Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity." It was a successful campaign and did particularly well in the Far East. "In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally."

Point being, the science that Coca-Cola propagated is entirely legitimate. But that science itself does not tell the whole, obvious truth, which is that there is certainly a correlation in a society between obesity rates and overall sugar-soda consumption rates. "Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim."

"Trust the science" can thus be a dangerous call to arms. Here's the book, if anybody's interested. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451...

If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out, because of all the lobbying and armies of scientists paid to find and publish a very narrow version of truth

While I agree that there may be things which have subtle but cumulatively harmful effects over time, the two specifics that you cited (cell phones and microwaves) are very poor examples because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.

If you thought the tobacco and silicone breast implant settlements were impressive...

Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too).

This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE".

I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors:

> Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October

> Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850

> https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18

Think "leaded gasoline" if you need a concrete example

Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.

To quote from the paper:

“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”

That is why the director of the NIAID, which is a research organization and not a public health agency at all, took charge of the century's biggest public health situation over the head of the (sadly impotent) CDC, which should have been in charge of coordinating the US's response.

The scientific consensus that you were sold was never really a consensus. It was a power play.

By contrast, there's a strong consensus on climate change, for example, that involves a very large number of scientists who should know and who are not incentivized to believe it.

Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change.

Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to understand calculus and work. Understandably, everyone can grasp temperature.

I think your comment is a perfect example of misdirection and people using “data driven methods” to attack a “first principles” explanation of physical phenomena.

Here’s a link because that gives my idea more weight.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05686-x

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj8469

Computer people talk about scientific methods and their “home lab” stuff, ai and inherent structure of data then absolutely fall for the facebook-grade-misinformation arguments to not trust something that is too mainstream. Jfc

1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.

2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.

3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they cutoff 3+ weeks early, the ice was above average a few weeks later.

https://usicecenter.gov/PressRelease/ArcticMaximum2024

Besides all this, i am unsure if you're supportive or not of what i said.

> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?

"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.

There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses.

That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable.

What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes available.

Your post is the perfect example of what that doesn't look like.

(Footnote: There are a number of examples in history for pathogens leaking from labs, and for zoonotic origins, so having such strongly biased priors under poor evidence in either direction really just shows that you want to believe something.)

But I still don’t know how to put in useful words what “critical thinking” is because it’s not one thing.

It requires synthesizing a lot of information together in very specific and meticulous ways. And through feedback, collecting your previous thoughts and keeping track of how often you are correct or incorrect.

You can explain critical thinking in many ways but none of it will teach someone critical thinking.

If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.

Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!

Just because US weather stations in the 70’s were more rural than urban does not in itself gives credence to the idea that climate change/warming/ greenhouse gases is a nonissue or somehow a totally misunderstood non-warming phenomenon. Even a climate that tended to one mean value zero standard deviation throughout the year would be devastating coming from our current temporal and geographical distribution.

Your point about weather stations is a technical detail in data collection while there are several other corroborating methods indicating a warming ocean and atmosphere, albeit not geographically uniformly distributed. But you have this gotcha fact about weather stations ambient baseline temp vs some platonic ideal temp that reflects what’s going on in the abstract notion of a climate.

The sea ice has satellite photo analysis (area) dating to 70’s or 80’s with daily or weekly granularity.

I cannot convince a climate change denier or skeptic but am leaving that comment and this one hoping that observers don’t just take your initial counter-fact to be a valid falsifying argument.

As everyone says weather is not the climate, spurious yearly data do not nullify long form trends, and I’d just look at low pass filtered or line fit or yearly average of granular image data to argue that there is a time localize trend since the 80’s consistent with a warming ocean.

I disagree with you I think you used logical fallacies to misdirect and cause skepticism about something that is fairly corroborated and the debate needs to focus on mitigation or investment or policy changes.

Your link says it's "the seventh highest recorded since 2006 when this metric from IMS was first tracked consistently". Where are you getting "highest extent in 20 years"?

Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.

The interesting/newer things start when propagandists have multiple outlets and can distribute a number of mutually incompatible falsehoods to different audiences.

The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?

I'm highly skeptical of folks who take issue with something like "trust the science" because, while I fully cosign that as a slogan it's lacking and one doesn't "trust" science so much as learn about it and see if it holds up, the sort of people who say things like that invariably follow up with something like questioning climate change, or questioning the handling of the COVID pandemic. And that's not to say that there weren't mistakes made, we made a shitload of them, but too many bad actors in that space will take legitimate problems with the response to COVID and use that to launch into things like saying vaccines cause autism or are a plot on the part of China to kill all the white people, or other such ridiculous fuckin nonsense.

