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.
> 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.
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”.
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.
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
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.
PS: Also, what does "The same can't be said of other human activities" mean?
Even the worst of superstitions and persecutions eventually stopped. The Romans eventually stopped feeding Christians to lions. The Catholic Church eventually realized burning witches wasn't a good idea. Germany renounced Nazism. Europe eventually realized colonialism was a bit sus. Americans eventually abolished slavery. Things do fix themselves, even outside the realm of science. Is there a similar "beauty" in those systems as well?
What is so special about the modern scientific process, in which you seem to admit it has flaws, just like religious and political systems, that allows it to realize the truth unlike the others?
I just meant that other human endeavours are less constrained by facts and thus we explore the space of possibilities in many many arbitrary ways. If you shun a cultural reformer it's unlikely that a thousands of years from now people will spontaneously recreate the same culture. Yes, there is some degree of convergent evolution even between cultural artefacts, but I think it's fair to say that science is more objective and can as a whole survive individuals not living up to it's standards
'Reality' isn't something that different people can easily agree on. Most people including professional scientist have little or no inclination to investigate their beliefs.
My point is that the scientific process is the thing that allows reality to be eventually probed despite the occasional stubbornness or irrationality of a particular individual or even a whole generation (or a whole century).
You seem to be throwing the baby with the bathwater and being too cynical if you conclude that reality just cannot be something people agree on just because there are (and always will be) particular areas of research where people are far from objectivity because led by other interests)
>You seem to be throwing the baby with the bathwater and being too cynical if you conclude
No, I didn't disagree with the scientific process per-se. But don't put too much faith in it either if there are things at stake for you. You have to personally investigate a subject if needed if the stakes are high enough. Medicine is one area I can think off. Don't always conclude that it is a generally upward trajectory of better understanding either. People often replace one set of superstition with another.
In the end it really depends on your personal background and experience. If you have never taken on the establishment or if you never observed an anomaly with established expert/scientific opinion you won't know the rot.
> You have to personally [..]. People often replace one set of superstition with another.
indeed you're right to be suspicious of others, when there are incentives that drive their behaviour in ways that are not necessarily aligned with your best interest (consciously or unconsciously).
but, the sad truth is that you yourself can be victim by all sorts of biases and not even personally investigating stuff will necessarily bring you closer to an objective assessment.
The best you can do is to be critical of your own biases, inasmuch as possible.
It cuts both way: the superstition of the conspiracy is also a thing that clouds the mind.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It only seemed like “the vast majority” because to go against the grain, no matter how right you are, would instantly label you an alt-right grandma killing asshole. You’d probably destroy your reputation and career standing up for what you think is right.
I mean hell, there are people right in this post calling dudes horrible grandma killers for stating rational, logical opinions against “everyone”.
I mean how right were they? There's hundreds if not thousands of cases of people "going against the grain" and then dying of Covid. People did die because someone wanted to spread some ignorant ideas about what they thought of the pandemic.
"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.
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."
And thanks for illustrating the main point: anyone who dared to question the "settled science" got a Twitter rage mob howling at them and hurling feces like a pack of monkeys. Including some "journalists."
The fact that you're using the word "deplorables" kind of gives away your views here. There's room for debate but going for herd immunity would have been utter insanity to be frank. We know how bad uncontrolled Covid would get from places like Italy early in the pandemic and it wasn't pretty. You're basically saying you'd be willing to accept millions more people in the United States dying of this disease so we can maybe get back to a functional economy in 3 months. And the deaths would increase as we ran out of things like ventilators and asthma medication that we're actually shown to be effective treatments. Your view is incredibly callous.
Wasn’t the point to try to protect the more vulnerable?
Realise that we solidly failed to do this with all our masks and measures.
I’m not at all convinced that by those who argue it was not possible to apply focused protection. We spent so much on unfocused protection. What if we took those resources — or even just a fraction of them — and redirected them to those at most need.
The point of masks was always to limit community spread, principally to prevent a situation where hospitals are so full you can't treat regular issues like car crash victims. In practice that means you do try to keep vulnerable people out of the hospital but it's not the main concern if you're goal is to prevent a really bad public health situation.
Masks and social distancing absolutely had an effect on the situation, and the main reason we had to do unfocused solutions as you call them is because people infected with Covid did not always have symptoms, and it was extremely contagious. If algae is exponentially covering a pond, it covers half the pond the day before it covers the whole pond. The exponential nature of infection is really hard to reason about and I think people like you really aren't understanding that at the time, with no vaccines, the only way to protect the most vulnerable was to reduce community spread. You also don't have a magic eight ball telling you who might get hospitalized. We had really fit people dying in two weeks. There was no way to tell who was and wasn't vulnerable.
ah, I see. You have a one-way view of political leanings. Got it. You're not only deplorable if you question "the science," you're deplorable if you use the word "deplorable."
also, skipping over the most egregious thing of all: censoring anyone who suggested lab-leak.
> "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.
"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.