This is just mathematically false, as Pearl showed and won the Turing Award for forty years ago! The standard textbook is called *Causality*, by Pearl; i'm sure people have written intro explainers online.
What Pearl showed is that you can tell which causal models are true by checking for particular conditional dependences among the probabilities. Different claims about causality give different predictions about what joint probability distributions you will infer. In that sense you can in principle get causality from bayes.
And when there were reams of video publicly available on the topic at the time?
I think the difference is when NPR sends out "without evidence" they believe that relieves them of the need to actually confront, analyze, and make an argument about their viewpoint regarding the available evidence. Instead, they can smuggle in their conclusion while trying to make it seem the objective truth.
And "rational/scientific thinkers" fall for it regularly. This phenomenon where "smart" people are only smart on a relative scale in comparison to idiotic strawman characterizations (subconscious heuristic imaginations of reality, perceived as reality itself) of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists seems like one of the most under-reported and plausibly consequential things out there.
Saying someone "claimed something without evidence" is basically accusing them of showing greater-than-justified certainty, which can be true even if it later turns out their claim was accurate. (When it's not just a formal synonym for "lying".)
The implication there is certainly not "it may be true, but it's too early to tell, we need more careful consideration of the issue before we reach the final conclusion" but "it's definitely false, in fact, it's so obviously false that even seriously considering that it might be true makes you look kinda stupid". And when it turns out that it wasn't false of course it does wonders to the credibility.
If they were only talking about safety, maybe. But they are usually talking about effectiveness as well, and both were equally new for the new disease.
Well, as a general rule, we require more evidence to support forcing something on other people (vaccinator mandates, requiring vaccine passports, etc), than we do to support letting people do something to themselves (deciding to take a drug that you think is worthless).
Also, there should be a higher bar for "things you do to healthy people" (here, let's have 250 million Americans take this shot!) than for "things you do for sick people" (let's have 1 million sick people take this drug).
Does ivermectin cause 250 times as many bad side effects as the "vaccine"? How many more people will be getting the shot, compared to taking ivermectin? Have you even bothered to think about that?
Or did you just get your marching order "Pfizer good, ivermectin bad", salute, and follow them?
Yes, actually. And for older individuals with functional immune systems it's a standard very clearly met, especially since even if Ivermectin 'works' it likely doesn't work as well as vaccines do as an over-arching strategy. For younger individuals I haven't had time to review the data, and so make no comments.
Exactly. Although it's a slight variation (and even worse) because they are playing games with a binary definition of a word -- "evidence."
This article talks about scientific "evidence." But a legal definition is probably most appropriate for most phony "fact checks" claiming "no evidence." Any fact is "evidence" so long as it makes a conclusion somewhat more likely to be true. That includes circumstantial evidence, plausible presumptions, uncorroborated statements, anecdotes, etc. You can argue such evidence is weak or not persuasive to you, but that doesn't mean it isn't even "evidence" at all.
However, when confronted with a claim they don't like, "fact-checkers" treat the word "evidence" as if the words means "conclusive proof already established" and then proclaim the assertion debunked because: "no evidence." For checking facts they like, however, any second hand statement or assertion suddenly becomes "substantial evidence" of the good fact.
I'd say this scam is 15% stupidity and 85% bad faith, but the "evidence" for this allocation is open to interpretation.
I 100% agree with the sentiment here, but maybe we SSC/ACX people are weird in how we use "evidence?" I looked up what dictionary.com says:
* that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
* something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign:
Maybe some people think "evidence" means "proof?"
Similarly: In the last few years I've noticed headline writers using "refute" to mean "dispute," which makes me crazy. But some dictionaries say "refute" means "deny or contradict" - can I blame them?
If that's your position, you should be saying something much stronger when you want to express something like "No Evidence That COVID Vaccines Have Killed 45,000 People"
Some writers seem to be doing a thing lately where they try to avoid repeating a false/low-status/dubious claim when debunking it, but this leads to even less-clear headlines.
"COVID Vaccines' Effect on 45,000 People, Explained"
“Recent popular assertions about coronavirus vaccine safety, examined,” is the sort of headline I would click on, but there are people whose whole job is baiting clicks and they seem to eschew such phrasing, probably with good reason
In "There is no evidence", there's also a bit of a problem with this sneaky word "is". There can be evidence that exists, but has not been found, or has been found but was ~rejected, or has been found but was covered up, and so on and so forth. Of course, this inconvenient complexity of reality can easily be perceptually dismissed with "That's pedantic" or confused appeals to Russell's Teapot, but this is an illusion, it doesn't make the actual epistemic problem itself cease to exist.
Another word that people tend to have problems with is "the", as in "The evidence..." or "The facts....".
It doesn't for sure...but I suspect that is not how reality appears to those who say such things. Personally, I don't think these people are lying, I believe that they are describing reality as they truly see it. Consciousness (and culture, "reality", etc) is to a very large degree a controlled hallucination.
Of course they aren't consciously lying, by and large. Evolution bred us to compete for status first (which is in large part facilitated by sincere and overconfident pushing of our flawed notions), and to arrive at correct beliefs a distant second.
Evolution also bred us to consider our perception of reality to be synonymous with reality itself, and (most) cultures tend to fairly strictly enforce the maintenance of this illusion, at a sub-perceptual/instinctive level.
This might be the case of our perceptions of reality actually having been accurate enough for the purposes of living in the ancestral environment, where you knew everybody by name and (almost) all knowledge was common and orally transmitted.
I disagree, though, that it's exactly what more sophisticated cultures try to enforce. I'd say that they instead strive to create a sort of shared narrative, which is inculcated from the young age and through which reality is interpreted, subconsciously and unquestioningly.
Which hasn't been done of course, and is essentially impossible in most cases.....which is fine, I'm not criticizing that. Rather, it is the utterly brutal inaccuracy of the perception that I find interesting, and that hardly anyone including extremely intelligent and logical people seem immune from this bug. It even seems like there is a process in the mind that id designed to detect and reject discussions of such ideas....which is clearly crazy but I swear this is how people behave.
I don't think that works -- if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors, in good Bayesian fashion, then by definition, nothing counts as evidence until you actually know it. Facts that haven't been ascertained yet are part of the unknowns you're trying to discover, not data to help you discover them.
1. something which shows that something else exists or is true
2. a visible sign of something
3. material that is presented to a court of law to help find the truth about something
Let's say an incriminating piece of evidence exists at the crime scene (satisfying #1), but it is not discovered by investigators (due to incompetence or malice) - this would fail to satisfy #2 and #3, as well as "knowledge" in "if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors". So in this case, a Bayesian approach will produce a worse prediction that a super strict epistemic approach.
I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
The last sentence is just reinforcing the map vs. territory dichotomy here: knowledge vs. the thing it represents. "Evidence" is a relation of knowledge, not a quality of entities in reality. So things that exist, but haven't been discovered yet, remain part of the reality you're trying to use knowledge to represent, but haven't yet produced knowledge that can be used to improve your model of that reality.
> I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
Agree....I was looking at it from the perspective that "it exists (in physical reality) and shows something", *thus it is evidence* - however, many people will claim with complete sincerity that undiscovered evidence *is not evidence* (ie: "There **is** no evidence!!!"). I'm pretty sure we're on the same page but looking from different angles. My main point was that Bayesian reasoning (as I understand it) doesn't take unknown unknowns into account, or at least not substantially (I rarely hear this very real problem noted in discussions as Rationalists are eagerly forming script based conclusions).
But in science today, especially astrophysics, there is little caution in how things are phrased: "The unexpected radiation emanating from two black holes colliding". Black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, etc. are hypothetical constructs which attempt to explain the observed phenomena, but they are talked about as if there were no question about their existence. Actually there are other cosmologies that explain the observed phenomena, don't require any exotic physics, and are backed up by more than a century of laboratory experiments. But the Narrative is so ingrained that these alternates are considered "crackpot" and dealt with like Aunt Clara in the English Music Hall ditty "We never mention Aunt Clara, her picture is turned to the wall".
Related: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.
Then there is the Appeal to Authority:
From Wikipedia:
"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'
Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." - Carl Sagan
One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[22] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[23][24] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[25] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority,[26][27][24] despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23.[23][28] Even textbooks[23] with photos showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24[28] based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.[29]
There's *something* at the absolute center of the Crab Nebula (supernova remnant). It's flickering every 33 milliseconds, which is enough time for light to travel about 6000 miles, or comparable to the radius of the earth, which sets an upper bound on its size. (otherwise, the hot spot of light causing the flicker wouldn't be able to make it around the ball in time) However, that's if it's rotating at ~the speed of light, which... is a very implausible assumption. If you dial it down to some rotational speed that might actually exist, like 10% of lightspeed, that sets an upper bound of 600 miles across. The equations that capture how white dwarf matter works (which is in a low enough energy domain that known physics holds extremely accurately) rather clearly indicate that no white dwarf can be that small (ie, it's at the point where additional laws of physics start applying).
Also, whatever it is has a temperature of about 1.6 million kelvin (as inferrable via the spectra and a blackbody radiation calculator on the internet), very very far beyond even the toastiest of blue giant stars.
In addition, these sorts of rapidly flickering radiation sources have been found in the centers of some other supernova remnants (like the Vela supernova remnant), and also others have been found in binary orbits with other stars, allowing exact determination of their mass through good old Newton's laws of gravity. Which, again, is well past the limit that the white dwarf equations of state suggest is possible.
And when you put the mass and the radius bounds together (since there are some pulsars which flicker far faster than the crab, which, as previously stated, lets you upper-bound the radius)... For the fastest-rotating one (716 times per second), napkin math says that even if it was rotating at light speed it would have to be less than 260 miles across. ~2 solar masses in a 260-mile ball (which is probably a serious overestimate, since light-speed rotation isn't happening) is the sort of density that... lines up pretty well with estimates of what neutron star densities should be, what pop science says their properties are.
The only authority being relied on here are that the astronomers are accurately reporting the rotation rates, spectra, and orbital periods of these thingies, the rest of the math can be worked out by yourself with a high school physics textbook and a napkin.
I would like to distinguish pulsars and black holes from dark matter. I think the case for dark matter is way way way more solid than you think it is, but doubting dark isn't completely outside the realm of sanity the way the existence of pulsars and black holes is.
Like, for black holes, there's a star at the center of the galaxy that pulls a hairpin turn around *something* at 2% of lightspeed, and via ordinary high-school newtonian physics, that tells you that whatever the heck it is weighs about 4 million solar masses. And we've turned radio telescopes across earth on that thing and *taken a direct picture of the event horizon*.
Thank you for your detailed reply. In Plasma Cosmology the object at the center of galaxies is a plasmoid. Oscillating resonant circuits explain very well the behavior of pulsars. Birkeland currents are a reasonable explanation of the rotation of galaxies and the fact that the equator of the sun rotates more rapidly than the poles. Experiments in plasma labs have produced results that line up very well with cosmological observations.
The refusal to credit the electric force with any role in astrophysics despite a wealth of evidence is beyond puzzling. I have looked long and hard for a credible falsification of Plasma Cosmology, and so far have not found it. Many people just reject the idea out of hand, but worse those claiming to have "debunked" it distort or outright lie. Understanding Plasma Cosmology would take an investment of a few hours of your time. You would find that it all hangs together.
LOL of course the guy that uses astrophysics as their example of bad science is the electric-universe conspiracy theorist. You're not that guy, guy. There are examples of actual bad science but I doubt you'll ever find it with those abilities.
If you actually looked at the data you might change your mind. The standard model has so many infirmities if it was a dog they'd have to put it down. Black holes are metaphysics, not physics. Same with neutron stars, dark matter, etc. They are crutches propping up the standard model with zero experimental evidence. The 80 year search for dark matter has yielded nothing. Rather than dark matter, I propose that it's Giant Space Monkeys riding Giant Space Unicorns herding the galaxies towards the Cosmic Railhead. This is functionally equivalent to the dark matter, dark energy phantasm, only the silliness is more obvious. Can you imagine Newton, Galileo, Maxwell, or Rutherford putting up with the lack of rigor exhibited by the Big Bangers? I can't either.
The value of any theory is its ability to predict outcomes. The predictions made by EU physicist Wal Thornhill before the Deep Impact mission to Tempel 1 proved to be correct, while the mission scientists had the usual collection of "unexpectedly" remarks.
This is my pet peeve about dictionaries. They only tell you how a word is *similar* to other words, not how a word is *different*. But differences *matter*.
My other pet peeve about dictionaries is that they lack information about syntax: "he stops eating" is different from "he stops to eat", but "he starts eating" means the *same* thing as "he starts to eat". I don't know of any dictionary that explains things like this. Another example: put. Put is a ternary verb; it requires three arguments, unlike normal transitive verbs that require two. Merriam-Webster simply describes it as "transitive". "throw" is also transitive: "He throws the ball", but *"he puts the ball" is invalid; instead "he puts the ball in the bag".
_Garner's Modern American Usage_ is terrific and comes *kind* of close to what you're wishing for, in terms of giving information about the idiosyncrasies and particularities of various words. It doesn't contain the 'stops to' example (I checked) but I strongly suspect it contains an entry for the *category* of things you're talking about; I just don't know the name of that category.
It seems like what you're looking for is higher level than a dictionary and lower level than a usage guide, though. I don't have a copy of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary anymore, but it does extend a little ways into the territory your wishing for, certainly much further than any other dictionary I'm aware of.
"you're wishing for"; well, that's a particularly awkward comment for an error like that -- speech to text, I swear it.
Good lord, I'd forgotten just how comprehensive the unabridged OED really is. It has several pages of variations for "put", and very much includes the kinds of details you're looking for. I've uploaded an image at https://imgur.com/a/UKvASc1 which gives the simplest part of what you're commenting on, and they phrase it as "to move (a thing)...to cause [it] to get into or be in some place or position expressed or implied", which I think nicely expresses the multi-argument nature of it (and also points to 23 other subsections of "put" for phrases with prepositions and adverbs). It's really overwhelming, but it *has* to be if it's going to capture that level of detail...
As far as I'm concerned, Bryan Garner is the God-Emperor of the English language, and I accept his opinions on all such questions as received Truth. Can't go wrong with "Modern American Usage," and if you're a lawyer, "Reading Law--the Interpretation of Legal Texts" is even more essential
I wanted to write a comment defending the folk concept of „no evidence“ and blaming science communicators for restricting „evidence“ to „studies officially conducted by scientists“ when it suits them (see also John Schilling‘s comment), but perhaps the biggest culprit here is indeed the English word „evidence“, if it can mean both „hint“ and „proof“.
It’s an important point - that words can have different meanings in different contexts. “Evolved” means very different things to an evolutionary biologist than to a layperson. I think evidence is very much the same - to the average person, the biblical story of Lazarus constitutes evidence.
“No evidence that 45000 died of vaccine complications” and “no evidence that vaccines cause new variants” are just the same kind of “no evidence” hand waving about possibly/likely true claims that the other cases are. If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution. And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination
[LOL Scott now appears to have edited the piece to remove the example about vaccines causing new variants being false, but it was there originally]
"And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination"
Studies of vaccinated individuals find their non-COVID mortality rate is below that of unvaccinated individuals, so, while it is reasonable to "suppose" this, it is contradicted by the evidence.
I think the only thing we should infer from the observation that the NON-covid mortality rate of vaccinated individuals is below that of unvaccinated individuals, is that our method of collecting data is flawed (or there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for). My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low.
One confounder that always shows up in nutrition research: whatever "healthy" thing is currently in vogue tends be associated with better health outcomes, even if it's the opposite of what the "healthy" thing was 10 years ago.
The reason: healthy people tend to do whatever is considered "healthy" at the time.
Seems like this effect is likely present re: vaccines!
Clearly incorrect. There are all sort of possible confounders here, some of which are obvious.
People more likely to get the vaccine might have lower risk behaviors in general.
When we compare what is known broadly about the demographics of vaccine takers versus none vaccine takers, this becomes obvious. People less likely to take the vaccine tend to come from communities where overall diet is less healthy, more dangerous drug use, more poverty- heck, probably more average time spent in a car overall.
It would be remarkable if Covid vaccinations provided additional and unexpected health benefits, wouldn't it? If unvaccinated individuals have a higher non-COVID mortality rate, doesn't this suggest that vaccines do rather less than supposed? 'Healthy population is healthy' is a tautology, not a scientific discovery.
Seriously, I'd like to see evidence of this claim, because it's off intuitively to me. For one thing, unvaccinated individuals are more likely to be seriously ill (as in confined to bed) than vaccinated ones, and time spent in bed means you can't die in a traffic accident (a small risk, but a real one considering the number of person-days we're talking about).
I would go so far and assume that literally all vaccines against any disease give you additional and VERY EXPECTED health benefits.
See my argument above.
Or just consider exercise is good for you and decreases all-cause mortality.
That the cumulative effect of exercise counts, so any period of time in your past, you were prevented from exercising, is time that you didn't spend lowering your all-cause mortality.
Having any specific disease prevents exercise. (or having a worse case, prevents it longer)
It depends on how narrow you define exercise. Being in bed fighting a cold or flu prevents exercise for you muscles, but is strong exercise for your immune system.
"My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low."
My prior for that would be fairly high.
If you have a more dangerous disease (cancer, close to having a heart attack, Malaria etc.), where it's a toss-up between recovery and death, a major vs a minor case (or even no case at all) of Covid could make the difference.
And I think that it's reasonable to assume that vaccination would make that difference very often.
[though if you always count Covid as the primary or exclusive cause of death, then we might have a model]
Of course, maybe the side effects of the vaccine could also push you into death, when on the brink. And that would weigh against it.
But iirc, the side effects tend to be stronger, when you have a healthy immune system and are not old. [might just be own conjecture]
My 91 year old frail grandmother didn't notice them, whereas I spent a day in agony after the second vaccination and also with the booster afterwards.
But I'm below 30 and in very good shape. So even if you put me down, there's not a bunch of threats lurking, to finnish me off.
Also a doctor friend told me that getting flu shots seems to confer a general resistance to colds (in her experience). Informal evidence, that. But it seems plausible, if you assume that the flu vaccine effectively frees up capacity, even if you're not particularly susceptible to the flu.
There's something known as non-specific immunity. Some vaccines seem to make you less vulnerable to disease IN GENERAL. We still don't know why. It only seems to function with some vaccines, so it's not some general benefit.
That said, given that COVID has some nasty side effects, it wouldn't be surprising if getting COVID could weaken you and help finish you off from other things.
Classic selection effect because people who get the vaccine differ in other ways (fewer co-morbidities, more health conscious). In fact, people with lots of co-morbidities are sometimes too sick to get the vaccine…because the vaccines actually do have risks
If "studies show vaccinated have lower non-COVID mortality" does not convince you of "vaccinations do not cause mortality increases," what possible evidence *could*?
“Studies show” is not the be-all and end-all of evidence, there are a ton of crap studies out there. Possibly most.
In terms of what would convince me, if all-cause and Covid mortality dropped over the year after we vaccinated 70+ percent of the adult population that would certainly help. Doesn’t seem that’s happening
For me that conclusion is strong evidence that those studies have methodological flaws, and/or naive/deliberately misleading authors -- so I'd say those studies count as "no evidence" either way.
why, when off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers that I listed above.
You seem to be drawing your conclusion that the studies are flawed based on the idea they showed causality where taking the vaccine leads to lower non-covid mortality. The studies are not claiming causality, they are showing a correlation. This is basic rationalism 101.
>off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers
If you can think of them, shouldn't the study authors also think of them, and correct for them in their analysis? Or if this is not possible, just, like -- not do that analysis?
If it's so confounded that it's producing a result which clearly doesn't have a possible biological mechanism, then what can we possibly take from it? (Other than "anti-vaxers bad and will probably die")
Also I think that if you look at the demographics of vaccine-takers that are actually relevant to dying of not-covid (age and other health conditions, "living in an old age home" in particular) you will find that vaccine uptake runs in rather the opposite direction that you are hypothesizing -- the point is that *this result is something you should really look into* prior to publishing a study, rather than just handwave it with a single line amounting to "huh, weird -- oh well, we got the result we wanted".
I mean there's beliefs and then there's beliefs -- "a coronavirus vaccine is unlikely to massively (IIRC the OR was like .3) reduce all-cause non-coronavirus mortality" is a pretty well founded belief.
1) Non-specific immunity. Getting certain vaccines seems to make your body better able to reject disease in general. Why? We don't know. But it has been observed with certain vaccines, and seems to be a real effect. One obvious possibility is the theory that challenging our immune systems has the same effect as exercise does - your immune system, in the absence of threats, gets "flabby" and less responsive. There's some evidence for this.
2) Negative COVID side effects. You get sick, recover, but have some new health problem due to COVID. This ends up interacting with something later on and killing you. Or your brain damage from COVID messes with your response time and you crash and die. Or whatever. The all-cause mortality risk is known to go up after having been infected with some diseases, even after clearing them from your system, so it's plausible COVID is the same way.
3) No disruption. Getting COVID can knock you out for a week or two. That can have significant negative health effects for a while. Someone dying a few months later because they are out of shape due to COVID or put on weight due to COVID is plausible.
Of course, it could be due to confounding factors as well.
I think you guys are conflating populations and individuals. Those studies are simply saying that, when looking at a population, the mortality risk of vaccination is less than the selection effect. It's a fact that vaccines will kill some individuals due to how weird immune systems are.
It all boils down to the classic "for the greater good" argument, and frankly I don't know the answer. The obvious choice of anyone responsible for a population of people is pro-vaccination. I would say this holds true for the vast majority individuals who, as far as they know, have normal immune systems. This gets more complicated though if an individual has reason to believe they might have a reaction. If someone has had weird immune reactions to other vaccines, should they get the covid vaccine? If someone ends up with myocarditis from the second dose, should they get a booster? And where are the limits of for the greater good? What if there was a sizable population of people who had adverse reactions, at what point is it not worth the safety of the population at large? Moral philosophy is a messy business with massive grey areas where arbitrary lines must be drawn. While I think a lot of the anti-vaccine movement is anti-science propaganda, I think the lack of acknowledgment of this topic contributes to the anxiety.
The minimum would be an RCT, as opposed to a population study.
One where everyone who dies is tested for COVID, to rule out not only selection effects, but also the possibility that some of the "non-COVID" deaths are actually due to undiagnosed COVID.
Preferably a study that shows that the frequency some particular other cause of death is reduced by the vaccine. In all-cause death studies, the signal is usually weak and easily confounded, because even if an intervention reduces a few particular causes of deaths, there are probably many other causes of death it doesn't affect, and this dilutes the signal. An effect on a particular cause of death is more likely to be convincingly large.
The rate of vaccine-induced myocarditis is probably more like 1 in 50,000-100,000. Moreover, the odds of actually dying from it are very small; most people who develop it recover.
There is evolutionary pressure to escape vaccination (as there is to escape natural immunity), but it’s a matter of how much, and how it relates to other pressures.
Careful with the myocarditis thing. Very age dependent.
>>If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution.
How so?
Presumably all the coronavirus currently circulating in the world is capable of mutating into a new variant. Widespread vaccination means that out of those variants, the ones which have mutated in such a way as to avoid the vaccine have an advantage over other variants. It doesn't by itself seem to have any mechanism for increasing the rate of variant production. Isn't the common cold constantly mutating and producing new variants?
Lamba in particular is hypothesized to have evolved in an AIDS patient that failed to clear it in spite of having a spike-protein-based vaccine, which could explain why there are so many mutations in the spike protein. Each different type of vaccine provides a different gradient for evolution to climb, so maybe you get more diversity of variants. [low confidence].
It seems like if you have a diversity of different gradients to climb, this makes it more different for any variant to spread, since it has to overcome new barriers for every person with a new vaccination type that it finds.
On the other hand, in the alternative world where no vaccines were made, everyone ends up with the same type of partial natural immunity (the sort you get from getting covid) and there's still a situation where there's evolutionary pressure for variants to evolve to get past the infection-acquired immunity and infect people again. Only now, once a variant has figured out the trick, it can indeed go on to re-infect everyone, since there's no diversity of different protections for different people.
I've read that this isn't necessarily true for natural immunity *or* vaccines. Your immune system will find an antibody that works and start mass-producing it, but it won't find *every* possible antibody. This means that multiple exposures (from boosters or from another infection) can broaden your protection by letting your immune system find more ways to attack it. Which is why boosters still seem to be effective against Omicron despite it having multiple changes from the vaccine strain.
Natural immunity has an advantage here since it has the entire virus to attack and not just the spike protein, but one reason the spike protein was used for the vaccine is because it's part of how the virus gets inside cells, and therefore hard to change without weakening the virus.
My understanding is that the other advantage of going specifically for the spike is that only the spike and the rest of the outer shell are really accessible to antibodies before it attacks a cell (the rest being encapsulated), and antibodies that hit the spike can prevent it from entering new cells, while other antibodies can merely flag it for white blood cells. So natural infection results in both maximally useful "neutralizing" antibodies that hit the spike, and relatively useless non-neutralizing antibodies to other parts of the virus. While the vaccine forces the immune system to go for neutralizing antibodies.
Where natural infection may confer an advantage is in T cell protection, as infected cells can present proteins encapsulated inside the virus to the immune system, which can kill the infected cell. But it appears with this virus that T cell protection without neutralizing antibodies would mean a mild but symptomatic and contagious infection in most cases.
And I believe your immune system will generate multiple kinds of antibodies even after one shot, but will not be as thorough as if it has multiple exposures. This is part of why you see significantly reduced neutralization against certain variants (in particular beta and now omicron) but not zero neutralization.
Which does make one wonder if covid was lab engineered. The responses against that are about the variance from the likely source, assuming basically a "one pass" round of engineering. But there was a decade long time gap between the hypothetical source and the version that leaked (if that's what happened) It seems like the original could have been "watched" for years to see how it evolved naturally, with different divergent strains being stored to see how they would respond to evolutionary pressures, then when a candidate for gain of function research emerged, they created the current strain.
I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. All the criticism that it couldnt have been a lab leak that I saw was on the assumption that the engineering was all done from the original strain found in caves, as opposed to having played with that version and see how it might mutate under different pressures over the years, THEN doing the direct gai of function engineering.
It could evolve quite a bit if they run it through a series of deliberately-infected humanized mice over years, which is something gain of function researchers might do.
"I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. " I am not. The only surprise is that you are so naive.
Any suggestion or discussion of a man-made origin for Covid-19 has been Officially Forbidden since the very beginning of this debacle. Any scientist who tried to talk about this has been shouted down, silenced, and shunned. Some have reported direct threats re: loss of funding and employment if they followed this line of thought.
To me, this is the darkest poison imaginable. It's by far the worst damage of this whole pandemic. Threatening scientists with the punishments of politics and religion (excommunication is the only appropriate word) shows that our culture has truly Lost its Way.
In all fairness, there has actually been a lot discussion about this in the science community - mainly informal, but still. To the point where I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. Mind you, I am a scientist in a somewhat different area (computer science): but I have friends across a lot of neighbouring and not so neighbouring "hard science" fields, including molecular biological research.
All of them, and in particular those who actually are into viral genetics, see it as by far the most likely hypothesis that someone in Wuhan fucked up super hard (Chernobyl-level), and that Covid is the result. So at least parts of the science community seem to have come to conclusions anyway, even though it might not be very visible from the outside. But as you say, voicing those conclusions out loud is not an opportune thing to do, in a lot of places, which is very worrying indeed.
The political and media side of things is really in a bad shape: there, we seem to have the perfect storm together, in that both the U.S. science establishment and the Chinese state would lose face if it were officially acknowledged that Chernobyl v. 2.0 actually happened. In case you saw the HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl 1.0 accident: remember how the Communists tried to save face, by all means. How the various slimy apparatchiks tried to keep the full truth from coming out.
Fast forward to 2021: and look at Fauci and his friends, like that Daszak chap. All of them were to varying degrees involved with the Wuhan lab (Fauci only peripherally, but still). All of them would have their heads on the chopping block if hard evidence emerged that this thing actually comes from there due to negligence and hubris.
Add to that the reluctance of the Chinese state to ever acknowledge that their "fast forward science at all costs" policy might have been part of the problem as well (even though the vast majority of the blame needs to go to the lunatics, most of them Westerners, who proposed and performed those gain of function experiments in the first place), and it does not look good for this to be properly handled at the official level any time soon.
I appreciate and agree with everything you are saying. There are several very damaging things going on here, and our culture and society needs people to start pushing back, loudly, against this stuff:
-- People at Lancet and the NYTimes need to be called on the carpet and explain why they published as God's Own Truth, the justifications and misdirections of Daszac et. al. The NYT continues to quote Daszak as a "leading COVID expert" in all their coverage of this, never mentioning his role (er, "conflict of interest") in causing it.
-- It is impossible to debunk or expose or even rationally disagree with crazy conspiracy theories, when basic questions that normal people might ask, like "maybe this bat coronavirus could have leaked from the one place in the world where these are collected and studied, right where the outbreak started", are branded as crazy conspiracy theories, and then some are later quietly understood to have been COMPLETELY true.
-- The most disgusting and cynical part of all this has been the deliberate conflation of 1) suspicion and criticism of the Communist Chinese Government, with 2) "xenophobia" and "racism", those accusations being among the two most powerful and prejudicial of our times. Such labels, so used, are a spiritual acid.
-- This deliberate miuse of language, along the lines of "no evidence" and "linked to", doesn't just undermine, it DESTROYS trust in both journalism and science. Certainly it diminishes the dignity of all concerned, the liars and the lied-to in equal measure.
I do not think there is a Marvel-Comics-MFDOOM-type conspiracy to cover all this up, but it is certain that the economic and ideological interests of a great many people in the media and even the scientific establishment, all align with never really knowing the origin of this virus.
Knowing the truth of this specific problem is secondary to exposing and escaping from the atmosphere where inquiry is forbidden and people are afraid to voice their opinions and knowledge.
/Sorry if this became a rant. I just don't know of many communities where rational inquiry is considered so important, where people would likely agree with this line of, let's call it, "militant skepticism"
> I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. ... I am a scientist in ... computer science
Granted, his list of "six impossible things" you have to believe to be a "lab leaker" range from "not impossible" to "not needed in a lab-leak hypothesis", but I find that fora for experts to talk to other experts tend to be a reliable information source, especially if they have few views/subs (quacks seek public attention!) As of now this video has 122 views including myself, the channel has 77 subscribers, and its content is technical, signs which point to a nonpoliticized information source.
I only wish I had a good way of finding unpopular information sources like these...
The claim (before Scott deleted it) was that it was obviously false to say that vaccines “caused” new variants. But by changing the evolutionary payoffs for different variants vaccines clearly do affect the nature of variants, “causing” them to be different
It's true that theoretically vaccines create *new variants that are resistant to the vaccine*, but covid in non-vaccinated people just gets *more new variants*, maybe deadlier, maybe less, maybe easier spreading, maybe harder, whatever. It can go hog wild.
I organize a race with a thousand Covid runners, 100 of which are weird mutants. First we race in a vaccinated person, and only a few reach the finish. These will likely be selected for vaccine-resistance and could spread, but it's a low dose of Covid.
Now we run the race again in the non-vaccinated person, and most of them reach the finish, including weird ones. These could also spread.
You seem to suggest that a vaccine-resistant mutation is less likely to survive a non-vaccinated immune system than a vaccinated person, which doesn't make sense!
Which is why pretty much all variants so far have come from places where a whole bunch of unvaccinated people got Covid, and the virus could spread wild and just mutate as it pleases.
He is actually correct that a "vaccine-resistant mutation is less likely to survive a non-vaccinated immune system than a vaccinated person." This is because 1 host is a significant evolutionary opportunity for a virus.
Many variants will evolve in this unvaccinated host and unlike in a vaccinated host, the majority will be non-vaccine-resistant. Because there are far more NVR than VR variants, there are many opportunities for them to be efficient reproducers in ways absent in the VR variant.
Cheetahs may evolve in the absence of really-fast-prey but they will never become a species as a low-speed version with lesser caloric needs will "eat their(metaphoric) dinner."
Yes, but this just means we can either have a lot of vaccines, and the virus evolves for vaccine resistance (or dies), or we have few vaccines, and the virus evolves for whatever is its optimum reproduction variant.
'The vaccines cause more variants, or everything we know about evolution is wrong' is just silly and misinformed.
It isn't silly but it isn't well worded. How about: The presence of a vaccinated population in regular contact with active virus creates an environment where vaccine-resistant variants can thrive, multiply and continue to evolve additional vaccine-resistant variant-variants.
The idea here ( and I am not enough of an expert to speak to its accuracy) is similar to how the overuse of anti-biotics leads to anti-biotic resistant pathogens.
If an antibiotic doesnt kill all of the pathogen, the pathogens that survive and reproduce will be the ones that were exposed to the antibiotic but survived. This is why people are advised to take all of their antibiotic prescription even if they feel better.
The theory with so called "leaky vaccines" is similar. Particularly in cases where you dont have total vaccination and hence herd immunity.
You have strands mutating in the "wild"- the unvaccinated population. The strands that can best infect those who are vaccinated in theory outcompete the strands that dont.
This could still happen in theory with a "leaky" vaccine, one that isnt 100 percent effective, but is less likely as there the reduction of vectors (meaning only a small number of the disease creating pathogens survive and dont have anywhere to go making the disease extinct before it can evolve.
This is a case of punctuated equilibrium so either the disease "dies out" (or clings on at very low levels in reservoirs) or makes an evolutionary jump to be able to survive the vaccination.
Keep in mind when we talk about "punctuated equlibirum" we are talking about cases where the organism under threat of extinction does not go extinct. The thing where it rapidly evolves is likely more rare.
Covid is a bit of an odd bug. Anyway, to be clear I am not a virologist, just explaining the general idea. I'm sure experts could greatly clarify/correct things I am misunderdstanding.
Well, this is (one of) the problems with Aristotelian arguments from symbolic analogy, a curse on human progress since circa 300 BC. A vaccine and an antibiotic can both be classified, logically and symbolically, as "things that eliminate disease" so voila! we should be able to argue that actions which are symbolically similar with both should have symbolically similar outcomes, n'est-ce pas?
But it turns out to be complete rubbish, because our logical (or linguistic) symbolism bears no necessary relationship to the underlying molecular reality.
Overuse of antibiotics is a problem because it exposes bacteria to an environmental toxin *which they have not encountered before* and would not encounter in the wild, which means they experience evolutionary pressure to adapt to it -- and that gives you antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by and by. Mind you, you get antibiotic-resistant bacteria even if you *don't* overuse antibiotics, you just get them slower. Note the necessary aspect here: you expose the bacteria to a weapon they've never seen before, and wouldn't encounter otherwise.
A vaccine has nothing in common with that. A vaccine gives the heads-up to your immune system, but it does not directly attack an infection, and the way in which the immune system attacks a viral infection with and without a vaccine doesn't change by an atom. So the virus is *not* subject to novel evolutionary pressure, because it's not experiencing something it would not otherwise experience -- indeed, it's experiencing *exactly the same* kind of pressure it always experiences from an immune system. It is under no pressure to evolve novel defenses, because it's not under novel pressure. More precisely, it's not under additional pressure, it's under the same pressure to evade the immune system it always is. An advantage in infecting a vaccinated person is of no unique value -- it would also be an advantage in infecting an unvaccinated person -- because the immune mechanisms that are being subverted are exactly the same.
Ironically, there *is* a mechanistically reasonable comparison between the mis-use of vaccine and the mis-use of antibiotics, but it points in the other direction. Since viruses only mutate during active infection, and are only under evolutionary pressure when under attack by the immune system, it follows that the way to maximize the mutation rate of viruses is to have longer infections, and the way to minimize it is to have the shortest possible infections, rapidly cleared. (There are speculations that people who take unusually long times to clear COVID, e.g. the partially immunocompromised, who can take months, are indirectly responsible for the lion's share of new variants.)
Of course, the way to minimize the length of time of an infection is to get a vaccine, even one that doesn't work very well. That will *always* reduce the average length of time of an infection, and therefore always reduce the rate of evolution of a virus. Exactly the opposite conclusion from that of the (faulty) argument by analogy.
I'm not disputing your explanation because I simply don't know whether it's true or not. But if it is, why do we need updated vaccines for different variants? If the vaccine doesn't change the immune response "by an atom" then why would different vaccines target different viral strains?
Antibiotics present a novel challenge to the bacteria - there's no reason for a bacteria which is immune to an antibiotic to be favored over one that isn't unless the antibiotic is present in the enviornment.
Conversely, viruses are contending with the immune system. This is always a threat to the virus, so a virus will always try to escape the immune system response, no matter what.
Thus, introducing antibiotics will increase the likelihood of getting resistance because there's an actual adaptive pressure in favor of developing antibiotic resistance.
Vaccines, however, are only presenting the same challenge as the virus always had - getting around the immune system. As such, it makes the virus's job of mutating strictly harder, because in both cases, it will have to contend with immune systems, but in a more heavily vaccinated population, fewer people get infected, and thus the virus has fewer opportunities to mutate to get around the threat.
Variants can still arise and escape the immune response, and thus potentially require new vaccines. But it's harder for them to do so in an environment with vaccines because it has fewer opportunities to develop the mutations necessary to do so.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? I may just be confused, but I don't see how your comment functions as a reply to mine. I asked him a question about why we need updated vaccines if vaccines don't change the nature of the immune response.
This simply isn’t true of COVID vaccines. Because they are designed to get your immune system to attack the spike protein, your immune response to the vaccine will be different than your immune response to a wild infection.
A vaccine absolutely does expose the target virus to "evolutionary pressure to adapt to it" when the vaccinated and unvaccinated members of a population intermingle. The only real difference between this and the antibiotic case is that the antibiotic is applied to an already infected individual.
In actuality, neither a vaccine nor an antibiotic "causes" new strains to evolve. Instead it kills off strains it can allowing more opportunity for strains with some level of resistance to evolve. Similarly, the immune system does not pressure a virus to evolve any more than fast antelope pressured cheetahs to evolve. They just starved the slow ones out of the population.
Everyone should read the first sentence of that last paragraph above by REF carefully! The best way to understand evolution and selective pressures is to think of it not at a proactive mutation of the organism but as a subtractive phenomenon, i.e. removing the “weak” (the susceptible) to allow the mutants to proliferate. Everything makes more sense when we suppress our tendency to anthropomorphize viruses/bacteria as wanting to change and instead think of it as elimination steps. Not survival of the fittest; rather death of the weakest. At least that works best for me.
Natural selection is an unintelligent process, but his argument is actually flawed - vaccines and antibiotics are not the same.
Vaccines don't actually increase pressure to escape; that already exists because infected individuals acquire immunity after being infected. In both a vaccinated and unvaccinated population, the virus is presented with the pressure to escape immunity.
The only difference is that in a vaccinated community, there's fewer cases and thus fewer opportunities for it to mutate to escape immunity.
Conversely, antibiotics present a new, different sort of threat that there is no benefit to acquiring immunity to in its absence. As such, antibiotic resistant strains are no more likely to proliferate than ones that are not (actually, often less so, because antibiotic resistance often imparts a cost on the bacterium - they generally are less fit in antibiotic free environments).
As such, exposing bacteria to antibiotics actually does create a new kind of selective pressure and select for something that isn't otherwise being selected for.
The difference is that the challenge presented by vaccines is exactly the same as the challenge presented by the immune system, while the challenge presented by antibiotics is a new challenge to the bacteria.
In an unvaccinated population, the virus still has the exact same pressure to escape immunity - namely, the immunity of already infected people.
As such, in the case of vaccines, vaccines strictly damage a virus's ability to escape immunity by reducing the number of cases and thus the number of opportunities for the virus to mutate.
In both an unvaccinated and a vaccinated population, there's pressure on the virus to mutate to escape immunity; the only difference is that in a vaccinated population, there's less opportunity for it to do so.
Vaccination doesn't expose the virus to evolutionary pressure to develop new defenses or resistance, but it does expose the virus to evolutionary pressure to change in such a way that the vaccine no longer helps the immune system recognize it faster.
The problem with this idea is that it assumes that natural immunity (from catching the disease) gives you a higher degree of immunity than artificial immunity (from the vaccine). However, it seems that, at least in the case of COVID, the vaccine actually gives *better* immunity than actually getting COVID does.
This would mean that a fully vaccinated environment is always worse for the disease than an unvaccinated one, because in an unvaccinated environment, there are more people with "leaky vaccines" than there are in a vaccinated environment.
Yes there is. Studies have been done on this very subject matter. People who were immunized were less likely to be infected/hospitalized than those who had previously been infected with COVID and recovered.
there's vaccines causing new variants and then there's causing them on net. We vaccinated the hell out of smallpox and now there's almost none of it left to mutate. Likewise, the fewer people who have COVID the less chances there are for it to mutate (despite increased selection pressure)
What matters is the number of virus replications under immune system pressure, not number of people infected. The way the vaccine reduces virulence is by reducing both duration of infection and number of viruses, which both reduce evolutionary pressure.
