[roenxi]

I respect the author's principle-based approach but many of her arguments seem a little off. If the RS doesn't expel people for their politics, then it doesn't make sense to expel Musk for, essentially, concerns about his politics. And if you expel crotchety scientists for disagreeing with the scientific consensus there won't be any left. The RS motto is literally "Take nobody's word for it"; I don't see how Musk disagreeing with other's opinions could possibly be grounds for removing him.

That being said, Musk does seem like a vaguely inappropriate addition to the Society. His wikipedia page suggests he doesn't have a PhD, doesn't do any research and is involved in military matters for an army foreign to the UK. He's obviously being included because he has lots of money and it isn't clear to me if that is proper or not.

[cauch]

> If the RS doesn't expel people for their politics, then it doesn't make sense to expel Musk for, essentially, concerns about his politics.

But the article does not talk about Musk's political opinion per se. The concerns would have been totally the same if Musk was acting the same way but involving himself with a different political ideology.

The concerns seem to be: 1) Musk is aggressive towards his fellow scientists, 2) Musk is supporting and spreading anti-science things, 3) Musk is pushing for anti-science practices in his own scientifically linked activities (such as not following the steps that guarantee good science in clinical trials).

The article mentions that Musk is getting more political. However, the message is not "being political is the reason why he should be excluded", the message is "while it is possible to be political and continue to adhere to the scientific practice, what we see is that Musk gets more and more anti-science because he gets more and more political".

[ineedaj0b]

I understand where you're coming from but because of Covid and those years, using the shield of 'science' to disallow criticism is a little underhanded. Covid/Vaccines/Lockdowns are on the table of politics for the foreseeable future.

[black_puppydog]

Not in the context of the royal society they aren't. Or they shouldn't be. That's kinda the point of its existence.

[didntcheck]

I feel similarly. I agree Musk doesn't belong in the RS, but I'd have said the same in 2018 (I missed the news). It's concerning that the author has only come to this realization now that Musk vocally disagrees with her political views. I don't consider that principled at all

[shafyy]

It's not about that Musk disagrees with her political views, it's that he is being anti-scientific, pushing wrong scientific facts and so on to further his personal agenda, which happens to involve a lot of politics.

[a-french-anon]

I took the time to read those Guardian links (sigh) and that's just misrepresentation.

Vaccines: almost nobody refutes the scientific basis behind vaccines (not even talking about mRNA vs traditional), but trusting vaccine admission means trusting powers that have historically been quite evil (cf Tuskegee syphilis study, MKUltra, contaminated blood scandals in Europe and Japan, etc...). Elon's "meme" isn't about said science and this article/post conflates the two.

Climate: I read the 2024 article and extracts from a mostly informal interview like

  “If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.

  “We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”

, while not without faults, don't seem anti-scientific in any way to me. Trump's side seemed way more unhinged, from the few cherry-picked quotes in the article.

Misinformation on X: the usual "calling the other side fake news/disinformation/conspiracy theories and touting threat to democracy", not interesting in the least. Also, why is someone writing about that in the British Medical Journal??

tl;dr this is an ideological blog post amongst thousand of others.

[n4r9]

The video that Musk posted with the vaccine efficacy numbers dropping from 100 to 50 is clickbait nonsense. As is the "shouldn't all the unvaccinated be dead" meme. On the myocarditis topic he consistently focused on the relatively tiny risks and brought up vaccines in the context of Bronny James for no reason other than to bait outrage. None of this befits a serious scientist such as the FRS aims to include in its ranks.

[a-french-anon]

No, I agree with most of it, but that's what should have been written in the blog post and not by someone else on HN after the fact.

The meme, though, I wonder... I live in a country that wasn't as hardcore as some of the Commonwealth on the "forced vaccination" front so I don't identify with it, but there was certainly a lot of propaganda surrounding it in the wide world; on how people who refused were almost traitors shirking their civic duties.

[n4r9]

> how people who refused were almost traitors shirking their civic duties

I wasn't quite that hardcore, but I did (and still do) find it difficult to accept refusals to vaccinate for seemingly little reason. It felt like some people were being stubbornly complicit in drawing out the pandemic and putting their contacts at higher risk. I guess it's a question of degree - how many lives does a collective behaviour need to save, before it becomes justified to mandate it?

