patrick.net

None of the Democratic Senators who attacked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. demonstrated any understanding of his character or of the intellectual journey he has been on for the last 25 years. Our understanding of nature has NEVER—not once in history—advanced by embracing orthodoxy.

Throughout history, heterodox thinkers have been compelled by their voracious curiosity to learn new things. Making new discoveries and gaining new insight is invariably a process of trial and error. Long ago, Mr. Kennedy recognized maladies in the environment and public health of the American homeland, and he set out to correct them. ...

At any given moment in history, the safest posture has always been to embrace the prevailing orthodoxy. Each era’s ruling class has little interest in insights that could threaten their established order.

Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story yesterday morning, and if you haven't read it yet, you should. It's about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible. ...

That's what we're seeing here, and a 300-page dossier has been assembled with examples of it. Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals: a great deal of effort seems to have gone into carefully doctoring, cleaning, beautifying, and spicing up these papers digitally. After looking over examples, I find the evidence convincing and impossible to explain (at least in my mind) as anything other than sustained, deliberate acts of deception lasting for decades. Hundreds of them. Again and again. The dossier references 132 papers with apparent problems. ...

How many people do we need to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize? What a mess.

At this point, I am going to work on the basis that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. It would take extraordinary and dramatic evidence to convince me otherwise, and I doubt that anything like that is coming.

Recently the independent physicist and YouTube star Sabine Hossenfelder managed to whack the hornet’s test of her erstwhile colleagues with a short address bearing the bluntly provocative title Should We Defund Academia?

Hossenfelder’s argument is essentially that scientific research funding in the United States – and in the Western world more broadly, as the same model has been adopted everywhere – is essentially a centrally planned, Soviet-style economy, which has inevitably produced all of the same pathological outcomes that one would expect, namely overinvestment and thus overproduction in some areas, at the expense of underinvestment and underproduction in others. ...

Hossenfelder’s model of diminishing returns through malinvestment neatly explains the declining breakthrough rate, in which disruptive scientific papers – works that change the paradigms of their fields so thoroughly that citations to the new works entirely eclipse citations to the previously foundational papers that they supplant – have all but disappeared from the contemporary academic landscape.




Scientific breakthroughs tend to come from the creative application of novel insights from one field of science to another; they tend to require an extended period of quiet contemplation on the part of the researcher who makes them; and they tend to be intensely resisted by established authorities. The current centralized national grant system for research funding inhibits all three of these.

Cross-fertilization is made more difficult by the aforementioned malinvestment: you can’t draw on new insights from other fields if those other fields aren’t advancing because no one is spending money on them.

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1908030521302471131