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The problem being that scientific dissidents are always attacked with “the science is settled”, “trust the science”, “conspiracy theorist”, etc. See: ongoing s

by vGPU 3y ago

The problem being that scientific dissidents are always attacked with “the science is settled”, “trust the science”, “conspiracy theorist”, etc. See: ongoing statin controversy. Pretty much every drug related to diabetes. The discovery of the Benadryl-dementia link. Etc. The science is never settled. That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving.

Loquebantur 3y ago
If you were right, scientific knowledge would be inexistent and scientific opinion meaningless. To come to an agreement among experts just like among anyone else one has to adhere to some obvious(?) rules. Everybody having their own opinion without sound arguments validated by others leads to a useless cacophony.
- b59831 3y ago
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- vGPU 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
akira2501 3y ago
The problem is that "scientific dissident" is a meaningless term. You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist. If you already believe you know everything, then there's no need to engage in the process of experimentation, recording, and ultimately discovery. As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." "The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. It's an inappropriate idea from an inappropriate place with inappropriate ends.
- __loam 3y ago
  I think there's a pretty big difference between "this is what our knowledge of medicine and most experts in the field are telling us to do now and it's the best answer we have so we're going to do it until the consensus in the medical community changes" and "the science is settled". Nobody was trying to manipulate the "will of the citizens". Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    > Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had Um, no. Wrong. The Great Barrington Declaration was not put out by a bunch of "random morons." Yet Francis Collins said it needed a quick and devastating takedown. Someone with scientific integrity would have said your first quote, not that.
    - __loam 3y ago
      When I say "Everyone" what I mean is, the vast majority of the scientific community in both those fields. Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        Ah, "the vast majority" other than the ones at the top? And by the "fringe idea" you mean the one that the virus was a lab leak? That fringe idea?
        freshpots 3y ago
        You sidestepped their point: "Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine." Also, many prominent and credible scientists did support the lab leak hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
- tbalsam 3y ago
  Dissidence != Appropriate scientific skepticism. I believe appropriate skepticism is part of being a skilled scientist, being a dissident is part of being a noisy scientist. These two do not always correlate with each other. That said, standing up when it is right is a good thing. But the above is similar to reasoning that I hear from a more anarchic political view, and I do not generally agree with that way of handling issues or doing science.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." The lived experience of a recent Nobel prize winner is illustrative here. > In April 1982, Shechtman spotted an odd atomic arrangement through his electron microscope at Johns Hopkins University: A crystal of aluminum and manganese arranged with pentagonal symmetry. It was thought to be impossible — five sides do not a perfectly repeatable structure make. The laws of nature held that the atoms in a solid could be arranged in an amorphous, blob-like pattern, or organized with symmetrical periodicity into crystals. Shechtman saw something that fit neither category. https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accused-quasi-science-wins-nobel-quasicrystal-discovery/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus... You would think a scientist holding physical proof from an electron microscope that atoms can arrange themselves in a way that had not been previously recognized would be able to share the discovery without being targeted by the "experts". > He told his colleagues what he’d seen and they laughed him off, he said in an interview earlier this year. He was eventually asked to leave his research group for “bringing disgrace” to its members, he told the Ha’aretz in April. Two years later, he finally published his findings, yet the skepticism remained — and it remained bitter, as the AFP explains it. The famous American chemist Linus Pauling once declared at a conference: “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists”. https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accused-quasi-science-wins-nobel-quasicrystal-discovery/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus... Nope. He was attacked by world famous scientific "experts" including a double Nobel laureate and fired from his job, despite presenting proof that what he was reporting was real.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    And the beauty of science is that despite all that human drama and our inability to live up to our best standards, the _is_ a fact of the matter that eventually people will recognize, given enough time and false starts. You can forget a scentific knowledge and somebody in the future may stumble in the same thing. The same can't be said of other human activities
