Science In General

10 Times Covid Experts Failed Us

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Marty Makary presents a list of failures in his NY Post article 10 myths told by COVID experts — and now debunked.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during COVID:   Much of the time, they were wrong.

To be clear, public health officials were not wrong for making recommendations based on what was known at the time.  That’s understandable. You go with the data you have.

No, they were wrong because they refused to change their directives
in the face of new evidence.

When a study did not support their policies, they dismissed it and censored opposing opinions.

At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weaponized research itself by putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR.

In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation
that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession.

Here are 10 ways they misled Americans:

Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity

A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary COVID vaccine series.  In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s “misinformation” policy.

Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected.  That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic.

Most Americans who were fired for not having the COVID vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralized the virus, but they were antibodies that the government did not recognize.

Misinformation #2: Masks prevent COVID transmission

Cochran Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine.  And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on COVID transmission.

When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomized controlled studies.

But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomized studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.

If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channeled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.

Misinformation #3: School closures reduce COVID transmission

The CDC ignored the European experience of keeping schools open, most without mask mandates. Transmission rates were no different, evidenced by studies conducted in Spain and Sweden.

Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection

Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle.  They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.

A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite.  We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the COVID vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.

Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a COVID vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had COVID.

Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster

Boosters reduced hospitalizations in older, high-risk Americans. But the evidence was never there that they lower COVID mortality in young, healthy people.

That’s probably why the CDC chose not to publish its data on hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under 50, when it published the same rates for those over 50.

Ultimately, White House pressure to recommend boosters for all was so intense that the FDA’s two top vaccine experts left the agency in protest, writing scathing articles on how the data did not support boosters for young people.

Misinformation #6: Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates

President Biden and other officials demanded that unvaccinated workers, regardless of their risk or natural immunity, be fired.  They demanded that soldiers be dishonorably discharged and nurses be laid off in the middle of a staffing crisis.

The mandate was based on the theory that vaccination reduced transmission rates
— a notion later proven to be false.

But after the broad recognition that vaccination does not reduce transmission, the mandates persisted, and still do to this day.

A recent study from George Mason University details how vaccine mandates in nine major US cities had no impact on vaccination rates.  They also had no impact on COVID transmission rates.

Misinformation #7: COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory

Google admitted to suppressing searches of “lab leak” during the pandemic.  Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, claimed (and still does) he didn’t believe the virus came from a lab.

Ultimately, overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to a lab leak origin — the same origin suggested to Dr. Anthony Fauci by two very prominent virologists in a January 2020 meeting he assembled at the beginning of the pandemic.

According to documents obtained by Bret Baier of Fox News, they told Fauci and Collins that the virus may have been manipulated and originated in the lab, but then suddenly changed their tune in public comments days after meeting with the NIH officials.

The virologists were later awarded nearly $9 million from Fauci’s agency.

Misinformation #8: It was important to get the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose

Data were clear in the spring of 2021, just months after the vaccine rollout, that spacing the vaccine out by three months reduces complication rates and increases immunity.

Spacing out vaccines would have also saved more lives when Americans were rationing a limited vaccine supply at the height of the epidemic.

Misinformation #9: Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’

Dr. Ashish Jha famously said this, despite the bivalent vaccine being approved using data from eight mice.  To date, there has never been a randomized controlled trial of the bivalent vaccine.

In my opinion, the data are crystal clear that young people should not get the bivalent vaccine. It would have also spared many children myocarditis.

Misinformation #10: One in five people get long COVID

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 20% of COVID infections can result in long COVID.

But a UK study found that only 3% of COVID patients had residual symptoms lasting 12 weeks. What explains the disparity?

It’s often normal to experience mild fatigue or weakness for weeks after being sick and inactive and not eating well.  Calling these cases long COVID is the medicalization of ordinary life.

Summary

What’s most amazing about all the misinformation conveyed by CDC and public health officials is that there have been no apologies for holding on to their recommendations for so long after the data became apparent that they were dead wrong.

Public health officials said “you must” when the correct answer
should have been “we’re not sure.”

Early on, in the absence of good data, public health officials chose a path of stern paternalism.

Today, they are in denial of a mountain of strong studies showing that they were wrong.

 

 

 

Politics Deep in the Thrall of Climate Change

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Mark Imisides writes at Australia Spectator Politics deep in the thrall of climate change.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images.

The issue of Climate Change stormed across our TV screens at the recent federal election (Australia). Funded by a renewables investor, the Climate 200 candidates mopped up – taking eight seats from the major parties.

How did something that was considered a slightly oddball theory in the late 80s morph into a multiheaded monster that seems to have every world government, including ours, in its thrall?

By any measure, the Climate Change industry is huge. It’s quite common to hear people use the term ‘big oil’, but given that the Climate Change industry is now, at $1.5 trillion, rapidly catching up to the oil industry ($2.1 trillion), it’s entirely valid to use the term ‘big climate’. Andrew Urban recently pointed this out, with several cases of people that have cashed in big-time from Climate Change alarmism.

How did it get so big? How did it become the colossus that it now is? As it happens, there is a back story that few people outside of the scientific sector are aware of.

From Jo Nova in 2010 US$. In 2015 Climate Change Business Journal reported: “The $1.5 trillion global “climate change industry” grew at between 17 and 24 percent annually from 2005-2008” The $1.5-trillion price tag appears to exclude most of the Big Green environmentalism industry, a $13.4-billion-per-year business in the USA alone.

In simple terms, it was a perfect storm of four factors that all came together in the late 80s. As I was doing my PhD at the time, I got to see this firsthand. Very few people understand this process, largely because those outside the sector don’t know that science is just as prone as any other industry to the shifting sands of zeitgeist – trends that emerge that shape and mould how science is done, funded, and perceived.

These four factors were to revolutionise science, and although not all the changes were bad, their lasting legacy will be the entry of science into political discourse, the grubby touching of research funds by hands soiled by self-interest, greed, and corruption.

Revolutionary Factor 1:  Chernobyl Ended Science’s Golden Age

The first of these factors was the accident at Chernobyl in 1986. What? What on earth does Chernobyl have to do with climate change?

The answer is that there is no direct connection. It was, however, the final nail in the coffin of science’s golden age. Coming out of the second world war, science was seen as having the answers to all the world’s ills. It was seen as having won the war (largely due to the atomic bomb) and was the way of the future. This optimism is expressed beautifully in the film A Beautiful Mind where the incoming students at Princeton in 1948 are given a stirring lecture by the mathematician Hellinger of the future of science in the post-war world.

And so science flourished. Antibiotics became readily available, DNA was characterised, and the contraceptive pill introduced a new era of sexual freedom. The synthetic chemical industry also boomed, as did the nuclear power industry. We had wonder chemicals like DDT that eradicated malaria-carrying mosquitoes, aerosol fly sprays, and cheap reliable power thanks to the power of the atom.

