Tag: Fake Science

Too Much Truth

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“In 2020, five psychologists asked the editors of PNAS to retract their study of racial bias in police shootings. PNAS, which stands for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, is one of the most prestigious multidisciplinary journals in the world. Retraction is an outcome no scholar wishes to experience because it signifies a serious research error and, as such, entails considerable reputational damage.”

Was it because of they made up data or because their calculations were wrong.  Nope.

“Some observers have suggested that the retraction was politically motivated. The study, which showed no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, had been used in political debates in ways that challenged calls for radical police reform; calls that had grown louder in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, claimed the article was retracted because she had cited it in a congressional hearing and in essays published in the Wall Street Journal and other right-leaning media outlets. Others denied this claim. Most importantly, Dr. Joseph Cesario, the senior author of the retracted article wrote, in response to Ms. Mac Donald, “We retracted the paper because we overstepped with the inferences we made from our data.” In other words, he maintained the reason was not political but motivated by purely scientific considerations.”

The narrative must be maintained at all costs, even if it means loss of credibility of some of the hive workers.

The truth?  What is truth?  Is your truth my truth?

Hah!

Guest Contributor – TomD – 25MAR2023 – Scientific American Goes Woke

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Did a quick google (Laura Helmuth) and found she’s chief editor of Scientific American. That would be hard to believe if SA hadn’t been totally co-opted 20 or so years ago. I hate it too, I subscribed to SA for decades and absolutely devoured every issue. I remember the issue with the article on the Supernova of 1987 in the Great Crab Nebula. Whoever wrote it did a great job, it was exciting, mesmerizing, illuminating. Back then, the basis of the magazine was purely science

I watched politics and what is now called wokeism creep in. There was an editor change, don’t remember the names now, but that opened the gates. SA hired a new columnist (again don’t remember the name), who on his 2nd column, stated flatly that the verdict of history was now in and the political organizing system of the future was clear and that was socialism.

Oh, yeah? That was it for SA for me. Now you don’t know if any particular article is true or an outright lie intended to mislead you to believe in some woke bulls***t.

World Didn’t End in 2023. Greta Thunberg Exclaims, “How Dare You!”

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I think her punishment for being wrong should be for her to be put in one of those dunk tanks and let all the non-climate alarmists get five baseball pitches to try and dunk her.  With any luck she’ll drown.

Best Title of the Month – Approximately Zero

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That’s the title of this article in City Journal.  It’s about a report that came out on a study done by the Cochrane Collaboration which is described thus:

“The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions. Funded by the National Institutes of Health and other nations’ health agencies, it’s an international network of reviewers, based in London, that has partnerships with the WHO and Wikipedia. Medical journals have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.””

And here comes the result:

“We now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero. The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses.”

But now the bad news:

“This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask mandates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the rest of the public-health establishment to forsake “the science”—and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as determined as ever to ignore actual science. Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed little or no benefit from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like flu and colds. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and other national public-health agencies did not recommend masking the public. But once Covid-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed. Officials ignored the previous findings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked.”

So there you go.  None of this is news.  But now we see that “science” is just a magical incantation the Left uses to get their followers to raise their banner and start marching.  Maybe it’ll be good for starting fights with crazy relatives at holidays.

Will the Internal Combustion Engine be Outlawed by 2035 and What Would be the Results?

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Mandating battery driven automobiles would be an enormous change to the world we live in.  It would, in one fell swoop, destroy enormous corporations like Exxon and British Petroleum.  It would require the extraction of tremendous quantities of minerals such as lithium and nickel from the ground with devastating impact on the environment that is allegedly the reason for the change.  It would require us to sacrifice the almost limitless mobility we currently enjoy for a greatly diminished horizon.  And it would require an enormous upgrade in the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure.  And hidden in the switch is a higher level of control on your access to energy.

