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

Promoting peaceful debate is arguably a core aspect of scientific integrity. My impression is that the author would be just as miffed by someone spreading misinformation about GMOs that leads to left-wing thuggery against crop research institutes.

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.”

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.

> 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.

> 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

If you don't take vaccines you are a fucktard

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).

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.