And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

I would also put forward that something I've observed as we've gotten further and further into the social media age is the conflation between skepticism and ignorance, which are different things, and people who are doing the second thing will reliably say they are doing the former. To be skeptical is not a bad thing, even an uninformed skeptic like a member of the general public is fully capable of being at least somewhat informed, vetting sources, and coming to reasonably accurate conclusions without a formal education, however, it is also extremely, trivially easy for a layman to find stuff that corroborates whatever they think is already the truth, stated in professional-looking formats, that looks like science but just isn't credible or worthy of being taken seriously, and then go "look, see, I found this thing. I'm right!" If you find one, single academic, who has an entire rest-of-their-discipline shouting at them about how wrong they are, which is more likely: that you found one truth teller in a sea of liars, or that you found one liar?

Maybe the Nobel Committee is in on… no, that'd only affect whether they awarded the prize, not whether people expect them to. They must be suppressing the evidence at the source: the instruments themselves. … No, they'd have to alter everything, and there's no way they got to my weather station. Maybe there's some way to remotely manipulate all the weather station reading at once? Think, what do all the weather stations have in common?

I've got it! They're doing something to the atmosphere, to make it seem like there's anthropogenic climate change, and trick all the scientists into publishing studies showing that it's real and happening, but actually it's just people altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere en-masse for unspecified nefarious reasons, likely personal profit. Or, maybe it's a byproduct of some industrial process, that they don't want us to know about. I bet that's what chemtrails are.

Probably not, as electronics manufacturers would quikly take that into consideration. Liability comes from both knowing and continuing.

Well, as far as direct physical harms, yes, but as far as mental harms that translate to physical harms, the jury's still out:

'“Given that the increase in mental health issues was sharpest after 2011, Twenge believes it’s unlikely to be due to genetics or economic woes and more likely to be due to sudden cultural changes, such as shifts in how teens and young adults spend their time outside of work and school.'

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-healt...

Sure, the raw facts don't care about your feelings, but the way that these facts are interpreted and presented absolutely do care. Two people can look at the exact same data and draw widely different but comparably accurate conclusions out of it.

Using your Coke example, the raw fact that "exercise is good for reducing obesity" is broadly true and not really disputed by anyone as far as I'm aware, but the interpretation of "exercise alone can be a solution to obesity" or "how much exercise vs how much diet restriction is a solution to obesity" is subject to interpretation and biases.

The last time a Nobel Prize was awarded to someone overturning a long-held charged dogma was in 2005 when Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They demonstrated that Helicobacter pylori bacteria, not stress or excess stomach acid, were the primary cause of peptic ulcers.

Whereas the inverse--suppression of findings that invalidated long-held scientific dogmas--are numerous throughout the last 150 years. Stegener faced ridicule and suppression for continental drift. So did Semmelweiss for germ theory. And Mendelian inheritance. And Lemaître's expanding universe. And Prusiner's prion theory. And Margulis's endosymbiotic theory. And horizontal gene transfer.

Beyond Marshall and Warren, Prusiner was the only one to receive a Nobel for their findings and that was fifteen years after consensus had emerged from below.

And in the case of Marshall and Warren, the findings of a bacterial origin of ulcers had been published in 1906, 1913, 1919, 1925, 1939, 1951, 1955, 1958, 1964, 1971, 1982, and 1983. With this 1983 paper being authored by... Marshall and Warren. They will not receive a Nobel Prize for their findings for another 22 years.

Science is moved forward in spite of dogmatic consensus, not because of it.

Many people try to do it with many different methods. So you're right it's not one thing. Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret.

Everybody lies.

people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence

It was known at the time that the Wuhan lab was studying coronavirus, and known they had both safety and security lapses. That is far from proof, but it is evidence.

Also, the incentive was to blame China was mixed. At the time, Xi had recently the US, and both sides were advancing a trade deal. It was a moment the US govt was trying to improve relations, and particularly get US agricultural sales to China boosted. The lab leak talk was tamped down for months. It wasn't until March that you had US officials really start to talk about it.

I don't think this statement is true.

Long-term effects can only be observed over the, well, long term which makes it hard to compare with the baseline. It was measured differently and with very different external factors. Then even if we do by chance manage to observe the harm today it could be very hard to identify the reason — we would see the factual result but neither the process nor the cause.

