patrick.net

Posted previously I think.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/is-scientific-publication-a-discipline

but then the optimizers came and publication became both doctrinaire and big business. many journals were “captured” by ideologues who turned peer review into a form of ideological purity test and this found confluence with reliance upon government grants to perform the studies in the first place to the extent that entire fields became feudal fiefdoms working backwards from forgone conclusions to find ways to “prove” them because that’s what the money wanted. discovery became dogma.

and “peer review” became a potent tool to gatekeep this phenomenon. “we, the experts will only allow publication of that which agrees with the theory we have previously put forth” is where science goes to die. it’s stultification and stagnation. but it’s also VERY politically useful to a certain sort of technocrat seeking to gin up validation for policy choices. and so of course they seek, by sleight of hand, to make “peer review” synonymous with “proof” and every time someone on the internet demands “was it peer reviewed!?!” as though anything not so sifted could not plausibly have value, it simply digs the pseudoscientific pit of guild systems defending doctrine deeper.

past a point, it essentially substitutes “have the political commissars approved this?” for “scientific method” and alas, very few people seem to notice. ...

and as the very same AI that makes it so easy to catch university presidents for plagiarism spreads, the tide is going out and quite a lot of people are turning out not to have any pants on.




... the whole industry and vocation is under fire.

good.

this is the reputation economy at work and like most things, it should be a market, not an oligopoly and certainly not a dictatorship.

science that cannot be criticized can never be sound.

how would you even know?

if the claims stand up, then challenge makes them stronger.

if they don’t, then overturn them and move on.

adversarial debate is the only way and systems that evict you or refuse to fund you if you challenge then are the antithesis of scientific method.

@Patrick pretty sure scientists have been "scientists now" forever. You should see what they did to the guy that suggested cleaning your hands for child birth.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/principles-saturday-june-7-2024-c

Science was a thinking toolbox. It held a hammer of skepticism, a wrench of logic, and a screwdriver of reason. It was designed to help humans learn more about the natural laws governing our perceptible universe. You couldn’t touch science. You couldn’t see it. It’s not tangible. You can’t really put it in a toolbox, or a hot pocket, or anywhere else.

But like the Hulk, ’science’ evolved. It morphed, emerging after centuries from its intangible chrysalis of rational inquiry, revealed as something new, something tangible, something that had its own separate existence. It became Science with a capital ’S’. And Science was something to believe in, like Santa Clone or the Tooth Fauci.

Belief in capital-S Science required faith, not reason. And faith is something that brooks no questions.

Faith and belief are binaries. They are litmus tests. Either you believed in Science, or you didn’t—there was no middle ground. If you didn’t believe in Science, put your faith in Science, and trust in Science, you clearly were anti-Science.

You were, in fact, a Science denier.

The ‘Science denier’ label was, of course, always a blood libel. It was intended to evoke the sulphuric odors of antisemitic Holocaust denial. Ironically, shredding small-s science’s pragmatic roots, Science irrationally injected muddy belief and politics into the previously sterile corridors of rational philosophy.

It didn’t make sense. Calling people “anti-Science” always bore the same logical weight as calling atheists anti-God, or calling UFO skeptics anti-UFO.

(This irrational train would shortly pass through the rabbit hole tunnel and arrive at an Alice in Wonderland station where the gift shop sells books like Anti-Racist Baby. But that’s a different discussion.)

Science’s zealous and devoted high priests were the billionaires, bureaucrats, and bioengineers. Science’s sacrament was the high-tech vaccine that, like baptism, must be unquestioningly received by evangelistic believers in a public demonstration designed to prove their faith. Science’s original sin was disbelief.

Many career scientists with impeccable credentials who asked the wrong questions were branded anti-Scientific and ritualistically excommunicated from the ranks of true believers.

It’s easy to mistake the high priests of this new religion of Science as the architects and authors of the religion itself. Blaming the pandemic’s fervent administrators is natural, since they were the visible face of its worst excesses. But this comfortable conclusion overlooks the vast community of maniacal adherents.

Politics, they say, is downstream from culture.

Observe the global nature of the pandemic response. The new religion of Science took the world in its iron grip, and over a few days, every single world government signed a legal loyalty oath requiring them all to respond in exactly the same way.

But universal agreement is not human. Humans never easily agree on anything. They never all agree, even when people are all aligned and same-minded. Anyone who’s ever volunteered on the homeowner’s association board knows exactly what I mean.

How then did the entire world fall into line in a few days (apart from short-lived exceptions that more fully prove the rule)? How did they achieve universal agreement to supplant the long-standing, inarguable goods of truth, transparency, and trust with a brand new lodestar, a new universal faith offering redemption to the human race — Science?

It’s equisitely tempting, comforting even, to blame the high priests of the pandemic — the billionaires, bureaucrats, and bioengineers — global agreement has never before been achieved, regardless of money or military power.

