I'm starting a new job soon and I'm trying to figure out how I'll handle these "silence is complicit" characters. My personal policy is to not discuss political/social issues at work.
“Thanks for letting me know how you feel about this, I consider this a valuable opinion and think deeply on it”.
Then go ahead and do whatever you were going to do anyway, but at least let them know you’ve heard and acknowledged what they had to say. Sometimes folks just want to be acknowledged, that doesn’t seem like too much of a burden.
I think the unfortunate reality is that some people are intolerant of others who are insufficiently supportive of certain causes, and the only way to deal with those people is not to deal with them. The subject of this thread seems to be one of those people.
I think the unfortunate reality is that this isn't about individual people expecting support for certain causes. What you're looking at is fundamentally a social phenomenon - a belief that's been spreading from person to person and community to community that every person in the social group must support the correct causes in the correct ways, that anyone who doesn't go along with this is actively going against the cause and must be shamed and shunned until they do. It's the social spread via peer pressure that gives this its power. This isn't a new thing, it's been spreading amongst the tech community and elsewhere for probably well over a decade at this point.
I agree that this type of toxic peer-pressure is spreading, and I have no idea what to do about it. It reminds me of what Louis Fischer and Arthur Koestler described in their respective essays in "The God That Failed".
It’ll crumble if you allow them to continue pushing the matter and imposing upon you, enforce your personal boundaries and if they continue intruding, probably HR time or at least sidebar with your manager. Good luck in your new job otherwise!
But do you actually acknowledge them? I think this is fine if you're taking it to heart and actually internalizing the discussion a bit. Otherwise, it's disingenuous.
Edit: this is very basic EQ and active listening, not sure why it's controversial to have good social skills.
If you want genuine don't ask people questions where the answer can give them negative backlash at work.
Getting upset when someone wont be truthful on things with you on touchy subjects at work is like being upset when someone wont be truthful with you on touchy subjects when you're pointing a gun at them.
Acknowleding someone’s opinions and feelings can be as simple as being quiet, letting them speak, giving them room to express themselves without interruption, objection objection or reprisal. You don’t need to automatically alter your course of action just to merely recognize and acknowledge something someone’s said, sometimes just shutting up and being deferential is enough.
“Thank you for your opinion but I’m going another way” is no more of a failure than establishing any other decent and respectable boundaries between peoples.
Manners maketh the man (or woman, or however an individual chooses to self-identify).
OK, I think I'm getting this a bit more. I believe this is a healthy way to think about these topics. I just wasn't sure if you were encouraging people to participate in active listening or passive-aggressiveness. It's clear you're focused on the former which I find commendable.
I encourage seeking clarity and being secure in one's own emotional intelligence to ask questions when things are ambiguous, so I appreciate your asking. Happy to have helped find a mutual understanding. Sorry your comments were so negatively reacted to here.
Assuming you're in the US, it's my understanding that political affiliation is generally not a protected category. So if it's at-will employment at a private employer, it's probably legal to fire you for your political beliefs / actions (or "no reason" when it's really about political affiliation). If someone is engaging in behavior that bothers you, tell them to stop. If they don't, report them to HR. Make sure everything is in writing. But, be aware that HR might not be on your side; but at that point you really need to reconsider whether you want to work at a place where you are harassed and not supported by the company for not discussing politics.
The City of Seattle "assure[s] equal opportunity to all persons, free from restrictions because of race, color, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, political ideology, age, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, honorably discharged veteran or military status or the presence of any sensory, mental or physical disability."
This is how in soviet times and to extent how this works with china, unless you are vocally "independently" supportive of party line then you are hiding opposite dissenting view and need to be educated etc.
Unfortunately I've heard that drawing critical analogies to communist regimes is a "right-wing dog-whistle", so I'm hesitant to defend myself in public by pointing out these sort of parallels..
The way it works at my workplace is that in meetings with more than one person, we just say "times are tough and thanks for coping with the hard times and still getting the work done. We also recognize that times may be especially hard for some people." But in 1-on-1 convos some of my colleagues and I trust each other enough to say, for example, that we attended a protest.
I'd like to portray another question for you to consider: Do you think being able to have this policy is an inherently privileged position? For the record, I don't disagree with you. I have the same one.
I don't want to assume anything about you, so I'll speak about myself: I'm a het cis white male. I'm well-educated and well paid. Politics basically don't affect me unless it's taxes (which is why our industry ends up leaning so heavily libertarian." I am able to CHOOSE when to discuss political/social issues because i am able to CHOOSE when they affect me.
