Here is another very enjoyable conversation, with @Pandata19’s scientific advisory board member, Dr Jay Bhattacharya. Key ideas in this thread.

We are making world-changing decisions on the basis of evidence that is not very good. Vast scientific evidence tells us that infection fatality rates are much lower than originally expected. A small fraction of people get severe illness. 2/10
The scientific community has been resistant to evidence not supporting the majoritarian view, preferring instead to gin up panic, focusing on the worst case for everything the virus does & the best case for everything lockdowns do, and ignoring the range of uncertainty. 3/10
Academe is a strange place now, with debate stifled. But there's a sense some are opening up to considering opposing views. This is key, since suppression of views stops knowledge from progressing—the end of science. Public health norms of unified messaging complicate this. 4/10
Why did we, from the start, assume we knew nothing about this virus, instead of assuming a reasonable prior? Low susceptibility was evident early on. Assuming any virus is new is hard to square with our deep-time co-evolution with viruses, & their slow evolution. 5/10
A lot of smart people changed their minds about what to do in March, and need to change them back. Our hope has to be that people will lose respect for scientific institutions, and not for science itself. 6/10
From the first day Jay heard about lockdowns, they felt like a violation of everything he knew about public health. Shutting down of schools has been their most shocking manifestation. 7/10
Asymptomatic people and children are at least much less efficient at transmitting. B- and T-cell responses persist after antibody levels have waned, so it is unlikely that people who are reinfected will get severely sick. 8/10
The issue of Long Covid is overstated by the media. Similar to the flu, there are occasional extra-respiratory manifestations, but they appear to be relatively uncommon and seldom serious. 9/10
Fear of the disease prevents young, healthy people from doing the usual thing & shouldering the burden of infection, so the elderly are spared ending up in the exposed group. Then there is an interesting discussion about vaccinations, including who should seek them. Enjoy! 10/10

More from Science

So it turns out that an organization I thought was doing good work, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (associated with Center for Inquiry, James Randi, and Martin Gardner) was actually caping for pedophiles. Uhhhh oops?


Since this, bizarrely, turned out to be one of my longest videos ever (??) here's a quick thread to sum it up for those of you like myself with short attention spans. 1/10

In the '90s the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was founded to call attention to the problem of adults suddenly "remembering" child abuse that never actually happened, often under hypnosis. Skeptics like James Randi & Martin Gardner joined their board. 2/10

A new article reveals that the FMSF was founded by parents who had been credibly and PRIVATELY accused of molestation by their now-adult daughter. They publicized the accusation, destroyed the daughter's reputation, and started the foundation. 3/10

The FMSF assumed any accused pedo who joined was innocent, saying "We are a good-looking bunch of people, graying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want to count as a friend" 😬 4/10
It was great to talk about reproducible workflows for @riotscienceclub @riotscience_wlv. You can watch the recording below, but if you don't want to listen to me talk for 40 minutes, I thought I would summarise my talk in a thread:


My inspiration was making open science accessible. I wanted to outline the mistakes I've made along the way so people would feel empowered to give it a go. Increased accountability is seen as a barrier to adopting open science practices as an ECR

It also comes across as all or nothing. You are either fully open science or your research won't get anywhere. However, that can be quite intimidating, so I wanted to emphasise this incremental approach to adapting your workflow

There are two sides to why you should work towards reproducibility. The first is communal. It's going to help the field if you or someone else can reproduce your whole pipeline.


There is also the selfish element of it's just going to help you do your work. If you can't remember what your work means after a lunch break, you're not going to remember months or years down the line

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