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Post by Ward on Apr 27, 2021 9:02:57 GMT -6
drbill Do you...think that ericn and matt@IAA are part of the "the mainstream media"? The need to frame this as Your Side vs My Side and constantly evoke boogeymen like "the media" is problematic, in my view. Why not just let the arguments and perspectives sink or swim on their own, without the need for all the extra rhetorical window dressing? The media has had quite the involvement in how various pieces of the covid puzzle have been framed since it started. With the latest CNN employee candidly admitting to steering narratives around covid for ratings and political agenda involving the election, how can we not see the media as a huge self-interest? It's pretty clear that a lot of cherry-picking has been done with information on covid by the media, so how can we trust what's been offered to us when it's all based on confirming the consumer's bias for ratings? Your last few posts have been some of the best public posts I have read in a while. Anywhere. Thank you. |
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 27, 2021 11:32:37 GMT -6
svart this is a bit of a non sequitur. You have formal training in EE, so this doesn't meet the situation I described. You didn't present these things as secret knowledge that "they" didn't want you to know. It wasn't based off of a fundamental misunderstanding. In none of those stories are you an outsider or a layman. The story you gave is of an innovative engineer finding a creative way to solve a problem that others didn't see. This is exactly what I said happens - when people do things that experts say won't work it comes from special insight or perspective. Not ignorance. You solved the problem through creativity, working with other experts in your field (you used a reference design), and when you solved the problem, you were able to demonstrate it. In other words, this is exactly how it is supposed to work and exactly the opposite of the cases we're talking about here. Also, it sounds like the people you were working with were just tenured. But that doesn't make them experts. An expert has comprehensive knowledge, and that gives them the ability to speak with authority from that knowledge. This is a really bad faith characterization, especially the last point. No one, not once, has suggested that education trumps inventiveness. But education is a force multiplier. Doing and breaking stuff is a kind of education. Sometimes when you say "that won't work" and they challenge you with "why not?" the answer is - because I've tried exactly that before, and it doesn't work. The opposite of innovation is not expertise. Expert is not a synonym of stodgy. Or even conservative. And innovative isn't synonymous with ignorant.
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Post by svart on Apr 27, 2021 12:02:20 GMT -6
svart this is a bit of a non sequitur. You have formal training in EE, so this doesn't meet the situation I described. You didn't present these things as secret knowledge that "they" didn't want you to know. It wasn't based off of a fundamental misunderstanding. In none of those stories are you an outsider or a layman. The story you gave is of an innovative engineer finding a creative way to solve a problem that others didn't see. This is exactly what I said happens - when people do things that experts say won't work it comes from special insight or perspective. Not ignorance. You solved the problem through creativity, working with other experts in your field (you used a reference design), and when you solved the problem, you were able to demonstrate it. In other words, this is exactly how it is supposed to work and exactly the opposite of the cases we're talking about here. Also, it sounds like the people you were working with were just tenured. But that doesn't make them experts. An expert has comprehensive knowledge, and that gives them the ability to speak with authority from that knowledge. This is a really bad faith characterization, especially the last point. No one, not once, has suggested that education trumps inventiveness. But education is a force multiplier. Doing and breaking stuff is a kind of education. Sometimes when you say "that won't work" and they challenge you with "why not?" the answer is - because I've tried exactly that before, and it doesn't work. The opposite of innovation is not expertise. Expert is not a synonym of stodgy. Or even conservative. And innovative isn't synonymous with ignorant. At the time of my story I had never even seen or understood a PLL before. I did some reading around the internet and just went with what I thought might work. My point was long winded but I was faced with folks who had 30+ years of experience telling me that my lack of understanding was also the source of my imminent failure. The thing worked because I didn't know that it wasn't supposed to work that way and my lack of limitation found a novel way to proceed. So I do believe it's relevant. Any old Joe can read around the internet and read a few datasheets and gain the knowledge I had at the time. Ok, so maybe I've been interpreting your posts incorrectly but it seems that in every reply it boils down to "experts are the only ones who can create solutions and we shouldn't listen to anyone without the funding or academic connections to get published" which is untrue. I'm not saying that education isn't helpful, but I am saying that suggesting that it's a required basis for whether a person or their opinion is deemed respectable is false. I'm also not suggesting that Joe is doing virology in his basement and can solve the covid issue on his own either. I am saying that suggestions and theories are always helpful even if to help someone else figure out why they won't work. Sometimes breaking things apart is how we figure out how to make other things better. |
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Post by Tbone81 on Apr 27, 2021 12:32:08 GMT -6
I think a major problem with all this is that many “experts” aren’t really experts. And some people who aren’t “experts” really are.
