I think you are more interested in the specifics of Dr. Malone. I don’t have enough information to know if he is purely a misinformation spreader or just a mis-informed scientist asking questions (although it seems more likely it’s the former).
I was providing more general guidelines for how I attempt to identify misinformation-spreaders vs. minority scientific opinions and attempting to apply those “red flags” to Malone. In my opinion, he ticks a few of them, which would make me suspicious of his positions.
If he is purely arguing that there isn’t enough evidence to support vaccinating healthy 21-year-olds, then fine, we can discuss that, but he seems to be spreading far more doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy than that (“gene therapy” for example).
Anyway, for me that is the line: if you are spreading scientific opinions that are not backed up by data, doing it in the public sphere rather than scientific journals, and not really attempting to do the scientific work that would be required to prove your opinion, then you are not acting as a scientist. When you are doing it on a topic where being wrong can kill thousands of people merely by stating your opinions you should probably have some data on your side, particularly when the consensus has the majority of the high-quality scientific research backing them up.
I don’t know for sure how to solve the issue. But my inclination is to let anyone who has the requisite training and history of accomplishment has his say, and let the experts fight it out.
As I said in the OP, my own inclination is to go with the majority view of qualified experts (scientists, in this particular case). But I think this is undermined to some extent by supressing minority views. Because then I can’t get a sense if some minority view is supported by 1% of qualified experts and can be ignored or if perhaps it’s supported by 30% who have been silenced by the 70%, and should be taken more seriously.
This actually extends even further in the case of CT-types. One of the key tenets of all sorts of CTs is the notion that the truth is being supressed by “the establishment”. And the one thing that gives oxygen to this notion is the very visible fact that these views are being supressed. So I think it’s actually kind of counterproductive even in terms of what it’s trying to accomplish.
Which is always interesting since (especially in most cases) the bit they are saying is suppressed is well known in the established places - I can easily look up these bits of data/claims and see the counterpoint.
They rarely bring something new to the table - much of what they do bring to the table really doesn’t pass the sniff test - the little that starts to seem plausible is easily researched.
For me - I tell the difference based on the facts/presentation itself - if it starts off with ‘they don’t want you to know’ - its 99.9% of the time misinformation.
They do so in academic journals and such, that’s where the “fight” actually happens.
They do not do so in the media. That’s where those who cannot win against evidence and logic go to convince the public who is not trained in the fields being discussed, and so cannot make an informed decision on which “expert” is correct, and which is talking out their ass.
But, as has been said, those views are not being suppressed.
Want to hear all the hypothesis about how Oumuamua is an alien space probe, those are easy to find. Want to find out about how aliens built the pyramids, all the evidence in favor of that supposition is a quick google away.
So, your entire premise is indeed counterfactual, and even though your entire premise is counterfactual, it is not being suppressed, and you can easily find many others who express the same view with as little evidence as you have presented.
Right, that’s part of the conspiracy theory that they have made up that bears no relation to reality.
Except they are not, only in the heads of those very same conspiracy theorists is this true.
Except that what you claim isn’t what is happening. Now, there are those who will go out on the public square and tell the public that they are being suppressed for the simple reason that they are not agreed with by the experts, but that’s not what suppression is. It’s simple persecution complex, trying to get people like yourself to feel sorry for them, and therefore, give their opinions more weight than to those who actually bring facts.
That’s a fine approach, but you need to recognize that when an “expert” shows up on Joe Rogan to explain why all the other scientists are wrong and he is right, that’s almost always because the experts fought it out, and that guy lost.
Yup. The way they fight it out is important. We don’t say, “Let the experts fight it out…with karate,” because that’s not the appropriate method for refining knowledge or discovering objective truth. We don’t say, “Let the experts fight it out…through a rap battle,” because the winner of the rap battle might have the best rhymes, but that doesn’t mean they have the most valid statistical analysis. Rap battles and karate are completely irrelevant to the actual fight between scientific experts.
Oh for the sake of the FSM. This is exactly what has happened. The experts fought it out, and Malone is one of the people who failed to prove their point. It’s like the Black Freakin’ Knight in Monty Python. He’s been dismembered, and he keeps taunting and making excuses for being utterly defeated by actual facts and research, but claiming he’s victorious. Sure, he can’t fight, can’t actually show any viable research, or prove in any way he’s won, but he can keep running his mouth until all rational adults walk away from the meaningless braggaddocio and noise.
I saw Luis Alvarez talk about this at Princeton in early 1981. It was early days - he speculated that the impact point was near Iceland - but he was pretty clear about the limits of their knowledge at that point. Not that I doubt the bad blood - scientific controversies can get very heated. Walter Alvarez’s book has lots about the arguments. I had a famous professor yell at me when I was on a panel at a conference.
There were maybe 40 people in the audience. We went because it was like two blocks from our apartment. So not even a big deal at the time.
I was going to mention him but you beat me to it. Great example of a skilled scientist going off the rails.
By '89 in geology it was getting to be pretty much accepted, we were certainly presented with it as the leading hypothesis - although one of my own geochem lecturers was still doubtful at that point, and was actively researching alternate Ir enrichment pathways for the K-Pg (well, K-T at the time) fishclay. I know she, and other authors on that paper, had come around by the time I left Uni, though, as I did vac work with them and they were not skeptical at all. By, say, 1995 it was very dominant.
