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Sun, 30 Oct 2022 11:44:30 -0300

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

Science, to me, is debate. Science is attacking ideas from all directions. No exceptions. Those ideas which cannot be destroyed may turn out to be correct. But, if an idea is considered sacrosanct, with anyone questioning it condemned as an unbeliever, then we do not have science. We have religion. So yes, in my opinion, vaccines, and vaccination, have become a religious belief. No evidence needed.

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Sun, 30 Oct 2022 13:49:26 -0300

Alexandre Hannud Abdo

aleabdo@hubzilla.com.br

I'm not in favor of that kind of information suppression tactics. However, it is a mistake to characterize the situation as pertaining to science. What he describes is an issue of freedom of expression, not of science.

Science is not debate. Science is debate on the exclusive basis of mechanistic deduction and model selection through (statistical) inference involving observation and experimentation.

This principle gets implemented in diverse ways according to the specificity of each field. But, in all cases, the suppression of ideas whose defense doesn't stand on that ground is routine and necessary for the production of scientific knowledge under finite ressources. Otherwise, people practicing science would find themselves drowning in noise.

The cost of entry in scientific debate is, in this sense, high: without proper scientific justification, ideas get legitimately discarded without being debated.

Conflating the openness of science with that of freedom of expression is ignorance. Doing so while posing as a practitioner or defender of science is, in my view, dishonest, whether voluntarily or not.

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 16:05:01 -0300 última edição: Sun, 30 Oct 2022 16:29:53 -0300

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

parlehaakon@hub.volse.no

I have not clicked the link, I have just read the quote, and then I get tired of debating with ignorance, and want to ignore it.

First, science is trying to give plausible answers to complex questions, e.g. "Will dead bacteria cells from a dangerous bacterial disease allow the body to recognize the disease when it shows up for real, alive and kicking, and will this be better for more people than simply getting the disease into the body without this Dead Bacteria Training'?". Now, this has been tested MANY times and the answer is YES to the first part and YES, SOMETIMES and NO to the second part, i.e. the general principle of vaccine holds true, while its effect versus no vaccine has to be VALIDATED every time for each new vaccine.

Now, what is a positive effect?

Say without vaccine you and other people are sick for 10 days on average. With vaccine people are sick for 9 days on average. This is huge, e.g. 10 million people who feel OK one day faster and get back to work adding 1 day x 10 M of productive output is a great win for the economy.

Say with vaccine and you get sick and you are still making other people sick, but you have upped your chances to not be seriously ill and end up in hospital. This is huge, not only for you personally, but you helped the nurses and doctors to not break down and cry under the burden of trying to save too many seriously ill people.

As for evidence, here is a visual of what happened when the USA introduced a vaccine against measels in 1963. It took 5 seconds to find.

The Impact of Vaccines

A recreation of a WSJ graphic by Tynan DeBold and Dov Friedman.

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 22:13:35 -0300

Marshall Sutherland

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

@Alexandre Hannud Abdo I see where you are coming from. I think he is being critical of the culture around science, not "science" itself, in the same way Max Planck was when he said "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

@Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) If you had clicked the link, you might have saved yourself a lot of typing.

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 13:56:01 -0300

Alexandre Hannud Abdo

aleabdo@hubzilla.com.br

@Marshall Sutherland

I thought it could be the case, and perhaps he himself thinks he's doing that, but I don't feel that's what he's actually doing. As I said he's possibly not purposefully dishonest, and perhaps that's too strong a word. I strongly agree with him that people calling for censorship of "anti-vax" speech, or worse calling for full censorship of another person because of their "anti-vax" speech, is wrong. But the way he phrases this as a science thing is not correct. Definitely not correct for the phenomenon that he discusses in the blog post.

In the post he's mixing up a problem with public debate and a problem of scientific debate. The reason this could be dishonest is that it might be because he also wants to argue that there is a problem with the scientific debate, so he's using evidence of a different problem as an misleading replacement.

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 14:43:42 -0300

Alexandre Hannud Abdo

aleabdo@hubzilla.com.br

And, otherwise, regarding the different discussion about the openness of the scientific community.

I'd note that the volume of studies on covid19 vaccines, by diverse institutions with diverse funding sources in diverse places around the world (see for example < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine_clinical_research>), added to existing knowledge about vaccines in general, and particularly considering the high resources (not only financial) required for such studies, points very much to the contrary of a "lack of openness of researchers to seriously considering side effects".

What has been found is that we've been able to identify the side-effects, and they're either not serious or are confined to circumstances that we can control with the right combination of population and vaccine. Now, I'm saying the message is that researchers have indeed being asking the right questions about vaccine effectiveness and safety, and the evidence is favorable to covid19 vaccines. Nobody is forced to agree with that, but to join the scientific debate you have to start by showing why, on scientific grounds, that might not be the case — and I'm not aware of anything close that. Otherwise you won't convince the "next generation of scientists", like Max Planck did.

Planck was an established scientist when he published the quantum solution to the black-body problem. His solution, however revolutionary, was formulated and argued in dialogue with the methods and criteria of the research community of his discipline. He had no trouble presenting it to colleagues in the relevant scientific meetings of his time, nor publishing his findings in rigorous venues, and many major academics didn't hesitate to asks questions and build on his work, though others did resist the implications. The "opponents" he talks about in that citation aren't people who excluded new ideas from scientific debate, but people who stuck to their convictions, and kept devising and defending explanations for facts that were better explained by dropping those convictions.

In the covid19 vaccine context, the scientific problem is not that revolutionary nor complicated. In my view such convictions exist way more in the public debate than in the scientific one.

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:38:20 -0300

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

parlehaakon@hub.volse.no

I have read the link now, and I think I understand the context of the quote better - he is saying it is very difficult to introduce reservations into discourse once the public is on board with scientific truth, which is a problem as "scientific truth" means "absolute truth" to the public and "temporarily our best truth" to scientists.

In Sweden, the Health Authority was the only government body which decided how the pandemic was handled. In Norway, several government bodies came into collaborative play. Both countries were sure they had chosen the correct political strategy. Introducing doubt was very difficult. I am not going into that.

The GDPR is an improvement of the privacy rights of citizens in the EU/EEA area. Saying it also introduces problems into public discourse is very difficult, because this presupposes knowledge most people - even "experts" - do not have. It does not matter if all data is encrypted locally using a physically removable private key, because that is not the concern of the GDPR. The data is still not legally safe. Complex DPAs must be written first, months waiting for each other to accept the template and the content must pass, etc, etc. The GDPR is a legal device, the technical operation of it is left out, as it ahould be. Techs will say CIA can steal the private key, break into your house, copy and decrypt your data, and then put the key back into your pocket. Techs will also say if you can get at your data across the net, then so can determined attackers. Both of which are true. So you get two expert groups arguing, lawyers and techs, from their own black box with an imperfect integration and the public knows "the law is ultimately right" forgetting laws are made by imperfect people for other imperfect people.

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 09:08:34 -0300

Marshall Sutherland

dwatney@hub.farthinghalearms.com

I can always count on you guys for intelligent responses, :-)