Read into that what you will but it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference and media of all sorts (FB, YouTube, CNN, Fox News, etc etc) all compound that problem.
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 27, 2021 13:44:39 GMT -6
Any old Joe can’t read, understand, and apply datasheets. That’s kind of the point.
Yeah, no. I don’t believe this at all. However research and papers are an invaluable tool in presenting and evaluating these things. And not just one paper but many. This type of project is immensely complex.
Quite frankly if you’re going to look for breakthroughs in physics the best place to look is physics journals. Just like the best place to look for breakthroughs in music is with musicians and engineers. Doesn’t mean they can’t come from somewhere else, but that’s where the action is.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2021 15:21:57 GMT -6
Very interesting and civil conversation, reminds me of the early days of the net.
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Post by ericn on Apr 28, 2021 8:15:25 GMT -6
The problem with the media is since every cable news network hired MD’s as contributors they go to there paid guys rather than seeking out actual experts. I have yet to see anybody put a lab dir or any Pathologist on when it talking about testing. ER, Virologist etc have no idea about the nuts and bolts of testing! Seen or heard from a pharmacologist ? Hell no!
You also notice terrible editing of copy, a lot of this is very, very complicated and dropping what seams like an unimportant qualifier or comma can completely change the meaning.
Maybe I just need one of those non plant based beers.
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 28, 2021 12:24:37 GMT -6
I thought this random dude had a perfect take on it. I have no idea who this person is, never listened to him before. He may be a crank. But his words below to me are spot on. zdoggmd.com/vanden-bossche/ |
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Post by seawell on Apr 28, 2021 13:39:06 GMT -6
Vanden Bossche is far from the only scientific/medical voice that has raised concerns about these vaccines. I disagree that the internet has given an equivalent voice to anyone...it may for about 15 minutes before they get shadow banned or completely de-platformed. There have been some very compelling presentations made that were gone before I could even share them with others that were interested in the subject. They aren't all quacks and if the same scrutiny that has been applied to them were applied to Tedros(also not a medical doctor), Fauci and Gates(who invited this guy anyway 😂) then you wouldn't have to dig deep to find some serious concerns and potential conflicts of interest. Science ain't what it used to be unfortunately.