This is not the case for many others, including I bet your coworkers. If you are a woman, non-hetero, non-cis, or a racial minority, you don't get to choose whether politics/society affects your life - it is automatic. There is no clean separation for a lot of people between work and life and it spills over, and even if they intend to not bring it up, it sometimes will.
I say all this not to get you to change your policy, but to keep in mind why others may not be able to have the same one. What will naturally follow from that, is that people invariably look for allies. So if someone asks you to discuss a subject, one that violates your policy, you should really consider whether your policy actually makes sense in the world, or if it only helps you while actively harming those around you.
So if you're an ally, you should consider flexing your policy, and trying to help.
And if you're not, well...then your silence IS complicit, and you shouldn't be surprised if it affects your career accordingly.
It’s absolutely relevant. Whether it’s a public open source project or a fight over sports in a pub, there is a line you cannot cross if the other person is a co-worker. Context is everything.
That is not coercion or appealing to community shaming. Those are both terms that have meanings. Telling people to consider the actions of the developers of a software project is not coercion or an appeal to community shaming.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter. No one's rights were violated. Apparently you have a different definition of what constitutes appropriate public speech for employees than Facebook does, but so what? You're not his employer. This guy said something and got fired for it. That is the system working how everyone wants it to.
What are we discussing? Whether Facebook was justified in firing him? By definition if they didn't fire him for a prohibited reason, it was justified, right? Is your argument that it was "unfair" to fire him for an act of speech?
Mentioning a private conversation on Twitter that didn’t go your way is 100% aggressive. There is no purpose other than to drum up harassment for the person you mentioned.
The purpose is to inform interested people of the reason for the action (or lack thereof). That is the purpose of communication. Beyond that, you are only speculating about secret intentions, with absolutely no evidence.
There is no legitimate reason to inform the public of someone else’s private conversations in this scenario. It’s not the public’s business to begin with.
I’m not speculating about secret intentions. It is the only reason to call out a private conversation that didn’t go your way.
If you're healthcare, you're taught not to trust results because it was published under a brand-name journal.
YES, you should be skeptical, but mostly not at the journal-level. You need to be skeptical at the article-level. That is why it's so important to be actually TRAINED to interpret the studies.
The abstract of a trial is like an "advertisement" for the study. You quickly scan it to see if the study is worth reading. If it is, you make multiple passes of the article, identifying biases, understanding the study context, calculating ratios and numbers, reading through the lens of your own practice, and a bunch of other things.
Healthcare pros are minimally trained in research paper interpretation and are almost all unable to perform the most basic statistical or critical review work.
So yes, I'd argue that brand names are a big problem. You just have to see how proud people are when they are accepted in one of the major publication venues, and the prestige that results.
Except that it on the sole basis of this publication that the WHO and many other health organisations suspended ongoing trials of this molecule. So let's not pretend they would have done the same based on some random obscure journal.
People are losing their heads out there because they don't understand how to interpret studies.
The most infuriating offenders are the media, who have been irresponsible with the presentation of clinical study results. They'll take the results of an observational study and herald it as some revolutionary insight, when in reality the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists interpreting these results are saying "hmm okay, well let's be cautious in our approach and wait for other studies to be done".
Clinical practice should never change, and has never changed (to my knowledge) from the whims of a single OBSERVATIONAL study. But outside medical circles, people will see the results they want to see, and never look past the first 10 words of a headline.
A problem is that different fields that sound similar have very different standards.
Epidemiologists appear to frequently take un-reviewed, un-published papers straight to the press and politicians specifically to change government policy.
Actual doctors, not so much.
What's the difference between an expert in infectious diseases and an expert in treatment of infectious diseases, to the layman? Hardly any.
The media plays a part. Journalists routinely conflate doctors, academics and political activists under the rubric of "experts". Sometimes this is deliberate and overt. Guido Fawkes has had a long running campaign where they expose TV news presenting left-wing activists as neutral experts, without telling anyone about the interviewees backgrounds. As can be seen in this particular incident, that campaign has started to have a small effect, but some journalists don't like being exposed that way!
For people to get better at interpreting studies the first step must be to de-conflate different kinds of "expert". In particular academics need to be referred to as such and separated from the type of practical expert who practices their craft in the real world every day.
> A drug on the market for 60 years (and over the counter in many countries) is “extremely dangerous”?
Yes it can, if used in a different context. You can't generalize stuff in medicine. There are hundreds of factors in play: co-morbidities, genetics, interacting drugs, timelines, dosages, dose delivery forms, routes of entry, previous surgical procedures, demographics...
