#72

As a scientist, being told that I am a cynical conspiracy guy about anything that I for utterly irrational reasons simply do not like is a deeply insulting personal attack!

And now I am out of here. Enough of this. I gonna mute this thread right now. Have fun everybody.

#74

Thanks @MichGuy12 !!! I still post plenty!!! (Good morning everyone!!! :slight_smile: ).

And yessss, I agree this site dramatically improves our health!!! My life has done a 180 since meeting all of you!!!

And @DeStrider, this is good to know because Rapadmin would have to pull the keyboard out of my cold dead hands.

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#75

A reasonable ask for any reasonable person

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#76

Fortunately this forum is not about beliefs related to freedom of speech nor about politics

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#77

This is the crux of the matter, with regards to any privately owned and operated chat forum with a very specific purpose.

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#78

What does “leads to evolved responses” even mean?

And the virus was not “benign” for the millions of people who died from it. I know several people who would have lived many more years if not for that virus.

Also, the fact is that every single one of us has had this virus multiple times already - whether you knew it or not. So disentangling what problems may or may not be caused by it is massively problematic. I don’t know of anybody credible who is saying that vaccines had worse side effects than the virus. In fact, the opposite seems to be true unless, and multiple studies at the population level, and with specific cohorts all show that the virus was more harmful than any of the vaccines. You really do some deliberate, unscientific, cherry picking of the data to find any population where vaccines were worse than being infected.

Also, the mRNA vaccine is not “gene therapy”. I think if you can’t even get the terminology right, we’re simply not having a discussion on equal terms.

And again, I’m not taking any sort of blanket “pro vaccine” or “pro pharma” position here. It’s just that the conspiracy theories are really out of hand and there simply isn’t data to support the things that are being claimed.

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#79

And this is why the person you are replying to is on my block list. No benefit to me from a technical aspect. Babble is not helpful to anyone except the babbler or their fellow babblers :slight_smile:

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#80

This poses a difficult question for the scientifically minded who also value free speech. One possibly helpful criterion is whether the position of the anti-vaxxer (or other anti-science conspiratorialist) is taken within the boundaries of science and logic. When you study conspiratorialists in general, you find just enough truth or plausibility in their position for them to feel justified in holding it. However, upon closer inspection, you see that they do not understand the logic of scientific method and from that deficit they go on to draw illogical generalizations typically based on outliers.

Life was short and brutish when superstition dominated our inquiry. Today virtually every improvement in the modern world rests on scientific and related forms of rational inquiry and It is sometimes difficult to believe that humans in the aggregate have only reasoned scientifically for a few hundred years. I would wager today that the logic of the scientific method is not fully grasped by one-third or more of the adult population.

I’m comfortable having our moderator do the excellent job we have come to expect making this decision. If I were voting, it would be to avoid trashing up our crowded idea space with information that is clearly unscientific and or illogical. If it should turn out that merit was buried in a specific piece of gobbledygook, it will emerge over time accompanied by rational support. The validity of information still rests on the methods used to acquire it.

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#81

I think you are being generous here.

I’d say that 90% of my non-science oriented friends have no clue that there is a scientific method. Even my tech friends are often oblivious to this concept, all the while doing their R&D projects… I’ve found that my highly educated friends, the Phd’s do operate in that realm, as expected.

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#82

He is on mine too. :slight_smile:
Recently added bobo too.
BTW it’s easy to check the signal to noise ratio of anybody on this forum by looking at their activity from their profile. For some there is only noise and no useful contributions.

Ignoring threads is less efficient because they have a tendency to diverge and can cover any other topics. They all eventually might converge back to discussing lipids though.

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#83

I love science. One of the few things I care about just as much is free speech.

Let’s continue to protect the right of everyone to express their opinion (especially when we disagree with it). Debate is a positive and can help educate!

I hate the idea of banning anyone, but if the moderation team decides it is necessary I hope it’s on the basis of preventing personal attacks. From reading this thread it seems like most of us are strongly against content based moderation.

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#84

I agree that this is fundamental to an enjoyable learning and sharing experience.

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#85

The idea that vaccines and population level health care can be divorced from politics just can’t be justified by any reasonable person. So I do think its a special type of political fig leaf to say no politics on this board.

Since the consensus+mods want to leave up the rumble video that is in fact banned from major sites, as if it’s just fine to link out to decades old conspiracy theories that have major health outcomes like death, i’ll just say i disagree, and later, I’ll say I told you so.

Hope people you care about don’t die in a measles/whooping cough etc outbreak.

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#87

We run the risk of conflating rights of speech and transparency with duties of respect and courtesy, and the rights to privacy.

In the US and other liberal democratic nations, we have broad rights of free speech but it is not a restriction of those right to be prohibited from interrupting a corporate executive meeting or a meeting of school principals to insist that they listen to us talk about chicken soup recipes. The antivaxx people have every right to advance their agenda so long a doing so does not interfere with the rights of others to advance theirs with whatever level of efficiency they choose. We are not restricting their freedoms to prohibit them from creating unwelcome opportunity costs for others via their posting here.

I do not agree that the borderline between pseudo science and science are adjacent and to that extent permeable. The propositions generated by each may be adjacent but the methods by which their propositions are generated place them in very different worlds.

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#88

I think we have to be careful with banning. Nobody anywhere has only rational beliefs. Everybody has biases. Tons and tons of supplements taken by people here have virtually no evidence for it, even less than the already questionable rapamycin. Whole threads about various peptides that people gobble up, I find horrifying, but I say nothing. Should we ban all that? There would be nobody left, including you and me.

