Hmm thanks for the context. The healthy vs. unhealthy vegan diet and "can a vegan diet be healthy at all?" questions do actually seem like worthwhile ones to me.

It's just confusing that the post title and the authors' recommendation of vegan over non-vegan diets point to that comparison of vegan vs. non vegan, which is completely different. They (authors and OP) really shouldn't do that.

>Although this type of study cannot show a healthy vegan diet actually caused the improvements in health outcomes, the authors recommend people concerned about chronic disease adopt a plant-based diet that's low in animal products, sugary drinks, snacks and desserts, refined grains, potatoes, and fruit juices.

?

Also a bit of a cheat to compare specifically healthy vegan diets to all other diets, rather than to specifically healthy diets that include animal products, right?

>Commenters particularly negatively evaluated social sciences, especially psychology, calling it pseudoscientific.

One of the things people really love is conflating criticism of particular studies/articles with criticism of an entire field...

I'm guessing the analysis is less reflecting on how to improve science communication and more about how it's the children who are wrong.

My comment does not assume that.

Neither the study of social disparities nor of disease are helped when saying popular things that you already know is more important than taking a critical and open minded approach to figuring out what is going on. Worrying about what the average person downplays is something politicians and social activists should do; scientists should worry about what the evidence in front of them says.

It's amazing how quickly we slid away from trying to improve things by following evidence and back into hand waving toward essentially religious explanations that are certain to go nowhere ("it's bad because all of society is bad").

So? You seem to have this set up as a dichotomy where either we have complete trust in twitter people or it's so threatening that they be allowed to say what they want that we need to take action against them. Neither of those things are true.

Um are you worried that if people on twitter are allowed to say wrong things your surgeon will use that when treating you?

Great example. Now that someone you don't agree with is in control of the company, do you still want them to use your standard of censoring any speech that he thinks is bad?

Which right wing politicians do you think should be in charge of deciding who gets to speak when they have the majority? Whatever standard you advocate for is going to be applied by the exact people you're afraid of.

Free speech is not about equivalency between sides. The idea that you can vet out who is right and silence anyone who doesn't meet your standard is both a fantasy and will surely backfire on you.

What emotional plea? I'm advocating against the emotion-based argument that we have to suppress people because maybe rationality might not win out.

People who are reporting their own experience aren't responsible for putting that in context of the rest of the population. They are literally just saying what happened to them.

The rest of us should take their report in context of the balance of evidence, not try to dismiss it because we need all evidence to point 100% in one direction. There will always be evidence for and against any position.

It's not really that threatening for people to be allowed to say wrong or exaggerated things; it going to happen all the time no matter what you do. Sorry to break that news. A lot of it will by by people who are on "your side" of any given issue.

It's taken on this weird in/out group aspect since it became so tied up in politics and people's personal identity that really does not serve us well, no matter what your goals are.

The fact that no authority controls discourse has always been part of the tradeoff of an open society. It is significantly more immoral to silence someone genuinely giving their experience than it is to allow some hucksters to speak.

You should also consider that whatever power you give to censor people is going to end up also being wielded by whatever group you currently hate most.

I stated up front that I am not really skeptical of the COVID vaccines. I'm not the one who's afraid that good evidence won't beat bad evidence.

Considering that I basically agree with the pro-vaccine position I'm really curious, what's the bad faith motive that you're accusing me of for saying "just don't censor people"?

I will say that if someone has a bad reaction to any medical treatment it is flatly immoral to tell them they can't share their experience or to try to silence them. It's completely crazy to me that responsible people would think that's what they should do to control "misinformation".

One person's personal experience can't be assumed to generalize, but it's still a hard fact of what happened to them.

I'm pretty pro-vaccine, but this kind of "science says we need to suppress anyone who questions our narrative" paper really creeps me out. We should not have a problem with people sharing their concerns, much less their actual experiences. Aside from it being morally wrong to silence people and depriving us of one source of information, this is exactly the kind of thing that contributes to the "declining authority of scientific expertise in public debates" that the authors note.

Unique historical events can't be treated as if they prove a generalization case. The shift from info on NPIs in the 1918 Flu pandemic to pronouncements about NPIs in general is a shocking level of disordered thinking. The motivated reasoning here seems entirely driven by, as they say it, "discussions in contemporary newspapers"

Because of the awesomeness?

Reddit TL/DR

Ultimate flex.