> A lot of the COVID pseudo-science was specifically designed to manipulate people's emotions (e.g. journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result [1]).
1. What Covid pseudo science are you referring to?
2. How does the x thread you referenced show “journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result”? As I read it, the rejection was because the journal had a higher bar for evidence on claims around herd immunity than the researchers were able to meet. That is, they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.
It’s not clear to me that this bar existed just to increase vaccine uptake, but to generally avoid moves towards relaxing interventions based on insufficiently strong evidence (social distancing, mask wearing, etc).
It’s not clear to me what objection one would have to having a high threshold for evidence when publishing research with such high potential to impact public health. That seems like a good thing to me.
It's damning for academia that on HN of all places, a forum filled with academics, this stuff has to be spelled out by outsiders. Once more unto the breach?
The rejection reason: "it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk."
What should scientific institutions do? Answer questions about the natural world honestly.
What should politicians do? Make policy tradeoffs informed by those answers and the preferences of the public.
What were the institutions actually doing? Hiding correct answers due to an ideological and pathologically strong preference for risk avoidance without any regard for cost.
> they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.
A "very high evidence bar" that isn't described anywhere is one that doesn't actually exist. They never showed anything wrong with the science, they rejected it out of hand because they didn't like that it would support a libertarian conclusion. Even if they had invented such a bar, requiring weak evidence for policies you like and strong evidence for policies you dislike is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific intellectual fraud being criticized in the article.
COVID was full of this stuff. That event wasn't surprising, it was typical behavior of most "scientists".
You have to realize, that when the universities get disestablished, it'll be because of decades of discussions like this one. The correct response to that Twitter thread is to demand the journal be immediately shut down and that heads roll at the publisher. The wrong response is to say "of course we should block research that supports policies we dislike, why would anyone be against that?"
> A "very high evidence bar" that isn't described anywhere is one that doesn't actually exist
If your claim is: “if a standard isn’t explicitly written down somewhere such that one can utilise it to ascertain whether something meets it without ambiguity then it doesn’t exist” then the entailments are absurd. The world is full of standards that do not meet such a bar (“reasonable doubt”, for example) yet obviously this is a real standard.
> COVID was full of this stuff
Yet when I asked you for to give examples of “this stuff” you failed to do so. How come?
> when the universities get disestablished
Lmao. Not going to happen, I see we’re off in cloud cuckoo land now.
1. What Covid pseudo science are you referring to?
2. How does the x thread you referenced show “journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result”? As I read it, the rejection was because the journal had a higher bar for evidence on claims around herd immunity than the researchers were able to meet. That is, they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.
It’s not clear to me that this bar existed just to increase vaccine uptake, but to generally avoid moves towards relaxing interventions based on insufficiently strong evidence (social distancing, mask wearing, etc).
It’s not clear to me what objection one would have to having a high threshold for evidence when publishing research with such high potential to impact public health. That seems like a good thing to me.