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The site has a pro-science bias. Lots of its articles argue based on scientific principles that positions being advertised as a "scientific consensus" aren't re

The site has a pro-science bias. Lots of its articles argue based on scientific principles that positions being advertised as a "scientific consensus" aren't reached using the scientific method. Look at this article from the front page for an example: https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-review/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-revi... It reports on some claims (pre-print) that changing the name and title on a paper between a nobody and a Nobel Prize winner radically changes the likelihood of paper acceptance, i.e. scientific journals are relying mostly on reputation and not paper quality in their peer review process. If true that's not scientific and can lead to "consensus" that just reflects the opinions of a tiny handful of people through inertia. Here's an article by an anonymous academic criticizing a group of scientists who were engaging in political lobbying: https://dailysceptic.org/archive/when-did-scientists-turn-into-lobbyists/ https://dailysceptic.org/archive/when-did-scientists-turn-in... In general, consider how much COVID science was advertised as a consensus right up until the moment it inverted or was proven false. The lab leak was a disproven conspiracy theory right up until the Biden administration admitted it could be true and should be investigated. Vaccine mandates were required to stop the spread, then it was admitted vaccines didn't stop transmission. In the UK, Omicron had the same IFR as Delta and refusal to lock down over Christmas would create 4000 deaths a day, except that it didn't. The DS started as a blog for people who scratched the surface of these claims and went looking for the papers. When found they were invariably either missing or pseudo-scientific so there was a need for people to exchange notes and demonstrate their arguments for why this wasn't really science. It's important that such sites exist.

henearkr 4y ago
If they attack positions that are widely recognized as scientific consensuses, then they clearly are NOT pro-science. I'd say further, the clearest sign that somebody or some organisation is not listening to science, is that they are actively questioning scientific consensuses.
- origin_path 4y ago
  "If they attack positions that are widely recognized as scientific consensuses, then they clearly are NOT pro-science." This is the authoritarian pseudo-science that has been corrupting actual scientific progress for some time now. You are wrong for three reasons: 1. There's no such thing as a scientific consensus because science is a method, not a set of people, but a method can't have a consensus about something. 2. None of the positions they attack are actually a consensus anyway even if we replace the word "scientific" with "academics/scientists", and they like to prove it from time to time by pointing to scientists or entire groups of scientists stating that they disagree with those positions (see other comment). 3. Their writers provide data backed and scientific [counter-]arguments for their positions. There's also lots of articles there sounding the alarm about corruption of scientific institutions. Like this recent one [1] about bias in the peer review process. Here's another where they decry ideological bias in Nature [2]. They pretty regularly cover cases where scientific institutions are clearly acting in unscientific ways. [1] https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-review/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-revi... [2] https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/02/the-ideological-capture-of-nature-and-why-it-matters/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/02/the-ideological-capture-...
  - henearkr 4y ago
    A/ "Scientific consensus" means that the specialists of the subject overwhelmingly agree, and moreover they give a high statistical confidence in their conclusion (because, yes, they also quantify certainty/uncertainty). You seem to think that science is way more than what it is. Science is just knowledge + logic. The presence of logic gives a highly structured architecture to it, true, but it is guided by logic so it all has a reason to be. B/ I would add: very nice for them to play the Knights of the Lost Cause with minor theories, but they seem to ignore the adage "choose your fights". Which is most important, highlight a very unlikely small possibility that AGW does not exist, or help people understand the known mechanisms of it and organize themselves to counter it? Yeah rhetorical much.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      Experts in drilling oil wells agree with 95% certainty that oil wells are beneficial and we should have more of them. There's a consensus of specialists, so you have to accept this is true and adopt their position, right? "[consensus means] the specialists of the subject overwhelmingly agree ... Science is just knowledge + logic" So is science what specialists say it is, or is it just knowledge+logic? If the latter then what specialists say doesn't matter, because anyone can obtain knowledge and apply logic.
n4r9 4y ago
Sorry but I don't buy it. The website has a clear agenda focusing on right-wing talking points and being selective or misrepresentative of the actual science. For example, if anyone searched "Ivermectin" without any prior knowledge and read Will Jones' four articles, they would think that the research is overwhelmingly that it is effective, when in fact the opposite is true [0,1] . Similarly, anyone searching for "climate change" would think that scientists all over the world are speaking out in denial of there being any climate urgency, when again that's not the case [2]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9215332/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9215332/ [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y [2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774/...
- origin_path 4y ago
  There are plenty of websites that focus on left-wing talking points that selectively misrepresent actual science. Do you want to ban those too? If so then public health agencies like the NIH and CDC will be the first to lose their bank accounts, because they've repeatedly outright lied about scientific issues (masks, herd immunity, etc) and then even admitted doing so in public. It would be amusing to have a government department get de-platformed for spreading left wing anti-science misinformation, wouldn't it? Or maybe not that amusing actually. Re: climate. Scientists are in fact speaking out against the ever more unhinged rhetoric around climate. Here's Zeke Hausfather, a well known climatologist - who bizarrely and very problematically given this story is a climate research lead at Stripe - saying that even he is now being called a "climate denier": https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1533875297220587520 https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1533875297220587520 That's a guy who's very much done his part to stoke those sorts of claims! Yet he now argues that "Doomerism is a disease, and a self-fulfilling prophesy"! Go outside the field and you can find lots of scientists and people with scientific training who disagree that there's much urgency at all, here's just one example: https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-06272215121.pdf https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-0... The point is, actual science is a methodology, not a set of people in a set of institutions. The Daily Sceptic has consistently defended this view against people like henearkr above, who is literally arguing that being pro-science means blindly agreeing with whatever someone (him) has declared is the "scientific consensus". It's the opposite of science to believe this. It's pseudo-scientific authoritarianism of the sort that enabled Lysenko and worse.

