SCIENCE WITHOUT SENSE

junkscience ^ | 1995 | Steven Milloy

[Wooly]

Finding the right risk to "discover" is the critical first step. If you pick the right risk, its intrinsic characteristics will make most of the risk assessment process a mere formality. Pick the wrong risk and the only thing at risk is your career.

The risk should be unprovable. The very existence of your risk must be unprovable by conventional scientific methods. After all, if it was provable, somebody else (like a real scientist), would already have done the work and your risk assessment wouldn't be necessary. A risk may be unprovable either because it doesn't actually exist or because the risk is too small to evaluate with science. In either case, fortunately for you, it's technically impossible to disprove such a risk.

For example, consider Superfund, the federal program to clean up hazardous waste sites. Sites are designated for clean-up where it is calculated that someone's chance of getting cancer from the site is 1 in 10,000 or more. This risk is so small that it could never be scientifically shown to exist. It would take a study with at least 500 million subjects — about two times the current U.S. population — to prove such a small risk exists. Even a 1 in 1,000 risk would require a study with five million subjects! (A typical study contains just a few hundred subjects; on rare occasions, a few thousand.)

Using an unprovable risk offers several advantages. First, you can never be proved wrong. This is very important. Of course, you can never be proved right either, but that's a small detail, one that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. You just need to allege, not prove.

[Wooly]

Everybody do yourself a favor and read this article. It will inform you on how these medical scare studies are done and you will no longer be enticed to beleive them when you hear or read about them in the media.

[PATRIOT1876]

Modern day science seems to be more about politics than facts.

The easiest example are the lies that “support” man-made global warming.

The whole climate change hoax has made anyone calling themselves scientists look suspect.

Oh, I forgot, the debate has ended.... /sarq>

[Agamemnon]

The corruption of science began when the scientific community chose to decouple the search of truth from the study of science.

This world view and thought process became forged in the halls of Darwinism, where man chose to delude himself with the fantasy that somehow he has been his own creator with the powers to control his own "evolution." -- and now his environment -- and his "risks" which mus now be solved by the political "scientists."

Man's elevated sense of self worth goes on further with the "master of his Universe delusion" to believe he will harness the imagined forces of such things as AGW with what are in the end nothing more than political solutions trumpeted in "News-speak" and unhinged from reality or real scientific data that doesn't fit "the premise."

Social Darwinism takes on a whole new shape, and has already had many of its deadly out-workings thereof in the 20th century, but whether medical fears, supposed evolutionary "advacements" to solve them, or AGW it's the identical thought process throughtout, which drives the world view -- and the political agenda.

Where the serach for truth dies, Freedom dies with it. The first victim is truth. The final victim is freedom.

FReegards!

[marktwain]

This is exactly the kind of junk science that the legal profession has used to extort, legally, trillions of dollars from innocent Americans. You have almost certainly been a victim, but you don’t know it, because the amount per lawsuit per victim tends to be small. As the amounts have added up, though, the total has been quite large, and mostly collected from the productive class.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear Agamemnon!

[r-q-tek86]

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