rastinza @rastinza@qoto.org

@kenobit
Se vieni a Santiago de Compostela te li preparo caldi sul momento; che tanto cucinare bisogna farlo sempre e comunque

@onlmaps
United States, 56 out of the best 100 university in the world and it still produces some of the stupidest people I met in my life

@Andre
Yes, there are reports of falsified data in certain trials; not a lot but still worrying.
Big Pharma is definitely paying a lot of money to sponsor their own drugs as opposed to the ones from their competitors.
They do some pretty disgusting stuff, such as prohibiting countries to gift unused vaccine doses to other countries and rather have them wasted.

I'm not certain what you mean by using drugs off label.

I work in the development of new drugs; I'm not working for a big pharmaceutical company, but I do know a thing or two.

Even with these things you said, I don't see where my statements are factually or logically incorrect.
@pamby1 @ringo

@ringo
I'm sorry, as far as I wish to keep the conversation going I have no interest in reading those documents.
I do not think the vaccine is a biological weapon nor that it has been under development since the 1970s.

I have no idea what the supposed objectives of this weapon would be, but definitely we're missing the technology to make such a thing imaginable.
I mean, we currently have troubles finding drugs which temporarily inhibit the mechanism of a single protein...
@pamby1 @Andre

@marco197
Il fascismo non è un'ideologia illegale.
In Italia esiste la libertà di pensiero.
Ognuno è libero di essere fascista e non può essere condannato in base a ciò, fintanto che non porta un partito fascista alle elezioni.
@sio

@pamby1
I'm not extremely informed on the matter, so take what I'm writing with a grain of salt.
Indeed covid treatment might have been done in a different way.
Vaccines were pushed over other alternatives, but after all a solution was needed and it made sense to focus on only one solution in order to find it quickly.
What has been done with covid vaccines is impressive, it was unimaginable that a vaccine could be developed so quickly.

Single doctors with a few patient with whom a particular treatment worked mean nothing.
A larger study is required to ascertain the goodness of one treatment, that is why there is pharmacovigilance in place.
It doesn't look to me as if alternative opinions and cures have been censored: these are readily available everywhere and anyone can read them.
You're here talking about them despite not being one of the doctors who was using those cures.

I'm definitely not saying that the covid emergency was handled in the best way possible.
But emergency handling has nothing to do with the scientific method.
@Andre @ringo

@climagic
Always forget those, and the formatting in the crontab file is so bad I always have to search it...

@pamby1
While it is true that often politicians and media incorrectly depict scientific knowledge and misunderstand what is the current state of affairs, I do believe it is correct to adopt measures according to the currently accepted scientific knowledge.
In the case of climate change the wide consensus among scientists makes me believe that political choices should be taken in order to diminish the causes of climate change, which are attributed to certain human activities.
Regarding covid19 on the other side I really don't know what you're referring to, frankly I'm not too interested. As far as I know there is large consensus that covid19 is a virus and that it killed a lot of people; saying that this is false would be impossible without revolutionising the whole fields of biology and medicine.
@Andre @ringo

@thatguyoverthere
You can look at other fields of science and clearly see that in many cases no wide consensus is available.
Just have a glimpse into theoretical physics, put together in a room someone supporting quantum mechanics and someone else supporting relativity and see who's the one coming out alive.
@Andre @pamby1 @ringo

@thatguyoverthere
The peer reviewing process currently has some big flaws.
This said, the peer reviewing process is just one step in the scientific knowledge development.

Reading a paper you first of all try to understand if it makes sense; that is: is the way they're describing their methodology appropriate?
If the methodology is not appropriate for the problem at hand, then you discard the article.
Then you use that knowledge, and that's the place where the consensus starts to grow.
If the things described in the paper work, you will keep using it and knowledge about it will spread, if it doesn't work then you will address the flaws.

Thus, even with a broken peer reviewing process, bad articles still get addressed (though a bit more down the line) and good ones get more accepted.
@Andre @pamby1 @ringo

@Andre
Some think that science is something that is somehow superior to humans and that a "truth" exists and it is identifiable through science; thus the scientists who don't strive all the time for finding such truth are not good scientists.