[shafyy]

Everything is ideological. But reading the excerpts from the RS Code of Conduct she posted, Musk's behavior does seem to go against it.

Also, you cannot deny that Musk has been amplifying conspiracy theories. Does not matter if he believes in them or just does it for the "lolz".

[a-french-anon]

A conspiracy theory for one side is undeniable truth for the other. Not falling into relativist garbage, there's a difference between "conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to race replacement theory to misogyny" and flat earth.

[ben_w]

If it was just scientific consensus and politics, that would be one thing — while I share the author's opinion in these aspects, I recognise these aspects are not sufficient for such a response.

To actively stir up trouble and misrepresent other scientists, and to perform experiments outside recognised ethical norms as Musk does, is much much worse.

And also very obviously a violation of the quoted rules, and brings the society into disrepute.

[Veen]

Yes, the mistake was inviting him to be a fellow in the first place. Now he's in, the Society must follow its rules and precedents. At the very least, it shouldn't be seen to expel someone for political opinions or heterodox views on science. Some the of Royal Society's most notable members have had lunatic fringe ideas and they weren't thrown out.

[waihtis]

It's a valid viewpoint, however membership to the royal society is judged via candidates having made 'a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science'. I would argue Elon is fully within scope, outside of the fact that I think Elon is not the slightest fit to the general ethos of that specific organization.

[bell-cot]

The full quote:

> Although most Fellows are elected on the basis of their scientific contributions, others are nominated on the basis of "wider contributions to science, engineering or medicine through leadership, organisation, scholarship or communication". [Italics in original.]

But yes, you hit the nail on the head about Musk being within their supposed scope, but a disastrously bad fit for their org. Making him a Fellow (back in 2018) was a self-serving idiot move by the Society. And now the Wages of Dim are adding up.

[quonn]

How is he within scope? At best he might have contributed to advancing engineering science, but is that really the case? Has he not rather merely financed engineering science and perhaps not even engineering science but just engineering practice?

[bondarchuk]

From the blogpost: "wider contributions to science, engineering or medicine through leadership, organisation, scholarship or communication" He's clearly relevant based on contribution to engineering (maybe science too) through organization (maybe leadership, communication too).

[nonrandomstring]

This is the salient point. Musk is not a "science" person. He is no Einstein or Newton. He has many good qualities, amongst them a broad appreciation of engineering, commerce and motivating people. He is ambitious. But Musk neither holds a PhD (I imagine he'd lack the patience and focus) nor has any notable specialism. Like Gates and Zuckerberg who both dropped out of their computer science degrees to make money, Musk is another of this new breed of "technologist" who we lionise as though they were "great scientists".

The Royal Society is a club for great scientists and it has erred by expanding its definition of "contribution to science" to include businessmen and financiers who contribute through money and influence.

[waihtis]

> This is the salient point

No it's not lol. you just decided to ignore the criteria for membership and invent your own, like a phD being requisite (it is not.)

Also, to call Musk a "businessman" is reductive as hell. I know a lot of people have pressure to hate him because of political reasons, but be real for once.

[nonrandomstring]

> hate him because of political reasons,

I was purposefully avoiding politics. You brought that up.

[tim333]

Their website has:

>Fellows - The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of many of the world’s most eminent scientists, engineers, and technologists.

Maybe he isn't a scientist but he is an engineer/technologist. If you put "greatest living engineer" into google you can guess who pops up.

[bjornsing]

The core of the OP’s argument as I see it is that the RS requires its fellows to treat other scientists with curtesy. Elon clearly doesn’t feel bound by that, but the OP does.

This is something I’ve noticed more and more: there are essentially two very different ways to look at rules of various kinds (including laws).

Some people focus on consequences, and have a mental model along the lines of “if I do X, Y could realistically happen to me”. When they read the Statutes and Code of Conduct of the RS they see literally nothing of note, because there are no realistic consequences.

Other people essentially see rules as expressions of the will of some abstract entity, in this case the RS, and feel honor-bound to comply with them or at least take them into account. The consequences are not very important to them. When they read the CoC of the RS they come way with a lot of limits on their behavior.

We used to live in a world where most people who could aspire to be a FRS were clearly in the latter category. We don’t any more. IMHO we therefore need to adjust the rules so that the two categories of people come way with similar mental models of them.