But then, over time, mistakes happened, largely because environmental science, as a discipline, didn’t exist. Or, to put it another way, the world was seen as an infinitely-sized bucket into which chemicals could be poured, and the concept of man-made chemicals exerting any influence on the world in which we live just didn’t exist. It just never occurred to anyone.

But then reality began to impinge on this mindset. Amongst other things, the persistence of nonbiodegradable pesticides like DDT became a problem, CFC propellants threatened the ozone layer, and we had Sellafield and Three Mile Island. Neither of these two incidents actually killed anyone but they gave everyone an awful fright.

But Chernobyl was the last straw. Scientists, it seemed, couldn’t be trusted after all.
It was the China Syndrome for real.

Revolutionary Factor 2:  Global Recession Crashed Research Funding

This mistrust brought with it added scrutiny, and this coincided with the second factor in this list – the worldwide recession in the late 80s (as Paul Keating famously said, the recession we had to have).

The combination of the loss of trust in scientists with the fact that there wasn’t as much money to splash around as before, resulted in a massive change in the emphasis of scientific research. Before this time it was pretty easy to get funding for any pet project that you had, and you didn’t have to you justify it much in terms of its importance or relevance. But after this time, suddenly funds became much more difficult to get. To get funding, you had to prove the relevance of your research. You had to justify why it was important in terms practical outcomes.

In scientific terms, we could say that the emphasis switched
from pure research to applied research.

This change in emphasis had a dramatic effect on university faculties. Prior to this time if you went onto any campus you would find a science faculty that contained four departments – physics, chemistry, geology, and biology. When this change from pure to applied research happened, it hit the physics departments hardest. Of the four classic sciences, physics is the most fundamental, and the least applied. That is, it forms the basis on which knowledge in the other three disciplines are developed, but it is not as directly applicable to the real world.

And so, suddenly, people that were either physics academics or postgraduate students had very bleak career prospects. Consequently, from about this time physics departments began to disappear from university campuses, being subsumed into faculties with titles such as ‘Physical Sciences’ and so on. Suddenly, there were a lot of highly qualified physicists looking for work.

Revolutionary Factor 3:  Warming Replaced the Cooling Trend

The third factor that came into play at about this time was that the world had started warming again. It cooled from about 1940 until 1975, but by the late 80s a warming trend was emerging. And, as it happens, this fed right into Margaret Thatcher’s political agenda – the fourth and final factor in our list.

Revolutionary Factor 4:  Power Struggle Thatcher vs. Coal Unions

Thatcher had an awful problem with coal unions and wanted to break their power. She did this by approaching the Royal Society and essentially saying that she wanted to demonise coal and get people to use nuclear power, and there was money on the table if they could do that.

Thus, the IPCC was born, and every government department around the world
devoted to ‘climate science’ dates from about this time.

But who could they employ – the term ‘climate scientist’ didn’t exist. Well, as it happens, questions of heat transfer fall squarely into the lap of physicists, and, oh look, there are plenty of them looking for work. They had a precious job offer if they would just say the right things.

Thus, the discipline of ‘climate science’ was born, degrees were established, and people began selecting it as a career option from the undergraduate level.

Well, so far so good. When new scientific knowledge is revealed, new career paths, and even new language is established. For example, with the advent of electricity in the early 19th Century largely as a result of the efforts of Volta, the term ‘electrician’ was coined.

Climate Science Discredited Early On

But here is where the similarity between ‘climate science’ and other new technologies like electricity (or quantum mechanics or biogenetics) ends. In each of these latter cases, the science has developed from its infancy into a mature discipline, as research and enquiry revealed further information and deeper understandings.

With ‘climate science’, however, the very opposite happened. It was barely a decade old when it was comprehensively disproved, by two discrete mechanisms. That is, it was proven that the notion of CO2 warming the world had no scientific basis, and the computer models that predicted its influence were wrong.

The first of these was the absence of the ‘tropospheric hotspot’ that was predicted by the computer models. Anthony Watts has a very good, even-handed discussion of it on his website.

The second, and more significant study, resulted from a set of ice-core studies from Vladivostok in 1999, that showed that atmospheric CO2 concentration followed temperature changes, not the other way around.

As an Analytical Chemist, it was this second study that struck a chord with me. From the time I first saw Al Gore’s graph with overlaid temperature and CO2 charts, the first question I asked was, ‘How do they know which one is cause and which one is effect? Haven’t they ever heard of Henry’s Law?’

Henry’s Law, for the layman, relates the concentration of a compound in the aqueous phase to its concentration in the vapour phase above it. In simplest terms, the solubility of a gas in a liquid decreases with temperature. That is, the hotter a liquid gets, the less of the gas that can dissolve in it. So if the ocean was heating, it would release CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in higher gaseous concentrations.

The question of which one is cause and which one is effect is determined simply by which one leads, and which one lags, and the Vladivostok ice cores showed that CO2 changes lagged behind temperature changes by about 10,000 years. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

In other words, the Vladivostok ice core data comprehensively disproves the notion that man-made CO2 is heating the planet. A theory was advanced, accepted by many, but then disproven.

This has happened many times in science, and it is the very mechanism by which scientific knowledge is advanced.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is luminiferous ether theory. It was a theory that was spawned by a simple observation. It was observed that if an alarm clock was placed in a glass bell, and a vacuum was drawn, then when the alarm went off, no sound was evident, despite the fact that you could see the hammer striking the bells.

They concluded, correctly, that sound requires air to move through, but light didn’t. Why was the clock still visible in the vacuum? Why, the only explanation possible, it seemed, was that there was some other, as yet unknown, medium through which it moved. Thus, the luminiferous ether was proposed.

This was widely accepted, until Michelson and Morley sought to measure it, in 1887. They discovered, in simple terms, that it just wasn’t there. Thus, the theory was overturned, almost overnight. As it happens it took Michelson and Morley some time to realise the implication of their experiment, but when they did, the conclusion was inescapable – there was no luminiferous ether.

This led to further studies into the nature of light, and before long the photoelectric effect was discovered, and the passage of light through a vacuum was elegantly explained. Thus, the luminiferous ether theory has been consigned to the dustbin of history, along with phlogiston theory and a whole lot of other theories that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anthropogenic Global Warming Escaped Scientific Death

Why hasn’t that happened to the notion of Anthropogenic Global Warming? Why, when it was discovered that CO2 concentration followed temperature, and not the other way around, didn’t people say ‘temperature is the dog, and CO2 is the tail’? Why, in 2023, is the tail wagging the dog?

The simple answer is that science is no longer driving the bus.

What is happening is the type of positive feedback loop that climate scientists talk about, despite the fact that these things are almost unheard of in the physical world. It is alive and well in politics.

It is always in a government’s interest to create a crisis. It is a well-known political phenomenon that people cling the incumbents in a crisis, and the governments go to great lengths to make people think that they are saving people from the crisis. Many people, for example, attribute John Howard’s success in the 2001 election to the Tampa Crisis, and George W Bush’s popularity shot up after 9/11.

