There is no typo in the title. We are discussing The Science, and not science. Science-sans-article is chugging along, doing okay there, and poorly there, the whole decaying for all the reasons we’ve discussed many times. We won’t go into these reasons today.
Today we are interested in The Science. Which is defined as science-sounding claims by rulers, elites, and Experts whch they demand we swear allegiance to.
Last week, the Regime trotted out their hired-for-her-Diversity-and-sexual-interests spokescreature and had her recommend masking. Again. One summary: “White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre reminds the press that per current CDC COVID guidance based on hospital admissions, approximately ‘93% of the country’ should be considering mask mandates”.
Ian Miller, an old-fashioned small-s scientist of the School of Reality reacted to this, saying, “This is the problem with letting the CDC get away with endless misinformation — they’re never going to stop recommending masks now because COVID is never going away and they’re never going to stop pretending they work.”
This led me to ponder the role evidence plays in modern The Science. It begins with the realization that all evidence contradictory to a beloved or useful theory can just be ignored.
Contradictory evidence is unpersoned. All right-thinking people pretend not to see it. And, except for some fringe Realists, nobody cares.
It is not that evidence against the Regime-sponsored theory, which is what all The Science is, has been examined by top Experts and its weaknesses laid bare in the same way as a pathologist conducts a post-mortem. It is that it is not examined at all. It lies unacknowledged.
The best an Expert will do, when pressed, and pressed hard, is to say the evidence in question has already been refuted. He won’t say why or by whom. Except that other Experts have found the evidence unworthy, and so he does, too.
All know the story of Einstein and Bohr and the first Solvay Conference. Evidence uncomfortable to everybody’s beliefs was presented during the day, thought about in the evenings, and argued over the following day. Back and forth. Openly—which is how we know about it—and not always in quiet temper. This is not to say that the results of that conference were therefore true. Indeed, the foundations of quantum mechanics are debated to this day. Though more quietly.
Even, say, twenty years ago, presenting arguments in front of peers could turn into querulous affairs. Not all of the heat was truth-directed, of course. Scientists are if anything even more temperamental and histrionic than non-scientists when their cherished ideas are attacked. Ideas are all scientists have.
But because, inter alia, of the Great Nicening, occurring for obvious reasons and enforced by administrators and HR, battle scenes are now far less common.
That is only one reason why silence is the most common kind of disagreement. The more important reason in The Science is that contradictory evidence is deemed hostile. Or even “hate”. And so it is, in the minds of Experts, rightly ignored.
This applies even to evidence you would think, given the hersteria over certain theories, would should be seen as good news. Take polar bears and coral reefs. Both were said to be disappearing because of The Science of “climate change.” When, instead, the nasty white seal killers increased in number and the corals flourished, news which you’d suppose would be greeted with great joy—the world is not ending after all!—the news was ignored. The failed theories which predicted demise survive. The Science, contradicted by Reality, lives on.
This most obvious case is The Science of masks. Acres—nay, hectares, even continents—of evidence, compiled over a century of diligent investigation, show the kind it became a crime not to wear are worthless.
But when there has been a minuscule uptick in mostly harmless variant of coronadoom, the same sad The Science was shrieked from on high, and masks became mandatory again. The recent well trumpeted Cochrane review (in link above) which compiled great swaths of evidence disproving masks? Ignored.
The Fabulous Fauci was out lying about masks recently, pretending contradictory evidence doesn’t exist. “There’s no doubt that masks work. Different studies give different percentages of advantage of wearing it, but there’s no doubt that the weight of the studies…indicate the benefit of wearing masks,” lied the inveterate liar.
So ludicrous was Fauci’s fornicating of the truth that the lead author of the Cochrane study, Tom Jefferson, was moved to publicly state:
“So, Fauci is saying that masks work for individuals but not at a population level? That simply doesn’t make sense,” said Jefferson.
“And he says there are ‘other studies’…but what studies? He doesn’t name them so I cannot interpret his remarks without knowing what he is referring to”…
“It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,” said Jefferson. “Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence.”…
…”There were no randomised studies, no new evidence to justify [Fauci’s] flip-flop. That’s simply not true.”