Studies seem to suggest that, using the same metric for "leakiness" as past vaccines, the leakiness of COVID may actually be pretty similar to the leakiness of the Smallpox vaccine.
COVID is ridiculously more contagious than smallpox. The R0 on it is ridiculous, Delta is like 2x more infectious than that, and Omnicron is 2-7x more infectious than DELTA.
It's ridiculously awful.
"Leaky" vaccines make less of a difference than you think; the main issue is the number of viral replications. As long as the vaccines reduce that number (and they do) they impair its ability to mutate and evolve.
Basically you have committed a fatal error in your analysis, by failing to compare to the background rate. It is entirely possible that the COVID vaccines actually PROTECT against myocarditis.
Vaccines actually lower the rate of mutation by lowering the number of infections, which reduces opportunity for infection.
All viruses are inherently encouraged to mutate to evade immunity from prior infection, so vaccinating lots of people doesn't actually apply any pressure over and above what already exists in nature, it decreases the number of hosts available for the virus to infect and thus mutate.
There's no evidence long covid is real. Except if you accept that me/cfs is real. Then you have a strong prior an infection can cause serious long last deibilty after the acute infection is gone. But of course, there's "no evidence" patients with me/cfs aren't just making things up.
The absence of a single clear biomarker in me/cfs is considered to be " no evidence" and that absence of evidence is definitive for some peopple, rather than a good reason to do more research. I hope we can learn more about how long covid works.
This seems to go back to the "what does no evidence mean"? problem. There is evidence, in the sense that people who have had covid are reporting symptoms that have persisted past their infection, as well as new problems that only seem to manifest after Covid infection, and these are not just self-reports but in some cases things doctors who have treated them have seen. That is evidence. It is not the the kind of strong evidence where there are clear biomarkers, or clear etiologies, or where one can't be sure that given the number of covid infections they are co-incidental. But it's evidence, and there seem to be quite a fair number of medical professionals that seem to think something is happening.
This reminds me of another type of fallacious reasoning that seems similar. When there isnt a known etiology for something, and it doesnt happen in the majority of cases, the default assumption being its not real.
Biology is complicated, and there are many things where only some people, given some unknown pre-existing factor, might have an atypical reaction. We recognize this is the case for some things like allergies, but seem quick to rule it out when it "looks" like something. There have been a few cases where the medical establishment was convinced certain claims were hogwash, then eventually realized there was actually something to them.
I think its like a correlation between the types of people who take these sort of things seriously also being more likely to be into wu and pseudoscience.
You'd lose that bet (on long COVID, at least), because symptoms such as long-term loss of taste and smell are easily quantifiable -- and have been measured.
I find this fascinating. Aside from the trash can CFS diagnosis, there's a pretty substantial body of research showing that people do get all kinds of chronic post-infectious syndromes.
Many of them are autoimmune -- the body's immune system gets thrown into overdrive in the wake of fighting a novel infection and starts fighting itself. Guillain-Barré syndrome, Hashimotos, Sjogren's syndrome, Sydenham's chorea. Celiac disease is also sometimes triggered by a gut infection in a person who has the genetic predisposition.
In some cases, a weak immune system or insufficient treatment fails to completely clear an initial infection -- rheumatic fever is "a disease that can result from inadequately treated strep throat" for instance. My brother missed an entire year of school because of it. In other cases, failure to completely clear the initial infection leads to an immune system on chronic overdrive and that leads to autoimmunity. Autoimmunity can be measured in a range of ways -- as the clinical diagnoses above and sometimes by a chronically elevated rheumatoid factor or other lab results.
Why would Covid be any different from all the other infections that we know can sometimes, but not commonly, lead to chronic conditions?
Many many people do have psychosomatic illness -- it's thought a lot of chronic back pain, maybe the majority of it, is psychosomatic. Headaches. Anxiety-induced diarrhea. High blood pressure due to stress. All the people going to ERs for panic-related chest pain who think they're having heart attacks. Tension-induced muscle spasm. Often we can even recognize the psychosomatic causes of these conditions because people say "oh my god have I been under a lot of stress lately!"
And then there are the people who say, "Yeah, I got a cold virus, and then I got Guillain-Barré syndrome and I was hospitalized for three weeks and I almost died and then I got better but five years later I still haven't gotten all my energy back and the tips of the fingers on my right hand are still numb. Or another common one: "I traveled abroad and came back with diarrhea that was finally diagnosed as some kind of amoebic dysentery but it took almost a year to get properly treated and I developed fatigue and joint pain after six months. The antibiotics cured the diarrhea but I still have joint pain and fatigue years later. It gets worse and it gets better, but it never goes away entirely." I know a lot of these stories.
I'm thinking the people who default to the opinion that post-infectious syndromes are psychosomatic have no direct experience with autoimmunity or chronic illness following infection. Because once you meet it a few times, it's pretty hard to keep thinking it's psychosomatic. If you're an infectious disease doctor and you still hold this view, I will consider myself properly chastened.
CFS symptoms seem so obviously possible to create in multiple different ways, I don't think it's really "one thing" so much as it is a symptom of many different sorts of damage that the body can sustain, which can cause overlapping symptoms.
It's not a disease, it's a symptom.
It seems likely that some people have psychosomatic issues while others genuinely do have real problems that are caused by post-viral damage to their bodies.
Honestly, given the fact that polio could cause people to end up on iron lungs or otherwise paralyzed, the notion that infections can't cause permanent damage seems really dumb. They obviously can.
I know someone who has developed asthma as a result of having gotten COVID. They also now suffer from chronic fatigue. Their doctor first prescribed them with post-viral cough, but it never went away.
Honestly, my guess is that "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is really caused by tiny amounts of damage to the body that add up into your body just not working as well, resulting in you being chronically tired because your function is impaired.
This isn't a 'no anything' forum... err, this is a 'yes everything'- no wait
When I started writing this it seemed like they would be a pithy way to explain that in this forum the only thing that matters is argumentation, we tend not to rule things out because they belong to a category with a mockable name
Except stuff like psychic powers or astrology, but even then we've got that one astrologer who shows up to advertise his services and 'own the materialists' and I suspect several people have sent him emails to set up experiments and demonstrations
If you think long covid is 'real', or that tye notion that it isn't is 'junk science', let's hear your argument
...unless ofc you were just referring to the phrase 'no evidence' and how the new post by scott is all about misuse of that phrase
CFS probably doesn't have a single cause, so we wouldn't expect it to have a single biomarker.
I have a friend who has developed chronic fatigue after being infected with COVID, and now also has asthma, something he didn't suffer from before. Sometimes he coughs so much he throws up.
Re homeopathy: Low Dose Immunology sometimes uses dosages that are close to the highest concentrations homeopathy uses. There could be a mechanism there, for some instances of homeopathy. The logic behind it is generally bananas....or at least "alternative"
There are some cases where very low or micro doses of drugs have different effects then higher doses and thus can have utility. Naltrexone would be an example.
But homeopathy proper implies dluting something till its no longer detectable.
I think it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of homeopathy is nonsense. Sure, maybe there is some specific chemica that has an unusual helpful property in microdoses- but this isnt homeopathys' claim.
Scott has previously written about medications that otherwise would require a prescription, being available as a homeopathic remedy at useful dosages, due to this.
I'm not familiar with that. I think it's possible that you're lumping all alternative supplements into homeopathy? But the supplements I'm familiar with him mentioning (fish oil, melatonin, etc.) aren't homeopathic.
It was an instance of a medication also being available as a homeopathic "formulation", that was still strong enough to have an actual effect: that was why I remembered it. I haven't found the article yet though.
The meaning of "homeopathic" medication is that it has been diluted away to nothing. Thus it is not a homeopathic "formulation" and instead it is a "homeopathic" formulation(That is homeopathic in labeling only).
It sounds like the very meaning of the term "homeopathy" is being diluted by these alternative medications. Which, logically, should make "homeopathy" as a word even stronger.
They believe that the more they dilute it, the stronger it gets, but that doesn't mean they don't sometimes sell formulations with concentrations in parts-per-thousand, which presumably they think are their weakest possible doses??
I think part of the problem is the way we use euphemism to soften our language. "No evidence" has a literal meaning that is about how we haven't studied it enough yet, but in some contexts is a nicer way to say idiotic. While in some ways I think this is a very good thing, it sometimes comes at the cost of clarity.
I've noticed this in other contexts to. I think describing a moronic claim as "flawed logic" is a similarly technically correct understatement. It gives more cedes more ground than necessary to Motte Bailey and other fallacies. I was once in a conversation with a friend where I wanted to strongly express that their claim was a fallacy, but I found that I didn't even have the language to express the strength of my disagreement.
I don't have a good solution. I certainly don't think we would be better off with constant reddit-style "you're and idiot" "no u" arguments, but an inability to clearly express the wrongness of flawed logic seems like a serious limitation.
I think you're on to something here. A lot of the times these "No evidence for [whatever thing right wingers are on about]" articles don't seem to be aimed at correcting the record. Instead, they are an indirect / classier / plausibly deniable way of saying "Look at what these crazy right-wingers are on about, can you believe it?"
In particular I'm thinking of things like the fact-checks of Babylon Bee articles. They're more "We didn't like that they poked fun at [whatever right wingers are poking fun at these days], so here are some words about why, framed as a fact-check."
I think you may be overestimating some people here.
I was in a discordian group where we created as a troll group, Christians against Dinosaurs.
The aim was to keep making it more and more absurd. Actual Christians were not fooled, but there was basically no amount of absurdity that people who came there to say "look at these idiot Christians" wouldnt buy as actual Christians.
Many studies have shown that right wingers can more accurately identify the self-described positions of left wingers then vice a versa.
This is a curious phenomenon, but partially I think it has to do with how there is maybe more of a distance between how rightwingers will self identify versus how they are described by their opponents.
For example, most right wingers will not self identify as racist, but left wingers will either hold that the things they do believe in constitute racism or that they are not being honest about their beliefs.
Whereas say, it wouldn't be hard to find a large number of left wingers who will openly state they favor socialism over capitalism, or think that the US is an inherently oppressive country.
Of course politics are rapidly changing. Its odd as part of the traditional right thin was the "big tent" philosophy, whereas left wingers tended to be more about "purifying the party"- but on the other hand, it seems like the right makes more of an effort to distance themselves from the radical wing then the left did. Or did up untill recently, QAnon has risen quickly and dramatically. On the other hand, while the radical left influences the mainstream left, they havent displaced the mainstream left in the same way.
I realize there are a lot of contradictions here- I'm sure someone has done a complex analysis of all this.
Also, the Babylon Bee I think often is a bit less obviously satirical from a left point of view then say The Onion is. Some of the articles anyway.
And there's also the thing where people do get its satire but its very obvious what actual position its supporting so there can be criticism of that, whereas again compared to the Onion, one can't always easily walk backwards from a ridiculous satirical article to "this is what this person believes."
I basically mean that, while sure, The Onion appeals to the progressive left, its less obviously partisan then the babylon bee
> Many studies have shown that right wingers can more accurately identify the self-described positions of left wingers then vice a versa.
I think it's because media and Hollywood is pretty left wing. Left wing thinking is thus literally broadcasted widely and our culture is saturated with it, so of course conservatives can't help but absorb it and get a feel for how left leaning people think. I can't say the same applies to conservatives. Left leaning people largely just see the caricatures of conservatives in their media headlines, so of course they think most conservatives are loons. The percentage of loons on both sides is probably pretty even.
Actually media and Hollywood tends to be centrist or even lean right. This is because they are owned by large capitalist corporations. You can read something like "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and Herman to learn about this in lengthy detail.
They may lean right on economic issues, but it's very clear they lean heavily left on social issues. Just look at how J.K. Rowling is being omitted most of her credits in the latest Harry Potter productions due to her controversial statements on trans issues. Examples like this abound.
Your example actually proves my point. JK Rowling is an extremely rich and influential writer and she's on the right-wing of this social issue. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say she's being "omitted" - she's listed as a producer and screenwriter on the most recent Potter movie that I looked up.
> but I found that I didn't even have the language to express the strength of my disagreement.
Can't you say something like "I think that statement you just made is 100% incorrect"? There's no need to call someone an idiot to express disagreement. I try to never call my friends idiots but I don't shy away from strongly disagreeing with them if that's how I feel.
"I fear, Sir, that if I were to truly express the extent of my disagreement, we would be forced to meet at dawn, to the detriment of at least one of us."
This is a general language problem. Language composes "signs" that refer to things, not things in and of themelves.
Language also evolves. A precise use of language tends to grow to encompass things beyond its original narrow purpose. Or contextual use creates a new implied meaning.
Often there are phrases which are non-sensical or misleading if taken literally. It's generally useful to try and understand the original purpose behind the word or phrase to ee where it's gone wrong.
An example of this where the use has gone so far beyond its original meaning it creates extremely confused thikning- "Intentions dont matter."
If one thinks about this, it is inherently absurd. But it has become a matter of dogma for many.
Going back to what the phrase originally meant, it was trying to express something like this- "If one does or says something that causes harm or has some negative effect, the fact that one didnt intend to cause that harm of have that effect does not relieve one of all responsibility for the effect."
This gets shortened to "intentions don't matter" which is patently absurd.
Using terms like "no evidence" as shorthand leads to similar, but more subtle problems, which is what I think is the point Scott is making.
The "intentions dont matter" thing is especially ironic, because in the context where it's most used, involving racism or sexism or something of that nature, intentions clearly do matter.
Although the language there I think evolves not just out of foolishness but as useful sophistry.
While let's say, expressing a sexist sentiment unintentionally may be bad, clearly doing so intentionally is worse.
But one can use it in the selective sophist way to say "no, this person doing something unintentionally should be judged in the same way as if they were doing it intentionally"
While this kind of thing manifests clearly in those spaces, as it is somewhat more obvious, it be perilous to rationalists as one may unintentionally use similar sophistry to prove a point or argument without being consciously aware of the language manipulation.
Sometimes I go with "I believe that you believe it." I acknowledge their passion and certainty while making it tacitly clear that I harbor strong doubts.
"I didn't even have the language to express the strength of my disagreement." Have you considered, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Which is why it's better to say "This hasn't been researched" versus "This has been researched and we've found bupkis."
It's the difference between evidence of absence and absence of evidence. An absence of evidence can be caused by evidence of absence but can also be caused by no one really studying it.
Thank you for this. Communication from the WHO, CDC, FDA et al has been embarrassingly horrible throughout the entire pandemic. “No evidence of…” has been a particular thorn in my side because of the exact reason why you mentioned it. When the WHO would vehemently say obviously wrong statement like “no evidence that masks work”, “no evidence that asymptomatic people transmit the disease” etc, it’s pathetically comical as to how they shot themselves in the foot. No one believes them now.
What’s wrong with saying “we don’t know if masks work yet”? It’s so much clearer and saying that wouldn’t have destroyed their reputation. Instead of “No evidence that hydroxychlorquine works”, say “based on all available studies, hydroxychloroquine does not work.”
I think the biggest takeaway from the pandemic is that the deference to science has evaporated in the age of social media and if scientists and science/medical groups like the WHO, CDC or FDA want to regain their ability to lead people, they will need to reengineer their communications strategy. Using scientifically accurate but stupidly confusing phrases like “No evidence that…” really need to be eliminated. Clear, concise and easy to understand language needs to be used 100% of the time. Literally dumb it down so that it’s clear to the lowest common denominator such that we don’t get another politicization of what we saw with COVID.
> What’s wrong with saying “we don’t know if masks work yet”?
I honestly believe that not many people are able to realize that they don't actually know something. When the subconscious mind injects a prediction about reality into one's consciousness, distinguishing that prediction about reality from actual reality (which being unknown, is therefore not "present" in the mind as a second option to consider) is pretty damn hard. Rationalists screw up on this all the time, expecting Normies to pull it off reliably seems like a pretty big ask.
> Using scientifically accurate but stupidly confusing phrases like “No evidence that…” really need to be eliminated.
That “No evidence that…” is considered *scientifically* *accurate* (presuming you are correct) is itself pretty damning of science considering how epistemically flawed it is.
My guess is that it's one of those things where people with an authoritative position feel, by means of institutional logic, that they don't want to appear "weak." Of course this winds up shooting them in the foot.
A politician can't say "I don't know." Maybe for similar reasons the WHO or whoever cant actually say that, but they could probably do the political version of this.
The communication from Fauci about the Omicron Variant was much better in this regard, although most of the comments seem to indicate they didnt actually listen to what he said and responded to what they assumed he would say, or they did some kind of transformation thing.
So maybe its less of a conscious thing then a "unspoken rules of language" deal where people reuse certain phrases because thats how other people have used them.
The thing about the masks was actually worse. It wasn't just "there is no evidence."
There were some people including experts who discouraged mask use early on on two bases- 1. There was a shortage, and they were concerned people would buy up masks and scalp them, so that medical proffessionals couldnt get them. (There seems to have been some confusion here- maybe assuming there would be such a shortage of the heavy duty medical masks that medical personnel would be forced to use the cheaper masks? This might have been these people buying into the absolute worst case scenarios which were inaccurate for various reasons. One being that a lot of initial data cam from the cruise ship case which represented a "best case scenario" for viral spread and for the virus remaining airborn and infectious for the longest.
The second reason seems to have been a "the perfect i the enemy of the good deal."
That the regular masks didnt provide that much protection against covid, and people would behave as though the masks basically made them immune, which would be worse then people not wearing masks and just staying at home/taking reasonable precautions.
I think there are two problems here. One is that people who comment, like virologists or whoever, aren't psychologists or economists- they give their advice based o what they know or think they know without regards to other relevant factors.
2. if it bleeds it leads. News media will report the most alarmist thing, and in this case there was a cycle. Some experts say something, media repeats it, there was already a political partisan attitude forming, people on both sides signal boost the most alarmist thing for different reasons, etc.
There is a developing science of how media and psychology and the internet affect each other, but as of now this seems to mostly be studied by strategists, marketers, and people employed by companies with a stake.
There needs to be more of an independent discipline to understand how these downstream unintended consequences will likely play out.
The mask shortage was real. I was on a team working with local emergency response when COVID first hit. Local hospitals were very low on masks, and there were very few available for purchase. Not just high quality, but really any masks. We were gathering all of the masks we could find for main hospital use, and no one else was getting any provisions of masks.
I'm still against lying to the public in any case. It may (or may not) have helped in the short term to get enough masks for professional use. It definitely hurt the trust of much of the population, and that will be the legacy of the early decision. Even now people can't remember if there really was or wasn't a mask shortage, but they absolutely remember that the government lied to us about masks.
Well put, Mr Doolittle! False public statements early on may have helped to give better availability to health care workers who desperately needed masks early on - but it totally made WHO/CDC etc out to be incompetent or liars to the public - so long term a really bad strategy, even if short term understandable.
Agreed 100%. Public health officials should be above reproach, and that and the other lies have seriously undermined their credibility and that's still having repercussions to this day.
Again, there is a difference between poor communication/lacking nuance and outright lies. Where were the outright lies?
The closest thing I can think of is how a number of journos and institutions treated the lab leak theory as completely debunked conspiracy raving when most serious scientists thought it was unlikely but not an impossibility.
I could go on for Fauci alone, and I have no doubt others have made similar blunders, but Fauci is clearly the main public health figure. I personally don't think public servants charged with public health should be lying to the public, no matter what utilitarian calculation they think justifies those lies.
Unfortunately the legitimate criticisms against him are dismissed as partisan posturing. No public servants in any other country did this to my knowledge, certainly not mine, and no disaster followed this honesty.
I didnt claim there wasn't a mask shortage, I was restating the rational as I heard it at the time. I was a bit confused on the issue of proffessional masks versus more common masks, but from what you said it appears my guess here was correct.
What I'm not clear on- when did the medical establishment "lie" to the public? The message I remember getting was that masks weren't that effective at preventing one from catching COVID. Now of course there is a lot of ambiguity around "not that effective." I don't remember hearing specifics. Obviously wearing a face covering provides some sort of protection, just as it blocks some particles. But there wasn't much in the way of specifics which is another problem with science communication. It seems that science communicators (and I understand it's unfair to group this as a monolithic thing as there are many people with different incentives involved in this) were saying that masks didnt offer much protection for an individual against COVID. Like many things, the specifics weren't part of the message as it often seems like the "science communicators" think the public is too ignorant to understand complexity or nuance. This isn't unfair per ce, but it does lead to negative downstream consequences. I would argue the climate change communication debacle is very similar. Even generally well informed people, people who work in that area. are really misinformed about the nuance and the particulars. Of course there is a process of scientists collecting data, interpreting that data, that data being communicated, and science journalism, mainstrea journalism- this isnt just a science issue, a lot of things are subject to this game of telephone.
The real switch on this was when strong correlation data came in from countries where mask wearing was common actually had lower transmission rates. Some of that was corrolated not causal, but people seem to start saying "ok, while they are of dubious help protecting the people wearing them from catching the virus, they are definitely helpful in terms of people who already have it not spreading it further.
So while I agree there was a lot of stuff that was misleading and vague, where were the actual lies?
This is a tough one because I am always for truth, but I also understand there is a not insignificant group of people who see nuance and the ability to change argumentd with new data/perspectives as an inherent weakness, not a strength.
I don't disagree with you, but this is getting into (perfectly valid) things other than the phenomenon I am referring to, which you did touch upon somewhat:
> I think there are two problems here. One is that people who comment, like virologists or whoever, aren't psychologists or economists- they give their advice based on what they know or think they know without regards to other relevant factors.
I believe that a lack of deep understanding of certain aspects of psychology (and ability to actually take it seriously, for those who do have such knowledge to some degree) is the elephant in the room that everyone is missing.
> The communication from Fauci about the Omicron Variant was much better in this regard, although most of the comments seem to indicate they didnt actually listen to what he said and responded to what they assumed he would say, or they did some kind of transformation thing.
> So maybe its less of a conscious thing then a "unspoken rules of language" deal where people reuse certain phrases because thats how other people have used them.
Here you are kind of touching on what I think is another very interesting phenomenon: how (and to what degree) does our language, something that we take for granted with hardly a second thought, fundamentally distort our perception of reality?
>I honestly believe that not many people are able to realize that they don't actually know something.
That's the mistake theory explanation.
The reality may be conflict theory instead: the CDC and media have an agenda that is not accurate communication. If they think something might be true, but they want the public to act as though it's definitely true, they'll use the "no evidence" formulation because the public will read it as "definitely true" but just in case they're proven wrong later, they can claim they were being literally accurate and didn't lie.
Of course, every time they mislead by saying "no evidence" to imply stronger confidence than the truth, they lose credibility for the times where the statement should actually be believed with strong confidence. This leads to the phenomenon Scott observed.
A note: what you described as "conflict theory" doesn't actually necessarily involve conflicting interests between the CDC and the population. Rather, the CDC thinks (rightly or wrongly) that it's bending the truth in the interests of the population.
Tbh I'm also somewhat sceptical that these small lies actually do much to erode people's trust in the institutions. I feel like most of the population either continues to broadly trust the institutions, or has distrusted them from the beginning, usually for not very well-thought-out reasons; those who aren't inherently inclined to distrust the institutions but have come to do so as a result of their lies are a small fraction of the population. Those of us who are inherently bothered by this sort of bending of the truth feel like the institutions would *deserve* to lose people's trust as a result, but I'm not sure there is actually much such effect.
Not really, what I'm referring to anyways, which is core, abstract cognitive behaviors, how the mind perceives reality itself. Fundamentally, I am referring to how people are not good *during realtime cognition* of realizing that there is a distinction between reality itself and our perception of it. When a person forms a conclusion on a topic, it *seems* that they are correct, based on (some) "logic" - but if they forget that they are perceiving reality, it is also very easy to overlook that one's potentially perfect logic is subject to error as a consequence of incorrect premises (one's "facts").
This is probably like Psychology 101, which everyone "knows", but what people don't seem to consider is the "realtime cognition" aspect of it (do you know this *always*?).
It turns out that playing a game of telephone, between a group of people that have trained as scientists and not PR people and a group of people that trained to talk to PR people and have no grasp of science, doesn't work at all, predictably.
You know, in the 50s and 60s, when physics and space seemed like Really Important aspects of the future -- that future voters would need to be understanding news stories about missiles, rockets, orbits, weird weapons -- it was considered essentially to boost the amount of education people got in those things at a young age, and to try to come up to speed in it yourself, even as an adult. Same arguably with computers in the 70s and 80s. You were supposed to study up on the difference between RAM and ROM, so you could understand (and judge for yourself) the stories you read bout computers.
I don't quite get why it doesn't seem that way today. The Internet? Everyone can look up a Wikipedia article on virology, and pose as credibly informed on the issue, at least for two or three 140-character rounds of Internet argument? It's very strange. It's almost like we're all aristocrats now, where we believe our native wit can combine with any random source of information to render us experts-on-demand, so why bother going through the hard slog of actually educating one's self on the salient issues of the era?
I wasn't alive in the 50s and 60s, but I thought the reasoning was "so that our kids can *work* on rockets and computers," not "so they can *vote* on rockets and computers." Certainly that's the reasoning I was told for teaching computer programming in schools (and for emphasizing STEM in general).
The "Oligarch Conspiracy Theory" is the Oligarchs wanted rocket science talent to work in their military and commercial high-tech industries, so heavier science and math education was put on school youth in order to screen for the talent.
Sure....but why does it (actually) not work? Could things be substantially improved, and what are the variety of ways in which it could be improved (as opposed to "the" answers that pop into our minds)?
My favorite models do journalism as a public good. Either government-funded through arm's-length or mandatory contribution arrangements (e.g. BBC) or as purely charitable undertakings (see Quanta Magazine, funded by the Simons Foundation). Good journalism by definition has massive positive externalities, and it's an iron law of economics that anything that generates positive externalities is undersupplied by markets. Things with negative externalities tend to get overproduced, and so negative-externality journalism proliferates while, in the free market at least, positive-externality journalism withers on the vine.
One approach would be to regulate the industry, in an actually serious manner. Of course: "now you have two problems", but perhaps we could kill two birds with one stone and learn how to do things *properly* in the process - a lot of shit policy implementation could be monitored and critiqued by public crowd sourcing....but then if that abstract idea got out of the bag, the whole system would be under threat.
> say “based on all available studies, hydroxychloroquine does not work.”
That's also ambiguous. It could mean either "based on all available studies, we are practically certain that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work", or "based on all available studies hydroxychloroquine probably doesn't work, but we can't exclude the possibility that further studies will show that it does work".
Point of clarification: This piece confuses “science journalists” with “science communicators,” which obscures how this problem occurs. “Science communicators” describes a job class ranging from public information officers to PR flacks; they aren’t journalists, and journalists in turn aren’t communicators, in the sense that their primary obligation isn’t to promote new research but to report on and contextualize it. “Science communicators” write the press releases with phrases such as “no evidence,” and far too often journalists just repeat that language because they aren’t sophisticated enough (or are too busy) to interrogate that claim or the valences of the phrase. So, yes, the problem is bad science communication, but also bad journalism, or stenography masquerading as journalism, which a lot of science journalism is. (Edits for grammar only.)
"The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists."
There's another overlooked aspect of this. Often a scientist or a general reader will see an article and be furious about how the headline utterly misrepresents what is actually a nuanced article by picking out the most dramatic quote or statement, even if it is unrepresentative of the content. I saw this many times and only later found out that it was standard practice in journalism for editors to make headlines and for reporters to have no input.
Given the increasing salience of headlines in the clickbait age, I regard this as a reprehensible practice rising to the level of journalistic fraud. Readers see headlines and articles as a whole. If a publisher can't trust the reporter to write a headline, why trust them to report at all?
Journalism has quite a few of these odd practices that appear to have evolved over time. I'd be careful about assuming it's a bad idea until it's been properly investigated at least. Another one that's often infuriating: a refusal to let experts consulted for an article fact-check the resulting article. This one at least has a fairly obvious cause; people will pick a fight with the article if they don't like how it's been presented, but, it also means that articles which interview someone knowledgable on a topic frequently go to press with fundamental garblings even though someone who could have fixed it was right there.
Yes, it is not a practice that helps general readers understand science. And I believe it is an international phenomenon, at least it is not limited to the US. You can insist to read an article that interviews you on a publication you have written, but you cannot correct- or even be let to know in advance- what the headline and introductory sentences ("ingress") is going to be, because that is decided at the "desk" of the newspaper, not by the journalist that interviews you. I have had some very frustrating experiences with this myself. More generally, I have almost never read an accurate presentation of a science report I have actually read myself. Mark Twain supposedly said the the difference between those who read newspapers and those who do not is the difference between the misinformed and the uninformed, not between the informed and the uninformed. Goes for social media also I guess. (Oh well.)
Every finding is at least a little indexical, and it's ultimately a personal choice on how much you're allowed to abstract and generalize beyond a literal retelling of what happened. For something like UFOs, you're presumably agreeing that "Mr. X will tell you that he was abducted by UFOs" is a replicable truth, and taking issue with when the indexical "these people will tell you" can wash into the less-indexical "This thing can be sometimes observed". This is a judgement call! But we don't have great language about making these judgement calls, and I think that's ultimately the snarl that makes science communication so insufferable. A desire for "objectivity" means trying to find the most defensible source of judgement call, bigger groups are more defensible than individuals, and bigger groups skew conservative because you drift from needing one-person-saying-yes to no-people-saying-no.
I think an ideal way to write scientific articles is for the author or interview subject to just literally described the process they undertook, and what they found when undertaking it. Let the reader do the work of deciding whether that process leads to finding that generalize. Pretensions of objectivity (THIS one is "anecdote", THAT one is "evidence") boil down to an appeal to authority that "science" is an institution that can reliably decide which findings are allowed to generalize. And since we watched institutions fuck it up roughly a billion times throughout the pandemic, hopefully we can stop pretending we believe that!
Reminds me of this genius, but maybe apocryphal, marketing ploy from the 19th century: "Warning: the many reports that this tonic makes your hair grow back have not all been verified."
Garrett Jones once said something that I think about a lot: “To a wise Bayesian, when evidence is cheap to acquire, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.” Perhaps this conversation could use some depth by thinking about the search costs of that evidence.
In spring 2020 many people believed that COVID-19 would never get out of Asia, just like a few previous diseases didn't.
Therefore, if you believed otherwise and advocated mask use, the conclusion of American mainstream journalism was that you were obviously a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans.
As an example, look at this April 2020 snapshot of RationalWiki article on COVID-19, and search for "mask". It specifically includes the claim that the masks "in reality will not be helpful against this virus".
It was an interesting time for me, because at that moment in Slovakia, wearing face masks in public was already mandatory. Just as Scott wrote, "because it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread"; and for some mysterious reason, Slovakian epidemiologists agreed with this. So everyone around me was like "we are doomed, people will die, wear the mask and you have a chance to survive", and then I visited some English-speaking websites (not the rationalist ones, but popular sites like Hacker News), and everyone was like "wearing masks is obviously stupid, don't be a sheep".
Then, suddenly the American journalists turned 180 degrees, and declared that everyone who refuses to wear a mask is an anti-scientific Trump voter.
I went to the citation given by RationalWiki for that claim. Quote in the article: "'There's little harm in [masking],' Eric Toner, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Business Insider. 'But it's not likely to be very effective in preventing it.'"
Sure, this turned out to be wrong. But no claim that wearing masks made you "a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans." That's pure invented nonsense from you.
It wasn't wrong. Masks did in fact have no impact in the end, just look at the time series in question. This is why you almost never see numerical claims about how effective masks are, in the same way you do for vaccines. To get such a number you'd need either an RCT but those are nearly impossible to do (see bangladesh fiasco), or to see an obvious and consistent sharp change in the case curve. No such changes are visible, which is why these arguments always devolve into "masks work!!" followed by "no they don't!!". Classically, the latter argument is the null hypothesis and those arguing against need to present the evidence, but on the rare occasions said evidence is presented it's usually some dodgy modelling study or just argument by authority.
Edit: the racism thing isn't invented nonsense, either. Slick videos were being reshared on YouTube in Feb 2020 telling Italians to hug a Chinese person, because refusing to be around Chinese tourists was racist.
In Slovakia during spring 2020, face masks were mandatory and schools were closed. The number of cases was the lowest in Europe. (During the first 6 months of 2020, only 28 people have died of COVID-19, out of five million population.) At that time, we attributed the success to the masks.
In hindsight, it was probably closing the schools that made the greatest difference. Because in autumn 2020 most people decided that keeping schools closed for too long was unacceptable... and since then, the number of cases per capita is comparable with the rest of Europe.
By the way, here is a popular Vietnamese video from February 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtulL3oArQw Maybe if all those woke anti-racists actually listened to what Asian people were saying...
> To get such a number you'd need either an RCT but those are nearly impossible to do
You can do a double-blind RCT and it's been a bugbear of mine for the past few weeks here in ACX comment sections.
Mankind should've done it decades ago with the flu. The fact that we *still* haven't done it is a serious problem.
But, yes, put a few people in a room, one knowingly infected with the flu, and wearing masks of unknown-to-the-wearer-and-tester quality, and see how well they work.
After we understand it for flu, repeat for other communicable diseases.
Nitpick: you can do an RCT, but not really a double-blind one. Participants know if they are wearing a mask or not. Perhaps you could do a double-blind study between outwardly identical masks with better or worse material, but the amount of difference you could have between masks without it being noticeable is likely pretty small.
Did it turn out to be wrong? Does masking (using the types of cloth masks typical of the general public) actually work? Has there been a real-world experiment that shows a statistically significant effect?
I guess what I am asking is: What was it that convinced you that they are effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19?
I think they likely work, but we can absolutely study it in laboratory double-blind RCT conditions, and we should.
Maybe it costs millions of dollars, but the question is relevant for approximately ~billions of people, right now, so those costs amortize away to nothingness quickly.
The data is somewhat mixed, but the latest studies I reviewed on this showed that:.
No mask < cloth mask < surgical mask < N95 mask in terms of limiting droplet spread.
Some studies were used real "simulated" testing in an air chamber with human faces models. Others were based on actual results between states that did and did not mask in Bangladesh.
The West Coast of the US has had mask mandates that are pretty well followed; Hawaii also has such mandates. All of those states are well down in the bottom half for COVID deaths and infections.
"But no claim that wearing masks made you "a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans." That's pure invented nonsense from you."
There is, however, a study about "(Un)masking threat: Racial minorities experience race-based social identity threat wearing face masks during COVID-19" where there is discussion of racism:
"The CDC favored the use of home-made masks, including a bandana, over medical-grade masks for the broader public (CDC, 2020a). Such makeshift strategies might be acceptable for White Americans. Some racial minorities, on the other hand, were left in a double bind adopting the new recommendations: wear a face mask and risk being racially profiled—seen as a criminal or foreign/infectious and subjected to increased surveillance and discrimination—or be at risk of COVID-19.
...Asian people and Asian Americans also faced increased stereotyping and discrimination due to the origin of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. They were treated as scapegoats for the virus and its devastating impact on daily life in the United States. Former President Trump’s use of the terms “China virus” or the derogatory “kung flu” (Nakamura, 2020) reentrenched and legitimized blame toward Asian Americans. Reports of Asian people being spit on, screamed at, verbally threatened, and physically assaulted were noted across the United States, and COVID-19-specific hate crimes were reported (Tavernise & Oppel, 2020). Associated with experiencing increased discrimination during COVID-19, Asian individuals suffered from physical and mental health symptoms including increased anxiety, depression, and sleep problems (S. Lee & Waters, 2020).
...It is argued that wearing face masks for Asian people during COVID-19 primes these historical stereotypes of foreignness, infection, and disease. While the use of face masks in Asian countries is normalized and less stigmatized, this was not the case in the United States at the beginning of the pandemic (Friedman, 2020). In Asian cultures, wearing a mask has long been a signal of illness, worn as a courtesy to prevent disease from spreading to others (Jennings, 2020). For Asian people, wearing a mask, particularly early in the pandemic, could prime COVID-related stereotypes and myths that Asian people were more likely to be carrying and spreading the virus. The media perpetuated this stereotype, often using images of Asian people wearing masks as the “face” of the pandemic (Burton, 2020), actions that drew condemnation from the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA, 2020). During the pandemic, Asian people noted increased attention, surveillance, and the presumption they were carrying COVID-19 specifically when wearing a face mask, mirroring these racial and ethnic stereotypes (Buscher, 2020; Pak, 2020)."
Recommendations on face masks were initially 'the public shouldn't wear them unless they are sick, we need them for healthcare workers'
So I think it is arguable that in the early days, being seen to want to wear masks as a private citizen was seen as panic-buying and taking away scarce and necessary supplies from health workers, so you were selfish and unsociable.
Then mask-wearing became recommended, and the media coverage swung around to "Trump encourages racism by talking about the 'kung flu'" instead.
"College campuses have proven ripe incubators for fear amid the spreading coronavirus outbreak, as shown by a series of insensitive, racist and discriminatory incidents. Students have donned face masks in classrooms, and an online petition to suspend classes at the University of California, Santa Barbara collected more than 1,100 signatures."
Google "before:2020-03-01 covid fear racism mask" if you want to scroll through a huge list of articles just like this one.
Nothing in that article amounts to anything close to a claim that advocating mask use makes you "a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans." The part you quoted very clearly does not say that.
You seem to be construing Viliam's claim very narrowly. I suppose you have that right. Maybe nothing short of a journalist from February 2020 quoting Viliam word-for-word would satisfy you. For instance, the article doesn't say "phobia", -- it says "xenophobia". It mentions students donning masks in a list of "insensitive, racist and discriminatory incidents", but it doesn't specifically call anybody a "right-wing racist", nor does it accuse anybody of "using pseudoscience".
With most claims, you can construe them narrowly enough that no existing evidence is sufficient to substantiate them. And you can also do that here. That's not going to be an interesting or profitable conversation, as far as I'm concerned.
I leave it to readers to do the Google search, see for themselves the kind of articles Viliam is talking about, and make their own judgment.
Most importantly, they changed stances on a dime with no intervening evidence. There was not an RCT published in April 2020 showing high effectiveness of masks at reducing spread of respiratory viruses.
I feel like this is a downstream result of a curious phenomenon in the modern intellectual climate: that we have almost entirely discounted arguments from expert knowledge as invalid, in favor of arguments from evidence, so we have no way -- as a society -- to argue that "a reasonably understanding of the science says this should not be possible".
Like: should masks work? there's no evidence, but it follows if a virus is transported in aerosolized particles that yes, they should help. Should homeopathy work? No, a basic understanding of chemistry and biology says it's absurd. But those arguments, which would be perfectly convincing in person, carry no weight at the level of common understanding that journalism is allowed to assume, so they're reduced to only reporting on the state of the evidence. Hence the nonsensical headlines.
I kinda think that in the far future people will look back on our era and talk about this as one of dominant social trends of the time: that weird time when all arguments resorted to data and no one was allowed to be intelligent.
Incidentally, this is the failure mode that my corporate tech job has. No one is willing to make bold claims about what would be good decisions -- everything is heavily rooted in a sort of ritual of performing data science, which lets us assign value to stupid short term decisions (if we add this popup, revenue increases, the data proves it) but not wise long term decisions (if we keep popups to a minimum people will like our brand and stick with it for years, giving brand loyalty and doing right by our customers).
A lot of the stupid things in tech follow from this kind of decision-making, which as far as I can tell is endemic to Bay Area-style businesses, but not really a healthy way to run a company. I used to work at Amazon and they notably _didn't_ work this way, which IMO is one of the main reasons they've managed to grow so large, because they have the ability -- bestowed by Bezos -- to take very long-term strategies instead of chasing short-term improvements in their metrics.
Huh weird. I'd say it's the exact opposite. Governments, media and academia are constantly making arguments from authority and arguments from evidence are not only unfashionable but systematically shouted down. 95% of science journalism is "according to expert X blah blah blah". Relatively few outlets do any real home-grown analysis of raw evidence and virtually none will write articles of the form "according to expert X blah blah but according to evidence and logic, anti-blah".
Maybe it seems the opposite if you primarily read ACX and other Substacks, but that's unusual. Blogs are really the only place you'll find outsiders picking direct fights with scientific 'experts' on topics within their sphere of 'expertise'.
Could depend on the audience. In the progressive/liberal/tech-savvy/well-educated world I perceive an over-reliance on arguments from evidence, but maybe it's a reaction to the rest of the world having an under-reliance on the same. If that's the case, I guess I'd say the reaction is excessive and problematic.
I'm afraid I don't quite follow what you're arguing any more. Your original post talks about not listening to experts but then your example is that masks "obviously" work because of what aerosols are, which isn't an argument by expert but rather an argument by logic.