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 28, 2021 13:55:02 GMT -6
This falls back into the same false equivalence. Just like not all research is of the same quality (it isn't) and not all experts are of the same quality (they're not) not all concerns are of the same validity. There are people with serious reservations about the earth being round. They are likely to be disproportionately represented. Perusing the internet would likely give you an inflated view of just how many people truly believe the earth is flat. This is no different. Controversy gives a disproportionate voice to vocal minority opinions. Especially when those controversial hot takes drive clicks and revenue on otherwise completely uninteresting topics. Case in point - the show ancient aliens on History channel.  We need to guard against our own perception of what is compelling. I am not an expert in medicine or vaccines or anything. I readily admit I could easily be fooled or confused by someone in these fields. Something could be very compelling to me, a layman with very little understanding of the finer things about the immune system and human biological chemistry, that would be completely ludicrous and stupid to a person who actually knows what they're talking about. And then there's all the shades of gray. Popular vote is not the arbiter of truth. What is compelling to the average person isn't necessarily a good indication at all of the quality of the information being presented. To be clear, there's very little "science" being discussed here. Science is about making a hypothesis, testing it, and analyzing your results. It isn't making an opinion or a post on a blog, or a video, or a website with a lot of technical jargon. There IS a lot of science being done on the COVID pandemic, vaccines, treatment - again, in varying degrees of quality. But very little is being referenced by people as evidence against taking vaccines. As far as I know the only scientific evidence presented on the subject in this thread was the actual studies from the vaccine trials I linked. And again there what they did was - hypothesis: vaccines will cause lower disease rates - experiment of randomized placebo controlled in multiple phases, multiple sites, tens of thousands of people - and results confirm hypothesis. If there is a paper that shows the opposite, that's something to give a very big platform to. If there is any evidence, ANY, of Vanden Bossche's idea being seen before, measured before, described before, that's something. But there isn't -- right now it is a person saying you need to stop vaccinating because of something I say will happen, take my word for it, and oh by the way buy my product. There's a trend here. The other thing that is incredibly suspect to me is that all too often where people fall on these issues is highly correlated with political leanings. I make no secret of the fact that I am extremely conservative. I find myself confused often by people suggesting that my views on COVID are a litmus test for my political alignment. It's absolute crazy pants. Red-blue shouldn't predict whether you think these vaccines are good or not. |
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Post by ehrenebbage on Apr 28, 2021 15:00:13 GMT -6
It's not a bad idea to question the motives of big pharma. In this particular instance I see their incentives being somewhat aligned with the public interest as was the case with polio and measles. Unless we're all rubes in an unbelievably complex global scam, Covid is real and it kills. I've had Pfizer #1 and #2 with no immediate side effects, other than posting on forums more than usual.
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Post by svart on Apr 28, 2021 15:02:13 GMT -6
Popular vote is not the arbiter of truth. What is compelling to the average person isn't necessarily a good indication at all of the quality of the information being presented. Facts are nothing more than observations agreed upon by multiple people, aka popular vote. History is full of "facts" that were once known to be true that are now known to be false based on new observations by different people. As people say, science changes based on new observations, so that means that facts cannot be absolute by definition and therefor "truth" is transient based on context. |
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 28, 2021 15:04:08 GMT -6
I didn’t say facts were the arbiter of truth either. Things are either true or they’re not. No postmodernism for me. Or empiricism / logical positivism for that matter.  |
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Post by ragan on Apr 28, 2021 15:25:07 GMT -6
There's also something else at play in a lot of this, which is that science is the de facto granter of credibility (since the 18th century anyway) and that has led to a lot of disingenuous claims to it. It's common that something which would be a perfectly valid ideological or philosophical view tries to put on science-y clothing to gain credibility, thus making itself invalid. There's nothing inherently invalid about saying, "I don't trust the government" or "I don't trust _____ experts" or whatever. People have ideologies and philosophies, it's part of being human*. But when someone says, "The science is flawed" or "there's lots of conflicting science" or whatever, if they're wrong about those claims and the reason they're sympathetic to those claims is ideological, there's some fundamentally invalid stuff going on. I wish we could just be comfortable saying, "I have an ideological/philosophical issue with ______" and not try to doll it up with science as a way of conferring legitimacy.
And if we are going to run around making scientific claims, well, then we have a duty to understand the science. And if we can't understand the science, we're left with arguments from authority (the vast majority of the discussion in this thread) and we have a duty to understand that too. Being honest about making arguments from authority means being honest about one's own motives for choosing which voices we grant legitimacy to. Too often we walk around with vague (but strongly held!) positions that are the result of arguments from authority where we never stopped to ask ourselves, "Has this media outlet/pundit/radio host/blogger earned my trust? Am I actually justified in absorbing these views as my own?" It's usually just a casual stream of headlines and posts which have been heavily-curated to keep our eyeballs glued (and thus keep us profitable to the platforms) that, over time, become seen as a set of obvious, common sense truths. It's a mess.