    - hnfong 3y ago
      Do you have any proof of what you said? The GP has given evidence of some instances where people who claim to be scientists obstruct the investigation of truth. You merely gave an assertion. Appeal to emotion. Isn't there a possibility that we are much more ignorant than we thought, the scientific process much worse than you'd thought, and the instances in which we "eventually" realized the truth are just the tip of an iceberg, of which those cases merely reflect survivorship bias, and that there are many more cases in which the truth never came to light? You have to be an extreme optimist to look at the history of science to claim that there is a "beauty" in the persecution of those who seek truth, only because eventually in a couple of cases, the truth was eventually discovered. Perhaps there is a beauty eventually, but are you seriously going to say to those people who have lost their reputation and job that it's "beautiful" that the system is doing that to them, because maybe in a couple decades they would be vindicated assuming they aren't already forgotten? This attitude is really sick, and honestly, a bit psychopathic.
- msla 3y ago
  > "The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. Especially those citizens who follow sheep-like behind a Media Personality who happens to believe that vaccines will make you a magnetic zombie from beyond the stars and give all your chakras autism of the turbo-cancer.
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    Who are you referring to?
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      Probably this "doctor": https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/doc-who-thinks-vaccinated-people-are-magnetic-is-in-big-trouble-with-med-board/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/doc-who-thinks-vacci...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist. No. There are still so, so many things left that humanity doesn't even have an idea about what exists... submarine life is probably the largest of the uncharted territories. Or simple QA - repeating and reproducing the discoveries of others to uncover missing data, incomplete documentation or unthought-of implicit dependencies (e.g. barometric pressure, effects of gravity or magnetic field). For all of that, you don't need to be a "dissident" in whatever meaning of the word.
  - basilgohar 3y ago
    There are plenty of people and established organizations, experts, and scientists that will assert, with full confidence, a "complete" explanation for something in nature and decry further examination. This is part of the arrogance of the academic class that assumes they know everything there is to know about something. I categorically disagree that you do not need to have both some humility in your own understanding and some rejection of the status quo of current understanding (the word dissident was used here, I feel this captures the idea) to have the curiosity to pursue study that others reject. Pure science exploration is continuously challenged by experts and administrators holding the purse strings in the pursuit of something more marketable, profitable, or easily reproducible (think something like iterative changes to drugs to be different enough to patent but similar enough to have the same effects and use the same processes of manufacture).
systemvoltage 3y ago
[flagged]
wyager 3y ago
> That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving. I think the point is actually to get a high degree of epistemic rigor, and when you see science "evolving", it's actually because the epistemic rigor in that field wasn't very good in the first place. Physics hasn't really "evolved" very much in the way medical "science" has. It's developed, but it's never needed to totally contradict itself. QM and SR are refinements on classical mechanics, not rebuttals.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Because much of medical science is based on assumptions about how the unknown works. You can test gravity using [almost] any method you want and nobody will care. Start testing medical assumptions and pesky things like “ethics committees“ and “police” will show up rather quickly.
civilized 3y ago
Such generalizations are too easy. Plenty of science is very settled. Germ theory, accuracy of Newtonian mechanics at low velocities...
kragen 3y ago
not always; this seems to be a new phenomenon in the last three years
ramraj07 3y ago
What’s the statin controversy. I mean I know what it is, but do you have reliable citations?
- rawrgrr 3y ago
  I'm not an expert by any means, but here's the gist of my understanding of the statin controversy from reading Metabolical: - There's two types of LDL cholesterol that are measured together in a standard fasting lipid profile: type A LDL and type B LDL - Type A LDL makes up 80% of LDL and is increased by dietary fat consumption - Type A LDL is not predictive of heart disease nor does it drive the accumulation of plaque in the arteries - Type A LDL is lowered by statins - Type B LDL makes up 20% of LDL and is predictive of heart attacks - Type B LDL is not lowered by statins - Taking statins comes with a bunch of side effects - Selling statins has been a lucrative business Citations at https://robertlustig.com/metabolical/metabolical-references-chapter-2/ https://robertlustig.com/metabolical/metabolical-references-... for pages 34 through 39
fuckyah 3y ago
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by vGPU 3y ago

