MADISON, Va. — “I haven’t been able to ride a horse in months,” Dr. Robert Malone said from his 50-acre horse farm about two hours southwest of Washington. “It’s just a constant barrage of requests for assistance.”
Dr. Malone, 62, was sitting barefoot at his kitchen table, wearing a navy tie decorated with dark red spikes of the coronavirus, in the middle of another busy day of appearances on conservative television shows and podcasts. Just that week, he had appeared on “Hannity,” a hit on Fox News that averages over three million viewers, and on One America News. He joined “Candace,” an online talk show hosted by the right-wing media personality Candace Owens. And he was a guest on the podcasts “America First With Sebastian Gorka” and “The Joe Pags Show.”
Dr. Malone spent decades working in academic centers and with start-ups seeking to bring new medical treatments to market and to combat the Zika and Ebola outbreaks. But in recent months, as the coronavirus pandemic has persisted, he has taken up an entirely different role: spreading misinformation about the virus and vaccines on conservative programs.
In many of his appearances, Dr. Malone questions the severity of the coronavirus, which has now killed nearly one million people in the United States, and the safety of the coronavirus vaccines, which have been widely found to be safe and effective at preventing serious illness and death. His statements in late December on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” one of the most popular podcasts in the country, with 11 million listeners per episode on average, were at the center of the uproar over Mr. Rogan’s role in spreading bad information about the virus.
Dr. Malone also routinely sells himself on the shows as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, the technology used by Pfizer and Moderna for their Covid-19 shots, and says he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for their development. While he was involved in some early research into the technology, his role in its creation was minimal at best, say half a dozen Covid experts and researchers, including three who worked closely with Dr. Malone.
In spreading these exaggerations and unfounded claims, Dr. Malone joins medical professionals and scientists, like Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Judy Mikovits, whose profiles have grown during the pandemic as they spread misinformation about mask-wearing and convoluted conspiracy theories about virus experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
But unlike many of them, Dr. Malone is quite new to the right-wing media world, first appearing regularly on podcasts last June. Even two years into the pandemic, new misinformation stars are being minted. And in today’s media echo chamber — powered by social media algorithms and a tightknit network of politicians and influencers promoting debunked claims — they can quickly catapult to stardom.
In addition to his regular appearances on conservative shows, Dr. Malone has more than 134,000 subscribers to his Substack newsletter. About 8,000 pay the $5 monthly cost, he said, which would amount to at least $31,200 in monthly revenue. And mentions of him on social media, on cable television and in print and online news outlets have soared — to more than 300,000 so far this year, according to Zignal, a media research firm.
The coronavirus pandemic has “given rise to a class of influencers who build conspiracy theories and recruit as many people into them as possible,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms. “These influencers usually have a special claim to expertise and a veneer of credibility.”
“And almost without exception, these influencers feel that they have been wronged by mainstream society in some way,” Mr. Brooking added.
Dr. Malone earned a medical degree from Northwestern University in 1991, and for the next decade taught pathology at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland. He then turned to biotech start-ups and consulting. His résumé says he was “instrumental” in securing early-stage approval for research on the Ebola vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-2010s. He also worked on repurposing drugs to treat Zika.
In extended interviews at his home over two days, Dr. Malone said he was repeatedly not recognized for his contributions over the course of his career, his voice low and grave as he recounted perceived slights by the institutions he had worked for. His wife, Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, paced the room and pulled up articles on her laptop that she said supported his complaints.
The example he points to more frequently is from his time at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. While there, he performed experiments that showed how human cells could absorb an mRNA cocktail and produce proteins from it. Those experiments, he says, make him the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology.
“I was there,” Dr. Malone said. “I wrote all the invention.”
What the mainstream media did instead, he said, was give credit for the mRNA vaccines to the scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, because there “is a concerted campaign to get them the Nobel Prize” by Pfizer and BioNTech, where Dr. Kariko is a senior vice president, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Weissman leads a laboratory researching vaccines and infectious diseases.
But at the time he was conducting those experiments, it was not known how to protect the fragile RNA from the immune system’s attack, scientists say. Former colleagues said they had watched in astonishment as Dr. Malone began posting on social media about why he deserved to win the Nobel Prize.
The idea that he is the inventor of mRNA vaccines is “a totally false claim,” said Dr. Gyula Acsadi, a pediatrician in Connecticut who along with Dr. Malone and five others wrote a widely cited paper in 1990 showing that injecting RNA into muscle could produce proteins. (The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by injecting RNA into arm muscles that produce copies of the “spike protein” found on the outside of the coronavirus. The human immune system identifies that protein, attacks it and then remembers how to defeat it.)
But Dr. Malone was not the lead author on the paper and, according to Dr. Acsadi, did not make a significant contribution to the research. While the paper stated that the technology could “provide alternative approaches to vaccine development,” Dr. Acsadi said none of the other authors would claim that they invented the vaccine.
“Some of his work was important,” said Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric infectious disease doctor based in Vancouver, British Columbia, “but that’s a long way away from claiming to have invented the technology that underpins the vaccines as we use them today.”
The vaccines “are the result of hundreds of scientists all over the world, all combining to come together to form this vaccine,” Dr. McAlpine said. “It was not one individual or the pioneering work of an individual person.”
A spokeswoman for Penn Medicine said, “We have been excited to witness the deployment of the vaccines in the global fight against the virus and the well-deserved global recognition for Drs. Kariko and Weissman’s decades of visionary basic science research.”