The other side of this feedback loop is that if you are employed to investigate ‘climate change’, well, you’d jolly well better find it, or the government money will dry up.

So if the scientists say the right things, they get employment and ‘research’ funding. The greater the crisis they report on, the happier the government is, and the more money they get paid.

This is the reason that these ‘climate scientists’ avoid scrutiny. They don’t have to justify their research to an ARC or CRC committee. They don’t have to produce results for scrutiny, in order to justify their research. It’s already guaranteed, in perpetuity, with a blank cheque.

No scientist is going to say ‘there is no climate crisis’ or he will be out of a job, and no government is going to say ‘there is no climate crisis’ or they’ll be out on their ear.

Energy to be The Sacrificial Lamb Instead

The consequence of this is an energy crisis. People dying from the cold because they cannot pay their bills. Game shows in the UK now offer the payment of energy bills as a lucrative prize, and here in Australia we face the prospect of skyrocketing energy bills because of the comically inept Chris Bowen, and his massive uncosted plan to completely replace our electricity with renewables.

So what do we do about it? I think there is hope for sanity to return, but we have to prosecute the case in the right way.

 

Geologists’ Turn in Anti-Science Barrel

Posted on by Ron Clutz

David Lewis Schaefer reports on the attempted political takeover of the profession in his American Mind article A Sad New Epoch.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Even the field of geology is rejecting science in the name of making political statements.

The Anthropocene Working Group of geologists, featured on the front page of the New York Times, is poised to announce the discovery/invention of a new epoch in the Earth’s history, beginning in the middle of the 20th century. Whereas seven previous epochs ranged from 4.6 billion to the most recent one, the “Holocene” (11,700 years since the end of the last ice age), during which homo sapiens evolved, scientists in the working group claim that no broad numbers are needed to date the Anthropocene since developments caused by humans, such as the increased use of nitrogen fertilizers, global warming, “the proliferation of plastics, garbage, and concrete across the planet,” and potential nuclear war, are directly visible to us. The group claims that the effects of the new age “will be discernible in the rocks for millenniums.”

The iconic Metronome clock in New York City was repurposed as an 80-foot-wide climate clock that shows our remaining time to take urgent action on climate change. (photo credit: BEN WOLF)

Certification of the new epoch will require a 60% vote by four committees. If it fails to receive such a vote from any of the committees, the Times warns it “might not have another chance to be ratified for years.”

But of course this isn’t how science develops, properly understood. As Stanley C. Finney, the secretary-general of the International Union of Geological Sciences, has observed, the notion of the Anthropocene has become a way for geologists to make a “political statement.” One advocate of the statement (a historian of science, not a geologist) explains that whereas she had once been taught “that geology ended when people showed up,” the Anthropocene designation signifies that “actually, the human impact is part of geology as a science.” Another expresses the fear that failing to recognize the Anthropocene would have “political reverberations,” as if the “geological community is denying” that human beings “have changed the planet drastically.” As another proponent of what we might term geological mission creep puts it, “I always saw [the designation] not as an internal geological undertaking, but rather one that would be greatly beneficial to the world at large,” as “a call to attention.” In other words, let’s mend our sinful ways!

The term “Anthropocene” is reported to have been coined and popularized by biologist Eugene Stormer and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000. It has since been put to wider use by political activists as a way of indicating that humanity’s presence is just one more passing stage.

In fact, some even look forward to the end of that stage so as to restore
Mother Earth to her pristine, pre-human condition.

Instead of simply accepting widespread climate change dogma, shouldn’t geologists be aware of the transition from the sometimes devastating Little Ice Age, variously defined by scientists as running from the 14th or 16th centuries through the mid-19th century, to more moderate worldwide climates, which began long before the invention of the internal combustion engine? (The Little Ice Age, confined largely to areas of northern Europe, followed a preceding Medieval Warming period.) Scientists have attributed those changes to such causes as cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, and variations in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt.

Have those forecasting devastation from a warming climate considered the significance of millennia-old corpses, like Ötzi, sometimes discovered under many feet of snow in areas like the Alps, suggesting a longer-term cooling trend? And why dismiss the likelihood that scientific research will uncover means of combating detrimental effects from excessive heat: should that occur, would the geologists have to reverse their announcement of the new epoch?

This politicization of science encourages an unjustified suspicion or rejection of real science.

Look no further than Anthony Fauci’s sometimes contradictory, and admittedly sometimes purposely misleading, pronouncements regarding the causes of and appropriate responses to COVID, which have eroded public trust in the institution of public health. Also, as politically appealing “discoveries” win the attention and respect of science educators, they will inevitably be integrated into science curricula, starting at the elementary or middle school level. Students will not only be indoctrinated into the latest, politically correct dogmas, but they will be misled as to the nature of the scientific enterprise.

Given their subject of expertise, geologists are probably less equipped than physicists, chemists, and biologists to conduct controlled experiments in the Baconian sense. That fact does not make their undertaking any less a science but only confirms the observation made by Aristotle that different objects of study require different sorts of scientific approaches. But it does not excuse them from the need to offer rebuttable hypotheses, always subject to revision or even refutation in light of further data or a more comprehensive explanation.

Yet how can they possibly document the prediction reported in the Times that the effects
of the human activities they cite will be discernible for millennia?

Announcing the “discovery” that the world has suddenly reached a new epoch, within living memory, resembles nothing so much as the pronouncements once issued by Christian millenarians that “the end is near.” In fact, one advocate quoted in the Times views the authorization of the new epoch as its “canonization.”

Note the ominous claim that the new era will
“bring the previous chapter of the Earth’s history to a close.”

But how can any human being, lacking divine guidance, be qualified to pronounce such a change? If we have just embarked on the Anthropocene era, what could follow it? If there is a post-Anthropocene epoch, there won’t be any human beings left to record it. Geologists, please curb your eagerness to grab the world’s “attention” or make it comply with your political-theological wishes, and stick to your cores and samples. The world will be the better for it.

Decolonizing Attack on Science

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update Dec. 30 at end

Rex Murphy writes at National Post Science does not need to be ‘decolonized’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Does Concordia University wish to be an instrument of learning, or a funnel for wokeness?

Scholars at Montreal’s Concordia University are planning to trace and counter what they say is colonialism in physics, which they describe as a “social field” rather than one of “pure knowledge.” — True North, Campus Watch

How would a person decolonize penicillin? Or anesthesia? Or open-heart surgery? Or the miracle advances the past century gave the world through the understandings — still not complete — of quantum physics?

First of all, you would have to ask the question: what could “decolonize” even mean in these miracle domains?

(I use miracle here only as metaphor, or in its now weaker and more normal usage as an advance scarcely dreamed of but brought on by science, science which is the application of mind, of intellect — not politics — to the understanding of nature.)

Scientific truth is the truth of bare fact. The only reverence science knows is the genuflection before hard, physical reality. Science wears no ribbons of fealty to causes, colours or the predispositions of any mentality or ideology, other than the asking of questions and the submission to the answers provided by absolutely neutral inquiry — answers always tentative, always open to revision or correction; science is never final.