Take any unexplained health issue we have today, e.g. decline in male fertility estimated at 50% in western counties since 1970s, a dramatic change. Could it be microwaves? Well possibly, can't be ruled out at this point, among many other candidates. Furthermore, with the new research saying that 1) microwaving food in "microwave-safe" plastic containers releases huge number of microplastic particles into the food and 2) microplastic accumulates in testicles — it's not even a fringe science anymore but a normal theory to be studied and be proven or disproven.

Do we have any other health issues that increased over the past 50 years? Yes. What caused them, is it something recent that became popular in the past 50 years? Very likely, yes. Do we know it? Not yet.

It took us a very long time to figure out cigarettes. Or leaded fuel, even though we knew in advance that lead is poisonous.

Here's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

[0] >And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Masliah

I think the problem with this idea is that thinking can be corrupted by emotional bias. Ideologies and power differentials(People with powerful incentives to control narratives) can have a lasting effect on perception, when you pair this with modern media, it can create a cascade effect that can drown out the truth. The psychology of group-think also plays a part in this as well. Its a very complicated topic and your conclusion is one small part of the puzzle.

There is this great YouTube [0] video that describes this problem perfectly in my book. They interviewed people with some data that was math based and what they found is people would skew there own thinking to support there own political ideologies. This can be used against the population to create perceptions that don't line up with facts.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno

The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts. You can try and broaden that statement all you want to pull in other topics, but that slogan says nothing about having a disregard for how facts are interpreted OR presented.

It goes without saying that facts can be subject to multiple interpretations. I think people need to be more honest about what you're really saying: you don't like conservatives and you distorted a basic phrase as you gaslit a group of people and accused that group of doing what you yourself just did.

The particular viruses they were working with were only distantly related to covid. Related in the same way that house cats are related to tigers.

In addition they were not doing “gain of function research”, unless you want to say that they were also doing “loss of function research”. What they were doing was seeing how point mutation affected infectivity both positively and negatively.

We know what they were working with, and it wasn’t the virus that gave rise to covid. There are much closer matches than in other species.

But I still feel its important for people to act from their own values, right or wrong, and not from a "hey trust the science" mentality which reminds me of majority thinking. Just because a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the science is sound, it doesn't make them right. There are plenty of situations where decided by majority viewpoints have been wrong.

If it were a lab leak then we’d expect the initial cases to cluster around the lab, and to show up in those who had contact with lab workers.

Nobody considered the lab as a source because the basic epidemiological evidence doesn’t support it.

To the extent that they were looking at gain of function, they were also looking at loss of function. My understanding is that the research was looking at how random point mutation affect infectivity, both positively and negatively.

They were using also using virus evolutionary pretty distant from covid 19.

There are corona viruses present in species in the wet market that were much closer to covid 19. (eg pangolin caron’s viruses)

Blaming the wuhan lab is like finding that your child has been eaten by a tiger and the blaming a house cat breeder on the other side of town.

I didn't say anything about your beliefs. I said other people who say similar things believe these things, and when people say things like them, I tend to assume they're about to drop anti-vax nonsense. That's not an accusation, it's the statement of an observed correlation.

> I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one.

I mean, again, I wasn't referencing your specific beliefs so I don't really care if you confirm them or not. But I would also say, again as a statement of a correlation not an accusation against you, that the people who espouse the anti-science sentiments I've been discussing also will refuse to lay down specific confirmations of their beliefs, as part of a larger "just asking questions" fallacious argument, in which they take the position of an unconvinced centrist but consistently espouse "questions" that favor one side of it.

Again, to be clear, not accusing, merely observing. You may indeed be someone who is genuinely just asking questions, the problem is a whole lot of shitty people out there corroborate that position to advance bunk. And assuming you're being truthful, which I have no reason to assume you aren't, for that you have my sympathies.

> ere's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

Well sure. Science isn't perfect, it's only as good as the people who are doing it. It's the same way that basically every anti-vax sentiment, measure, study, etc. that you can find leads in one way or another back to former-doctor Andrew Wakefield and his junk study about vaccines and autism from back in the 90's. There are still medical practitioners who believe he was correct, there are multiple organizations that are built off of his research who oppose vaccines, we've had numerous outbreaks of various preventable diseases because of vaccine hesitancy. This shit has real consequences.

However, it's worth noting that both that story and the one you're referencing are notable because on the whole, most of the time, science does get it right, and more importantly, if it gets it wrong but it is being done honestly, it is also self correcting.

