I want my flying car. They promised!
The scientific method has been sacrificed on the altar of
political correctness and quick easy profits.
We went to the Bay Area Science Festival. Most of the displays were environmental ideology falsely displayed as science. If the presenters were asked hard science questions (many were kids, a little unfair, but they were put forth as the “scientist”) they could not answer. There was too much carbon in the atmosphere, but no one could say what percentage of the atmosphere is oxygen, hydrogen, or carbon. And no one could say why a one to two year cycle for so-called bio-fuels was good but a multi-million year natural cycle for carbon based fuels bad.
There was very little hard science. It was mostly a display of what type of science related jobs are out there. It was ok, but clearly slanted to anyone who wasn’t on the save everything band wagon.
It is conducted by humans, and humans are just bags of emotions walking around.
search for Truth.
A very high percentage of studies first performed cannot be replicated but they are published and funded. so make money while you can.
search for “scientific study fraud” and “scientific study replicated” or replication and just read the headlines.
Here’s a good one:
http://www.science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/139231/majority-of-landmark-cancer-studies-cannot-be-replicated
‘Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.’ - Thomas Edison
If Edison were around today it would be “the other eight-five percent are liberals”.
In truth, science is still very productive. Its biggest problem is science fraud, and the unwillingness to unmask it, end the careers of the fraudsters, and get nothing in return for doing this.
I know a dentist who spent the first part of his career vetting medical science papers. He learned that just by reading them he could tell if they were faking their data, as well as their degree of confidence in their conclusions.
Fakes must write a certain way to cover their rear ends in case it all blows up. The most successful fakes are those that are mentally too far gone to care. The middle group are fakes that band together to produce data supporting predetermined conclusions. But they get so caught up in their fraud that eventually the weak link breaks and the whole operation is unmasked.
Degree of confidence, while more legitimate, is often subtler, and shows that the scientist is caught up in the expectations of others. Likewise this indicates that “basic science” isn’t enough, that to be a success they must innovate “technologies”. But the two things are often “apples and oranges”.