Short form: Science does not wear badges.

There have been instances where science has been forced to wear a political coat. A certain regime in Germany during the 1930s, under the tenure of a racist madman, declared that there was no such a thing as “Jewish” science. And, therefore, it was innately false, to be banned, alas along with the great Jewish scientists.

That Einstein was Jewish, therefore he was wrong,
has to have been the most warped equation ever.

There was in Hitler’s imperium, room for only “Aryan” science. And there was the deadly flaw. Science allows no qualifying epithets, no qualificatory precedent adjectives.

(I dare say Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t know this, but then, there is much that Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t know. That’s why she’s on The View.)

Communism in the hard days of ruthless Stalin also had a Marxist “line” on what science had to be. In both cases, radical and totalitarian regimes tried to subdue thought itself, the functioning of intellect, to their grim, idiotic and malign ideologies.

Science is science, and it is only science, or it is not science: with any limiting descriptive it is just a rigged machine for producing approved results. Politics acts on science as an acid to truth: it distorts inquiry and banishes rigour and dispassion — the core qualities of science.

So let me curl back to the otiose question of “decolonizing” science. What can Concordia possibly mean by such a project?

Is the university, directly or indirectly, saying that the manifold revelations brought about by adherence to scientific methodology, since the days of Isaac Newton — the premier figure in the advance of empirical thought — are wrong? Is Concordia saying Western science is bent by racial considerations and thereby should be dismissed? Side-stepped? Layered over?

Does the university agree with the judgment that since science is “colonized,” it must be “corrected?” That E = mc², perhaps the most basic equation of the whole universe, proceeds from a “colonialist” mentality?Is it saying that because much, but by no means all, of the science came from people with a certain colour of skin — that would be white — it is therefore not only fallible but an imposition of “colonial” understanding on young minds, whatever that ridiculous phrase may be taken to mean?

Concordia has a fairly well known project called Decolonizing light. And what could that mean? Does it challenge the speed limit of the universe, that light travels at 186,000 miles per second? What alternative measurement is it offering from its decolonized science?

And most pertinently how can it be that a university — an institution for the transmission of knowledge and truth — would bend to the woke notions of our over-politicized times and offer that the progress of scientific truth is but one more unfolding of “imperialist,” “colonizing” white thought?

Speak up Concordia. Or trim your fees.

There are few things that offer more despair in these fad-ridden times than the easy, cowardly concessions to racial and ethic politicization by (once) prestigious institutions.

Penicillin works. Anesthesias have saved millions from pain. The second law of thermodynamics has no reference to race or creed. The scientific method is the very closest attempt in all of history to remove all prejudice, of any kind, from the attempt to answer any question. Its kernel, its very ultimate idea, is submission to what is really seen, what is really there, what is really to be understood.

Most important of all, the colour of the skin of a discoverer has no bearing on the discovery.

You cannot “decolonize” science, because science has no colonies, it wishes none, and would lose all verity if it owed any allegiance except to cold observation, relentless questioning, and the utter exclusion of secondary impulses, most particularly those of race and activism.

Concordia has a choice to make, a choice many other universities must also face. Does it wish to be an instrument of learning, or a funnel for the trite obsessions of a very particular moment?

Update Dec. 30

I am prompted to add a clarification to this post.  By attacking historic findings of scientists, the aim is to discredit the scientific process.  That is, the real threat to institutional power over individuals is “sciencing”, the activity of asking skeptical questions and independently thinking and seeking answers.  When people on the left say we should trust the “science,” they mean trust the institutional authorities who approve and disapprove the ideas and conclusions.

If  literate people are allowed to do “sciencing”,  they can and do arrive at ideas and findings not approved, or even disapproved by the authorities.  We have seen how this works in the censorship of highly qualified immunologists who disagreed with rationales for Covid poliicies.  Also highly credentialed climate scientists have been demeaned and demonized for contradicting the global warming/climate change narrative.

Instead of “sciencing,” here is their idea of “research”

See also Sciencing Vs. Scientism

Extinction Hype and Dubious Biodiversity COP15 in Montreal

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Headlines Claim, But Details Deny

The advertising proverb says it all: “The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.”

Unfortunately, climate science is rife with this. A research announcement is released and the same text appears in media articles everywhere, the only difference being who can attach the scariest headline. One list of things claimed to be caused by global warming numbers 883, including many head scratchers.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

For example: species extinctions.

WWF claims “The rapid loss of species we are seeing today is estimated by experts to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. MSNBC laments the “fact” that 100,000 species of flora and fauna will no longer be with us by next Christmas. And yet, WWF also estimates the number of identified unique species to be between 1.4 to 1.8 million, an uncertainty of 400,000. As someone said, “Anytime extinctions are claimed, ask for the names.”

Note from California Academy of Sciences:

How many species on Earth?  Eight million, seven hundred thousand species! (Give or take 1.3 million.)

That is a new, estimated total number of species on Earth—the most precise calculation ever offered—with 6.5 million species found on land and 2.2 million dwelling in the ocean depths.

Until now, the number of species on Earth was said to fall somewhere within the large range of 3 and 100 million.

The new study, published yesterday in the open access journal PLoS Biology, says a staggering 86% of all species on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and catalogued.

The debunking is done in detail here:  Plenty of Wiggle Room in Scientific Certainty

They know that 99.9% of all species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct. They know that in the last 540 million years there have been five events in which more than half of the planet’s “animal genera” have died off. (They have not been able to link all of these events to the activities of Big Oil yet, but they’re working on it.) They know we are in the midst of Sixth Great Mass Extinction that the “experts” say is more destructive that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Source: Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.png Author: SVG version by Albert Mestre

Chris D Thomas Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of York writes in the Conversation New species are coming into existence faster than ever thanks to humans. Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

Animals and plants are seemingly disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs died out, 66m years ago. The death knell tolls for life on Earth. Rhinos will soon be gone unless we defend them, Mexico’s final few Vaquita porpoises are drowning in fishing nets, and in America, Franklin trees survive only in parks and gardens.

Yet the survivors are taking advantage of new opportunities created by humans. Many are spreading into new parts of the world, adapting to new conditions, and even evolving into new species. In some respects, diversity is actually increasing in the human epoch, the Anthropocene. It is these biological gains that I contemplate in a new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, in which I argue that it is no longer credible for us to take a loss-only view of the world’s biodiversity.

Entirely new species have even come into existence. The “apple fly” has evolved in North America, thanks to European colonials bringing fruit trees to the New World. And house sparrows mated with Mediterranean “Spanish” sparrows somewhere on an Italian farm. Their descendants represent a brand new species, the Italian sparrow. Life on Earth is no longer the same as it was before humans arrived on the scene.