Sorry, I should be more clear but as far as I know I can't edit posts on Substack to clarify so I'm stuck with my initial phrasing (or maybe I can? I feel like that's new. neat.)
I mean arguments from _expertise_, or logic as you say: knowledge of how things work, which can be either experts (who know a lot and can explain what they know and therefore believe as a result of it), or laypeople, who can also be experts on things as well, if they, well, are (very case-by-case of course).
In either case I think it is perfectly valid to be convinced something is true by an argument without needing to go gather data on it, and that (liberal, progressive) media largely acts like it doesn't really believe that that's true. It does, you're right, believe in _authority_, but in a sort of vapid and pointless way. So I guess (and I've adjusted my point throughout this thread), I'd say:
* insisting on data to believe anything and ignoring logic = silly but ubiquitous
* insisting authority to believe anything and ignoring data and logic = silly but ubiquitous
* allowing a healthy mix of authority, data, and logic, as appropriate = wise and good, but rare and not common in the media at all.
Ah ha! I see. Well, I find myself much more in agreement with your formulation here than the original formulation. To what extent that was me misunderstanding your use of experts vs expertise, and to what extent it's due to your position changing through the thread, I don't know. But I agree that you do need to balance the different ways of reaching conclusions - people who are genuinely experts and have shown that via empirical evidence (e.g. correct predictions) are worth listening to, and sometimes without even requiring data to back it up, but if they start saying things that are clearly illogical then there's a problem. Or something like that.
"I kinda think that in the far future people will look back on our era and talk about this as one of dominant social trends of the time: that weird time when all arguments resorted to data and no one was allowed to be intelligent."
While I cannot of course evaluate the predictive power of your claim ("no evidence" as of yet NATCH), the phrase "no one was allowed to be intelligent" describes our current social and intellectual climate better than I could have imagined.
I hope you're right about the people of the future looking back on us and seeing us blinded to natural intelligence, but I have to disagree that the public has an obsession with pure empiricism. Increasingly, the public, even the alleged intelligentsia in it, is completely uninterested in any kind of rational thought at all. Everything boils down to rank tribalism- you must support your side no matter how psychotic or even harmful the signals for that side become, and you must hate everything the other side does and openly fantasize about somehow removing them from the public sphere entirely, possibly by violence. Anything else shows insufficient loyalty, which is worse than merely being the enemy.
It seems like Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are competing to see who can destroy civil society in the US the fastest and most thoroughly.
I think you're being way too kind to the news articles at the top.
These are professional communicators we're talking about. If they wanted to convey "we haven't looked into X but our priors on X are high" they could have. In fact their priors on X were low. Or, worse, their priors on X weren't so low but they wanted other people's to be low. They were intentionally using the "no evidence" ambiguity to make it sound like they'd looked into X and disconfirmed it when they hadn't.
As a conspiracy theorist, I find it maddening how I am constantly mocked for my conspiracy theories, even though every single one of them thus far has turned out to be true.
The first problem with your reasoning here is your premises that 1. There is such a thing as an expert consensus and 2. That a newspaper would be capable of conveying it to you.
In my experience, experts tend to live in spaces with very little consensus at all. The misrepresentation of that dynamic by people who don't understand its subtleties is the problem under discussion here.
You're also the guy who claimed to be responsible for getting Trump elected via a new science of "memetics" that you personally invented and kept secret, and also claimed to be responsible for QAnon by the same means, so I'm going to take your claims to be right about anything else with an entire barrel of salt.
It is amazing to me how everyone seems to ignore the conspiracy theories that are actually true. Like Project MKUltra or the century-long tobacco/oil industry propaganda campaign
Ooh, do "linked to" next. As in "red wine linked to heart health".
And there's a special place in hell for "Scientists Find". What it sounds like: total scientific consensus. What it actually means: two guys published a paper.
Yes, "linked to" is the Swiss Army Knife of lazy BS journalism. Sadly there are not enough electrons on the Internet to fully explore what crap these words signal.
I'd be more or less forgiving of two of the headline formulations: "No Clear Evidence" and "No Hard Evidence." Perhaps "No Proof Yet" would be a good phrase to use in the early days.
This post lacks in conflict theory. Feynman once said, "... poets do not write to be understood". Well, journalists write to be misunderstood. While there is no evidence exaggeration of scientific findings is not accidental, it is not.
While it's true that information in the news is intentionally misrepresented, I think the lack of conflict theory in Scott's post is perfectly justified. Journalists who use the phrase "no evidence" to mean "this isn't true" probably aren't secretly conspiring to have readers interpret the opposite. Maybe if this were a top-down executive decision to undermine science in the public eye, but that's a little too conspiratorial for my tastes. I say it's a genuine mistake.
People who used the phrase "no evidence it's airborne" were *openly* conspiring to have readers reach a conclusion of "So I shouldn't buy up N-95s." They admitted to this! Burning trust is the byproduct of lying, not the goal.
>. Journalists who use the phrase "no evidence" to mean "this isn't true" probably aren't secretly conspiring to have readers interpret the opposite.
They're not conspiring to have readers interpret "no evidence" as the opposite of "this isn't true". They're conspiring to have readers interpret "no evidence" *as* "this isn't true".
They may be uncertain, or they may actually think it's false, but either way, they don't want to communicate that. It's conflict theory, not mistake theory.
Less conflict theory more incentive structures. In the current media economy headlines are written for maximum clicks, entirely separate from the content of the articles. So tend to be more extreme or eye catching. This isn't an act of malice its a product of the only currently viable business model for publications, and the ones that don't follow it lose out, and articles with less inflammatory headlines don't go viral so you don't see them
I don't believe this. It's trivial to think of clickbait headlines which work favorably to the right. The reason we didn't see headlines like "don't be afraid of appearing racist--wear your mask!" is that there is, in fact, ideology that underlies the media's clickbait; it's not just there to get views.
A possible counterpoint would be that there is a whole ecosystem of right-wing clickbaiting and you probably aren't seeing it because the algorithm has put you in a walled garden.
Well, all I can say is that you must have an astonishingly high prior that the purpose of science journalism is to inform, rather than (say) to entertain ha ha.
Also...when you say the search for truth is Bayesian, I would have to say that depends on what you mean by the phrase. If you mean the kind of search for the truth that a jury does, or a voter, or a physician listening to a patient's tale of his symptoms in the ER, or that any random Person A does when listening to Person B's remarkable story about what happened last Saturday, then that seems quite sound to me.
But if you mean the search for the truth in the sense of discovery, scientific progress, innovation -- then, no, I would say Bayes' Theorem is of no assistance at all -- indeed, I would say it is more or less explicitly rejected by empiricism, the most successful model for scientific progress the world has ever known, as a throwback to medieval scholasticism -- the belief that the quality and persuasiveness of the argument is the best way to decide the truth of a proposition. In the modern era we *train* our scientists to question what seems certain, to doubt theoretic arguments, most especially those that are personally persuasive. (Feynmann wrote a great essay about this which I cannot find unfortunately.)
Personally, I've never known someone to make a genuine (nontrivial, scientific) discovery thinking along Bayesian lines, because those lines always point to the conventional wisdom. Genuine discovery is a black-swan thing, and you only get there by black-swan thinking -- by, among other things, resolutely ignoring the reasonable priors and wandering off into "crazy" directions. Suppose air is *not* just one element, as every reasonable chain of logic and all the evidence suggests it is? What if time is *not* the same for every observer, batshit crazy as that seems at first? What if RNA could catalyze chemical reactions all by itself -- somehow?
I think there really is (perhaps unfortunately) a surprisingly thin wavy line between original thinking that leads to powerful discovery and irrationality, paranoia, UFOlogy, even madness, which has been noted more than once among the most creative people. How you tell the difference I couldn't really say, being neither mad nor profoundly creative.
I don't think that this is quite right. People who made those novel discoveries explored "crazy" directions precisely because conventional theories weren't able to adequately explain every empirically observed oddity. If theories already had perfect explanations for everything there would've obviously been no point. So the failure to adhere to "bayesianism" wasn't with them, it was with those who didn't give due weight to counter-evidence to those theories.
That said, some counter-evidence by itself doesn't grant you the necessary insight required to create a new, better framework. The skill allowing to do this is among the rarest and most difficult to transmit, and saying "just use bayes lol" clearly misses the point.
The purpose of almost all journalism is to make money and that means getting clicks, not specifically entertaining or informing but attracting attention. Because these are private companies and this is how they make their money. (I say almost all because there are public funded media in some countries, others run by foundations, or at a loss by wealthy owners. Which have a different set of incentives)
Modern discoveries in physics (eg the Higgs, gravitational waves, etc) are all made via a Bayesian process of evidence collection to investigate a theory-informed prior. This is why ideas like a "five sigma signal" exist - because at this level the empirical process is necessarily statistical. Theoreticians tells us something should probably exist, then experimentalists collect a bunch of data over a bunch of trials, which then goes through a statistical process to determine whether the thing actually exists.
Part of this, to me, seems to be due to science institutions being unwilling to give thoughtful priors in the face of no newly generated evidence, to science communicators. When a science communicator queries an institution, if there was no new evidence generated, they simply return "no evidence."
We seem to be in this strange world, where the only way to get credible priors, absent new evidence, is to find the handful of smart scientists on twitter, who are willing to deal you some blackmarket priors.
Err, your picture looks like a lot of things I completely agree with (transmission from kids, mask wearing being useful) and then the huge claim that Covid is a lab escape, which generally I only see in anti-vax circles who are taking horse dewormer voluntarily and prophylacticly. I know it wasn’t the point of the post, but if you currently believe covid is a lab escape, I’d be fascinated as to why. And I think it’s quite distracting from your argument to have it in there as an example.
1. At this point the hard evidence for lab escape is drastically stronger than the other way around. There's lots of it but to me, the leaked grant proposals where EcoHealth/WIV were requesting money from DARPA to do risky GoF experiments on bat coronaviruses from Chinese caves, were pretty much a textbook example of the sort of experiment that could have created SARS-CoV-2. But there's also the US intel about people falling sick with COVID symptoms in autumn 2019, the sudden spikes in PCR equipment acquisition, the extremely guilty-looking behaviour exhibited by the Chinese authorities like suddenly pulling WIV databases offline in September 2019 - months before COVID was known to the world, and then refusing to put them back etc.
2. Your prior on "a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a coronavirus lab came from that lab" should be extremely high. Especially when learning that the French, who built it, already knew it was using inadequate safety levels, and that lab escapes happen all the time.
Even without hard evidence like the grant proposal the most likely thing here is an escape. The evidence just tips the scales even harder.
> Your prior on "a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a coronavirus lab came from that lab" should be extremely high.
That's not your prior, that's your posterior probability. The original priors are the likelihood that a new coronavirus like this would escape the lab in a given timeframe (before knowing that there is a new coronavirus epidemic), and the likelihood that a new coronavirus would jump from animals to humans in the same timeframe. These may then be adjusted based on various information, like the fact that the new virus surfaced in Wuhan.
The problem is that I can't even put a handle on the order of magnitude of the original priors, so even if there are pieces of evidence in favor of lab leak, I have no idea what the posteriors will look like.
> But there's also the US intel about people falling sick with COVID symptoms in autumn 2019
How does that change the relative likelihood of it being a lab leak vs. a natural zoonotic virus?
I should have mentioned that the people falling sick were lab workers.
Is it a posterior? The prior for a lab leak of any virus should be quite high given the long history of such leaks happening. I agree that the prior on zoonotic crossover should also be taken into account, but surely there's a geographical component to that too, that is, it's not the prior of an animal jump but the prior of an animal jump in the same place as a coronavirus lab. Which is surely vanishingly tiny.
Scott writes ‘ Every single one of these statements that had “no evidence” is currently considered true or at least pretty plausible.’ In my current social circles, nearly all of the statements are considered true, and lab escape covid is considered up there with anti vax and other conspiracy theories. It just looked like a really odd outlier in an otherwise really boring list.
That says a lot about your social circle, and much less about Scott's writing and/or the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis. There is in fact a great deal of evidence - not *proof*, but definitely evidence - to support the lab leak hypothesis, and it is broadly considered credible by nonpartisan experts and informed amateurs.
Which makes it a very good example of what Scott is talking about. For the motte of "evidence means scientific proof in an RCT or peer-reviewed journal article", journalists and other thinkfluencers can honestly say "there is no evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis" if that's what their audience wants to hear and will get them the most clicks. And thus their audiences can feel smugly certain in their superior knowledge. Meanwhile, people rationally evaluating all the evidence that isn't peer-reviewed journal articles and RCTs (but is still evidence), can reasonably come to the conclusion that the lab leak hypothesis may be true or even that it is probably true, but we'll probably never be certain the way all the people in your social circle are certain of their belief.
I don't know the likelihood of lab leak vs. natural cause, but what does seem to be clear at this point is that in the early stages of the pandemic, the media decided that it was definitely not a lab leak (to the point of social media companies censoring claims that it was) with very close to zero evidence either way.
When you say "horse dewormer" I assume you're talking about Ivermectin. Here is the NIH introduction:
"Ivermectin is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved antiparasitic drug that is used to treat several neglected tropical diseases, including onchocerciasis, helminthiases, and scabies.1 It is also being evaluated for its potential to reduce the rate of malaria transmission by killing mosquitoes that feed on treated humans and livestock.2 For these indications, ivermectin has been widely used and is generally well tolerated...."
Your pejorative "horse dewormer" tells me that you are either unaware that doctors have prescribed drugs "off label" for many years, and that two large states in India have had remarkable success with using Ivermectin, or you don't particularly care that many thousands of lives have been lost unnecessarily. Check the stats from India yourself if you dare. C19study<dot>com is a website that aggregates studies of treating Covid with various drugs. Check out the results for Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. HCQ has proven to be quite effective when given early enough to avoid the dangerous Cytokine storm, particularly when given with zinc or Azithromycin. Ivermectin I've already addressed. Since Ivermectin is "generally well tolerated", and no treatment protocol ever emerged from CDC or NIH, why in the world get between doctors and their patients when lives are at stake?
"..The 20th-century logic of evidence-based medicine, in which scientists pursued the goals of certainty, predictability and linear causality, remains useful in some circumstances (for example, the drug and vaccine trials referred to above). But at a population and system level, we need to embrace 21st-century epistemology and methods to study how best to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability and non-linear causality.."
"... philosophical contrasts between the evidence-based medicine and complex-systems paradigms. Ogilvie et al have argued that rather than pitting these two paradigms against one another, they should be brought together .."
"Nonlinear causality is a form of causation where cause and effect can flow in a bidirectional fashion between two or more elements or systems. The essential characteristic of nonlinear causality is the idea of feedback that an effect can create a cause, but equally, this cause can then feedback to create an effect in the first system. Nonlinear causality can be contrasted with linear causality where the direction of affect flows in a unique direction. Nonlinear causation leads to a number of important outcomes that are not possible when considering more simple circumstances of linear causality. Nonlinear causality can lead to self-reinforcing or self-amplifying processes through feedback, thus allowing for disproportionality between initial cause and final effect.
Feedback seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to understand in the context of usual, "evidence-based", "effects follow causes" types of science. There's quite a gap between "object A affects object B, and object B affects object A", which run-of-the-mill first-year undergrad physics deals with regularly; and quasi-esoteric claims about "effects creating causes".
That we can model feedback at all may come as a surprise to someone for whom the mathematical complexity of science does not span beyond computing percentages, but it's not anything new under the sun of empiricism.
And I definitely don't see how it has anything to say about things being "evidence-based".
Ohhh KEGG, that brings some nice memories back! I had to use it while taking a detour from physics into a metabolomics lab, for a couple of years. We were working on software to do "autodiscovery" of metabolic pathways as sort of "small deviations" around the established ones.
Definitely lots of non-trivial feedback going on in the metabolism. I think the field was a bit late to the "just throw computing power at it" party, but it's catching up nicely. And I can promise these people have a thing or two to teach to anyone saying "reductionism bad, complex systems magic".
Non-linear causality is a combination of false characterizations of traditional understandings of causality accompanied by examples of physical events that are difficult to analyze mechanically, by unjustified assertions that this difficulty is a failure of traditional understandings of causality, and by hand-wavy claims that some other notion of causality would solve the "problem".
"Maternal kissing of boo-boos confers no benefit on children with minor traumatic injuries compared to both no intervention and sham kissing. In fact, children in the maternal kissing group were significantly more distressed at 5 minutes than were children in the no intervention group. The practice of maternal kissing of boo-boos is not supported by the evidence and we recommend a moratorium on the practice."
This isn't bad communication, it's a deliberate tactic. The aim is to make certain claims look bad and their proponents crazy - using the same language to describe the case for alien abductions and a lab origin of the coronavirus is a feature, not a bug. Looked at positively, it's an attempt to curate and shape the debate and lead their audience away from misinformation.
Of course, the information environment around coronavirus has been far more fast-moving than the media is used to, so it just reveals them for the toads they are.
Any hypothesis that requires a bunch of different competing media companies around the world to coordinate to promote some agenda has a very high prior against it. A more parsimonious hypothesis is that they are individually following economic incentives, and the current click based business model encourages misleading headlines
Fish don't need to coordinate to swim in a school. Birds don't need too coordinate to fly in a V. Independent agents with similar behavioral models that only require them to look at other agents emerge patterns all the time.
ESR coined this as a "prospiracy". Craig Renyolds used it to create the boid algorithm. Football fans do it every sunday to make the wave and to all yell at the tv in unison.
CNN is losing money hand over fist. Seems to me this is an anomaly to your hypothesis. And you have obviously not been paying attention to the absolutely brazen dishonesty of the Pravda media: All of the usual suspects (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, NPR) cut around 500 words from the transcript of Trumps conversation with Zelensky or otherwise tampered with it, giving a markedly different, negative impression of the call.
Were you to actually go back and research the accuracy of my assertion, you might be tempted to call it an "outlier". It is not. It is business as usual, day after day. It's not a "matter of opinion", all of the evidence of what was said or published is right here on the intertubes. They get away with it because either people don't bother to confirm their accuracy, or people approve because it's necessary if the progressive agenda is to be achieved. And with all the "othering" that attends these distortions and outright lies, many refuse to consider other points of view.
Would you call it coordination, if the major actors just experience the same incentives, or most of the people working there share the same filter bubble?
Do you remember the "JournoList"? Have you seen the emails between Fauci and Collins the Great Barrington Declaration launched by three top scholars in the fields of public health and epidemiology, which called for focused protection of those most at risk from Covid? The emails and background can be seen at "https://brownstone.org/articles/faucis-war-on-science-the-smoking-gun/". Key quote: "There needs to be a quick and published take down of its premises." The linked article documents how the emails were acted on by the media.
I noticed the "no evidence" thing this year. I looked up links between cracking knuckles and arthritis
One site that said "no evidence!" had its main example that one doctor had cracked his knuckles on one hand for decades and x-rays showed no change
There have been reasonable studies as well that found no evidence (but a correlation with lower grip strength) but I did notice that 'no evidence' meant something different from what almost anyone would think of as deserving that term
It seems evident that in this case it's a result of a sharp focus on not allowing positive beliefs about something without clear evidence within the medical community but I think it's also fair to say that specific meaning is now being adapted to dismiss whatever beliefs some journalists think ought to be dismissed regardless of just what the full state of evidence for or against really is
But note that even Bayesian reports wouldn't be a perfect silver bullet to solve this problem!
E.g., suppose the Bayesian Times published the headline "50% Probability That Schrödinger's Cat Is Dead". This could mean either "We have no idea what Schrödinger's cat is up to, but based purely on its breed and date of birth the prior on it having died by now is 50%" or "Actually, Schrödinger has just been spotted forcing his cat into a quantum murder box, and according to quantum mechanics there is exactly 50% probability that it is now dead".
Now this isn't *as much* of a problem, because *if* you do your priors right these Bayesian headlines would still give you the information you need to inform your decisions (e.g., whether to bet on Schrödinger's cat being dead) even if they wouldn't really tell you how strong the evidence (as opposed to the prior) for a given claim is.
It is still a problem, though, both because priors are hard to do right (especially if a priori there are literally infinite mutually exclusive equally likely scenarios) and because in one case the probability that a new piece of information will significantly shift your probability in either direction is low, and in the other it is high (but equally high in both directions).
Fortunately (?) it's not a problem that this is a problem because the Bayesian Times will never come to be, so we'll never even get to mitigate the magnitude of the problem such that this contribution is significant. I guess. It would still be nice to have a systematic way to fix this - maybe going a little meta and using confidence intervals rather than just point estimates of probability?
Is there a probability system that solves this issue, and allows me to distinguish the between the levels of confidence in "I think there's a 50% chance this coin will come up heads" and "I think there's a 50% that the next Marvel movie will score above 90 on Rotten Tomatoes"?
Without lapsing into the "frequentist heresy" (which might be a convenient way out even if you only see some probabilities as "effectively" objective), my current best suggestion is to refer both to the probability estimate and to the probability that your estimate will be updated more than some delta in either direction... Presumably my probability for the coin will be very stable (assuming good reason to believe it's not biased) and my probability for the Marvel movie will be relatively volatile. But if working out one probability is already generically hard, imagine two! Then again, this doesn't have to be easy!
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The evidence against the hereditarian hypothesis of the black-white IQ gap in the US was compelling decades ago, it is decisive today. Continuing to hold to it under present circumstances requires a commitment to absurd views about EA heritability in Africa.
The real answer was so obvious that it's been imbedded in popular culture for years.
Bayesian reasoning is great, but it only works if people start out with more or less the same priors. If I firmly believe that poltergeists exist (P(ghost)~=1), then I'm likely to interpret any random tremor or noise in the house as evidence for angry spirits. You could tell me that angry spirits are totally imaginary (P(ghost)~=0) until you're blue in the face, but you wouldn't be able to provide much more than mere assertions. You could point out how ghosts are unscientific, but doing so would merely lower my confidence in science, as opposed to ghosts -- since, from my point of view, ghosts just obviously exist.
Indeed. This is one of the strongest arguments against multiculturalism. People can form healthy societies only if there's a broad agreement on underlying principles, because otherwise, like you say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Of course, the response is that even multiculturalism doesn't work, it's the reality we're stuck with anyway.
I think "no evidence" is part of an implicit society-wide project to make knowledge somehow not require intelligence and common sense and rationality to acquire and apply. Because any time people are using their brains, different conclusions will be reached. Thinking is risky and threatens collective solidarity.
Many in the PMC would prefer to neutralize this threat with rules that can be mindlessly, "objectively" applied, like p < 0.05 or "things are true if and only if there is a peer reviewed study in this list of 'respected' journals", to define what knowledge is in the public square.
Which is not to say they're wrong to want this. The benefits are obvious! But rational folks need to have a clear-eyed accounting of the pros and cons, which may be very context-dependent.
If one wanted to be less charitable (and I do), One would argue some lazy/dishonest writers use this phrase to launder weak claims by giving them the same wording as strong claims.
//Well, because it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread.//
Seat belts save the lives (and time) of car occupants at the cost of the lives of pedestrians. It's probably a good (ie more net lives saved than lost) but immoral (ie cost born by innocent bystanders to benefit the cost producers) trade off. But it doesn't deserve snearing dismissal.
I was being facetious, not partisan. Tullock's spike would kill a large swath of the population (because it's a terrible idea). This would reduce overpopulation, reduce climate change and reduce voting fraud(all because there are just fewer people alive).
As a pilot and driver of a sports car, I feel quite uneasy without my seatbelt buckled. This is anecdotal, but there have been several news items from my neck of the woods where multiple people were in an automobile accident, the buckled in lived, and the unsecured died (one went from the back seat through the windshield and impacted a tree).
I have a RAT oriented colleague doing transport safety research. He once suggested improving road safety by mandating putting a large spike on the steering wheel and outlawing seat belts in the driver's seat.
Did you read the intervening comments? The point is that requiring an intervention to be more effective than any degree of risk compensation it might deter, is a way to dismiss all imperfect interventions (seatbelts....).
Oh, no, I didn't read the intervening comments. I'm illiterate and very stupid, you see.
You should unfuck your tone. It's exceptionally condescending.
Requiring an intervention to be more effective than the risk compensation it actually does deter is not unreasonable or unserious. It is particularly important to consider when the effect of the intervention is likely to be very small or conditional, and when it's not obvious whether or not it's working.
I am responding 1 more time to clarify my understanding of your position and my reason for my response:
Your initial statement was an objection to the idea that masks obviously have some effect (due to reduced spread of droplets) because, "only if there is no risk compensation."
This reads as you believing that 100% of the people who wear masks would take risks that fully outweigh the benefit of the masks. I fully believe that this is an unserious conjecture. If this was not your intent, then you might want to reword your initial statement.
The effect size for surgical masks is so small that almost any level of risk compensation overwhelms it completely, and it seems particularly prone to risk compensatory behaviour.
FWIW I've read an article that claimed that the oil of a specific chinese snake reduced inflammation. I don't recall whether the claim was that it needed to be topical or consumed.
Given that, "snake oil" seems to me to be sort of "misrepresented traditional medicine used out of context, and with fradulent ingredients". I often think that this more nuanced meaning would make the common uses of the term "snake oil" more meaningful.
Still...there is reasonable evidence that snake oil works, if you choose the proper snake, and if it's really snake oil, and if you want to reduce inflamation (possibly of the joints...I believe that it was topical, I just can't remember the article well enough to assert it). But those details tend to get lost in the shuffle.
Snake oil is a reference to a specific historical practice of fraudulent medical peddlers selling bottles of amazing 'cure-alls' that (if you were lucky) had a bunch of stimulants or alochol or (if you were unlucky) toxic substances. Its an American-specific historical context. (sorry if you already new this, couldn't tell from your comment or not).
This fraudulent product was sold as Snake Oil sometimes. Some historians aledge that this was to help it sell with the the Chinese immigrant laborers that were working on the railroads at the time, but I think that's a pretty big stretch.
Yes, but I think his point was that real snake oil may have had health benefits that have been lost in the condemnation of fake snake oil hucksters. Those hucksters were trading on the genuine reputation of snake oil, but ended up completely flipping the preception of snake oil through their duplicity. Therefore, the blanket assumption that "snake oil" is disreputable is not necessarily factually/scientifically correct, even if most laypeople's and scientists' priors are "snake oil bad."
Suggesting that scientists and journalists are merely confused is a very charitable interpretation of their motives. The message of all those articles, the party line that everyone's dutifully repeating is "Do not panic, do not change your behaviour and especially do not buy any N-95s, we need those for ourselves".
When a bunch of people who later admitted to a goal of "prevent the public from buying up the supply of masks" said "no evidence that it's airborne", we should consider the possibility that they weren't confused about modeling the world and it was not a coincidence that their misleading word choice aligned perfectly with their goals.
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
IIRC there were some pre-COVID studies that showed masks in the general public weren't very effective because the general public is bad at wearing masks properly (as you can witness if you go to any crowded place with a mask mandate). But as the pandemic wore on, the theory instead became "any mitigation is better than no mitigation" - even if some people wear masks on their chin and others forget to wear them and others wear scarves that are barely better than nothing, you still have some effect at the population level.
> This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.
I've been saying for years that most science journalism is borderline trash, sometimes even when the journalist in question has training in science. The pandemic has brought in all kinds of journalists that haven't a lick of trained in science so you can guess how my opinion has shifted.
> You read “no evidence of human-to-human transmission of coronavirus”, and then a month later it turns out such transmission is common. You read “no evidence linking COVID to indoor dining”, and a month later your governor has to shut down indoor dining because of all the COVID it causes.
This has been happening for years. People read headlines about studies claiming one thing about fat, cholesterol, sugar, or what have you, and then a week later they see a headline claiming the exact opposite. I think this is a big reason why there's so much lay person distrust in science.
Scientists have only compounded this by not taking the replication crisis much more seriously.
> Here we should reject journal articles because they disagree with informal evidence!
I'm not sure I count that as informal evidence. If anything, mechanistic explanations are more formal than observational data. In any case, "knowledge" has to be logically consistent, so what we have are two sets of conflicting evidence, only one of which I think counts as "knowledge".
> But I think the most virtuous way to write this is to actually investigate.
Sadly a lost art in today's journalism. I was reading recently about how all of the journalists who were groomed in environments in which facts were important, and how to investigate and report those facts in a balanced way have aged out. They have been progressively replaced by social media-driven pseudo-journalists that aren't much interested in objective truth so much as "my truth".
I really appreciate this post though, the problems of journalism are legion but this might just be a good starting place for change.
"Investigative journalists" are who I was thinking of mainly, but even so-called reporters have lost the plot. Like that hilarious clip that made the rounds of the CNN reporter describing peaceful protests while fires burned behind him.
I don’t think journalists, as a rule, are confused. We write stuff that we know editors will like and use, so they'll pay us and our children won't starve. It's option 2 throughout, it's clear that "there's no evidence for" in the trade essentially means "only anti-science Trump supporters believe that." I think Scott knows this, but he's being nice and giving us journalists the benefit of the doubt.
"We are uncomfortable with this assertion and since no one has looked into it at all we're dismissing it out of hand"
It's like, epistemologically, nothing can possibly true until someone has gathered data
I saw this a lot with the notion that TikTok might be doing some spying for the Chinese state. This seemed to just make sense but folks who were uncomfortable with the idea would say "there is no evidence for that"
I feel like this discussion is good but it sort of misses the distinction between:
People have studied this and the studies show no evidence
and
There's no evidence because no one has studied it
For example, lots of traditional remedies get dismissed because there is no evidence that they work, but there's also no funding to study them. if a traditional remedy DID work even the people who didn't pay to study it could profit off that news
so very little study gets done
is that the same as a case where real researchers have actually checked and found no evidence?
Lots of studies have been done on lots of traditional remedies. Just search for whatever remedy you are interested in and some key term like "clinical study".
Haha I literally opened the FT to a headline saying there was "No evidence" that Omicron was less severe, immediately got annoyed that they weren't more clear, then found this in my email.
I read Scott's post first and then saw the FT article. I initially disagree with Scott that journalists were using "No Evidence" to mean "very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet". Seems like they were using it to mean "Don't believe that ...". But this FT article does explicitly say "casts doubt on the hopes of some experts, based on reports from medics in South Africa". They are mentioning evidence right there -- "reports from medics".
According to Scott's article, journalists use "no evidence" to mean anything from "very likely false" to "we don't know", not "very likely true". (Where he says journalists mean something like "very likely true", he means the negation of the claim there is "no evidence" for, if I understood correctly.)
I’m a bit more cynical - it seems like 90% of the time, “no evidence” in an article basically means “I, the author, want this to be false but I don’t actually have (or can’t be bothered to find and communicate) an opposing fact to refute it”. I see mostly two flavors:
1) “No evidence Omicron is less deadly” - there is literally no strong evidence one way or the other, but the author wants to give the impression that “Omicron is less deadly” is emphatically false.
2) “Donald Trump said, without evidence, that…” - an isolated demand for rigor. Politicians of any stripe rarely give citations for their claims, whether they are well founded or not. Tacking “without evidence” to the claim, without citing opposing evidence, is basically a throwaway line to discredit the statement without going to the effort to refute it (if it is indeed refutable!) and tends to be isolated to statements the author opposes.
In defense of the "Trump said without evidence" thing, when Trump made claims there was frequently no evidence of the claim *anywhere*. Your framing implies that Trump's only failure was failing to cite his sources, rather than bluntly lying about things.
You mean that the mainline "journalists" didn't use "without evidence" when Biden said his Build Back Better bill would cost nothing when the CBO had scored it otherwise? I wonder why they didn't use "without evidence" in this case. Things that make you go hmmm.
Beware also the ever-popular argument from ignorance.
"Just because we have no evidence that Donald Trump is not Mickey Mouse wearing a disguise just means we need to look harder! In the meantime, we can safely assume that Trump in fact has big black ears and also a tail. Say, has anyone ever seen Trump and Mickey in the same room together?
I hate to do self-promotion, but I made similar points in February to address people who were saying "we don't know how well AstraZeneca works in US populations / the elderly", "we don't know how well NovaVax works", etc because of a lack of Phase III RCT data. People were ignoring all the other strong reasons to believe those vaccines would work (in particular immunogenicity studies).
>I challenge anyone to come up with a definition of "no evidence" that wouldn't be misleading in at least one of the above examples.
**Evidence:**
- A verifiable and compelling reason to believe that something is true
**No Evidence:**
- Lack of a verifiable and compelling reason to believe that something is true.
**Parachutes:** People die when the fall long distances. We can come up with many examples of this. It will be relatively hard to find examples of people who have jumped from a high distance who have not died(without a parachute). People who use parachutes may die sometimes when something goes wrong, but they die at drastically lower rates than people who do not use Parachutes. This may not be formal scientific evidence, but it is a reason, we can verify it, and it is also compelling.
**Aliens:** Individual reports of abductions may be a "reason" per-se to believe in abductions, but as far as I know, none of them have been compelling, and we can verify that they did claim to be abducted, but we can't verify that they're telling the truth. Now if someone got abducted, and a lot of people saw it, and if it was caught on video, it would be compelling, and we would have verifciation of the event, and if we had such an event then perhaps belief in alien abductions would be the norm. If people did get abducted hundreds of times, then you might expect there to be more witnesses if such a conspicous event occured, but there aren't. A witness in the area who saw nothing is a sort of evidence that a particular abduction didn't happen.
**Homeopathy:** "No evidence" doesn't really apply here. It's just that the evidence opposed to it is even stronger. You did acknowledge that the understanding about water, chemicals, and immunology counted as informal evidence against homeopathy working. I think it's a mistake to assume that evidence from jouranal articles must always be stronger or informal evidence, or vise-versa. Maybe if you keep doing the formal study and it keeps showing the same results, it could get there. I have a hard time believing that those 90 studies the only studies on homeopathy out there. Do any studies show that it doesn't work? Do studies that show that it doesn't work tend to be better at getting replicated than those that show it does? I'll admit that I haven't personally done a meta-alalysis on homeopathy studies, but If I did and found that the positive results outweigh the negative ones, than I may actually have to revise my opionion on the practice.
**Henry VIII's Spleen:** We have verifiable and compelling evidence that Henry VIII was a human. We know who his parents were, we know where he was born. we also know what he looked like, and he looked like a human. I'm assuming that we have verifiable and compelling evidence that humans have spleens. I don't feel like checking right now. But if you'd like to contest this go ahead. Via Modus Ponens, that works out to verifiable and compelling evidence that Henry VIII had a spleen.
"There have been some incredible instances of people falling out of airplanes without parachutes and surviving. Take the story of Alan Magee, an American airman who survived a 22,000-foot fall from a damaged B-17 bomber over France in 1943. Thrown clear of the aircraft and rendered unconcious, he fell four miles before crashing through the glass roof of St. Nazaire train station, shattering it and miraculously surviving, though with severe injuries.
The all-time record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute belongs to Yugoslavian flight attendant Vesna Vulović. She was the sole survivior of a bomb placed onboard JAT Flight 367 in 1972 which saw her plummet more than 30,000 feet. Experts believe she survived by being trapped by a food cart inside a section of the aircraft's fuselage which subsequently landed at an angle on a heavily wooded and snowy mountainside in Czechoslovakia.
Soviet Air Force lieutenant Ivan Chisov and Royal Air Force sergeant Nicholas Alkemade also survived in similar circumstances, thrown clear of bombers in the Second World War before landing in a mixture of snow and trees. Remarkably, Alkemade only suffered a sprained leg after falling 18,000 feet. The following infographic provides a list of known occasions where people survived extremely high falls without a parachute."
So, you know - are parachutes *really* as good as their advocates claim? 😉
Not all people have spleens. Asplenia is a rare disorder where a person has no spleen or a nonfunctioning spleen. In rare cases, it can be caused by genetic factors. Some people think that Henry VIII had other genetic disorders, such as McLeod syndrome and being Kell-positive. Asplenia is associated with poor immune system function. Henry VIII suffered from a leg wound which was constantly infected, which could have been aggravated by an immune deficiency.
The problem is that there is always some evidence that snake oil works. All someone has to do is write a paper that looks "sciencey" enough. Most people won't be able to tell the difference. So saying "Snake oil doesn't work" isn't good communication either.
What would be better is: "Studies overwhelmingly have found that snake oil doesn't work. There are some % of studies claiming it does, but their methodology is severely flawed for x, y z reasons".
The second line is more respectful towards the intelligence of the average person.
I'm not sure I agree with this. In many cases the studies *aren't* overwhelming - I think more studies have confirmed psi effects than debunked them, or at least the ratio isn't too lopsided in favor of debunking. In some cases you have to be willing to abandon studies and go off common sense and expert opinion.
It seems to me that the solution that's really being pointed to here is for journalists to write stories that are explicitly Bayesian - including descriptions of a set of priors, and a Bayes' formula update based on whatever new evidence has been marshalled. The math of the process operates simply enough that you can basically include all of it within an article that outwardly looks like it's written in plain and straightforward English
"Is there "no evidence" for alien abductions? There are hundreds of people who say they've been abducted by aliens! By legal standards, hundreds of eyewitnesses is great evidence! If a hundred people say that Bob stabbed them, Bob is a serial stabber - or, even if you thought all hundred witnesses were lying, you certainly wouldn't say the prosecution had “no evidence”! When we say "no evidence" here, we mean "no really strong evidence from scientists, worthy of a peer-reviewed journal article". But this is the opposite problem as with the parachutes - here we should stop accepting informal evidence, and demand more scientific rigor."
Okay! Obligatory Chesterton quotations that are (I hope) apposite!
"I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality) from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little episode in the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and instructive: the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There are really two stories:
the story as seen from the outside, by a man reading the paper; and the story seen from the inside, by the journalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand through the night.
...That is a little tale of journalism as it is; if you call it egotistic and ask what is the use of it I think I could tell you. You might remember it when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hanged by the neck on circumstantial evidence."
(2) From the story "The Trees of Pride":
"I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been," he answered, "to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories. And yet, in justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur to your sweeping inference. I respect these peasants, I respect your regard for them; but their stories are a different matter. I think I would do anything for them but believe them. Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them, when in the more instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have considered what would be involved in taking their word for anything. Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now; and kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn a witch. No, doctor, I admit these people have been badly used, I admit they are in many ways our betters, but I still could not accept anything in their evidence."
The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then, for the last time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.
"Quite so," he said. "But you would have hanged me on their evidence."
So am I saying "believe everything, including fairies and homeopathy"? No, I think what both Scott and Chesterton are getting at is that (a) there's a great deal of confusion around what does and does not constitute 'evidence' and (b) we apply tests of 'do I think this is reasonable or not?' when weighing evidence - we might not believe the Cornish farmer about ghosts on his bare word that he saw a ghost in the wood, but we might very well convict a man on that same farmer's bare word that he saw him in the wood where a murder happened.
"Be a little more discrimating and a lot less quick to believe all you read" is the moral here, I fancy.
(2) "This doesn’t have the same faux objectivity as “No Evidence Snake Oil Works”.
I think this may be perhaps they do this because there is always the faint chance that somebody may come up with a study saying that *this* particular snake oil does in fact work, and if they confidently run a story about "Auld Doctor McSnakey's Guaranteed Cure-All Oil" is bunkum, then somebody tests it and goes "I hate to break it to you but...", they will be liable for getting sued by Doctor McSnakey.
>Here’s another: No Evidence Vaccines Cause Miscarriage.
Uh so doesn't this fall under "this is probably true, but we haven't checked"? I mean vaccines definitely cause fevers, and fevers probably cause miscarriages, so it would be surprising if vaccines *didn't* cause miscarriages. After all, many European countries do not recommend the vaccine for pregnant women.
Edit: thinking about this a bit more, it seems like Scott is treating science communicators as people who are honestly trying to describe the world accurately, whereas I see them as choosing what to say based on what their statement will cause other people to do or believe. The linked example is not exactly this, but if 45k people in the world die of vaccine side-effects, that's a risk many science-communicators would be willing to take. But they think that admitting this will cause backlash, so phrasing it via "no evidence" is safer. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels . Thinking about it this way makes the early cases make sense also.
It's not even just that people get the two types of "no evidence" confused, it's that people often exploit the confusion to mislead people, as a Motte and Bailey.
Like when people were saying "No evidence COVID-19 came from a lab", a lot of them were saying:
"1. This thing is super plausible... but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure."
while knowing that people would interpret it as:
"2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie."
I assume part of the communication/journalism dilemma here is that most people are never going to read more than a headline about any particular claim. So any nuanced, investigative analyses that can't be summarized as a sentence header above a picture on Facebook is as almost the same as writing nothing at all.
"“No Evidence That Snake Oil Works” is the bread and butter of science journalism."
From Scientific American:
"In a series of later papers, the most recent published in the Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism in July 2007, Shirai and his team evaluated the effects of Erabu sea-snake oil on a number of outcomes in mice, including maze-learning ability and swimming endurance. In both cases, snake oil significantly improved the ability of the mice in comparison with those fed lard." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/snake-oil-salesmen-knew-something/
Further to the alien abduction claims, I once met a psychiatrist who had extracted an implant from the roof of the mouth of one of her patients who reported repeated alien abductions.
