BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

Jay wrote:

Jay wrote:

This is pretty good:
https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock- … -pandemic/

This one is even better
https://www.aier.org/article/how-wrong- … s-and-why/

Neil Ferguson seems like a media whoring turd.

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)[2] is an 501(c)(3) economic research institute located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1933 by the 20th century economist Edward C. Harwood with the intention of protecting individual rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ … c_Research

I think the articles posted there need to be read with this in mind.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

Jay wrote:

This is pretty good:
https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock- … -pandemic/

This one is even better
https://www.aier.org/article/how-wrong- … s-and-why/

Neil Ferguson seems like a media whoring turd.

You are going to have to copy and paste at least a paragraph or two.

The TLDR version is that when the models were being hyped back in March they were working with insufficient data and overprojecting. The guy at the forefront of the media hype storm was the same guy that overhyped mad cow disease, Neil Ferguson, and led to the destruction of 4 million cows because he predicted hundreds of thousands of human deaths when all of the competing models predicted approximately 1000 deaths. Apparently, he knows how to feed the media the type of story they want to feature: death, destruction, the end of society as we know it.

It's interesting to me how Jay will promote some articles as if they were god's spoken word while randomly and simultaneously dismissing others utterly regardless of writer or interviewee qualifications. "ORANGE MAN BAD," he mocks, parroting the MAGA camp, later (after his self-imposed cool off period) linking to a libertarian publication known to criticize the president.

With the failure of the '68 flu analogy, here's a second article comparing the coronavirus to, of all things, mad cow disease. If that doesn't convince y'all then there's no hope!

Jay wrote:

It was a negative locally in the rust belt, sure, but globally it's been pretty awesome.

Obviously its made a positive difference to people in Bangladesh etc. but locally in first world countries its been a disaster, hence you have a dead rust belt and half the US populations earns less than $30,000/year, 44% less than $18,000/year.

On the average its been negative for first world countries.

david nutt isn’t at imperial and i don’t hang on his every word. a lot of what he says is stupid. he’s the media darling, as well as he might, because he cultivates the media. he was the government’s chief scientific advisor, not a humdrum everyday researcher.

i talk to hundreds of researchers a week. i know what scientific research is.  is it even worth explaining to you what double-blind peer review is? how scientific research and its reception is completely untainted by the name of the authors? this is basic, fundamental stuff. no i am not fanboying for individual researchers. and anything published in a serious journal isn’t, either.

it’s amazing you’ll support jay’s idiotic view of science and experts, all because you can’t bear one guy publishing stuff about drugs. talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

makes you wonder what’s really going on at your beloved imperial, doesn’t it? mad cow disease prophets, psychedelic research centres, people claiming alcohol is bad for you. it’s almost as if scientific research doesn’t conform to your own narrow political views. egads!

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-05 01:35:46)

i thought he had since moved to liverpool. no great matter.

you think humans would be better off if we all chewed grass and hay all day long and got big and strong like horses. you don't like any scientists who produce research on nasty illegal drugs. you think daisy-chaining together several disparate studies with limited conclusions enables you to say things like 'it's easy to prove that weed pushes people into murder'. we know well where you stand as an esteemed biologist and chemist. there's really little point in side-diving into the reputation of david nutt once again. it still doesn't change the fact that jay has no idea how models are made and research published. how consensus is reached, and how research and predictions are methodically explored and improved. it isn't like supporting a football team.

nothing quite spells you out as a blinded fanatic like your willingness to side with jay's 'experts are bad, we should trust trump' line because you've still got a bee in your bonnet about drugs research that said alcohol is worse for you than some other drugs. you know full well yourself that demonizing and going after individual researchers is the opposite of what good science is about. the entire efforts of right-wing think-tanks to 'smear' experts like jay's new bete noire is fundamentally stupid. poor data gets replaced with better data, models are replaced or iterated upon. what is the point of doing a political hitpiece on a researcher? research either stands or falls on its own merits. people don't get published or cited based on name-brand.

once again:

i don’t know why he’s going after one guy at imperial college so much. as if the entire country has followed one man’s advice. the imperial college model was one early projection among several, and modelled what happened if governments did nothing. jay seems to keep overlooking that part. it was a rudimentary model calculating the infectiousness and spread of the disease.

what happens to the scientific method if scientists are afraid to make preliminary projections, or to form rudimentary models, for fear of being wrong? or, worse, misquoted? or, worse yet, intentionally misused by libertarian think-tanks to encourage people to go back out and protest their freedom against coronavirus? what happens when researchers self-censor putting out their findings? when they fear hitpieces in the media? you're siding with the people who want to do away with experts and install only apparatchiks. you're siding with jay, who thinks that because scientists occasionally get it wrong, they should be barred from decision-making and greeted only with skepticism.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-05 02:30:39)

peer-review is always single-blind, occasionally double-blind, and increasingly often triple-blind. a person's name or reputation never comes into it. people don't know who they're reviewing, or whom they are being reviewed by. this is a fundamental, basic, root-level principle of peer-reviewed research. hence my point that going after individual researchers is a little bit stupid.

