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The most depressing experience of the current outbreak of COVID-19 has been the proliferation of armchair virologists, epidemiologists and population geneticists, most of whom seem to have had no training in these disciplines whatsoever. Nor in any science. Nor indeed in even the rudiments of logic, most of which have been available since the Middle Ages. it is a point which we tried to address in our post If you are not a virologist, just shut up...[sic] on 1st May.
Now the Editor of New Scientist* has said it much, much better. We therefore take the awful liberty of posting direct from their leader article from 9 May 2020
The covid-19 pandemic has upended many of the things that we once took for granted, but perhaps the most insidious is what it is doing to our ability to detect fact from fiction.
Science remains the best tool we have f-though by no means a perfect one -for creating reliable knowledge………………………it is becoming hard at times to sort good science from bad, and worthwhile hypotheses from conjecture, hyperbole and nonsense.
The editorial expands on this gloomy theme, then links to a detailed article by Graham Lawton* called “Science in Crisis” in the print version, which we link below.
Graham’s article is so very good that we shall extract his “suspect science” checklist and discuss it in a blog to follow shortly
#newscientist #coronavirus #covid19 #grahamlawton #hydroxychloroquine
Learning, Science and Society 