Loquebantur 3y ago

If you were right, scientific knowledge would be inexistent and scientific opinion meaningless. To come to an agreement among experts just like among anyone else one has to adhere to some obvious(?) rules. Everybody having their own opinion without sound arguments validated by others leads to a useless cacophony.

b59831 3y ago
[dead]
vGPU 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

akira2501 3y ago

The problem is that "scientific dissident" is a meaningless term. You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist. If you already believe you know everything, then there's no need to engage in the process of experimentation, recording, and ultimately discovery. As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." "The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. It's an inappropriate idea from an inappropriate place with inappropriate ends.

__loam 3y ago
I think there's a pretty big difference between "this is what our knowledge of medicine and most experts in the field are telling us to do now and it's the best answer we have so we're going to do it until the consensus in the medical community changes" and "the science is settled". Nobody was trying to manipulate the "will of the citizens". Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had Um, no. Wrong. The Great Barrington Declaration was not put out by a bunch of "random morons." Yet Francis Collins said it needed a quick and devastating takedown. Someone with scientific integrity would have said your first quote, not that.
  - __loam 3y ago
    When I say "Everyone" what I mean is, the vast majority of the scientific community in both those fields. Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      Ah, "the vast majority" other than the ones at the top? And by the "fringe idea" you mean the one that the virus was a lab leak? That fringe idea?
      - freshpots 3y ago
        You sidestepped their point: "Fringe ideas like this idea that we could have reached herd immunity in 3 months would have killed literally millions of people that didn't have to die. Especially true considering how quickly we were able to develop a vaccine." Also, many prominent and credible scientists did support the lab leak hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
tbalsam 3y ago
Dissidence != Appropriate scientific skepticism. I believe appropriate skepticism is part of being a skilled scientist, being a dissident is part of being a noisy scientist. These two do not always correlate with each other. That said, standing up when it is right is a good thing. But the above is similar to reasoning that I hear from a more anarchic political view, and I do not generally agree with that way of handling issues or doing science.
GeekyBear 3y ago
> As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." The lived experience of a recent Nobel prize winner is illustrative here. > In April 1982, Shechtman spotted an odd atomic arrangement through his electron microscope at Johns Hopkins University: A crystal of aluminum and manganese arranged with pentagonal symmetry. It was thought to be impossible — five sides do not a perfectly repeatable structure make. The laws of nature held that the atoms in a solid could be arranged in an amorphous, blob-like pattern, or organized with symmetrical periodicity into crystals. Shechtman saw something that fit neither category. https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accused-quasi-science-wins-nobel-quasicrystal-discovery/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus... You would think a scientist holding physical proof from an electron microscope that atoms can arrange themselves in a way that had not been previously recognized would be able to share the discovery without being targeted by the "experts". > He told his colleagues what he’d seen and they laughed him off, he said in an interview earlier this year. He was eventually asked to leave his research group for “bringing disgrace” to its members, he told the Ha’aretz in April. Two years later, he finally published his findings, yet the skepticism remained — and it remained bitter, as the AFP explains it. The famous American chemist Linus Pauling once declared at a conference: “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists”. https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accused-quasi-science-wins-nobel-quasicrystal-discovery/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus... Nope. He was attacked by world famous scientific "experts" including a double Nobel laureate and fired from his job, despite presenting proof that what he was reporting was real.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  And the beauty of science is that despite all that human drama and our inability to live up to our best standards, the _is_ a fact of the matter that eventually people will recognize, given enough time and false starts. You can forget a scentific knowledge and somebody in the future may stumble in the same thing. The same can't be said of other human activities
  - hnfong 3y ago
    Do you have any proof of what you said? The GP has given evidence of some instances where people who claim to be scientists obstruct the investigation of truth. You merely gave an assertion. Appeal to emotion. Isn't there a possibility that we are much more ignorant than we thought, the scientific process much worse than you'd thought, and the instances in which we "eventually" realized the truth are just the tip of an iceberg, of which those cases merely reflect survivorship bias, and that there are many more cases in which the truth never came to light? You have to be an extreme optimist to look at the history of science to claim that there is a "beauty" in the persecution of those who seek truth, only because eventually in a couple of cases, the truth was eventually discovered. Perhaps there is a beauty eventually, but are you seriously going to say to those people who have lost their reputation and job that it's "beautiful" that the system is doing that to them, because maybe in a couple decades they would be vindicated assuming they aren't already forgotten? This attitude is really sick, and honestly, a bit psychopathic.
msla 3y ago
> "The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. Especially those citizens who follow sheep-like behind a Media Personality who happens to believe that vaccines will make you a magnetic zombie from beyond the stars and give all your chakras autism of the turbo-cancer.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Who are you referring to?
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Probably this "doctor": https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/doc-who-thinks-vaccinated-people-are-magnetic-is-in-big-trouble-with-med-board/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/doc-who-thinks-vacci...
mschuster91 3y ago
> You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist. No. There are still so, so many things left that humanity doesn't even have an idea about what exists... submarine life is probably the largest of the uncharted territories. Or simple QA - repeating and reproducing the discoveries of others to uncover missing data, incomplete documentation or unthought-of implicit dependencies (e.g. barometric pressure, effects of gravity or magnetic field). For all of that, you don't need to be a "dissident" in whatever meaning of the word.
- basilgohar 3y ago
  There are plenty of people and established organizations, experts, and scientists that will assert, with full confidence, a "complete" explanation for something in nature and decry further examination. This is part of the arrogance of the academic class that assumes they know everything there is to know about something. I categorically disagree that you do not need to have both some humility in your own understanding and some rejection of the status quo of current understanding (the word dissident was used here, I feel this captures the idea) to have the curiosity to pursue study that others reject. Pure science exploration is continuously challenged by experts and administrators holding the purse strings in the pursuit of something more marketable, profitable, or easily reproducible (think something like iterative changes to drugs to be different enough to patent but similar enough to have the same effects and use the same processes of manufacture).