Dr. Malone pushes back against the criticism directed at him by scientists, researchers and journalists, and dismisses the dozens of fact-checks disputing his statements as “attacks.”
He also continues to repeat his claims, with the help of his wife, Dr. Glasspool Malone, who is trained in biotechnology and public policy. She writes, he said, more than half of the articles posted onto his Substack newsletter — which is awash in conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccines. Recent articles include “The illusion of evidence-based medicine” and “How does it feel to be vindicated?”
Dr. Malone said he did not align himself with any particular political party. But in recent months, he and his wife have made numerous stops at popular conservative conferences, like Hereticon, the Peter Thiel-backed conference in Miami for Silicon Valley’s self-proclaimed contrarians, and the “Defeat the Mandates” march in Washington.
Dr. Malone says much of the pushback he receives is because anything that questions the guidance from organizations like the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is automatically labeled misinformation by the medical establishment, as well as the technology platforms.
Many well-meaning public figures and donors committed themselves to the wrong ideas, just to be able to tell themselves that they are indeed playing a role helping to solve the crisis, he said.
“It is really easy to get caught up in it, and obsess, and lose perspective — and kind of lose yourself,” Dr. Malone said of them.
Many scientists and researchers say there is good-faith disagreement about how to translate fast-moving science into policy, and acknowledge that health agencies have adjusted guidelines over time, as new information is collected.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, said such guidance was “only as reliable as the evidence behind it, and thus it should change when new evidence is obtained.”
But they say Dr. Malone has twisted legitimate policy debates to use them as cover for continuing to spread misinformation and to advance claims about the pandemic that are demonstrably incorrect.
Months ago, he was promoting the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for treatment of Covid-19, despite several studies and scientific trials showing a lack of evidence that the drugs improved the conditions of Covid patients. Dr. Malone said that early on in the pandemic, he believed that what he could contribute was bringing repurposed drugs to market.
“All the big boys came in for the vaccines,” Dr. Malone said. “We weren’t needed for that.”
The Food and Drug Administration continues to caution against the use of hydroxychloroquine “due to risk of heart rhythm problems,” and a large study published in March found that ivermectin does not reduce the risk of Covid hospitalization. The F.D.A. has also said taking large doses of the drug is dangerous.
“Robert Malone is exploiting the fact that data-driven course correction is inherent to the scientific process to peddle disinformation,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “It’s extraordinarily dishonest and morally bankrupt.”
That’s the glorious thing about the rainbow. It contains all (visible) colors. (Obviously the pride flag is limited to stripes of distinct colors, but it’s supposed to be representative of everything.)
As someone who enjoys quantum mechanics, but papers are too far over my head; and has struggled with a nagging sense that something about all the explanations just wasn’t making sense, thank you for this beautifully clear explanation of how these conclusions were reached.
Sadly, Magic is once again missing from the world.
Btw, please don’t use Anti-Asian phrases created by a literal Pedophile in your debunks (Woo Woo)
All else I have to say is, knowing that amount of things you have to do to even measure this wave in the first place… There’s no great mystery here, it’s just “The ways we have to measure this thing are insanely shitty.”
Btw, please don’t use Anti-Asian phrases created by a literal Pedophile in your debunks (Woo Woo)
Wut? I’m pretty sure this has been a derogatory term for pseudoscience since at least the early 90s. I dunno what you think the origins of the word are, but the only relation to Asian people or culture I can find are in the form of it being used to mock charlatans peddling vaguely Asian-sounding spiritual beliefs.
It was made up by James Randi, a crazy man who claimed he debunked meditation and climate change… Sure he’s also the reason no one takes Uri Geller seriously, but that’s like the ONE good thing he did…
James claimed it was based on music in sci-fi films, but the suspicious similarity to the asian phrase “Wu”, and his own contempt for Eastern Religious Practices are noteworthy.
Nobody should be taking Uri Geller seriously, so that’s good.
The “Randi is a pedo” is from a very obviously take smear campaign that is about as real as any of the fraudsters randi debunked.
As for mediation, a massive number of the claims about it ARE fake. Randi has some very clear YouTube videos about his opinion on meditation.
It really sounds like you have a personal grudge against the guy. So now I’m wondering which of your beloved ideas he debunked, or if you simply didn’t spend the 40 minutes requires to research these claims.
Randi tried to explain this away as a sting operation he performed with police, but… That makes no sense since if teenagers are calling him for sex, that makes Randi look suspicious, not them, I mean how they’d even get the number.
He also served as the primary science advisor on the False Memory Foundation, which was debunked as a kiddie diddling organization and disbanded shortly after in 2019
Dr Thomas Phantasy, Dr Benjamin Shamfield and Randy The Amazing are my new favourite trio of crime solving detectives. With hypnosis they uncover theft, kidnappings, and even murder? Follow them in the next issue of “Wait, wtf did I just read”.
Why is this whole post about photons? I always thought that the double slit experiment was interesting because this happened with electrons, even individual electrons would still generate the interference pattern, and I guess I always thought that you could detect which slit the election went through by detecting an induced current or something
They talk about how it was never actually possible to do this before, because it requires very fine “electron optics” and manufacturing of components, like slits and shutters, with nanometer precision. So while the thought experiment with electrons itself was proposed by Feynman in 1963 (which is probably what inspired the monkey meme and the like), it was not actually realized until 2019. I’m also now guessing that the electron quantum eraser paper from 2014 doesn’t use a double slit but some other electronic quantum circuit that is easier to work with.
The two-stripe photo to match the monkey meme, with electrons and measuring which-way information, probably doesn’t exist yet. So that’s why!
