6 ms·

I'm fully bracing for downvotes, but I really think that having professional immunologists/scientists/etc. interacting directly with Twitter masses off of fresh

• KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
  Everything you just wrote applies equally well to traditional mass media.
• bertil 5y ago
  > there's zero accountability. If this entire thread ends up being wrong -- as so many of these Twitter hot takes have been proven to be wrong from last year -- no one cares. It is true in many cases, but I feel like anyone who has contributed _as an expert in epidemiology_ has a good track record on correcting their statements. Did I miss anything worrisome?
  • dvt 5y ago
    > feel like anyone who has contributed _as an expert in epidemiology_ has a good track record on correcting their statements I think this feeling would be misguided: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/ -- retractions have been basically non-existent. On the scientist or the journalist side.
    • bertil 5y ago
      The only reference to a forecast in that article is a "chair of the department of medical ethics", not an epidemiologist, on a television program, not a tweet that they can comment.
    • threeseed 5y ago
      The primary author seems to have a lot of incorrect positions though: "Ioannidis estimated that deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 could potentially be as low as 10,000—or they could approach levels not seen since the flu pandemic of 1918" "writing to President Trump of his concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the efficacy of lockdowns" And just like with the Y2K bug one of the issues with takes like this is that it ignores all of the work that people did to prevent it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there were no vaccines, lockdowns or similar health measures maybe the predictions would have been accurate. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ioannidis-affair-a-tale-of-major-scientific-overreaction/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ioannidis-aff...
  • sbuttgereit 5y ago
    This assumes that a correction or retraction will necessarily spread with the same dynamics of the original statement. The distribution network, and the motivations of other actors spreading the information, is more important the person making the original statement. In this case, much of Twitter is the appeal to emotional responses, not rational ones. And as a medium for information conveyance is just terrible (16 tweets for something like this is evidence of that fact). Given that, I expect that any real value to the message here will be completely lost, as would that of any correction or retraction, because those amplifying the message will be doing so on the basis of their own prior sentiments on response to the diseases. All considered I feel the point of the original comment.
    • bertil 5y ago
      On twitter, the correction should have the roughly same audience as the original — unless you stop following the author. People who amplified the original still share that amplification. My point still stand: I have not seen an epidemiologist write something that proved false without a clarification. Non-specialist write uninformed things but it’s not really new.
  • orra 5y ago
    Eh, Indy SAGE (of which the author is a member) can be quite cranky. Just because the UK Government are terrible and SAGE advise the UK Government doesn't intrinsically make Indy SAGE any good. Specifically, Indy SAGE are eternal doom-mongers. Most of what they say is completely out of proportion in this vaccines era of COVID. They also scream “close the borders” _all_ _the_ _damn_ _time_. This is (a) generally pointless when COVID is everywhere, and moreover the UK is doing worse than many countries. Also, (b), it helps perpetuate the UK's dangerous anti migrant rhetoric. Just yesterday people drowned in the English Channel as a result of the UK's hostility to refugees, and a bunch of xenophobic politicians feigned horror.
    • thenewnormal 5y ago
      Refugees? Is France that bad now?
  • disabled 5y ago
    There are scammer epidemiologists. Dr. Eric Fiegl-Ding is one of them who also has a Twitter profile. A good write up on him is here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-alarmist-eric-feigl-ding-looks-pretty-good-right-now https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-alarmist-eric-feig...
    • nishs 5y ago
      For anyone wondering, Wikipedia says: Feigl-Ding holds doctorates in both epidemiology and nutrition, with his professional experience in nutritional epidemiology and epidemiology of chronic disease. Since this professional experience and research work are not in infectious disease epidemiology, the subfield most relevant to COVID-19, Feigl-Ding has been criticized for offering viral social media and other media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic. --- I think readers should form their own opinion on whether to label him a "scammer epidemiologist".
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  That's a tough one. I had a similar reaction: this is science, not tabloid, why are we mixing the two? On the other hand, Twitter is a weird-ass mechanism that can disseminate all sorts of information instantly. On the third hand, information is not knowledge, they are two very different things: Knowledge is power, Information seems to cause chaos. I'd prefer we stick to the research paper format for stuff like this where there is a distinct space for results, and a distinct space for conclusions. Let's make knowledge out of the information first.
