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> The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety. See, that's my w

> The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety. See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community". If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?

epistasis 11mo ago
I guess if you think the very idea of science is invalid, the idea that people can study and learn a lot about a topic and discuss it using their knowledge, then perhaps your comment makes sense. Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"? If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.
- CWuestefeld 11mo ago
  Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"? That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
  - danaris 11mo ago
    Everyone has the right to question scientific findings. If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up. Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do. Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is. *: not "you" personally; the general "you"
    - CWuestefeld 11mo ago
      Yeah, I agree that sucks. If you go back to my first reply in the thread, I said: Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem. Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients. Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it". I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.
      - dekhn 11mo ago
        Wegener was technically a meteorologist but his PhD was in Astronomy and he had lots of training in physics. He (among others) noticed that the shapes of landmasses seemed to complement each other. He had a great deal of observational evidence. and he really wasn't this lone figure crusading for drift- that's partly because when we write narratives of science, people like to hear about lone rangers who overturn paradigms, when really, most scientific paradigms are overturned by a large number of people collecting evidence that supports the new theory. We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else. There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).
ryandrake 11mo ago
> See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community". > If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply? If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood. It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."
- CWuestefeld 11mo ago
  If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance. My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...

epistasis 11mo ago

I guess if you think the very idea of science is invalid, the idea that people can study and learn a lot about a topic and discuss it using their knowledge, then perhaps your comment makes sense. Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"? If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.

CWuestefeld 11mo ago
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"? That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
- danaris 11mo ago
  Everyone has the right to question scientific findings. If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up. Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do. Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is. *: not "you" personally; the general "you"
  - CWuestefeld 11mo ago
    Yeah, I agree that sucks. If you go back to my first reply in the thread, I said: Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem. Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients. Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it". I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.
    - dekhn 11mo ago
      Wegener was technically a meteorologist but his PhD was in Astronomy and he had lots of training in physics. He (among others) noticed that the shapes of landmasses seemed to complement each other. He had a great deal of observational evidence. and he really wasn't this lone figure crusading for drift- that's partly because when we write narratives of science, people like to hear about lone rangers who overturn paradigms, when really, most scientific paradigms are overturned by a large number of people collecting evidence that supports the new theory. We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else. There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).

ryandrake 11mo ago

> See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community". > If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply? If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood. It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."

CWuestefeld 11mo ago
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance. My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...