it's to the net benefit of science for people to publish failed experiments and bad research. it is useful to other researchers. there's actually a very real problem with selection bias when people only bother to go through the effort of publishing their successful experiments. but that's another, much more complex topic that isn't worth abrogating here. i doubt you really have any serious interest in academic discourse outside of saying 'these guys published findings i didn't like, therefore it is bad'.

scientific consensus is very much a thing, 'groupthink' when you don't like it, but nobody complains about 'groupthink' when a new medicine or vaccine is introduced after multiple trials and oodles of research efforts. funny, that. no, consensus is reached through trial and arbitration, and is the best we have in terms of arriving at 'objective knowledge' in our current scientific framework. that might include a few shonky studies, but, again, being wrong or publishing findings with limitations/caveats is part of the gradual process at arriving at new knowledge. you know this, really, because you've done academic research. jay doesn't understand that part. you are only doing more harm by encouraging the dunces.

of course you have, dilbert. one step ahead of the researchers in a field totally unrelated to your own.

are you typing in a rage or something? your posts are becoming noticeably incoherent.

i've never claimed to be anything but a layman when it comes to science. i've never claimed to be an epidemiologist. i am claiming that going after one single epidemiologist by name to claim that all coronavirus caution is 'hysterical' is a misguided endeavour. i am claiming that attacking scientists personally is to misunderstand how scientific opinion and consensus works. i'm not making any claims beyond my own level of expertise.

presumably imperial college has enough faith in his research to keep on employing him full-time. i trust that they know what they are doing; or, otherwise, that they understand that the freedom to be wrong, to explore some dead-ends, is an integral part of scientific research. you know these things also, but flecks of spit start to adorn your lips when scientists say something you don't personally like. it's really not my problem.

because you don't have expertise in nutrition, or psychopharmacology, or neurology, or any of the topics you gloat about 'debunking' after reading a paper for 5 minutes. an engineering degree evidently doesn't make you an expert at chemistry. your thinking is frankly bizarre on some of these topics, if not laughable. i can't imagine your CAD experience is giving you a great advantage. 'horses only eat grass and they are big and strong, makes you think'. no, no it really doesn't.

part of the editorial tasks of academic publishing is to arrange peer-review, contacting reviewers and sending them papers, etc. researchers even in adjacent deep physics fields are happy to state when they don't have the necessary expertise to review another's work. that's people working at post-doctoral level in the same micro-field of a subject. if they are not equipped to review it, they pass. the fact you think an engineering degree from imperial in the 1970s gives you mastery over several sciences in 2020, and sniff at academics and their 'groupthink', is really quite funny. i'm sure you know more about the validity of prof nutt's research than the appointing committee at imperial college.

Last edited by uziq (2020-05-05 03:30:35)

good job i have a schoolboy's knowledge of statistics, then.

and righty-ho. moving on.

scientists are not 'tricking' anyone. again, what is it with your wilful misunderstanding? nobody is publishing deceitful models or disingenuous research.

you're more hung up on one researcher at imperial who provided one (of several) early models than anyone else. why is it that your niche think-tank are seizing upon this strand of argument so assiduously? because that's not how science works. maybe they're putting ideology before honesty?

uziq wrote:

peer-review is always single-blind, occasionally double-blind, and increasingly often triple-blind. a person's name or reputation never comes into it. people don't know who they're reviewing, or whom they are being reviewed by. this is a fundamental, basic, root-level principle of peer-reviewed research. hence my point that going after individual researchers is a little bit stupid.

it's to the net benefit of science for people to publish failed experiments and bad research. it is useful to other researchers. there's actually a very real problem with selection bias when people only bother to go through the effort of publishing their successful experiments. but that's another, much more complex topic that isn't worth abrogating here. i doubt you really have any serious interest in academic discourse outside of saying 'these guys published findings i didn't like, therefore it is bad'.

scientific consensus is very much a thing, 'groupthink' when you don't like it, but nobody complains about 'groupthink' when a new medicine or vaccine is introduced after multiple trials and oodles of research efforts. funny, that. no, consensus is reached through trial and arbitration, and is the best we have in terms of arriving at 'objective knowledge' in our current scientific framework. that might include a few shonky studies, but, again, being wrong or publishing findings with limitations/caveats is part of the gradual process at arriving at new knowledge. you know this, really, because you've done academic research. jay doesn't understand that part. you are only doing more harm by encouraging the dunces.

Peer review has been shown to be next to useless. Tens of thousands of experiments have been shown to be completely unreproduceable and yet they received the peer reviewed badge of honor. The more outrageous the results, the more likely the media picks it up and funding increases.