Tag Archives: science

The Corruption of Science – beware of the white lab coat

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | May 26, 2015

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” – Richard Feynman

Scientist in Lab Coat

I’m a scientist at heart, so why do I love to ridicule my fellow scientists so much? I think it’s because of their highly exalted and unassailable position in our so called modern era (1946 – present) and because so many are sellouts who serve the selfish agendas of the moneyed “powers that shouldn’t be” and more particularly many serve down-right evil corporations that just happen to sign the front side of their paychecks, provide grants and donate huge sums to our likewise exalted and corrupted universities … and it’s also partly due to the fact so many people have been trained that if someone in a lab coat says something then it has to be true. Turn off your brain… case settled.

Though many scientists are waking up to the systemic fraud and deception throughout our scientific community, the average citizen is completely unaware.

And it appears that the ‘Scientific American’ wants to have it both ways. First they are more than willing to point out the fraud, yet they are themselves a big part of the fraud perpetrated on the hapless public as evidenced by their two articles below. One supports GMO with trickery and sleight of hand while the other article complains about ‘An Epidemic of False Claims’ in scientific studies. You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Scientific American.

I’ve been reading the Scientific American since I was twelve, yes twelve years old; though I can’t claim I understood what I was reading at that age. With all the colorful diagrams and mathematical formulas, I just knew they were talking about something important and wanted to know what it was.

So what is the evidence that the once exalted Scientific American is one of the worst offenders? If you read their article below in support of GMOs, you will discover that they have munged or commingled several terms thereby obfuscating their meanings to suit their preconceived conclusions.

I really get the promise of GMO providing food to the hungry (though recent data has disproved this benefit), but I would prefer to use artificial or natural selection, not transginic bioengineering using gene-splicing and gene insertion from different species. I just don’t trust Monsanto and now I don’t trust SA. I think this article represents the best of bad science: The SA article cleverly commingles several terms: Selective breeding, Artificial selection, Bioengineering and GMO and would therefore have the reader believe they are the same. They are not. And there is a huge difference between Cisgenic and Transgenic. I would prefer Cisgenic only because I don’t think man is smart enough to have a clue about what he is doing. Of course we need to have GMO labeling. I don’t care if my food has been selectively bred: examples are the Delicious apple, the Hereford cow, etc. because in selective breeding you are breeding cow to cow or apple to apple; NOT cow to virus or cow to rat or pig or cow to cockroach…or some other unknown concoction Monsanto may have created. I want to know if there is virus, bacteria, transgenic DNA/RNA in my food and I want to know if there is Glyphosate a.k.a. Roundup® on my food and I want to know if it is safe. Another undisclosed issue is that when GMO corn pollinates adjacent fields of heirloom corn, it destroys for all time the genetics of that heirloom corn. On a global stage, this could be devastating.

Another glaring flaw in this SA article is that they seem content on referring to “other” authorities. Just give me the science … after all aren’t you Scientific American?

Scientific American comes out in favor of GMOs
By Ashutosh Jogalekar | September 6, 2013

From Scientific American: An Epidemic of False Claims
Competition and conflicts of interest distort too many medical findings
By John P. A. Ioannidis | May 17, 2011

Scientific American Goes Full Anti-Science
September 12, 2020/ Francis Menton

And from the Lancet, we have the following …

www.thelancet.com
Vol 385 April 11, 2015 by Richard Horton
Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? (PDF)
“A lot of what is published is incorrect.” I’m not allowed to say who made this remark because we were asked to observe Chatham House rules. We were also asked not to take photographs of slides. Those who worked for government agencies pleaded that their comments especially remain unquoted, since the forthcoming UK election meant they were living in “purdah”—a chilling state where severe restrictions on freedom of speech are placed on anyone on the government’s payroll. Why the paranoid concern for secrecy and non-attribution? Because this symposium—on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, held at the Wellcome Trust in London last week—touched on one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.”

HughPickens.com … writes in today’s Slash Dot the following brilliant little ditty…

“Richard Horton writes that a recent symposium on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research discussed one of the most sensitive issues in science today: the idea that something has gone fundamentally wrong with science (PDF), one of our greatest human creations. 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. According to Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, a United Kingdom-based medical journal, the apparent endemicity of bad research behavior is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world or retrofit hypotheses to fit their data.”

“Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative. Tony Weidberg says that the particle physics community now invests great effort into intensive checking and rechecking of data prior to publication following several high-profile errors. By filtering results through independent working groups, physicists are encouraged to criticize. Good criticism is rewarded. The goal is a reliable result, and the incentives for scientists are aligned around this goal. “The good news is that science is beginning to take some of its worst failings very seriously,” says Horton. “The bad news is that nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.”

The Corruption of Science. The Hydroxychloroquine Lancet Study Scandal. Who Was Behind It? Anthony Fauci’s Intent To Block HCQ on Behalf of Big Pharma

Additional Reading from ClearNFO:

And from skeptiko…

Why you, me, and our neighbors have a distrust of science and New York Times science journalists

SCIENTIFIC REGRESS by William A. Wilson May 2016

TED Talks

‘Thought Leader’ gives talk that will inspire your thoughts | This is That | CBC

Related ClearNFO thoughts on science and religion:

Misc Musings on the surety of science or why I am skeptical of ‘Well-Established’ facts.

4 Replies

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | December 12, 2014

$Math-for-Piano-Performance$ Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion were proven science for 100s of years and helped put a man on the moon and are still used today … only one problem: they are incorrect. Newton’s laws of motion, together with his law of gravitation, provide a useful basis for explaining the motion of everyday objects under everyday conditions. However, when applied to extremely high speeds or extremely small objects, Newton’s laws break down.

How about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? It put a big crack down the middle of the well-behaved universe.

How about Zeno’s paradox Achilles and the tortoise? How about the a priori? The fallacy of logic: If A=B and B=C, then A=C, right? But the entire logic is based on an unexamined assumption of the IF which is the a priori which can never be proven.

How about the Precambrian explosion of life forms in the geologic record?

How about the three sets of laws that don’t agree? The big laws (Relativity), the medium laws (Newtonian) and the really small laws (Quantum). They are all correct except when they are not.

In ancient times mathematicians ran into a logical brick wall which no one could overcome. This had to do with the interplay of the linear, logical, discontinuous mind-set of the day –that many of us today still possess– and the reality of infinity. Corollaries to this conundrum would be the asymptote (y – 1/x), Zeno’s paradox or just trying to find the area under a curve for y = x^2 or y equals x squared.

The area of a square or rectangle is easy enough to determine. If the box is 4 ft. by 5 ft. you just multiply 4 X 5 and the area is 20 sq. ft. If however you want to determine the area under a curve defined for example by the equation of y = x^2 (Note: y is also called the function at x or f(x)), you can subdivide the area under the curve into smaller and smaller boxes but you can never determine the exact area under the curve because you can never make the boxes small enough since there are an infinite number of box sizes before you can get them small enough to determine the exact area under the curve.

The Calculus solved this problem by saying that the limit of f(x) is exactly = to the area as the change in x goes to zero. So, we never really get there, we just say that the limit or the point beyond which it can go is limited by the curve.

Mathematics…is man’s way of cutting up and compartmentalizing the world he is able to experience into digestible units and then describing relationships that seem to have some meaningful use. The result of this activity can produce useful understanding and some ability to control / manipulate our environment.

Science…I believe in the empirical method. I also believe that many in our scientific community have let their emotions and political point of view turn their science into a religion. You either believe certain “well-established facts” or you do not get tenure or you are ridiculed or…. These “well-established facts” represent a dogma or a credo similar to any religion. The result is that many place their minds in a box and their ability to take in new information and process this information critically and honestly is therefore necessarily aberrated.