The Lancet is one of the most impactful journals in medicine, and has played an important role in shaping how medicine is practiced. It is rigorous in its process, but it's not foolproof. So yes, there are some bad studies that come through, but that is why healthcare professionals are TRAINED to interpret studies--we separate all the bullshit from the legitimately useful stuff.
You should see some of the crap that comes through in some of the lower-impact journals.
> The combination of preprint servers + twitter has proven far more effective in looking after humanity’s best interests.
This view is incredibly false and dangerous for so many reasons.
Well if healthcare professionals are trained to interpret study, and separate the wrong from the useful stuff I guess it won't be so hard for The Lancet to hire some of them to review papers... I tend to believe Didier Raoult when he says in his last interview that anybody who works in medecine could easily tell this paper smelled really fishy, and I am sure it would be less costly for The Lancet than the reputation loss they are going to suffer.
Most professionals found Raoult's own published claims of the 100% cure rate of hydrochloroquine combined with azithromycin based on small groups without proper controls fishy, for a start.
I tend to agree with you in whole, with caveat that past contributions don't speak to current value, necessarily. I'm always reminded of the ruthless statement, "God cares not what you have done, but what you are doing". I say it tongue-in-cheek, but there's wisdom to it.
Also, can we all stop describing any view or information as "dangerous"? It sounds like my mom, or religious people from the 80's.
False is one judgement and objectively proven.
"Dangerous" smacks of a censorious nature, which is subjective and, sorry, often based on a conflict of interest/agenda.
I am a healthcare professional, and I've published in one of the Lancet Journals. I understand perfectly fine.
Here's the thing - The Lancet is not impactful. Researchers choose to publish their impactful research in The Lancet. Other researchers donate their time to peer review this research. It is the researchers that have shaped how medicine is practiced, not The Lancet. It is the researchers and the peer reviewers that are rigorous. The Lancet itself is none of these things, it is a business run by people who don't do research. Without the people who actually do the work, or the patients that volunteer for the research, it is nothing. The Lancet, like all top tier journals, has long forgotten this distinction.
The problem isn't healthcare professionals lacking training. Take the Wakefield study. Did any doctor decide to stop offering vaccines because of that study? No. But it had a large impact on a the anti-vax narrative. These top journals have influence far beyond the professional sphere. This is why your suggestion we should give them a free pass is dangerous.
I think it is clearly true that rapid publication and out in the open discussion and peer review is very healthy. I don't see how you could argue otherwise? Why wouldn't I want to be able to read the opinion of someone I respect intellectually eg Andrew Gelman, on a study they have decided to comment on? How is that 'dangerous' if I am a healthcare professional who should be able to critically review a published paper as you suggest? Why do I need to rely on the reviewers the journal has chosen? The Journals want to keep things as they are to maintain their importance and their bottom line. We suffer as a result.
Healthcare pro also. You are right. Academic publishing has become extremely toxic to both science and the healthcare system in general.
A major issue with this is the political and hierarchical benefits of publishing. It encourages professionals to focus on that, to the point that clinical work is now looked down upon and producing loads of shitty papers will propell you to the forefront of the academic star system and make you rich. It's truly cancer for our healthcare system.
But I keep hearing that the definition of good science is "peer reviewed" science. So you are right that it is not the peer review that makes the science, but what about the science us laypeople can rely on? How else can we tell a serious claim from a fantasist one?
The scientific method is hard to explain, and scientists frequently mention peer reviewed papers when talking to the public. I think that this is mainly to dismiss things like health anecdotes that spread around the internet. We don't have time to explain in detail why your uncle's implausible and untested miracle cure for whatever disease is unlikely to work.
There's no easy answer to which sources are reliable, but it helps to look at what reputable organizations say. They typically base their advice on the majority opinions of relevant experts. Scientists are human, so they are bound to make mistakes, but in the whole they have made demonstrable progress in a variety of fields.
Peer reviewing is mostly orthogonal to journal publishing. Publishing in a journal generally requires a peer review, but there's no reason why you need a journal publication to get a peer review. Journals largely exist to manage prestige and career advancement in academia.
As for what science lay people can rely on? I'm not sure there's a simple answer to that question.
I think you either have to find scientists you can trust (which presents a chicken & egg process) or study the field yourself.
That said, there are some good heuristics. Good scientists are able to show their reasoning process and explain why X is bad/good science. Bad ones handwave everything and push credentialism or rely on fallacious reasoning.
For example, I remember long ago when Ars Technica posted a detailed explanation of both what homeopathy is and how we know that it's completely bogus, why "water memory" doesn't and cannot exist, etc.