I posed this as a question.  But what it boils down to is a simpler question.  Are the Millennials and Generation Z so docile and bought into the Climate Change argument that they’ll just go along with this change.  My personal experience with these people says the answer is yes.  They are a completely different animal from their parents and grandparents.  They are easily led into actions that are painted as socially virtuous.  They do not possess any instincts to question authority.  And they like to move with the herd they identify with.  Put simply they’re domesticated animals, let’s say sheep.  And this is a generalization that of course has millions of exceptions but as a reflection of the majority of this cohort it is accurate.

This being the case I’ve been thinking about whether there is some combination of actions or events that could change this result.  The only thing I could think of is if some states band together and resist this mandate and because of this make owning battery driven cars unattractive.  For instance, suppose that the west coast states mandate battery cars but the rest of the west refuses.  That would mean that people in the gas vehicle areas would continue to have enormous freedom to travel where they wish but the coastal state people wouldn’t have that advantage.  I guess they could rent gas vehicles at the borders of their state and use these cars to travel for business or vacation.  And even this would reinforce for these people just how pathetic battery cars are in comparison.  In the east, with the smaller size of the states, gas vehicles could quite often pass right through a battery only state without running out of gas.  For instance, let’s say that Illinois was a battery state.  Someone in Indiana could drive right through Illinois and reach Iowa or Missouri without running out of gas.

So, the west coast, the Great Lakes and the northeast would become dead zones for gas cars and enclaves for battery cars.  And the enclaves would put up restrictive laws.  They would restrict or forbid gas cars from entering their territory, much in the way they restrict gun transport.  Maybe the gas car states would retaliate to punish the battery car states with similar bans.  That might be an interesting way to start driving wedges between the red and blue states.

But the funny part of all this is that freight hauling trucks would probably still be running on fuel.  Specifically, diesel fuel but probably there won’t be any battery-powered 18-wheelers.  Will these battery car states dispense with trucks?  Will they start building railway spurs everywhere and use only electrified tracks?  I guess it’s possible.  But what’s more likely is that they’ll leave diesel trucks as an anomaly, since private citizens won’t be able to have diesel powered cars.  After all inconsistency isn’t a problem for them.  It’s a feature of a quasi-religious approach to life.

Now, this is all spit-balling.  But you can see that this push to eliminate gas powered cars could have unexpected results.  And even if the whole country goes along with it, there could be strong reactions to the problems of mandating an inferior technology over an existing superior one.  Eliminating gas cars might have the outcome of making hydrogen fueled cars suddenly attractive.  These aren’t as convenient as gas cars but they eliminate the refueling time problem inherent in the battery cars.  Trade-offs will be weighed and people will gravitate to what makes their lives easier.  Even the sheep will choose between the bad options they’ve accepted to minimize the pain they have to endure.

I love the freedom that modern automobiles give us.  Being able to pack my bags and drive five hundred miles and go camping or attend an event has become a feature of American life.  The fact that the young would let this go to “save Gaia” is extremely depressing in my mind.  But I think it’s accurate.  Once again, we will witness soon whether the American dream will be sacrificed by our descendants or whether the will to resist still exists.

Einstein They Ain’t

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“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,

    As he landed his crew with care;

Supporting each man on the top of the tide

    By a finger entwined in his hair.

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:

    That alone should encourage the crew.

Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:

    What I tell you three times is true.”

(from “The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in 8 Fits” by Lewis Carroll)

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German woman with a doctorate in theoretical physics and a YouTube channel full of videos that discuss all manner of scientific and engineering subjects.  Her area of research is “analog models of gravity.”  So, she’s trying to visualize things like black holes and think up tests to add to our understanding of these outlandish phenomena.  And she’s an obvious girl nerd.

What I like about her popular work (YouTube videos) is that she has no fear of exposing just how dysfunctional modern day physics has become.  From dark matter and dark energy to string theory, to futile attempts by particle physicists to invent extraneous particles and then waste untold millions of dollars proving they don’t exist, she exposes the transparent mediocrity and obvious academic make-work that these pseudoscientists are engaging in.  They are the hunters of the that altogether mythical snark.

