I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the finding? The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching them. A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first.

Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger.

I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples. I'm sure we had many situations where resesearch was suppressed in reality for some reason or another.

>I think there is a lot more nuance than people admit. Lets take an example of we have a deadly disease spreading through the population (much more deadly than covid) . Let's say a scientist finds out that the disease is primarily (exclusively) spread by red haired people. Should they just publish the finding?

Yes, they should.

>A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first.

OK - talk to the authorities first, and then publish the results.

>Another example could be that there is some disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public?

Yes, it should.

>I admit these are somewhat hypothetical scenarios, but you said the truth should always come up,. I just give counterexamples.

You didn't give counter-examples. You gave examples of times where the information should be shared with the public and then asserted that it shouldn't for .. I don't know what reason.

Here's a pragmatic reason for sharing truthful information with the public: If you want the population to trust public health officials, public health officials need to trust the public with the truth.

ding ding ding

I don’t think a lot of scientists and health officials realize that their work is two sided. ESP if you’re working with public health the other side is who you view as the unwashed masses. You don’t get to make commandments

Maintaining trust with the public is the most important thing to do, and the best way to do that is transparency.

All the games about if we “should tell people xyz” needs to end if these institutions want to rebuild their credibility with the broader public.

The cdc is at least being retrospective but it seems like nature has gone the opposite way and are institutionally entrenching this idea that the public can’t be trusted with the truth.

The attitude that the public can’t be trusted with certain facts is a catalyst for all the wacked out conspiracy theories that have been cropping up.

You don't need to make up a hypothetical disease. Just look at the current monkeypox situation with health authorities waffling on how best to message that 98% of cases are in men who have sex with men.

It's simultaneously totally relevant information from a public health standpoint while also being stigmatizing. Completely ignoring the facts/suppressing that info to avoid stigma would contribute to greater spread within and outside of that community, and is irresponsible. Nuance, indeed.

You mean in the United States. Monkeypox isn't a MSM disease worldwide. And you should perhaps look at the case trends in countries where children have started going back to school.

And France. And Spain. And the UK. Basically everywhere that it wasn't previously endemic it's 95%+ MSM cases. It isn't 100%, nor is it only sexually transmitted. But burying our heads in the sand to overlook obvious facts and preventing messaging to at-risk communities out of sensitivity is contributing to _why_ there are cases in kids at schools.

Science brings facts.

Politics deals with how we use those facts.

If the fact brought about by science leads one group of people to kill another, we are faced with a political decision. Do we allow this or do we stand against it.

We need the separation of science and politics. Otherwise, important facts will be politically suppressed and falsehoods will be presented as truth for political gain.

It’s a story as old as the world, I don’t understand why so many people still want to mix those two.

I don't think you can separate science from politics. The scientific method that relies on repeatable experimental results is just a workaround for the general problem that the search for knowledge is done by highly opinionated, stubborn, egotistical, and very biased human beings. When people become scientists they don't lose those attributes, it's just that reproducibility of results act as a check on their biases. You can't remove politics from science without removing people from science. Even if the methodology is good, the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political.

That said, I think scientists should be given pretty wide latitude to explore wherever their curiosity leads them, and results shouldn't be rejected from publication without really good reasons that go beyond "the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable". (Though as a practical matter, research that doesn't serve some political or social objective probably isn't going to get funding.)

You can’t remove politics from the people practicing science. Because they are people. But science it’s self is a process. It does not have, by definition, political inputs or outputs.

> the question of which hypotheses are worth pursuing and which experiments should be done is political

In a sense yes, but it also proves my point.

The example I think of is this. For the sake of argument, imagine there is a left leaning scientist and a right leaning one and they study economic differences between ethnic groups. The left leaning scientist will have political biases, politics, etc, because he is human, and guided by these biases he makes the decision to hypothesise the economic differences are caused by systemic inequality. This is indeed an example of a political choice guiding the scientific process.

I think that is perfectly fine. I don’t see this as “politics being in science” I see this as “politics being in humans practicing science”.

Now, coming back to the right leaning scientist, he too has biases and politics and a sense of morality etc because he is human. Also guided by these things he hypothesises economic differences between ethnic groups are caused by innate biological differences.

Just like the left scientist, I think this is fine. This is politics in the human practicing science, not politics in science directly.

Where politics in science appears is, if the prevalent political system discourage research into innate biological differences between humans and interferes in the scientific process to prevent researcher into this topic.

And that is what I have a problem with. And that is exactly what is being done through guidelines like this.

> the results of this experiment make us uncomfortable

I think we both know that is exactly how these rules will be used.

Finally, a charitable reading!

The article draws the comparison with the ethics of doing science on human subjects. We mostly agree in principle, that some science simply shouldn't be done if it harms human test subjects[1], even if it would produce important scientific output. We're willing to make that trade-off because the cost outweighs the potential results. The article simply extends this principle to harms done to humans that are not test subjects.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

Those are terrible examples. In both cases you're advocating to keep vital information about how a disease works and spreads hidden in order to protect the social standing of an ethnic group while that very group is most at risk.

