23 ms·

How the pandemic is changing the norms of science

74 points by phreeza 5y ago

ivoras 5y ago
Sigh. Some day I hope I can get this project funded: https://github.com/WOTvision/wot1 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 5y 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 5y ago
  But how can the public know which submission to the blockchain is the ground truth?
- yyyk 5y 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 5y 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!
cblconfederate 5y 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 5y ago
  Not a crisis, but climate change was similar
  - bobbytit 5y ago
    The climate religion destroyed the credibility of science.
    - ant6n 5y ago
      Those with money and power have always sought to undermine scientists that uncover inconvenient truths. Example: Gallileo.
      - bobbytit 5y ago
        Which is why every scientist with the courage to speak out against the climate scam has been cancelled.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  That just makes science easier to dismiss and feeds conspiracies.
- derbOac 5y 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.
Barrin92 5y 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?s=20 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.
- cblconfederate 5y 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/2110977 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
  - phreeza 5y ago
Proven 5y ago
> By August 2021, 330,000 scientific papers were published on COVID-19, involving roughly a million different authors. Reason 1) it's easy to get funding. Reeason 2) it's fashionable and trendy, potentially good for an author's career, especially in the handouts-heavy public health or healthcare sector where there's little link between cost and benefit and (as we see in the US) it doesn't even matter what the customer (healthcare subscriber) wants
ZeroGravitas 5y 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-ham-fisted-elite-harming-kids-wrecking-scientific-debate-dennis-patterson-jacob-hale-russell 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-john-ioannidis/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...
- tchalla 5y 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 5y 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.
- neogodless 5y 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 5y 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.
    - neogodless 5y ago
      Where did I claim otherwise? Are you just assuming I think the same things that "everyone" thinks?
    - watwut 5y ago
      Who is that "we"? Cause I have seen that both accounted in models and in regulations.
jrochkind1 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis
- hoseja 5y ago
  You're a second person trying to cancel the author, under such an article. Funny.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrochkind1 5y 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).
bernulli 5y 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.
- CountDrewku 5y 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.
h2odragon 5y 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 5y ago
  That's how bad software engineering is done so imagine social engineering consequences.
garden_hermit 5y 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-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... [2] https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lang=en https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lan... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioannidis-coronavirus-lockdowns-fox-news/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioan...
epistasis 5y ago
This guy's terrible conduct and horrifyingly bad science throughout the pandemic should permanently discredit him from ever getting published again. Seriously, his cherry picking of bad studies in order to intentionally misestimate the fatality rate of COVID 19 was bad enough that every single paper he has been on should be reevaluated. I know that I will never trust a single paper I see from him again. He has exposed himself as a fraud, openly, and in the public. I have even lost a good chunk of respect for his peers at Stanford for not banding together to denounce him more. He may be incredibly famous in the field, but if enough people work together they could have put a stop to his behavior sooner.
- cnlrate 5y ago
  The whole comment sounds like an admonition of a party member directed at a group of East German scientists to condemn a politically unsound one. Science has always worked by allowing diverging opinions, not vague accusations of "bad conduct" (the modern version of counterrevolutionary activities) and behavior. Meanwhile, Sweden and Finland aren't doing worse than many ideologically sound countries.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Edit: after a bit more thought, I would like to point out that my critique was explicitly not at all like East German accusations of secret bad politics. Im critiquing specific bad science done in the open. You call these vague and political, but do not support your accusations at all. In fact, if there are "East German" type allegations anywhere in this thread, they seem to be coming from your comment, as I am not critiquing him politically at all, but your entire comment about mine is making up politics that I supposedly believe in. Oh please, it's about his bad science. If he was doing bad science in the service of politics, as you suggest, that might make it seem worse, but it's no worse. The scientific crime is the cherry picking to deceive. Any halfway honest person familiar with the studies could tell that he was doing really bad science. Why? I still don't know why he did that. But since you seem to understand the politics, maybe you could explain.
  - watwut 5y ago
shadowgovt 5y 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 5y 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...