We must look for a non-human cause.

In early 2021, I published my most widely read post, which immediately went viral, got me canceled, and got C&C purged from every single publishing platform on the same day. It was a letter to the Church, addressed to pastors. I advised spiritual shepherds to stop falsely telling their flocks that the vaccines stopped transmission, and most of all, to stop preaching that taking the jabs was a moral imperative.

I explained the World had been possessed by a demonic Spirit of Fear, manifested in a substitute religion of Science with its own rituals, sacraments, and high priests. (Biblical rabbit hole: compare Zechariah 1:7-11 and 6 with Revelation 5:6 and 6:1-7, and discuss.) This diabolical Spirit of Science displaced everything in its satanic swath of destruction, casting churches into the non-essential abyss, instantly rendering them useless artifacts of the old order.

It was not coincidental that in the United States, the only lawful protection from the legalistic sacrament of mandates was a religious exemption.

The good news today is that, after recovering its footing after the shock of the initial onslaught, the rational world fought back. Now we are at war. Because it involves Spirits and not reason, it is a spiritual war.

And a spiritual war requires a spiritual defense.

Every inexplicable post-pandemic development in the world, like all the wars — both real military wars and insane cultural wars — plus the rumors of wars, and downstream global effects like worldwide inflation, are merely by-products of this spiritual war.

If that is true, how then should Christian legislators respond? The legislative response is to restore to government the essential Biblical principles of truth, transparency, and trust. The legislative branch must overthrow the false Religion of Science, along with all its unholy sacraments and performative legalism. Don’t fall into the slough of despond. Focus on those three positive values.

It’s unnecessary to grapple with Science’s made-up sins of misinformation, conspiracy theory, or its pseudo-scientific forced orthodoxy.

Government should always be truthful and should never lie. Government should always be transparent — sunlight being the best disinfectant — and should never act in secret. And government should always act in ways that cause citizens to trust it more, and never act in ways that destroy the essential trust required by democratic systems based on the notion that citizens govern themselves.

These arguments are uncontroversial and inarguable. Cling to them. Truth, transparency, and trust are universally recognized values. They aren’t the exclusive jurisdiction of Christians. They are fundamental, inarguable principles preserving freedom, individual rights, and human flourishing.

It is time to restore truth, transparency, and trust to government. It is time to reject the false premise that Science can somehow redeem humanity’s sins. It is time to focus legislative efforts on restoring real values, to force government to live up to its own standards, and to expose the false promises of pseudo-scientific deception, however painful or embarrassing that might ultimately be.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-blue-wall-wednesday-june-12-2024

Way back in 2009, Marcia Angell, the executive editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, dropped this truth bomb in an article she published in the New York Review of Books:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Ten years ago in 2015, Richard Horton, chief editor of top journal The Lancet, also raised the alarm, and he was even more pessimistic than Marcia:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
A turn toward darkness! And just in time for the pandemic. It’s too bad nobody listened. That dose of scientific skepticism might have been very helpful back when the pandemic modelers swamped us with fake studies exaggerating the risks of covid mortality by orders of magnitude.

But the Journal, and all the downstream articles also wringing their hands about the loss of trust in Science, overlooked the more meaningful problem. During the pandemic, when fake studies based on “models” filled the journals hyping massive covid mortality — which were then used to justify the draconian pandemic mitigation laws — journal editors were systematically canceling any submitted studies with different conclusions.

You can argue about “study mills” and “pharma capture” all you want, but the truth is the journal editors failed. They earn their salaries as gatekeepers with the duty to ensure fair peer review. They are expected to actually read the studies to make sure they make sense. They failed. Worse, they reason they failed to do their job was on purpose, because the editors decided their job was not to ensure good science, but to enforce the official narrative.

But the narrative was wrong.

Given the stakes and the dollars involved, and how the system markets “peer review” as some kind of false scientific gold standard, of course pharma will try to get its fake studies published. Fake studies mint billions. But, if “peer review” is to be used as the gold standard, then editors like Wiley must ensure their products are not just a shiny artifice.

They are selling us fool’s gold. The good news is the whole rotten frame is falling down on them. And what started it tipping over was how far they overreached during covid. It’s another unexpected covid blessing.

https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1832323979639505211

Patrick says

But the narrative was wrong.

The narrative wasn't 'wrong', it was a planned mass murder. In that sense, it was right for the perpetrators because that is what they wanted.

The_Deplorable says

https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1832323979639505211

I used to put pushpins into the wall of my cube at Schwab at 4pm where the sun made an X from the window frame shadow. Was something like that shape.

A couple more quotes from Medical Journal editors:

“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analysis and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends….” Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet

“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical (and vaccine) industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”  – Arnold Seymour Relman, MD, Harvard Professor of Medicine and former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

https://x.com/RefugeOfSinner5/status/1849797940409418035

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-space-to-create-wealth

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1853063328152653966