Coincidentally, elemental analysis showed that it had the same make-up as mercury dental fillings.
Something really confusing (to me at least) and somewhat common in science reporting (and for that matter in actual scientific papers) is the construct:
I think it's generally meant to say that the study looked for an effect and found none. (I mean how do you actually 'show' no evidence). But it's such a backwards way of saying that. They didn't find no evidence of an effect, they found evidence that there is no effect! Or more properly that the effect is within epsilon of no effect. Or even more properly that the effect is smaller than minimal detectable effect size given the power of the study to the certainty of whatever p-value they used. But I'm not sure I've ever seen that reported like that. It actually feels really close to the fallacy that "statistical significance is not itself significant" in a way.
Consider "Study shows no evidence Ivermectin improves COVID outcomes" vs. "Study provides evidence that Ivermectin does not improve COVID outcomes". Why favor the former phrasing?
**Interesting aside, the first two results of that search for me are a preprint study with the conclusion "No positive RT-PCR result was found in the semen or testicular biopsy specimen. The results from this study show no evidence of sexual transmission of 2019-nCov from males." and a COVID literature review that quotes from a study that "The results from this study show no evidence of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through vaginal sex from female to her partner. However, the risk of infection of non-vaginal sex and other intimate contacts during vaginal sex should not be ignored." Not sure what to make of that, either my search history is a bit weird or google/people are really worried about sexual transmission of COVID...
Yet the positive results of Ivermectin in India have been reported, so unless there was some hanky panky with the statistics, that would seem to me to qualify as "evidence". Of course there are those who believe if it's not a double-blind peer-reviewed study then it's not evidence. But as evidence that is not a valid position I offer the replication crisis.
I don’t remember where I first heard it, and it itself is a somewhat fuzzy statement, but a good mantra for journalist types and consumers of news is that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Absence of evidence is perfectly good evidence of absence, iff you've spent time looking for evidence using methods that would reasonably be expected to work. It's not evidence of absence if you haven't even tried looking yet.
In most of those "no evidence" headlines, the journalists were surely trying to use "no evidence" in the "almost certainly not true" way. It's not a mistake; it's a conflict.
"Maybe it would sound less authoritative. Breaking an addiction to false certainty is as hard as breaking any other addiction. But the first step is admitting you have a problem."
Actually, I have a feeling that at least part of the problem here is due to underconfidence. Saying: "there is no evidence for X" creates a much safer line of retreat than claiming that X is indeed false.
Although, to be exact, the alternative was not claiming „X is false“, but claiming „scientists claim X is false“.
In any case, for me, „Breaking an addiction to false certainty is as hard as breaking any other addiction. But the first step is admitting you have a problem“ is the best bit I have read anywhere in months.
But scientists don't actually claim that something is wrong, do they? We can't prove a negative via induction. So what scientists do is either find evidence in favour of some hypothesis or not. They very virtuously make sure not to claim more than they strictly can. And then science communicators very virtuously say exactly the same phrase instead of inventing their own interpretation. And then this phrase itself becomes an interpretation, an ephemism for something being false, but a very safe one, with huge motte and bailey dynamics where every participant of (mis)communication can plausibly deny responsibility. And all this virtue goes down the toilet when initial underconfidence creates overconfidence.
I agree that the phrase is true and there are people who need to hear it. But for me it rings too obviously true, so much that it becomes borderline expectation of applause. The correct approach to truthseeking isn't being minimally confident about everything. It would've been very easy, otherwise, and ancient greek sceptics would've nailed it. The hard part is separating truth from falsehood, knowing what to be confidence in and what not to. And we can't achieve good f-score by just tweaking the general confidence factor.
I try again „to be exact“, after indeed failing the first time: the alternative to claiming „there is no evidence for X“ (for the science communicator, in Scott‘s essay, in the context you quoted from) was not claiming „X is false“, but claiming „scientists believe X is false“.
And as I read it, the essay says that if you thus neglect to mention the scientists (who failed to find „official“ scientific evidence) then the phrase „there is no evidence for X“ is overconfident, not underconfident. Not because it changed meaning as people internalised the style of science communicators, but because it means (to quote the essay) „there is literally not a single piece of evidence anywhere in the world that anyone could use in favor of“ X.
There are two points of miscommunication in the example. First one, between scientists and communicators where both "haven't investigated yet" and "investigated but didn't find the effect meaningful" cases are framed as "no evidence". The second is between communicators and media consumers where "no evidence in scientific terms" becomes "literally no evidence anywhere in reality".
I agree that second point is bad and is an example of overconfidence. However, even if we deal with it, the main part of the problem will still be with us. Imagine, that all these articles in the headline of the post explicitly said "scientific evidence". What would change? People wouldn't be deluded into thinking there literally zero evidence in favour of some point and then swinging the other way after hearing some anecdotes? Maybe.
But people would still have similar confidence levels for "masks do not help against covid", "covid didn't originate in the lab", "vaccines are safe" and "we aren't ruled by lizard people". And this is really very bad and can't be solved by less confidence.
Notice the absence of a third option: "Unlike the authors of the paper X, we found no evidence that fit within the accuracy constraints of our experiment design; our error bars are xyz. The authors of paper X did not include that they tested the data with <some confirmation test>, which we believe would have led them to reconsider including the data in their study." Now I might not have phrased in the proper journalese, but I hope my point is clear.
Virtuous scientists? From the current state of "Science" they seem to be an endangered species. Politics has corrupted science, as has the go-along-to-get-along attitude in so many researchers. One seldom acknowledged problem is how subjective observation is. The LIGO experiment, which has supposedly "found" evidence of gravity waves, is an example. The choice to include or exclude data points is made by a researcher, then the data are tortured on a super computer until the desired result is obtained. And the self-righteous snobbery of the defenders of this travesty are dismissive of the idea that the results are questionable, much less wrong.
I read an article the other day about the possibility we're heading towards another Maunder Minimum. The article was full of "if this then that", and "this could be an indication of x, or possibly y". I couldn't believe it. Where was the absolute certainty characteristic of the modern science article. I expect the authors to be disciplined, or given the grave nature of their offense, disappeared.
I wonder if instead of "There is no evidence of X" we could just say "There is evidence that X is wrong" followed by the evidence, which might include a list of studies which attempted to prove X but failed. And for the cases where there really isn't evidence yet, we'd just stick with "There hasn't been much research done yet so we don't know if X is true."
If there are also studies that show evidence of X, and those studies are omitted from the paper, then how is that paper not a fraud? Yet that is more common than you might hope.
Sure, but someone could also put out an article saying "Studies show X" while omitting many studies that suggest the opposite. I see those all the time. So I don't think the existence of this sort of fraud is a knock against my suggestion specifically.
Yes, sorry I was unclear. In my zeal to highlight the trimming that occurs too often in scientific papers I neglected to say I was proposing an addendum to your excellent suggestion.
I agree with all that but I'm not convinced this is merely the result of journalists being confused. Rather, I think it's the result of the incentives of journalists not to legitimize (or even repudiate) views their peers see as bad/harmful.
I mean consider a journalist assigned a piece about whether or not COVID might have originated from a Chinese research lab. The journalist realizes that if they say 'no evidence either way' they give a wide swatch of the public an excuse to start blaming the Chinese and fear that it will lead to anti-Chinese violence/discrimination and bad public policy.
Of course, this should be balanced against the harm of decreased public trust in experts. The problem is that responsibility for that decreased trust is diffuse in a way that means the journalist isn't likely to suffer loss of social status or even find themselves feeling guilty. OTOH if they write the article that makes it clear that we can't yet reject the idea the virus came from China and then someone beats someone of Chinese descent to death they have to feel bad and may even find their career at risk.
---
This kind of asymmetry in moral blame is basically the same thing that causes the FDA to withhold probably life-saving medications and overregulation generally.
What an excellent point! What is the journalist' responsibility? To report ALL the relevant facts and let the chips fall where they may? Or to hedge and censor in fear of the potential consequences? What is often lost in the calculation is that predicting the future is difficult, and that the absence of all of the facts may have potentially worse consequences that a complete report. Cynic that I am, I believe the self-censorship is usually in aid of the preferred Narrative.
"No evidence that wearing a mask works" and "no evidence that vaccines kill 45000 people" are exactly the same thing: "scientists" (the media, and adjacent truthmongers) want you to believe that the thing in the second half of the sentence is false. The difference between those two is that the second one is actually false. But "scientists" aren't making the statement based on whether it's false--they'll say it for unproven things they want you to believe and for proven things they want you to believe.
This is not an example of "scientists" using the same terminology to inform you of two very different degrees of proof. This is an example of "scientists" using the same terminology for the same purposes, that may happen to have different degrees of proof, but where they don't care about that part at all.
Fundamental to this issue is the absolute mess of the collection process of the statistics, and the profound ignorance of the population of the use of statistics. When the current number of cases is reported, I want to know for each segment
1. The demographic breakdown.
2. The test(s) used.
3. Which variant of the virus was detected.
4. How many hospitalizations resulted.
5. How many deaths resulted.
6. The comorbidities for 4. and 5.
It would also be helpful to have a true standardized protocol for administering the tests.
The way to write without bullshit is to prefer active verbs. People only pull off these obfuscations by using the passive tense. “There is no evidence” is ambiguous, but “we did X and Y and Z and didn’t find evidence” cuts to the quick. Knowing you’ll have to explain yourself forces you to put in the rigor.
But if we’re really diving deep on “what is evidence”, and “how do we communicate it”, sure Frequentism is laughably wrong but Bayesianism doesn’t solve the problem either. Even Bayes provides no formal and rigorous methods of idea generation or rejection.
Suppose you only have one theory of some data, and for sake of argument let’s say it’s an exponential model. Suppose the true mechanism is actually distributed Pareto. Give me a formal, rigorous, verifiable way to reject the exponential model and replace it with the true model. How will you know that the outliers are the story and that you shouldn’t toss them out?
Science is something people do when they understand the statistical nature of the world and can clearly explain what would change their mind, regardless of how formal or rigorous their reasoning. Newspapermen live in a world of absolutes where they are the authority telling us How It Be. Journalists don’t get any points for saying “I was wrong and you’ve changed my mind”.
I’m sure I’m kicking a hornet’s nest because of the likely priors of many Scott followers, but … I’ve often thought about this flaw in reasoning with regard to the common comment that there is “no evidence” for (or proof
of) God’s existence. To theists like myself, this comment is mind-boggling because the evidence for God is everywhere and obvious.
Those making this comment seem to mean that the existence of God cannot (at present) be empirically proved. But there are many other methods and standards of proof, some of which are mentioned in this article.
Arguments about "no proof of God's existence" have their ancestry, not in persuasive arguments against believing in God, but in persuasive arguments against laws that favored Christian religion over others. If there's no conclusive empirical proof that God exists over Buddha or the Jade Emperor or Inti the Sun God, then laws that discriminate against believers in the latter three purely on the basis of (approximately) "They believe in pagan nonsense, we believe in the One True God" become significantly less coherent.
I have only encountered this argument in the context of modern atheist vs theist debates where “God” is used generically. I am unfamiliar with any American laws that favored the Christian religion over others as this is expressly forbidden by our Constitution.
The Butler Act is a state law, not unique in its kind, that explicitly prohibited any teaching in school that man came about in any way save a literal interpretation of the Genesis account. Before evolution became widely-known, the Genesis account was also taught in public schools as scientific fact.
This is far from ancient history: Kansas was attempting to enshrine intelligent design as the state standard in 2005.
I will also point out that something being expressly forbidden in the Constitution by your reading of it has never stopped the law from being otherwise. Modern readings of the Constitution take it as a priori that "all men are created equal" means all men are created equal- an opinion that was utterly disregarded for, at a conservative estimate, nearly a century of America's history.
True. Neither does your assertion something is true make it true. You said the argument I referenced (no evidence for God) has its "ancestry" in these laws. What is your support for that claim?
FYI: The Butler Act was struck down by the Supreme Court, which comports perfectly with my statement "this is expressly forbidden by our Constitution." Meanwhile, your statement "Kansas was *attempting* ..." does not offer support for your assertion. If something is attempted and fails, my statement is supported, not contradicted.
Finally, I concede that something being in the Constitution does not mean it is regarded or followed. Your example is good support for that claim. However, you would have to show that this was the case here for your claim to be relevant. Otherwise, it's a non-sequitur.
1. I have no empirical evidence for this, but I would say that it's a logical conclusion upon looking at the past and reference you to conversations above RE: how not absolutely every argument needs to be grounded in hard empiricism. I can't empirically prove that I have a mind or free will, either, but you seem to take those as not requiring empirical proof, given that you're communicating with me as if I had a mind and as if that mind could be changed. I perhaps oversold a statement that was more speculative in nature.
2. The Butler Act was never struck down by the Supreme Court- Scopes' fine was waived by the TN Supreme Court on technical grounds, but this did nothing to the Butler Act. Point in fact, the TN Supreme Court said as follows:
"We are not able to see how the prohibition of teaching the theory that man has descended from a lower order of animals gives preference to any religious establishment or mode of worship. So far as we know, there is no religious establishment or organized body that has in its creed or confession of faith any article denying or affirming such a theory. "
(a weasely and insincere statement if I'd ever heard one, given that the law stated "That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.") The case was not pressed further.
The law was never brought before the Supreme Court because it was repealed by the TN state legislature 22 years after it was passed. The fact you speak with such supreme confidence when your knowledge of the material facts is so blatantly wrong, and could be corrected by a single Google search, is very disappointing.
3. "Attempted" is an undersell on my behalf: the creation of new science teaching standards that explicitly encouraged teachers to mention and accept supernatural explanations for the origin of life and man alongside natural ones was, in fact, passed, and was only repealed due to a massive shake-up in the legislature. Once again, no court case involved. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_evolution_hearings
Ha! You're right on both of your first two counts. You totally oversold an utterly speculative statement, and I completely misread the facts of the Butler Act. I will promise to read more carefully next time and avoid errors that "could be corrected by a single Google search" if you promise not to express "supreme confidence" (nice pun btw) in statements that are speculative. Deal? We wouldn't want to go disappointing each other, now would we?
I was going to engage further with your second and third points. (Especially the third, since apparently a single Google search was all it took to help you realize your error, lol). Then I realized we are still off on a digression from the topic of my original post!
Recall that I wanted to discuss the relevance of Scott's article to the claim there is "no proof of God's existence." I really didn't want to discuss your ideas about the origin of the "proof of God" claim. (Although I admit the topic of whether the TN law and the KS law violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution is interesting to me.)
So let's skip to your point, if you have one: How are these court cases relevant to my original point and/or Scott's article?
As a person who used to have a very strong belief in God, I can empathize with seeing evidence in favour of His existence everywhere. Moreover, I claim that it's initially a very reasonable thing to do.
When you've just come into this life, your first evidence are based on your own existence and personal experience of being a mind, which feels completely trustworthy and fundamental. With such evidence it's completely rational to accept some kind of idealistic/spiritualistic framework, be it subjective idealism up to solipsism or objective idealism up to some specific religion.
However, later new evidence start pointing into the opposite direction. You learn about materialistic laws, which seem to be stable, disallow miracles and do not have direct God's will as their component. Why would God make a clockwork universe? Why basing it on math and physics rather than His divine will alone? Why do we learn the nature of the universe from secular sources and not sacred books?
These laws do not disprove God or idealism. But they create a different framework and there is a tension between it and a spiritualistic one. They don't require and don't follow from each other, while being simultaneously true. Maybe there are materialistic phenomena and spiritualistic phenomena? But dualistic approach fails. Moreover, the more you learn about materialistic framework, the more it seems self sufficient, capable of explaining more and more things which previously seemed unexplainable without God.
You learn about astro-physics, evolutional biology and cognitive biases. You get an understanding how our planet, life on it and the of concept of God itself could exist if there were actually no God.
When you get a grasp of reductionism, it becomes clear that your mind isn't fundamental, that it's complex and consist of different parts. You understand how these parts interact and this reveals a materialistic explanation for your spiritual experiences in the past.
As your understanding deepens and there are less and less unsolvable mysteries left, you notice how things which used to be evidence in favour of idealism when they were unanswerable questions become reframed as evidence for materialism when the answer is presented and so obvious in hindsight. And even though there are still questions that you right now do not have answers for, looking back at the epistemological path you've walked, you understand the whole principle of question answering. That it's very likely that these questions too will be answered and that your current ignorance isn't a sign of anything.
You can learn about computability and Kolmogoroff complexity and its consequences to the priors for existence of omniscient and omnipotent being. You can still learn so much more. But already at this point it's clear that there is no epistemical reason to keep holding to the idealist framework. It's no more rational or reasonable with the amount of evidence in favour of it literally approaching zero, despite the fact that once it felt so obviously self evident that God exists.
Or you go in that direction and then return as you mature even further. You realize that science is beset with all the same problems you thought were moving you away from God (e.g. lack of empirical evidence, things that don't add up logically, human cognitive biases) and that materialism offers no good answers to the big questions in life. You realize that you got lost in the weeds of complicated, ever-shifting hypotheses to explain away the clear imprint of design on the universe, and you see the world with the fresh eyes of a child again, one to whom the existence of God is clear and obvious. But we digress...
What I wanted to discuss was how Scott's article applies to this debate, not have the debate itself. I understand Scott to be saying there are many other methods and standards of proof besides the most rigorous scientific kind. If so, and he's right, doesn't that invalidate the common claim that there is no proof for God?
It does, and it also invalidates any claim you wish to make about God being so obvious and real and true and pure and good that anyone who denies it must be blind. I used to be Christian, and now I am Buddhist, because when I studied Buddhist scripture it became obvious and clear to me that Buddhism described the fundamental truth of reality, just like how it is clear and obvious to you that everything was created by the Christian God.
I want to clarify one thing, though. I am not making a brief for the Christian God here. For one thing, that is at least step two in the process of making a claim for God in the generic sense. For another thing, that was not my intention in posting above. I merely wanted to see if others agreed that Scott's argument invalidates a common objection to the existence of God.
If you or anyone else assumed I meant "the Christian God," I did not. I meant the general concept of a Creator, Designer, Supreme Intelligence, etc. As I understand it, atheists are not rejecting the Christian God, specifically, and there are no atheist Buddhists. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That depends on how you define "atheist". There are a small number of Buddhists (mostly American) who see the doctrines of rebirth, karma, nirvana, and other supernatural elements as entirely metaphorical and interpret Buddha's teachings in a strictly and purely materialist light. I would personally argue these people are more like atheists who like the aesthetics of Buddhism, as they are incapable of having right understanding, but many define them as Buddhists.
Most Buddhists, myself included, believe in supernatural or unprovable-by-empiricism concepts such as the cycle of rebirth and non-material states of being. Many extend this to beliefs in higher states of existence that, to a human, might be called "gods", whether this refers to occupants of the deva-realm or the Bodhisattvas. These are qualitatively different, but you clearly aren't interested in a lectures on the nuances of Buddhist theology.
Buddhism does not believe in a creator, designer, or supreme intelligence. On the high scholastic level, samsara, or what we would call reality exists due to a chain of dependent origination that cannot be disentangled such that you can point to one thing and say "that is what created the universe", and there is no highest state or highest being that cannot be approached. Even the Primordial Buddha (the first being to attain full enlightenment in the distant cosmological past) is a Buddha. In this sense, one might call Buddhism atheist, as it does not believe in deities that are distinct from humanity in some special way or wield supreme power or a decisive right of morality- the Buddhas follow the Eightfold Path because it is right, the Eightfold Path is not right because the Buddhas followed it. On the lower level, Buddhism does not depend on a particular narrative about the origin of the world, the peoples in it, etc. It depends on the acceptance of the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, which are concerned with what the world IS rather than how things came to this point.
Interesting. Thank you for explaining that. In this context, I don't think it matters if we are talking about a Creator God or another concept of a deity/deities. The "no proof" argument would apply equally to all metaphysical beings.
Reminds me a bit of the book War and Chance, in which the author argued that instead of saying thing like "We have no evidence the Soviets are placing missiles on Cuba", generals and intelligence analysts should just give a probability like "There is a 5% chance the Soviets are placing missiles on Cuba".
"There is a 5% chance COVID-19 will spread from person to person" is a statement much more useful to policymakers than "There is no evidence that COVID-19 spreads from person to person".
Certainly, if you are going to talk about prior and posterior probabilities, it will help if you tell people what those probabilities actually are.
If you want to express how big something is, you have to use units of distance, eg meters. If you want to express how fast something is, you have to use units of speed, eg meters per second. If you want to express how powerful something is, you have to use units of power, eg horsepower.
And if you want to express how likely something is, you have to use units of likelihood. Eg "probability 1%", 10%, 50% 95% etc.
You cannot accurately convey estimates of uncertainty without using numbers to measure your uncertainty.
This was a point noted by War and Chance, as it happens. But even if you used the terms rigorously, why would you use use a lookup table to turn a numerical estimate (for example "10%") into a "word of estimative probability", and then expect your reader to use the same table to turn that word into a range of probabilities which includes, but is not limited to, the number you started with?
Certainly not in order to accurately convey a probability estimate. It would be a lot quicker for both you and your reader, and more accurate, to just say "10%" and be done with it.
Messing around with "words of estimative probability", even in an alternative universe in which everybody knew what they meant and used them properly, can only make conveying uncertainty slower and less accurate.
You expect your reader to use the same words with the same meanings as you because it's part of your institutional culture that those words have those meanings. And if the format allows you include a table with the percentages, but sometimes you're just talking to people and sometimes you're writing for people who think better with words than numbers.
Here is a table of “Words of Estimative Probability” from War and Chance:
“Remote” – 1-5%
“Highly Unlikely” – 5-20%
“Improbable” – 20-45%
“Roughly even odds” – 45-55%
“Probable” 55-80%
“Highly probable” -80-90%
“Nearly certain”- 95-99%
And here is a test sentence: “Option A is 10% likely, Option B is 20% likely, and Option C is 30% likely”.
How would you rewrite the test sentence using the “Words of Estimative Probability” to make the meaning clearer to someone? Who would find the rewritten sentence easier to understand?
I assume you are also advocating that the percentage actually relates to a credible and repeatable process. That would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.
But even if it were not possible, the best way to convey that you are 10% sure of something, is to say that you are 10% sure of it. And not fiddle around with "words of estimative probability" that cost you resolution even when people use them properly, which I gather they never do anyway.
Replacing perfectly good numbers with words just makes everything vaguer and less reliable. So why do it? Surely numbers are not that scary?
This is incoherent. Yes, it's true that evidence needs to be considered in the light of the sum total of previous evidence and of our theoretical understanding. But, for example, for a brief period in January 2020, there really was no evidence of human-human transmission. It was an entirely new and unknown virus. A Chinese study cleared that up rather rapidly.
Quoting a politician (Murphy) saying there is 'no evidence' is not poor scientific communication, it's reporting the words of a politician who didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
And if lunkheads don't understand absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we need to educate them, not stop using an accurate phrase.
Does anyone else really, really want the government to start massively subsidizing media outlets (pending periodic evaluations and audits to ensure accurate reporting)? Surely the reason the media sucks is that you don't have to buy newspapers to learn the news - you can get it from a search engine or social media, which means a lot of media production can't afford quality research to back it, and the version people end up getting is biased.
"a lot of media production can't afford quality research to back it"
I sincerely doubt that. In fact, I think there is better epistemology, better scientific inquiry, taking place at modestly-financed and even free media outlets, and the howlers are coming from very well-paid journos at well-financed outlets. Just as some fine education is taking place in penny-pinching home schools and public schools in poor districts. Not an inverse correlation, mind you, just no correlation. Er, 'no evidence of correlation.'
I feel a lot of journalism is okayish, but not great. And I think covid has made it pretty clear that science journalism is hard. See Scott's article on the phrase "no evidence", for example, or how countries like the US have become so divided on covid policy (despite nobody having any opinion on pandemic management beforehand).
I guess another contributing factor is that for every wedge issue, journalists are kind of pressured into taking a "both-sides" approach.
The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, the one that tends to affect smart and educated people, as if education made people more confirmatory in their responses and more liable to fall into simple logical errors.
This isn't really a verbiage problem. The use of 'no evidence' etc. are simply ways for media to report their preferred conclusions (or those of their masters) regardless of study data.
Maybe you can convince them to use a different weaselly phrase instead, but what will that achieve? They might as well keep using 'noevidence' so that we know when to be very skeptical.
I don't "believe there is a significant number of vaccine-related deaths"; I have no beliefs about the number because the record keeping and reporting for this entire Covid phenomenon has been a confused mess. I believe, but of course have "no evidence" (to keep within the theme of the thread) that vaccine caused deaths are being covered up, but with the suppression of anything that questions the vaccinate everybody regardless of natural immunity or age group Narrative, I'd bet $100 it's just one more thing being suppressed.
The most compelling evidence to me is
1. The fear porn being pushed by Fauci and Dem governors despite the reports from South Africa that Omicron was mild.
2. So far there I've seen an unsubstantiated report that Omicron killed one person.
3. There are reports that admissions to hospitals are up, but I have yet to see anything that breaks the admissions down by demographics, reason for admittance, comorbidities, or locations.
4. From the reports I've seen It's mostly "fully vaccinated" people who are testing positive for Omicron.
4. The lies and suppression (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, CNN et al) about the actual positive results achieved by Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.
If the Omicron variant is as mild as initially reported it's a Godsend - we can finally achieve herd immunity.
“No evidence” means that at this time there is no scientific data to show that the assertion is true, so the best we can do is use related data to evaluate the truth of the assertion.
In the real world, people don't use anything like a Bayesian process to search for truth unless they are required to do so by some sort of formal constraint like the laws governing approval of new drugs, or the publishing requirements of the big-name journals in certain fields of science. In the real world, even in science, people believe something when a fact strikes a chord for them. Perhaps it fits neatly into some explanatory scheme they favor, or it suits their prejudices, or it relieves stress (or, in the case of certain personality disorders, it increases stress), or it has other implications or serves other purposes that they like or are prone to.
Philosophers of science have even tried to justify a version of this pre-rational approach to belief. They call it "inference to the best explanation", which just means, "pick the explanation that you like best".
Not that I mean to imply that the Bayesian process is epistemologically any better, just pointing out that it is seldom used.
It seems that a defensible claim to 'no evidence' relies on a proper formulation of the question that the writer deploys the 'no evidence' assertion to disprove. Just as the real news many undecided people need to read, without saying so, is which news is chosen by editors to not report. Editors didn't ask the question because they don't want to hear the answer: they have the answer they want already.
While you have diagnosed the problem, you haven't proposed the remedy of how to reasonably prove there is sufficient evidence against a particular claim. Studies need to be performed to explicitly rule out the smallest effect size of interest, by utilizing statistical equivalence testing.
I try, when possible, to not say "no evidence". I'll usually say "that study hasn't been done," or "There were studies that showed this didn't work." Part of the problem with this is positive publication bias, so a negative result won't be as readily accessible. I think science journals ought to have negative versions of themselves, so that important failures are widely seen and easily citable.
> Here we should reject journal articles because they disagree with informal evidence!
For homeopathy, we reject journal articles because they disagree with formal evidence in the "hardest" field of science: physics. But also, surely there are some well-powered journal articles saying homeopathy at 10+ centessimal potency it doesn't work?
you accord journalists too much morality in my view. I think they're more inclined to spread fear and uncertainty than to explain and clarify. The objective is sensationalism and stroking of their own egos --rarely is there any follow-up of the same story when evidence one way or the other is eventually uncovered. As well, journos rarely give solid evidence to support their own opinionated spin --other than the spin and verbiage of their peers. The motto is "Never let the truth get in the way of a good headline." Sad.
'In traditional science, you start with a “null hypothesis” along the lines of “this thing doesn’t happen and nothing about it is interesting”.'
I don't think this is true; at least it's not the way the "successful" sciences work. I know it's the Popper story, as then modified by Kuhn, but that doesn't mean it's true.
The way real science works as done by real scientists is a form of extreme pattern recognition: you look at a bunch of disparate items and (after a vast amount of thinking, and internally considering and discarding alternative hypotheses) you propose a "pattern" (eg a mathematical structure) that describes what you are seeing. Other, equally good scientists, appreciate the point, can see how the pattern fits (and doesn't) , and use that to make the pattern better. This, in essence, is what physicists really mean when they go on about beautiful equations, and talk about how it doesn't matter *that much* if one experiment doesn't fit because chances are that will be resolved; the overall pattern works so well that it's probably "essentially" true.
This is completely different from Popper, substantially different from Kuhn, and has nothing in common with the social science/medicine model Scott described. So why isn't it the way science is usually discussed? In one word -- because it is aristocratic, not democratic. It says that the only people who can do truly leading edge science are those few who are exceptionally good at pattern-matching. Any monkey can propose hypotheses and run the experiments (and, god nows, that's 99% of what social science and medicine consist of); but only a few can do what I have described. (And, even worse, the talent of "extreme pattern recognition" goes by another name, a name that must not be spoken, involving the letter that comes before J and the letter that comes after P.)
So: we start with an insane model of how society and people work. ("Aristocracy bad, Democracy good -- anywhere and everywhere". We force science (certainly how it's discussed, even how much of it is practiced, though the hard sciences have mostly, so far, escaped this ...for now...) to conform to this fantasy. And then we're amazed when the machinery falls apart, both in practice and even more so in communication, when those doing the communicating have no freaking clue what real science looks or smells like, only what they were told in some "philosophy of science" class.
:"are hundreds of people who say they've been abducted by aliens! By legal standards, hundreds of eyewitnesses is great evidence! If a hundred people say that Bob stabbed them, Bob is a serial stabber - or, even if you thought all hundred witnesses were lying, you certainly wouldn't say the prosecution had “no evidence”! When we say "no evidence" here, we mean "no really strong evidence from scientists, worthy of a peer-reviewed journal article". But this is the opposite problem as with the parachutes - here we should stop accepting informal evidence, and demand more scientific rigor."
Somewhat tangentially but this is a terrible example and a very common talking point of people who believe in the paranormal. "Stabbings" are things we have many, many independent lines of evidence to confirm the existence of and in this example presumably the specific stabbings themselves have left plenty of wounds, ER records, etc. The eyewitnesses are just making a claim about a specific instance of a thing we already know broadly exists (stabbings) AND we have corroborating evidence of the specific stabbings in question. This isn't the same as positing the existence of some entirely new unconfirmed phenomenon (aliens visiting earth) *purely on the basis of eyewitness testimony*. If 100 witnesses claimed Bob stabbed them with a real plasma lightsaber from Star Wars or bludgeoned them with a handheld perpetual motion machine their testimony would not mean squat in the courts b/c those are things we have no reason to believe exist in the first place and eyewitnesses are a terrible basis on which to hang their existence. Plus they don't even have crazy impossible plasma burns to corroborate their stories! If they DID have crazy unexplainable burns that would open a whole other can of worms but I don't know of any alien abduction stories with corroborating physical evidence that doesn't have a more parsimonious explanation.
A lot of this is just the unavoidable contested vagaries of language. Saying "no evidence" implies no *good* evidence and "good" evidence is always inherently contentious. If I say I have a deep gut feeling or a premonition in a dream that Tom is a burglar it's fine to say there's "no evidence" for that even though deeply felt gut feelings and premonitions and revealed knowledge have constituted a kind of "evidence" for most of human history. Entire religions and societies and cultures have risen and fallen and shaped their entire value systems around revealed knowledge and premonition and visions in dreams. Talk to religious people enough about why they believe and many will eventually say something along the lines of "I can just *feel* the presence of God deep down and that's how I know He's real." By many peoples' working definition that's a kind of evidence too!
There has been a lot of dismissal of knowledge about viruses and vaccines on the basis that we haven't yet proven it to apply specifically to SARS-CoV-2 as it does to other viruses and vaccines (and can be expected to apply to SARS-CoV-2).
Scott, you are my mental doppelganger (but smarter, more educated and more serious). I've been trying (your classification of types of "no evidence" cases was hugely helpful) for quite some time to explain this to people who either "like" posts when it's used incorrectly or in "exchanges" (usually not "discussions") with the "Science Faithful" and the "Science Deniers" (being one or the other seems to have become a huge cultural, mental problem).
This is just mathematically false, as Pearl showed and won the Turing Award for forty years ago! The standard textbook is called *Causality*, by Pearl; i'm sure people have written intro explainers online.
What Pearl showed is that you can tell which causal models are true by checking for particular conditional dependences among the probabilities. Different claims about causality give different predictions about what joint probability distributions you will infer. In that sense you can in principle get causality from bayes.
If anyone else wants to see the deleted comments, control-F "penttrioctium" here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211219013338/https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
Edit button?!
Edit: Edit button!!
Holy moly this will help.
Wanna see this for myself thanks
E: sweet
Edited to add - Joy of joys and splendidness abounds. All is forgiven. I love Big Brother.
Edit: I also wan't to try, I hope you don't mind
I have immediate work to do!
edit again
xxx2222
111
Finally!!!
Headline: "Scant Evidence of an Edit Button"
lol!
Whooohoooooo (edit whooooohoooooooo)
This reminds me of Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor.
Yes! Burdens of proof! Why are we demanding extraordinary evidence for vaccines and not for ivermectin. Why are we “digging deeper” only selectively
Who is "we", and what specifically does "demanding" refer to? There's a fair amount of conversation going on out there.
Don't forget the phrase "without evidence" adopted recently by some journalists in order to imply someone was lying without coming out and saying it.
Example: "Trump claimed without evidence, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense."
"With no evidence" was better than saying "lying" because Trump would often assert things we just had no idea about.
But then, well, [insert Scott's entire essay here].
And when there were reams of video publicly available on the topic at the time?
I think the difference is when NPR sends out "without evidence" they believe that relieves them of the need to actually confront, analyze, and make an argument about their viewpoint regarding the available evidence. Instead, they can smuggle in their conclusion while trying to make it seem the objective truth.
And "rational/scientific thinkers" fall for it regularly. This phenomenon where "smart" people are only smart on a relative scale in comparison to idiotic strawman characterizations (subconscious heuristic imaginations of reality, perceived as reality itself) of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists seems like one of the most under-reported and plausibly consequential things out there.
The academic studies discussing the difference between "bullshit" and "lying" would prove valuable.
Saying someone "claimed something without evidence" is basically accusing them of showing greater-than-justified certainty, which can be true even if it later turns out their claim was accurate. (When it's not just a formal synonym for "lying".)
The implication there is certainly not "it may be true, but it's too early to tell, we need more careful consideration of the issue before we reach the final conclusion" but "it's definitely false, in fact, it's so obviously false that even seriously considering that it might be true makes you look kinda stupid". And when it turns out that it wasn't false of course it does wonders to the credibility.
In the UK its very hard for newspapers to ever call someone a liar.
They could be mistaken or just stupid no matter how much evidence you have that they said something obviously false with a motive to mislead people.
Maybe some people feel more comfortable taking a medicine whose toxicity is well known therefore they demand more evidence for new medicine.
If they were only talking about safety, maybe. But they are usually talking about effectiveness as well, and both were equally new for the new disease.
Well, as a general rule, we require more evidence to support forcing something on other people (vaccinator mandates, requiring vaccine passports, etc), than we do to support letting people do something to themselves (deciding to take a drug that you think is worthless).
Is the actually difficult for you to understand?
Also, there should be a higher bar for "things you do to healthy people" (here, let's have 250 million Americans take this shot!) than for "things you do for sick people" (let's have 1 million sick people take this drug).
Does ivermectin cause 250 times as many bad side effects as the "vaccine"? How many more people will be getting the shot, compared to taking ivermectin? Have you even bothered to think about that?
Or did you just get your marching order "Pfizer good, ivermectin bad", salute, and follow them?
"Have you even bothered to think about that?"
Yes, actually. And for older individuals with functional immune systems it's a standard very clearly met, especially since even if Ivermectin 'works' it likely doesn't work as well as vaccines do as an over-arching strategy. For younger individuals I haven't had time to review the data, and so make no comments.
division of labor
Exactly. Although it's a slight variation (and even worse) because they are playing games with a binary definition of a word -- "evidence."
This article talks about scientific "evidence." But a legal definition is probably most appropriate for most phony "fact checks" claiming "no evidence." Any fact is "evidence" so long as it makes a conclusion somewhat more likely to be true. That includes circumstantial evidence, plausible presumptions, uncorroborated statements, anecdotes, etc. You can argue such evidence is weak or not persuasive to you, but that doesn't mean it isn't even "evidence" at all.
However, when confronted with a claim they don't like, "fact-checkers" treat the word "evidence" as if the words means "conclusive proof already established" and then proclaim the assertion debunked because: "no evidence." For checking facts they like, however, any second hand statement or assertion suddenly becomes "substantial evidence" of the good fact.
I'd say this scam is 15% stupidity and 85% bad faith, but the "evidence" for this allocation is open to interpretation.
Absolutely!
I 100% agree with the sentiment here, but maybe we SSC/ACX people are weird in how we use "evidence?" I looked up what dictionary.com says:
* that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
* something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign:
Maybe some people think "evidence" means "proof?"
Similarly: In the last few years I've noticed headline writers using "refute" to mean "dispute," which makes me crazy. But some dictionaries say "refute" means "deny or contradict" - can I blame them?
If that's your position, you should be saying something much stronger when you want to express something like "No Evidence That COVID Vaccines Have Killed 45,000 People"
Yeah, absolutely.
Some writers seem to be doing a thing lately where they try to avoid repeating a false/low-status/dubious claim when debunking it, but this leads to even less-clear headlines.
"COVID Vaccines' Effect on 45,000 People, Explained"
If it *can't* be explained in a headline, that's a good summary.
But, also, feels like clickbait.
Hmm. Is "this issue is too complex to be summarized in the headline" good because it gives nuance, or bad because it is clickbait?
“Recent popular assertions about coronavirus vaccine safety, examined,” is the sort of headline I would click on, but there are people whose whole job is baiting clicks and they seem to eschew such phrasing, probably with good reason
https://xkcd.com/2551/
Given psychology studies, the correct headline there is "COVID Vaccines are safe and effective".
A lot of people will think that COVID vaccines kill people just by reading a headline debunking the idea.
In "There is no evidence", there's also a bit of a problem with this sneaky word "is". There can be evidence that exists, but has not been found, or has been found but was ~rejected, or has been found but was covered up, and so on and so forth. Of course, this inconvenient complexity of reality can easily be perceptually dismissed with "That's pedantic" or confused appeals to Russell's Teapot, but this is an illusion, it doesn't make the actual epistemic problem itself cease to exist.
Another word that people tend to have problems with is "the", as in "The evidence..." or "The facts....".
Right. A more humble and honest phrasing would be "we", or even better, "I don't have evidence". Doesn't quite pack the same punch though, does it?
It doesn't for sure...but I suspect that is not how reality appears to those who say such things. Personally, I don't think these people are lying, I believe that they are describing reality as they truly see it. Consciousness (and culture, "reality", etc) is to a very large degree a controlled hallucination.
Of course they aren't consciously lying, by and large. Evolution bred us to compete for status first (which is in large part facilitated by sincere and overconfident pushing of our flawed notions), and to arrive at correct beliefs a distant second.
Evolution also bred us to consider our perception of reality to be synonymous with reality itself, and (most) cultures tend to fairly strictly enforce the maintenance of this illusion, at a sub-perceptual/instinctive level.
This might be the case of our perceptions of reality actually having been accurate enough for the purposes of living in the ancestral environment, where you knew everybody by name and (almost) all knowledge was common and orally transmitted.
I disagree, though, that it's exactly what more sophisticated cultures try to enforce. I'd say that they instead strive to create a sort of shared narrative, which is inculcated from the young age and through which reality is interpreted, subconsciously and unquestioningly.
Or "there is no credible evidence", which in fact often boils down to "there is no evidence that I would find credible".
I agree, the “is” further implies a comprehensive search for evidence was undertaken and completed in a rigorous manner
Which hasn't been done of course, and is essentially impossible in most cases.....which is fine, I'm not criticizing that. Rather, it is the utterly brutal inaccuracy of the perception that I find interesting, and that hardly anyone including extremely intelligent and logical people seem immune from this bug. It even seems like there is a process in the mind that id designed to detect and reject discussions of such ideas....which is clearly crazy but I swear this is how people behave.
I don't think that works -- if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors, in good Bayesian fashion, then by definition, nothing counts as evidence until you actually know it. Facts that haven't been ascertained yet are part of the unknowns you're trying to discover, not data to help you discover them.
This kind of demonstrates the trickiness of it I think.
