| HN Mirror

The problem with Malone is that his theories are in disagreement with the vast majority of subject matter experts. His CV, while real, isn't without issues, and his involvement in mRNA research is often misrepresented in the sense that it fails to mention he was just one of hundreds of researchers that contributed to getting where we are today, and that his contribution rests on experiments over 30 years ago.

Science doesn't work flawlessly, nor does it rely on some magical subset of the population deemed "scientists" having perfect knowledge and judgement. The rest of the process matters, precisely because scientists make mistakes likely at rates not really any different than anybody else. By waving Malone's scientist credentials, JR is implicitly saying that this story is science, but that whole angle is actually anti-science! Credentials alone don't define the scientific process.

Furthermore, people haven't internalized how difficult much of this is. Scientists make mistakes all the time because despite professionalism interpreting data isn't easy, and even peer review doesn't catch most errors. As a symptom of that consider what's underlying the replication crisis in science (which doesn't affect all science equally). Interpreting messy data with lots of confounders and imperfect experimental setups, imperfect measurements of those confounders, imperfect statistical models that simplify distribution characteristics, imperfect statistical tools that cannot capture all higher order effects, imperfect generalization from the specific experiment to the interesting take-home claim, etc etc etc may well be impossible in most cases. Finding the few nuggets of truth where we can cut through all that trickiness is not easy. And identifying flaws in such research is not easy either; experts get it wrong all the time. That's OK, that's normal. The hope isn't that every scientific claim is perfect, it's that the system eventually converges to a slightly better understanding of the world than we have now.

If Malone wants to present his interpretation to his peers: that's great, and fine. They're used to uncertainty, and have the best tools and training to deal with the cognitive dissonance of having lots of partially contradictory research. But his arguments seem to have failed to convince them - at least I'm not hearing much backup. However, cherry-picking "experts" with non-conventional views and presenting their interpretation to an audience that cannot interpret the uncertainty behind Malone's claims while supporting his credentials is essentially lying to listeners; you're encouraging them to draw false conclusions.

People are social animals; we're uniquely good at learning - and copying from - others. It's that copying that is our greatest strength, while also being a risk when mixed up with mass-media's ability to selectively amplify voices. And we all run our economies fully embracing that; which is why businesses hire experts and try to avoid all kinds of biases when it hits their bottom line; it's why advertisements work as a business; it's why we talk about propaganda and use information warfare in actual military conflicts. People aren't very good at filtering and processing information; they're great at _copying_ it and distributing that knowledge through social circles. Knowledge is power, but it's also a vulnerability.

If we cannot acknowledge our cognitive weaknesses, we cannot prevent being ruled by them. To put it another way: memes are real, and have the power to control us if we're not careful. Giving Malone an unfiltered megaphone through which to amplify what most other experts appear to conclude is nonsense is not being careful.