There is no doubt that the rate at which species are dying out is very high, and we could well be in for a “Big Sixth” mass extinction. This represents a loss of biological diversity. Yet, we also know that the Big Five mass extinctions of the past half billion years ultimately led to increases in diversity. Could this happen again? It seems so, because the current rate at which new animals and plants (such as the apple fly, the Italian sparrow and Oxford ragwort) are coming into existence is unusually high – and it may be the highest ever. We are already on the verge of Genesis Number Six – a million or so years from now, the world could end up supporting more species, not fewer, as a consequence of the evolution of Homo sapiens.

China Practicing Sun Tzu’s Art of War?

Beyond the exaggeration and fear-mongering featured in all these UN gatherings, there are particular reasons to be skeptical of this Biodiversity COP15 in Montreal.  For one thing, it serves as a platform for Virtue-Signaler-in-Chief, Justin Trudeau, to burnish his social justice warrior creds.  And for another thing, there’s a devious collaboration with China’s despot.  Terry Glavin explains in his National Post article Trudeau Liberals too eager to buy into China’s green ‘co-operation’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

No country has cooperated with China on environmental issues
more enthusiastically and obsequiously than Canada

China’s President Xi Jinping

As at least 10,000 delegates and observers from more than 190 countries gather in Montreal for the Convention of the Parties’ biodiversity summit this week, it’s difficult not to be dreary about the summit’s prospects for reversing the alarming trends that continue to push the earth’s animal and plant species over extinction’s cliff edge.

It’s not all bad news. But it’s pretty bad. And with Beijing as the co-host with Canada, it’s hard not to be at least a bit cynical about the whole thing.

The conference in Montreal was supposed to be convened two years ago in Kunming, China, but COVID-19 got in the way, so now the event is being held in Canada owing to the Trudeau government’s decision to oblige the Chinese. In the lead-up to Kunming, the United Nations’ Global Biodiversity Outlook prepared a report card on how the world had progressed by then on the 20 biodiversity targets set 10 years earlier when the parties met in Aichi, Japan. It’s pretty grim reading.

Of the 20 Aichi targets, none were met. Of the 60 “elements” within the targets, only seven were achieved and 13 registered no progress at all. The UN couldn’t figure out what was going on with a couple elements, but there was progress in 38 elements.

Numerical analyses don’t illuminate much on a global scale, but that’s the scale the COP15 gathering in Montreal is dealing with. The rate of global deforestation had slowed by a third over that decade, but overfishing has accelerated, and wetlands continued to vanish. Still, harmful invasive species were eradicated from islands in 200 projects. Also to the good: 44 per cent of the critical areas of the world identified as particularly rich in species diversity ended up with some degree of protection, up from 29 per cent identified at the Aichi gathering.

It doesn’t help to be cynical about these things but Beijing is, after all, in the wheelhouse here.

The hollowest banality you’ll hear when it comes to China is the one about how, sure, the Chinese Communist Party might be a world-devouring rogue state that we have to protect ourselves from, but gosh, we do have to get along with Chinese strongman Xi Jinping when it comes to big-picture challenges like the impact of climate change on human well-being and global biodiversity.

The way that platitude is put in Ottawa’s recently-unveiled Indo-Pacific Strategy: China may well be “an increasingly disruptive global power,” but “China’s sheer size and influence makes co-operation necessary to address some of the world’s existential pressures, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, global health and nuclear proliferation.”

And fair enough. It makes sense. But the thing is, we’ve been co-operating like crazy already, all along. No country has co-operated with China on environmental issues more enthusiastically and obsequiously than Canada. How’s that been working out? For all its much-lauded investments in electric cars and solar panels, China had given the green light to 8.63 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power in the first quarter of this year. China now emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed-world output, combined.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but it’s hard to put your finger on a folly more obvious now than the 1981 decision by Pierre Trudeau’s government to rejig the Canadian International Development Agency’s eligibility requirements so as to allow China to qualify as a foreign-aid recipient. Within a year, CIDA’s role in China was fashioned to suit the purposes of the trade lobby, and that’s how CIDA was run in China until the agency was folded into Global Affairs in 2013.

China has used its “developing country” pretensions to evade a variety of the multilateral environmental and climate change obligations that burden “First World” countries. The result has been that in the existential challenge of global warming, you’d never know it but the greenhouse gas output from Europe and North America have pretty much flatlined over the past quarter of a century, while China’s output has quadrupled.

LULUCF refers to emissions from land use and forestry, which can be in addition or subtraction.

China has been at the forefront of assertions that it is the developed economies’ job to bear the greater costs of climate change mitigation, owing to the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. There’s a case to be made for that, but according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data project, the volume of carbon dioxide China has pumped into the atmosphere over the past eight years exceeds the two-century output of the United Kingdom, where the Industrial Revolution began.

So perhaps, yes, “China’s sheer size and influence makes co-operation necessary,” but Canada has never shied away from co-operating. Canada never stopped co-operating, in just the way Beijing wanted, long after CIDA was folded up.

Conclusion

Many know of the Latin phrase “caveat emptor,” meaning “Let the buyer beware”.

When it comes to UN climate science, remember also “caveat lector”–”Let the reader beware”.

Left Replaces Thinking with the “Stochastic Terror” Lie

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Christopher F. Rufo explains in his City Journal article The “Stochastic Terror” Lie  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Left’s latest gambit for suppressing speech is built on preposterous grounds.

[Note: Those of us who follow the global warming/climate change alarmists see how the same mentality operates in order to avoid proving cause and effect.  Just watch how climate reparations are being pushed presuming that any loss or damage from natural events is caused by humans using fossil fuels.]

I browsed the news recently only to discover that, according to a popular science magazine, I was responsible for the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In an opinion piece for Scientific American, writer Bryn Nelson insinuated that my factual reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour was an example of “stochastic terrorism,” which he defines as “ideologically driven hate speech” that increases the likelihood of unpredictable acts of violence. On the night of the attack, Nelson argued, I had appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss my reporting, and, hours later, the alleged attacker, David DePape, radicalized by “QAnon” conspiracy theories about “Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

This is a bizarre claim that, for a magazine supposedly dedicated to “science,”
hardly meets a scientific standard of cause and effect.

There is no evidence that DePape watched or was motivated by Tucker Carlson’s program; moreover, nothing in my reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour encourages violence or mentions Nancy Pelosi, QAnon, or Satan-worshipping pedophiles. My appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight and DePape’s attack against Paul Pelosi are, in reality, two unrelated incidents in a large and complex universe.

And Nelson, a microbiologist specializing in human excrement, is full of it.  But Nelson isn’t trying to prove anything in a scientific sense. Under the concept of “stochastic terrorism,” logic, evidence, and causality are irrelevant. Any incident of violence can be politicized and attributed to any ideological opponent, regardless of facts.

The scheme works like this: left-wing media, activists, and officials designate a subject of discourse, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, off-limits; they treat any reporting on that subject as an expression of “hate speech”; and finally, if an incident of violence emerges that is related, even tangentially, to that subject, they assign guilt to their political opponents and call for the suppression of speech. The statistical concept of “stochasticity,” which means “randomly determined,” functions as a catch-all: the activists don’t have to prove causality—they simply assert it with a sophisticated turn of phrase and a vague appeal to probability.