So, getting away from the specific case, I think it’s fair to say that minority opinions that are real science are hashed out in academia, not in the media. Maybe you’ll see pieces about “Joe Blow has an interesting and radical idea about whatever, and research is ongoing to see if it’s true that our leadership are all lizard people”, but you won’t see the lizard-person-proponent going on shitty podcasts and ranting about how “they all thought I was mad! Mad, I tell you!” He or she will be hashing it out at conferences and in papers.
Most things are minority opinions until they get evidence for them.
Lawrence Krauss predicted the existence of Dark Energy (or something that acted like Dark Energy, he didn’t call it that) long before there was evidence for it. He wrote a paper and it was filed away, where a very few number of people ever looked at it.
Only once the rate of increasing expansion of the universe was measured in the late 90’s did he dust it back off and start using his hypothesis as something worth putting into the media, with occasional light smugness that he had predicted it based on math (I don’t actually understand the paper well enough to know what the math was based on) before it was confirmed.
He could have gone the other way, and started going on podcasts and news shows to talk about how everyone that believed that the universe was slowing down was an idiot and they were wrong and he was right, but then, he would have been a crackpot, even though he ended up being right.
I think it’s right there in the title. Understand the difference between “opinion” and “information” (facts).
For me, a lot of it comes from the context of who is forming the opinion and why.
Let’s take anti-COVID vaccine people. On the one side, you have the CDC, peer reviewed publications, the greater medical community and the entire pharma industry telling you that the vaccines are safe and effective.
On the other side, you have an assortment of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, right-wing pundits, discredited scientists, and other assorted idiots and fanatics claiming that people “following the religion of science are sheep”, misinterpreting the odd graph or chart or article taken out of context or referring to anecdotal statements by people who kind of know someone who knows someone who worked for Pfizer.
The problem is that the experts have to be completely right all the time while the idiots and fanatics don’t have to meet any particular standard other than their own beliefs.
The problem IMHO is that there is so much general information and bullshit out there about everything and people are so generally stupid that it’s hard to tell what’s what. And you see all these people who suddenly get rich off of crazy shit like “disruptive” tech companies or cyber currency or NFTs or posting crap on Tik Tok that most people don’t understand. So I think on some level it leads people to think “well my life is super boring and ordinary and I don’t know shit about what these people are doing, but they are getting mega-rich doing it. Maybe they are on to something that I don’t know about!” So what I think that does is it makes people constantly look for other “minority opinions” they can glom onto.
Just as there is a distribution of size, weight and intelligence, there seems to be a distribution of the ability to reason logically. The anti-vaxxer I know is sorely deficient in this skill. A year ago she distributed nonsense from this pediatrician all about the vaccine antennas and Bill Gates etc. She of course refused to get vaccinated, and she has had Covid twice. It still doesn’t sink in. I don’t think she’d ever admit that what she sent out was misinformation. She’s also a Flat Earther, believes in Contrails and even lizard people. But she is sure she knows all the secrets the man has been hiding from us.
Don’t call these people stupid. Call them gullible. That will really make them mad.
First words said was that only 1 daycould be used on Earth to not changethe 1 day marshmallow. So they applied the 1day and ignored the other 3 days.The marshmallow time was wrong then and itproved wrong today. This a major liehas so much boring feed from it’s wrong.No man on Earth has no belly-button
Given all the wailing from Malone and supporters about how he’s been censored and canceled for his Brave Maverick opinions, it’s ironic how Malone has retaliated against opponents. For instance, there’s a Hawaii physician, Michael Patmas, who made a complaint to the Maryland medical board (where Malone is licensed) about his spreading misinformation in Hawaii during an appearance to promote opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates:
“Shortly after being notified about the complaint by the Maryland board in December, Malone tweeted about it to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. He disclosed Patmas’s name and workplace, and later spoke about the complaint in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, leading to Patmas being verbally attacked online, receiving complaints to his workplace, and becoming the subject of a retaliatory complaint made to his own medical board. Malone also informed colleagues in Maui about Patmas’s complaint and contacted Patmas through LinkedIn in a message containing the lines “Found you,” and “Merry Christmas,” plus a warning that his lawyers would be in touch.”
Nice.
There are other examples of how Malone deals with opposition and professional rivalry, and they aren’t pretty.
Minority views in science and medicine when well-constructed and founded on good or at least reasonable evidence, won’t make you a pariah, though you can expect challenges and criticism. “Experts” who puff up their CVs, posture like they are modern-day Galileos, consort with cranks and heavily depend on social media to make their case are ones to be wary of.
When evaluating expert credentials, it is good to determine 1) how directly those credentials relate to the field the supposed expert is discussing, and 2) what percentage of qualified colleagues agree.
It may at first glance look impressive if, for example, a PhD immunologist* argues that vaccines cause terrible damage to the immune system and should be avoided, until you realize that the vast majority of PhD immunologists would see that viewpoint as false and reprehensible.
*there is such a person.