“Scientists” complain that the government is interfering in “science” by denying them regulatory authority over other people’s economic activity.
Nasa’s primary goal is to make Muslims feel good about Muslim science. (more…)
Archive for the ‘science’ Category
The death of science
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010“ethics”
Saturday, July 10th, 2010The Washington post complains about unethical science in China.
Zhao is turning his attention to a topic Western researchers have shied away from because of ethical worries: Zhao plans to study the genes of 1,000 of his best-performing classmates at a top high school in Beijing and compare them, he said, “with 1,000 normal kids.”
Politically incorrect science is “unethical”
Today western science is stagnant for the same reasons as it was stagnant from 1293 to 1648 – because it has been subordinated to religion.
The boot comes down hard on the Institute of Physics
Friday, March 5th, 2010As you doubtless know by now, the Institute of Physics gave a wonderfully politically incorrect report on Global Warming.
Predictably the boot came down on them hard.
Academia is indeed like a communist country. They don’t shoot dissidents in Academia, but communist thought control seldom found it necessary to shoot people. It mostly worked by quietly blighting the lives of troublesome people. (more…)
Exegesis on the Institute of Physics report on the CRU emails
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010The Institute of Physics tells us.
The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.
In plainer words, climate science lacks credibility. That climate scientists tell us we are doomed unless we repent of our sins against Gaea is not good reason to think we are doomed.
The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions … This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
Yes, they are condemning the entire field, not just Phil Jones, not just Hadley CRU
… proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.
In plainer words, evidently the reason that Climate scientists refused to make their data available because if other people looked at the data, they would have concluded the climate scientists were full of $#@%. This is a reference to the alternate climate reconstructions in Steve McIntyre’s report on the CRU emails. (more…)
The problem with peer review
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Peer review is not part of the scientific method. In most fields, for example physics, it is a new thing, and wherever it has become a standard thing, we see stagnation.
Peer review keeps out cranks, but it also keeps out the impious. It makes it safe for a science to become a religion, and for scientists to become priests of a state sponsored theocracy. Cranks have never been a threat to science, state sponsored theocracy has always been a threat to science, thus peer review has always been a failure. It is caused by science becoming theology, and causes science to become theology.
Back in the days when physics made dramatic progress, there was little peer review, perhaps none. For example, “Electrodynamics of Moving bodies” was not peer reviewed, and my guess is that today it would never have passed peer review – because it was written by a patent clerk, and was in large part a novel way of looking at results that were a hundred years old. Outsiders, and novel ways of looking at things are pretty much guaranteed to fail peer review.
The science is scuttled
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010Nasa, as evidence that we are doomed unless we make sufficient sacrifice to Gaia and tithe to Gaia’s high priesthood, has long had on its web page
Mountain Glaciers and snow cover have declined on average in both hemispheres and may disappear altogether in certain regions of the planet, such as the Himalayas, by 2030
Which web page has silently changed
So was it a lie, or an error?
In other words, a lie. And if one lie, all lies.
As Patrick Archibald told us of an earlier scandal with the same lesson, the science is scuttled
Global warming science in action
Sunday, January 24th, 2010The “Air Vent” follows the money:
The IPCC makes a hyperbolic claim about retreating glaciers, which claim originates from a for profit company owned by the chairman of the IPCC. Millions of dollars are then granted to this company to investigate this purported disaster, to the personal profit of the chairman of the IPCC.
Mencius and Kling agree
Saturday, January 16th, 2010Mencius Moldbug has long argued, in an exceedingly long winded fashion, that we live in a theocracy. The priesthood teach that the state deserves authority, the schools teach the official religion, and the state funds the schools and the priesthood.
Now Arnold Kling gives the same analysis, calling it market failure, rather than theocracy
Suppose that we have a group that wants enormous political power. The group rewards people who justify its power by calling them “experts.” It punishes those who question its power by dismissing them as “hacks.” If you want money and status, you want to be labeled as an expert. In order to be labeled as an expert, you produce analysis that justifies concentrated political power for the elite group.
This process is self-reinforcing. It is like the Harvard-Goldman filter. That filter says that only “reliable” people are allowed to be bank CEO’s or policymakers. A requirement for being “reliable” is sharing the views of other “reliable” people as to what constitutes reliability.
It is like the tenure system in academia. Who gets tenure? Above all, it is people who support the existing tenure system
Mencius’s proposed cure for this problem is a “strong” sensible state, where “strong” means something very like fascist, or despotic. However, strong states have a poor record for sanity. Power tends to isolate the possessor from reality.
Another solution for this problem, something that Kling would probably find more congenial, is Mencius’s “antiuniversity”
After all, the previous theocracy bit the dust thanks to protestantism and the reformation, which held one could do religion without a hierarchy. If religion can be done without a hierarchy, so can science. The priesthood is the most vulnerable part of a theocracy.
No twentieth century warming 3
Monday, January 4th, 2010Hadcrut temperatures are fraudulent, for the Climategate files reveals that no one knows how they were constructed.
The Air vent attempts an honest reconstruction:
Of course, this reconstruction can only be as good as the data it rests on, which we now know from the Climategate documents directory to be poor. I argue we should throw out all dubious data – which likely means we should rely on proxy indications of temperature for the early part of the century.
The scientific method
Monday, January 4th, 2010When science becomes a priesthood, it is no longer science.
Reference to authority is unscientific, indeed antiscientific, a rejection of the principles of
science. One must appeal to evidence, not authority. What authority says is not scientific evidence.
Independent replication is evidence.
If people all over the world have made observations for the last 100 years about temperature, I can’t replicate them; but other people at the time could replicate them.
The date at which Lake Winnipesaukee ice goes out, is the date at which people can go to their properties, and do go to their properties. If the ice out date was wrong, they would notice and be mighty pissed. I selected Lake Winnipesaukee, because that is the lake whose ice outs receive the most attention unrelated to estimating climate. Of all older climate data, Lake Winnipesaukee ice outs are the best replicated, thus, the most scientific.
And ice out dates on Lake Winnipesaukee indicate no twentieth century warming That I provide the data and method of calculation, and that this data is the most widely replicated data available means that this blog post is far more scientific than anything that could ever be permitted to appear in the journals “Nature” or “Science”.
This is the opposite of the Giss-Hadley-CRU approach, which uses vast piles of data whose validity no one can possibly know, and which there is every reason to doubt, and then capriciously excludes some of that data, includes other of that data, and whimsically adjusts what is included for reasons that are not only not revealed, but which the Climategate files revealed that Hadley-CRU themselves do not record, which large adjustments, even if justified rather than fraudulent, are an admission of the complete worthlessness of the data for the purpose. No one can possibly know, not even Hadley-CRU, whether their adjustments are justified or fraudulent, not that it would matter since if the large adjustments are justified, the data is worthless for the purpose of estimating past climate.
If you have to estimate the veracity of the reports based on the authority of what you know about those making the reports, that is not science, but religion. Those with the greatest authority are always the most religious, thus this approach guarantees acceptance of the most holy doctrine of the consensus of the most holy and eminent synod – which approach is anthropogenic global warming in a nutshell.
“The consensus” is not science.
Science is common sense, observation, truthfulness, and impartiality, with social mechanisms to enforce truthfulness and impartiality. If science becomes a priesthood, if you hear the words “consensus” and “peer reviewed publication”, the mechanisms that enforce truthfulness and impartiality have failed. “Peer reviewed”is only an indication of some connection to reality when people do not rely on it as evidence of connection to reality.