If you consider the scenario of a crime having been committed, and then take a dictionary definition:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evidence
1. something which shows that something else exists or is true
2. a visible sign of something
3. material that is presented to a court of law to help find the truth about something
Let's say an incriminating piece of evidence exists at the crime scene (satisfying #1), but it is not discovered by investigators (due to incompetence or malice) - this would fail to satisfy #2 and #3, as well as "knowledge" in "if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors". So in this case, a Bayesian approach will produce a worse prediction that a super strict epistemic approach.
I don't understand your last sentence though?
I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
The last sentence is just reinforcing the map vs. territory dichotomy here: knowledge vs. the thing it represents. "Evidence" is a relation of knowledge, not a quality of entities in reality. So things that exist, but haven't been discovered yet, remain part of the reality you're trying to use knowledge to represent, but haven't yet produced knowledge that can be used to improve your model of that reality.
> I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
Agree....I was looking at it from the perspective that "it exists (in physical reality) and shows something", *thus it is evidence* - however, many people will claim with complete sincerity that undiscovered evidence *is not evidence* (ie: "There **is** no evidence!!!"). I'm pretty sure we're on the same page but looking from different angles. My main point was that Bayesian reasoning (as I understand it) doesn't take unknown unknowns into account, or at least not substantially (I rarely hear this very real problem noted in discussions as Rationalists are eagerly forming script based conclusions).
I think in a courtroom, when they say "proof" they mean "evidence." While mathematicians think "proof" means "is completely true, zero doubt remains."
And I think normies are closer to mathematicians than lawyers on this issue.
But in science today, especially astrophysics, there is little caution in how things are phrased: "The unexpected radiation emanating from two black holes colliding". Black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, etc. are hypothetical constructs which attempt to explain the observed phenomena, but they are talked about as if there were no question about their existence. Actually there are other cosmologies that explain the observed phenomena, don't require any exotic physics, and are backed up by more than a century of laboratory experiments. But the Narrative is so ingrained that these alternates are considered "crackpot" and dealt with like Aunt Clara in the English Music Hall ditty "We never mention Aunt Clara, her picture is turned to the wall".
Related: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.
Then there is the Appeal to Authority:
From Wikipedia:
"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'
Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." - Carl Sagan
One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[22] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[23][24] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[25] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority,[26][27][24] despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23.[23][28] Even textbooks[23] with photos showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24[28] based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.[29]
There's *something* at the absolute center of the Crab Nebula (supernova remnant). It's flickering every 33 milliseconds, which is enough time for light to travel about 6000 miles, or comparable to the radius of the earth, which sets an upper bound on its size. (otherwise, the hot spot of light causing the flicker wouldn't be able to make it around the ball in time) However, that's if it's rotating at ~the speed of light, which... is a very implausible assumption. If you dial it down to some rotational speed that might actually exist, like 10% of lightspeed, that sets an upper bound of 600 miles across. The equations that capture how white dwarf matter works (which is in a low enough energy domain that known physics holds extremely accurately) rather clearly indicate that no white dwarf can be that small (ie, it's at the point where additional laws of physics start applying).
Also, whatever it is has a temperature of about 1.6 million kelvin (as inferrable via the spectra and a blackbody radiation calculator on the internet), very very far beyond even the toastiest of blue giant stars.
In addition, these sorts of rapidly flickering radiation sources have been found in the centers of some other supernova remnants (like the Vela supernova remnant), and also others have been found in binary orbits with other stars, allowing exact determination of their mass through good old Newton's laws of gravity. Which, again, is well past the limit that the white dwarf equations of state suggest is possible.
And when you put the mass and the radius bounds together (since there are some pulsars which flicker far faster than the crab, which, as previously stated, lets you upper-bound the radius)... For the fastest-rotating one (716 times per second), napkin math says that even if it was rotating at light speed it would have to be less than 260 miles across. ~2 solar masses in a 260-mile ball (which is probably a serious overestimate, since light-speed rotation isn't happening) is the sort of density that... lines up pretty well with estimates of what neutron star densities should be, what pop science says their properties are.
The only authority being relied on here are that the astronomers are accurately reporting the rotation rates, spectra, and orbital periods of these thingies, the rest of the math can be worked out by yourself with a high school physics textbook and a napkin.
I would like to distinguish pulsars and black holes from dark matter. I think the case for dark matter is way way way more solid than you think it is, but doubting dark isn't completely outside the realm of sanity the way the existence of pulsars and black holes is.
Like, for black holes, there's a star at the center of the galaxy that pulls a hairpin turn around *something* at 2% of lightspeed, and via ordinary high-school newtonian physics, that tells you that whatever the heck it is weighs about 4 million solar masses. And we've turned radio telescopes across earth on that thing and *taken a direct picture of the event horizon*.
IT'S OVER.
Thank you for your detailed reply. In Plasma Cosmology the object at the center of galaxies is a plasmoid. Oscillating resonant circuits explain very well the behavior of pulsars. Birkeland currents are a reasonable explanation of the rotation of galaxies and the fact that the equator of the sun rotates more rapidly than the poles. Experiments in plasma labs have produced results that line up very well with cosmological observations.
The refusal to credit the electric force with any role in astrophysics despite a wealth of evidence is beyond puzzling. I have looked long and hard for a credible falsification of Plasma Cosmology, and so far have not found it. Many people just reject the idea out of hand, but worse those claiming to have "debunked" it distort or outright lie. Understanding Plasma Cosmology would take an investment of a few hours of your time. You would find that it all hangs together.
LOL of course the guy that uses astrophysics as their example of bad science is the electric-universe conspiracy theorist. You're not that guy, guy. There are examples of actual bad science but I doubt you'll ever find it with those abilities.
If you actually looked at the data you might change your mind. The standard model has so many infirmities if it was a dog they'd have to put it down. Black holes are metaphysics, not physics. Same with neutron stars, dark matter, etc. They are crutches propping up the standard model with zero experimental evidence. The 80 year search for dark matter has yielded nothing. Rather than dark matter, I propose that it's Giant Space Monkeys riding Giant Space Unicorns herding the galaxies towards the Cosmic Railhead. This is functionally equivalent to the dark matter, dark energy phantasm, only the silliness is more obvious. Can you imagine Newton, Galileo, Maxwell, or Rutherford putting up with the lack of rigor exhibited by the Big Bangers? I can't either.
The value of any theory is its ability to predict outcomes. The predictions made by EU physicist Wal Thornhill before the Deep Impact mission to Tempel 1 proved to be correct, while the mission scientists had the usual collection of "unexpectedly" remarks.
This is my pet peeve about dictionaries. They only tell you how a word is *similar* to other words, not how a word is *different*. But differences *matter*.
My other pet peeve about dictionaries is that they lack information about syntax: "he stops eating" is different from "he stops to eat", but "he starts eating" means the *same* thing as "he starts to eat". I don't know of any dictionary that explains things like this. Another example: put. Put is a ternary verb; it requires three arguments, unlike normal transitive verbs that require two. Merriam-Webster simply describes it as "transitive". "throw" is also transitive: "He throws the ball", but *"he puts the ball" is invalid; instead "he puts the ball in the bag".
_Garner's Modern American Usage_ is terrific and comes *kind* of close to what you're wishing for, in terms of giving information about the idiosyncrasies and particularities of various words. It doesn't contain the 'stops to' example (I checked) but I strongly suspect it contains an entry for the *category* of things you're talking about; I just don't know the name of that category.
It seems like what you're looking for is higher level than a dictionary and lower level than a usage guide, though. I don't have a copy of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary anymore, but it does extend a little ways into the territory your wishing for, certainly much further than any other dictionary I'm aware of.
"you're wishing for"; well, that's a particularly awkward comment for an error like that -- speech to text, I swear it.
Good lord, I'd forgotten just how comprehensive the unabridged OED really is. It has several pages of variations for "put", and very much includes the kinds of details you're looking for. I've uploaded an image at https://imgur.com/a/UKvASc1 which gives the simplest part of what you're commenting on, and they phrase it as "to move (a thing)...to cause [it] to get into or be in some place or position expressed or implied", which I think nicely expresses the multi-argument nature of it (and also points to 23 other subsections of "put" for phrases with prepositions and adverbs). It's really overwhelming, but it *has* to be if it's going to capture that level of detail...
Here's a direct link to that page: https://archive.org/embed/in.ernet.dli.2015.99997/2015.99997.The-Oxford-English-Dictionary-Vol-8poy-ry
As far as I'm concerned, Bryan Garner is the God-Emperor of the English language, and I accept his opinions on all such questions as received Truth. Can't go wrong with "Modern American Usage," and if you're a lawyer, "Reading Law--the Interpretation of Legal Texts" is even more essential
_American Heritage_ will explain the difference between synonyms.
I wanted to write a comment defending the folk concept of „no evidence“ and blaming science communicators for restricting „evidence“ to „studies officially conducted by scientists“ when it suits them (see also John Schilling‘s comment), but perhaps the biggest culprit here is indeed the English word „evidence“, if it can mean both „hint“ and „proof“.
I think the word they are really looking for is "rebut" but it has fallen out of fashion and doesn't occur to them.
It’s an important point - that words can have different meanings in different contexts. “Evolved” means very different things to an evolutionary biologist than to a layperson. I think evidence is very much the same - to the average person, the biblical story of Lazarus constitutes evidence.
“No evidence that 45000 died of vaccine complications” and “no evidence that vaccines cause new variants” are just the same kind of “no evidence” hand waving about possibly/likely true claims that the other cases are. If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution. And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination
[LOL Scott now appears to have edited the piece to remove the example about vaccines causing new variants being false, but it was there originally]
"And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination"
Studies of vaccinated individuals find their non-COVID mortality rate is below that of unvaccinated individuals, so, while it is reasonable to "suppose" this, it is contradicted by the evidence.
I think the only thing we should infer from the observation that the NON-covid mortality rate of vaccinated individuals is below that of unvaccinated individuals, is that our method of collecting data is flawed (or there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for). My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low.
One confounder that always shows up in nutrition research: whatever "healthy" thing is currently in vogue tends be associated with better health outcomes, even if it's the opposite of what the "healthy" thing was 10 years ago.
The reason: healthy people tend to do whatever is considered "healthy" at the time.
Seems like this effect is likely present re: vaccines!
> is that our method of collecting data is flawed (or there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for).
Seems fairly certain it's about group differences.
Clearly incorrect. There are all sort of possible confounders here, some of which are obvious.
People more likely to get the vaccine might have lower risk behaviors in general.
When we compare what is known broadly about the demographics of vaccine takers versus none vaccine takers, this becomes obvious. People less likely to take the vaccine tend to come from communities where overall diet is less healthy, more dangerous drug use, more poverty- heck, probably more average time spent in a car overall.
Right, this is the most plausible version of "there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for".
It would be remarkable if Covid vaccinations provided additional and unexpected health benefits, wouldn't it? If unvaccinated individuals have a higher non-COVID mortality rate, doesn't this suggest that vaccines do rather less than supposed? 'Healthy population is healthy' is a tautology, not a scientific discovery.
Seriously, I'd like to see evidence of this claim, because it's off intuitively to me. For one thing, unvaccinated individuals are more likely to be seriously ill (as in confined to bed) than vaccinated ones, and time spent in bed means you can't die in a traffic accident (a small risk, but a real one considering the number of person-days we're talking about).
I would go so far and assume that literally all vaccines against any disease give you additional and VERY EXPECTED health benefits.
See my argument above.
Or just consider exercise is good for you and decreases all-cause mortality.
That the cumulative effect of exercise counts, so any period of time in your past, you were prevented from exercising, is time that you didn't spend lowering your all-cause mortality.
Having any specific disease prevents exercise. (or having a worse case, prevents it longer)
This comment serves as a good guideline for demonstrating the necessity of psychic hygiene when exposed to commenters
I do not understand, what you mean.
It depends on how narrow you define exercise. Being in bed fighting a cold or flu prevents exercise for you muscles, but is strong exercise for your immune system.
It's likely a selection effect
"My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low."
My prior for that would be fairly high.
If you have a more dangerous disease (cancer, close to having a heart attack, Malaria etc.), where it's a toss-up between recovery and death, a major vs a minor case (or even no case at all) of Covid could make the difference.
And I think that it's reasonable to assume that vaccination would make that difference very often.
[though if you always count Covid as the primary or exclusive cause of death, then we might have a model]
Of course, maybe the side effects of the vaccine could also push you into death, when on the brink. And that would weigh against it.
But iirc, the side effects tend to be stronger, when you have a healthy immune system and are not old. [might just be own conjecture]
My 91 year old frail grandmother didn't notice them, whereas I spent a day in agony after the second vaccination and also with the booster afterwards.
But I'm below 30 and in very good shape. So even if you put me down, there's not a bunch of threats lurking, to finnish me off.
Also a doctor friend told me that getting flu shots seems to confer a general resistance to colds (in her experience). Informal evidence, that. But it seems plausible, if you assume that the flu vaccine effectively frees up capacity, even if you're not particularly susceptible to the flu.
There's something known as non-specific immunity. Some vaccines seem to make you less vulnerable to disease IN GENERAL. We still don't know why. It only seems to function with some vaccines, so it's not some general benefit.
That said, given that COVID has some nasty side effects, it wouldn't be surprising if getting COVID could weaken you and help finish you off from other things.
Some vaccines have non-specific beneficial health effects that boost your immunity to disease in general. We don't know why, but they do.
It's entirely plausible that the COVID vaccine does as well.
That said, group effects seem more likely.
However, if the vaccine killed a bunch of people, that'd be very unlikely.
Classic selection effect because people who get the vaccine differ in other ways (fewer co-morbidities, more health conscious). In fact, people with lots of co-morbidities are sometimes too sick to get the vaccine…because the vaccines actually do have risks
If "studies show vaccinated have lower non-COVID mortality" does not convince you of "vaccinations do not cause mortality increases," what possible evidence *could*?
“Studies show” is not the be-all and end-all of evidence, there are a ton of crap studies out there. Possibly most.
In terms of what would convince me, if all-cause and Covid mortality dropped over the year after we vaccinated 70+ percent of the adult population that would certainly help. Doesn’t seem that’s happening
Basically, you don't understand infectious diseases, nor do you understand randomized controlled trials, nor are you interested in understanding.
Less of this type of comment please. mixtyplyk seems to be arguing in good faith to me. He, and you, both said 'studies' not 'RCTs'
For me that conclusion is strong evidence that those studies have methodological flaws, and/or naive/deliberately misleading authors -- so I'd say those studies count as "no evidence" either way.
why, when off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers that I listed above.
You seem to be drawing your conclusion that the studies are flawed based on the idea they showed causality where taking the vaccine leads to lower non-covid mortality. The studies are not claiming causality, they are showing a correlation. This is basic rationalism 101.
>off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers
If you can think of them, shouldn't the study authors also think of them, and correct for them in their analysis? Or if this is not possible, just, like -- not do that analysis?
If it's so confounded that it's producing a result which clearly doesn't have a possible biological mechanism, then what can we possibly take from it? (Other than "anti-vaxers bad and will probably die")
Also I think that if you look at the demographics of vaccine-takers that are actually relevant to dying of not-covid (age and other health conditions, "living in an old age home" in particular) you will find that vaccine uptake runs in rather the opposite direction that you are hypothesizing -- the point is that *this result is something you should really look into* prior to publishing a study, rather than just handwave it with a single line amounting to "huh, weird -- oh well, we got the result we wanted".
This is a fully general argument to never updating your beliefs.
I mean there's beliefs and then there's beliefs -- "a coronavirus vaccine is unlikely to massively (IIRC the OR was like .3) reduce all-cause non-coronavirus mortality" is a pretty well founded belief.
There's three obvious mechanisms:
1) Non-specific immunity. Getting certain vaccines seems to make your body better able to reject disease in general. Why? We don't know. But it has been observed with certain vaccines, and seems to be a real effect. One obvious possibility is the theory that challenging our immune systems has the same effect as exercise does - your immune system, in the absence of threats, gets "flabby" and less responsive. There's some evidence for this.
2) Negative COVID side effects. You get sick, recover, but have some new health problem due to COVID. This ends up interacting with something later on and killing you. Or your brain damage from COVID messes with your response time and you crash and die. Or whatever. The all-cause mortality risk is known to go up after having been infected with some diseases, even after clearing them from your system, so it's plausible COVID is the same way.
3) No disruption. Getting COVID can knock you out for a week or two. That can have significant negative health effects for a while. Someone dying a few months later because they are out of shape due to COVID or put on weight due to COVID is plausible.
Of course, it could be due to confounding factors as well.
I think you guys are conflating populations and individuals. Those studies are simply saying that, when looking at a population, the mortality risk of vaccination is less than the selection effect. It's a fact that vaccines will kill some individuals due to how weird immune systems are.
It all boils down to the classic "for the greater good" argument, and frankly I don't know the answer. The obvious choice of anyone responsible for a population of people is pro-vaccination. I would say this holds true for the vast majority individuals who, as far as they know, have normal immune systems. This gets more complicated though if an individual has reason to believe they might have a reaction. If someone has had weird immune reactions to other vaccines, should they get the covid vaccine? If someone ends up with myocarditis from the second dose, should they get a booster? And where are the limits of for the greater good? What if there was a sizable population of people who had adverse reactions, at what point is it not worth the safety of the population at large? Moral philosophy is a messy business with massive grey areas where arbitrary lines must be drawn. While I think a lot of the anti-vaccine movement is anti-science propaganda, I think the lack of acknowledgment of this topic contributes to the anxiety.
The minimum would be an RCT, as opposed to a population study.
One where everyone who dies is tested for COVID, to rule out not only selection effects, but also the possibility that some of the "non-COVID" deaths are actually due to undiagnosed COVID.
Preferably a study that shows that the frequency some particular other cause of death is reduced by the vaccine. In all-cause death studies, the signal is usually weak and easily confounded, because even if an intervention reduces a few particular causes of deaths, there are probably many other causes of death it doesn't affect, and this dilutes the signal. An effect on a particular cause of death is more likely to be convincingly large.
The rate of vaccine-induced myocarditis is probably more like 1 in 50,000-100,000. Moreover, the odds of actually dying from it are very small; most people who develop it recover.
There is evolutionary pressure to escape vaccination (as there is to escape natural immunity), but it’s a matter of how much, and how it relates to other pressures.
Careful with the myocarditis thing. Very age dependent.
>>If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution.
How so?
Presumably all the coronavirus currently circulating in the world is capable of mutating into a new variant. Widespread vaccination means that out of those variants, the ones which have mutated in such a way as to avoid the vaccine have an advantage over other variants. It doesn't by itself seem to have any mechanism for increasing the rate of variant production. Isn't the common cold constantly mutating and producing new variants?
Lamba in particular is hypothesized to have evolved in an AIDS patient that failed to clear it in spite of having a spike-protein-based vaccine, which could explain why there are so many mutations in the spike protein. Each different type of vaccine provides a different gradient for evolution to climb, so maybe you get more diversity of variants. [low confidence].
It seems like if you have a diversity of different gradients to climb, this makes it more different for any variant to spread, since it has to overcome new barriers for every person with a new vaccination type that it finds.
On the other hand, in the alternative world where no vaccines were made, everyone ends up with the same type of partial natural immunity (the sort you get from getting covid) and there's still a situation where there's evolutionary pressure for variants to evolve to get past the infection-acquired immunity and infect people again. Only now, once a variant has figured out the trick, it can indeed go on to re-infect everyone, since there's no diversity of different protections for different people.
I've read that this isn't necessarily true for natural immunity *or* vaccines. Your immune system will find an antibody that works and start mass-producing it, but it won't find *every* possible antibody. This means that multiple exposures (from boosters or from another infection) can broaden your protection by letting your immune system find more ways to attack it. Which is why boosters still seem to be effective against Omicron despite it having multiple changes from the vaccine strain.
Natural immunity has an advantage here since it has the entire virus to attack and not just the spike protein, but one reason the spike protein was used for the vaccine is because it's part of how the virus gets inside cells, and therefore hard to change without weakening the virus.
My understanding is that the other advantage of going specifically for the spike is that only the spike and the rest of the outer shell are really accessible to antibodies before it attacks a cell (the rest being encapsulated), and antibodies that hit the spike can prevent it from entering new cells, while other antibodies can merely flag it for white blood cells. So natural infection results in both maximally useful "neutralizing" antibodies that hit the spike, and relatively useless non-neutralizing antibodies to other parts of the virus. While the vaccine forces the immune system to go for neutralizing antibodies.
Where natural infection may confer an advantage is in T cell protection, as infected cells can present proteins encapsulated inside the virus to the immune system, which can kill the infected cell. But it appears with this virus that T cell protection without neutralizing antibodies would mean a mild but symptomatic and contagious infection in most cases.
And I believe your immune system will generate multiple kinds of antibodies even after one shot, but will not be as thorough as if it has multiple exposures. This is part of why you see significantly reduced neutralization against certain variants (in particular beta and now omicron) but not zero neutralization.
Which does make one wonder if covid was lab engineered. The responses against that are about the variance from the likely source, assuming basically a "one pass" round of engineering. But there was a decade long time gap between the hypothetical source and the version that leaked (if that's what happened) It seems like the original could have been "watched" for years to see how it evolved naturally, with different divergent strains being stored to see how they would respond to evolutionary pressures, then when a candidate for gain of function research emerged, they created the current strain.
I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. All the criticism that it couldnt have been a lab leak that I saw was on the assumption that the engineering was all done from the original strain found in caves, as opposed to having played with that version and see how it might mutate under different pressures over the years, THEN doing the direct gai of function engineering.
It could evolve quite a bit if they run it through a series of deliberately-infected humanized mice over years, which is something gain of function researchers might do.
"I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. " I am not. The only surprise is that you are so naive.
Any suggestion or discussion of a man-made origin for Covid-19 has been Officially Forbidden since the very beginning of this debacle. Any scientist who tried to talk about this has been shouted down, silenced, and shunned. Some have reported direct threats re: loss of funding and employment if they followed this line of thought.
To me, this is the darkest poison imaginable. It's by far the worst damage of this whole pandemic. Threatening scientists with the punishments of politics and religion (excommunication is the only appropriate word) shows that our culture has truly Lost its Way.
In all fairness, there has actually been a lot discussion about this in the science community - mainly informal, but still. To the point where I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. Mind you, I am a scientist in a somewhat different area (computer science): but I have friends across a lot of neighbouring and not so neighbouring "hard science" fields, including molecular biological research.
All of them, and in particular those who actually are into viral genetics, see it as by far the most likely hypothesis that someone in Wuhan fucked up super hard (Chernobyl-level), and that Covid is the result. So at least parts of the science community seem to have come to conclusions anyway, even though it might not be very visible from the outside. But as you say, voicing those conclusions out loud is not an opportune thing to do, in a lot of places, which is very worrying indeed.
The political and media side of things is really in a bad shape: there, we seem to have the perfect storm together, in that both the U.S. science establishment and the Chinese state would lose face if it were officially acknowledged that Chernobyl v. 2.0 actually happened. In case you saw the HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl 1.0 accident: remember how the Communists tried to save face, by all means. How the various slimy apparatchiks tried to keep the full truth from coming out.
Fast forward to 2021: and look at Fauci and his friends, like that Daszak chap. All of them were to varying degrees involved with the Wuhan lab (Fauci only peripherally, but still). All of them would have their heads on the chopping block if hard evidence emerged that this thing actually comes from there due to negligence and hubris.
Add to that the reluctance of the Chinese state to ever acknowledge that their "fast forward science at all costs" policy might have been part of the problem as well (even though the vast majority of the blame needs to go to the lunatics, most of them Westerners, who proposed and performed those gain of function experiments in the first place), and it does not look good for this to be properly handled at the official level any time soon.
Alexander,
I appreciate and agree with everything you are saying. There are several very damaging things going on here, and our culture and society needs people to start pushing back, loudly, against this stuff:
-- People at Lancet and the NYTimes need to be called on the carpet and explain why they published as God's Own Truth, the justifications and misdirections of Daszac et. al. The NYT continues to quote Daszak as a "leading COVID expert" in all their coverage of this, never mentioning his role (er, "conflict of interest") in causing it.
-- It is impossible to debunk or expose or even rationally disagree with crazy conspiracy theories, when basic questions that normal people might ask, like "maybe this bat coronavirus could have leaked from the one place in the world where these are collected and studied, right where the outbreak started", are branded as crazy conspiracy theories, and then some are later quietly understood to have been COMPLETELY true.
-- The most disgusting and cynical part of all this has been the deliberate conflation of 1) suspicion and criticism of the Communist Chinese Government, with 2) "xenophobia" and "racism", those accusations being among the two most powerful and prejudicial of our times. Such labels, so used, are a spiritual acid.
-- This deliberate miuse of language, along the lines of "no evidence" and "linked to", doesn't just undermine, it DESTROYS trust in both journalism and science. Certainly it diminishes the dignity of all concerned, the liars and the lied-to in equal measure.
I do not think there is a Marvel-Comics-MFDOOM-type conspiracy to cover all this up, but it is certain that the economic and ideological interests of a great many people in the media and even the scientific establishment, all align with never really knowing the origin of this virus.
Knowing the truth of this specific problem is secondary to exposing and escaping from the atmosphere where inquiry is forbidden and people are afraid to voice their opinions and knowledge.
/Sorry if this became a rant. I just don't know of many communities where rational inquiry is considered so important, where people would likely agree with this line of, let's call it, "militant skepticism"
BR
> I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. ... I am a scientist in ... computer science
Then it would be prudent to see what biologists or virologists have to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhsBE0C8Zcg
Granted, his list of "six impossible things" you have to believe to be a "lab leaker" range from "not impossible" to "not needed in a lab-leak hypothesis", but I find that fora for experts to talk to other experts tend to be a reliable information source, especially if they have few views/subs (quacks seek public attention!) As of now this video has 122 views including myself, the channel has 77 subscribers, and its content is technical, signs which point to a nonpoliticized information source.
I only wish I had a good way of finding unpopular information sources like these...
The claim (before Scott deleted it) was that it was obviously false to say that vaccines “caused” new variants. But by changing the evolutionary payoffs for different variants vaccines clearly do affect the nature of variants, “causing” them to be different
ok, that makes more sense
This is wrong.
It's true that theoretically vaccines create *new variants that are resistant to the vaccine*, but covid in non-vaccinated people just gets *more new variants*, maybe deadlier, maybe less, maybe easier spreading, maybe harder, whatever. It can go hog wild.
I organize a race with a thousand Covid runners, 100 of which are weird mutants. First we race in a vaccinated person, and only a few reach the finish. These will likely be selected for vaccine-resistance and could spread, but it's a low dose of Covid.
Now we run the race again in the non-vaccinated person, and most of them reach the finish, including weird ones. These could also spread.
You seem to suggest that a vaccine-resistant mutation is less likely to survive a non-vaccinated immune system than a vaccinated person, which doesn't make sense!
Which is why pretty much all variants so far have come from places where a whole bunch of unvaccinated people got Covid, and the virus could spread wild and just mutate as it pleases.
He is actually correct that a "vaccine-resistant mutation is less likely to survive a non-vaccinated immune system than a vaccinated person." This is because 1 host is a significant evolutionary opportunity for a virus.
Many variants will evolve in this unvaccinated host and unlike in a vaccinated host, the majority will be non-vaccine-resistant. Because there are far more NVR than VR variants, there are many opportunities for them to be efficient reproducers in ways absent in the VR variant.
Cheetahs may evolve in the absence of really-fast-prey but they will never become a species as a low-speed version with lesser caloric needs will "eat their(metaphoric) dinner."
Holy crap!!! We got an edit button!!!
Yes, but this just means we can either have a lot of vaccines, and the virus evolves for vaccine resistance (or dies), or we have few vaccines, and the virus evolves for whatever is its optimum reproduction variant.
'The vaccines cause more variants, or everything we know about evolution is wrong' is just silly and misinformed.
It isn't silly but it isn't well worded. How about: The presence of a vaccinated population in regular contact with active virus creates an environment where vaccine-resistant variants can thrive, multiply and continue to evolve additional vaccine-resistant variant-variants.
The idea here ( and I am not enough of an expert to speak to its accuracy) is similar to how the overuse of anti-biotics leads to anti-biotic resistant pathogens.
If an antibiotic doesnt kill all of the pathogen, the pathogens that survive and reproduce will be the ones that were exposed to the antibiotic but survived. This is why people are advised to take all of their antibiotic prescription even if they feel better.
The theory with so called "leaky vaccines" is similar. Particularly in cases where you dont have total vaccination and hence herd immunity.
You have strands mutating in the "wild"- the unvaccinated population. The strands that can best infect those who are vaccinated in theory outcompete the strands that dont.
This could still happen in theory with a "leaky" vaccine, one that isnt 100 percent effective, but is less likely as there the reduction of vectors (meaning only a small number of the disease creating pathogens survive and dont have anywhere to go making the disease extinct before it can evolve.
This is a case of punctuated equilibrium so either the disease "dies out" (or clings on at very low levels in reservoirs) or makes an evolutionary jump to be able to survive the vaccination.
Keep in mind when we talk about "punctuated equlibirum" we are talking about cases where the organism under threat of extinction does not go extinct. The thing where it rapidly evolves is likely more rare.
Covid is a bit of an odd bug. Anyway, to be clear I am not a virologist, just explaining the general idea. I'm sure experts could greatly clarify/correct things I am misunderdstanding.
Well, this is (one of) the problems with Aristotelian arguments from symbolic analogy, a curse on human progress since circa 300 BC. A vaccine and an antibiotic can both be classified, logically and symbolically, as "things that eliminate disease" so voila! we should be able to argue that actions which are symbolically similar with both should have symbolically similar outcomes, n'est-ce pas?
But it turns out to be complete rubbish, because our logical (or linguistic) symbolism bears no necessary relationship to the underlying molecular reality.
Overuse of antibiotics is a problem because it exposes bacteria to an environmental toxin *which they have not encountered before* and would not encounter in the wild, which means they experience evolutionary pressure to adapt to it -- and that gives you antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by and by. Mind you, you get antibiotic-resistant bacteria even if you *don't* overuse antibiotics, you just get them slower. Note the necessary aspect here: you expose the bacteria to a weapon they've never seen before, and wouldn't encounter otherwise.
A vaccine has nothing in common with that. A vaccine gives the heads-up to your immune system, but it does not directly attack an infection, and the way in which the immune system attacks a viral infection with and without a vaccine doesn't change by an atom. So the virus is *not* subject to novel evolutionary pressure, because it's not experiencing something it would not otherwise experience -- indeed, it's experiencing *exactly the same* kind of pressure it always experiences from an immune system. It is under no pressure to evolve novel defenses, because it's not under novel pressure. More precisely, it's not under additional pressure, it's under the same pressure to evade the immune system it always is. An advantage in infecting a vaccinated person is of no unique value -- it would also be an advantage in infecting an unvaccinated person -- because the immune mechanisms that are being subverted are exactly the same.
Ironically, there *is* a mechanistically reasonable comparison between the mis-use of vaccine and the mis-use of antibiotics, but it points in the other direction. Since viruses only mutate during active infection, and are only under evolutionary pressure when under attack by the immune system, it follows that the way to maximize the mutation rate of viruses is to have longer infections, and the way to minimize it is to have the shortest possible infections, rapidly cleared. (There are speculations that people who take unusually long times to clear COVID, e.g. the partially immunocompromised, who can take months, are indirectly responsible for the lion's share of new variants.)
Of course, the way to minimize the length of time of an infection is to get a vaccine, even one that doesn't work very well. That will *always* reduce the average length of time of an infection, and therefore always reduce the rate of evolution of a virus. Exactly the opposite conclusion from that of the (faulty) argument by analogy.
Thanks for such a clear explanation.
I'm not disputing your explanation because I simply don't know whether it's true or not. But if it is, why do we need updated vaccines for different variants? If the vaccine doesn't change the immune response "by an atom" then why would different vaccines target different viral strains?
You didn't understand his argument.
Antibiotics present a novel challenge to the bacteria - there's no reason for a bacteria which is immune to an antibiotic to be favored over one that isn't unless the antibiotic is present in the enviornment.
Conversely, viruses are contending with the immune system. This is always a threat to the virus, so a virus will always try to escape the immune system response, no matter what.
Thus, introducing antibiotics will increase the likelihood of getting resistance because there's an actual adaptive pressure in favor of developing antibiotic resistance.
Vaccines, however, are only presenting the same challenge as the virus always had - getting around the immune system. As such, it makes the virus's job of mutating strictly harder, because in both cases, it will have to contend with immune systems, but in a more heavily vaccinated population, fewer people get infected, and thus the virus has fewer opportunities to mutate to get around the threat.
Variants can still arise and escape the immune response, and thus potentially require new vaccines. But it's harder for them to do so in an environment with vaccines because it has fewer opportunities to develop the mutations necessary to do so.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? I may just be confused, but I don't see how your comment functions as a reply to mine. I asked him a question about why we need updated vaccines if vaccines don't change the nature of the immune response.
This simply isn’t true of COVID vaccines. Because they are designed to get your immune system to attack the spike protein, your immune response to the vaccine will be different than your immune response to a wild infection.
You’re like the smartest guy on the internet. Have you started your own substack yet?
Sorry, that sounded sarcastic. I’m serious.
I'd subscribe.
A vaccine absolutely does expose the target virus to "evolutionary pressure to adapt to it" when the vaccinated and unvaccinated members of a population intermingle. The only real difference between this and the antibiotic case is that the antibiotic is applied to an already infected individual.
In actuality, neither a vaccine nor an antibiotic "causes" new strains to evolve. Instead it kills off strains it can allowing more opportunity for strains with some level of resistance to evolve. Similarly, the immune system does not pressure a virus to evolve any more than fast antelope pressured cheetahs to evolve. They just starved the slow ones out of the population.
Everyone should read the first sentence of that last paragraph above by REF carefully! The best way to understand evolution and selective pressures is to think of it not at a proactive mutation of the organism but as a subtractive phenomenon, i.e. removing the “weak” (the susceptible) to allow the mutants to proliferate. Everything makes more sense when we suppress our tendency to anthropomorphize viruses/bacteria as wanting to change and instead think of it as elimination steps. Not survival of the fittest; rather death of the weakest. At least that works best for me.
Natural selection is an unintelligent process, but his argument is actually flawed - vaccines and antibiotics are not the same.
Vaccines don't actually increase pressure to escape; that already exists because infected individuals acquire immunity after being infected. In both a vaccinated and unvaccinated population, the virus is presented with the pressure to escape immunity.
The only difference is that in a vaccinated community, there's fewer cases and thus fewer opportunities for it to mutate to escape immunity.
Conversely, antibiotics present a new, different sort of threat that there is no benefit to acquiring immunity to in its absence. As such, antibiotic resistant strains are no more likely to proliferate than ones that are not (actually, often less so, because antibiotic resistance often imparts a cost on the bacterium - they generally are less fit in antibiotic free environments).
As such, exposing bacteria to antibiotics actually does create a new kind of selective pressure and select for something that isn't otherwise being selected for.
The difference is that the challenge presented by vaccines is exactly the same as the challenge presented by the immune system, while the challenge presented by antibiotics is a new challenge to the bacteria.
In an unvaccinated population, the virus still has the exact same pressure to escape immunity - namely, the immunity of already infected people.
As such, in the case of vaccines, vaccines strictly damage a virus's ability to escape immunity by reducing the number of cases and thus the number of opportunities for the virus to mutate.
In both an unvaccinated and a vaccinated population, there's pressure on the virus to mutate to escape immunity; the only difference is that in a vaccinated population, there's less opportunity for it to do so.
As I pointed out above (in response to you), natural immunity and RNA vaccine immunity are not the same and thus provide different impetus.
Vaccination doesn't expose the virus to evolutionary pressure to develop new defenses or resistance, but it does expose the virus to evolutionary pressure to change in such a way that the vaccine no longer helps the immune system recognize it faster.
The problem with this idea is that it assumes that natural immunity (from catching the disease) gives you a higher degree of immunity than artificial immunity (from the vaccine). However, it seems that, at least in the case of COVID, the vaccine actually gives *better* immunity than actually getting COVID does.
This would mean that a fully vaccinated environment is always worse for the disease than an unvaccinated one, because in an unvaccinated environment, there are more people with "leaky vaccines" than there are in a vaccinated environment.
There is no credible evidence that the injections provide superior immunity to natural infection.
Yes there is. Studies have been done on this very subject matter. People who were immunized were less likely to be infected/hospitalized than those who had previously been infected with COVID and recovered.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm
there's vaccines causing new variants and then there's causing them on net. We vaccinated the hell out of smallpox and now there's almost none of it left to mutate. Likewise, the fewer people who have COVID the less chances there are for it to mutate (despite increased selection pressure)
The vaccines are extremely leaky and don’t seem to stop people getting and transmitting COVID, although they do seem to reduce its virulence.
Do you have a link?
What matters is the number of virus replications under immune system pressure, not number of people infected. The way the vaccine reduces virulence is by reducing both duration of infection and number of viruses, which both reduce evolutionary pressure.
What do you mean by this? Are you claiming that vaccination causes less than 70% reduction in infection and transmission?
Studies seem to suggest that, using the same metric for "leakiness" as past vaccines, the leakiness of COVID may actually be pretty similar to the leakiness of the Smallpox vaccine.
COVID is ridiculously more contagious than smallpox. The R0 on it is ridiculous, Delta is like 2x more infectious than that, and Omnicron is 2-7x more infectious than DELTA.
It's ridiculously awful.
"Leaky" vaccines make less of a difference than you think; the main issue is the number of viral replications. As long as the vaccines reduce that number (and they do) they impair its ability to mutate and evolve.
"Viral myocarditis has an incidence rate of 10 to 22 per 100,000 individuals."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053077020300227
Basically you have committed a fatal error in your analysis, by failing to compare to the background rate. It is entirely possible that the COVID vaccines actually PROTECT against myocarditis.
Vaccines actually lower the rate of mutation by lowering the number of infections, which reduces opportunity for infection.
All viruses are inherently encouraged to mutate to evade immunity from prior infection, so vaccinating lots of people doesn't actually apply any pressure over and above what already exists in nature, it decreases the number of hosts available for the virus to infect and thus mutate.
There's no evidence long covid is real. Except if you accept that me/cfs is real. Then you have a strong prior an infection can cause serious long last deibilty after the acute infection is gone. But of course, there's "no evidence" patients with me/cfs aren't just making things up.
The absence of a single clear biomarker in me/cfs is considered to be " no evidence" and that absence of evidence is definitive for some peopple, rather than a good reason to do more research. I hope we can learn more about how long covid works.
What does “me/cfs” refer to?
Looks like "myalgic encephalitis / chronic fatigue syndrome". Sometimes also given as CFS/ME (both names are used in Scott's Long COVID post)
This seems to go back to the "what does no evidence mean"? problem. There is evidence, in the sense that people who have had covid are reporting symptoms that have persisted past their infection, as well as new problems that only seem to manifest after Covid infection, and these are not just self-reports but in some cases things doctors who have treated them have seen. That is evidence. It is not the the kind of strong evidence where there are clear biomarkers, or clear etiologies, or where one can't be sure that given the number of covid infections they are co-incidental. But it's evidence, and there seem to be quite a fair number of medical professionals that seem to think something is happening.
This reminds me of another type of fallacious reasoning that seems similar. When there isnt a known etiology for something, and it doesnt happen in the majority of cases, the default assumption being its not real.
Biology is complicated, and there are many things where only some people, given some unknown pre-existing factor, might have an atypical reaction. We recognize this is the case for some things like allergies, but seem quick to rule it out when it "looks" like something. There have been a few cases where the medical establishment was convinced certain claims were hogwash, then eventually realized there was actually something to them.
I think its like a correlation between the types of people who take these sort of things seriously also being more likely to be into wu and pseudoscience.
My money is on long covid and cfs both being psychosomatic
You'd lose that bet (on long COVID, at least), because symptoms such as long-term loss of taste and smell are easily quantifiable -- and have been measured.
Psychosomatic doesn't mean "not real". You can experience real symptoms and it can still be psychosomatic
If it turns out that it is COVID that causes the psychosomatic symptoms (by causing localised brain damage or whatever) would long COVID then exist?
I find this fascinating. Aside from the trash can CFS diagnosis, there's a pretty substantial body of research showing that people do get all kinds of chronic post-infectious syndromes.
Many of them are autoimmune -- the body's immune system gets thrown into overdrive in the wake of fighting a novel infection and starts fighting itself. Guillain-Barré syndrome, Hashimotos, Sjogren's syndrome, Sydenham's chorea. Celiac disease is also sometimes triggered by a gut infection in a person who has the genetic predisposition.
In some cases, a weak immune system or insufficient treatment fails to completely clear an initial infection -- rheumatic fever is "a disease that can result from inadequately treated strep throat" for instance. My brother missed an entire year of school because of it. In other cases, failure to completely clear the initial infection leads to an immune system on chronic overdrive and that leads to autoimmunity. Autoimmunity can be measured in a range of ways -- as the clinical diagnoses above and sometimes by a chronically elevated rheumatoid factor or other lab results.