You’re right, I don’t like conservatives very much, but I have seen left leaning people fetishizing stoicism and I think those people are dumb too.

ETA:

Also, slightly confused how I “gaslit” anyone. You can go through my post history and I am generally pretty happy to acknowledge I don’t like conservatives very much.

I'll also say that that 'I don't trust science' implies that the scientific method is somehow corrupt. The scientific method is a thing that can be used well or badly. 'I don't trust science' is like saying 'I don't trust statistics'. The wrong person can use out of context science, done well, to imply totally absurd things.

in fact, go google "sea ice extent 2024" and see how many different figures you get and check the dates! February 2024 they were claiming we were in dire straits because it was at 15.01mm sqkm. what you have to do, as a reasonable person, is get the actual data, as granular as you can. 2024's ice extent was above 1995s, even. and approached 1990s. it was way higher than 2014-2020:

https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sea-ice...

https://i.imgur.com/ZIopSoI.png

My point is just repeating ad nauseam tripe like "the ice is melting" and "hottest year ever" isn't convincing anyone of anything. I'm also tired after doing this reading and research and talking about it and arguing about it for 23 years now, already. I can't be the only one who looks at the actual data, can i?

It's actually remarkably cold on earth, colder than it's been in over 450mm years. but if you look at the graph, it's not a diagonal or straight line, it goes up and down over millions of years.

so, with these two facts: Will it get warmer or colder?

Knowing that, why do i have to listen to this claptrap?

The atlantic was colder this year than normal. I know a lot of media people were saying "hot as bathwater" and "perfect fixins for storms and climate issues" but also this year they said that the AMOC may be ending and northern europe will be igloo central. Guess how long we've been studying that? 20 years. TWENTY.

call me old fashioned, but "models" made in the last few decades on data we've only been realistically collecting in a "rigorous" fashion for 20-40 years don't impress me, especially with stuff like Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024) coming out in the past couple months showing that the global temps over the last 485mm years mean all this "anthropogenic climate change" stuff is hilariously wrong-headed.

Now, hear me out for one second. I am environmentally conscious, i try not to pollute. i rarely drive, i never fly, i tried solar but it didn't work very well in my location. I care about people not damaging the planet we live on. What i can't abide is pointing at models (what's the M in LLM stand for? does SD have models? how about the music generation stuff, those models?) and extracting currency from everyone to solve a problem that moves when you stare at it.

i don't expect to convince anyone here. It's not my calling in life to go debate this in public. Do what you want. Just don't tell me i have to do something else because "the model says so", alright?

there's a joke "apparently the police have been beating up black people like hotcakes" that was unknown until consumer camcorders and cameras were widespread. We now have billions and billions of sensors on this planet, and we can all do our duty to VERIFY that what the model says is accurate, and what the model was fed was accurate. You ever researched when the first "accurate" thermometer was developed/patented?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6466186/

> An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.

This means that for there to be a conspiracy, the conspirators have to communicate with each other about it. Many people would read your post and conclude that you think that there's a centralized organization that all the journalists get their marching orders from.

I feel like in reality you probably think that the journalists, like most humans, are very good at knowing what is "in vogue" and what is "outside acceptable discourse" for their circles, and so they engage in systematic bias.

A lot of arguments over conspiracy theories consist of people using the dictionary definition of the word scoffing at people who are using the second definition of the word.

There's no serious question that the WIV has unpublished viruses--even with no attempt at secrecy, every active research group has unpublished work. Researchers found an unpublished merbecovirus in contamination from shared equipment. This isn't related to SARS-CoV-2, but shows the claim that the WIV had zero unpublished viruses to be specifically false. Public access to the WIV's database of viral genomes was removed early in the pandemic, and never restored.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

Pangolins were initially proposed as the proximal host, but that's been abandoned for years. After a long delay, the paper in Nature was extensively corrected, following Alina Chan's discovery that the alleged multiple samples were all from a single batch of smuggled pangolins. These were probably infected during trafficking, in the same way that housecats are sometimes infected by SARS-CoV-2 but aren't the source.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

The goal of research like DEFUSE was gain of function, a deadlier or faster-spreading virus. That goal wasn't always successfully achieved, but that's true for all goals. The point is that skilled researchers specifically trying to achieve a goal (like by directed evolution during serial passage, or by genetic engineering) are much more likely to do so than would random point mutations alone.

None of this means it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 arose from an accident at the WIV. The picture that you've received isn't accurate, though.