Yes, double slit interference happens with both photons and electrons, and even with C60 buckyballs and organic fluorescent dye molecules (arxiv.org/abs/1402.1867)! This post is more so about the quantum eraser, as a counterpoint to the 12 posts about it that @kromem wrote in the other thread. The first experimental quantum eraser paper from 2001 uses photons, so that’s the figures I used here. There might be newer papers that use electrons, like this one doi.org/10.1126/science.1248459 from 2014, but I don’t have access to it. I presume detecting the electron there using induced current or whatever would disturb its wavefunction to the same severity as using the polarizer filter does here.
Holy smokes! I always thought it just showed that electrons and photons aren’t ‘really’ particles, I had no idea it also worked for atoms and even molecules.
So it turns out the original meme was kind of right? It just didn’t illustrate what it was talking about very well. According to @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone:
The double slit experiment is about observation.
When you fire photons through the double slits, one photon at a time, they cause wave interference patterns with themselves as if each photon travelled through both slits.
Yet if you set something up to measure which slit each photon passed through, they no longer interfere with themselves, and give you the two straight lines pattern, rather than the interference pattern.
In this experiment, they didn’t even bother measuring which slit each photon passes through. The 3D glasses don’t measure or observe the photons, they merely polarize them (although they do block 50% of light). The detector D_S doesn’t measure which-path information either. The researchers could have placed a circular polarizer in front of D_S, and when they get a hit they could have said with confidence “this photon came through the top slit!” but they didn’t even bother doing it this time. The fact that the 3D glasses alter the light in a manner which makes the which-path information theoretically measurable (even if not actually measured), alone is sufficient to destroy the interference pattern.
The original meme is definitely correct, idk why so many people were having conniption fits over it. In the double slit experiment’s simplest form, not measuring the photons leads to the wave interaction pattern and measuring the photons leads to the two bars as you’d expect from particles.
And since physicists decided to use the stupidest term possible to describe that measurement, the monkey “observing” the experiment is a play on what the actual experiment is doing
It’s clear he’s observing something, but all too easy for the viewer to think the monkey is merely observing the pattern on the screen at the end. It also doesn’t help that there are a bunch of slight variations on the double slit experiment, like those listed in this post.
If the monkey was at 90 degrees to the experiment, looking at the slits only side on, then it might be clearer - though I’m not sure how you could draw that lol.
The paper doesn’t use an actual screen, they only have the detector D_S that they move up and down to record the coincidences. I simulated what the monkey would see had there been a screen in place for the purpose of the meme. I copied down the datapoints from the graph and simulated 100,000 photons hitting the screen with the probabilities indicated by those points. My javascript pastie is available here: html.cafe/xcd2a5ed3?k=19f51bff26c65bcf253ee5257a5… Importantly, the monkey can never see images 4 and 5 on the physical screen - those can only be displayed on the computer. The monkey will only ever see image 3, which is the sum of 4 and 5.
Both this paper and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment paper (arXiv:quant-ph/9903047) only show a single blob, not the double stripe. If anyone has a paper that clearly shows a photo with the double stripes the way it’s shown in the classic monkey meme, I’d like to add it to my collection!
Obviously if the slits are big and wide enough apart you will just get two spotlights, so that doesn’t count. It wouldn’t even demonstrate wave physics, let alone quantum. It has to be a paper where there is some switch you turn on or some filter you slide in place or whatever that makes the image on the physical screen toggle between two stripes and multiple.
If we cover one slit, it will look like figure 3, shifted to the side and at half intensity.
In this experiment, yes. There could be other experiments with electrons instead of light, maybe where you toggle on some kind of magnet to measure which slit an electron goes through, but the measurement itself would still disturb the electrons in a manner where you shouldn’t be surprised when the interference pattern disappears.
I mean, quantum mechanics is still definitely different from classical physics. There are things like the quantum bomb tester, and the Bell inequality violation is still totally real. But the way quantum mechanics has been presented to me in popular science has totally fucked me up. It was not until college quantum physics classes that it all turned out to be actually quite straightforward. And every each time after that when I go back to a research paper underlying some popular science presentation I’ve seen in the past, it turns out there was some giant 3d glasses just off-screen that the presenter somehow “forgot” to mention, and awareness of whose presence totally removes the “fuck”-factor.
Uhhhh, the dominant historical source of academy science is race science. We require many barriers to science because science has historically been completely entrenched in oppression and it hasn’t really ever stopped
The man was operating at the same time as other scientists who were just starting to create hypotheses that DNA was the physical manifestation of their theorized concept of a “gene”. He denied the existence of the gene because he, correctly, established that his data contradicted the oversimplified view of genetic inheritance. His data showed that somatic changes were part of what an offspring inherited. Lo and behold, he was talking about the current field of study we call “epigenetics”. His “eugenics” theories were nothing like those of race scientists. Instead, his theory was that the state must produce a healthy society in order to produce healthy people. Lo and behold, we find that trauma transmits to offspring and that the traumas of slavery (for example) are passed down from generation to generation. This position cannot be accounted for in the genetic theories of the time, and as such he rejected those theories. In essence, Lysenkoism is actually an attempt at thinking of biology dialectically, and that does indeed make it Marxist-Leninst.