Heck this isn't even an hypothetical scenario, you'd suggest we should have kept secret the ways in which monkeypox spreads?

Ah, we've already tried this! Check out the early history of HIV in SF - scientists/doctors/politicians knew how it was spread and refused to do or say anything lest they further stigmatize the gay community, which was disastrous to the actual gay community.

This is incorrect. Politicians and doctors refused to do very much about it because gay lives weren’t considered worth saving. Before the viral factor was discovered it was believed it was literally divine punishment to kill gays.

Those sorts of hypothetical "facts" don't just happen though. At best there might be some research indicating a very high correlation between hair colour and level of infectiousness. But just as often as not it turns out not to be the straightforward connection an initial finding might suggest. So there's no reason to withhold publishing of the results of such research, but every reason to ensure that new research is presented in a way that makes it clear that they're new preliminary findings that are likely to be overturned as more research is done and better understanding is achieved. If that still sets the mobs loose then your only option is government intervention to protect the victims. Suppressing knowledge about the real world is not a feasible long (or even medium) term strategy anyway - it's there to be discovered by anyone and everyone.

The question is where and how do you draw the boundary for censorship? If you can't use science to draw the boundary, what is left? Let humans with their own biases do it? This inevitably turns into dictatorship.

You can come up with hypotheticals where truth strategy may harm some people. But censorship strategy is guaranteed to harm more people in the long run.

Also your hypotheticals can be easily countered:

> disease that is entirely harmless but 100% infectious and deadly to some group (e.g. Black people). Now should that research just be released into the public? This might encourage some groups to purposefully infect these people, thus putting them in significant danger.

Let's say you decided to censor your research. And then few years later the groups that you mentioned got lucky enough to discover the same disease. Now, because your research wasn't public, the world was not able to develop a cure.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first.

Who will then have to create a public health campaign targeted at, for example, gay men, and everyone will learn of the research anyways.

Besides which, most countries are led by people who constantly leak secrets. It would get out long before any action could be taken.

What alternative are you suggesting? That the public be lied to? Misled? "Despite report, this disease is not primarily spread by red hair people"?. Then what happens when the truth does get out? Who do you think the public believes then?

It was pretty clear this approach was used during Covid. "You don't need to wear a mask", "Covid vaccines prevent infection" are just a couple claims that were made "for the public's own good".

Then when people found out they were lied to, they were then skeptical of everything said thereafter.

It's a terrible approach.

To be clear, vaccines do provide a degree of protection from infection. They also reduce the severity and likelyhood of transmission of diseases.

The two major vaccines - Pfizer and Moderna, never tested for infection prevention. There was literally no data to even say if they did or didn't prevent infection.

You can look up the clinical trial endpoints. Patients were only tested for infections if they experienced symptoms. I believe it was only AZ or J&J that regularly tested to capture any effect on infection rate.

But it was stated several times "The vaccine will stop you from getting Covid". Why? Because if you tell people "Well, the vaccine won't stop you from getting it, but it will make it less likely you'll get really sick", they thought people wouldn't take it.

I didn't mention COVID. You're focusing on COVID vaccines because that is the anti-vax cause at the moment.

It's the case with ALL vaccines that they don't provide 100% protection. They are still incredibly useful for preventing infection, reducing the severity of disease and preventing further transmission.

Btw, vaccines work by clearing infection quickly, not preventing infection. The virus infects you and begins to multiply. Whether your body has the antibodies to recognize the virus determines whether you will suffer from illness or be well.

Ok, but how is that relevant to my point which was about Covid?

You suggested that the COVID vaccine was somehow bad for being like every other vaccine. I'm suggesting that you need to learn about vaccines and get vaccinated.

> quietly talk to the authorities first.

This is risky because the authorities are are almost certainly idiots.

>> A better way is likely to quietly talk to the authorities first

Which ones?

The church? Trump?

People have different authorities.

> The fact becoming openly known might lead to mobs of people chasing red hairs and locking them up or even lynching them.

You missed this small little thing called Rule of Law, which - in any polity worth living in - bans vigilante justice and forming mobs to punish people without trial.

You also missed this other small little thing called the Internet, where you can publish a paper on arxiv for free without review, or post its PDF link on 4chan completely anonymously. Together "Red-Haired People Spread Disease" being a fact, and thus is almost certainly being discovered independently by several labs and institutions at the same time, this will ensure that the truth will come out, and much faster than you think. The only difference is if the public hears it from your institutions first, i.e. your legitimacy and credibility in the public eye.

I don't think this is the right way to think about this. The editors of a journal do screen the articles that get published. Their criteria are hidden. They do not need to justify in any way why the accept or reject a submission. The process is entirely opaque. Scientists are thoroughly obsessed with publishing in top tier journals in many important fields, like biomedicine, so the whims of the editors are extremely influential. Here we have the faceless editors at least specifying some of the criteria they will be using. This is beneficial. We can now discuss and critique these criteria. We can also, if we disagree, choose not to publish in these journals, or post on twitter that our article was rejected on these grounds.