74 points by phreeza 5y ago

Sigh. Some day I hope I can get this project funded: https://github.com/WOTvision/wot1 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 5y 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 5y ago
But how can the public know which submission to the blockchain is the ground truth?
yyyk 5y 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 5y 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!

cblconfederate 5y 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 5y ago
Not a crisis, but climate change was similar
- bobbytit 5y ago
  The climate religion destroyed the credibility of science.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    Those with money and power have always sought to undermine scientists that uncover inconvenient truths. Example: Gallileo.
    - bobbytit 5y ago
      Which is why every scientist with the courage to speak out against the climate scam has been cancelled.
dehrmann 5y ago
That just makes science easier to dismiss and feeds conspiracies.
derbOac 5y 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.

Barrin92 5y 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?s=20 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.

cblconfederate 5y 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/2110977 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
- phreeza 5y ago

Proven 5y ago

> By August 2021, 330,000 scientific papers were published on COVID-19, involving roughly a million different authors. Reason 1) it's easy to get funding. Reeason 2) it's fashionable and trendy, potentially good for an author's career, especially in the handouts-heavy public health or healthcare sector where there's little link between cost and benefit and (as we see in the US) it doesn't even matter what the customer (healthcare subscriber) wants

ZeroGravitas 5y 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-ham-fisted-elite-harming-kids-wrecking-scientific-debate-dennis-patterson-jacob-hale-russell 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-john-ioannidis/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...

tchalla 5y 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 5y 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.

neogodless 5y 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 5y 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.
  - neogodless 5y ago
    Where did I claim otherwise? Are you just assuming I think the same things that "everyone" thinks?
  - watwut 5y ago
    Who is that "we"? Cause I have seen that both accounted in models and in regulations.

jrochkind1 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis

hoseja 5y ago
You're a second person trying to cancel the author, under such an article. Funny.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jrochkind1 5y 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).

bernulli 5y 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.

CountDrewku 5y 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.

h2odragon 5y 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 5y ago
That's how bad software engineering is done so imagine social engineering consequences.

garden_hermit 5y 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-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... [2] https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lang=en https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1263296963627356161?lan... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioannidis-coronavirus-lockdowns-fox-news/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/16/john-ioan...

epistasis 5y ago

This guy's terrible conduct and horrifyingly bad science throughout the pandemic should permanently discredit him from ever getting published again. Seriously, his cherry picking of bad studies in order to intentionally misestimate the fatality rate of COVID 19 was bad enough that every single paper he has been on should be reevaluated. I know that I will never trust a single paper I see from him again. He has exposed himself as a fraud, openly, and in the public. I have even lost a good chunk of respect for his peers at Stanford for not banding together to denounce him more. He may be incredibly famous in the field, but if enough people work together they could have put a stop to his behavior sooner.

cnlrate 5y ago
The whole comment sounds like an admonition of a party member directed at a group of East German scientists to condemn a politically unsound one. Science has always worked by allowing diverging opinions, not vague accusations of "bad conduct" (the modern version of counterrevolutionary activities) and behavior. Meanwhile, Sweden and Finland aren't doing worse than many ideologically sound countries.
- epistasis 5y ago
  Edit: after a bit more thought, I would like to point out that my critique was explicitly not at all like East German accusations of secret bad politics. Im critiquing specific bad science done in the open. You call these vague and political, but do not support your accusations at all. In fact, if there are "East German" type allegations anywhere in this thread, they seem to be coming from your comment, as I am not critiquing him politically at all, but your entire comment about mine is making up politics that I supposedly believe in. Oh please, it's about his bad science. If he was doing bad science in the service of politics, as you suggest, that might make it seem worse, but it's no worse. The scientific crime is the cherry picking to deceive. Any halfway honest person familiar with the studies could tell that he was doing really bad science. Why? I still don't know why he did that. But since you seem to understand the politics, maybe you could explain.
- watwut 5y ago

shadowgovt 5y 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 5y 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...