So I guess my point is, if you're going to attempt to make a scientific argument about something, you have a duty to either understand the science or understand why you've accepted the authority of the entities responsible for your position. And if what it really boils down to is that you're making an ideological/philosophical case, just be ok with that and don't try to stick a science-y veneer on it. It'll be more persuasive that way anyway because it's coming from a place of clarity and candor.
*granted, we live in a culture where vast fortunes are made by duping people into bad faith ideologies and philosophies, so the root of any given way of seeing the world could be totally fraught with disingenuousness, but that's totally subjective and is a separate issue from the science vs ideology distinction
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 28, 2021 15:50:27 GMT -6
Man ragan if could like... frame that I would.
The worst part of the past year is that there have been so many incorrect or bad-faith appeals to "the science" and "follow the science" and "party of science" that now it's like a joke, and you amplify the existing anti-intellectual sentiment that's been trending. If "science" is a liar sometimes who cares what the scientists say? Like the scene in Sunny -
No one wants to be like one of those stupid science bitches.
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Post by ragan on Apr 28, 2021 16:04:54 GMT -6
I love Always Sunny so much.  Now I've forgotten whatever it is we were talking about and I just want to go watch Charlie present his Bird Law case in court. |
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Post by svart on Apr 28, 2021 17:10:09 GMT -6
Man ragan if could like... frame that I would. The worst part of the past year is that there have been so many incorrect or bad-faith appeals to "the science" and "follow the science" and "party of science" that now it's like a joke, and you amplify the existing anti-intellectual sentiment that's been trending. If "science" is a liar sometimes who cares what the scientists say? Like the scene in Sunny - No one wants to be like one of those stupid science bitches. The problem is that we're conditioned to believe that "science" solves all problems and it's infallible because experts and those caring people in government all have our best interests at heart. Then you have covid arrive and suddenly millions of people need somewhere to find deliverance from the fear that came along with it. Fear for their lives and their loved ones. Fear for their jobs. Fear of pain and suffering. Fear of the unknown. They desired assurances and "trusted" media sources delivered 24/7 "expert" knowledge to assuage those fears. They paraded out "facts" that human nature gobbled up and put to work, easing that unknown. 2 weeks to flatten the curve. Wait, the science has changed. Everything we told you with sheer confidence was wrong, but trust us *this time*. We're right this time, we swear. Suddenly the trust is broken. The science isn't absolute. The worry has crept back. The experts don't know everything?? Who do we turn to? The politicians say they know best. Trust them. My favorite leader says the other political group is to blame! The other side isn't doing these things we've been asked to do! It can't possibly be that the virus is unstoppable. I can't allow myself to believe that or else I'll lose all hope! It has to be a simple solution. I need to believe it's a simple solution. I need the structure that doing these simple things brings because it takes my mind off of the possibility that this is unfixable. I'm part of the solution and I feel that I'm a better person than the other political group! I have hope! The science changed again? All those things I've been doing hasn't changed the outcome? But the scientists and the politicians said if I followed them, we'd be over this by now! The new politicians in office will fix things. Their science says things that make me feel hopeful. That's how you get folks that "follow" the science with an almost religious fervor. |
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 28, 2021 17:54:41 GMT -6
Sure, modernists are predisposed to believe that science and institutions can improve the world. And postmodernists are predisposed to reject the very idea of authority. One issue I have with your sarcasticquotes is that the problem isn't with science failing, it's largely with pop-media communication of science failing. You're mixing the two as if they're the same thing, but they're not. Even the way you're framing this shows the skewed narrative. "2 weeks to flatten the curve" has nothing to do with science. That's public policy my dude. Actual scientific papers are quite conservative in their claims. They have to be - they're focused in scope, and everything they say *should* be supported with a citation or data. What those same scientists say to the media, or how their papers may be presented for public consumption, or how politicians may frame policy or conclusions ostensibly based on those papers is completely another thing entirely. In this case you're blaming the signal for the distortion, when it's all in the amp. The truth is the actual science for this is