systemvoltage 3y ago

[flagged]

wyager 3y ago

> That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving. I think the point is actually to get a high degree of epistemic rigor, and when you see science "evolving", it's actually because the epistemic rigor in that field wasn't very good in the first place. Physics hasn't really "evolved" very much in the way medical "science" has. It's developed, but it's never needed to totally contradict itself. QM and SR are refinements on classical mechanics, not rebuttals.

vGPU 3y ago
Because much of medical science is based on assumptions about how the unknown works. You can test gravity using [almost] any method you want and nobody will care. Start testing medical assumptions and pesky things like “ethics committees“ and “police” will show up rather quickly.

civilized 3y ago

Such generalizations are too easy. Plenty of science is very settled. Germ theory, accuracy of Newtonian mechanics at low velocities...

kragen 3y ago

not always; this seems to be a new phenomenon in the last three years

ramraj07 3y ago

What’s the statin controversy. I mean I know what it is, but do you have reliable citations?

rawrgrr 3y ago
I'm not an expert by any means, but here's the gist of my understanding of the statin controversy from reading Metabolical: - There's two types of LDL cholesterol that are measured together in a standard fasting lipid profile: type A LDL and type B LDL - Type A LDL makes up 80% of LDL and is increased by dietary fat consumption - Type A LDL is not predictive of heart disease nor does it drive the accumulation of plaque in the arteries - Type A LDL is lowered by statins - Type B LDL makes up 20% of LDL and is predictive of heart attacks - Type B LDL is not lowered by statins - Taking statins comes with a bunch of side effects - Selling statins has been a lucrative business Citations at https://robertlustig.com/metabolical/metabolical-references-chapter-2/ https://robertlustig.com/metabolical/metabolical-references-... for pages 34 through 39

fuckyah 3y ago

[dead]