6 ms·

That's honestly news to me. I thought that "scientific consensus" is supported by peer-reviewed research, by definition. Can you elaborate?

virtuallynathan 5y ago
There’s quite a few medical practices which guidelines still recommend that do not show benefit in better or newer trials. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104821 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104821
- newswasboring 5y ago
  This paper says we should abandon practices when they are shown to not work. I don't think anyone will disagree with that. But the original post made it seem like there were practices which were adopted willy nilly. But this paper just shows the self correcting nature of science.
  - virtuallynathan 5y ago
    They had to write a paper saying that because it doesn’t happen. We are still doing these procedures today. Do the interventional cardiologists want to stop stenting people? Not really. The orthopedic surgeons still want to mess with your meniscus, etc.
    - newswasboring 5y ago
      I mean... This is the scientific framework. There was a mistake and the mechanism to fix it is to write more papers. I know it's not fixed yet, but that's the procedure. Do you believe this should never have happened? Then I guess we disagree on how powerful human intellect can be.
      - virtuallynathan 5y ago
        I think its fine for this to occur, and we should expect it, but how long should it take to reverse a bad practice? Is a decade or more acceptable?
        newswasboring 5y ago
        Of course not. Nobody is endorsing for that. The problem is these are hard problems to solve and forming a consensus is a hard problem in addition to it. If we keep flip flopping on every new data point we will have more misses than hits.
stickfigure 5y ago
Not the parent, but this study seems to be the best RCT of mask effectiveness so far (N=350,000): https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-masks-covid-19.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask... Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19. (surgical masks - different story) Yet I'm still surrounded by people - wearing predominantly cloth masks - that are full of outrage for the maskless. I've not heard any updates from the CDC on this issue.
- deusexml 5y ago
  This is not true. The study found a reduction in COVID-19 symptoms for the cloth mask group. They also found a reduction in seroprevalence for the cloth mask group, but that reduction wasn't statistically significant. "Statistically insignificant" is not the same as "not true". It is very hard to sufficiently power a seroprevalence study.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    This is a high-power study with N in the hundreds of thousands. "Statistically insignificant" is the same as "no reason to believe it is true".
- wepple 5y ago
  This is really interesting, and I’d like to read the paper - do you have a link? EDIT: here: https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-masking-covid-19-cluster-randomized-trial-bangladesh https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-... That summary is really hard to draw conclusions from; “However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.” And “ A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.” But also “ Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.”
  - DenisM 5y ago
yawboakye 5y ago
It's a sad sign of the times that "scientific consensus" doesn't sound crazy anymore. It was scientific consensus that the Catholic church based on to sentence Galileo. He was a lone dissenting voice. A bit of history for you. And this is besides the fact that true scientists have never sought consensus/peer-review. I'll stand by as you come up with non-modern, paper-churning, publish-or-perish examples of great scientists famous (or great) for work or theory that was accepted by means of consensus.
- nemo 5y ago
  There's no Catholic Church prosecuting those who defy the official scientific position today. Galileo was not a lone dissenting voice - he was a proponent of Copernicanism, which he overstated the accuracy of his evidence for, feuding with the Church about whether he was overstating, and getting himself in terrible trouble with the Church. Once Kepler's models were confirmed with observations after Galileo with better telescopes the Church accepted. Later Enlightenment thinkers built a martyr myth around Galileo, and today the nature of his conflict with the Church is an ahistorical picture painted by later hagiographies of Galileo This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic. Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.
  - ravar 5y ago
    Call it the church of Google(Faang?) if you will. They have real power over peoples lives and livelihoods. The church of Faang has a nice ring to it.

virtuallynathan 5y ago

There’s quite a few medical practices which guidelines still recommend that do not show benefit in better or newer trials. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104821 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104821

newswasboring 5y ago
This paper says we should abandon practices when they are shown to not work. I don't think anyone will disagree with that. But the original post made it seem like there were practices which were adopted willy nilly. But this paper just shows the self correcting nature of science.
- virtuallynathan 5y ago
  They had to write a paper saying that because it doesn’t happen. We are still doing these procedures today. Do the interventional cardiologists want to stop stenting people? Not really. The orthopedic surgeons still want to mess with your meniscus, etc.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    I mean... This is the scientific framework. There was a mistake and the mechanism to fix it is to write more papers. I know it's not fixed yet, but that's the procedure. Do you believe this should never have happened? Then I guess we disagree on how powerful human intellect can be.
    - virtuallynathan 5y ago
      I think its fine for this to occur, and we should expect it, but how long should it take to reverse a bad practice? Is a decade or more acceptable?
      - newswasboring 5y ago
        Of course not. Nobody is endorsing for that. The problem is these are hard problems to solve and forming a consensus is a hard problem in addition to it. If we keep flip flopping on every new data point we will have more misses than hits.

stickfigure 5y ago

Not the parent, but this study seems to be the best RCT of mask effectiveness so far (N=350,000): https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-masks-covid-19.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask... Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19. (surgical masks - different story) Yet I'm still surrounded by people - wearing predominantly cloth masks - that are full of outrage for the maskless. I've not heard any updates from the CDC on this issue.

deusexml 5y ago
This is not true. The study found a reduction in COVID-19 symptoms for the cloth mask group. They also found a reduction in seroprevalence for the cloth mask group, but that reduction wasn't statistically significant. "Statistically insignificant" is not the same as "not true". It is very hard to sufficiently power a seroprevalence study.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  This is a high-power study with N in the hundreds of thousands. "Statistically insignificant" is the same as "no reason to believe it is true".
wepple 5y ago
This is really interesting, and I’d like to read the paper - do you have a link? EDIT: here: https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-masking-covid-19-cluster-randomized-trial-bangladesh https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-... That summary is really hard to draw conclusions from; “However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.” And “ A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.” But also “ Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.”
- DenisM 5y ago

yawboakye 5y ago

It's a sad sign of the times that "scientific consensus" doesn't sound crazy anymore. It was scientific consensus that the Catholic church based on to sentence Galileo. He was a lone dissenting voice. A bit of history for you. And this is besides the fact that true scientists have never sought consensus/peer-review. I'll stand by as you come up with non-modern, paper-churning, publish-or-perish examples of great scientists famous (or great) for work or theory that was accepted by means of consensus.

nemo 5y ago
There's no Catholic Church prosecuting those who defy the official scientific position today. Galileo was not a lone dissenting voice - he was a proponent of Copernicanism, which he overstated the accuracy of his evidence for, feuding with the Church about whether he was overstating, and getting himself in terrible trouble with the Church. Once Kepler's models were confirmed with observations after Galileo with better telescopes the Church accepted. Later Enlightenment thinkers built a martyr myth around Galileo, and today the nature of his conflict with the Church is an ahistorical picture painted by later hagiographies of Galileo This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic. Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.
- ravar 5y ago
  Call it the church of Google(Faang?) if you will. They have real power over peoples lives and livelihoods. The church of Faang has a nice ring to it.