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How Expert Worship Is Ruining Science
The American Mind ^ | October 21, 2020 | Pasha Kamyshev

Posted on 10/24/2020 10:32:14 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat

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This is long and relatively technical piece.

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?"

1 posted on 10/24/2020 10:32:14 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
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To: CheshireTheCat
Richard Feynman explains science in 21 seconds.
2 posted on 10/24/2020 10:38:45 AM PDT by ArcadeQuarters (Socialism requires slavery.)
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To: CheshireTheCat

Phooey on science. The Earth is really flat and gravity sucks.


3 posted on 10/24/2020 10:43:36 AM PDT by Don Corleone (The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth)
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To: CheshireTheCat
Bookmark 🔖
4 posted on 10/24/2020 10:44:25 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
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To: CheshireTheCat

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.


5 posted on 10/24/2020 10:45:56 AM PDT by thoughtomator (here comes the switch to Hillary)
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To: CheshireTheCat

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.


6 posted on 10/24/2020 10:50:18 AM PDT by Hostage (Article V)
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To: CheshireTheCat

Bookmark


7 posted on 10/24/2020 10:58:39 AM PDT by Mase (Save me from the people who would save me from myself!)
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To: Hostage

Liberalism has simply ruined science like they ruined anything else. Making everything political and always trying to use crisis to fuel agenda is sickening.


8 posted on 10/24/2020 10:59:46 AM PDT by shanover (...To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.-S.Adams)
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To: Hostage
And much of “settled science” is a lie. Compare a 1950 HS science book to a current one.

It seems like the more we learn, the less we know...

9 posted on 10/24/2020 11:00:19 AM PDT by gov_bean_ counter (In this circus called the Democrat Party, Biden is the monkey and Harris is the organ grinder...)
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To: Hostage

Science settled by consensus isn’t science at all...


10 posted on 10/24/2020 11:01:21 AM PDT by gov_bean_ counter (In this circus called the Democrat Party, Biden is the monkey and Harris is the organ grinder...)
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To: CheshireTheCat

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?


11 posted on 10/24/2020 11:03:18 AM PDT by alternatives? (If our borders are not secure, why fund an army?)
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To: CheshireTheCat

Just when celebrity chefs begin to fade into appropriate obscurity here come the the celebrity scientists honking like geese.

(I like food and science.)


12 posted on 10/24/2020 11:06:36 AM PDT by coaster123 (Hate has a home here.)
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To: thoughtomator

Gravitational waves are not fiction. They were predicted by Einstein and have now been observed.


13 posted on 10/24/2020 11:07:37 AM PDT by beethovenfan (Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin)
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To: CheshireTheCat

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.


14 posted on 10/24/2020 11:09:05 AM PDT by perfect_rovian_storm
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To: CheshireTheCat
Nothing new here. Doctors thought blood didn't circulate for 1500 years because a Greek "expert" said so.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2018/01-02/history-william-harvey-medicine-heart/

15 posted on 10/24/2020 11:13:13 AM PDT by CtBigPat (2020 is becoming everything 2012 aspired to be.)
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To: coaster123

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.


16 posted on 10/24/2020 11:18:38 AM PDT by Cold Heart (Portland Voted for IT)
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To: CheshireTheCat

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.


17 posted on 10/24/2020 11:19:12 AM PDT by Wuli
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To: CtBigPat

I have to agree with the doctors. A blood clot cannot circulate for 1500 years:)


18 posted on 10/24/2020 11:20:15 AM PDT by Cold Heart (Portland Voted for IT)
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To: Wuli
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.

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

19 posted on 10/24/2020 11:21:25 AM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: beethovenfan

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.


20 posted on 10/24/2020 11:25:10 AM PDT by Hostage (Article V)
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