And that brings me to this video.  Sabine chronicles the last fifty years of mythical particles that have been proposed and have failed to appear.  She describes how the creators of these unicorn particles keep them alive by moving the goal posts whenever the experiments fail to confirm their existence.  And finally, she shows how this form of “science” is basically worthless because it has no chance of asking the right questions needed to extend our knowledge.  She uses a couple of graphs with data and then the extrapolations associated with these junk science predictions to show how truly worthless this half century of make-work particle physics has been.

It is my belief that the only way to bring rigor back to theoretical physics is to use corporal punishment for failures in achieving successful experimental results.  I’m not talking about executions or amputations.  Nothing barbaric.  I’m talking about caning, possibly flogging.  No cat o’nine tails, nothing over five lashes.  Barely enough to draw blood.  All very civilized and calibrated to bring about the desired results.  And I’ll be fair.  The physicists can decide whether he’d prefer losing his tenure or being publicly lashed.  What could be fairer than that?

All kidding aside, scientific research, not only in this country but throughout the western world, has been stagnating and falling into disrepute.  In the social sciences it has degenerated into gobbledygook with the results of the majority of research papers being unreproducible.  Doctorates in sociology and psychology are now essentially worthless.  Even in the “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry but especially in pharmaceutical research progress at answering fundamental problems has ground to a halt.

So, it’s very refreshing for someone in the academic world to be out there declaring that the emperor has no clothes.  Now that’s not to say I agree with every one of her videos.  She had a presentation about hydrogen as a fuel, the conclusions of which I completely disagreed with.  But she at least lays out a lot of the facts and that allows an informed viewer to  judge her opinion based on them.  Kudos to Sabine.

On the more general front of scientific research today, all of this confirms something that has become clear.  Government money, especially in the United States has turned academia into a racket.  Research is a bottomless pit of money that funds unqualified “scientists” to waste resources without any hope of finding the results they are supposedly pursuing.  All they accomplish is creating a bureaucracy of people defending their paychecks via government grants.

Other than weapons research the United States government needs to get out of the research business.  If they want to incentivize scientific progress let them offer large monetary prizes for successful solutions to practical problems in the engineering and science realms, like the fabulous “cure for cancer” we’re always hearing is right around the corner.  Even if the results are more incremental than this at least we would stop incentivizing fraud.  Until then we will continue to hear about the latest search for the particle equivalent of the snark.

Way Too Smart for Their Own Good

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I feel it’s time for another physics rant.

Somebody named Paul Sutter wrote an article in Ars Technica called “ Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything.  String theory was supposed to explain all of physics. What went wrong?”

I have some excerpts from the article that indicate the thrust of the problem with string theory.

“Like most revolutions, string theory had humble origins. It started in the 1960s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered.”

“A group of physicists took a mathematical technique developed (and later abandoned) by quantum godfather Werner Heisenberg and expanded it. In that expansion, they found the first strings—mathematical structures that repeated themselves in spacetime. Unfortunately, this proto-string theory made incorrect predictions about the nature of the strong force and also had a variety of troublesome artifacts (like the existence of tachyons, particles that only traveled faster than light). Once another theory was developed to explain the strong force—the one we use today, based on quarks and gluons—string theory faded from the scene.”

So, look at this.  They borrow a technique from someone who was extremely smart.  But it was a technique that was discarded because it doesn’t work.  They ignore the fact that it produces crazy answers and they try to nurse it along by expanding it into more dimensions and other complications.  Shades of Ptolemy’s epicycles!

“Unlike its quantum cousins, when it comes to string theory, we have no fundamental theory—we have only a set of approximation and perturbation methods. We’re not exactly sure if our approximations are good ones or if we’re way off the mark. We have perturbation techniques, but we’re not sure what we’re perturbing from. In other words, there’s no such thing as string theory, just approximations of what we hope string theory could be.”

Wow.  It’s useless and wrong and yet it lives on decade after decade.

“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”

They’re paying these people!  No one’s forcing them to pay them but they keep on paying them.

“The beams of the LHC began their first test operations in 2008 with two main science goals in mind: finding the elusive Higgs boson and finding evidence of supersymmetry.  Four years later, the Higgs was found. Supersymmetry was not. It’s now 15 years later, and there are still no signs of supersymmetry.”

Can we get our money back?

