Posted on 10/24/2020 10:32:14 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
What is science? Has it changed from past to present? Is it still working? The coronavirus pandemic has put a spotlight on the question of science as a whole and biology and drug research in particular. Now, the popular narrative is that if only we listened to the scientists, we would have prevented this, presumably contrasting scientists against “politicians” and perhaps some un-specified “non-expert” others. The pandemic is happening against a completely unprecedented backdrop of censorship of what seems to me like normal-people discussion about the effects of different drugs and therapies. The CEO of YouTube has specifically said that the platform would block people suggesting vitamin C has beneficial effects on helping one recover from coronavirus. This is, of course, done “in the name of” science, because everything ought to be done in the name of science in the West. My current view is that large numbers of fields which are considered “scientific” in the West are a complete mess and lack the essential feature of what it means to be a science in the first place....
Again, that’s not to say that all censorship is unjustified. There can be harmful misinformation, but one key role of any future academy must be to define a formal Overton Window for the set of hypotheses that are “within” the realm of scientific discourse. If it’s a plausible hypothesis for an experiment, it’s likely plausible to be discussed in public....
The American ideal of a citizen informed enough to make decisions in the voting booth is in direct contrast with a citizen who needs to be disciplined for making obvious logical conclusions about vitamins and virus relationships.....
(Excerpt) Read more at americanmind.org ...
One interesting point made further down that could have persuasive value in your discussions with expert worshippers:
"Other sciences suffer from major problems as well. You can tell a particular field has issues by asking, “has society gotten better or worse on the factors studied by the science? And have we done so by looking at official advice or ignoring it?” The obvious example is nutrition. Obesity, as well as a host of other nutrition-related problems, has increased in America. If the entire nation is failing, then how good can the scientific establishment of nutrition be?"
Phooey on science. The Earth is really flat and gravity sucks.
Institutional “science” is too politically and financially conflicted to be honest these days.
“Dark matter” is a great example of how they just pull stuff out of their hindquarters to pretend failed theories haven’t failed. And we end up spending billions to chase already-falsified propositions.
When they built a $5B “gravitational wave” (another fiction) detector - a functionally unreproduceable experiment - and BUILT IN the ability to produce fraudulent data, that should have sent alarm bells ringing everywhere.
Science is not ‘truth, it is the ‘search for truth’.
Scientific findings are subject to test and may survive testing in certain contexts under specific conditions. For example, should a finding in physics be established and accepted under standard temperature and pressure, it does not necessarily generalize to say the Earth’s Moon.
Science is useful in the context under the conditions for which it applies.
We who practice and respect science are faced with an aberrant growth in the number of incidents of scientific misconduct. Just as fake news has affected journalistic integrity, so has fake science reporting affected scientific integrity.
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Liberalism has simply ruined science like they ruined anything else. Making everything political and always trying to use crisis to fuel agenda is sickening.
It seems like the more we learn, the less we know...
Science settled by consensus isn’t science at all...
Science now primarily consists of multivariate analysis which is just regression with more that one variable. In any regression the question is “Is it causation or correlation?” If the “scientist”, or more accurately the person paying for the study, likes the result it is causation, if not it is correlation.
Is it any surprise that government funded studies almost always come to the conclusion that we need more government?
Just when celebrity chefs begin to fade into appropriate obscurity here come the the celebrity scientists honking like geese.
(I like food and science.)
Gravitational waves are not fiction. They were predicted by Einstein and have now been observed.
This SHOULD be an important and influential piece. I wish this guy had brought in someone more relatable to rewrite it, because the bones of it are very well done. But if I shared this with someone who has a problem with ‘expert worshiping’, their eyes would glaze over by about paragraph 2.
The fall goose migration has started here. I love the sound of wild geese honking while flying.
I will turn several of them into food.
A key of the Progressives political philosophy is rule by the experts - things are too complicated and democracy too messy to leave detailed decisions to legislators.
To implement that idea requires one-time legislative acts that designate an “expert” body to thereafter make many legal (”regulatory”) decisions over more and more matters.
The fallacy of the idea is in the appointing of said experts.
There is zero rational, and zero logic, and zero intellectual honesty to think that merely by appointing someone to some “expert” government opinion role that that mere appointment makes the appointed person (a) the smartest person on any subject, or (2) the most “expect” possible on any matter.
ALL “government expert” positions do is help to create bunches of scientific orthodoxies as the government position becomes the “official” position and challenges to it are called “science deniers”.
The idea of rule by the experts is no more than a different path to tyranny.
I have to agree with the doctors. A blood clot cannot circulate for 1500 years:)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas, with compassion and vision
We'll be clean, when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
-Donald Fagen
True but it was a speculation until observations turned it into an argument.
But as with many of Albert’s theoretical conjectures (many due actually to his wife), they are not subject to test.
The conjectures and calculations however, of the energy release by the mass defect in splitting an atom was speculative and then upon testing was established and thus entered science as a hard fact.
Gravitational waves are still in the argument stage.
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