Hacker News Reader

Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

>When you say you are no longer highly 'pro science' would you say that you would rather people take advice from scientists or from people who have a background of "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter".

I would prefer that the general public take advice from scientific researchers with a grain of salt, with an understanding that the system is far from perfect and much of what is published either contains methodological flaws that lead to false conclusions or cannot be reproduced at all.

I also think a little bit of common sense would go a long way.

View on HN

I too have worked in academia, and in partnership with them over 3 deacdes, so seen how the sausage is made. So I understand and recognise some of your points. Still we can and should be pro-science; but recognise that science in academia is extremely political, and increasingly bending to marketing pressures and industry influence.

A big problem, as I see it, is the unwillngness of academia to engage in debate with the public. Whilst academics nowadays are supported and encouraged to engage in "outreach"; the nature of that is almost always in broadcast mode.

In the age of social media, science needs to learn how to communicate, and engage with non-tenured people asking good, evidence based, questions. Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.

Trust is breaking down in society. Is there any wonder, when trust grows from interaction?

Couldn't agree more, man.

I think there are more places where this applies:

> Sure they get bombarded with abuse and crackpots, but that should not mean ignoring absolutely everybody that approaches them with reason and civility; as so often happens.

I think it is a really hard problem. Figuring it if someone is arguing in good faith is hard. And engaging with someone arguing from bad faith is really draining. Besides the difficulty, people worry that engaging with some people will draw even more responses, many of them being in bad faith. Certainly only responding partially often leads to "yeah you are responding to them, but what about X".

I think in the end, wading through all the abuse is just so painful that many people decide to ignore input. And doing anything that might cause more abuse to flood in is reflexively avoided, since that abuse actually hurts.

Solving this is going to require specialization. Because being able to wade through the abuse is not something everyone can do. It will also require proper incentives to actually do this, because the people who can handle the abuse aren't going to do so out of charity.

Isn't the simple solution to just not engage with comments on social media? Honestly, that's where the problem is aka trolls and partisan bots. Have face to face conversations between scientists and skilled interviewers, the scientist supplies the answers and the interviewer generates the questions and keeps the conversation moving along and interesting for the viewer. Publish the content on social media since that is really the only thing it is good for but don't read the comments. We have specialists in this area already, they're called journalists. All they need to do is make a phone call, set up the interview and record it.

That all sounds disturbingly like you kinda are okay with Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein spreading nonsense about how vaccines are killing people and how ivermectin is better than vaccination.

Joe Rogan doesn't spread anything. He interviews experts in the field and listens to what they have to say. Currently everyone is angry because he interviewed Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccines. You can read about Robert Malone's contributions here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Robert Malone's bio

"Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment."

Do you really think it is unreasonable to listen to what someone with this kind of a background has to say about mRNA vaccines?

Malone worked on that stuff almost 30 years ago, and hasn't been involved in any way, shape, or form with the vaccines that exist today. Moderna's platform has a decade of work behind it and he had nothing to do with it, and the studies that show that it's safe and effective have nothing to do with him, nor does he have any particular knowledge about them that a smart grad student in a lab wouldn't have.

So no, I don't think his random commentary is particularly relevant or reasonable to listen to, any more than Jaron Lanier's haterade @ the tech industry is relevant just because he was working on shitty VR in 1990. Some people are dinosaurs and just need to be ignored, it's not unusual for people to grow to hate the things that they worked on when they were young and get increasingly unhinged arguing against them.

I don't think Rogan should be censored, for sure, 100% and without any reservations - free speech should be absolute, I'm old-school in that respect. But I absolutely think anyone paying attention to this crap should be socially scorned as a dumbass, and TBH I can't get my chuff up too far over people trying to convince Spotify to boot Rogan over this, free markets are also sacrosanct and that's what this is (even if I also would vastly prefer that Spotify holds to a hardline free-speech ethos and leaves him up).

Joe Rogan is a both-sides-ist. He shows people who speak the truth, and people who speak lies, and then claims to be impartial because he showed both sides.

Imagine this in any other field. It is not exactly reasonable to separately bring both a Nazi and a non-Nazi and claim to be impartial. In that scenario, most likely the normal person would sound relatively ambivalent, while the Nazi would be extremely agitated and emphatic that urgent action must be taken.

Joe Rogan has recently talked about that - that he just interviews people who seem interesting https://www.instagram.com/tv/CZYQ_nDJi6G/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com