There is no reason to believe it's possible to determine the point of introduction with such granularity from initial epidemiological data. The form of modeling behind these geographic claims shows no history of correct predictions, making them essentially unfalsifiable.

The misleading claims that you're repeating here are exactly those promoted by the scientific press, including both the highest-impact peer-reviewed journals and popular outlets like Scientific American. If you are willing to entertain the possibility that they'd misinform you and seek sources outside that bubble, then I believe you'll see that yourself.

Beyond the general background already linked, Dr. Shi specifically did not expect that natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 occurred near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...

She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.

Either you need to somehow show we've gotten the molecular properties of Carbon Dioxide wrong so that it doesn't absorb the wavelengths of light we think it does, or you need to show that we've gotten basic chemistry wrong, and that the reactions involving hydrocarbons and oxygen do not produce carbon dioxide.

These are all very basic things and have been known for about two hundred years. It was even possible, well over a century ago, to reason from these basic principles and conclude that mass burning of fossil fuels would result in a global temperature rise.

It just basic science, and if you want to deny it, you have to deny almost all of modern physics.

Cancer rates continue to rise, and will be well over 50% of all people in my lifetime.

There is no doubt our current world is making us very sick.

For the curious reader, here's a short introduction, the tip of the iceberg.

> Daszak’s $3.7 million NIH grant first set off alarm bells in early May 2016, as it entered its third year. The NIH requires annual progress reports, but Daszak’s year-two report was late and the agency threatened to withhold funds until he filed it.

> The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research?

> But the 2015 research paper he cited was not particularly reassuring. In it, Shi Zhengli and a preeminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina, Ralph Baric, mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells. (Baric did not respond to written questions seeking comment.)

> If anything, the MERS study Daszak proposed was even riskier. So he pitched a compromise to the NIH: that if any of the recombined strains showed 10 times greater growth than a natural virus, “we will immediately: i) stop all experiments with the mutant, ii) inform our NIAID Program Officer and the UNC [Institutional Biosafety Committee] of these results and iii) participate in decision making trees to decide appropriate paths forward.”

> This mention of UNC brought a puzzled response from an NIH program officer, who pointed out that the proposal had said the research would be performed at the WIV. “Can you clarify where the work with the chimeric viruses will actually be performed?” the officer wrote. Ten days later, with still no response from Daszak, the program officer emailed him again. On June 27, Daszak responded, buoyant as ever:

> “You are correct to identify a mistake in our letter. UNC has no oversight of the chimera work, all of which will be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology…. We will clarify tonight with Prof. Zhengli Shi exactly who will be notified if we see enhanced replication…my understanding is that I will be notified straight away, as [principal investigator], and that I can then notify you at NIAID. Apologies for the error!”

> Allowing such risky research to go forward at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “simply crazy, in my opinion,” says Jack Nunberg, director of the Montana Biotechnology Center. “Reasons are lack of oversight, lack of regulation, the environment in China,” where scientists who publish in prestigious journals get rewarded by the government, creating dangerous incentives. “So that is what really elevates it to the realm of, ‘No, this shouldn’t happen.’”

https://www.polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-t...

All I can conclude from your posts in this thread is that you are in an unfortunate bubble, are desperately trying not to see reality, or simply want others to doubt it for whatever reason.

Or is there something else I'm supposed to be seeing?

What they meant was "Don't question our data or our decisions".

Science isn't trusted, it's understood and practiced. Not everyone has enough scientific literacy to understand the difference between being data driven and hypothesis driven, even if they intuit parts of it on a daily basis.

We can easily be misled by data, but when we make decisions by evaluating the probability that any hypothesis is true conditioned on evidence supported by openly collected and evaluated data, we're much closer to doing science.

>Thesis: China is a backward country where basic hygiene is not followed and any animal will be eaten live and raw.

>Antithesis: China is more advanced than many first world countries, with state of the art biological research pushing boundaries beyond what current protocols can handle.

>Synthesis: An infected bat escaped from the Wu Han institute of virology and was promptly eaten.

This becomes problematic since low quality experience is easily used to make arguments from authority with very high confidence.

You cannot entirely separate intention from the merit of the science. Those 200 studies are an elaborate propaganda campaign, and they always were, each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that they had an internal logic.

Scientists should react with violent disgust and ostracism at clear attempts to attain a specific result without a lot of very explicit framing (eg: pre-announcing, announcing the other 190 studies, having a third party independently replicate the 10, etc), but they can't, because this sort of industrial campaign is funding such a huge percent of scientific research.