And, like anything else in science, the dominant power structure must do everything it can to dismiss and denigrate anyone that correctly pointed out critiques of their work. For almost 200 years we taught doctors in training that the human body had 78 organs. We finally updated that to 79 in 2012, despite the overwhelming evidence from 3 separate researchers and papers. The doctor who made the claim that stood the test of 100+ years was an English knight. The researchers who contradicted him were Italian and American. The Italian contradicted him 5 years before his own book was published. But, the dominant culture must be correct. The British empire is also the structure that maintained the incorrect science that the brain and lymph system were not connected, despite detailed anatomical sketches from non-English doctors showing otherwise. That position was held for centuries until it was finally overturned in 2015, but not before much controversy that it couldn’t be possible and those other doctors were probably just obsessed with something irrational.
The claim of Lysenkoism being eugenics “just like what the imperialists did” is just completely ahistorical and requires a desire to absolve one’s own national project through the use of projection. Lysenko’s theories, and the policies that were built on them, failed in many ways and caused a lot of harm, none of which holds a candle to child separation, centuries of mass rape, and centuries of forced sterilization (which, we must acknowledge, continued well into the 1960s in the USA).
Lysenko was wrong about a lot of things, and was right about very little. But the idea that his contrarian position to the dominant theories of genetics is to be mocked or even vilified is a completely ideological position firmly seated in the imperialist camp.
Do you understand that the primary barriers being referred to here are intellectual property? I suspect you aren’t in favor of propritarian intellectualism. What do you think those racist academies opinions on intellectual property has been?
Do you understand that the primary barriers being referred to here are intellectual property?
I understand that anyone who knows what SciHub is about would infer that. It’s not what the slogan says. It says remove all barriers in the way of science. The slogan is problem.
Thank you for reminding me to reach out to the Boost app dev to ask why I’m still seeing lemmygrad dumbass trash takes even though I blocked the grad the day I downloaded the app.
you are literally responding to a scihub post. the founder of scihub is a communist. the founders of lemmy are communist. you are a star trek fan. it was made by A COMMUNIST.
I’m sorry, is there something inherent in communism that suggests we should be anti-intellectual because racism exists? There are valid criticisms of racism in all aspects of our society, yes including academia. But “the dominant source of academic science is race science” therefore we need barriers to all science ain’t it
I’m very aware of the history of race science. Tell me what that has to do with physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and exactly why we should “require many barriers to science” today because the already thoroughly refuted race science existed? Because that is what the other commenter stated.
Race science is just an example of how academic science hasn’t always acted responsibly. research should and is subject to ethical considerations and responsible inovation meaning that science should be done in the public interest
it would be science to create a new hyper infectious strain of smallpox and there should be barriers to stop someone doing that
There are ethical barriers to stop those kind of things. Militaries are going to ignore those ethical considerations, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There was tremendous outcry when irresponsible researchers in China genetically modified fetuses in hopes of making them immune to HIV, without any consideration for the ethics of the situation.
Is academic ethics perfect? Of course not. But it exists and I don’t see any proposals for a better system.
It’s not different from the abortion debate. Abortion is already regulated quite well by medical ethics. Will that prevent 100% of morally reprehensible situations from occurring? Of course not. But that does not mean we need additional legal regulation (which wouldn’t prevent, but only punish anyway.)
There is already effort to improve the racist, sexist barriers to performing academic science and to call out questionable science (particularly medical science, which is probably the worst offender for perpetuating racist and sexist science right now). Those efforts are precisely why we’re seeing such a backlash from the white supremacists these days. Just look at what they’re targeting - critical race theory and intersectional feminism. Those are academic corrections to academic problems.
You’re conjuring up a false exaggerated position no one here took (“require many barriers to science”) and making dubious excuses for “shitty” science under pretense of “release all the science, shitty/false or otherwise” idealism.
EDIT: Fine. You quoted one person. That doesn’t justify making dubious excuses for “shitty” science under pretense of “release all the science, shitty/false or otherwise” idealism.
That’s a literal word for word quote from the comment I was originally replying to. I didn’t exaggerate anything.
Is someone still publishing caliper head measurements in 2023 that you’re aware of? No. Just like no one is publishing flat earth “studies” even though some idiot members of the public think that’s fun right now. And no one is publishing about the aether. Who is the arbiter of what compromises junk science, if not the scientific community? The founder of SciHub is a communist. Release all the science.
Are you doing a blowhard long winded workaround way of calipers-free-but-still-racist “shitty” science under pious pretenses of it still being scientific enough to get attention?
Who is the arbiter of what compromises junk science, if not the scientific community?
Release all the science.
It’s clearly a losing battle within that community if you’re making excuses for “shitty” science getting attention that it both doesn’t deserve and that will actually harm people.
No more than you’re suggesting that there are racist astronomy studies being published, even though I could choose to disingenuously represent your position with that statement.
Racist studies need to be refuted. It’s not that hard. Restricting access to all science (which I see you now notice is what that other commenter was suggesting) isn’t going to magically stop racist studies from being published.
And again, who are you suggesting should be the arbiter?
That arbiter is not doing a good job considering the proliferation of antivax, race “science,” and climate change denialism, among other things.
Feel as above the fray as you like, but normalizing the mass distribution of junk/shit or otherwise false science under some lofty ideal of “the free marketplace of ideas will select for the correct data” is clearly, demonstratively, and repeatedly not doing that and hasn’t in the past either.
You have utterly no idea what’s even present in scientific publications. Antivax and climate change denialism are not rampant in published science. They’re rampant amongst ignorant members of the public. That’s not even remotely the fault of science.
And here’s a summary of the current state of race science:
Someone else responded better than I could to what amounts of your wall of arrogance that was toward someone with an opinion and a take so similar to yours that it applies to you as well.