• Iolaum 5y ago
  On the other hand, professional immunologists/scientists/etc on twitter have posted stuff on Twitter that governments wanted to suppress or just didn't care enough to act on. For example look The Seattle Flu Study Story at https://stratechery.com/2020/zero-trust-information/ https://stratechery.com/2020/zero-trust-information/
  • littlestymaar 5y ago
    Yes but in this case the poster is commenting on a public statement from the South African government so we're typically not in the situation you're talking about.
• makomk 5y ago
  This pretty much concurs with the current BBC reporting, just with more graphs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418127 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418127 It's honestly better than I'd expect from any of the usual American publications these days as well.
  • keketi 5y ago
    ...and the UK just banned all flights from South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59424269 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59424269
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ithkuil 5y ago
      TIL Swaziland got renamed Eswatini in 2018
• threeseed 5y ago
  I think the history of COVID disagrees with this. If the scientist is completely wrong then the impact is that governments and the public took precautions that were unnecessary. But most of those impacts e.g. banning visitors from hot-spots, stronger health measures e.g. mask-wearing come with limited downsides and potentially huge upsides i.e. saving lives. So it seems like that scientists should do more to engage with the public and communicate any potential threats as clearly and early as possible.
  • AndrewBissell 5y ago
    "limited downsides" https://news.yahoo.com/remote-learning-led-to-catastrophic-learning-loss-new-study-finds-143532040.html https://news.yahoo.com/remote-learning-led-to-catastrophic-l... https://www.wfp.org/stories/hunger-pandemic-food-security-report-confirms-wfps-worst-fears https://www.wfp.org/stories/hunger-pandemic-food-security-re... https://gazette.com/business/nearly-40-of-u-s-small-businesses-shuttered-in-pandemic/article_b0e0fcfc-ced6-11eb-a8b3-f37eb6b09e61.html https://gazette.com/business/nearly-40-of-u-s-small-business... https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substance-use/ https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-imp...
    • threeseed 5y ago
      That is what happens when you don't act early. You end up with aggressive, last-resort measures like extended lockdowns. Hence my point that there is minimal downside to being overly cautious when you first hear about new variants.
      • AndrewBissell 5y ago
        I call this the "No True Lockdown" argument. If they fail to indefinitely prevent significant outbreaks (and in nearly every case they have), well, it just means they weren't implemented soon enough. Even if they drag on for weeks and months with zero cases, only to have an outbreak at the slightest loosening of restrictions. I guess the idea is that if the entire world did this at once the virus would disappear? Completely unworkable, and almost surely false, given the existence of animal reservoirs. Your entire framing of these policy choices as inevitable and the only option is baseless. Australia and New Zealand used to be held up as the shining lights of "just act fast enough and you can avoid the need for any sustained restrictions" and now we are seeing just how well kicking the can in that way actually works, and the lengths that must be gone to keep kicking it.
• the8472 5y ago
  > This isn't a big deal when breaking who the Kardashians are dating, but it's very dangerous when talking about public health policy. https://twitter.com/ungeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/ungeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969 Also remember, it's not airborne and sanitizing surfaces is all it takes.
  • Pyramus 5y ago
    I'm not sure I understand - that was the official position at the time, not a 'hot take' on Twitter. The problem with experts getting it wrong is experts getting it wrong, not the unfiltered fire hose that is Twitter. Edit: To clarify this is not a judgement on experts getting things wrong. Experts can't know everything.
• stefan_ 5y ago
  Is it? What's the danger? Now that B.1.1.529 is out there, what changes for you? The entire western world already pretends Covid is over. Like, there is no call to action here. No one is looking to deceive you into buying an ape for the good of the arts.
  • jazzyjackson 5y ago
    sorry off topic, but what in the world is your last idiom there referring to? is there something i don’t know about art grants and the underground primate market? (while i’m asking, why is everything in the future so heavy?)
    • camjw 5y ago
      It's a reference to Bored Ape Yacht Club a popular - at least with Crypto people - series of NFTs. If you use Twitter and follow any Crypto people/VCs you might have seen them as profile pictures. One of these sold for $200k. It's a JPEG :)
      • jazzyjackson 5y ago
        * face palm * yes ofc I am surrounded by bored apes but never would have connected it to being a patron of the arts, hah!
    • Someone 5y ago
      Probably https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/ https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/ (more info at https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/bayc-bored-ape-yacht-club-nft-interview-1250461/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/bayc-bored...)
• boringg 5y ago
  Tough call here. If it ramps up the pressure to stop this before it spreads to quickly thats a win - the risk is if it isn't as dangerous and the new rules cause backlash amongst the fatigue. Also putting that information out into twitter will get to the right people and the wrong people (i.e. people who can understand whats she's saying and people who aren't) and then the information gets used in multiple different ways. Yes hot takes are risky.