pretty straightforward. This isn't the first pandemic the world has seen. It's not new for us, how this works is well understood. It's a disease with an observable reproductive rate. We can also observe the fatality rate two ways - by cases, and by seroprevalence and other population-level monitoring (poop, even) - to estimate how many people are likely to die. With those two numbers you basically have the whole picture. Reproductive rate sets the number of people who will ultimately get it absent a vaccine, and the fatality rate tells you how many will die. Well, back in March of last year actual scientists estimated the IFR of the disease by age cohort, and for the US they estimated it to be 0.6%. The R0 numbers indicate that it will ultimately infect ~65-80% of the population. The only way a pandemic for a novel virus in a naive population ends is when it runs out of hosts. The only part of the picture you don't have fixed in this is how long it will take to play out. This is actual science, along with refining those numbers, the medical trials and treatments, vaccine development, and so on. The problem is you take those numbers and you get big numbers. Even if we cut the IFR in half, 0.3%, and use the low end of the infection you get 330 million * 0.65 * 0.003 = 643,000 deaths. If you use a higher range you get 330 million * 0.8 * 0.006 = 1.58 million. There is no way around these numbers. A respiratory illness that is not quite deadly can't be snuffed out, so that was never an option. We knew this a long time ago. For example, this was published in Nature in March of 2020: All you can do is prolong the inevitable so that instead of that 65%-80% group may be comprised of people who are vaccinated versus people who actually get the disease. And prolong the inevitable so that hopefully that 0.6% IFR can be reduced through improvements in medical treatment. We accomplished both of these things. It is a remarkable achievement. The do-nothing scenario likely would have resulted in over a million deaths in the US in 2020. It's strange to say things like "unstoppable" or "changed the outcome." You can't change the virus, but you can change the number of times people contact other people. You can reduce the susceptible population. You can improve treatment. You can develop vaccines. All of those things happened, and it seems to me an objective truth that the outcome was changed. The problem isn't science. That's like saying the problem is knowledge, or information. The truth is in aggregate science and knowledge are more or less the same thing. As Quine said -- Unless we're going to argue for the futility of human action in a sort of fatalistic way, or argue against the value of knowledge, investigation, and communication of information, I really can't see how science has failed here. |
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Post by Ward on Apr 28, 2021 20:13:39 GMT -6
Holy trilobites, there are an awful lot of microagressions in the past couple of pages!
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 28, 2021 20:25:17 GMT -6
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Post by seawell on Apr 28, 2021 22:43:37 GMT -6
This falls back into the same false equivalence... I don't think it's false equivalence at all to compare the opinion of doctors to other doctors. My bigger point was that Dr. Bossche isn't the only one that has expressed concern so we shouldn't get too focused on him alone. I get it, he is a vet but he does have a Ph.D. in virology so it's not exactly apples to oranges. For what it's worth, I hope he's wrong! The point being that we(the public) can't know for sure because we don't currently have open and honest scientific debate amongst the experts. We have one main narrative and if you step outside of that it's not just good enough to challenge your opinion, your character has to be attacked as well. It's gross. We're not even at full FDA approval of the vaccines yet so I'd say we're still well within the timeframe to allow concerns to be heard. I agree we need to guard against our own perception of what is compelling. I would just like the opportunity to do that myself, not have it done for me. I wish things were allowed to play out and that the public could decide for ourselves who deserves our trust moving forward. I don't think fact checkers at Twitter or Facebook have the scientific chops to know whether or not a particular article is safe for me to read or share. Some interesting links for anyone interested in reading more into some of the concerns: www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-the-dangers-of-weak-vaccines/a-56339759www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/will-delaying-vaccine-doses-cause-a-coronavirus-escape-mutant--68424www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00036-0/fulltext |
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Post by matt@IAA on Apr 29, 2021 6:48:31 GMT -6