So overall, I think this is a net win.

The Nature Publishing group is not science. Science will survive whatever self-righteous fad the Nature editors decide to champion next week. If you want to criticise anyone, criticise the post-war generation of academics who have allowed journals to have too much power and landed us in this stupid soul crushing arrangement we have today.

Imagine if we devoted a tremendous amount of resources to studying whether being left or right handed increased your chances of transmitting COVID. Then millions of people online start citing scientific papers saying that right handed people spread COVID more often. Then some left handed people attack right handed people (similar to how Asian Americans are being brutalized in public during the pandemic). The point is that choosing to study the differences in certain demographic groups makes a big assumption that it's important to study the groups for whatever reason.

You could also become some kind of “hate researcher” if you wanted to. Pick a group of people you don’t like(ethnic, socio, political, whatever), and start hammering out publications on their IQ, epidemiology, sociopolitical beliefs, etc. Maybe do a bit of P-hacking to make the deleterious stuff really pop out. Eventually you’ll have a nice corpus of literature out there framing your target group as stupid, disease ridden and ignorant.

Yes, exactly. Then you could write popular opinion books about the studies which flesh out the conclusion. Then it could be a motivating tool for an entire political party. You could go on tour to promote your "controversial" books. People will say that the facts must be heard and both sides should be represented.

That sounds like an unrealistically stretched hypothetical to justify not pursuing otherwise interesting scientific avenues.

Sounds like you're trying to censor information by dismissing the left/right hand hypothesis as "unrealistically stretched".

To put it another way: the way you feel about studying handedness being linked to COVID is the way I feel about studying an assumed link between race and "intelligence". It's not "otherwise interesting" at all. It's ignorant at best.

But if you did notice a subgroup/IQ correlation would you ignore it? Because I wouldn't ignore a handedness/sickness correlation. You can't fix what you don't measure and investigate.

You're ASSUMING that race could be linked to "intelligence", that it's important to study, just like I was ASSUMING that handedness might have something to do with spreading COVID. There is clear bias introduced by what we think is important to measure.

If the science is bad, then the science is bad. If you do good science and find a result that doesn't fit your preconceived ideas of right and wrong, that doesn't make the science bad. You don't need to be concerned with the ethical impact of the truth, but you do need to be concerned with the ethics of your process.

I don't understand what the actions of pseudo-science bigots has to do with someone who is doing real science. Idiots will be idiots regardless of what real science says.

Oh, good and bad. It's just that simple!

The point is that results can be true and correct even if you dislike them. Conversely they can be false and incorrect even if we like them. How could you miss that and instead jump to this snarky response?

I didn't miss that at all.

Sorry, this is completely off topic. Why aren't you using capital letters? I've seen this trend starting to gain more traction and it makes no sense to me.

The textual medium of the internet has allowed for the creation of differing written registers. You may have learned to write in a "standard way" in school that implicitly established itself as "the right way to write." What was left out was an analysis of the socio-linguistic component (probably because you were in 5th or 6th grade and this topic is addressed much later in specialized courses).

Proper or "improper" writing can signal formality and casualness and that sort of casualness is how I read the response. For example, I deliberately pick a register when I consider the audience I'm addressing and use it as a tool to convey side-band information. You may have seen social media posts where nearly every word is suffixed with an emoji. I'd consider this its own register. While I might use all lowercase in a text message or on a discord server, I'd likely only expect to read an emoji-laden message on Facebook or Twitter. Also if it came from me, it would probably look sarcastic as that's not a register I typically use.

Either way, people can do this accidentally, purposefully, or sometimes as a function of the medium. Eg: I can't write in an emoji-laden register here because HN strips emoji. An entire register, simply, and absolutely inaccessible. We probably agree that it doesn't fit the tone of the site, but still, we can imagine how the texture of the site would change if it was allowed and the pros and cons of that decision.

I see it as pure laziness. The purpose of writing is to communicate and exchange information. Just like misformatting some markup language will result in communications errors, so will not writing proper English with an English-reading audience.

Emojis are different; they're an addition, meant to convey extra meaning or information that's difficult to convey with pure text. Omitting capitals doesn't do this; it just makes the text harder to read.

August 25, 2022

Dear respondent,

Your points are duly noted. However; may I suggest you write in a more formal register? Your prose reflects the lack of effort with which I am displaying by using this very form of writing. A higher degree of effort on your part will demonstrate the level of commitment to the written word that this audience expects. Please respond in kind.

Yours Truly,

kelseyfrog

Thank you for both of your responses. This one made me laugh, which was needed this morning.

k

People have been writing like this for like 25 years. You see it on subcultures all over the internet. HN is a bastion of formal pedantry, so it’s a bit more uncommon here, but it’s been a thing for a long time.

Positing ideas that can be disproven is science. It's also how thinking works.