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  I think you’ll find it’s a popular opion, but not one you’ll find espoused much on Twitter. I like to think you and people like me are the “silent majority”. While it’s fascinating to see this stuff out in Public, it’s the same kind of fascination I had when Trump started diplomacy via Twitter, or when I saw my neighbours have a shouted domestic argument on their front lawn…
• basisword 5y ago
  I’m not sure why people are posting Twitter threads but this is headline news, at least in the UK, and that news doesn’t seem to stem from this thread. The UK has also added several southern African customers to the travel red list again and they aren’t doing that late in the evening based on a random Twitter thread.
• coffeefirst 5y ago
  You’re not wrong. On the one hand it’s great to have a public forum for science, on the other I’ve learned I can’t vet it at all, so I should wait until they get farther along before reacting at all. After all, Twitter has predicted 45 of the last 2 consequential variants. As an individual that’s fine. As a society, we’ve got you and me who’ve learned to hold back, friends and alarmists who react to every signal to their own detriment and risk drowning out the real message, and we’ve got disillusioned trolls who cherry-pick the noise to “prove” scientists aren’t trustworthy. I don’t know if it’s possible to have the open conversation while cooling off the side effects.
• disabled 5y ago
  A good read on this is “Contrarian Doctors: The Pandemic is Over, Again”. See: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pandemic-is-over-again/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pandemic-is-over-again/ I knew that the pandemic was far from over with in the US even with the mass vaccination campaign being declared mostly a success this summer. On a worldwide scale, given the rates plus the raw numbers in locales plus mobility within borders along with people crossing borders...it simply did not add up. Plus, Americans are a very polarized group of people. (I say this as an American citizen living abroad who is also culturally American and has lived there the vast majority of her life.). Some counties in the United States had 25-30% vaccination rates at best right before the fall season. (I have not recently checked.) But, I do recall reading that the US created a model (which of course is frequently being updated) for coronavirus spike protein mutations that would predict when the virus was statistically likely to evolve in such a way. I think it was a DARPA funded program or something like that. So, it’s not like this new “big news” came out of nowhere. But, what is going on in the ascribed South African province in the above linked Tweet is unlikely to just be random coincidence. First, it is South Africa’s most populated province at around 15 million people. Second, it’s nearly summer in South Africa and it’s been hot there. Overall, we need people to investigate and for people to stop transmitting things that are not covered well and balanced, making many of us susceptible to confirmation bias. But, stopping virus transmission altogether should have been our goal worldwide. Very few countries have succeeded. Yes, the WHO failed but so did the vast majority of the world’s countries. See: Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/12/covid-pandemic-was-preventable-says-who-commissioned-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/12/covid-pandemic...
• _Wintermute 5y ago
  This is more for other scientists, science-twitter is quite a big thing and often how scientists communicate new results, pre-prints, job-postings etc. It's just sad that the media and lay-people are ruining one of the only positives twitter provides.
• lvs 5y ago
  Agree, but I would widen this critique quite far into Twitter and social media in general. The motivation to promulgate information, factual or otherwise, on social media is attention-seeking, not truth-seeking. The method is sticky because it rewards attention-seeking with the desired attention, thereby optimizing on the kind of information, factual or not, that gains attention. However, had the link been one of the many news articles on this topic rather than a tweetbarf, I think this comment would not be at the top, and we'd be talking about the virus instead.
• DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
  I think twitter hot takes are fine. That's what twitter is for. It's just a discussion, a way to test ideas. The problem is people considering twitter comments as facts and basing their medical decisions off of them.
• ohiovr 5y ago
  If lies ran, and truth walks, twitter has supersonic jets.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• sammyo 5y ago
  Deeply agree with your sentiment, yet, information yearns to be free? No not quite the right catchphrase. As a society we need mechanisms developed to rapidly peer review at a kind of instant level, "quality report", "new untrusted", "rehash of wacko". Some indication. Sometimes some twitter threads that are authentic do this. The disinformation threads badly need stronger vetting, and rapid discrediting or deletion.
• thenewnormal 5y ago
  Could not agree more. I also strongly disagree with the use of highly emotive words like "horrific" mutations. Exactly how are they horrific, given how little anyone knows about this variant? In my opinion, it's incredibly irresponsible public fearmongering. FWIW my trust in academia, and specifically medical, will never return.