Though framed in scientific terms, this gambit is a crude political weapon.

In practice, left-wing media, activists, and officials apply the “stochastic terrorism” designation only in one direction: rightward. They never attribute fire-bombings against pro-life pregnancy centers, arson attacks against Christian churches, or the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice to mere argumentation of left-wing activists, such as, say, opposition to the Court’s decision in Dobbs. In those cases, the Left correctly adopts the principle that it is incitement, rather than opinion, that constitutes a crime—but conveniently forgets that standard as soon as the debate shifts to the movement’s conservative opponents.

In recent years, the Left has not only monopolized the concept of “stochastic terrorism”
but also built a growing apparatus for enforcing it.

Last year, left-wing organizations and the Department of Justice collaborated on a campaign to suppress parents who oppose critical race theory, under the false claim that sometimes-heated school-board protests were incidents of “domestic terrorism.” Earlier this year, left-wing activists and medical associations called on social media companies and the Department of Justice to censor, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question.

If this process is left unchecked, the consequences will be disastrous.

Left-wing NGOs, social media companies, and federal security apparatchiks will gain unprecedented power to police speech and criminalize political opposition. Conservatives and old-line liberals who still care about civil liberties must expose the scheme and work to dismantle the apparatus that supports it. The line of argument is simple: speech is not violence; statistical abstraction is not a substitute for evidence; and free-association fantasies cannot determine guilt. But the politics of fighting back are more complex. It will require dislodging a network of professionals who see the concept of “stochastic terror” as a path to power.

That concept is built on a lie. It deserves to be exposed and discredited.

See also Science + Politics = Politics

Climate Reductionism

Goalless Solutions Make Things Worse

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson wrote at Brownstone Institute The Chief Cause of Problems Is Bad Solutions.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

When H. William Dettmer started working with Dr. Eli Goldratt’s Thinking Process framework for solving profound problems in the 1990s, he soon realised how very often people focused on the wrong problems, and then spent their time and effort on figuring out root causes behind often trivial issues.

Dettmer’s solution to this was based on a simple, yet profound insight: A problem is not really a problem unless it prevents us from reaching our goal. The first step in problem-solving should therefore be to define the goal, and in Dettmer’s amended framework not only a goal but also the factors critical to achieve it. This way, focus on what actually mattered would be ensured; the problem solver could rest assured he was not wasting his time on trivialities.

Source: Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning

What we perceive as important problems are often things that annoy us, but which really do not matter in the bigger context. I might perceive a cluttered inbox or a broken coffee machine in the office as a major problem, while those are totally unimportant to the long-term success of the company.

As long as I realise such issues are important only to me personally, no harm is done. But as soon as my focus shifts to the trivial problems and I become obsessed with them, I may be headed for wrong decisions, a situation exemplified by Eric Sevareid’s insight:

Eli Goldratt’s book, The Goal, is one of the most influential management books of all time and his ideas have had a profound impact, especially in production and project management. Goldratt’s first axiom is that every decision must aim at furthering the company’s overall goal. Self-evident as it may sound, all senior managers know the constant effort it takes to maintain this focus.

What happens if we have no clear goal? In that case any undesired change may come to be perceived as an important problem. The more sudden or unexpected the change, the more likely this is.

If there is no goal, we have no way to judge the importance.

Source: Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning

What Goals Directed Covid Responses? 

In the summer of 2020 I had a long discussion with a consultant friend in Paris, another of Goldratt’s disciples, on the situation and outlook after the Covid-19 crisis struck. Our first instinct was of course to try and define a goal. We agreed that when it comes to public health the goal should always be to minimise the loss of life-years, or rather quality-adjusted life-years, both now and in the future.

This was shortly after the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo had claimed that any severity of measures against the coronavirus was worth it, if they saved just one life. Across the world, national leaders constantly repeated the mantra of “following the science,” meaning the whole of society should be managed based on the advice of experts in a narrow field of medical science, focusing on suppressing or even eradicating a single disease. An ethics professor I interviewed in late 2020 said it was morally right to brush aside all concerns of collateral damage because we were “in a pandemic.”

Maximising the number of life-years might well be a proper goal for healthcare. It calls for both short and long-term strategies, including prevention, treatment, even nutritional policies and many other strategies. But when we look at society as a whole, the maximum number of life-years, even when “quality-adjusted,” is hardly a proper overall goal; it focuses on physical existence only, ignoring all the other complex factors which make life worth living.

What then about the goal of “following the science” or of preventing even just one death from a coronavirus at all costs? It should be obvious how absurd it is to view those as true goals when it comes to governing a society. But for some reason, over the past 30 months, those and other similar extremely narrow objectives became the chief goals of public health authorities and governments in almost the whole world.

There is little doubt that the phenomenon of mass formation described by Mattias Desmet has played a role here. I clearly remember how many people had convinced themselves that nothing mattered except to stop the virus in its tracks, to delay infections. And when I say nothing I mean nothing. “The only thing that matters is preventing infections,” someone told me back in 2020. And when I pressed him, asking if he meant the only thing that mattered in the whole wide world was slowing the spread of the virus, if everything else was really of no consequence, education, the economy, poverty, mental health; everything else, the answer was a resounding “Yes!”

Escaping the Problem Obsession Trap

What those cases have in common is how, in the absence of a goal, our focus is diverted towards a problem, otherwise insignificant, or at least not the only problem in the world, and eliminating the problem becomes the goal.

This is why the key to successful problem-solving is to first agree on a common goal, otherwise we may end up solving the wrong problems.

The loss of focus we have experienced during the past 30 months rests on two pillars. One is the power of mass formation. But the other one, no less important, is the loss of leadership. In both Sweden and the Faroe Islands the leadership, epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in the case of Sweden, and the government in the case of the Faroe Islands, never succumbed to irrational fear. If they had, it would surely have taken over in both countries.

The chief reason it didn’t was the stance taken by the leaders who, guided by common sense. never lost sight of the goal of government; ensuring the well-being of society as a whole, or, at the individual level, ensuring man’s possibility to live a full life, as Eli Goldratt once put it. Neither is clear-cut of course, but however fuzzy and imperfect the goal statement may be, once we lose sight of it, we are in grave danger of succumbing to mass formation. It only takes a sudden change or an unforeseen threat, blown out of proportion, unrestrained by the common goal.

When almost the whole world loses sight of the common goal of human society, and the elimination of a single problem, in the end a rather unimportant one, takes precedence over everything else, thus becoming the goal – a distorted and absurd one, a disastrous and ruinous one for sure – this is an indication of a fundamental loss of common sense.

A healthy society does not succumb to mass formation. The reason this can happen is that we have no common goal any more, no common sense. To get out of this situation and to avoid it in the future, we must find our goal again, we must reestablish our focus, we must regain our common sense.