Quite a rare reaming (read the rest). If evidence still mattered in The Science, Facui would be walking bow-legged the rest of this life.
As it is, those in the Cult of Safety First!, all prime consumers of The Science, will gobble up his lies—and keep issuing new mandates.
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the PR department of The Science has no text modules for empirical evidence, that is one of the reasons …
To quote from Festinger’s intro to.. When P Fails.. (for correct para/ numbering etc see telearb.net ) I just paste here.
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A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.
But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.
How and why does such a response to contradictory evidence come about? This is the question on which this book focuses. We hope that by the end of the volume, we will have provided an adequate answer to the question, an answer documented by data.
Let us begin by stating the conditions under which we would expect to observe increased fervor following the disconfirmation of a belief. There are five such conditions.
A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
These five conditions specify the circumstances under which increased proselyting would be expected to follow disconfirmation.
And bear in mind, please, that his real question amounted to “how did the NAZIs get good Germans to kill other Germans with such enthusiasm?”
I check the Internet every morning to see if Fauci has died yet. So far I’ve been disappointed.
THE SCIENCE ™ is a PR front for GOVERNMENT INC. (sm)
GOVERNMENT INC. (sm) works for BIG CORPO GROUP (r).
All three like MAKING MONEY and HAVING TOTAL CONTROL AND OBEDIENCE.
LIES are VERY PROFITABLE.
All three are not necessarily always friends, but here their interests align mightily!
And because the little guy also at the very least needs money if only to eat, there is no shortage of little guys to carry out the duties associated with the LIE. They hope the guilt will quickly go by, hence all the thorough hand-washing.
When I was a little kid I had GI-Joes and I’d play war with my GI-Joes and make war noises until I got bored with the war and with the GI-Joes so I’d start to torture my GI-Joes by running trucks over them or ripping their arma off or melting their faces with my dad’s cigarette lighter. WELL, we’re at that stage in human civilization were the BIG GIANT KID is bored …. with us little plastic GI-Joes.
@Gunther Heinz: “we’re at that stage in human civilization were the BIG GIANT KID is bored …. with us little plastic GI-Joes.”
Growing up in the late 1950s with WWII just over a decade in the rear view mirror, I was always proud that America was acclaimed as the best of the good guys. People from around the world still struggled to come here for freedom, for the right to speak freely and do with their lives as they wished. Free medical care, free housing, free groceries, free legal services — none of that was available, and NO ONE even thought it was desirable. My playmates and I wondered how it happened that the German people had somehow turned so bad when they decided to support Hitler. Maybe he hypnotized them. Maybe Germans just had an evil streak in them. I always thought that if I had been a German, I would have resisted, I would have spoken out.
And now it is 2023… It turns out that not only was I correct about the Germans, but Americans are just the same. Americans have been hypnotized. Americans DO in fact have an evil streak in them. And yes, I am speaking out. But, as you say, “we’re at that stage in human civilization were the BIG GIANT KID is bored …. with us little plastic GI-Joes.” The astounding part is that a majority of the little plastic GI-Joes cheer more and more loudly every time the BIG GIANT KID squirts gasoline on them.
Murph:
Good question. Here’s another: how did American leaders get good Americans to incinerate innocent Germans and Japanese in savage fire bombing attacks? How were we induced to mass murder German civilians in open air concentration camps after the war, where men, women, and children died like flies. How were good Americans tricked into mass murdering innocent Vietnamese in a war where no Vietnamese attacked America? What American interest was defended in our Korean War? What the hell are we doing in our savage and stupid Middle Eastern wars? Why are we starting WWIII? There’s a good case to made that Americans are the most savage and stupid force for evil in the modern world. Tangential to Briggs interesting post, apologies.
Hagfish, the answer is that the Giant Kid Americans, like the Germans and every other Giant Kid-run country have forgotten all about the BIG DADDY upstairs. Despite Big Daddy telling them He is going away for awhile, but will return and expects to find something when he comes back. Let us endeavor to be like the runt little bros who stay out of trouble and then point at them and go “Ha-ha!” upon His return.