The NSF is doling out 9 billion dollars a year to run at least semi-objective science, and if this was 90 billion or 900 billion, things would be quite a bit different, and motivated "research" would not have the same place. We are dramatically over-supplied on researchers, to the point that a lot of them are making sub-minimum wage working as adjuncts, postdocs, "grad students", baristas. We built a system of university research that is the envy of the world, that exports knowledge and culture en masse, and we're not using it for more than 0.03% of GDP because some Congressperson has a poster of researchers "Spent $1.5M studying the mating habits of fruit flies, like some kind of pervert", and because Reagan hated government and wanted Coca-Cola to do our science for us.

- Yishan Wong, once Reddit CEO and still very much in the know, admitted to the following (direct quote):

> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

- Twitter had a CCP-affiliated person on their board of directors during Covid

- I assume everyone here is familiar with the Lancet letter.

It's like saying that a computer is one thing despite the fact that the one thing is made up of multiple pieces.

Who created chaos at school board meetings with yelling about trans kids and history books over the last couple of years? I have yet to hear anyone who isn't on the Right freak out about "what they're teaching our kids" the way that conservatives do.

Sounds more like people who like to use propaganda who keep their methods in shadows (not always, though). I try to teach critical thinking all the time. I bet you do too. Do you not try to inform loved ones how detect spam or scams? How to evaluate what's true in their inbox or on a webpage? Do you have anything to withhold in such a scenario?

Disinformation is so much easier when truth is not a dimension you care about.

The tide seems to be turning, indeed.

They went from a passive aggressive “I don’t understand this idiom” straight to an unhinged tirade of “conservatives are morons” without much provocation.

Of course you share that sentiment, like the overwhelming majority of people on this very left leaning message board, but I still find it funny when it comes out so explicitly.

"Unhinged tirade" seems like a bit stretch. I called Ben Shapiro a moron, a statement I also stand by, then I said that I don't like conservatives very much, which I also stand by, and that left-leaning people who fetishize stoicism are also dumb, so it's not really just about conservatives.

I'm genuinely confused how you got "conservatives are morons" out of that. Yes, Ben Shapiro is a moron, but I also called left-leaning people dumb.

What I'm trying to get at, and what you seem desperate to dismiss out of some strange partisanship, is that I think it's really dumb to dismiss emotions as part of an argument. I don't really care if it's a lefty or a conservative or a libertarian or communist or anything else I'm missing; emotions are important, and pretending that you're somehow "above" feeling emotional about a subject doesn't make you smart.

They never said that. Ironically, this is a perfect case of "facts don't care about your feelings" - even though you're upset, it doesn't change the fact that they never said that. It seems like your comments about needing self-reflection and complaining about "gaslighting" actually apply towards you instead.

Edit: regardless, this whole comment subthread is a useless waste of time and only serves as an airing of irrelevant grievances.

If there's actually a book in that list that promotes pedophilia, it probably should be banned; which book are you referring to?

What list are you referring to? Perhaps I missed something, but I don’t see a list of banned books. However, regarding books promoting pedophilia, the worst example I am aware of (that isn’t Lolita, which I feel is a cop-out) is The Bluest Eye. I won’t link directly to the passage, however searching “Passages Challenged Bluest Eye” should lead you to a website with excerpts. They have not just one, but two characters who prey on the main character, and she is assaulted twice by her father in unnecessarily graphic scenes.

Regardless, most of the old testament is pretty child-unfriendly. Lots of passages about rape and violence with extremely questionable morality (including unambiguous endorsement of genocide), and I do not think it has any place in a classroom, even if we disregard separation of church and state (which we shouldn't).

I didn't mean a literal "list", though I realize it was bad wording on my part.

"Unnecessarily graphic" doesn't imply "promotes". I haven't read the book, and it might not be appropriate for a school library, but your description here doesn't seem to indicate that it's promoting pedophilia.

Deciphering the commenter’s true meaning wasn’t super hard in this case. From claiming that a highly intelligent conservative pundit is a moron it’s easy to deduce that the person thinks less intelligent conservatives are also morons. They also explicitly said they “don’t like conservatives” which is a pretty silly statement to throw out there in general.

It’s also painfully obvious that the poster doesn’t understand the idiom “facts don’t care about your feelings” from them having now tripled down on trying to explain it or those who use it unsuccessfully.

The idiom’s intended message is as simple as it seems. It says that getting emotional about facts doesn’t change them. It’s not some deeply profound thing to say.