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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, th

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
        AlbertCory 3y ago
        No, they sidestepped the main point about integrity. You don't get to tar your opposition with the actions of a few nutcases. The "many prominent and credible scientists [who] did support the lab leak hypothesis" faced merciless censoring & blacklisting for it.
        freshpots 3y ago
        The fringe ideas about herd immunity and the Great Barrington Declaration go hand in hand. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-public-health-groups-experts-blast-herd-immunity-strategy-backed/ https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-publi... The Great Barrington Declaration was indeed the actions of a few nutcases and was not supported by science. Furthermore, many signatories were venturing way out of their lane/expertise along with, likely, a majority that were not even real/certainly not remotely close to being an expert: "While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration, this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings". More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner". An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt. Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#Signatories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#S...
- GeekyBear 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. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take. In the pandemic, those in charge were asserting that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) and were shutting down domain experts who asserted that Covid was a virus that was fully airborne (like the measles). > Aerosol researchers started warning that "the world should face the reality" of airborne transmission in April 2020. Then in June, some claimed that it was "the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19". In July, 239 scientists signed an open letter appealing to the medical community and governing bodies to recognize the potential risk of airborne transmission. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/04/who-coronavirus-airborne/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/04/who-corona... Because they were only willing to accept a theory that was incorrect and ignored domain experts, those in charge were pushing mitigations that could never be effective against a virus you caught by breathing. No amount of hand washing, wiping down surfaces, putting up sneeze guards, or staying six feet apart can possibly protect you from breathing in a virus that floats in the air. This was the biggest failure of the pandemic, and it took two years for the truth to start being begrudgingly accepted. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-covid-the-battle-to-accept-airborne-transmission https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...
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).

__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
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        No, they sidestepped the main point about integrity. You don't get to tar your opposition with the actions of a few nutcases. The "many prominent and credible scientists [who] did support the lab leak hypothesis" faced merciless censoring & blacklisting for it.
        freshpots 3y ago
        The fringe ideas about herd immunity and the Great Barrington Declaration go hand in hand. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-public-health-groups-experts-blast-herd-immunity-strategy-backed/ https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-publi... The Great Barrington Declaration was indeed the actions of a few nutcases and was not supported by science. Furthermore, many signatories were venturing way out of their lane/expertise along with, likely, a majority that were not even real/certainly not remotely close to being an expert: "While the authors' website claims that over 14,000 scientists, 40,000 medical practitioners, and more than 800,000 members of the public signed the declaration, this list—which anyone could sign online and which required merely clicking a checkbox to claim the status of "scientist"—contains some evidently-fake names, including: "Mr Banana Rama", "Harold Shipman", and "Prof Cominic Dummings". More than 100 psychotherapists, numerous homeopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other non-relevant people were found to be signatories, including a performer of Khoomei—a Mongolian style of overtone singing—described as a "therapeutic sound practitioner". An article in The Independent reported that the false signatures put claims about the breadth of support in doubt. Bhattacharya responded by saying that the authors "did not have the resources to audit each signature," and that people had "abused our trust" by adding fake names." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#Signatories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#S...
GeekyBear 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. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take. In the pandemic, those in charge were asserting that Covid was a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) and were shutting down domain experts who asserted that Covid was a virus that was fully airborne (like the measles). > Aerosol researchers started warning that "the world should face the reality" of airborne transmission in April 2020. Then in June, some claimed that it was "the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19". In July, 239 scientists signed an open letter appealing to the medical community and governing bodies to recognize the potential risk of airborne transmission. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/04/who-coronavirus-airborne/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/04/who-corona... Because they were only willing to accept a theory that was incorrect and ignored domain experts, those in charge were pushing mitigations that could never be effective against a virus you caught by breathing. No amount of hand washing, wiping down surfaces, putting up sneeze guards, or staying six feet apart can possibly protect you from breathing in a virus that floats in the air. This was the biggest failure of the pandemic, and it took two years for the truth to start being begrudgingly accepted. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-covid-the-battle-to-accept-airborne-transmission https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...

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).