Why would Covid be any different from all the other infections that we know can sometimes, but not commonly, lead to chronic conditions?
Many many people do have psychosomatic illness -- it's thought a lot of chronic back pain, maybe the majority of it, is psychosomatic. Headaches. Anxiety-induced diarrhea. High blood pressure due to stress. All the people going to ERs for panic-related chest pain who think they're having heart attacks. Tension-induced muscle spasm. Often we can even recognize the psychosomatic causes of these conditions because people say "oh my god have I been under a lot of stress lately!"
And then there are the people who say, "Yeah, I got a cold virus, and then I got Guillain-Barré syndrome and I was hospitalized for three weeks and I almost died and then I got better but five years later I still haven't gotten all my energy back and the tips of the fingers on my right hand are still numb. Or another common one: "I traveled abroad and came back with diarrhea that was finally diagnosed as some kind of amoebic dysentery but it took almost a year to get properly treated and I developed fatigue and joint pain after six months. The antibiotics cured the diarrhea but I still have joint pain and fatigue years later. It gets worse and it gets better, but it never goes away entirely." I know a lot of these stories.
I'm thinking the people who default to the opinion that post-infectious syndromes are psychosomatic have no direct experience with autoimmunity or chronic illness following infection. Because once you meet it a few times, it's pretty hard to keep thinking it's psychosomatic. If you're an infectious disease doctor and you still hold this view, I will consider myself properly chastened.
CFS symptoms seem so obviously possible to create in multiple different ways, I don't think it's really "one thing" so much as it is a symptom of many different sorts of damage that the body can sustain, which can cause overlapping symptoms.
It's not a disease, it's a symptom.
It seems likely that some people have psychosomatic issues while others genuinely do have real problems that are caused by post-viral damage to their bodies.
Honestly, given the fact that polio could cause people to end up on iron lungs or otherwise paralyzed, the notion that infections can't cause permanent damage seems really dumb. They obviously can.
I know someone who has developed asthma as a result of having gotten COVID. They also now suffer from chronic fatigue. Their doctor first prescribed them with post-viral cough, but it never went away.
Honestly, my guess is that "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is really caused by tiny amounts of damage to the body that add up into your body just not working as well, resulting in you being chronically tired because your function is impaired.
"There's no evidence long covid is real."
I had hoped that this would be a no-junk science forum but I guess I am wrong.
Maybe read more than a single sentence
This isn't a 'no anything' forum... err, this is a 'yes everything'- no wait
When I started writing this it seemed like they would be a pithy way to explain that in this forum the only thing that matters is argumentation, we tend not to rule things out because they belong to a category with a mockable name
Except stuff like psychic powers or astrology, but even then we've got that one astrologer who shows up to advertise his services and 'own the materialists' and I suspect several people have sent him emails to set up experiments and demonstrations
If you think long covid is 'real', or that tye notion that it isn't is 'junk science', let's hear your argument
...unless ofc you were just referring to the phrase 'no evidence' and how the new post by scott is all about misuse of that phrase
CFS probably doesn't have a single cause, so we wouldn't expect it to have a single biomarker.
I have a friend who has developed chronic fatigue after being infected with COVID, and now also has asthma, something he didn't suffer from before. Sometimes he coughs so much he throws up.
It's been going on for over a year now.
Re homeopathy: Low Dose Immunology sometimes uses dosages that are close to the highest concentrations homeopathy uses. There could be a mechanism there, for some instances of homeopathy. The logic behind it is generally bananas....or at least "alternative"
There are some cases where very low or micro doses of drugs have different effects then higher doses and thus can have utility. Naltrexone would be an example.
But homeopathy proper implies dluting something till its no longer detectable.
I think it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of homeopathy is nonsense. Sure, maybe there is some specific chemica that has an unusual helpful property in microdoses- but this isnt homeopathys' claim.
Scott has previously written about medications that otherwise would require a prescription, being available as a homeopathic remedy at useful dosages, due to this.
I'm not familiar with that. I think it's possible that you're lumping all alternative supplements into homeopathy? But the supplements I'm familiar with him mentioning (fish oil, melatonin, etc.) aren't homeopathic.
It was an instance of a medication also being available as a homeopathic "formulation", that was still strong enough to have an actual effect: that was why I remembered it. I haven't found the article yet though.
The meaning of "homeopathic" medication is that it has been diluted away to nothing. Thus it is not a homeopathic "formulation" and instead it is a "homeopathic" formulation(That is homeopathic in labeling only).
It sounds like the very meaning of the term "homeopathy" is being diluted by these alternative medications. Which, logically, should make "homeopathy" as a word even stronger.
They believe that the more they dilute it, the stronger it gets, but that doesn't mean they don't sometimes sell formulations with concentrations in parts-per-thousand, which presumably they think are their weakest possible doses??
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/#comment-859920 is _probably_ what I was thinking of.
I think part of the problem is the way we use euphemism to soften our language. "No evidence" has a literal meaning that is about how we haven't studied it enough yet, but in some contexts is a nicer way to say idiotic. While in some ways I think this is a very good thing, it sometimes comes at the cost of clarity.
I've noticed this in other contexts to. I think describing a moronic claim as "flawed logic" is a similarly technically correct understatement. It gives more cedes more ground than necessary to Motte Bailey and other fallacies. I was once in a conversation with a friend where I wanted to strongly express that their claim was a fallacy, but I found that I didn't even have the language to express the strength of my disagreement.
I don't have a good solution. I certainly don't think we would be better off with constant reddit-style "you're and idiot" "no u" arguments, but an inability to clearly express the wrongness of flawed logic seems like a serious limitation.
I think you're on to something here. A lot of the times these "No evidence for [whatever thing right wingers are on about]" articles don't seem to be aimed at correcting the record. Instead, they are an indirect / classier / plausibly deniable way of saying "Look at what these crazy right-wingers are on about, can you believe it?"
In particular I'm thinking of things like the fact-checks of Babylon Bee articles. They're more "We didn't like that they poked fun at [whatever right wingers are poking fun at these days], so here are some words about why, framed as a fact-check."
I think you may be overestimating some people here.
I was in a discordian group where we created as a troll group, Christians against Dinosaurs.
The aim was to keep making it more and more absurd. Actual Christians were not fooled, but there was basically no amount of absurdity that people who came there to say "look at these idiot Christians" wouldnt buy as actual Christians.
Many studies have shown that right wingers can more accurately identify the self-described positions of left wingers then vice a versa.
This is a curious phenomenon, but partially I think it has to do with how there is maybe more of a distance between how rightwingers will self identify versus how they are described by their opponents.
For example, most right wingers will not self identify as racist, but left wingers will either hold that the things they do believe in constitute racism or that they are not being honest about their beliefs.
Whereas say, it wouldn't be hard to find a large number of left wingers who will openly state they favor socialism over capitalism, or think that the US is an inherently oppressive country.
Of course politics are rapidly changing. Its odd as part of the traditional right thin was the "big tent" philosophy, whereas left wingers tended to be more about "purifying the party"- but on the other hand, it seems like the right makes more of an effort to distance themselves from the radical wing then the left did. Or did up untill recently, QAnon has risen quickly and dramatically. On the other hand, while the radical left influences the mainstream left, they havent displaced the mainstream left in the same way.
I realize there are a lot of contradictions here- I'm sure someone has done a complex analysis of all this.
Also, the Babylon Bee I think often is a bit less obviously satirical from a left point of view then say The Onion is. Some of the articles anyway.
And there's also the thing where people do get its satire but its very obvious what actual position its supporting so there can be criticism of that, whereas again compared to the Onion, one can't always easily walk backwards from a ridiculous satirical article to "this is what this person believes."
I basically mean that, while sure, The Onion appeals to the progressive left, its less obviously partisan then the babylon bee
> Many studies have shown that right wingers can more accurately identify the self-described positions of left wingers then vice a versa.
I think it's because media and Hollywood is pretty left wing. Left wing thinking is thus literally broadcasted widely and our culture is saturated with it, so of course conservatives can't help but absorb it and get a feel for how left leaning people think. I can't say the same applies to conservatives. Left leaning people largely just see the caricatures of conservatives in their media headlines, so of course they think most conservatives are loons. The percentage of loons on both sides is probably pretty even.
Actually media and Hollywood tends to be centrist or even lean right. This is because they are owned by large capitalist corporations. You can read something like "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and Herman to learn about this in lengthy detail.
They may lean right on economic issues, but it's very clear they lean heavily left on social issues. Just look at how J.K. Rowling is being omitted most of her credits in the latest Harry Potter productions due to her controversial statements on trans issues. Examples like this abound.
Your example actually proves my point. JK Rowling is an extremely rich and influential writer and she's on the right-wing of this social issue. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say she's being "omitted" - she's listed as a producer and screenwriter on the most recent Potter movie that I looked up.
Chomsky suffers very badly from being a crazy person.
He's not really cognitively capable of recognizing that he suffers from the Hostile Media Effect to an extreme degree.
He can't really accept the idea that his opinions are terrible and wrong, so he decides that everyone is secretly conspiring against him instead.
Where does he write that everyone is "secretly conspiring against him"?
Clearly it is due to our powerful and robust amygdalae.
> but I found that I didn't even have the language to express the strength of my disagreement.
Can't you say something like "I think that statement you just made is 100% incorrect"? There's no need to call someone an idiot to express disagreement. I try to never call my friends idiots but I don't shy away from strongly disagreeing with them if that's how I feel.
I would recommend 99.999.... 100 percent is overconfidence. You're not that sure of anything.
Sure. My point was simply that you can politely express strong disagreement or disbelief.
"I fear, Sir, that if I were to truly express the extent of my disagreement, we would be forced to meet at dawn, to the detriment of at least one of us."
This is a general language problem. Language composes "signs" that refer to things, not things in and of themelves.
Language also evolves. A precise use of language tends to grow to encompass things beyond its original narrow purpose. Or contextual use creates a new implied meaning.
Often there are phrases which are non-sensical or misleading if taken literally. It's generally useful to try and understand the original purpose behind the word or phrase to ee where it's gone wrong.
An example of this where the use has gone so far beyond its original meaning it creates extremely confused thikning- "Intentions dont matter."
If one thinks about this, it is inherently absurd. But it has become a matter of dogma for many.
Going back to what the phrase originally meant, it was trying to express something like this- "If one does or says something that causes harm or has some negative effect, the fact that one didnt intend to cause that harm of have that effect does not relieve one of all responsibility for the effect."
This gets shortened to "intentions don't matter" which is patently absurd.
Using terms like "no evidence" as shorthand leads to similar, but more subtle problems, which is what I think is the point Scott is making.
The "intentions dont matter" thing is especially ironic, because in the context where it's most used, involving racism or sexism or something of that nature, intentions clearly do matter.
Although the language there I think evolves not just out of foolishness but as useful sophistry.
While let's say, expressing a sexist sentiment unintentionally may be bad, clearly doing so intentionally is worse.
But one can use it in the selective sophist way to say "no, this person doing something unintentionally should be judged in the same way as if they were doing it intentionally"
While this kind of thing manifests clearly in those spaces, as it is somewhat more obvious, it be perilous to rationalists as one may unintentionally use similar sophistry to prove a point or argument without being consciously aware of the language manipulation.
Sometimes I go with "I believe that you believe it." I acknowledge their passion and certainty while making it tacitly clear that I harbor strong doubts.
"I didn't even have the language to express the strength of my disagreement." Have you considered, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Which is why it's better to say "This hasn't been researched" versus "This has been researched and we've found bupkis."
It's the difference between evidence of absence and absence of evidence. An absence of evidence can be caused by evidence of absence but can also be caused by no one really studying it.
Thank you for this. Communication from the WHO, CDC, FDA et al has been embarrassingly horrible throughout the entire pandemic. “No evidence of…” has been a particular thorn in my side because of the exact reason why you mentioned it. When the WHO would vehemently say obviously wrong statement like “no evidence that masks work”, “no evidence that asymptomatic people transmit the disease” etc, it’s pathetically comical as to how they shot themselves in the foot. No one believes them now.
What’s wrong with saying “we don’t know if masks work yet”? It’s so much clearer and saying that wouldn’t have destroyed their reputation. Instead of “No evidence that hydroxychlorquine works”, say “based on all available studies, hydroxychloroquine does not work.”
I think the biggest takeaway from the pandemic is that the deference to science has evaporated in the age of social media and if scientists and science/medical groups like the WHO, CDC or FDA want to regain their ability to lead people, they will need to reengineer their communications strategy. Using scientifically accurate but stupidly confusing phrases like “No evidence that…” really need to be eliminated. Clear, concise and easy to understand language needs to be used 100% of the time. Literally dumb it down so that it’s clear to the lowest common denominator such that we don’t get another politicization of what we saw with COVID.
> What’s wrong with saying “we don’t know if masks work yet”?
I honestly believe that not many people are able to realize that they don't actually know something. When the subconscious mind injects a prediction about reality into one's consciousness, distinguishing that prediction about reality from actual reality (which being unknown, is therefore not "present" in the mind as a second option to consider) is pretty damn hard. Rationalists screw up on this all the time, expecting Normies to pull it off reliably seems like a pretty big ask.
> Using scientifically accurate but stupidly confusing phrases like “No evidence that…” really need to be eliminated.
That “No evidence that…” is considered *scientifically* *accurate* (presuming you are correct) is itself pretty damning of science considering how epistemically flawed it is.
My guess is that it's one of those things where people with an authoritative position feel, by means of institutional logic, that they don't want to appear "weak." Of course this winds up shooting them in the foot.
A politician can't say "I don't know." Maybe for similar reasons the WHO or whoever cant actually say that, but they could probably do the political version of this.
The communication from Fauci about the Omicron Variant was much better in this regard, although most of the comments seem to indicate they didnt actually listen to what he said and responded to what they assumed he would say, or they did some kind of transformation thing.
So maybe its less of a conscious thing then a "unspoken rules of language" deal where people reuse certain phrases because thats how other people have used them.
The thing about the masks was actually worse. It wasn't just "there is no evidence."
There were some people including experts who discouraged mask use early on on two bases- 1. There was a shortage, and they were concerned people would buy up masks and scalp them, so that medical proffessionals couldnt get them. (There seems to have been some confusion here- maybe assuming there would be such a shortage of the heavy duty medical masks that medical personnel would be forced to use the cheaper masks? This might have been these people buying into the absolute worst case scenarios which were inaccurate for various reasons. One being that a lot of initial data cam from the cruise ship case which represented a "best case scenario" for viral spread and for the virus remaining airborn and infectious for the longest.
The second reason seems to have been a "the perfect i the enemy of the good deal."
That the regular masks didnt provide that much protection against covid, and people would behave as though the masks basically made them immune, which would be worse then people not wearing masks and just staying at home/taking reasonable precautions.
I think there are two problems here. One is that people who comment, like virologists or whoever, aren't psychologists or economists- they give their advice based o what they know or think they know without regards to other relevant factors.
2. if it bleeds it leads. News media will report the most alarmist thing, and in this case there was a cycle. Some experts say something, media repeats it, there was already a political partisan attitude forming, people on both sides signal boost the most alarmist thing for different reasons, etc.
There is a developing science of how media and psychology and the internet affect each other, but as of now this seems to mostly be studied by strategists, marketers, and people employed by companies with a stake.
There needs to be more of an independent discipline to understand how these downstream unintended consequences will likely play out.
The mask shortage was real. I was on a team working with local emergency response when COVID first hit. Local hospitals were very low on masks, and there were very few available for purchase. Not just high quality, but really any masks. We were gathering all of the masks we could find for main hospital use, and no one else was getting any provisions of masks.
I'm still against lying to the public in any case. It may (or may not) have helped in the short term to get enough masks for professional use. It definitely hurt the trust of much of the population, and that will be the legacy of the early decision. Even now people can't remember if there really was or wasn't a mask shortage, but they absolutely remember that the government lied to us about masks.
Well put, Mr Doolittle! False public statements early on may have helped to give better availability to health care workers who desperately needed masks early on - but it totally made WHO/CDC etc out to be incompetent or liars to the public - so long term a really bad strategy, even if short term understandable.
Agreed 100%. Public health officials should be above reproach, and that and the other lies have seriously undermined their credibility and that's still having repercussions to this day.
Again, there is a difference between poor communication/lacking nuance and outright lies. Where were the outright lies?
The closest thing I can think of is how a number of journos and institutions treated the lab leak theory as completely debunked conspiracy raving when most serious scientists thought it was unlikely but not an impossibility.
> Where were the outright lies?
Fauci has literally, openly admitted to lying. Here he is admitting to lying about the need for masks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLXttHlUgK8
Here he is admitting to lying about the vaccinations needed to reach herd immunity by continually moving the goalposts until he got a "gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covid-coronavirus.html
I could go on for Fauci alone, and I have no doubt others have made similar blunders, but Fauci is clearly the main public health figure. I personally don't think public servants charged with public health should be lying to the public, no matter what utilitarian calculation they think justifies those lies.
Unfortunately the legitimate criticisms against him are dismissed as partisan posturing. No public servants in any other country did this to my knowledge, certainly not mine, and no disaster followed this honesty.
I didnt claim there wasn't a mask shortage, I was restating the rational as I heard it at the time. I was a bit confused on the issue of proffessional masks versus more common masks, but from what you said it appears my guess here was correct.
What I'm not clear on- when did the medical establishment "lie" to the public? The message I remember getting was that masks weren't that effective at preventing one from catching COVID. Now of course there is a lot of ambiguity around "not that effective." I don't remember hearing specifics. Obviously wearing a face covering provides some sort of protection, just as it blocks some particles. But there wasn't much in the way of specifics which is another problem with science communication. It seems that science communicators (and I understand it's unfair to group this as a monolithic thing as there are many people with different incentives involved in this) were saying that masks didnt offer much protection for an individual against COVID. Like many things, the specifics weren't part of the message as it often seems like the "science communicators" think the public is too ignorant to understand complexity or nuance. This isn't unfair per ce, but it does lead to negative downstream consequences. I would argue the climate change communication debacle is very similar. Even generally well informed people, people who work in that area. are really misinformed about the nuance and the particulars. Of course there is a process of scientists collecting data, interpreting that data, that data being communicated, and science journalism, mainstrea journalism- this isnt just a science issue, a lot of things are subject to this game of telephone.
The real switch on this was when strong correlation data came in from countries where mask wearing was common actually had lower transmission rates. Some of that was corrolated not causal, but people seem to start saying "ok, while they are of dubious help protecting the people wearing them from catching the virus, they are definitely helpful in terms of people who already have it not spreading it further.
So while I agree there was a lot of stuff that was misleading and vague, where were the actual lies?
This is a tough one because I am always for truth, but I also understand there is a not insignificant group of people who see nuance and the ability to change argumentd with new data/perspectives as an inherent weakness, not a strength.
I don't disagree with you, but this is getting into (perfectly valid) things other than the phenomenon I am referring to, which you did touch upon somewhat:
> I think there are two problems here. One is that people who comment, like virologists or whoever, aren't psychologists or economists- they give their advice based on what they know or think they know without regards to other relevant factors.
I believe that a lack of deep understanding of certain aspects of psychology (and ability to actually take it seriously, for those who do have such knowledge to some degree) is the elephant in the room that everyone is missing.
> The communication from Fauci about the Omicron Variant was much better in this regard, although most of the comments seem to indicate they didnt actually listen to what he said and responded to what they assumed he would say, or they did some kind of transformation thing.
> So maybe its less of a conscious thing then a "unspoken rules of language" deal where people reuse certain phrases because thats how other people have used them.
Here you are kind of touching on what I think is another very interesting phenomenon: how (and to what degree) does our language, something that we take for granted with hardly a second thought, fundamentally distort our perception of reality?
Very much so. Noam Chomsky made a whole career out of this very question.
Not to mention endless philosophers of multiple eras.
And approximately no one takes any of this *really* seriously, including Chomsky/linguistics and philosophy enthusiasts.
>I honestly believe that not many people are able to realize that they don't actually know something.
That's the mistake theory explanation.
The reality may be conflict theory instead: the CDC and media have an agenda that is not accurate communication. If they think something might be true, but they want the public to act as though it's definitely true, they'll use the "no evidence" formulation because the public will read it as "definitely true" but just in case they're proven wrong later, they can claim they were being literally accurate and didn't lie.
Of course, every time they mislead by saying "no evidence" to imply stronger confidence than the truth, they lose credibility for the times where the statement should actually be believed with strong confidence. This leads to the phenomenon Scott observed.
A note: what you described as "conflict theory" doesn't actually necessarily involve conflicting interests between the CDC and the population. Rather, the CDC thinks (rightly or wrongly) that it's bending the truth in the interests of the population.
Tbh I'm also somewhat sceptical that these small lies actually do much to erode people's trust in the institutions. I feel like most of the population either continues to broadly trust the institutions, or has distrusted them from the beginning, usually for not very well-thought-out reasons; those who aren't inherently inclined to distrust the institutions but have come to do so as a result of their lies are a small fraction of the population. Those of us who are inherently bothered by this sort of bending of the truth feel like the institutions would *deserve* to lose people's trust as a result, but I'm not sure there is actually much such effect.
> That's the mistake theory explanation.
Not really, what I'm referring to anyways, which is core, abstract cognitive behaviors, how the mind perceives reality itself. Fundamentally, I am referring to how people are not good *during realtime cognition* of realizing that there is a distinction between reality itself and our perception of it. When a person forms a conclusion on a topic, it *seems* that they are correct, based on (some) "logic" - but if they forget that they are perceiving reality, it is also very easy to overlook that one's potentially perfect logic is subject to error as a consequence of incorrect premises (one's "facts").
This is probably like Psychology 101, which everyone "knows", but what people don't seem to consider is the "realtime cognition" aspect of it (do you know this *always*?).
It turns out that playing a game of telephone, between a group of people that have trained as scientists and not PR people and a group of people that trained to talk to PR people and have no grasp of science, doesn't work at all, predictably.
You know, in the 50s and 60s, when physics and space seemed like Really Important aspects of the future -- that future voters would need to be understanding news stories about missiles, rockets, orbits, weird weapons -- it was considered essentially to boost the amount of education people got in those things at a young age, and to try to come up to speed in it yourself, even as an adult. Same arguably with computers in the 70s and 80s. You were supposed to study up on the difference between RAM and ROM, so you could understand (and judge for yourself) the stories you read bout computers.
I don't quite get why it doesn't seem that way today. The Internet? Everyone can look up a Wikipedia article on virology, and pose as credibly informed on the issue, at least for two or three 140-character rounds of Internet argument? It's very strange. It's almost like we're all aristocrats now, where we believe our native wit can combine with any random source of information to render us experts-on-demand, so why bother going through the hard slog of actually educating one's self on the salient issues of the era?
I wasn't alive in the 50s and 60s, but I thought the reasoning was "so that our kids can *work* on rockets and computers," not "so they can *vote* on rockets and computers." Certainly that's the reasoning I was told for teaching computer programming in schools (and for emphasizing STEM in general).
The "Oligarch Conspiracy Theory" is the Oligarchs wanted rocket science talent to work in their military and commercial high-tech industries, so heavier science and math education was put on school youth in order to screen for the talent.
Sure....but why does it (actually) not work? Could things be substantially improved, and what are the variety of ways in which it could be improved (as opposed to "the" answers that pop into our minds)?
My favorite models do journalism as a public good. Either government-funded through arm's-length or mandatory contribution arrangements (e.g. BBC) or as purely charitable undertakings (see Quanta Magazine, funded by the Simons Foundation). Good journalism by definition has massive positive externalities, and it's an iron law of economics that anything that generates positive externalities is undersupplied by markets. Things with negative externalities tend to get overproduced, and so negative-externality journalism proliferates while, in the free market at least, positive-externality journalism withers on the vine.
One approach would be to regulate the industry, in an actually serious manner. Of course: "now you have two problems", but perhaps we could kill two birds with one stone and learn how to do things *properly* in the process - a lot of shit policy implementation could be monitored and critiqued by public crowd sourcing....but then if that abstract idea got out of the bag, the whole system would be under threat.
> say “based on all available studies, hydroxychloroquine does not work.”
That's also ambiguous. It could mean either "based on all available studies, we are practically certain that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work", or "based on all available studies hydroxychloroquine probably doesn't work, but we can't exclude the possibility that further studies will show that it does work".
Point of clarification: This piece confuses “science journalists” with “science communicators,” which obscures how this problem occurs. “Science communicators” describes a job class ranging from public information officers to PR flacks; they aren’t journalists, and journalists in turn aren’t communicators, in the sense that their primary obligation isn’t to promote new research but to report on and contextualize it. “Science communicators” write the press releases with phrases such as “no evidence,” and far too often journalists just repeat that language because they aren’t sophisticated enough (or are too busy) to interrogate that claim or the valences of the phrase. So, yes, the problem is bad science communication, but also bad journalism, or stenography masquerading as journalism, which a lot of science journalism is. (Edits for grammar only.)
Thank you for helping me understand this process better.
Further nuance warranted; from Ashley Rindsberg:
"The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-science-journals
There's another overlooked aspect of this. Often a scientist or a general reader will see an article and be furious about how the headline utterly misrepresents what is actually a nuanced article by picking out the most dramatic quote or statement, even if it is unrepresentative of the content. I saw this many times and only later found out that it was standard practice in journalism for editors to make headlines and for reporters to have no input.
Given the increasing salience of headlines in the clickbait age, I regard this as a reprehensible practice rising to the level of journalistic fraud. Readers see headlines and articles as a whole. If a publisher can't trust the reporter to write a headline, why trust them to report at all?
Journalism has quite a few of these odd practices that appear to have evolved over time. I'd be careful about assuming it's a bad idea until it's been properly investigated at least. Another one that's often infuriating: a refusal to let experts consulted for an article fact-check the resulting article. This one at least has a fairly obvious cause; people will pick a fight with the article if they don't like how it's been presented, but, it also means that articles which interview someone knowledgable on a topic frequently go to press with fundamental garblings even though someone who could have fixed it was right there.
Yes, it is not a practice that helps general readers understand science. And I believe it is an international phenomenon, at least it is not limited to the US. You can insist to read an article that interviews you on a publication you have written, but you cannot correct- or even be let to know in advance- what the headline and introductory sentences ("ingress") is going to be, because that is decided at the "desk" of the newspaper, not by the journalist that interviews you. I have had some very frustrating experiences with this myself. More generally, I have almost never read an accurate presentation of a science report I have actually read myself. Mark Twain supposedly said the the difference between those who read newspapers and those who do not is the difference between the misinformed and the uninformed, not between the informed and the uninformed. Goes for social media also I guess. (Oh well.)
arent sophisticated enough, too busy, or just don't care
I think the natural "Well, then what?" followup is probably @literalbanana on the skilled practice of ignorance: https://carcinisation.com/2020/01/27/ignorance-a-skilled-practice/
Every finding is at least a little indexical, and it's ultimately a personal choice on how much you're allowed to abstract and generalize beyond a literal retelling of what happened. For something like UFOs, you're presumably agreeing that "Mr. X will tell you that he was abducted by UFOs" is a replicable truth, and taking issue with when the indexical "these people will tell you" can wash into the less-indexical "This thing can be sometimes observed". This is a judgement call! But we don't have great language about making these judgement calls, and I think that's ultimately the snarl that makes science communication so insufferable. A desire for "objectivity" means trying to find the most defensible source of judgement call, bigger groups are more defensible than individuals, and bigger groups skew conservative because you drift from needing one-person-saying-yes to no-people-saying-no.
I think an ideal way to write scientific articles is for the author or interview subject to just literally described the process they undertook, and what they found when undertaking it. Let the reader do the work of deciding whether that process leads to finding that generalize. Pretensions of objectivity (THIS one is "anecdote", THAT one is "evidence") boil down to an appeal to authority that "science" is an institution that can reliably decide which findings are allowed to generalize. And since we watched institutions fuck it up roughly a billion times throughout the pandemic, hopefully we can stop pretending we believe that!
One of the best encapsulations of this phenomenon I’ve read
Reminds me of this genius, but maybe apocryphal, marketing ploy from the 19th century: "Warning: the many reports that this tonic makes your hair grow back have not all been verified."
Garrett Jones once said something that I think about a lot: “To a wise Bayesian, when evidence is cheap to acquire, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.” Perhaps this conversation could use some depth by thinking about the search costs of that evidence.
Scott: Mistake theory! Here's how we can fix it.
Journos: Haha lets bash that guy over the head with our partisan conflict theory powers ;)
I don't think the airborne/droplet/formite thing was at all partisan and masks weren't very political.
In spring 2020 many people believed that COVID-19 would never get out of Asia, just like a few previous diseases didn't.
Therefore, if you believed otherwise and advocated mask use, the conclusion of American mainstream journalism was that you were obviously a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans.
As an example, look at this April 2020 snapshot of RationalWiki article on COVID-19, and search for "mask". It specifically includes the claim that the masks "in reality will not be helpful against this virus".
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19_pandemic&oldid=2176159
It was an interesting time for me, because at that moment in Slovakia, wearing face masks in public was already mandatory. Just as Scott wrote, "because it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread"; and for some mysterious reason, Slovakian epidemiologists agreed with this. So everyone around me was like "we are doomed, people will die, wear the mask and you have a chance to survive", and then I visited some English-speaking websites (not the rationalist ones, but popular sites like Hacker News), and everyone was like "wearing masks is obviously stupid, don't be a sheep".
Then, suddenly the American journalists turned 180 degrees, and declared that everyone who refuses to wear a mask is an anti-scientific Trump voter.
I went to the citation given by RationalWiki for that claim. Quote in the article: "'There's little harm in [masking],' Eric Toner, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Business Insider. 'But it's not likely to be very effective in preventing it.'"
Sure, this turned out to be wrong. But no claim that wearing masks made you "a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans." That's pure invented nonsense from you.
It wasn't wrong. Masks did in fact have no impact in the end, just look at the time series in question. This is why you almost never see numerical claims about how effective masks are, in the same way you do for vaccines. To get such a number you'd need either an RCT but those are nearly impossible to do (see bangladesh fiasco), or to see an obvious and consistent sharp change in the case curve. No such changes are visible, which is why these arguments always devolve into "masks work!!" followed by "no they don't!!". Classically, the latter argument is the null hypothesis and those arguing against need to present the evidence, but on the rare occasions said evidence is presented it's usually some dodgy modelling study or just argument by authority.
Edit: the racism thing isn't invented nonsense, either. Slick videos were being reshared on YouTube in Feb 2020 telling Italians to hug a Chinese person, because refusing to be around Chinese tourists was racist.
In Slovakia during spring 2020, face masks were mandatory and schools were closed. The number of cases was the lowest in Europe. (During the first 6 months of 2020, only 28 people have died of COVID-19, out of five million population.) At that time, we attributed the success to the masks.
In hindsight, it was probably closing the schools that made the greatest difference. Because in autumn 2020 most people decided that keeping schools closed for too long was unacceptable... and since then, the number of cases per capita is comparable with the rest of Europe.
By the way, here is a popular Vietnamese video from February 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtulL3oArQw Maybe if all those woke anti-racists actually listened to what Asian people were saying...
> To get such a number you'd need either an RCT but those are nearly impossible to do
You can do a double-blind RCT and it's been a bugbear of mine for the past few weeks here in ACX comment sections.
Mankind should've done it decades ago with the flu. The fact that we *still* haven't done it is a serious problem.
But, yes, put a few people in a room, one knowingly infected with the flu, and wearing masks of unknown-to-the-wearer-and-tester quality, and see how well they work.
After we understand it for flu, repeat for other communicable diseases.
Nitpick: you can do an RCT, but not really a double-blind one. Participants know if they are wearing a mask or not. Perhaps you could do a double-blind study between outwardly identical masks with better or worse material, but the amount of difference you could have between masks without it being noticeable is likely pretty small.
Did it turn out to be wrong? Does masking (using the types of cloth masks typical of the general public) actually work? Has there been a real-world experiment that shows a statistically significant effect?
I guess what I am asking is: What was it that convinced you that they are effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19?
Most experts seem to think they work. Scott seems to think they work. The cost is low, so I feel no need to second guess.
Really? That's it? Your firm belief on the effectiveness of masks is based on that!?
I think they likely work, but we can absolutely study it in laboratory double-blind RCT conditions, and we should.
Maybe it costs millions of dollars, but the question is relevant for approximately ~billions of people, right now, so those costs amortize away to nothingness quickly.
The data is somewhat mixed, but the latest studies I reviewed on this showed that:.
No mask < cloth mask < surgical mask < N95 mask in terms of limiting droplet spread.
Some studies were used real "simulated" testing in an air chamber with human faces models. Others were based on actual results between states that did and did not mask in Bangladesh.
The West Coast of the US has had mask mandates that are pretty well followed; Hawaii also has such mandates. All of those states are well down in the bottom half for COVID deaths and infections.
"But no claim that wearing masks made you "a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans." That's pure invented nonsense from you."
There is, however, a study about "(Un)masking threat: Racial minorities experience race-based social identity threat wearing face masks during COVID-19" where there is discussion of racism:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1368430221998781
"The CDC favored the use of home-made masks, including a bandana, over medical-grade masks for the broader public (CDC, 2020a). Such makeshift strategies might be acceptable for White Americans. Some racial minorities, on the other hand, were left in a double bind adopting the new recommendations: wear a face mask and risk being racially profiled—seen as a criminal or foreign/infectious and subjected to increased surveillance and discrimination—or be at risk of COVID-19.
...Asian people and Asian Americans also faced increased stereotyping and discrimination due to the origin of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. They were treated as scapegoats for the virus and its devastating impact on daily life in the United States. Former President Trump’s use of the terms “China virus” or the derogatory “kung flu” (Nakamura, 2020) reentrenched and legitimized blame toward Asian Americans. Reports of Asian people being spit on, screamed at, verbally threatened, and physically assaulted were noted across the United States, and COVID-19-specific hate crimes were reported (Tavernise & Oppel, 2020). Associated with experiencing increased discrimination during COVID-19, Asian individuals suffered from physical and mental health symptoms including increased anxiety, depression, and sleep problems (S. Lee & Waters, 2020).
...It is argued that wearing face masks for Asian people during COVID-19 primes these historical stereotypes of foreignness, infection, and disease. While the use of face masks in Asian countries is normalized and less stigmatized, this was not the case in the United States at the beginning of the pandemic (Friedman, 2020). In Asian cultures, wearing a mask has long been a signal of illness, worn as a courtesy to prevent disease from spreading to others (Jennings, 2020). For Asian people, wearing a mask, particularly early in the pandemic, could prime COVID-related stereotypes and myths that Asian people were more likely to be carrying and spreading the virus. The media perpetuated this stereotype, often using images of Asian people wearing masks as the “face” of the pandemic (Burton, 2020), actions that drew condemnation from the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA, 2020). During the pandemic, Asian people noted increased attention, surveillance, and the presumption they were carrying COVID-19 specifically when wearing a face mask, mirroring these racial and ethnic stereotypes (Buscher, 2020; Pak, 2020)."
Recommendations on face masks were initially 'the public shouldn't wear them unless they are sick, we need them for healthcare workers'
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html
This story covers the shifting attitudes towards masks:
https://www.wired.com/story/how-masks-went-from-dont-wear-to-must-have/
So I think it is arguable that in the early days, being seen to want to wear masks as a private citizen was seen as panic-buying and taking away scarce and necessary supplies from health workers, so you were selfish and unsociable.
Then mask-wearing became recommended, and the media coverage swung around to "Trump encourages racism by talking about the 'kung flu'" instead.
Here's just one example of a mainstream American journalist doing exactly what Viliam said:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/01/coronavirus-fight-fear-racism-anti-chinese-sentiment-campus-column/4913481002/
"College campuses have proven ripe incubators for fear amid the spreading coronavirus outbreak, as shown by a series of insensitive, racist and discriminatory incidents. Students have donned face masks in classrooms, and an online petition to suspend classes at the University of California, Santa Barbara collected more than 1,100 signatures."
Google "before:2020-03-01 covid fear racism mask" if you want to scroll through a huge list of articles just like this one.
Nothing in that article amounts to anything close to a claim that advocating mask use makes you "a right-wing racist using pseudoscience to defend your phobia of Asian Americans." The part you quoted very clearly does not say that.
You seem to be construing Viliam's claim very narrowly. I suppose you have that right. Maybe nothing short of a journalist from February 2020 quoting Viliam word-for-word would satisfy you. For instance, the article doesn't say "phobia", -- it says "xenophobia". It mentions students donning masks in a list of "insensitive, racist and discriminatory incidents", but it doesn't specifically call anybody a "right-wing racist", nor does it accuse anybody of "using pseudoscience".
With most claims, you can construe them narrowly enough that no existing evidence is sufficient to substantiate them. And you can also do that here. That's not going to be an interesting or profitable conversation, as far as I'm concerned.
I leave it to readers to do the Google search, see for themselves the kind of articles Viliam is talking about, and make their own judgment.
Most importantly, they changed stances on a dime with no intervening evidence. There was not an RCT published in April 2020 showing high effectiveness of masks at reducing spread of respiratory viruses.
That is why mistake theory doesn't explain.
Irony of railing against conflict theory by blaming a specific group
I'm actually making fun of mistake theorists for being hopelessly naive though...
I feel like this is a downstream result of a curious phenomenon in the modern intellectual climate: that we have almost entirely discounted arguments from expert knowledge as invalid, in favor of arguments from evidence, so we have no way -- as a society -- to argue that "a reasonably understanding of the science says this should not be possible".
Like: should masks work? there's no evidence, but it follows if a virus is transported in aerosolized particles that yes, they should help. Should homeopathy work? No, a basic understanding of chemistry and biology says it's absurd. But those arguments, which would be perfectly convincing in person, carry no weight at the level of common understanding that journalism is allowed to assume, so they're reduced to only reporting on the state of the evidence. Hence the nonsensical headlines.
I kinda think that in the far future people will look back on our era and talk about this as one of dominant social trends of the time: that weird time when all arguments resorted to data and no one was allowed to be intelligent.
Incidentally, this is the failure mode that my corporate tech job has. No one is willing to make bold claims about what would be good decisions -- everything is heavily rooted in a sort of ritual of performing data science, which lets us assign value to stupid short term decisions (if we add this popup, revenue increases, the data proves it) but not wise long term decisions (if we keep popups to a minimum people will like our brand and stick with it for years, giving brand loyalty and doing right by our customers).
A lot of the stupid things in tech follow from this kind of decision-making, which as far as I can tell is endemic to Bay Area-style businesses, but not really a healthy way to run a company. I used to work at Amazon and they notably _didn't_ work this way, which IMO is one of the main reasons they've managed to grow so large, because they have the ability -- bestowed by Bezos -- to take very long-term strategies instead of chasing short-term improvements in their metrics.
Huh weird. I'd say it's the exact opposite. Governments, media and academia are constantly making arguments from authority and arguments from evidence are not only unfashionable but systematically shouted down. 95% of science journalism is "according to expert X blah blah blah". Relatively few outlets do any real home-grown analysis of raw evidence and virtually none will write articles of the form "according to expert X blah blah but according to evidence and logic, anti-blah".
Maybe it seems the opposite if you primarily read ACX and other Substacks, but that's unusual. Blogs are really the only place you'll find outsiders picking direct fights with scientific 'experts' on topics within their sphere of 'expertise'.
Could depend on the audience. In the progressive/liberal/tech-savvy/well-educated world I perceive an over-reliance on arguments from evidence, but maybe it's a reaction to the rest of the world having an under-reliance on the same. If that's the case, I guess I'd say the reaction is excessive and problematic.
I'm afraid I don't quite follow what you're arguing any more. Your original post talks about not listening to experts but then your example is that masks "obviously" work because of what aerosols are, which isn't an argument by expert but rather an argument by logic.
Sorry, I should be more clear but as far as I know I can't edit posts on Substack to clarify so I'm stuck with my initial phrasing (or maybe I can? I feel like that's new. neat.)
I mean arguments from _expertise_, or logic as you say: knowledge of how things work, which can be either experts (who know a lot and can explain what they know and therefore believe as a result of it), or laypeople, who can also be experts on things as well, if they, well, are (very case-by-case of course).
In either case I think it is perfectly valid to be convinced something is true by an argument without needing to go gather data on it, and that (liberal, progressive) media largely acts like it doesn't really believe that that's true. It does, you're right, believe in _authority_, but in a sort of vapid and pointless way. So I guess (and I've adjusted my point throughout this thread), I'd say:
* insisting on data to believe anything and ignoring logic = silly but ubiquitous
* insisting authority to believe anything and ignoring data and logic = silly but ubiquitous
* allowing a healthy mix of authority, data, and logic, as appropriate = wise and good, but rare and not common in the media at all.