henearkr 4y ago

If they attack positions that are widely recognized as scientific consensuses, then they clearly are NOT pro-science. I'd say further, the clearest sign that somebody or some organisation is not listening to science, is that they are actively questioning scientific consensuses.

origin_path 4y ago
"If they attack positions that are widely recognized as scientific consensuses, then they clearly are NOT pro-science." This is the authoritarian pseudo-science that has been corrupting actual scientific progress for some time now. You are wrong for three reasons: 1. There's no such thing as a scientific consensus because science is a method, not a set of people, but a method can't have a consensus about something. 2. None of the positions they attack are actually a consensus anyway even if we replace the word "scientific" with "academics/scientists", and they like to prove it from time to time by pointing to scientists or entire groups of scientists stating that they disagree with those positions (see other comment). 3. Their writers provide data backed and scientific [counter-]arguments for their positions. There's also lots of articles there sounding the alarm about corruption of scientific institutions. Like this recent one [1] about bias in the peer review process. Here's another where they decry ideological bias in Nature [2]. They pretty regularly cover cases where scientific institutions are clearly acting in unscientific ways. [1] https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-review/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/status-bias-in-peer-revi... [2] https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/02/the-ideological-capture-of-nature-and-why-it-matters/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/02/the-ideological-capture-...
- henearkr 4y ago
  A/ "Scientific consensus" means that the specialists of the subject overwhelmingly agree, and moreover they give a high statistical confidence in their conclusion (because, yes, they also quantify certainty/uncertainty). You seem to think that science is way more than what it is. Science is just knowledge + logic. The presence of logic gives a highly structured architecture to it, true, but it is guided by logic so it all has a reason to be. B/ I would add: very nice for them to play the Knights of the Lost Cause with minor theories, but they seem to ignore the adage "choose your fights". Which is most important, highlight a very unlikely small possibility that AGW does not exist, or help people understand the known mechanisms of it and organize themselves to counter it? Yeah rhetorical much.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Experts in drilling oil wells agree with 95% certainty that oil wells are beneficial and we should have more of them. There's a consensus of specialists, so you have to accept this is true and adopt their position, right? "[consensus means] the specialists of the subject overwhelmingly agree ... Science is just knowledge + logic" So is science what specialists say it is, or is it just knowledge+logic? If the latter then what specialists say doesn't matter, because anyone can obtain knowledge and apply logic.

n4r9 4y ago

Sorry but I don't buy it. The website has a clear agenda focusing on right-wing talking points and being selective or misrepresentative of the actual science. For example, if anyone searched "Ivermectin" without any prior knowledge and read Will Jones' four articles, they would think that the research is overwhelmingly that it is effective, when in fact the opposite is true [0,1] . Similarly, anyone searching for "climate change" would think that scientists all over the world are speaking out in denial of there being any climate urgency, when again that's not the case [2]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9215332/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9215332/ [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y [2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774/...

origin_path 4y ago
There are plenty of websites that focus on left-wing talking points that selectively misrepresent actual science. Do you want to ban those too? If so then public health agencies like the NIH and CDC will be the first to lose their bank accounts, because they've repeatedly outright lied about scientific issues (masks, herd immunity, etc) and then even admitted doing so in public. It would be amusing to have a government department get de-platformed for spreading left wing anti-science misinformation, wouldn't it? Or maybe not that amusing actually. Re: climate. Scientists are in fact speaking out against the ever more unhinged rhetoric around climate. Here's Zeke Hausfather, a well known climatologist - who bizarrely and very problematically given this story is a climate research lead at Stripe - saying that even he is now being called a "climate denier": https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1533875297220587520 https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1533875297220587520 That's a guy who's very much done his part to stoke those sorts of claims! Yet he now argues that "Doomerism is a disease, and a self-fulfilling prophesy"! Go outside the field and you can find lots of scientists and people with scientific training who disagree that there's much urgency at all, here's just one example: https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-06272215121.pdf https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WCD-version-0... The point is, actual science is a methodology, not a set of people in a set of institutions. The Daily Sceptic has consistently defended this view against people like henearkr above, who is literally arguing that being pro-science means blindly agreeing with whatever someone (him) has declared is the "scientific consensus". It's the opposite of science to believe this. It's pseudo-scientific authoritarianism of the sort that enabled Lysenko and worse.