The false equivalence is that the opinion of one doctor, or even dozens of doctors, is the same worth as the opinion of any other doctor...or worse, of every other doctor... - simply because that person is also a doctor. There are absolute crazy nutjob doctors out there. There are doctors who are simply not very good. And everything in between there and true experts and amazingly excellent doctors. Like the old joke, what do you call the guy who graduates last in med school? Doctor. It's also a bit disingenuous to loop any concerns together. If out of a hundred doctors one says my concern is issue A, another says issue B, a third says issue C - that isn't three percent of with valid concerns. That's three separate concerns that are 99 to 1. You say there's no open and honest scientific discourse. But how can that be? There are thousands upon thousands of studies being done by millions of doctors, scientists, researchers all over the world. There are formal peer reviews being done there, and the papers are being published transparently in thousands of journals. This is how scientific discourse works. And then on top of that layer you've got millions and millions of people - laymen and non-research docs and other researchers - out there in the wide world making comments, reading papers, writing blog posts, making videos and podcasts. If you could name a thousand people that were shouted down, character attacked... it would still be the minority (and obviously still wrong). Something like 200,000 papers were published last year on COVID, like 5% of the total research output of the WORLD. That is astounding to me. This assumes that there hasn't been concerns heard, or the drugs being validated. But look, if you are a doctor with a concern about the drug, go to the FDA. Go to the people doing the research. Don't do the internet equivalent of standing on a streetcorner with a sign and a megaphone. We know about a handful of blood clot cases out of millions with the AstraZenica and J&J vaccines. These risks were then evaluated - openly and likely at great cost to credibility and public trust - and the conclusion was communicated. What reason do we have, truly, to mistrust what is going on? The FDA is still actively involved with these vaccines. The evaluation is ongoing. But the FDA approved these for use, didn't they? Do we trust them or not? When the FDA revoked emergency use authorization for Hydroxychloroquine people screamed at them to get out of the way. You can't win. I read all three of your links. The first two argue against taking only one dose and delaying the second. In other words, they argue for fully vaccinating people as quickly as possible. The third says that we may be unable to quell it completely through vaccination, so we need to get younger people on board with masks and social distancing and older people doing that and more. None are saying we don't need to vaccinate - if anything they're saying we need to go faster! The absolutely guaranteed, known, fastest way to generate variants is to let the virus infect more people. 100%. The task is to somehow show that vaccinations make it worse. |
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Post by svart on Apr 29, 2021 7:04:20 GMT -6
This falls back into the same false equivalence... I don't think it's false equivalence at all to compare the opinion of doctors to other doctors. My bigger point was that Dr. Bossche isn't the only one that has expressed concern so we shouldn't get too focused on him alone. I get it, he is a vet but he does have a Ph.D. in virology so it's not exactly apples to oranges. For what it's worth, I hope he's wrong! The point being that we(the public) can't know for sure because we don't currently have open and honest scientific debate amongst the experts. We have one main narrative and if you step outside of that it's not just good enough to challenge your opinion, your character has to be attacked as well. It's gross. We're not even at full FDA approval of the vaccines yet so I'd say we're still well within the timeframe to allow concerns to be heard. I agree we need to guard against our own perception of what is compelling. I would just like the opportunity to do that myself, not have it done for me. I wish things were allowed to play out and that the public could decide for ourselves who deserves our trust moving forward. I don't think fact checkers at Twitter or Facebook have the scientific chops to know whether or not a particular article is safe for me to read or share. Some interesting links for anyone interested in reading more into some of the concerns: www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-the-dangers-of-weak-vaccines/a-56339759www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/will-delaying-vaccine-doses-cause-a-coronavirus-escape-mutant--68424www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00036-0/fulltextNot to mention that due to nSARS-COV2 being an animal virus first.. You'd think an animal virologist would be thought of as a primary source, yet this person is being attacked for being an animal virologist. |
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Post by svart on Apr 29, 2021 7:32:57 GMT -6
