Science Says Chocolate Will Kill You & Cure You: So Will Everything Else

I am moving the Class, which is rather specialized, to the end of the week.

Credentialists are having a fit over the new regime whacking grant overhead and making other cuts to bureaucratic based-science funding. Some of these malcontents, as they do, got together to have a wee public fit. The headline is “Scientists rally in DC against Trump’s cuts to research“.

Rot. They don’t give a rat’s keister about science, not most of them. What they do care about is their jobs. They want you to keep paying them. The arrogance of these people is astonishing. They feel—the word is accurate—they are owed your money, and rarely consider they owe us good explanations why we ought to keep shelling out for their poor quality, and often wrong, work.

What’s hilarious is that The Atlantic thought they had a killer argument to keep the funds flowing. They had an article with the extraordinarily revealing headline “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save You Now: You can cite peer-reviewed research in support of almost any claim, no matter how absurd.“

They’re right!

Of course, they were whining in the service of their preferred narratives. Like how all mandatory medicines are “safe & effective”, puberty “blockers” are effective (a lie) and that sort of thing. They point out, rightly, that some papers outside their pozzed narrative are whacky and can’t or shouldn’t be believed. Our guys, those who staff Team Reality, don’t always love to hear it, but it’s true nonetheless that we sometimes, but with far less frequency and stubbornness than Team Fantasy, embrace bad “studies show” papers.

Yet that’s neither here nor there. I don’t care to argue today about any of these ideas. The real point is that yes, indeed, The Atlantic is right: the methods science uses can “prove” just about any damned thing it wants to.

We have already seen that “climate change” causes every bad thing. Yes. Any and every bad thing you can imagine is caused or made worse because of “climate change”. Science says so!

Don’t believe me. Go and try the game at “Climate Changes Causes Only Bad Things, And No Good Things“. It’s easy. Go to scholar.google.com, the search engine for science papers, and typed in ‘X “climate change”‘. Use the quotes around “climate change”, and put anything at all for X. By anything I mean any thing.

See, scientists are told that “climate change” is bad, so, using your money, and lousy statistics, and not caring to question whether minor fluctuations in the weather really are bad, they go on the hunt to “prove” how “climate change” will just happen to make the things in their own specialty, everything from aardvarks to zebras, worse. Which is impossible. Yet they publish, using your money, the opposite.

This is why I am giving the Class. To show you how all this works. It’s not easy going, but if you can, you should take it.

I’ve said hundreds of times that scientists, being more or less intelligent, are good at finding evidence to support whatever beliefs they have. But most stink at finding contradictory evidence. This is why we have to stop paying them. They are churning out, using your money, tsunamis of dreck. Scan this site for examples: about once a week we go over big-name papers that are touted by Big Science, but which are easily seen to be wrong, exaggerated, or worse.

You can easily prove to yourself The Atlantic’s contention. I went to scholar.google.com and typed in ‘X “increases” risk’ (with the quotes around increases), just for the few things I had laying around on my breakfast table, which is when I wrote this.

• Chocolate: Habitual Chocolate Consumption May Increase Body Weight in a Dose-Response Manner: “More frequent chocolate consumption was associated with a significantly greater prospective weight gain over time, in a dose-response manner.” (You have to laugh.)
• Bananas: Mortality among a Cohort of Banana Plantation Workers in Costa Rica:  “Mortality from septicemia was significantly higher than expected. Nonsignificant increases in mortality were also observed for testicular cancer, penile cancer, Hodgkin’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease in men, and for cervical cancer and lung cancer in women.”
• Pencils: Orbital and Orbitocranial Trauma From Pencil Fragments: Role of Timely Diagnosis and Management: “Three-dimensional CT scans were used to differentiate the penetrating graphite pencil fragments from the orbital wall, and catheter angiography was used in 1 case of suspected orbital apex penetration.”
• Light bulbs: The risk of ultraviolet radiation exposure from indoor lamps in lupus erythematosus: “Indeed, many of the light bulbs commonly used in the home and workplace emit low-dose ultraviolet radiation.”
• Coffee: Coffee consumption and hip fracture risk: a meta-analysis: “… coffee intake may increase hip fracture risk among women, elderly participants and Northern Americans.”
• Peanut Butter: Total nut, tree nut, peanut, and peanut butter intake and the risk of prostate cancer in the Netherlands Cohort Study: “Peanut butter consumption was associated with a significantly increased risk of non-advanced prostate cancer…”
• Butter: We did this last week.
• Napkins: Orange napkins increase food intake and satisfaction with hospital food service: A randomized intervention: “Patients in the orange napkin group (n = 66) consumed 17.6% more hospital-provided food than those in the white napkin (control) group (n = 65), driven by the significantly greater proportion of the carbohydrate side dishes and the vegetable dishes consumed.” Wut.
• Newspaper: Computer use increases the risk of musculoskeletal disorders among newspaper office workers: “Risk of musculoskeletal disorders was greater among workers at the newspaper who used computers, those involved in editing work, and those who adopted uncomfortable positions.” It’s science!

This can be done indefinitely. Even for prunes! Indeed, you will have a hard time finding something that isn’t statistically bad for you.

But you could just as easily find papers “proving” the opposite of, or good things, these bad “findings”. Sometimes all you find are good things, like papers over the last decade for chocolate or coffee. You’d think that after the 3,000th one (this number is lowballing it) proclaiming chocolate’s benefits scientists would move on to something else. They don’t because there are too many scientists, and they have to fill up their time doing something.

With your money.

“But Briggs, we’re missing out on cancer cures, which research your money goes toward.”

Yes, it does. Quoting myself (go and read or watch the whole Hillsdale speech):

The British Medical Journal 2017 review of New & Improved cancer drugs found that for only about 35% of new drugs was there an important effect, and that “The magnitude of the benefit on overall survival ranged from 1.0 to 5.8 months.” That’s it. An average of three months.

The majority of the New & Improved! drugs did nothing or made things worse. But at least most pharmaceuticals spend their money doing this research.

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