Meanwhile, in another failure of peer review, Nature published nonsense on "water memory" back in 1988:
How can you criticize The Lancet for a small number of faked studies that have gotten through, but then praise pre-print servers, which are rife with complete nonsense?
Pre-print servers are great for getting results out quickly, but the level of quality control is extremely low. Journals are slower, but have a higher level of quality control.
There is a trade-off between speed and quality control, and both pre-print servers and journals sit at useful points in that trade-off.
Given the pressure to get information that might help fight CoVID-19 out quickly, journals have probably shifted towards the "quick/low-quality" end of the spectrum in the past few months. They'll move back when things calm down.
Specifically I am praising pre-print servers in the current crisis, not in general. I don't propose they can replace journals wholesale in the near future.
The harm done by bad research in the Lancet is colossal because the results are widely read and disseminated, that is obvious isn't it? Pre-print servers are still quite obscure. Anyway, arxiv has been running for a long time with much success in certain fields, and hasn't been overwhelmed with nonsense, so your characterisation of pre-print servers is poorly calibrated and hyperbolic.
Also the Lancet charges money for its products, and can therefore expect to be held to greater account.
So the pre-print servers are better because not a lot of people read pre-prints?
> arxiv has been running for a long time with much success in certain fields, and hasn't been overwhelmed with nonsense, your characterisation of pre-print servers is poorly calibrated and hyperbolic
I just said that the level of quality control on pre-print servers is extremely low - which it is. They check for very little beyond blatant plagiarism and obvious junk (determined within minutes).
I didn't say that pre-print servers are useless. They're very useful, but it's undeniable that prestigious journals apply an additional filter, which is much more exacting.
If you were to pick a random study from a pre-print server, and a random study from the Lancet, which do you think is more likely to be reliable? Which do you think has undergone more thorough peer-review?
You don't seem to be reading my comments.
I agree with you that pre-print servers are not useless, and that prestigious journals are also not useless. Pre-print servers obviously have a lot of questionable content, this is immediately obvious. As I said, they are not a replacement for peer-reviewed journals (except maybe in the early stages of a pandemic, which was my long departed original point). It is also true that good research gets published in prestigious journals. Lots of good research also doesn't get published in prestigious journals because the editor of the Lancet decides it isn't interesting enough, or they chose clueless or callous reviewers who kill the paper in peer-review, or they just accepted a paper with the opposite result last week or for many other arbitrary reasons unrelated to the quality of the research or utility to humanity.
> To think that all of a sudden it became more dangerous was silly and unreasonable.
This is a dangerous view and not a fair take. Drugs CAN become more dangerous when used in a different context. The sheer permutation of prior/current medical conditions, interacting drugs, demographics, genetics, medical procedures, and a bunch of other factors all play into the equation that determines a drug's safety and efficacy profile. This is why we continue to do research. This is why guidelines are constantly shifting. This is why medicine requires years of study.
> The media was so quick to champion it everywhere though.
I definitely agree with this point. The media has caused harm to the population by taking the results of a single observational study, and parading it around like it was some new concrete medical certainty. This is not how professionals operate. We don't flip our practice on the whims of a single OBSERVATIONAL study.
And I emphasize OBSERVATIONAL because most people here don't understand what that entails. Most people here who comment on clinical trials are not even trained to interpret them. Is it randomized/non-randomized? Double-blinded? What did data collection look like? How were results analyzed? What was the patient population? Timelines? Control arm? Placebos? Previous findings? Primary/secondary endpoint? Do you know the difference between a meta-analysis and a systematic review? NNT? Hazards ratios? Odds ratios?
Too many people outside of medicine think they know how to interpret a study, when in reality they have no idea what they're looking at and cherry-pick the interesting sentences that they're looking for.
> I know I'm not going to trust the Lancet or the NEJM ever again.
This is not a fair take. The journals are responsible for reviewing and publishing the most influential clinical research in the world. Occasionally a bad study makes its way in due to falsified data or other illegitimate factors. Health care professionals are well-aware of this, which is why we are trained to interpret studies, and be conservative in the face of radical findings like this.
If anyone has a problem with the Lancet or NEJM, they should see some of the mess found in lower-impact journals.
I did not agree with the conclusions of the paper, but I fell prey of the same bias that many others had: it was "published in Lancet" and "those journals have strict peer review".
The lesson I learned is that I will always scrutinize papers I read with a more critical eye, regardless of where they were published in.
It just so happens that a core principle of crypto, "anonymity", allows scams without consequence.
The only force holding us back from hurting each other in the real world is the possibility that our identity can be tied to our actions.