Posted on 03/07/2014 5:21:18 PM PST by No One Special
I wrote in the John Maynard Keynes post about the hollowness and “fakeness” of Western civilization today. In case you didn’t see it, KD had a post up a few days ago about so-called “peer reviewed” scientific journals and how they are nothing of the sort. Utterly fake articles made by automatic word generators that literally string random polysyllabic words together into sentence structures – in other words, NONSENSE – are being regularly published in these journals. An investigative study found over 120 such articles over the past few years.
“Peer reviewed” science and academia is a LIE. Papers are published and certified as “peer reviewed” that have literally never been read by ANYONE, including the editors of the scientific journals. And yes, this echoes the fact that the so-called “laws” being passed and used to destroy civilization are likewise never actually read by anyone, most particularly the psychopath whore politicians who vote on them.
This has been a recurring theme of this website since its inception over ten years ago. Guys, I’m telling you, stupid people and/or frauds are running the planet. In fact, civilization is so far gone that the higher-ranking a person is, be it in academia, business, politics or the Church, the less likely it is that they have any degree of competence or genuine skill. This is a lesson that I have learned over and over and over again. The very people in positions of authority that we all desperately want to believe are not just competent but truly knowledgable and wise, are, almost without exception, bluffing or openly incompetent. The truly competent are marginalized at best, and destroyed at worst.
If you still believe in any way that higher-ups in the government, military, business world, universities or the Church are in any way competent to solve the unprecedented problems that humanity faces today (assuming that they want the problems solved at all), you are operating on a false premise that is so utterly contrary to reality that it defies quantification or even description.
Recognizing and acknowledging this sad and terrifying reality is utterly, utterly critical. You MUST have an accurate observation and picture of the battlespace in order to have any hope of formulating, much less executing effective tactics. You all think that you are battling veritable giants and geniuses, when in fact you are battling a cadre of puny imbeciles and obvious frauds.
The main quality these puny imbeciles and frauds have that is allowing them to roll over Western Civilization essentially uncontested is BOLDNESS.
They act. They play offense. But more importantly, YOU DON’T. Yes, they play dirty and we can’t. But the root problem isn’t that they are beating us by playing dirty. The root problem is that we aren’t playing at all. We are fielding no team whatsoever – not even a clean offense. We aren’t even on the field. We are all over on the sidelines curled into the fetal position, eyes shut tight, trying desperately to rock ourselves to sleep – while a team of five slobbering fools marches uncontested down the field over and over again in a game of 11 man football. So yes, a cadre of frauds and imbeciles can absolutely roll over an entire civilization IF and ONLY IF the civilization is so weak and whipped, so steeped in an effeminate desire to deny reality and avoid confrontation (aka, “be nice”), that the said civilization will surrender itself to said frauds and imbeciles to avoid any sort of masculine confrontation of reality, much less the execution of bold corrective action.
In short, we didn’t “lose” our nation and our civilization – we forfeited it.
It is indeed ironic that truly great men spring from cultures who don’t particularly NEED them, and those cultures that desperately need good men to lead them are all but incapable of producing them.
And this is why we pray, unceasingly, for the Divine Assistance and intervention in these especially dark days.
I went to the article and another article that was referenced and I didn’t see anything about the specific journals where this occurred.
So should everybody, and that's one reason why God lets it get so damned dark. To make it super obvious that He really is the only answer.
This answers the age-old question of whether the world is run by wise men bluffing or idiots who really mean it.
“Peer reviewed” science and academia is a LIE. Papers are published and certified as “peer reviewed” that have literally never been read by ANYONE, including the editors of the scientific journals.
Really?
Where are these articles? References, please.
I realize that to the layperson, the articles that we scientists write and publish may seem like utter gibberish, but that is only because we are writing in a very technical language that took us years to learn. Like any language, if you don't know scientific jargon, it sounds like nonsense, but that does not mean it is nonsense to those who understand it.
I read peer-reviewed scientific publications every day. I have yet to find one that is nonsense.
You must have missed these:
Fake Research Papers: How Did More Than 120 ‘Gibberish’ Computer-Generated Studies Get Published?
Here’s the article referenced by the KD article she references:
You were probably already aware of this one, but it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
The nonsense does not happen in every journal or every science. I have been a reviewer several times and I can assure you that I read each paper.
I will reject incremental papers reporting merely on progress, weak science papers, papers written so the department head will fund a trip to Hawaii (If that’s where the conference is), and papers I simply cannot understand or that don’t seem to be science papers. Papers I can’t understand I’ll usually toss to someone else in case my lack of understanding is rooted in ignorance.
I’ll need to see some examples of nonsense machine-written papers.
Then there is the Turbo Encabulator, which I encourage you all to look up. Also see Journal of Irreproducible Results.
The “paper” I generated was quite obviously fake. For example, one of the trial runs described in the “Dogfooding Papaya” section was “(2) we measured RAM speed as a function of optical drive speed on an Atari 2600.”
Without telling my son that the “paper” was randomly generated, I showed it to him. He skimmed through and pronounced the paper “BS.”
Now he is generating his own “paper.”
Re Sokal affair, from article, “At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review “
so it’s hardly a failure of peer review.
What I see in the article is that most of those fake papers were conference proceedings. Typically, submissions to conferences have a very low bar to publication.
The article also said that over 120 of these fake conference proceedings were published in five years. That’s a minuscule number compared to the millions of scientific publications every year. It is also a small subset of the 20,000 fraudulent papers estimated to be published every year.
Nah. But it was very funny.
Isn't that a problem in itself?
Oh yes indeed! The whole “gibberish paper” issue seems to be a joke played on the “establishment”.
“millions of scientific publications every year.
Isn’t that a problem in itself?”
What, that there are millions of scientific pubs, and perhaps 20,000 fraudulent ones?
Hardly cause for concern because most get caught later when nobody can replicate the results.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.