Every single time someone does a report on crime and breaks down data by race you’re seeing racist social science in action. The way we do clinical trials. Decisions about what to study, like the impacts of lead, or education, or pharmaceuticals, all of it lies on top of and interpermeates racist superstructure. Recent? Forced hysterectomies. Public statements from researchers that genetics are not politically correct. Mauna Kea. Environmental impact studies in Guam. I mean, it’s never ending.
It’s not never ending. We’re very critical of the racism and sexism in medical research. And the younger generations of doctors are far more aware of it.
We used to butcher women in radical mastectomy surgeries and we don’t do that anymore. We used to do medical experiments on black Americans without telling them and we don’t do that anymore. For everything that you can point to as a current problem, I can point to another thing that used to be a problem and now has been corrected.
And still none of that has anything to do with physics, chemistry, materials science, geology, oceanography. You can’t just say “racism impacts some sciences therefore we shouldn’t do science at all”
We’re very critical of the racism and sexism in medical research.
You’re demonstratably actively and overtly ignoring examples given to you, right now, showing just how flawed your claimed “critical” status is of such issues.
And still none of that has anything to do with physics, chemistry, materials science, geology, oceanography.
Yes, you have that ivory tower of yours crammed so high that you’re willfully ignoring intersectional issues that do affect the application, interpretation, even the funding and political will to allocate resources to such fields.
For everything that you can point to as a current problem, I can point to another thing that used to be a problem and now has been corrected.
That only demonstrates that correcting the process and actively rejecting bad/false science requires ongoing vigilance, not smug and arrogant dismissal of concerns.
therefore we shouldn’t do science at all
No one said that and you’re willfully ignorant at this point.
You think it’s anti-intellectual to address intersectional society-wide concerns? Is it truly “intellectual” to pretend that they didn’t happen or that they only happened in the past? ok
It is the pinnacle of ideological arrogance to believe that scientific fields, as practiced by scientists, exist in perfectly sealed vacuums that require no interaction with government or society and that every experiment that is funded, all research undertaken, is powered by sheer scientific purity instead of the unfortunate material realities of funding and decisions made of “what” is researched and for how long.
It does affect all of the above fields if funding and resources are wasted in pursuit of junk science. Announcing that such junk should be “free” and distributed out there under the belief that it will magically be banished by the light of truth and cease being distributed entirely because it is wrong with no other actions necessary is willful ideological ignorance.
Assuming people that disagree with you are children, and using that for insult purposes only demonstrates your contempt, even hatred, of children.
You failed to address what I talked about so of course I repeated myself. You had nothing to respond to but your own arrogant dismissal of issues and your empty sense of superiority.
So much for your fedora-tipping farewell. You needed to add just how not mad you are at having uncomfortable issues brought up that you failed to address.
You’re trying to win a last word game while demonstrating how very not mad you are in the most transparent way possible.
You had nothing from the start but your bloviating arrogance, and now you have nothing left but enraged immaturity after calling me a child (because children are contemptible to you, Redditbrained as you are).
Since you’re not posting anything of value (and didn’t do so before) I’ll just repost a reflection of what you’re continuing to do.
And that’s just the university system. Then you have actual laboratories. Los Alamos is notorious for being a massive “consumer” of indigenous women and girls of the slave trade. Current astronomy observatories on Mauna Kea are there against the will of the colonized Hawaiians and for years have destroyed their environment, their sovereignty, their health, and have contributed massively to the sex trade in Hawaii. The indigenous are a barrier to the planned 30m telescope there. Are you arguing that this barrier should be removed? Are you saying astronomy cannot possibly intersect with the structures of racism, settler colonialism, and genocide?
We do not need to be anti-intellectual to erect barriers to settler violence that impinge on science. Those barriers are important, and we need more of them. If we are to undo the harm of centuries of European imperialism, it will be a massive project that will hinder scientific inquiry in many ways. Establishing a “no barriers to science stance” creates an ideological commitment to the already existing conflict between justice and science that has been raging for centuries upon centuries.
I am very aware of all of this and it does not have anything to do with the output of most scientific endeavors. The colonialist history of the building of those telescopes doesn’t make the astronomical data collected with them somehow racist, and putting up barriers to sharing that data isn’t going to fix the racism involved in the administration of those institutions.
We need to change the way we practice academic science just like we need to change the way we practice at every other institution that was built by colonialist “enlightenment.” But saying somehow that SciHub is wrong and wet shouldn’t promote open sharing of scientific output isn’t going to change those institutions.
Also the entire history of academic science is one of evolving standards of practice based on updated ethical standards. In the beginning, experiments were performed without regard for the harm done to human, animal, or environment, and these days we have many ethical standards against those harms. In fact, I will point out that you’re sharing data from academic sources who are criticizing academic history which is how it always has been done.
it does not have anything to do with the output of most scientific endeavor
It does when you keep proclaiming the distribution of “all” science, false/shitty and whatnot, if you’re arbitrarily in favor of it under some pious ideal of “set it all free.”
it does not have anything to do with the output of most scientific endeavors
Don’t try to equivocate your way out of this. The practice of science does harm. Setting “remove all barriers to science” as your slogan is problematic. If you want to equivocate, advocate for a slogan change to “Remove all barriers to distributing the outputs of scientific research to any and all people free of charge”.
The colonialist history of the building of those telescopes doesn’t make the astronomical data collected with them somehow racist
Don’t strawman. No one claimed the data was racist. The 30M is not history, it’s the future. The US occupation of Hawaii is still illegal under US and UN law. It’s not historical colonialism, it’s present day colonialism. The indigenous people who were disenfranchised are still there, still occupied, still dying from water pollution, land pollution, and destruction of their food sources and ways of living. And the way we conduct science is actively playing a part in that occupation.