Footnote:  Preface to The Goal by Eli Goldratt

I  view science as nothing more than an understanding of the way the world is and why it is that way. At any given time our scientific knowledge is simply the current state of the art of our understanding. I do not believe in absolute truths. I fear such beliefs because they block the search for better understanding. Whenever we think we have final answers progress, science, and better understanding ceases. Understanding of our world is not something to be pursued for its own sake, however. Knowledge should be pursued, I believe, to make our world better—to make life more fulfilling.

There are several reasons I chose a novel to explain my understanding of manufacturing—how it works (reality) and why it works that way. First, I want to make these principles more understandable and show how they can bring order to the chaos that so often exists in our plants. Second, I wanted to illustrate the power of this understanding and the benefits it can bring. The results achieved are not fantasy; they have been, and are being, achieved in real plants. The western world does not have to become a second or third rate manufacturing power. If we just understand and apply the correct principles, we can compete with anyone. I also hope that readers would see the validity and value of these principles in other organizations such as banks, hospitals, insurance companies and our families. Maybe the same potential for growth and improvement exists in all organizations.

Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done. This challenging of basic assumptions is essential to breakthroughs. Almost everyone who has worked in a plant is at least uneasy about the use of cost accounting efficiencies to control our actions. Yet few have challenged this sacred cow directly. Progress in understanding requires that we challenge basic assumptions about how the world is  and why it is that way. If we can better understand our world and the principles that govern it, I suspect all our lives will be better.

Good luck in your search for these principles and for your own understanding of “The Goal.”

Link to The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eli Goldratt

Science + Politics = Politics

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Jukka Savolainen writes at City Journal And Yet It Moves.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A top scientific journal places political correctness above the search for truth.

Nature Human Behavior, one of the most prestigious journals for social science research, recently published an editorial titled “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.” Though short, the article generated tremendous pushback among academics and intellectuals concerned about the spread of social-justice ideology into science. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said the journal was “no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed,” while Greg Lukianoff, the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, described the journal’s statement as “an epistemic catastrophe.” What did the editorial say?

In short, it took the position that scientific truth should defer to politics. The journal now considers it appropriate to suppress research that “undermines—or could reasonably be perceived to undermine—the rights and dignities” of people or groups, as well as “text or images that disparage a person or group on the basis of socially constructed human groupings.” Researchers are urged to “consider the potential implications of research on human groups defined on the basis of social characteristics” and “to contextualise their findings to minimize as much as possible potential misuse or risks of harm to the studied groups in the public sphere.”

Anything that could be perceived as disparaging is now fair game for rejection or retraction.

The implications on scientific inquiry and truth-seeking are clear. As the journalist Jesse Singal observed, an empirically flawless study could be retracted under the guise of social justice. “What’s most alarming is that unless I’m missing something, research that is perfectly valid and well-executed could run afoul of these guidelines,” he wrote.

In the words of a scientist and commentator, the Nature Human Behavior editorial codifies policies “that most social science journals already have.” In his 2014 book The Sacred Project of American Sociology, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith laments the discipline’s unwillingness to come clean with the reality that pursuing specific kinds of social-justice goals is its central mission. As regrettable as the new editorial guidelines of Nature Human Behavior may be, at least they express honestly how contemporary social science is actually practiced.

Indeed, scientific journals cannot afford to remain neutral—but they need to take a strong stand for the pursuit of truth, not for any political cause. Like democracy, scientific inquiry does not happen by default; it requires unwavering commitment among its participants to play by the rules.

It is not acceptable to retract or suppress a methodologically sound study
simply because you don’t like the results.

Background Post:  Science Discredited by “Scientists”

Toby Young writes at Spectator How science became politicized. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

New rules from a leading journal do not bode well

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their “expert” advisors across the world have successfully promoted a series of controversial public policies by claiming they’re based on “the science” rather than a particular moral or ideological vision. I’m thinking of lockdowns and net zero in particular. Yet at the same time, this group has engaged in behavior that has undermined public confidence in science.

Why appeal to the authority of science to win support for a series of politically contentious policies — and then diminish its authority?

Take Anthony Fauci, for instance, who recently announced he’s stepping down as chief medical advisor to Joe Biden. Even though he once claimed to “represent science” in the eyes of the American people:

♦ he misled them about the likely duration of the lockdowns (“fifteen days to slow the spread”),
♦ overstated the efficacy of the Covid vaccines when they were first rolled out,
♦ refused to countenance the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
♦ it later emerged that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under his leadership, had given a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund “gain-of-function” research at the Chinese lab,
♦  and he conspired with other prominent scientists, such as Francis Collins, to besmirch the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (“There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” Collins told Fauci in an email).

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal concluded: “His legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.”

Another case in point is a recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour, one of several journals in the Nature Research stable, the world’s pre-eminent publisher of scientific research. “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded,” it begins, and then proceeds to set out rules that future academic papers will have to comply with in addition to meeting all the usual standards for publication, e.g. peer review. It says the journal won’t publish articles that might cause “potential harms” (even “inadvertently”) to individuals or groups that are most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism or homophobia.” “Academic content that undermines the dignity or rights of specific groups; assumes that a human group is superior or inferior over another simply because of a social characteristic; includes hate speech or denigrating images; or promotes privileged, exclusionary perspectives raises ethics concerns that may require revisions or supersede the value of publication,” it says.

It should be obvious that far from being politically neutral, these rules embody a particular ideology and in future the truthfulness of a scientific finding will be subordinate to this perspective.

To see this, you just need to do a simple thought experiment, as Bo Winegard has done in Quillette. Imagine, he says, if this editorial had been written by political conservatives who announced that “any research promoting (even ‘inadvertently’) promiscuous sex, the breakdown of the nuclear family, agnosticism and atheism, or the decline of the nation state, would be suppressed or rejected lest it inflict unspecified ‘harm’ on vaguely defined groups or individuals.” Those progressive scientists applauding Nature Human Behaviour would throw up their arms in horror and point out – correctly — that these rules are at odds with one of the foundational principles of science, which is to pursue the truth, wherever it may lead.

 

This editorial is a disaster from the point of view of closet ideologues who want to appeal to the authority of science to promote lockdowns and net zero, including, I suspect, its authors. After all, the reason rhetorical phrases like “the science” are supposed to win round those who are skeptical about these policies — conservatives, for the most part — is that they invoke a popular conception of scientists as politically neutral, disinterested “experts” who are basing their guidance on reason and evidence, uncontaminated by value judgments.

Yet here is a group of senior scientific gatekeepers announcing that the only knowledge that will count as “scientific” is that which promotes their agenda.

It’s as if they’re saying that scientific research unconstrained by this progressive straitjacket, i.e. science as conventionally understood, will yield results that are incompatible with their radical egalitarian agenda and so ought to be suppressed. In other words, “the science” is actually at odds with their political views.

How to explain this own goal? As I say, it’s a head-scratcher.