[roenxi]

Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour. One of the things that high-status people have to deal with is that they basically create the rules by their behaviour and actions. That leads to a certain disregard for what is written on-paper because they can write different things on it if they want to.

I'd imagine the RS people actually probably tended more towards the former in the early days. There was more of an aristocratic bent and the more vigorous a scientific body is the less respect it has for established rules - more than one of the good scientists from back when were also legit heretics (I've been reading the wiki page for Newton, for example - or the grave robbing doctors).

[bjornsing]

> Yeah, I'd class that as high- and low- status behaviour.

Interesting. You mean it’s high-status to disregard rules that don’t have formal consequences?

I guess I’m a bit confused, in that we clearly used to have a society that operated much more on rules without formal consequences. E.g. here in Sweden our law books are absolutely filled with them. Obviously there must have been high-status people that took them seriously in the past, otherwise we wouldn’t have been a well functioning society.

[roenxi]

Being high-status means someone can just ignore rules and frequently avoid consequences. Generally that seems to be true and historically it has been very true. Happens all the time if you keep your eyes peeled; and the converse - on sometimes formal consequences are forced on someone with high status regardless and they are shocked and confused because that has never happened to them before and they didn't realise that it was an option.

The formal consequences or lack thereof are often not a factor for people with very high status because they operate on the assumption that they can just ignore the consequences should they exist. That doesn't mean they ignore the rules - frequently the high-status types are the ones writing them so they typically agree with them in principle. But laws without formal consequences are about as effective as laws with formal consequences because the consequences aren't the major factor. Loss of status would be though, so things that are technically allowed can have major consequences (which IMO is part of why high status means someone eventually starts ignoring the rules - power corrupts as they say - the rewards and punishments are just different for someone with high status and eventually the feedback causes them to orient to that truth).

[nextlevelwizard]

The thing is neither climate change nor vaccines are political opinions or views. They are hard scientific facts and you are absolute moron if you try to twist them into political views.

[mdp2021]

Unfortunately, the expression 'hard scientific facts' does not represent general reality. Academically. (I.e.: "things are not that simple".)

[didntcheck]

Science informs policy, but it doesn't create or judge it. Science can help you predict the effects of vaccinating every adult in a population, but it can't say whether you should mandate that

This is hopefully incredibly obvious stuff, but unfortunately during the covid era "trust the science" was used to mean "my particular policy views are objectively correct and above criticism", and "antivax" targeted at people who had a vaccine themselves, but just did not believe it should be coerced on others

And is it still controversial to say that the efficacy of covid vaccine was a lot more disappointing than we were basically all expecting? Despite the revisionism of "well we never said that" (even when they did). Or that the apocalyptic predictions of lockdown-lifting were just a tiny bit overstated

[ben_w]

> And is it still controversial to say that the efficacy of covid vaccine was a lot more disappointing than we were basically all expecting?

As "controversial" means "prolonged public dispute or debate", necessarily so.

But I think also incorrect compared to the scientific discussion at the time. Not necessarily false compared to the political discussion or the newspapers etc., but the actual researchers themselves, who understood the reports and didn't get all their information from misleading summarised headlines like the rest of us:

"""What that means is if you had a hundred people who got coronavirus, this vaccine would have prevented 95% of them. So if that same 100 people had been vaccinated, only five of them would have got coronavirus. And that's the number that I really look for to start off with.

Now, when all of these studies were being designed, they said that they wanted to be able to get a vaccine that had a vaccine effectiveness of greater than 30%. That was the number that they were targeting. If they had a vaccine effectiveness of greater than 30%, then this would be a good result.

And to have a vaccine effectiveness of 95%, that's huge. That's so much more than we ever could have hoped for. And it's such a big result. And the other studies have also had really good vaccine effectiveness estimates.""" - https://www.numberphile.com/podcast/jennifer-rogers

> Or that the apocalyptic predictions of lockdown-lifting were just a tiny bit overstated

You reckon?

Emergency breaking is unpleasant, but it means you don't hit something that will decelerate you even harder.

This is the UK inquiry after the events, obviously the US is going to have had a different situation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9py388z17o

[nextlevelwizard]

If you don't take vaccines you are a fucktard