Ah ha! I see. Well, I find myself much more in agreement with your formulation here than the original formulation. To what extent that was me misunderstanding your use of experts vs expertise, and to what extent it's due to your position changing through the thread, I don't know. But I agree that you do need to balance the different ways of reaching conclusions - people who are genuinely experts and have shown that via empirical evidence (e.g. correct predictions) are worth listening to, and sometimes without even requiring data to back it up, but if they start saying things that are clearly illogical then there's a problem. Or something like that.
"I kinda think that in the far future people will look back on our era and talk about this as one of dominant social trends of the time: that weird time when all arguments resorted to data and no one was allowed to be intelligent."
While I cannot of course evaluate the predictive power of your claim ("no evidence" as of yet NATCH), the phrase "no one was allowed to be intelligent" describes our current social and intellectual climate better than I could have imagined.
Late contender for ACX Comment of the Year!
I hope you're right about the people of the future looking back on us and seeing us blinded to natural intelligence, but I have to disagree that the public has an obsession with pure empiricism. Increasingly, the public, even the alleged intelligentsia in it, is completely uninterested in any kind of rational thought at all. Everything boils down to rank tribalism- you must support your side no matter how psychotic or even harmful the signals for that side become, and you must hate everything the other side does and openly fantasize about somehow removing them from the public sphere entirely, possibly by violence. Anything else shows insufficient loyalty, which is worse than merely being the enemy.
It seems like Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are competing to see who can destroy civil society in the US the fastest and most thoroughly.
I think youʼre right. And not just scientists publishing papers, doctors making prescription decisions seem to also think about these two different concepts the same way: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/doctor-there-ar.html
I think you're being way too kind to the news articles at the top.
These are professional communicators we're talking about. If they wanted to convey "we haven't looked into X but our priors on X are high" they could have. In fact their priors on X were low. Or, worse, their priors on X weren't so low but they wanted other people's to be low. They were intentionally using the "no evidence" ambiguity to make it sound like they'd looked into X and disconfirmed it when they hadn't.
As a conspiracy theorist, I find it maddening how I am constantly mocked for my conspiracy theories, even though every single one of them thus far has turned out to be true.
https://questioner.substack.com/p/when-conspiracy-theories-are-real
The first problem with your reasoning here is your premises that 1. There is such a thing as an expert consensus and 2. That a newspaper would be capable of conveying it to you.
In my experience, experts tend to live in spaces with very little consensus at all. The misrepresentation of that dynamic by people who don't understand its subtleties is the problem under discussion here.
You're also the guy who claimed to be responsible for getting Trump elected via a new science of "memetics" that you personally invented and kept secret, and also claimed to be responsible for QAnon by the same means, so I'm going to take your claims to be right about anything else with an entire barrel of salt.
It is amazing to me how everyone seems to ignore the conspiracy theories that are actually true. Like Project MKUltra or the century-long tobacco/oil industry propaganda campaign
Ooh, do "linked to" next. As in "red wine linked to heart health".
And there's a special place in hell for "Scientists Find". What it sounds like: total scientific consensus. What it actually means: two guys published a paper.
Yes, "linked to" is the Swiss Army Knife of lazy BS journalism. Sadly there are not enough electrons on the Internet to fully explore what crap these words signal.
Remember also that reporters don't write the headlines. Headlines are written by low-level editorial staff glancing at the first paragraph.
Oh, I have *ample* evidence that other people are smarter than me.
I'd be more or less forgiving of two of the headline formulations: "No Clear Evidence" and "No Hard Evidence." Perhaps "No Proof Yet" would be a good phrase to use in the early days.
This post lacks in conflict theory. Feynman once said, "... poets do not write to be understood". Well, journalists write to be misunderstood. While there is no evidence exaggeration of scientific findings is not accidental, it is not.
While it's true that information in the news is intentionally misrepresented, I think the lack of conflict theory in Scott's post is perfectly justified. Journalists who use the phrase "no evidence" to mean "this isn't true" probably aren't secretly conspiring to have readers interpret the opposite. Maybe if this were a top-down executive decision to undermine science in the public eye, but that's a little too conspiratorial for my tastes. I say it's a genuine mistake.
People who used the phrase "no evidence it's airborne" were *openly* conspiring to have readers reach a conclusion of "So I shouldn't buy up N-95s." They admitted to this! Burning trust is the byproduct of lying, not the goal.
>. Journalists who use the phrase "no evidence" to mean "this isn't true" probably aren't secretly conspiring to have readers interpret the opposite.
They're not conspiring to have readers interpret "no evidence" as the opposite of "this isn't true". They're conspiring to have readers interpret "no evidence" *as* "this isn't true".
They may be uncertain, or they may actually think it's false, but either way, they don't want to communicate that. It's conflict theory, not mistake theory.
Less conflict theory more incentive structures. In the current media economy headlines are written for maximum clicks, entirely separate from the content of the articles. So tend to be more extreme or eye catching. This isn't an act of malice its a product of the only currently viable business model for publications, and the ones that don't follow it lose out, and articles with less inflammatory headlines don't go viral so you don't see them
I don't believe this. It's trivial to think of clickbait headlines which work favorably to the right. The reason we didn't see headlines like "don't be afraid of appearing racist--wear your mask!" is that there is, in fact, ideology that underlies the media's clickbait; it's not just there to get views.
A possible counterpoint would be that there is a whole ecosystem of right-wing clickbaiting and you probably aren't seeing it because the algorithm has put you in a walled garden.
Well, all I can say is that you must have an astonishingly high prior that the purpose of science journalism is to inform, rather than (say) to entertain ha ha.
Also...when you say the search for truth is Bayesian, I would have to say that depends on what you mean by the phrase. If you mean the kind of search for the truth that a jury does, or a voter, or a physician listening to a patient's tale of his symptoms in the ER, or that any random Person A does when listening to Person B's remarkable story about what happened last Saturday, then that seems quite sound to me.
But if you mean the search for the truth in the sense of discovery, scientific progress, innovation -- then, no, I would say Bayes' Theorem is of no assistance at all -- indeed, I would say it is more or less explicitly rejected by empiricism, the most successful model for scientific progress the world has ever known, as a throwback to medieval scholasticism -- the belief that the quality and persuasiveness of the argument is the best way to decide the truth of a proposition. In the modern era we *train* our scientists to question what seems certain, to doubt theoretic arguments, most especially those that are personally persuasive. (Feynmann wrote a great essay about this which I cannot find unfortunately.)
Personally, I've never known someone to make a genuine (nontrivial, scientific) discovery thinking along Bayesian lines, because those lines always point to the conventional wisdom. Genuine discovery is a black-swan thing, and you only get there by black-swan thinking -- by, among other things, resolutely ignoring the reasonable priors and wandering off into "crazy" directions. Suppose air is *not* just one element, as every reasonable chain of logic and all the evidence suggests it is? What if time is *not* the same for every observer, batshit crazy as that seems at first? What if RNA could catalyze chemical reactions all by itself -- somehow?
I think there really is (perhaps unfortunately) a surprisingly thin wavy line between original thinking that leads to powerful discovery and irrationality, paranoia, UFOlogy, even madness, which has been noted more than once among the most creative people. How you tell the difference I couldn't really say, being neither mad nor profoundly creative.
I don't think that this is quite right. People who made those novel discoveries explored "crazy" directions precisely because conventional theories weren't able to adequately explain every empirically observed oddity. If theories already had perfect explanations for everything there would've obviously been no point. So the failure to adhere to "bayesianism" wasn't with them, it was with those who didn't give due weight to counter-evidence to those theories.
That said, some counter-evidence by itself doesn't grant you the necessary insight required to create a new, better framework. The skill allowing to do this is among the rarest and most difficult to transmit, and saying "just use bayes lol" clearly misses the point.
The purpose of almost all journalism is to make money and that means getting clicks, not specifically entertaining or informing but attracting attention. Because these are private companies and this is how they make their money. (I say almost all because there are public funded media in some countries, others run by foundations, or at a loss by wealthy owners. Which have a different set of incentives)
Modern discoveries in physics (eg the Higgs, gravitational waves, etc) are all made via a Bayesian process of evidence collection to investigate a theory-informed prior. This is why ideas like a "five sigma signal" exist - because at this level the empirical process is necessarily statistical. Theoreticians tells us something should probably exist, then experimentalists collect a bunch of data over a bunch of trials, which then goes through a statistical process to determine whether the thing actually exists.
Part of this, to me, seems to be due to science institutions being unwilling to give thoughtful priors in the face of no newly generated evidence, to science communicators. When a science communicator queries an institution, if there was no new evidence generated, they simply return "no evidence."
We seem to be in this strange world, where the only way to get credible priors, absent new evidence, is to find the handful of smart scientists on twitter, who are willing to deal you some blackmarket priors.
Err, your picture looks like a lot of things I completely agree with (transmission from kids, mask wearing being useful) and then the huge claim that Covid is a lab escape, which generally I only see in anti-vax circles who are taking horse dewormer voluntarily and prophylacticly. I know it wasn’t the point of the post, but if you currently believe covid is a lab escape, I’d be fascinated as to why. And I think it’s quite distracting from your argument to have it in there as an example.
Not Scott but:
1. At this point the hard evidence for lab escape is drastically stronger than the other way around. There's lots of it but to me, the leaked grant proposals where EcoHealth/WIV were requesting money from DARPA to do risky GoF experiments on bat coronaviruses from Chinese caves, were pretty much a textbook example of the sort of experiment that could have created SARS-CoV-2. But there's also the US intel about people falling sick with COVID symptoms in autumn 2019, the sudden spikes in PCR equipment acquisition, the extremely guilty-looking behaviour exhibited by the Chinese authorities like suddenly pulling WIV databases offline in September 2019 - months before COVID was known to the world, and then refusing to put them back etc.
2. Your prior on "a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a coronavirus lab came from that lab" should be extremely high. Especially when learning that the French, who built it, already knew it was using inadequate safety levels, and that lab escapes happen all the time.
Even without hard evidence like the grant proposal the most likely thing here is an escape. The evidence just tips the scales even harder.
> Your prior on "a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a coronavirus lab came from that lab" should be extremely high.
That's not your prior, that's your posterior probability. The original priors are the likelihood that a new coronavirus like this would escape the lab in a given timeframe (before knowing that there is a new coronavirus epidemic), and the likelihood that a new coronavirus would jump from animals to humans in the same timeframe. These may then be adjusted based on various information, like the fact that the new virus surfaced in Wuhan.
The problem is that I can't even put a handle on the order of magnitude of the original priors, so even if there are pieces of evidence in favor of lab leak, I have no idea what the posteriors will look like.
> But there's also the US intel about people falling sick with COVID symptoms in autumn 2019
How does that change the relative likelihood of it being a lab leak vs. a natural zoonotic virus?
I should have mentioned that the people falling sick were lab workers.
Is it a posterior? The prior for a lab leak of any virus should be quite high given the long history of such leaks happening. I agree that the prior on zoonotic crossover should also be taken into account, but surely there's a geographical component to that too, that is, it's not the prior of an animal jump but the prior of an animal jump in the same place as a coronavirus lab. Which is surely vanishingly tiny.
I don't think Scott's point is that they are equally probable, but that the no evidence framing makes them seem that way
Scott writes ‘ Every single one of these statements that had “no evidence” is currently considered true or at least pretty plausible.’ In my current social circles, nearly all of the statements are considered true, and lab escape covid is considered up there with anti vax and other conspiracy theories. It just looked like a really odd outlier in an otherwise really boring list.
That says a lot about your social circle, and much less about Scott's writing and/or the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis. There is in fact a great deal of evidence - not *proof*, but definitely evidence - to support the lab leak hypothesis, and it is broadly considered credible by nonpartisan experts and informed amateurs.
Which makes it a very good example of what Scott is talking about. For the motte of "evidence means scientific proof in an RCT or peer-reviewed journal article", journalists and other thinkfluencers can honestly say "there is no evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis" if that's what their audience wants to hear and will get them the most clicks. And thus their audiences can feel smugly certain in their superior knowledge. Meanwhile, people rationally evaluating all the evidence that isn't peer-reviewed journal articles and RCTs (but is still evidence), can reasonably come to the conclusion that the lab leak hypothesis may be true or even that it is probably true, but we'll probably never be certain the way all the people in your social circle are certain of their belief.
Perhaps you're in a bubble.
Why not?
I don't know the likelihood of lab leak vs. natural cause, but what does seem to be clear at this point is that in the early stages of the pandemic, the media decided that it was definitely not a lab leak (to the point of social media companies censoring claims that it was) with very close to zero evidence either way.
When you say "horse dewormer" I assume you're talking about Ivermectin. Here is the NIH introduction:
"Ivermectin is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved antiparasitic drug that is used to treat several neglected tropical diseases, including onchocerciasis, helminthiases, and scabies.1 It is also being evaluated for its potential to reduce the rate of malaria transmission by killing mosquitoes that feed on treated humans and livestock.2 For these indications, ivermectin has been widely used and is generally well tolerated...."
Your pejorative "horse dewormer" tells me that you are either unaware that doctors have prescribed drugs "off label" for many years, and that two large states in India have had remarkable success with using Ivermectin, or you don't particularly care that many thousands of lives have been lost unnecessarily. Check the stats from India yourself if you dare. C19study<dot>com is a website that aggregates studies of treating Covid with various drugs. Check out the results for Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. HCQ has proven to be quite effective when given early enough to avoid the dangerous Cytokine storm, particularly when given with zinc or Azithromycin. Ivermectin I've already addressed. Since Ivermectin is "generally well tolerated", and no treatment protocol ever emerged from CDC or NIH, why in the world get between doctors and their patients when lives are at stake?
the problem is more complex:
Trisha Greenhalgh:"Will COVID-19 be evidence-based medicine’s nemesis?"
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003266
Published: June 30, 2020
"..The 20th-century logic of evidence-based medicine, in which scientists pursued the goals of certainty, predictability and linear causality, remains useful in some circumstances (for example, the drug and vaccine trials referred to above). But at a population and system level, we need to embrace 21st-century epistemology and methods to study how best to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability and non-linear causality.."
"... philosophical contrasts between the evidence-based medicine and complex-systems paradigms. Ogilvie et al have argued that rather than pitting these two paradigms against one another, they should be brought together .."
What is non-linear causality, exactly?
> what is non-linear causality, exactly?
oposite of: "a conventional Newtonian (linear, cause-effect) perspective"
and related to the "complexity and complex systems"
read more:
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-018-1089-4#Sec2
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-018-1089-4/tables/1
~"Emergent causality: multiple interacting influences account for a particular outcome but none can be said to have a fixed ‘effect size’"
another definition:
https://www.systemsinnovation.io/post/nonlinear-causality
"Nonlinear causality is a form of causation where cause and effect can flow in a bidirectional fashion between two or more elements or systems. The essential characteristic of nonlinear causality is the idea of feedback that an effect can create a cause, but equally, this cause can then feedback to create an effect in the first system. Nonlinear causality can be contrasted with linear causality where the direction of affect flows in a unique direction. Nonlinear causation leads to a number of important outcomes that are not possible when considering more simple circumstances of linear causality. Nonlinear causality can lead to self-reinforcing or self-amplifying processes through feedback, thus allowing for disproportionality between initial cause and final effect.
..."
Feedback seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to understand in the context of usual, "evidence-based", "effects follow causes" types of science. There's quite a gap between "object A affects object B, and object B affects object A", which run-of-the-mill first-year undergrad physics deals with regularly; and quasi-esoteric claims about "effects creating causes".
That we can model feedback at all may come as a surprise to someone for whom the mathematical complexity of science does not span beyond computing percentages, but it's not anything new under the sun of empiricism.
And I definitely don't see how it has anything to say about things being "evidence-based".
Agreed; for example, one of the simpler biological functions has feedback loops in it:
https://www.genome.jp/pathway/map00195
And yet, it is quite well studied and understood.
Ohhh KEGG, that brings some nice memories back! I had to use it while taking a detour from physics into a metabolomics lab, for a couple of years. We were working on software to do "autodiscovery" of metabolic pathways as sort of "small deviations" around the established ones.
Definitely lots of non-trivial feedback going on in the metabolism. I think the field was a bit late to the "just throw computing power at it" party, but it's catching up nicely. And I can promise these people have a thing or two to teach to anyone saying "reductionism bad, complex systems magic".
Non-linear causality is a combination of false characterizations of traditional understandings of causality accompanied by examples of physical events that are difficult to analyze mechanically, by unjustified assertions that this difficulty is a failure of traditional understandings of causality, and by hand-wavy claims that some other notion of causality would solve the "problem".
(parachute) another medical satire: "maternal kisses" --> "moratorium on the practice"
"Maternal kisses are not effective in alleviating minor childhood injuries (boo-boos): a randomized, controlled and blinded study"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jep.12508
"Maternal kissing of boo-boos confers no benefit on children with minor traumatic injuries compared to both no intervention and sham kissing. In fact, children in the maternal kissing group were significantly more distressed at 5 minutes than were children in the no intervention group. The practice of maternal kissing of boo-boos is not supported by the evidence and we recommend a moratorium on the practice."
context: https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/13/journals-publish-fake-studies/
This isn't bad communication, it's a deliberate tactic. The aim is to make certain claims look bad and their proponents crazy - using the same language to describe the case for alien abductions and a lab origin of the coronavirus is a feature, not a bug. Looked at positively, it's an attempt to curate and shape the debate and lead their audience away from misinformation.
Of course, the information environment around coronavirus has been far more fast-moving than the media is used to, so it just reveals them for the toads they are.
Any hypothesis that requires a bunch of different competing media companies around the world to coordinate to promote some agenda has a very high prior against it. A more parsimonious hypothesis is that they are individually following economic incentives, and the current click based business model encourages misleading headlines
There is no requirement for the various media companies to co-ordinate, you've made that up.
"There's no evidence of a massive media conspiracy to marginalize non-vaxxmax actors", you might say.
Fish don't need to coordinate to swim in a school. Birds don't need too coordinate to fly in a V. Independent agents with similar behavioral models that only require them to look at other agents emerge patterns all the time.
ESR coined this as a "prospiracy". Craig Renyolds used it to create the boid algorithm. Football fans do it every sunday to make the wave and to all yell at the tv in unison.
CNN is losing money hand over fist. Seems to me this is an anomaly to your hypothesis. And you have obviously not been paying attention to the absolutely brazen dishonesty of the Pravda media: All of the usual suspects (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, NPR) cut around 500 words from the transcript of Trumps conversation with Zelensky or otherwise tampered with it, giving a markedly different, negative impression of the call.
Were you to actually go back and research the accuracy of my assertion, you might be tempted to call it an "outlier". It is not. It is business as usual, day after day. It's not a "matter of opinion", all of the evidence of what was said or published is right here on the intertubes. They get away with it because either people don't bother to confirm their accuracy, or people approve because it's necessary if the progressive agenda is to be achieved. And with all the "othering" that attends these distortions and outright lies, many refuse to consider other points of view.
Would you call it coordination, if the major actors just experience the same incentives, or most of the people working there share the same filter bubble?
Do you remember the "JournoList"? Have you seen the emails between Fauci and Collins the Great Barrington Declaration launched by three top scholars in the fields of public health and epidemiology, which called for focused protection of those most at risk from Covid? The emails and background can be seen at "https://brownstone.org/articles/faucis-war-on-science-the-smoking-gun/". Key quote: "There needs to be a quick and published take down of its premises." The linked article documents how the emails were acted on by the media.
I noticed the "no evidence" thing this year. I looked up links between cracking knuckles and arthritis
One site that said "no evidence!" had its main example that one doctor had cracked his knuckles on one hand for decades and x-rays showed no change
There have been reasonable studies as well that found no evidence (but a correlation with lower grip strength) but I did notice that 'no evidence' meant something different from what almost anyone would think of as deserving that term
It seems evident that in this case it's a result of a sharp focus on not allowing positive beliefs about something without clear evidence within the medical community but I think it's also fair to say that specific meaning is now being adapted to dismiss whatever beliefs some journalists think ought to be dismissed regardless of just what the full state of evidence for or against really is
But note that even Bayesian reports wouldn't be a perfect silver bullet to solve this problem!
E.g., suppose the Bayesian Times published the headline "50% Probability That Schrödinger's Cat Is Dead". This could mean either "We have no idea what Schrödinger's cat is up to, but based purely on its breed and date of birth the prior on it having died by now is 50%" or "Actually, Schrödinger has just been spotted forcing his cat into a quantum murder box, and according to quantum mechanics there is exactly 50% probability that it is now dead".
Now this isn't *as much* of a problem, because *if* you do your priors right these Bayesian headlines would still give you the information you need to inform your decisions (e.g., whether to bet on Schrödinger's cat being dead) even if they wouldn't really tell you how strong the evidence (as opposed to the prior) for a given claim is.
It is still a problem, though, both because priors are hard to do right (especially if a priori there are literally infinite mutually exclusive equally likely scenarios) and because in one case the probability that a new piece of information will significantly shift your probability in either direction is low, and in the other it is high (but equally high in both directions).
Fortunately (?) it's not a problem that this is a problem because the Bayesian Times will never come to be, so we'll never even get to mitigate the magnitude of the problem such that this contribution is significant. I guess. It would still be nice to have a systematic way to fix this - maybe going a little meta and using confidence intervals rather than just point estimates of probability?
Is there a probability system that solves this issue, and allows me to distinguish the between the levels of confidence in "I think there's a 50% chance this coin will come up heads" and "I think there's a 50% that the next Marvel movie will score above 90 on Rotten Tomatoes"?
Without lapsing into the "frequentist heresy" (which might be a convenient way out even if you only see some probabilities as "effectively" objective), my current best suggestion is to refer both to the probability estimate and to the probability that your estimate will be updated more than some delta in either direction... Presumably my probability for the coin will be very stable (assuming good reason to believe it's not biased) and my probability for the Marvel movie will be relatively volatile. But if working out one probability is already generically hard, imagine two! Then again, this doesn't have to be easy!
"No Evidence" ==> "Managing uncertainty in the COVID-19 era" ( BMJ Opinion 5 th July 2020 )
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/22/managing-uncertainty-in-the-covid-19-era/
"""
...
This is because COVID-19 is, par excellence, a complex problem in a complex system.
Complex systems are, by definition, made up of multiple interacting components. Such
systems are open (their boundaries are fluid and hard to define), dynamically evolving
(elements in the system feed back, positively or negatively, on other elements), unpredictable
(a fixed input to the system does not have a fixed output) and self-organising (the system
responds adaptively to interventions). Complex systems can be properly understood only in
their entirety; isolating a part of the system in order to ‘solve' it does not produce a solution
that works across the system for all time. Uncertainty, tension and paradox are inherent; they
must be accommodated rather than resolved.
...
Managing uncertainty in a pandemic: five simple rules
1. Most data will be flawed or incomplete. Be honest and transparent about this.
2. For some questions, certainty may never be reached. Consider carefully whether to wait
for definitive evidence or act on the evidence you have.
3. Make sense of complex situations by acknowledging the complexity, admitting
ignorance, exploring paradoxes and reflecting collectively.
4. Different people (and different stakeholder groups) interpret data differently. Deliberation
among stakeholders may generate multifaceted solutions.
5. Pragmatic interventions, carefully observed and compared in real-world settings, can
generate useful data to complement the findings of controlled trials and other forms of
evidence.
...
"""
Related:
https://xkcd.com/2551/
👻👻👻ooooooooh👻👻👻I am the ghost of Christmas future, Emil Kirkegaard, they threw my Nazi pedophile ass out of a helicopter. Repent, repent of the heresy of Jensenism, There is still time! Lewontin was right!👻👻👻ooooooooh👻👻👻
The evidence against the hereditarian hypothesis of the black-white IQ gap in the US was compelling decades ago, it is decisive today. Continuing to hold to it under present circumstances requires a commitment to absurd views about EA heritability in Africa.
The real answer was so obvious that it's been imbedded in popular culture for years.
ARSA snp frequencies in the two populations:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
Birth cohorts effected by tetraethyl lead: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q8wQYK1tJUc
👻👻👻👻ooooooh👻👻👻it’s getting spookier and spookier in here
👻👻👻oooooooh👻👻👻
Some things you might not know about your friends at mankind quarterly. Read it Scott, read all of it. https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-YAnJOkt3G0B4uEGh/Scott+&+Jon+Lee+Anderson+-+Inside+the+League+(1986)_djvu.txt
I think you're going to want to talk to me directly before it gets any 👻👻👻spookier👻👻👻
I was expecting you to talk about Russell T, Warne.
Bayesian reasoning is great, but it only works if people start out with more or less the same priors. If I firmly believe that poltergeists exist (P(ghost)~=1), then I'm likely to interpret any random tremor or noise in the house as evidence for angry spirits. You could tell me that angry spirits are totally imaginary (P(ghost)~=0) until you're blue in the face, but you wouldn't be able to provide much more than mere assertions. You could point out how ghosts are unscientific, but doing so would merely lower my confidence in science, as opposed to ghosts -- since, from my point of view, ghosts just obviously exist.
Indeed. This is one of the strongest arguments against multiculturalism. People can form healthy societies only if there's a broad agreement on underlying principles, because otherwise, like you say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Of course, the response is that even multiculturalism doesn't work, it's the reality we're stuck with anyway.
I don't see how you could blame multiculturalism for this, unless you consider antivaxxers a "separate culture" from the rest of the US.
Would you see
1. The percentage of "fully vaccinated" people catching the Omicron variant
2. The reported mildness of the Omicron variant
3. The reported heart issues of vaccinated people
4. The rigid suppression of the use of off-label drugs
as evidence that the antivaxxers might have a point?
I think "no evidence" is part of an implicit society-wide project to make knowledge somehow not require intelligence and common sense and rationality to acquire and apply. Because any time people are using their brains, different conclusions will be reached. Thinking is risky and threatens collective solidarity.
Many in the PMC would prefer to neutralize this threat with rules that can be mindlessly, "objectively" applied, like p < 0.05 or "things are true if and only if there is a peer reviewed study in this list of 'respected' journals", to define what knowledge is in the public square.
Which is not to say they're wrong to want this. The benefits are obvious! But rational folks need to have a clear-eyed accounting of the pros and cons, which may be very context-dependent.
If one wanted to be less charitable (and I do), One would argue some lazy/dishonest writers use this phrase to launder weak claims by giving them the same wording as strong claims.
//Well, because it seems intuitively obvious that if something is spread by droplets shooting out of your mouth, preventing droplets from shooting out of your mouth would slow the spread.//
Only if there's no risk compensation.
That logic allows one to dismiss every intervention that is not 100% effective. Seems a bit silly.....
We shouldn't mandate seatbelts because people will drive more recklessly!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Tullock#Tullock's_spike
Seat belts save the lives (and time) of car occupants at the cost of the lives of pedestrians. It's probably a good (ie more net lives saved than lost) but immoral (ie cost born by innocent bystanders to benefit the cost producers) trade off. But it doesn't deserve snearing dismissal.
Tullock's Spike could actually solve a whole host of problems ( overpopulation, climate change, and voting fraud).
I don't share your partisan or tribal frame of reference, so I'm having a hard time understanding what you are meaning to communicate here.
I was being facetious, not partisan. Tullock's spike would kill a large swath of the population (because it's a terrible idea). This would reduce overpopulation, reduce climate change and reduce voting fraud(all because there are just fewer people alive).
Ah, Gordon Tullock suggested it first? I should have known.
In my family, whenever we drive somewhere, we debate about whether we're doing "Plan A" or "Plan B."
Plan A = Drive Carefully
Plan B = Wear your seatbelt
As a pilot and driver of a sports car, I feel quite uneasy without my seatbelt buckled. This is anecdotal, but there have been several news items from my neck of the woods where multiple people were in an automobile accident, the buckled in lived, and the unsecured died (one went from the back seat through the windshield and impacted a tree).
I have a RAT oriented colleague doing transport safety research. He once suggested improving road safety by mandating putting a large spike on the steering wheel and outlawing seat belts in the driver's seat.
You don't think masks and social distancing are more likely to be a special case than most?
Did you read the intervening comments? The point is that requiring an intervention to be more effective than any degree of risk compensation it might deter, is a way to dismiss all imperfect interventions (seatbelts....).
It is, accordingly, an unserious requirement.
Oh, no, I didn't read the intervening comments. I'm illiterate and very stupid, you see.
You should unfuck your tone. It's exceptionally condescending.
Requiring an intervention to be more effective than the risk compensation it actually does deter is not unreasonable or unserious. It is particularly important to consider when the effect of the intervention is likely to be very small or conditional, and when it's not obvious whether or not it's working.
I am responding 1 more time to clarify my understanding of your position and my reason for my response:
Your initial statement was an objection to the idea that masks obviously have some effect (due to reduced spread of droplets) because, "only if there is no risk compensation."
This reads as you believing that 100% of the people who wear masks would take risks that fully outweigh the benefit of the masks. I fully believe that this is an unserious conjecture. If this was not your intent, then you might want to reword your initial statement.
I'll be more explicit then:
The effect size for surgical masks is so small that almost any level of risk compensation overwhelms it completely, and it seems particularly prone to risk compensatory behaviour.
Snake oil:
FWIW I've read an article that claimed that the oil of a specific chinese snake reduced inflammation. I don't recall whether the claim was that it needed to be topical or consumed.
Given that, "snake oil" seems to me to be sort of "misrepresented traditional medicine used out of context, and with fradulent ingredients". I often think that this more nuanced meaning would make the common uses of the term "snake oil" more meaningful.
Still...there is reasonable evidence that snake oil works, if you choose the proper snake, and if it's really snake oil, and if you want to reduce inflamation (possibly of the joints...I believe that it was topical, I just can't remember the article well enough to assert it). But those details tend to get lost in the shuffle.
Snake oil is a reference to a specific historical practice of fraudulent medical peddlers selling bottles of amazing 'cure-alls' that (if you were lucky) had a bunch of stimulants or alochol or (if you were unlucky) toxic substances. Its an American-specific historical context. (sorry if you already new this, couldn't tell from your comment or not).
This fraudulent product was sold as Snake Oil sometimes. Some historians aledge that this was to help it sell with the the Chinese immigrant laborers that were working on the railroads at the time, but I think that's a pretty big stretch.
Yes, but I think his point was that real snake oil may have had health benefits that have been lost in the condemnation of fake snake oil hucksters. Those hucksters were trading on the genuine reputation of snake oil, but ended up completely flipping the preception of snake oil through their duplicity. Therefore, the blanket assumption that "snake oil" is disreputable is not necessarily factually/scientifically correct, even if most laypeople's and scientists' priors are "snake oil bad."
That is an excellent point..
Suggesting that scientists and journalists are merely confused is a very charitable interpretation of their motives. The message of all those articles, the party line that everyone's dutifully repeating is "Do not panic, do not change your behaviour and especially do not buy any N-95s, we need those for ourselves".
When a bunch of people who later admitted to a goal of "prevent the public from buying up the supply of masks" said "no evidence that it's airborne", we should consider the possibility that they weren't confused about modeling the world and it was not a coincidence that their misleading word choice aligned perfectly with their goals.
I'm not even sure they said that to prevent mask hoarding. I think they genuinely believed masks were detrimental.
"They don't work, save them for doctors."
That's the message I remember. Let's look it up:
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
> https://t.co/UxZRwxxKL9
US Surgeon General, February 2020
They definitely believed they worked, because they wanted healthcare providers to have them.
IIRC there were some pre-COVID studies that showed masks in the general public weren't very effective because the general public is bad at wearing masks properly (as you can witness if you go to any crowded place with a mask mandate). But as the pandemic wore on, the theory instead became "any mitigation is better than no mitigation" - even if some people wear masks on their chin and others forget to wear them and others wear scarves that are barely better than nothing, you still have some effect at the population level.
From time to time when out in public I'll advise someone that the mask is more effective if they'll cover their nose with it.
> This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.
I've been saying for years that most science journalism is borderline trash, sometimes even when the journalist in question has training in science. The pandemic has brought in all kinds of journalists that haven't a lick of trained in science so you can guess how my opinion has shifted.
> You read “no evidence of human-to-human transmission of coronavirus”, and then a month later it turns out such transmission is common. You read “no evidence linking COVID to indoor dining”, and a month later your governor has to shut down indoor dining because of all the COVID it causes.
This has been happening for years. People read headlines about studies claiming one thing about fat, cholesterol, sugar, or what have you, and then a week later they see a headline claiming the exact opposite. I think this is a big reason why there's so much lay person distrust in science.
Scientists have only compounded this by not taking the replication crisis much more seriously.
> Here we should reject journal articles because they disagree with informal evidence!
I'm not sure I count that as informal evidence. If anything, mechanistic explanations are more formal than observational data. In any case, "knowledge" has to be logically consistent, so what we have are two sets of conflicting evidence, only one of which I think counts as "knowledge".
> But I think the most virtuous way to write this is to actually investigate.
Sadly a lost art in today's journalism. I was reading recently about how all of the journalists who were groomed in environments in which facts were important, and how to investigate and report those facts in a balanced way have aged out. They have been progressively replaced by social media-driven pseudo-journalists that aren't much interested in objective truth so much as "my truth".
I really appreciate this post though, the problems of journalism are legion but this might just be a good starting place for change.
We used to call the "facts are important" journalists "reporters".
"Investigative journalists" are who I was thinking of mainly, but even so-called reporters have lost the plot. Like that hilarious clip that made the rounds of the CNN reporter describing peaceful protests while fires burned behind him.
I don’t think journalists, as a rule, are confused. We write stuff that we know editors will like and use, so they'll pay us and our children won't starve. It's option 2 throughout, it's clear that "there's no evidence for" in the trade essentially means "only anti-science Trump supporters believe that." I think Scott knows this, but he's being nice and giving us journalists the benefit of the doubt.
Another great article showing that, to be an intellectual, you don't need to be all-knowing. You need only take ideas seriously.
I also think "no evidence" often means:
"We are uncomfortable with this assertion and since no one has looked into it at all we're dismissing it out of hand"
It's like, epistemologically, nothing can possibly true until someone has gathered data
I saw this a lot with the notion that TikTok might be doing some spying for the Chinese state. This seemed to just make sense but folks who were uncomfortable with the idea would say "there is no evidence for that"
I feel like this discussion is good but it sort of misses the distinction between:
People have studied this and the studies show no evidence
and
There's no evidence because no one has studied it
For example, lots of traditional remedies get dismissed because there is no evidence that they work, but there's also no funding to study them. if a traditional remedy DID work even the people who didn't pay to study it could profit off that news
so very little study gets done
is that the same as a case where real researchers have actually checked and found no evidence?
Lots of studies have been done on lots of traditional remedies. Just search for whatever remedy you are interested in and some key term like "clinical study".
Haha I literally opened the FT to a headline saying there was "No evidence" that Omicron was less severe, immediately got annoyed that they weren't more clear, then found this in my email.
I read Scott's post first and then saw the FT article. I initially disagree with Scott that journalists were using "No Evidence" to mean "very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet". Seems like they were using it to mean "Don't believe that ...". But this FT article does explicitly say "casts doubt on the hopes of some experts, based on reports from medics in South Africa". They are mentioning evidence right there -- "reports from medics".
According to Scott's article, journalists use "no evidence" to mean anything from "very likely false" to "we don't know", not "very likely true". (Where he says journalists mean something like "very likely true", he means the negation of the claim there is "no evidence" for, if I understood correctly.)
I’m a bit more cynical - it seems like 90% of the time, “no evidence” in an article basically means “I, the author, want this to be false but I don’t actually have (or can’t be bothered to find and communicate) an opposing fact to refute it”. I see mostly two flavors:
1) “No evidence Omicron is less deadly” - there is literally no strong evidence one way or the other, but the author wants to give the impression that “Omicron is less deadly” is emphatically false.
2) “Donald Trump said, without evidence, that…” - an isolated demand for rigor. Politicians of any stripe rarely give citations for their claims, whether they are well founded or not. Tacking “without evidence” to the claim, without citing opposing evidence, is basically a throwaway line to discredit the statement without going to the effort to refute it (if it is indeed refutable!) and tends to be isolated to statements the author opposes.
Hat off to you for using examples for roughly two different parts for the political spectrum :)
In defense of the "Trump said without evidence" thing, when Trump made claims there was frequently no evidence of the claim *anywhere*. Your framing implies that Trump's only failure was failing to cite his sources, rather than bluntly lying about things.
You mean that the mainline "journalists" didn't use "without evidence" when Biden said his Build Back Better bill would cost nothing when the CBO had scored it otherwise? I wonder why they didn't use "without evidence" in this case. Things that make you go hmmm.
Every time I've had to oil a snake, snake oil has done the job perfectly. That's at least anecdotal evidence that snake oil works?
Beware also the ever-popular argument from ignorance.
"Just because we have no evidence that Donald Trump is not Mickey Mouse wearing a disguise just means we need to look harder! In the meantime, we can safely assume that Trump in fact has big black ears and also a tail. Say, has anyone ever seen Trump and Mickey in the same room together?
I hate to do self-promotion, but I made similar points in February to address people who were saying "we don't know how well AstraZeneca works in US populations / the elderly", "we don't know how well NovaVax works", etc because of a lack of Phase III RCT data. People were ignoring all the other strong reasons to believe those vaccines would work (in particular immunogenicity studies).
http://www.moreisdifferent.com/2021/02/01/judging-vaccine-safety-and-rejecting-the-precautionary-principle
Different from Scott's post, I explain how one can reason from prior knowledge / scientific theory in both a Bayesian and "Popperian" way.
Useful, thanks.
>I challenge anyone to come up with a definition of "no evidence" that wouldn't be misleading in at least one of the above examples.
**Evidence:**
- A verifiable and compelling reason to believe that something is true
**No Evidence:**
- Lack of a verifiable and compelling reason to believe that something is true.
**Parachutes:** People die when the fall long distances. We can come up with many examples of this. It will be relatively hard to find examples of people who have jumped from a high distance who have not died(without a parachute). People who use parachutes may die sometimes when something goes wrong, but they die at drastically lower rates than people who do not use Parachutes. This may not be formal scientific evidence, but it is a reason, we can verify it, and it is also compelling.
**Aliens:** Individual reports of abductions may be a "reason" per-se to believe in abductions, but as far as I know, none of them have been compelling, and we can verify that they did claim to be abducted, but we can't verify that they're telling the truth. Now if someone got abducted, and a lot of people saw it, and if it was caught on video, it would be compelling, and we would have verifciation of the event, and if we had such an event then perhaps belief in alien abductions would be the norm. If people did get abducted hundreds of times, then you might expect there to be more witnesses if such a conspicous event occured, but there aren't. A witness in the area who saw nothing is a sort of evidence that a particular abduction didn't happen.
**Homeopathy:** "No evidence" doesn't really apply here. It's just that the evidence opposed to it is even stronger. You did acknowledge that the understanding about water, chemicals, and immunology counted as informal evidence against homeopathy working. I think it's a mistake to assume that evidence from jouranal articles must always be stronger or informal evidence, or vise-versa. Maybe if you keep doing the formal study and it keeps showing the same results, it could get there. I have a hard time believing that those 90 studies the only studies on homeopathy out there. Do any studies show that it doesn't work? Do studies that show that it doesn't work tend to be better at getting replicated than those that show it does? I'll admit that I haven't personally done a meta-alalysis on homeopathy studies, but If I did and found that the positive results outweigh the negative ones, than I may actually have to revise my opionion on the practice.
**Henry VIII's Spleen:** We have verifiable and compelling evidence that Henry VIII was a human. We know who his parents were, we know where he was born. we also know what he looked like, and he looked like a human. I'm assuming that we have verifiable and compelling evidence that humans have spleens. I don't feel like checking right now. But if you'd like to contest this go ahead. Via Modus Ponens, that works out to verifiable and compelling evidence that Henry VIII had a spleen.
"It will be relatively hard to find examples of people who have jumped from a high distance who have not died(without a parachute)."
I hate to break it to you, but... 😁
https://www.statista.com/chart/19708/known-occasions-where-people-survived-falls/
"There have been some incredible instances of people falling out of airplanes without parachutes and surviving. Take the story of Alan Magee, an American airman who survived a 22,000-foot fall from a damaged B-17 bomber over France in 1943. Thrown clear of the aircraft and rendered unconcious, he fell four miles before crashing through the glass roof of St. Nazaire train station, shattering it and miraculously surviving, though with severe injuries.
The all-time record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute belongs to Yugoslavian flight attendant Vesna Vulović. She was the sole survivior of a bomb placed onboard JAT Flight 367 in 1972 which saw her plummet more than 30,000 feet. Experts believe she survived by being trapped by a food cart inside a section of the aircraft's fuselage which subsequently landed at an angle on a heavily wooded and snowy mountainside in Czechoslovakia.
