant); or (2) constant churn, where experts are constantly removed from the public sphere (because everyone makes mistakes), and so we only hear from the people who haven't yet had enough experience to make a mistake.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

moonshinefe 6y ago

So what main issues are you talking about that were "bullshit" advice from scientists in general exactly? You make a lot of super vague arguments with no specifics, and while it's nice to agree with children's fables like the boy who cried wolf, unless we agree on facts that happened, it's kind of a rhetorical argument with no real bearing in reality. Also, I've got to say, "cancelling" anyone who's ever wrong from being an "expert" in the public sphere sounds like a really poor idea. Everyone is wrong sometimes and that's a crazy standard which would have tons of its own perverse incentives, probably even worse than the ones scientific journals and the like have now. Do you want scientists on the record terrified of saying anything besides the most vague and unfalsifiable statements? It's an untenable situation if you bring it to its logical conclusion. I do agree with you that there ought to be more consequences for scientists willingly spreading bad science though, beyond what there is now--but the solution won't be simple. Given the vagueness of your post I'm not sure why you have the perspective that scientists produced a "non-stop wave of bullshit". From my perspective, I saw a bunch of demagogues and populists cynically manipulating a major demographic for personal gain while sidelining and ignoring the broader scientific advice and recommendations in the country the entire time, while over 350000 people died.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

c1ccccc1 6y ago

I have a more positive opinion of scientists than you seem to, and I'd like to explain why. A big part of the problem here is selective media reporting of science. All fields have good practitioners and bad practitioners. ("bad" here can mean overconfident or bad at stats or outright fraudulent) As the parent article points out, in fields where objective feedback is less easily accessible, it becomes easier and easier for bad practitioners to survive. Many media sources will report only the opinions of scientists that support the positions they agree with. And the fields with the least objective feedback are often the very same fields that the media has strong opinions about, meaning that they can easily find somebody supporting their position. Even well-intentioned media sources can have difficulty with mistranslating the results or misinterpreting the confidence level of some piece of research. I think the reason I have a more positive opinion is because I more often tend to look at primary sources: papers, or at least blog posts by researchers. That kind of stuff is often linked on HN, which is a big part of the value of this place. Looking at primary sources makes it harder to tell what's important, and what's just minor details, but the advantage is it allows you to see more of what's actually going on, instead of just getting the media's view of "the scientific consensus". Of course you still have to watch out for the replication crisis and all that, but it's easier to tell if the scientists did their stats right when reading their paper than to try and guess based on a journalist's write up of the results. I guess the problem I have with your "permanent cancellation" proposal is that it doesn't allow for uncertainty. Have a groups of people try to predict the outcome of 7 coin flips in a row, and less than 1 percent will remain, along with maybe Persi Diaconis. You need to have some way for people to say "there's a 50% chance of heads", without getting fired. I agree that we should still keep track of people's predictions, and stop listening to them when they've been confident and wrong many times. That kind of "prediction checkup" is important, and I wish that it was more mainstream to publish checkups of that kind. Expecting people to keep track in their heads means that most of them won't bother, and will end up listening to the same doofuses over and over.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

spaetzleesser 6y ago

“My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. “ Why only experts? Would other people be allowed to publicly say wrong things?