Additional reading …

“However, accelerating expansion requires a mysterious source of energy in space acting against gravity, dubbed “dark energy.” Calculations show that the energy required is equivalent to 73% of the total mass-energy of the universe! Historians will look back at science today with disbelief and amusement at the ‘science’ of today. Following equally mysterious ‘black holes’ and ‘dark matter,’ if we continue to discover darkness at the present rate we shall soon know nothing!” A Nobel Prize for the Dark Side

Defying textbook science, study finds new role for proteins

On Religion…

5 Replies

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | October 18, 2009

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Many of us claim to know the most about that which we know the least. This aberration can result in feeling and acting self righteous. Self righteous thought manifests as a temporary or sometimes chronic condition of being “self-righteous”; the particular target of this self righteousness can be related to an emotional charge that hasn’t been thoroughly processed through the intellect…in other words, some people may have a predisposition to this state of mind due to partially processed information. Whether a character defect, lazy-brain or an uninformed brain I think most would see self righteousness as disagreeable despite the source or the object of self righteousness. I would guess that we all could be or have been subject to this repugnant state of being. Not sure the mechanics of how we succumb but it might be that it can reside beneath our awareness, bypassing our normal “bull shit protector” criteria for knowledge also known as our epistemic system; possibly through acceptance of faith as a legitimate source of knowledge or scientific theory as immutable fact. In defense of religion, I hope to prove, that faith is a normal and necessary condition of man while scientific theories are tools to improve man’s condition.

I believe that I can also prove that much of science is a religion.

Someone once said that “all politics are local”. If we peal back the obvious meaning of this statement a bit, there is more to see. First, the obvious meaning is that people vote on what is directly effecting them before considering the broader dynamics of national or global politics, for example. A second derivative might point to our tendency to myopic points of view wherein we are limited by our own personal experiences. If we, for example, have had limited experiences with one partition of a particular religion and this experience was not a satisfying experience we would naturally tend to leverage this direct experience and along with our judgment or invalidation therein include the entire offending belief system of which our experience is merely a part—possibly an aberrant part. This judgment could be accurate or not but this method definitely saves time. This experience may have produced fear, disgust or even hatred if you have felt bamboozled. If however after this limited, unsatisfactory experience there still exists somehow an interest in further evaluation, more data must be gathered to make a more accurate assessment.

If you accept my premise that roughly 80% of any population are “sheeple” or followers, then you might share my appreciation that weekly “Church-going” offers an incredible reoccurring opportunity for the work-a-day average folk to partake in a pause to consider something outside of their normal diet of sitcoms, football and movies…to consider the profound, the supernatural, the philosophical…to ask questions and to contemplate their existence. Of course they have guides on this weekly tour and they have structure. In Christiandom we call the guides preachers and the structure is a combination of tradition, dogma and liturgy. Of course there are many out-of-band sub-currents weaving in and out of this dynamic weekly communion of the “sheeple”. Examples would be the tour guide’s need for money and validation from an ever-increasing flock and you have the social element of friendships, etc.

So what are some of the benefits of church going? The first one I have already mentioned…the meeting once a week to ponder matters of the profound. You might consider your fellows uninformed, unenlightened or buffoons but you share much with these mere mortals, I assure you. For the astute, there is much more, I think. The astute have the opportunity to directly observe, appreciate and try to understand the interplay of the archetypes on display; to breathe the aroma of the sublime and seek to understand the emotional and metaphysical content. Other benefits are a sense of belonging to a group, joy, happiness and opportunities to interact socially. For me, the “be attitudes” and the sermon on the mount represent pearls of wisdom that have produce much good thought and understanding in my life and have also stimulated my intellectual curiosity on my quest for understanding.

Ah…but you say this stuff is for the weak-minded and cannot be true. Evolution, science and the belief in my own intellectual powers are the mooring by which I will secure my ship.

What if I could prove to you that faith was pervasive and more importantly a necessary part of the human condition? There are too many examples in every day life. You believe that this metal box with wheels you call a car will get you to work safely or you would probably just stay in bed that day, right? You believe that there is something you can do to improve your current status in life or you would just stay in bed and never get up. You believe that if you will your finger to move or your hand to grasp a glass of water that it will obey…what if you didn’t believe? Would your hand tremble? Faith is a necessary part of everyone’s life every day. The person who commits suicide is the eternal optimist because he believes that the next world or the lack thereof will be better than this. So belief is the natural state of being and there is nothing wrong with believing.

So how do you know what you believe is true? You know the same way you know all things… by experience.

Additional Reading:

In Pursuit of Lady Truth

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