But saying somehow that SciHub is wrong and wet shouldn’t promote open sharing of scientific output isn’t going to change those institutions.
I have been very clear that the slogan is problematic. Scihub’s missing of free information flow is not.
In fact, I will point out that you’re sharing data from academic sources who are criticizing academic history which is how it always has been done.
Brown University was the first, and it happened because the president they chose was both the first black person and the first woman to ever be president at any Ivy League institution. Harvard University didn’t do - its undergrads did all the work and went public with it. The process of dismantling is ongoing, it’s very slow, and all the while the white supremacist structure that undergirds the academy remains and continues to dominate decision making.
In one big voice all of the university trustees have linked arms and established that any students and professors speaking and acting tor Palestinian liberation are to be condemned. The academy may do incremental reforms, but their power is not subject to incremental reforms because it is structural. As a communist, you should understand this. If you don’t understand, I’m happy to help you work through it. But don’t give me this incremental ethical reform bullshit. It comes nowhere near addressing the white supremacist structure that the academy participates in.
I agree with the sentiment in the context of it being a file sharing site for academic texts but it’s not worded so well barriers in the way of science could also include ethical concerns to certain kinds of experiment
Racial hatred and bigotry are individualistic barriers to science.
Racialized capitalism is the foundation of the modern university. Harvard resisted getting rid of its slaves and when they did they bought and sold people in the Caribbean outside of the reach of US law. Disgustingly high numbers of medical schools were built on the basis of dissecting and experimenting on black and indigenous people.
Most ivy league schools still have the remains of scores of black and indigenous people in their museums, their libraries, and even their classrooms. Entire skeletons of enslaved people were prepared for classroom demonstrations and used in contemporary memory!
The money for these universities came from the slave trade and from slave labor. The schools themselves were often built with slave labor. The patrons of the university funded race science to justify the structures of racism.
It has nothing to do with racial hatred and bigotry.
The structural racism funded the creation and expansion of universities. MIT would not exist if it weren’t for the need for textile producers to build machines to make more money so the money that got poured into MIT was the money that was extracted from slave labor picking cotton.
Undoing this harm and bringing about justice through reparations is going to really undermine university endowments. It’s going to require removing names of buildings, dishonoring scientific “heroes”, and preventing it from happening again is going to be seen as barriers to science.
Either way, even shitty science should be freely accessible so your point doesn’t make any sense.
It really shouldn’t. We saw through the COVID vaccine hysteria just how harmful shitty science can be. A lot of people died completely preventable deaths because we live under the illusion that reason prevails under the free marketplace of ideas or some nonsense like that.
Strong disagree, given the vaccine hysteria was on the part of the deniers. The science supported and continues to support the vaccines effectiveness and safety. It’s primarily people who aren’t scientists and don’t know how to interpret medical studies that are claiming that they are dangerous or ineffective.
Nice to meet you, I’m a medical scientist that specializes in Alzheimer’s research. Absolutely none of my colleagues think vaccines are dangerous.
The media and the general population do not recognize any one single specific scientific organization as an authority to depend upon, so being smug about your claimed place in the ivory tower does nothing to stop people from getting false science from somewhere other than that ivory tower.
EDIT: And how exactly are those masses that you condescend to supposed to distinguish “shitty” science from outright false science? And why should “shitty” science things be given validity and attention (which may well include race science because you never said otherwise in this thread) while you somehow distinguish that away from antivax nonsense? They’re both nonsense but you seem to be making pious excuses for one kind of it.
Stating “post all the science” must feel good to say but it does nothing to stop the posting of false science calling itself science and many people going along with that. You yourself claimed (or feigned) ignorance of race science as false science, which shows just how insidious such things really are.
Good. There isn’t a single scientific organization, given the whole point of science is democratizing information research.
General populace are supposed to rely on the top researchers in their field to disseminate information. These top researchers are usually the least controversial which is why they are trusted by the (again) democratized scientific community. I’ll say this because a lot of people don’t realize it: if you have any controversy in your past regarding misinformation or “fixing” results, and it ever gets out, you are immediately shunned and your work will never be looked at seriously again. You will lose your job and all credibility immediately. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it is heavily discouraged.
If we want to combat misinformation we should be encouraging people to trust scientists and not get information from organizations with ulterior motives.
If we want to combat misinformation we should be encouraging people to trust scientists
That sounds really grand on paper but in reality the societal definition of who a scientist is (and who is a credible scientist) is blurred to the point that you can piously disavow antivax conspiracy theories (some of them pushed by quack scientists with dubious qualifications) but also proclaim that even “shit science” should be freely released for all to see (with “race science” being mentioned in particular with you glibly disavowing knowledge of it) and you still haven’t provided a distinct measurable difference between the two.
You really seem to be more in favor of “race science” than antivax nonsense, and they are both nonsense.
I’m not saying trust any random person who calls themself a scientist. Myself included.
I’m saying people should trust reputable scientists at the top of their field. Ideally, journalists should do the leg work to identify these people and give them a voice, and describe why they should be trusted.
That doesn’t happen with nearly all right-leaning journalistic publications, unfortunately, resulting in a huge population not knowing who to trust or just mistrusting scientists in general.