“The dearth of evidence has slaughtered so many members of the supersymmetric family that the whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like “Beyond Supersymmetry” and “Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.””

You sure have!  And our billions in funding for this clap-trap!

“Most string theorists of the modern era don’t work on string theory directly but instead mostly on the AdS/CFT correspondence and its implications, hoping that continuing to probe that mathematical relationship will unlock some hidden insight into the workings of a theory of everything.  I wish them luck.”

I don’t!

We really need to restrict the funds available to really smart people such that only the one really smartest guy in the field is allowed to waste his whole life doing this kind of mental masturbation.  This is not physics.  It has the same relation to physics as rhythmic gymnastics has to power-lifting.  I mean should I get tenure for coming up with the new variant called string cheese theory?  Does my background in mozzarella qualify me to expound my theory that the universe is really a large amorphous blob of Italian dairy product?  I think not!

The rest of them should be forced to do this crap in their spare time if they want to when no one can see them and during working hours force them to do something that pays the electric bill.  Maybe they can get an engineering degree on the side and design quantum screw drivers or something.

Look at this quote again:

“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”

These guys have been futzin’ around with this thing for fifty years and they still haven’t got a theory to justify their paychecks.  In China they would have been taken out behind the building and shot and their families would be forced to pay for the bullets they were shot with.  Here they should have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Princeton on a rail.

Camera Girl has often told me off for being, in her words, “scholastic-asstic.”  By this she means too smart for my own good or more precisely an educated dope.  And often she is exactly right.  I wouldn’t dare tell her about this outrage to common sense because she would hit me for trying to waste her time listening to this nonsense.  She would equate it with ecclesiastical scholars  attempting to calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.  That is if she had ever heard of that concept before, which I’m fairly certain she has not.

So instead, I’m bringing this here for the larger audience to hear.  Albert Einstein figured out relativity while working as a patent clerk.  That should be the model.  When someone figures out anti-gravity or faster than light pizza delivery then we can talk about a cushy office in the physics department at Cal Tech and maybe tenure.  But if they’re going to spend forty years of academic salary and perks for this drivel, we need to break out the Chinese model.  Who knows, maybe we can throw in the cost of the bullets for free.  After all we are reasonable people.

Latest Green Fiasco, Offshore Windmills Killing Whales

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You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

“A New Jersey congressman is demanding an investigation into whether offshore wind projects are killing whales off the coast of the Garden State and the state of New York.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., announced on Friday that he would be calling for an investigation into the increasing number of dead whales that have washed up off the coast of New Jersey over the last month once committee assignments for the 118th Congress are finalized.

In less than two months, seven dead whales have washed up along the New Jersey-New York coastline, local media have reported.”

I have to admit I don’t see how offshore wind turbines are killing whales.  Sea birds yes but unless these are flying whales I don’t get the connection between the turbines and the dead whales.  But based on the track record of the geniuses in the green clown show I wouldn’t bet against it being so.

Well I guess the whales are just going to have to suck it up to save the planet.  Maybe next time it can be the polar bears’ turn.  Or the pandas.  Thanks Gaia.

Brain Researchers Are Finally Waking Up From Their Alzheimer’s Errors

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For the last twenty plus years researchers have single-mindedly chased the amyloid hypothesis as the solution to Alzheimer’s Disease.  And this has led nowhere.  Finally after hundreds of drug trials and billions of dollars spent, they’re waking up from their delusion and realizing that amyloid is a symptom of the disease not its cause.

More than anything this is an indictment of the system of selecting research and development targets in biomedical science.  But ti also may reflect the waning of the scientific method in the West too.  Considerable fraud was involved in a landmark research project that perpetuated the mistaken direction of Alzheimer’s research for decades.

The government/industry/academic “partnership” is at the center of the dysfunction that has become endemic across America and Europe.  The complex no longer rewards merit and is highly influenced by gender and racial politics and other irrelevant considerations that limit the scientific method.

But at least now maybe some progress can be made in this terribly debilitating disease.  In fact it might turn out that small molecule solutions that aren’t as costly or require such long development times as the antibody drugs might turn up now.