The only problem is that science is just a way to refer to human scientific knowledge.
The scientific consensus is part of the human scientific knowledge, and it is the best way we found until now to distinguish good theories from bad ones.

We could discuss on the existence of an objective truth, but it doesn't really matter, since the scientific method does not try to discover that at all.
If an objective truth exists, the methodologies to attain it are others, such as religion and philosophy.

Simplifying: science, as it is commonly conceived, does not exist.
@pamby1 @ringo

Devo lavorare al computer, trasferendo svariati GB di risultati ad alcuni server di calcolo.
La connessione disponibile in ufficio oggi gira sui 20 kb/s

Lavorare da casa sarebbe effettivamente migliore perché almeno li ho una connessione decente.
Per lavorare da casa devo avvisare 2 settimane in anticipo...

@pamby1
Depends on the scale and importance; generally new theories become accepted after being in use for a long while.
Thus: one guy might need this new theory for something in particular for which the old one doesn't work and starts using it.
If the theory works he will talk about it and eventually other people will start using it.
After some time everyone in the field will know the new theory, and commonly refer to it.
At this point this new theory will start being deemed accepted.

Let's say a theory has been accepted more or less when someone uses it and doesn't need to cite the source because it's obvious to everyone in the field what he's talking about.
@Andre @ringo

@pamby1
Never heard anyone talk about settled science.
Probably that's a thing that happens just in the US.

This said, scientific consensus is important in the scientific development; otherwise there would be no way to determine what to do.
While scientific knowledge does change over time, scientific consensus identifies theories that are useful to solve problems at hand and that work well at explaining observations.

I'm no expert about climate change models and the information they're based on.
I trust the scientific community to have studied the case deeply and thoroughly after all these years, and if the consensus is so strong I see no reason to believe climate change wasn't caused by men.
It is true that there might be problems somewhere in the research, and that is why it's important that people are trying to find them.
If publication about errors in data collection did not change the current stand on climate change, then evidence of these errors is not strong enough or methodological errors in these articles were probably made.
Anybody can publish an article, just saying that some scientists disagree is no way to discredit a theory.
Surely these papers have been read by other researchers in the field, if a proof of methodological errors was found this would probably have led to a large number of publications about it (because everyone wants to prove that the others are wrong while he came out with a better idea), this, however, didn't happen.
For all we know, modifying human behaviour that alters the biosphere is the best way to limit climate change.
Maybe some better solutions will be found in the future, but this one appears to be quite well grounded and supported by people working on the topic every day.
@Andre @ringo

@Andre
I'll explain briefly: all theories have problems, and this is known from the beginning. Identifying one single problem with the theory doesn't take down the theory, it just identifies one point of weakness.
Moreover, the observations must of course be confirmed through repeated observations.

The existing theory doesn't get destroyed as soon as an opposing observation is done, because that would throw away a perfectly good and working theory.
The theory gets replaced when a new one gets formulated, and the new one can also account for that observation which couldn't previously be explained.

The new theory gets approved through consensus, since there is no objective measure of theory superiority.
@pamby1 @ringo

@Andre
Peer review is not a substitute for replication, and at times stuff is replicated during peer review.
There are many problems with peer review that often make it practically valueless.
Founding biases are definitely there and they're a big problem, but I wouldn't say political/ideological ones are so important; maybe that's just because my field of research is not so politically exposed.
Plenty of funding biases often lead research towards proving points and ignoring other ones to promote certain industries and their practices, which could otherwise be deemed as dangerous or useless.
@pamby1 @ringo

@pamby1
Then again, it's also true some people are not open to new information, but I don't think this is one of the main problems of the scientific community at the moment.
@Andre @ringo

@pamby1
The scientific method is, in fact, based on consensus.
While a black swan observation does indicate that the theory that all swans are white might be wrong, the single observation is not enough to disprove an affirmed and working theory.
@Andre @ringo

@pamby1
What do you mean?
We don't know everything and it is still possible to do ones job correctly with all the proper knowledge required.
@Andre @ringo