Edit: I realize I didn’t answer your point on freedom of access. I do firmly believe all science should be accessible, because no single study should ever be taken as fact. Science works through repetition, and if you have a study that disagrees with nearly everything else then it’s either a brand new way of looking at things (and will be supported in the future) or is junk (and will be ignored). But just because something is junk doesn’t mean we should prevent people from accessing it.
But just because something is junk doesn’t mean we should prevent people from accessing it.
Again, after glibly dismissing antivax conspiracy theories as unscientific under the presumption that no one credible would believe them (not that that stopped the spread and distribution of them to the general public) you’re suggestion that all of the harmful prior false science listed at the following:
should get openly and freely distributed under some idealistic notion of “set it all free” while you already derided the public for buying into antivax nonsense. Your idealism can and will hurt a lot more people because you clearly are more fine with racism than antivax conspiracy theories.
You’re very good at putting words into people’s mouths (I didn’t even mention antivax theories), and that point is where I end the conversation. Good day
You’re very good at putting words into people’s mouths (I didn’t even mention antivax theories)
You previously said:
Strong disagree, given the vaccine hysteria was on the part of the deniers. The science supported and continues to support the vaccines effectiveness and safety. It’s primarily people who aren’t scientists and don’t know how to interpret medical studies that are claiming that they are dangerous or ineffective.
Nice to meet you, I’m a medical scientist that specializes in Alzheimer’s research. Absolutely none of my colleagues think vaccines are dangerous.
If you’re going to complain about “putting words into people’s mouths” don’t be a liar on top of that.
Ah, yes. Good catch, I did mention that there is no scientific evidence to support any widespread negative effects of the vaccines, and there continues to not be. You’re more than able to put yourself in the running for the Nobel prize for saving millions of lives by finding and publishing this evidence, though, since it seems that you’re so confident in it.
I did not state that “no one credible would believe them”, and your links about slavery are irrelevant because the discussion was about vaccines, not racism.
And I didn’t lie. Literally none of my colleagues thinks there is any merit to antivax scaremongering.
Race science is the science that emerged to rationalize and justify the structure of racism. It is the science that emerged to justify political race structures. Race science is what allowed black and indigenous children to be ripped away from their parents while other parents watched and participated and said “This is good”.
That race science was funded by the elite or society. They extracted wealth through settler colonialism and racialized capitalism and then donated it to the universities as “philanthropy” and used their influence to direct more research into race science and other endeavors to maximize their profits.
Making research freely available is not removing all barriers to science. It is removing but one barrier to science. There are many other barriers that exist, have existed, or could exist.
In this way, saying that all barriers to science must be removed ignores the historical facts that the origins of academic science in the US are rooted almost entirely in race science. Even medical schools were locations of mass racialized atrocities where black and brown bodies were bought, imported, experimented on, killed, and desecrated in order to meet the demands of donors and chasing more endowment money. That science was used to further establish the schools’ reputation and revenue streams.
Fixing this will be seen as a barrier to science, as fixing it required dismantling major portions of the socio-politico-economic structures that maintain academies of science. Reparations alone would make many scientific institutions disappear overnight.
I understand the historical context but many of us scientists strive to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Nearly every grant I apply to has a secondary version that prioritizes racially and ethnically diverse applicants. Half of articles I see published are now acknowledging the racial divide in science and striving to recruit more minority populations.
I’m applying to a federal grant now (K01) and I am required to state my strategy for ensuring representation of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in my recruitment population. I have a section of my grant discussing how the presentation of Alzheimers differs in black communities.
We definitely have more work to do, but it’s not like we’re pretending the racial divide doesn’t exist.
Nearly every grant I apply to has a secondary version that prioritizes racially and ethnically diverse applicants
That’s diversity at best and tokenism at worst and has no impact on what science has inherited. Black people working on chemical warfare doesn’t make it less structurally racist.
Half of articles I see published are now acknowledging the racial divide in science and striving to recruit more minority populations.
Doesn’t reduce the billions of dollars current institutions have extracted by consuming black and brown bodies.
We definitely have more work to do, but it’s not like we’re pretending the racial divide doesn’t exist.
It’s not a racial divide. It’s a racist structure. We ARE pretending like racism doesn’t exist in the way that it does but instead exists as not enough representation. Racism isn’t a lack of representation. It’s much much much bigger than that, and fixing it doesn’t require more representation to happen first.
Intentional racism is no longer an issue due to nearly every (reputable) publication’s requirement of a institutional review board. This is to prevent exactly what you describe.
Unintentional racism, yes I agree that’s a problem.
But come on. We’ve made huge strides in this over the past few decades.
Intentional racism is no longer an issue due to nearly every (reputable) publication’s requirement of a institutional review board. This is to prevent exactly what you describe.
This is LAUGHABLE
Unintentional racism, yes I agree that’s a problem.
You really gotta study what’s been written about racism. It’s not what you think it is, apparently.
But come on. We’ve made huge strides in this over the past few decades.
Nah, we really haven’t. Representation is better. White supremacy is still killing millions.
I’m happy to have this conversation but you really need to contribute more. I’ve described numerous ways we currently combat racism in science. Would you like to provide a recent example of racist science that we can discuss?
I’ve described numerous ways we currently combat racism in science.
No you didn’t. You described how we currently combat bigotry in the academy and somewhat in sampling for research. If you think the 1800s isn’t recent enough, then you’ve got a real problem. Imperialism and racism weren’t built in a couple of decades, they’re not going to be dismantled by asking people to identify as a goddamned racialized group. Every single time someone does a report on crime and breaks down data by race you’re seeing racist social science in action. The way we do clinical trials. Decisions about what to study, like the impacts of lead, or education, or pharmaceuticals, all of it lies on top of and interpermeates racist superstructure. Recent? Forced hysterectomies. Public statements from researchers that genetics are not politically correct. Mauna Kea. Environmental impact studies in Guam. I mean, it’s never ending.