The fundamental issue is that we are operating in an environment of imperfect information. Back in the day, I was interested in game theory, and the mathematical strategies one can use in situations of information assymetry and probability behavior. It’s really shocking how bad human beings are when it comes to making decisions in environments with limited information. Everyone thinks that their “intuition” is reliable compared to others - and it’s purely psychological, when put to the test in game theory, your intuition is just as poor as the other guy’s.

Bad reasoning, and faulty conceptual analysis 101 is rife on these boards. When I was an idealistic youth studying for my philosophy degree, I thought that all schools should teach the fundamentals of conceptual analysis as a sort of vaccine against misinformation and a guide to making decisions. I have long since given up. I think you cannot change human nature.

It comes down to a cast of mind. Those who have a conspiratorial cast of mind will always have it, and even if you somehow persuade them of the nuttiness of one particular belief (say, anti-vaxx), they’ll just as easily fall for another one. It’s like they have a weak intellectual immune system, and are easily overwhelmed by viral ideas. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine, but many people are unable to then interrogate the validity of any perceived pattern, and soon the faulty idea based on this consumes their mind - you might find a paxlovid for that particular idea, but it’s not effective against the next one, because they have a weakness in their intellectual immune system. Now, with early education, you can train that immune system as with childhood vaccines, and hopefully provide lifelong immunity against stuff like Nazism, but new generations may have not been exposed to this world wide disaster and it makes a comeback like polio. The guy who today believes that vaccines are a plot, is the same guy who believed that soap was a plot back in the day, or that witches or jews/x are casting spells in league with the devil, so burn them at the stake. They’ve always been with us and always will be. There is no cure, because it is human nature.

We are all “sinners” who hold some poorly justified beliefs and intuitions because we operate with imperfect information. As long as the boards maintain a decent signal to noise ratio, we can allow exotic views, but there is no reason why behavior standards should not be enforced, wrt. personal attacks etc. I personally just skip posts and posters where it’s just noise, I have no time, energy or will to engage. But that’s a broad category - noise is not just the obvious flat earthers, but the guy who frequently posts stuff devoid of any value, but shrouded in scientific lingo and apparent preoccupation with “science”, but which upon examination have no content of value, it’s a kind of psychological need for them to “participate” socially, but sadly having little of value to contribute they pass along counterfeit currency - I refuse transactions with them. My point is, noise comes in many frequencies, and anti-vaxxers are just one band, but there are many other frequencies and you can’t ban them all, you can only mute them.

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#90

Well said, while I’ve rarely strayed to the dark side of pseudo - I have made mistakes in some of my posts here and have been corrected by more knowledgeable members. And I really appreciate that.

It fits with my product dev philosophy when I was leading dev teams, I often said “It doesn’t matter who is right, it only matters that we find the right thing to do, so put it on the table and lets see what works” While I like to be right, I recognize that I’m not always right.

I find those that are on the other side of the fence don’t have the open mind they tell everyone else to have and are not willing to learn from people that have more experience in their field of expertise

Those who are not willing to be humble and accept they are wrong are an interesting lot.

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#91

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#92

Ultimately the owner/admin of this forum @RapAdmin will make a decision to change moderation policy (or not). So far I have been very impressed with how the forum has been moderated (with a very light touch). Human moderation becomes increasingly difficult with scale, so I’m happy with more of the burden being put on users that seek censorship. It is simple to use the ignore function for the small percentage of threads that relate to vaccines or other topics some find objectionable.

There are forums that attract a large percentage of “antivaxx people” but rapamycin.news is not one of them. I’d argue this is likely to be one of the better educated longevity/health related forums. Many forum members have graduate degrees and/or many years of experience with knowledge to share. Rather than creating victims of the people that choose to read threads containing pseudoscience id argue our community is well suited to protect users by promoting the scientific method to debunk potentially dangerous ideas.

Rather than pretending they don’t exist I am very happy that our forum frequently contains thoughtful warnings about peptides for example. Censorship will just drive vulnerable users to other platforms where there are less educated members to make them aware of potential risks.

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#93

That sounds about right. To me the most mind blowing thing about the scientific method is that it can only disprove — it can never prove anything. And even the disproving is only possible if an empirical experiment can be set out. Which is why I always retain some modicum of skepticism re: commonly accepted knowledge. We can only really know what is false, never fully what is true. It’s part of what drives me to tolerate even what seemingly borders gibberish.

Obviously I don’t mean that commonly accepted knowledge is useless. But it’s not bulletproof. Think classical mechanics until certain… discrepancies were discovered.

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#95

Yes. And isn’t this a somewhat self-limiting problem? Euphemistically referred to as Darwin at work. Who doesn’t remember the huge number of high profile anti-vaxxers winning the ultimate award. Looking at the death statistics among the demographics shunning the covid shot really tells the tale. You do the best you can to accurately inform, and then let the chips fall where they may.

I totally understand the opposition to mandates. Let people decide their own fate. If the vaccine advocates, such as me, are wrong, well I’ll suffer the consequences. If the anti-vaxxers pick wrong, it’s their turn to collect the award.

And this goes for everything related to health, including diet, lifestyle etc. You - or I - place a losing bet, that’s on you (or me).

Crucially, I don’t accept the argument about the poor deceived health consumer, who is helpless and blameless. We are all in the same position of choice, unless we’re in prison. The information is out there. If you fall for disinformation, it’s on you (me). If you fall for misinformed quacks, scammers, influencers, whose fault is that? I am in no better position than you are, so I’ve invested considerable time and effort in finding studies, evidence and sources that strike me as the best that can be had atm - if wrong, I, just like you, will suffer the consequences. I blame no one.

So why worry about some guy on a board arguing for or against a vaccine, or x, y, z, unless I’m forced to act on their dictums? Present an argument, I’ll hear it out (or not), and make my own decision. Somebody’s advocacy is no skin off my nose. We all answer to Mr. Darwin regardless.

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