It's also a bit disingenuous to loop any concerns together. If out of a hundred doctors one says my concern is issue A, another says issue B, a third says issue C - that isn't three percent of with valid concerns. That's three separate concerns that are 99 to 1. You say there's no open and honest scientific discourse. But how can that be? There are thousands upon thousands of studies being done by millions of doctors, scientists, researchers all over the world. There are formal peer reviews being done there, and the papers are being published transparently in thousands of journals. This is how scientific discourse works. And then on top of that layer you've got millions and millions of people - laymen and non-research docs and other researchers - out there in the wide world making comments, reading papers, writing blog posts, making videos and podcasts. If you could name a thousand people that were shouted down, character attacked... it would still be the minority (and obviously still wrong). Something like 200,000 papers were published last year on COVID, like 5% of the total research output of the WORLD. That is astounding to me. The absolutely guaranteed, known, fastest way to generate variants is to let the virus infect more people. 100%. The task is to somehow show that vaccinations make it worse. You say not to listen to outliers, but people get "second opinions" from multiple doctors all the time for that very reason. There's many cases/stories out in the world where people with generic symptoms go to multiple doctors and are given generic diagnosis. When they don't clear up they end up at another doctor who finds that the generic symptoms are from a disease unrelated to what was previously diagnosed. The outlier found the issue. Before you say it, I understand that the curve dictates that the average is the most likely to be correct, but to my earlier point, you can't find the curve without knowing the outlying information! That's why I keep saying that we MUST NOT IGNORE any data regardless of how far off base anyone might initially believe it to be. Anyway, 200K papers on covid. Ok, but most scientific papers are based on the research of others. Very few are new territory. Story time. I was part of a scientific paper about 10 years ago. A large group of hundreds of interested volunteers took part in validating the NWS/NOAA weather station network outside of government roles. We spent years siting the NWS stations and documenting each and every one. Thousands of them. Photographed, surveyed, described and recorded. Why? Because the NASA/NOAA/NWS raw data showed that certain stations were historically accurate while other's data were trending high and NWS/NOAA did not see fit to adjust for human encroachment and/or urban heat island effects. Their position was that "it would average out" when we contacted them. Our report found that 80% of all NWS surfacestations no longer met NWS sighting guidelines and their data was therefor invalid. Once we removed the worst offenders from the data, such as the Stevenson screens between two airport runways, the thermometers being blown on by air conditioning exhausts, the arrays that had been paved around when a parkinglot was built, etc., and used only rural data to avoid UHI biases, we found that the average contiguous USA temperatures had not risen in 100 years. In fact, we found a slight cooling had happened. In short we found that there was a 2 degree warm bias in the average US temperature assessment due to UHI effecting the data because NWS did not recalibrate the stations nor adjust the raw data. Many years later the paper was released, peer reviewed, and likewise not found to be wanting. It was submitted for publication and accepted by Nature. We also submitted it to NWS/NOAA for their usage to better their systems, calibration and adjustments. Nature was lobbied to deny publication by an AGW activist friendly with the editors. Nature turned down publication due to our having conflicting results with the "consensus". NWS/NOAA replied to our efforts by removing all raw data from public view. A lawsuit and FOIA request later, they returned the data in the form of "adjusted data product" and no longer offer the raw datasets to the public. Their data product homogenizes temperatures by regions, centered around the very urban sites we warned them about. We found out that internal NWS discussions were worried that 3rd parties would use the raw data to attack NWS/NOAA public positions on AGW. NWS/NOAA/NASA data is the basis for most AGW papers out in the world, yet they're using faulty datasets to come to their conclusions and they're knowingly producing it for others to use. That's why I don't believe that 200K papers has any significance whatsoever. If they're not groundbreaking research and the majority are basing their outcomes on data from others, then I can't help but to wonder about the quality of the base datasets because I know with personal experience that when a branch of science has political significance (just like AGW or covid) that the science is usually a casualty of war. |
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Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 29, 2021 9:17:40 GMT -6