Soviet Air Force lieutenant Ivan Chisov and Royal Air Force sergeant Nicholas Alkemade also survived in similar circumstances, thrown clear of bombers in the Second World War before landing in a mixture of snow and trees. Remarkably, Alkemade only suffered a sprained leg after falling 18,000 feet. The following infographic provides a list of known occasions where people survived extremely high falls without a parachute."
So, you know - are parachutes *really* as good as their advocates claim? 😉
Not all people have spleens. Asplenia is a rare disorder where a person has no spleen or a nonfunctioning spleen. In rare cases, it can be caused by genetic factors. Some people think that Henry VIII had other genetic disorders, such as McLeod syndrome and being Kell-positive. Asplenia is associated with poor immune system function. Henry VIII suffered from a leg wound which was constantly infected, which could have been aggravated by an immune deficiency.
The problem is that there is always some evidence that snake oil works. All someone has to do is write a paper that looks "sciencey" enough. Most people won't be able to tell the difference. So saying "Snake oil doesn't work" isn't good communication either.
What would be better is: "Studies overwhelmingly have found that snake oil doesn't work. There are some % of studies claiming it does, but their methodology is severely flawed for x, y z reasons".
The second line is more respectful towards the intelligence of the average person.
I'm not sure I agree with this. In many cases the studies *aren't* overwhelming - I think more studies have confirmed psi effects than debunked them, or at least the ratio isn't too lopsided in favor of debunking. In some cases you have to be willing to abandon studies and go off common sense and expert opinion.
It seems to me that the solution that's really being pointed to here is for journalists to write stories that are explicitly Bayesian - including descriptions of a set of priors, and a Bayes' formula update based on whatever new evidence has been marshalled. The math of the process operates simply enough that you can basically include all of it within an article that outwardly looks like it's written in plain and straightforward English
"Is there "no evidence" for alien abductions? There are hundreds of people who say they've been abducted by aliens! By legal standards, hundreds of eyewitnesses is great evidence! If a hundred people say that Bob stabbed them, Bob is a serial stabber - or, even if you thought all hundred witnesses were lying, you certainly wouldn't say the prosecution had “no evidence”! When we say "no evidence" here, we mean "no really strong evidence from scientists, worthy of a peer-reviewed journal article". But this is the opposite problem as with the parachutes - here we should stop accepting informal evidence, and demand more scientific rigor."
Okay! Obligatory Chesterton quotations that are (I hope) apposite!
(1) From an essay "The Real Journalist":
http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/2584/
"I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality) from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little episode in the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and instructive: the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There are really two stories:
the story as seen from the outside, by a man reading the paper; and the story seen from the inside, by the journalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand through the night.
...That is a little tale of journalism as it is; if you call it egotistic and ask what is the use of it I think I could tell you. You might remember it when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hanged by the neck on circumstantial evidence."
(2) From the story "The Trees of Pride":
"I am too happy just now in thinking how wrong I have been," he answered, "to quarrel with you, doctor, about our theories. And yet, in justice to the Squire as well as myself, I should demur to your sweeping inference. I respect these peasants, I respect your regard for them; but their stories are a different matter. I think I would do anything for them but believe them. Truth and fancy, after all, are mixed in them, when in the more instructed they are separate; and I doubt if you have considered what would be involved in taking their word for anything. Half the ghosts of those who died of fever may be walking by now; and kind as these people are, I believe they might still burn a witch. No, doctor, I admit these people have been badly used, I admit they are in many ways our betters, but I still could not accept anything in their evidence."
The doctor bowed gravely and respectfully enough, and then, for the last time that day, they saw his rather sinister smile.
"Quite so," he said. "But you would have hanged me on their evidence."
So am I saying "believe everything, including fairies and homeopathy"? No, I think what both Scott and Chesterton are getting at is that (a) there's a great deal of confusion around what does and does not constitute 'evidence' and (b) we apply tests of 'do I think this is reasonable or not?' when weighing evidence - we might not believe the Cornish farmer about ghosts on his bare word that he saw a ghost in the wood, but we might very well convict a man on that same farmer's bare word that he saw him in the wood where a murder happened.
"Be a little more discrimating and a lot less quick to believe all you read" is the moral here, I fancy.
(2) "This doesn’t have the same faux objectivity as “No Evidence Snake Oil Works”.
I think this may be perhaps they do this because there is always the faint chance that somebody may come up with a study saying that *this* particular snake oil does in fact work, and if they confidently run a story about "Auld Doctor McSnakey's Guaranteed Cure-All Oil" is bunkum, then somebody tests it and goes "I hate to break it to you but...", they will be liable for getting sued by Doctor McSnakey.
Apparently you can live without a spleen - so it's not THAT obvious that Henry VIII had a spleen. Just sayin'.
Great article by the way.
That's why I chose that example instead of heart or liver or something. You can't use "Henry was alive" as your evidence!
>Here’s another: No Evidence Vaccines Cause Miscarriage.
Uh so doesn't this fall under "this is probably true, but we haven't checked"? I mean vaccines definitely cause fevers, and fevers probably cause miscarriages, so it would be surprising if vaccines *didn't* cause miscarriages. After all, many European countries do not recommend the vaccine for pregnant women.
Edit: thinking about this a bit more, it seems like Scott is treating science communicators as people who are honestly trying to describe the world accurately, whereas I see them as choosing what to say based on what their statement will cause other people to do or believe. The linked example is not exactly this, but if 45k people in the world die of vaccine side-effects, that's a risk many science-communicators would be willing to take. But they think that admitting this will cause backlash, so phrasing it via "no evidence" is safer. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels . Thinking about it this way makes the early cases make sense also.
There has now been a randomized controlled trial of parachute use when jumping from airplanes.
Read. The. Entire. Article.
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
Pshhh. Not even double-blind.
It's not even just that people get the two types of "no evidence" confused, it's that people often exploit the confusion to mislead people, as a Motte and Bailey.
Like when people were saying "No evidence COVID-19 came from a lab", a lot of them were saying:
"1. This thing is super plausible... but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure."
while knowing that people would interpret it as:
"2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie."
Well the Narrative's not going to shape itself.
I assume part of the communication/journalism dilemma here is that most people are never going to read more than a headline about any particular claim. So any nuanced, investigative analyses that can't be summarized as a sentence header above a picture on Facebook is as almost the same as writing nothing at all.
"“No Evidence That Snake Oil Works” is the bread and butter of science journalism."
From Scientific American:
"In a series of later papers, the most recent published in the Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism in July 2007, Shirai and his team evaluated the effects of Erabu sea-snake oil on a number of outcomes in mice, including maze-learning ability and swimming endurance. In both cases, snake oil significantly improved the ability of the mice in comparison with those fed lard." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/snake-oil-salesmen-knew-something/
Further to the alien abduction claims, I once met a psychiatrist who had extracted an implant from the roof of the mouth of one of her patients who reported repeated alien abductions.
Coincidentally, elemental analysis showed that it had the same make-up as mercury dental fillings.
Something really confusing (to me at least) and somewhat common in science reporting (and for that matter in actual scientific papers) is the construct:
"Study shows no evidence of XXXX".
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=%22study+show+no+evidence%22 for many examples (**). For ex. "The findings from this study show no evidence of increased mortality risk in association with higher hemoglobin values in endogenous EPO patients."
I think it's generally meant to say that the study looked for an effect and found none. (I mean how do you actually 'show' no evidence). But it's such a backwards way of saying that. They didn't find no evidence of an effect, they found evidence that there is no effect! Or more properly that the effect is within epsilon of no effect. Or even more properly that the effect is smaller than minimal detectable effect size given the power of the study to the certainty of whatever p-value they used. But I'm not sure I've ever seen that reported like that. It actually feels really close to the fallacy that "statistical significance is not itself significant" in a way.
Consider "Study shows no evidence Ivermectin improves COVID outcomes" vs. "Study provides evidence that Ivermectin does not improve COVID outcomes". Why favor the former phrasing?
**Interesting aside, the first two results of that search for me are a preprint study with the conclusion "No positive RT-PCR result was found in the semen or testicular biopsy specimen. The results from this study show no evidence of sexual transmission of 2019-nCov from males." and a COVID literature review that quotes from a study that "The results from this study show no evidence of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through vaginal sex from female to her partner. However, the risk of infection of non-vaginal sex and other intimate contacts during vaginal sex should not be ignored." Not sure what to make of that, either my search history is a bit weird or google/people are really worried about sexual transmission of COVID...
Yet the positive results of Ivermectin in India have been reported, so unless there was some hanky panky with the statistics, that would seem to me to qualify as "evidence". Of course there are those who believe if it's not a double-blind peer-reviewed study then it's not evidence. But as evidence that is not a valid position I offer the replication crisis.
I don’t remember where I first heard it, and it itself is a somewhat fuzzy statement, but a good mantra for journalist types and consumers of news is that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Except when it is, e.g. the Loch Ness Monster.
Absence of evidence is perfectly good evidence of absence, iff you've spent time looking for evidence using methods that would reasonably be expected to work. It's not evidence of absence if you haven't even tried looking yet.
But like missing socks, Loch Ness Monsters are always in the last place you look.
In most of those "no evidence" headlines, the journalists were surely trying to use "no evidence" in the "almost certainly not true" way. It's not a mistake; it's a conflict.
"Maybe it would sound less authoritative. Breaking an addiction to false certainty is as hard as breaking any other addiction. But the first step is admitting you have a problem."
Actually, I have a feeling that at least part of the problem here is due to underconfidence. Saying: "there is no evidence for X" creates a much safer line of retreat than claiming that X is indeed false.
Although, to be exact, the alternative was not claiming „X is false“, but claiming „scientists claim X is false“.
In any case, for me, „Breaking an addiction to false certainty is as hard as breaking any other addiction. But the first step is admitting you have a problem“ is the best bit I have read anywhere in months.
But scientists don't actually claim that something is wrong, do they? We can't prove a negative via induction. So what scientists do is either find evidence in favour of some hypothesis or not. They very virtuously make sure not to claim more than they strictly can. And then science communicators very virtuously say exactly the same phrase instead of inventing their own interpretation. And then this phrase itself becomes an interpretation, an ephemism for something being false, but a very safe one, with huge motte and bailey dynamics where every participant of (mis)communication can plausibly deny responsibility. And all this virtue goes down the toilet when initial underconfidence creates overconfidence.
I agree that the phrase is true and there are people who need to hear it. But for me it rings too obviously true, so much that it becomes borderline expectation of applause. The correct approach to truthseeking isn't being minimally confident about everything. It would've been very easy, otherwise, and ancient greek sceptics would've nailed it. The hard part is separating truth from falsehood, knowing what to be confidence in and what not to. And we can't achieve good f-score by just tweaking the general confidence factor.
I try again „to be exact“, after indeed failing the first time: the alternative to claiming „there is no evidence for X“ (for the science communicator, in Scott‘s essay, in the context you quoted from) was not claiming „X is false“, but claiming „scientists believe X is false“.
And as I read it, the essay says that if you thus neglect to mention the scientists (who failed to find „official“ scientific evidence) then the phrase „there is no evidence for X“ is overconfident, not underconfident. Not because it changed meaning as people internalised the style of science communicators, but because it means (to quote the essay) „there is literally not a single piece of evidence anywhere in the world that anyone could use in favor of“ X.
There are two points of miscommunication in the example. First one, between scientists and communicators where both "haven't investigated yet" and "investigated but didn't find the effect meaningful" cases are framed as "no evidence". The second is between communicators and media consumers where "no evidence in scientific terms" becomes "literally no evidence anywhere in reality".
I agree that second point is bad and is an example of overconfidence. However, even if we deal with it, the main part of the problem will still be with us. Imagine, that all these articles in the headline of the post explicitly said "scientific evidence". What would change? People wouldn't be deluded into thinking there literally zero evidence in favour of some point and then swinging the other way after hearing some anecdotes? Maybe.
But people would still have similar confidence levels for "masks do not help against covid", "covid didn't originate in the lab", "vaccines are safe" and "we aren't ruled by lizard people". And this is really very bad and can't be solved by less confidence.
Notice the absence of a third option: "Unlike the authors of the paper X, we found no evidence that fit within the accuracy constraints of our experiment design; our error bars are xyz. The authors of paper X did not include that they tested the data with <some confirmation test>, which we believe would have led them to reconsider including the data in their study." Now I might not have phrased in the proper journalese, but I hope my point is clear.
Virtuous scientists? From the current state of "Science" they seem to be an endangered species. Politics has corrupted science, as has the go-along-to-get-along attitude in so many researchers. One seldom acknowledged problem is how subjective observation is. The LIGO experiment, which has supposedly "found" evidence of gravity waves, is an example. The choice to include or exclude data points is made by a researcher, then the data are tortured on a super computer until the desired result is obtained. And the self-righteous snobbery of the defenders of this travesty are dismissive of the idea that the results are questionable, much less wrong.
I read an article the other day about the possibility we're heading towards another Maunder Minimum. The article was full of "if this then that", and "this could be an indication of x, or possibly y". I couldn't believe it. Where was the absolute certainty characteristic of the modern science article. I expect the authors to be disciplined, or given the grave nature of their offense, disappeared.
I wonder if instead of "There is no evidence of X" we could just say "There is evidence that X is wrong" followed by the evidence, which might include a list of studies which attempted to prove X but failed. And for the cases where there really isn't evidence yet, we'd just stick with "There hasn't been much research done yet so we don't know if X is true."
If there are also studies that show evidence of X, and those studies are omitted from the paper, then how is that paper not a fraud? Yet that is more common than you might hope.
Sure, but someone could also put out an article saying "Studies show X" while omitting many studies that suggest the opposite. I see those all the time. So I don't think the existence of this sort of fraud is a knock against my suggestion specifically.
Yes, sorry I was unclear. In my zeal to highlight the trimming that occurs too often in scientific papers I neglected to say I was proposing an addendum to your excellent suggestion.
One could argue ”There is no evidence exonerating covid vaccines in the deaths of 45,000 people”.
I agree with all that but I'm not convinced this is merely the result of journalists being confused. Rather, I think it's the result of the incentives of journalists not to legitimize (or even repudiate) views their peers see as bad/harmful.
I mean consider a journalist assigned a piece about whether or not COVID might have originated from a Chinese research lab. The journalist realizes that if they say 'no evidence either way' they give a wide swatch of the public an excuse to start blaming the Chinese and fear that it will lead to anti-Chinese violence/discrimination and bad public policy.
Of course, this should be balanced against the harm of decreased public trust in experts. The problem is that responsibility for that decreased trust is diffuse in a way that means the journalist isn't likely to suffer loss of social status or even find themselves feeling guilty. OTOH if they write the article that makes it clear that we can't yet reject the idea the virus came from China and then someone beats someone of Chinese descent to death they have to feel bad and may even find their career at risk.
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This kind of asymmetry in moral blame is basically the same thing that causes the FDA to withhold probably life-saving medications and overregulation generally.
What an excellent point! What is the journalist' responsibility? To report ALL the relevant facts and let the chips fall where they may? Or to hedge and censor in fear of the potential consequences? What is often lost in the calculation is that predicting the future is difficult, and that the absence of all of the facts may have potentially worse consequences that a complete report. Cynic that I am, I believe the self-censorship is usually in aid of the preferred Narrative.
I've been thinking this for years but no evidence. Until now.
"No evidence that wearing a mask works" and "no evidence that vaccines kill 45000 people" are exactly the same thing: "scientists" (the media, and adjacent truthmongers) want you to believe that the thing in the second half of the sentence is false. The difference between those two is that the second one is actually false. But "scientists" aren't making the statement based on whether it's false--they'll say it for unproven things they want you to believe and for proven things they want you to believe.
This is not an example of "scientists" using the same terminology to inform you of two very different degrees of proof. This is an example of "scientists" using the same terminology for the same purposes, that may happen to have different degrees of proof, but where they don't care about that part at all.
Fundamental to this issue is the absolute mess of the collection process of the statistics, and the profound ignorance of the population of the use of statistics. When the current number of cases is reported, I want to know for each segment
1. The demographic breakdown.
2. The test(s) used.
3. Which variant of the virus was detected.
4. How many hospitalizations resulted.
5. How many deaths resulted.
6. The comorbidities for 4. and 5.
It would also be helpful to have a true standardized protocol for administering the tests.
It would also be helpful if all the purveyors of fear porn would knock it off.
The way to write without bullshit is to prefer active verbs. People only pull off these obfuscations by using the passive tense. “There is no evidence” is ambiguous, but “we did X and Y and Z and didn’t find evidence” cuts to the quick. Knowing you’ll have to explain yourself forces you to put in the rigor.
But if we’re really diving deep on “what is evidence”, and “how do we communicate it”, sure Frequentism is laughably wrong but Bayesianism doesn’t solve the problem either. Even Bayes provides no formal and rigorous methods of idea generation or rejection.
Suppose you only have one theory of some data, and for sake of argument let’s say it’s an exponential model. Suppose the true mechanism is actually distributed Pareto. Give me a formal, rigorous, verifiable way to reject the exponential model and replace it with the true model. How will you know that the outliers are the story and that you shouldn’t toss them out?
Science is something people do when they understand the statistical nature of the world and can clearly explain what would change their mind, regardless of how formal or rigorous their reasoning. Newspapermen live in a world of absolutes where they are the authority telling us How It Be. Journalists don’t get any points for saying “I was wrong and you’ve changed my mind”.
I’m sure I’m kicking a hornet’s nest because of the likely priors of many Scott followers, but … I’ve often thought about this flaw in reasoning with regard to the common comment that there is “no evidence” for (or proof
of) God’s existence. To theists like myself, this comment is mind-boggling because the evidence for God is everywhere and obvious.
Those making this comment seem to mean that the existence of God cannot (at present) be empirically proved. But there are many other methods and standards of proof, some of which are mentioned in this article.
Arguments about "no proof of God's existence" have their ancestry, not in persuasive arguments against believing in God, but in persuasive arguments against laws that favored Christian religion over others. If there's no conclusive empirical proof that God exists over Buddha or the Jade Emperor or Inti the Sun God, then laws that discriminate against believers in the latter three purely on the basis of (approximately) "They believe in pagan nonsense, we believe in the One True God" become significantly less coherent.
I have only encountered this argument in the context of modern atheist vs theist debates where “God” is used generically. I am unfamiliar with any American laws that favored the Christian religion over others as this is expressly forbidden by our Constitution.
Your lack of familiarity does not mean such laws did not exist. For the most famous one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Act
The Butler Act is a state law, not unique in its kind, that explicitly prohibited any teaching in school that man came about in any way save a literal interpretation of the Genesis account. Before evolution became widely-known, the Genesis account was also taught in public schools as scientific fact.
This is far from ancient history: Kansas was attempting to enshrine intelligent design as the state standard in 2005.
I will also point out that something being expressly forbidden in the Constitution by your reading of it has never stopped the law from being otherwise. Modern readings of the Constitution take it as a priori that "all men are created equal" means all men are created equal- an opinion that was utterly disregarded for, at a conservative estimate, nearly a century of America's history.
True. Neither does your assertion something is true make it true. You said the argument I referenced (no evidence for God) has its "ancestry" in these laws. What is your support for that claim?
FYI: The Butler Act was struck down by the Supreme Court, which comports perfectly with my statement "this is expressly forbidden by our Constitution." Meanwhile, your statement "Kansas was *attempting* ..." does not offer support for your assertion. If something is attempted and fails, my statement is supported, not contradicted.
Finally, I concede that something being in the Constitution does not mean it is regarded or followed. Your example is good support for that claim. However, you would have to show that this was the case here for your claim to be relevant. Otherwise, it's a non-sequitur.
1. I have no empirical evidence for this, but I would say that it's a logical conclusion upon looking at the past and reference you to conversations above RE: how not absolutely every argument needs to be grounded in hard empiricism. I can't empirically prove that I have a mind or free will, either, but you seem to take those as not requiring empirical proof, given that you're communicating with me as if I had a mind and as if that mind could be changed. I perhaps oversold a statement that was more speculative in nature.
2. The Butler Act was never struck down by the Supreme Court- Scopes' fine was waived by the TN Supreme Court on technical grounds, but this did nothing to the Butler Act. Point in fact, the TN Supreme Court said as follows:
"We are not able to see how the prohibition of teaching the theory that man has descended from a lower order of animals gives preference to any religious establishment or mode of worship. So far as we know, there is no religious establishment or organized body that has in its creed or confession of faith any article denying or affirming such a theory. "
(a weasely and insincere statement if I'd ever heard one, given that the law stated "That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.") The case was not pressed further.
The law was never brought before the Supreme Court because it was repealed by the TN state legislature 22 years after it was passed. The fact you speak with such supreme confidence when your knowledge of the material facts is so blatantly wrong, and could be corrected by a single Google search, is very disappointing.
Source for the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Act
3. "Attempted" is an undersell on my behalf: the creation of new science teaching standards that explicitly encouraged teachers to mention and accept supernatural explanations for the origin of life and man alongside natural ones was, in fact, passed, and was only repealed due to a massive shake-up in the legislature. Once again, no court case involved. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_evolution_hearings
Ha! You're right on both of your first two counts. You totally oversold an utterly speculative statement, and I completely misread the facts of the Butler Act. I will promise to read more carefully next time and avoid errors that "could be corrected by a single Google search" if you promise not to express "supreme confidence" (nice pun btw) in statements that are speculative. Deal? We wouldn't want to go disappointing each other, now would we?
I was going to engage further with your second and third points. (Especially the third, since apparently a single Google search was all it took to help you realize your error, lol). Then I realized we are still off on a digression from the topic of my original post!
Recall that I wanted to discuss the relevance of Scott's article to the claim there is "no proof of God's existence." I really didn't want to discuss your ideas about the origin of the "proof of God" claim. (Although I admit the topic of whether the TN law and the KS law violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution is interesting to me.)
So let's skip to your point, if you have one: How are these court cases relevant to my original point and/or Scott's article?
As a person who used to have a very strong belief in God, I can empathize with seeing evidence in favour of His existence everywhere. Moreover, I claim that it's initially a very reasonable thing to do.
When you've just come into this life, your first evidence are based on your own existence and personal experience of being a mind, which feels completely trustworthy and fundamental. With such evidence it's completely rational to accept some kind of idealistic/spiritualistic framework, be it subjective idealism up to solipsism or objective idealism up to some specific religion.
However, later new evidence start pointing into the opposite direction. You learn about materialistic laws, which seem to be stable, disallow miracles and do not have direct God's will as their component. Why would God make a clockwork universe? Why basing it on math and physics rather than His divine will alone? Why do we learn the nature of the universe from secular sources and not sacred books?
These laws do not disprove God or idealism. But they create a different framework and there is a tension between it and a spiritualistic one. They don't require and don't follow from each other, while being simultaneously true. Maybe there are materialistic phenomena and spiritualistic phenomena? But dualistic approach fails. Moreover, the more you learn about materialistic framework, the more it seems self sufficient, capable of explaining more and more things which previously seemed unexplainable without God.
You learn about astro-physics, evolutional biology and cognitive biases. You get an understanding how our planet, life on it and the of concept of God itself could exist if there were actually no God.
When you get a grasp of reductionism, it becomes clear that your mind isn't fundamental, that it's complex and consist of different parts. You understand how these parts interact and this reveals a materialistic explanation for your spiritual experiences in the past.
As your understanding deepens and there are less and less unsolvable mysteries left, you notice how things which used to be evidence in favour of idealism when they were unanswerable questions become reframed as evidence for materialism when the answer is presented and so obvious in hindsight. And even though there are still questions that you right now do not have answers for, looking back at the epistemological path you've walked, you understand the whole principle of question answering. That it's very likely that these questions too will be answered and that your current ignorance isn't a sign of anything.
You can learn about computability and Kolmogoroff complexity and its consequences to the priors for existence of omniscient and omnipotent being. You can still learn so much more. But already at this point it's clear that there is no epistemical reason to keep holding to the idealist framework. It's no more rational or reasonable with the amount of evidence in favour of it literally approaching zero, despite the fact that once it felt so obviously self evident that God exists.
Or you go in that direction and then return as you mature even further. You realize that science is beset with all the same problems you thought were moving you away from God (e.g. lack of empirical evidence, things that don't add up logically, human cognitive biases) and that materialism offers no good answers to the big questions in life. You realize that you got lost in the weeds of complicated, ever-shifting hypotheses to explain away the clear imprint of design on the universe, and you see the world with the fresh eyes of a child again, one to whom the existence of God is clear and obvious. But we digress...
What I wanted to discuss was how Scott's article applies to this debate, not have the debate itself. I understand Scott to be saying there are many other methods and standards of proof besides the most rigorous scientific kind. If so, and he's right, doesn't that invalidate the common claim that there is no proof for God?
It does, and it also invalidates any claim you wish to make about God being so obvious and real and true and pure and good that anyone who denies it must be blind. I used to be Christian, and now I am Buddhist, because when I studied Buddhist scripture it became obvious and clear to me that Buddhism described the fundamental truth of reality, just like how it is clear and obvious to you that everything was created by the Christian God.
Fair enough. Scott's article does cut both ways.
I want to clarify one thing, though. I am not making a brief for the Christian God here. For one thing, that is at least step two in the process of making a claim for God in the generic sense. For another thing, that was not my intention in posting above. I merely wanted to see if others agreed that Scott's argument invalidates a common objection to the existence of God.
If you or anyone else assumed I meant "the Christian God," I did not. I meant the general concept of a Creator, Designer, Supreme Intelligence, etc. As I understand it, atheists are not rejecting the Christian God, specifically, and there are no atheist Buddhists. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That depends on how you define "atheist". There are a small number of Buddhists (mostly American) who see the doctrines of rebirth, karma, nirvana, and other supernatural elements as entirely metaphorical and interpret Buddha's teachings in a strictly and purely materialist light. I would personally argue these people are more like atheists who like the aesthetics of Buddhism, as they are incapable of having right understanding, but many define them as Buddhists.
Most Buddhists, myself included, believe in supernatural or unprovable-by-empiricism concepts such as the cycle of rebirth and non-material states of being. Many extend this to beliefs in higher states of existence that, to a human, might be called "gods", whether this refers to occupants of the deva-realm or the Bodhisattvas. These are qualitatively different, but you clearly aren't interested in a lectures on the nuances of Buddhist theology.
Buddhism does not believe in a creator, designer, or supreme intelligence. On the high scholastic level, samsara, or what we would call reality exists due to a chain of dependent origination that cannot be disentangled such that you can point to one thing and say "that is what created the universe", and there is no highest state or highest being that cannot be approached. Even the Primordial Buddha (the first being to attain full enlightenment in the distant cosmological past) is a Buddha. In this sense, one might call Buddhism atheist, as it does not believe in deities that are distinct from humanity in some special way or wield supreme power or a decisive right of morality- the Buddhas follow the Eightfold Path because it is right, the Eightfold Path is not right because the Buddhas followed it. On the lower level, Buddhism does not depend on a particular narrative about the origin of the world, the peoples in it, etc. It depends on the acceptance of the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, which are concerned with what the world IS rather than how things came to this point.
Interesting. Thank you for explaining that. In this context, I don't think it matters if we are talking about a Creator God or another concept of a deity/deities. The "no proof" argument would apply equally to all metaphysical beings.
Reminds me a bit of the book War and Chance, in which the author argued that instead of saying thing like "We have no evidence the Soviets are placing missiles on Cuba", generals and intelligence analysts should just give a probability like "There is a 5% chance the Soviets are placing missiles on Cuba".
https://www.amazon.com/War-Chance-Assessing-Uncertainty-International-ebook-dp-B07PPWZ7ZY/dp/B07PPWZ7ZY/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
"There is a 5% chance COVID-19 will spread from person to person" is a statement much more useful to policymakers than "There is no evidence that COVID-19 spreads from person to person".
Certainly, if you are going to talk about prior and posterior probabilities, it will help if you tell people what those probabilities actually are.
If you want to express how big something is, you have to use units of distance, eg meters. If you want to express how fast something is, you have to use units of speed, eg meters per second. If you want to express how powerful something is, you have to use units of power, eg horsepower.
And if you want to express how likely something is, you have to use units of likelihood. Eg "probability 1%", 10%, 50% 95% etc.
You cannot accurately convey estimates of uncertainty without using numbers to measure your uncertainty.
Generals and intelligence analysts, among others, do in fact have a fairly specific language for specifying the degree of certainty in their statements, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_estimative_probability
Unfortunately, not everybody uses those words rigorously, and different communities have different scales.
This was a point noted by War and Chance, as it happens. But even if you used the terms rigorously, why would you use use a lookup table to turn a numerical estimate (for example "10%") into a "word of estimative probability", and then expect your reader to use the same table to turn that word into a range of probabilities which includes, but is not limited to, the number you started with?
Certainly not in order to accurately convey a probability estimate. It would be a lot quicker for both you and your reader, and more accurate, to just say "10%" and be done with it.
Messing around with "words of estimative probability", even in an alternative universe in which everybody knew what they meant and used them properly, can only make conveying uncertainty slower and less accurate.
You expect your reader to use the same words with the same meanings as you because it's part of your institutional culture that those words have those meanings. And if the format allows you include a table with the percentages, but sometimes you're just talking to people and sometimes you're writing for people who think better with words than numbers.
Here is a table of “Words of Estimative Probability” from War and Chance:
“Remote” – 1-5%
“Highly Unlikely” – 5-20%
“Improbable” – 20-45%
“Roughly even odds” – 45-55%
“Probable” 55-80%
“Highly probable” -80-90%
“Nearly certain”- 95-99%
And here is a test sentence: “Option A is 10% likely, Option B is 20% likely, and Option C is 30% likely”.
How would you rewrite the test sentence using the “Words of Estimative Probability” to make the meaning clearer to someone? Who would find the rewritten sentence easier to understand?
I assume you are also advocating that the percentage actually relates to a credible and repeatable process. That would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.
That would be desirable if it were possible.
But even if it were not possible, the best way to convey that you are 10% sure of something, is to say that you are 10% sure of it. And not fiddle around with "words of estimative probability" that cost you resolution even when people use them properly, which I gather they never do anyway.
Replacing perfectly good numbers with words just makes everything vaguer and less reliable. So why do it? Surely numbers are not that scary?
There are other traps in EBM
Taleb video
"MINI-LESSON 9: Evidence Based Science & Mistakes in Particularizing the General (Simplified)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIc5p79CxDk
This is incoherent. Yes, it's true that evidence needs to be considered in the light of the sum total of previous evidence and of our theoretical understanding. But, for example, for a brief period in January 2020, there really was no evidence of human-human transmission. It was an entirely new and unknown virus. A Chinese study cleared that up rather rapidly.
Quoting a politician (Murphy) saying there is 'no evidence' is not poor scientific communication, it's reporting the words of a politician who didn't know what the heck he was talking about.
And if lunkheads don't understand absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we need to educate them, not stop using an accurate phrase.
Good read, much appreciated!
"Evidence" is strong word in the mind of the common man who is likely to think about "evidence" in a legal sense of the word
Wouldn't it be better to use "There is not enough information/data to confirm if..."
That way as new data is collected, the conclusion can be changed
Does anyone else really, really want the government to start massively subsidizing media outlets (pending periodic evaluations and audits to ensure accurate reporting)? Surely the reason the media sucks is that you don't have to buy newspapers to learn the news - you can get it from a search engine or social media, which means a lot of media production can't afford quality research to back it, and the version people end up getting is biased.
"a lot of media production can't afford quality research to back it"
I sincerely doubt that. In fact, I think there is better epistemology, better scientific inquiry, taking place at modestly-financed and even free media outlets, and the howlers are coming from very well-paid journos at well-financed outlets. Just as some fine education is taking place in penny-pinching home schools and public schools in poor districts. Not an inverse correlation, mind you, just no correlation. Er, 'no evidence of correlation.'
Sorry I missed your reply!
I feel a lot of journalism is okayish, but not great. And I think covid has made it pretty clear that science journalism is hard. See Scott's article on the phrase "no evidence", for example, or how countries like the US have become so divided on covid policy (despite nobody having any opinion on pandemic management beforehand).
I guess another contributing factor is that for every wedge issue, journalists are kind of pressured into taking a "both-sides" approach.
The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, the one that tends to affect smart and educated people, as if education made people more confirmatory in their responses and more liable to fall into simple logical errors.
--Antifragile
This isn't really a verbiage problem. The use of 'no evidence' etc. are simply ways for media to report their preferred conclusions (or those of their masters) regardless of study data.
Maybe you can convince them to use a different weaselly phrase instead, but what will that achieve? They might as well keep using 'noevidence' so that we know when to be very skeptical.
If the vaccines have only killed 45,000 people worldwide I would be quite relieved
What number do you think is more accurate?
We would have a more accurate number if there were more willingness to acknowledge the phenomenon and report it rather than censor it.
And why do you believe there is a very significant number of vaccine-related deaths that are being covered up?
I don't "believe there is a significant number of vaccine-related deaths"; I have no beliefs about the number because the record keeping and reporting for this entire Covid phenomenon has been a confused mess. I believe, but of course have "no evidence" (to keep within the theme of the thread) that vaccine caused deaths are being covered up, but with the suppression of anything that questions the vaccinate everybody regardless of natural immunity or age group Narrative, I'd bet $100 it's just one more thing being suppressed.
The most compelling evidence to me is
1. The fear porn being pushed by Fauci and Dem governors despite the reports from South Africa that Omicron was mild.
2. So far there I've seen an unsubstantiated report that Omicron killed one person.
3. There are reports that admissions to hospitals are up, but I have yet to see anything that breaks the admissions down by demographics, reason for admittance, comorbidities, or locations.
4. From the reports I've seen It's mostly "fully vaccinated" people who are testing positive for Omicron.
4. The lies and suppression (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, CNN et al) about the actual positive results achieved by Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.
If the Omicron variant is as mild as initially reported it's a Godsend - we can finally achieve herd immunity.
“No evidence” means that at this time there is no scientific data to show that the assertion is true, so the best we can do is use related data to evaluate the truth of the assertion.
This works for all the examples.
In the real world, people don't use anything like a Bayesian process to search for truth unless they are required to do so by some sort of formal constraint like the laws governing approval of new drugs, or the publishing requirements of the big-name journals in certain fields of science. In the real world, even in science, people believe something when a fact strikes a chord for them. Perhaps it fits neatly into some explanatory scheme they favor, or it suits their prejudices, or it relieves stress (or, in the case of certain personality disorders, it increases stress), or it has other implications or serves other purposes that they like or are prone to.
Philosophers of science have even tried to justify a version of this pre-rational approach to belief. They call it "inference to the best explanation", which just means, "pick the explanation that you like best".
Not that I mean to imply that the Bayesian process is epistemologically any better, just pointing out that it is seldom used.
I noticed a cousin of "no evidence" in the press during the Trump administration.
"President Trump today claimed without evidence that ..."
It seems that a defensible claim to 'no evidence' relies on a proper formulation of the question that the writer deploys the 'no evidence' assertion to disprove. Just as the real news many undecided people need to read, without saying so, is which news is chosen by editors to not report. Editors didn't ask the question because they don't want to hear the answer: they have the answer they want already.
While you have diagnosed the problem, you haven't proposed the remedy of how to reasonably prove there is sufficient evidence against a particular claim. Studies need to be performed to explicitly rule out the smallest effect size of interest, by utilizing statistical equivalence testing.
I try, when possible, to not say "no evidence". I'll usually say "that study hasn't been done," or "There were studies that showed this didn't work." Part of the problem with this is positive publication bias, so a negative result won't be as readily accessible. I think science journals ought to have negative versions of themselves, so that important failures are widely seen and easily citable.
> Here we should reject journal articles because they disagree with informal evidence!
For homeopathy, we reject journal articles because they disagree with formal evidence in the "hardest" field of science: physics. But also, surely there are some well-powered journal articles saying homeopathy at 10+ centessimal potency it doesn't work?
you accord journalists too much morality in my view. I think they're more inclined to spread fear and uncertainty than to explain and clarify. The objective is sensationalism and stroking of their own egos --rarely is there any follow-up of the same story when evidence one way or the other is eventually uncovered. As well, journos rarely give solid evidence to support their own opinionated spin --other than the spin and verbiage of their peers. The motto is "Never let the truth get in the way of a good headline." Sad.
hey now
https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1435010889594413056?s=20
There is a parachute study now, another joke paper.
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
'In traditional science, you start with a “null hypothesis” along the lines of “this thing doesn’t happen and nothing about it is interesting”.'
I don't think this is true; at least it's not the way the "successful" sciences work. I know it's the Popper story, as then modified by Kuhn, but that doesn't mean it's true.
The way real science works as done by real scientists is a form of extreme pattern recognition: you look at a bunch of disparate items and (after a vast amount of thinking, and internally considering and discarding alternative hypotheses) you propose a "pattern" (eg a mathematical structure) that describes what you are seeing. Other, equally good scientists, appreciate the point, can see how the pattern fits (and doesn't) , and use that to make the pattern better. This, in essence, is what physicists really mean when they go on about beautiful equations, and talk about how it doesn't matter *that much* if one experiment doesn't fit because chances are that will be resolved; the overall pattern works so well that it's probably "essentially" true.
This is completely different from Popper, substantially different from Kuhn, and has nothing in common with the social science/medicine model Scott described. So why isn't it the way science is usually discussed? In one word -- because it is aristocratic, not democratic. It says that the only people who can do truly leading edge science are those few who are exceptionally good at pattern-matching. Any monkey can propose hypotheses and run the experiments (and, god nows, that's 99% of what social science and medicine consist of); but only a few can do what I have described. (And, even worse, the talent of "extreme pattern recognition" goes by another name, a name that must not be spoken, involving the letter that comes before J and the letter that comes after P.)
So: we start with an insane model of how society and people work. ("Aristocracy bad, Democracy good -- anywhere and everywhere". We force science (certainly how it's discussed, even how much of it is practiced, though the hard sciences have mostly, so far, escaped this ...for now...) to conform to this fantasy. And then we're amazed when the machinery falls apart, both in practice and even more so in communication, when those doing the communicating have no freaking clue what real science looks or smells like, only what they were told in some "philosophy of science" class.
:"are hundreds of people who say they've been abducted by aliens! By legal standards, hundreds of eyewitnesses is great evidence! If a hundred people say that Bob stabbed them, Bob is a serial stabber - or, even if you thought all hundred witnesses were lying, you certainly wouldn't say the prosecution had “no evidence”! When we say "no evidence" here, we mean "no really strong evidence from scientists, worthy of a peer-reviewed journal article". But this is the opposite problem as with the parachutes - here we should stop accepting informal evidence, and demand more scientific rigor."
Somewhat tangentially but this is a terrible example and a very common talking point of people who believe in the paranormal. "Stabbings" are things we have many, many independent lines of evidence to confirm the existence of and in this example presumably the specific stabbings themselves have left plenty of wounds, ER records, etc. The eyewitnesses are just making a claim about a specific instance of a thing we already know broadly exists (stabbings) AND we have corroborating evidence of the specific stabbings in question. This isn't the same as positing the existence of some entirely new unconfirmed phenomenon (aliens visiting earth) *purely on the basis of eyewitness testimony*. If 100 witnesses claimed Bob stabbed them with a real plasma lightsaber from Star Wars or bludgeoned them with a handheld perpetual motion machine their testimony would not mean squat in the courts b/c those are things we have no reason to believe exist in the first place and eyewitnesses are a terrible basis on which to hang their existence. Plus they don't even have crazy impossible plasma burns to corroborate their stories! If they DID have crazy unexplainable burns that would open a whole other can of worms but I don't know of any alien abduction stories with corroborating physical evidence that doesn't have a more parsimonious explanation.
A lot of this is just the unavoidable contested vagaries of language. Saying "no evidence" implies no *good* evidence and "good" evidence is always inherently contentious. If I say I have a deep gut feeling or a premonition in a dream that Tom is a burglar it's fine to say there's "no evidence" for that even though deeply felt gut feelings and premonitions and revealed knowledge have constituted a kind of "evidence" for most of human history. Entire religions and societies and cultures have risen and fallen and shaped their entire value systems around revealed knowledge and premonition and visions in dreams. Talk to religious people enough about why they believe and many will eventually say something along the lines of "I can just *feel* the presence of God deep down and that's how I know He's real." By many peoples' working definition that's a kind of evidence too!
Russell's Teapot comes to mind.
There has been a lot of dismissal of knowledge about viruses and vaccines on the basis that we haven't yet proven it to apply specifically to SARS-CoV-2 as it does to other viruses and vaccines (and can be expected to apply to SARS-CoV-2).
Scott, you are my mental doppelganger (but smarter, more educated and more serious). I've been trying (your classification of types of "no evidence" cases was hugely helpful) for quite some time to explain this to people who either "like" posts when it's used incorrectly or in "exchanges" (usually not "discussions") with the "Science Faithful" and the "Science Deniers" (being one or the other seems to have become a huge cultural, mental problem).