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Comment by m348e912 | Hacker News Reader

"Trust the science" has been a often drummed mantra the past several years but it's important to consider science is subject to bias, group think, influence, and sometimes corruption. (although the latter doesn't seem to apply here)

I applaud the researchers who have spoke out against the consensus at their own professional risk, it's a shame they have to take on such burden.

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The fact that researchers can and will speak out against consensus is exactly why I do “trust science.” I don’t trust consensus theories to be accurate at every instant in time, particularly in areas that have received more limited scrutiny (or where experiments are expensive and time consuming), but I generally do believe that it’s the very best process the human race has ever devised for arriving at truth.

Precisely, but saying “trust the science” just reinforces the status quo.

The very core of science is the idea that a theory is correct because it can stand up to extreme scrutiny.

When I did my graduate degree that idea was drilled into us. It’s your job as a scientist to try and tear apart what other scientists say.

If they can defend their conclusions under such questioning then that advanced the science. If they can't, then it's not a very good conclusion.

>> The fact that researchers can and will speak out against consensus is exactly why I do “trust science.”

This becomes more and more rare as the science becomes politicized, as we saw with COVID-19. Recommending against masks early, then justifying it post-hoc with the noble lie theory, over-promising what vaccines could do, lack of research into air filtration/sterilization, etc. Speaking out against these became a very difficult thing to do for someone in power with a lot to lose.

>Recommending against masks early ... lack of research into air filtration/sterilization, etc. Speaking out against these became a very difficult thing to do for someone in power with a lot to lose.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=air...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=mas...

The Scholar results do not support your claim.

Science is a method, where free-flowing ideas are subject to the cut and thrust of debate and review.

In general, where a set of ideas are protected, despite contrary, high-quality, evidence, this is the opposite of 'trusting the science'.

Few people who utter the phrase "trust the science" are scientists or care about science.

In that phrase, "the science" refers to the enforced narrative.

It means “I would rather trust the results of a scientific process than trust politicians.”

That's the thing, "the science" doesn't come from a scientific process, it comes from a political one.

That is the ideal, sure. In practice though, science is whatever scientists do.

And as seen here, sometimes scientists don't actually follow the scientific method, they fall trap to entrenched interests and other biases.

The people that tell you "trust the science" are not usually suggesting you get a PhD and study this yourself. They are actually suggesting you trust the scientists - which may or may not be good advice based on the field (e.g. trusting physicists, climate scientists, virologists: good; trusting dieticians, Alzheimer's researchers: possibly bad).

These are not science problems, these are human problems and the breadth of human endeavor is crippled by them. What is unique about science is that it acknowledges these problems and has mechanisms to address them.

I agree these are human problems, but in my experience science doesn't always acknowledge them; sometimes they're even worse because of a false mask of objectivity. In theory there should be mechanisms, yes, but in practice it's often very different.

For sure. The easiest person to fool is yourself. But again I think the primary thing science has going for it is that it at least acknowledges that humans have these problems. I’m not aware of any other field of human endeavour that does the same.

Well, that's the problem. There is no "science" as a separate entity from the humans who practice it. So, science can't acknowledge these problems and fix them, only people can. For that reason, I don't think it's useful to distinguish the abstract concept of Science from the actual human activity of science in this case.

> it's important to consider science is subject to bias, group think, influence, and sometimes corruption

You mean like religion?

Like any organized human endeavor

it's important to know what you're trusting. in, say, the thiomersal controversy, the hypothesis was that thiomersal causes autism. many studies were done. there's no link to autism. you either trust the science, or assert a conspiracy between dozens of independent groups to straight-up falsify data, and to what end? so yes, I trust the science on thiomersal. the same way I trust the science on covid vaccines.

you shouldn't "trust the science" when a single paper makes extraordinary claims and that haven't been replicated (e.g. the original vaccines-cause-autism paper itself, which seems to have been outright fraud.)

you also shouldn't trust the science beyond what the study can show. I trust that amyloid shows up in Alzheimer's brains, that neurofibrillary tangles disrupt neuronal function, that APP mutations lead to early-onset Alzheimer's. but beyond that, the science is only suggestive, not conclusive.

no experiment has proven the amyloid hypothesis, only pieces of the patchwork. smart, reasonable people can disagree on how those pieces fit together. all while trusting the same science.

Now take your logic and apply it to COVID-19.

Say specifically what your criticisms are. Such a generalized statement sounds like the beginning of a conspiracy rant.

Was there a lot of controversy among the scientific community ? The experts seemed to all say pretty much the same thing - masks indoors, social distance, get vaccinated, etc.

Indeed. What would happen to the career of a scientist who even tried to do something else?

(many careers were ended. In some cases, states threatened to pull licenses or even imprison researchers for even considering alternatives)

> states threatened to pull licenses or even imprison researchers for even considering alternatives

Where?

All sorts of places, including some unlikely ones. California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Texas all pulled licenses for refusing to uphold the narrative.

Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Arizona all threatened to do so, though I have been unable to determine whether any licenses were actually pulled.

California threatened criminal charges, though I have no evidence that any were ever actually filed.

I don't think any of that is true.

ok.

Not true. Some doctors tried to prescribe off label treatments and were prohibited, fired, etc (for example ivermectin or hydroxy

HCQ was an interesting thought in early March 2020 (my brother as an ICU doc was considering getting some for our parents). But the data was very quickly available that it was essentially worthless, and certainly nowhere near as useful as some other cheap, off patent medication such as steroids which was rapidly demonstrated to be highly effective at cutting mortality by the UK’s medical industrial complex.

People who acted in bad faith on data that was demonstrably bad were rightly defenestrated by the medical and scientific community. However many of those same people found themselves right at home in a new cheer squad of people who are more than happy to invest in beliefs over data. The mop up on the shitty evidence is drawing to a conclusion, with events such as the recent NEJM publishing of the ivermectin study. But stupid knows no bounds and the scientific method is going to be mopping up the damage from this one for a long time

People suggesting ivermectin ought to be interesting were not wrong. It could plausibly have had some effect, based on the biochemistry.

It just turned out not to work. I don't know of any evidence that trying it, when we had literally nothing else, did anybody any harm. All the harm came from people using it instead of, later, doing the things that did turn out to actually work. Probably a few people even cleared up a chronic worm infection they didn't know about.

What I did not see, and expected to see, was a study of relative infection rates in people already on ivermectin for an on-label use vs. people who were not. These came out pretty early vis a vis chloroquines, showing that people who had been taking that got COVID-19 just like anybody else. Maybe periodic ivermectin doses wasn't a thing...

Noone was going after researchers running proper studies with informed consent on e.g. ivermectin impact on Covid. However, doctors randomly prescribing stuff because they believe in it is quite different from a medical study - we have good historical reasons why we regulate medical experiments on humans, why we don't allow the medical and pharmaceutical industry to "just try it" unless certain conditions are met.

The same treatments that have been shown to offer little benefit, or even be detrimental?

Which doctors specifically are you referring to? There really wasn't any scientific controversy about the effectiveness of these drugs, it was mostly social media controversy by non-scientists.

You guys are still going on about ivermectin?

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