Every single time someone does a report on crime and breaks down data by race you’re seeing racist social science in action
Maybe I’m misinterpreting but… is your solution to ignore race and pretend it doesn’t exist? That we should be ignorant of how different groups are being treated and pretend everyone is the same? I think we both agree that minorities in many countries are more likely to be poor and have lower social mobility, and so it’s important to study them. As an example from my field: Alzheimer’s is significantly more likely if you’re a minority, especially black or hispanic, due to their reduced ability to access healthy food (food deserts) and quality healthcare due to past redlining. The only way we know this is by studying it.
Forced hysterectomies
That’s not science, that’s horrible treatment of minority groups and medical malpractice. No scientist with any degree of repute supports that shit.
I’m unfamiliar with the others: genetics being politically correct (this statement makes no sense to me), Mauna Kea, or Guam.
Mauna Kea is a sacred mountain in Hawaii that is colonized by astronomers and the proposed site of the very large 30M telescope. Indigenous Hawaiians who are illegally occupied are resisting it. Scientists are saying that they’re being anti-science.
In Guam, environmental impact studies are used to justify the continued destruction of habit because the study doesn’t reveal sufficient impact. This is because the definition of impact is politically motivated and informed by white supremacy.
I will try to find right-wing geneticists who go out and try to justify racism with genetics. It happens all the time. Richard Dawkins was someone who attempted to use science and neo-atheism to justify bombing brown people.
Forced hysterectomies come from the academy. They aren’t merely just bad behavior, they are the legacy of eugenics and white supremacist social policies informed and crafted by the academy. You can’t just stay science doesn’t do anything wrong - that’s a “no true Scotsman”.
Just because you aren’t informed of the prevailing critique of science as a continuous tool of oppression doesn’t mean it’s not. It just means you likely have a vested interest in not believing it. If you’re not making oodles of profit from science, then your vested interest is likely your self-concept.
Thanks for the information. Each of these are indeed troubling. But I think it’s disingenuous to say “science” is at fault for these. Shitty people doing shitty things for their own shitty reasons seems to be at play. Some of those reasons are for scientific funding or clout, but I think I comfortably speak for a lot of scientists when I say the scientific output is not worth it.
I think we’re mainly on the same page with a lot of this, we just have different descriptions of who we think the bad guy is. My view is that humans have the capacity for great evil, especially when motivated by profit or fame, but that science itself isn’t the root cause of this evil but is instead a catalyst enabling people to become famous as a result of it. It’s the fame, in my opinion, that drives people to do these terrible things. Science itself doesn’t really benefit, and is arguably hurt, by these actions, since there are likely other less harmful ways to research these topics.
Of course, I am biased. I have a career in science, after all. But I do genuinely believe that science does not require these terrible actions to thrive.
But I think it’s disingenuous to say “science” is at fault for these
I think it’s disingenuous to say that this is what I said. Science participates in the dominant social structure and is interpermeates the processes and structures of violent oppression.
Shitty people doing shitty things for their own shitty reasons seems to be at play.
That is an incredibly farcical representation of how liberals conceive of society. It’s just not true. These are systemic and structural outcomes, not simply morally reprehensible individual choices.
we just have different descriptions of who we think the bad guy is
Yup.
My view is that humans have the capacity for great evil
I don’t believe in good and evil at all. Morality is a socially constructed technology for influencing humans. It’s not real.
science itself isn’t the root cause of this evil
No one said it was.
is instead a catalyst enabling people to become famous as a result of it
The desecration of Mauna Kea has not made anyone famous. I dare you to name anyone involved in it without looking it up.
It’s the fame, in my opinion, that drives people to do these terrible things
What an incredibly unscientific perspective.
Science itself doesn’t really benefit, and is arguably hurt, by these actions, since there are likely other less harmful ways to research these topics.
Now you’re moving way into the abstract by saying that science can be hurt. What you mean is that the process of “science” exhibits suboptimal outcomes, in part, because of things like oppression and colonization. I agree. That doesn’t mean science doesn’t participate in it all the same. You’re crafting your worldview entirely from ideals and not actually engaging with reality.
Of course, I am biased. I have a career in science, after all
When you say you’re biased, it’s really important to understand what that means. I don’t think you actually mean it in the literal sense. You actually mean to say that you are “prejudiced” - meaning that you have a tendency to make judgments prematurely and stick to those judgments even in the face of evidence.
Bias is a statistical concept about outcomes. When I attempt to throw a dart at a bullseye, if my darts end up to right of the bullseye more often than not, then we can say I have a bias in my throwing behavior towards the right hand side of the dart board. What bias does your behavior exhibit, statistically? Is it that your prejudice biases your cognitive behaviors towards denying the harms of science, to fallaciously attribute harm to anything except science, to abstract science to its ideals more often than actually examine how it functions in society?
This is important, because if you think of your prejudice as bias, then you can’t ever examine what your actual bias is. Own that you’re prejudiced. It’s fine. We all have prejudices. I am prejudiced towards believing people who self-identify as communists have a better grasp of history and of dialectics. I am often wrong, but I still judge prematurely. My biases are fundamentally different than my prejudices. My network is biased towards white suburban men. My work is biased towards tech work. My friend-set is biased towards people who are often late to social events.
So, what is your prejudice, and what bias does it cause in your behavior?
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