Science Discredited by “Scientists”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Toby Young writes at Spectator How science became politicized. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

New rules from a leading journal do not bode well

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their “expert” advisors across the world have successfully promoted a series of controversial public policies by claiming they’re based on “the science” rather than a particular moral or ideological vision. I’m thinking of lockdowns and net zero in particular. Yet at the same time, this group has engaged in behavior that has undermined public confidence in science.

Why appeal to the authority of science to win support for a series of politically contentious policies — and then diminish its authority?

Take Anthony Fauci, for instance, who recently announced he’s stepping down as chief medical advisor to Joe Biden. Even though he once claimed to “represent science” in the eyes of the American people:

♦ he misled them about the likely duration of the lockdowns (“fifteen days to slow the spread”),
♦ overstated the efficacy of the Covid vaccines when they were first rolled out,
♦ refused to countenance the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
♦ it later emerged that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under his leadership, had given a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund “gain-of-function” research at the Chinese lab,
♦  and he conspired with other prominent scientists, such as Francis Collins, to besmirch the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (“There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” Collins told Fauci in an email).

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal concluded: “His legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.”

Another case in point is a recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour, one of several journals in the Nature Research stable, the world’s pre-eminent publisher of scientific research. “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded,” it begins, and then proceeds to set out rules that future academic papers will have to comply with in addition to meeting all the usual standards for publication, e.g. peer review. It says the journal won’t publish articles that might cause “potential harms” (even “inadvertently”) to individuals or groups that are most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism or homophobia.” “Academic content that undermines the dignity or rights of specific groups; assumes that a human group is superior or inferior over another simply because of a social characteristic; includes hate speech or denigrating images; or promotes privileged, exclusionary perspectives raises ethics concerns that may require revisions or supersede the value of publication,” it says.

It should be obvious that far from being politically neutral, these rules embody a particular ideology and in future the truthfulness of a scientific finding will be subordinate to this perspective.

To see this, you just need to do a simple thought experiment, as Bo Winegard has done in Quillette. Imagine, he says, if this editorial had been written by political conservatives who announced that “any research promoting (even ‘inadvertently’) promiscuous sex, the breakdown of the nuclear family, agnosticism and atheism, or the decline of the nation state, would be suppressed or rejected lest it inflict unspecified ‘harm’ on vaguely defined groups or individuals.” Those progressive scientists applauding Nature Human Behaviour would throw up their arms in horror and point out – correctly — that these rules are at odds with one of the foundational principles of science, which is to pursue the truth, wherever it may lead.

 

This editorial is a disaster from the point of view of closet ideologues who want to appeal to the authority of science to promote lockdowns and net zero, including, I suspect, its authors. After all, the reason rhetorical phrases like “the science” are supposed to win round those who are skeptical about these policies — conservatives, for the most part — is that they invoke a popular conception of scientists as politically neutral, disinterested “experts” who are basing their guidance on reason and evidence, uncontaminated by value judgments.

Yet here is a group of senior scientific gatekeepers announcing that the only knowledge that will count as “scientific” is that which promotes their agenda.

It’s as if they’re saying that scientific research unconstrained by this progressive straitjacket, i.e. science as conventionally understood, will yield results that are incompatible with their radical egalitarian agenda and so ought to be suppressed. In other words, “the science” is actually at odds with their political views.

How to explain this own goal? As I say, it’s a head-scratcher.

 

Examples of Debased Government Science

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John Stossel explains with examples in his Town Hall article Scientific ‘Integrity’.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

“Trust the science,” say the media. Polls show that fewer Americans do. There’s good reason for that.

“They don’t trust science because science is increasingly untrustworthy,” says science writer Andrew Follet in my new video. “The only group that trusts science right now is Democrats.”  Sixty-four percent of Democrats have “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community, compared to 34% of Republicans.

Of course, true science — using the scientific method — is important. But that’s not what much of “science” is these days.

Instead, today government science is misused by progressive politicians.

Example 1: Environmental activists want to limit commercial fishing. They want Congress to pass what they call the “Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act.” It claims climate change is the “greatest threat to America’s national security” and offers a dubious solution: close more of the ocean to commercial fishing.

The administration’s deputy director of Climate, Jane Lubchenco, told Congress that a scientific paper concludes that closing more of the ocean can actually increase catches of fish. 

Really? That doesn’t seem logical.  It isn’t. The paper was retracted. One scientist called its logic “biologically impossible.”   Also, Lubchenco’s didn’t tell Congress that the paper was written by her brother-in-law! And edited by her!

Did the White House punish Lubchenco for her ethics violations? No. In fact, after her testimony, she was appointed co-head of President Joe Biden’s Scientific Integrity Task Force!

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences banned her for five years. Yet she’s still on the White House’s Scientific Integrity Task Force.

Sadly, much of what’s called science today is simply left-wing advocacy.

“New fields like fat studies, African studies, Latinx studies, queer studies,” says Follet, “are essentially entirely fake.”  Fake? Well, they must be. “Experts” in those fields keep being fooled by people who submit gibberish.

Example 2:  Fat Studies

A ridiculous paper, “Embracing Fatness as Self-Care in the Era of Trump,” was accepted by Massey University’s “Fat Studies” conference. The conference then invited the paper’s author, “Sea Matheson,” to speak.

Attendees gave Matheson’s speech rave reviews, praising the paper’s description of Donald Trump’s “fatphobia” and inviting Matheson to review other work submitted to their “scientific” journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.

But Matheson is no scientist. “She” is actually comedian Steven Crowder, who disguised himself as an overweight woman to expose “ivory tower quackery.”

Crowder is just the latest person to fool today’s so-called science journals. James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted nonsense papers to “grievance studies” journals like Fat Studies, Sexuality & Culture and Sex Roles.

Seven accepted ridiculous papers.

One that took a section of “Mein Kampf” but replaced references to “National Socialism” with “feminism,” was accepted by Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.

Gender, Place and Culture accepted a paper that claimed there is rape culture at dog parks.

Follett blames this perversion of science on government. Its science agencies, like much of America, have been taken over by leftists hungry to promote themselves and their agenda.

In science, the way to promote yourself is to get papers published. That often gets you more funding. Government agencies like the National Science Foundation provide most of that funding.

“Nobody wants to publish something that goes against the paymaster,” says Follett. “You don’t get published unless the NSF likes your results.”

Example 3: The NSF gave nearly half a million dollars to a team that wrote a paper questioning glacier science because it “stems from knowledge created by men.”

Absurdities are pushed by the right, too. .Some people still claim that man plays no part in climate change or that the climate isn’t warming at all. Some say vaccines don’t work.  But the right’s junk science doesn’t get backed by government funds.

I’m angry that my tax dollars go to support leftist nonsense.

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t care. That’s probably because they don’t know that government throws so much money at ridiculous progressive advocacy.

“We’ll all start caring when the bridges start falling down and the planes start crashing,” says Follet. “That’s the inevitable end result of this.”

See also Trust Me, I’m a Scientist. Really?

 

See also Why Federalized Science is Rotten