It's also a bit disingenuous to loop any concerns together. If out of a hundred doctors one says my concern is issue A, another says issue B, a third says issue C - that isn't three percent of with valid concerns. That's three separate concerns that are 99 to 1. You say there's no open and honest scientific discourse. But how can that be? There are thousands upon thousands of studies being done by millions of doctors, scientists, researchers all over the world. There are formal peer reviews being done there, and the papers are being published transparently in thousands of journals. This is how scientific discourse works. And then on top of that layer you've got millions and millions of people - laymen and non-research docs and other researchers - out there in the wide world making comments, reading papers, writing blog posts, making videos and podcasts. If you could name a thousand people that were shouted down, character attacked... it would still be the minority (and obviously still wrong). Something like 200,000 papers were published last year on COVID, like 5% of the total research output of the WORLD. That is astounding to me. The absolutely guaranteed, known, fastest way to generate variants is to let the virus infect more people. 100%. The task is to somehow show that vaccinations make it worse. You say not to listen to outliers, but people get "second opinions" from multiple doctors all the time for that very reason. There's many cases/stories out in the world where people with generic symptoms go to multiple doctors and are given generic diagnosis. When they don't clear up they end up at another doctor who finds that the generic symptoms are from a disease unrelated to what was previously diagnosed. The outlier found the issue. Anyway, 200K papers on covid. Ok, but most scientific papers are based on the research of others. Very few are new territory. Story time. I was part of a scientific paper about 10 years ago. A large group of hundreds of interested volunteers took part in validating the NWS/NOAA weather station network outside of government roles. We spent years siting the NWS stations and documenting each and every one. Thousands of them. Photographed, surveyed, described and recorded. Why? Because the NASA/NOAA/NWS raw data showed that certain stations were historically accurate while other's data were trending high and NWS/NOAA did not see fit to adjust for human encroachment and/or urban heat island effects. Their position was that "it would average out" when we contacted them. Our report found that 80% of all NWS surfacestations no longer met NWS siting guidelines and their data was therefor invalid. Once we removed the worst offenders from the data, such as the Stevenson screens between two airport runways, the thermometers being blown on by air conditioning exhausts, the arrays that had been paved around when a parkinglot was built, etc., and used only rural data to avoid UHI biases, we found that the average contiguous USA temperatures had not risen in 100 years. In fact, we found a slight cooling had happened. In short we found that there was a 2 degree warm bias in the average US temperature assessment due to UHI effecting the data because NWS did not recalibrate the stations nor adjust the raw data. Many years later the paper was released, peer reviewed, and likewise not found to be wanting. It was submitted for publication and accepted by Nature. We also submitted it to NWS/NOAA for their usage to better their systems, calibration and adjustments. Nature was lobbied to deny publication by an AGW activist friendly with the editors. Nature turned down publication due to our having conflicting results with the "consensus". NWS/NOAA replied to our efforts by removing all raw data from public view. A lawsuit and FOIA request later, they returned the data in the form of "adjusted data product" and no longer offer the raw datasets to the public. Their data product homogenizes temperatures by regions, centered around the very urban sites we warned them about. We found out that internal NWS discussions were worried that 3rd parties would use the raw data to attack NWS/NOAA public positions on AGW. NWS/NOAA/NASA data is the basis for most AGW papers out in the world, yet they're using faulty datasets to come to their conclusions and they're knowingly producing it for others to use. That's why I don't believe that 200K papers has any significance whatsoever. If they're not groundbreaking research and the majority are basing their outcomes on data from others, then I can't help but to wonder about the quality of the base datasets because I know with personal experience that when a branch of science has political significance (just like AGW or covid) that the science is usually a casualty of war. Yes coming from a softer history background, there are so many things that have been ascertained from primary sources and archaeology that would not get cited as fact in the media, Wikipedia, or very mainstream journals despite overwhelming modern scholarly consensus when they were presented at conferences. They don’t like outlier data and conclusions in spite of better evidence. Nobody wants to hear “We do not know, it is unknown, we cannot know, and it is absurd to think what you do about X yet the evidence shows X was Y and thought Z.” Anything involving religions past and present, popular myth, nationalism, current academic goals, political ideologies, modern worldviews usually will get chewed out or buried despite hard evidence. They don’t want to believe it. |
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