A comment sent to me:
“If the research field does not accommodate or tolerate dissenting views (and it does not) then according to Karl Popper (1958) there is no real “science” happening.”
My response:
“I agree with you wholeheartedly “in theory” that science is not developing now as it ideally should. What happens ideally or correctly in a crisis? I can tell you, however, from my vantage point it is advancing extremely quickly, albeit with many mistakes made along the way. It’s certainly a mistake not to have intelligent debates with outliers or to censor them. I’m so sorry that is happening. But I’m sure it is a given that in a time of crisis many people are likely to deceive to further their own agenda. I’m sure that some of them are, although I know that many of them are not lying (yet certainly some of them are misguided). The reaction to censor is seen by most scientists as a way to protect from disinformation (misinformation that is deliberately spread) which can be quite dangerous. I am also sure that many of the scientists who are the most qualified to debate dissenting views are overworked to the point of having lost sleep. It is not the best time to spend time in debates so the public can know all sides of the issues. I am firmly convinced that it is important for all of us to learn the scientific evidence in as unbiased a way as possible. I am trying to do this as well as I can on my site. I am trying to learn about alternate theories so I can know what is going on there, but I cannot get into explaining them fairly on my site at this time. (Hopefully maybe some of them soon.) What I am doing now is to explain widely accepted theories and the new findings that I can recognize are consistent with scientific “facts” that have stood the test of time.”