Update 6/20/24 - I’m inserting a lead paragraph on how DEI is another destroyer of true science. This is from an UNSKOOL article about the undermining of university science programs. “He [Gad Saad, a Canadian professor] also mentioned how many grants often required applicants to submit a DEI statement. Anyone who decides to push back may not receive funding and have to look for options elsewhere.”
I love true science, and majored in physics. But I hate fake science. I’ve written before about the politicization of science research, peer review, and media bias. Qualified scientists who have done real, honest research don’t get grants or funding if they differ from the politically correct narrative. This has been glaringly obvious in vaccine research, in the study of climate change, in the energy field, and in the field of biological evolution vs non-evolution. It is even hard for a non-politically correct science student to get their PhD without keeping their opinions in the ‘closet’, no matter how talented or brilliant they are.
Today I’m excerpting an excellent post from Coffee&Covid on this topic, with minor editing to bring out the parts I’d like to emphasize. If you see 3 dots (…) that means I’ve skipped to his next point. Then also a mention of the Tuco’s Child post on China’s involvement.
“Publicly traded John Wiley & Sons, one of the largest and most well-regarded science publishers, has been polishing its sterling reputation for over 200 years. But over the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than eleven thousand papers that turned out to be faked, and last month Wiley announced it was closing nineteen journals “infected by large-scale research fraud.”
Trust the science!
The Wall Street Journal spotted the awful risk that morons like us will conclude the whole Science industry is just a big casino-like shell game where the house always wins:
…This story should surprise no one.
Way back in 2009, Marcia Angell, the executive editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, dropped this truth bomb in an article she published in the New York Review of Books:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Ten years ago in 2015, Richard Horton, chief editor of top journal The Lancet, also raised the alarm, and he was even more pessimistic than Marcia:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
A turn toward darkness! And just in time for the pandemic. It’s too bad nobody listened. That dose of scientific skepticism might have been very helpful back when the pandemic modelers swamped us with fake studies exaggerating the risks of covid mortality by orders of magnitude.
But the Journal, and all the downstream articles also wringing their hands about the loss of trust in Science, overlooked the more meaningful problem. During the pandemic, when fake studies based on “models” filled the journals hyping massive covid mortality — which were then used to justify the draconian pandemic mitigation laws — journal editors were systematically canceling any submitted studies with different conclusions.
…Given the stakes and the dollars involved, and how the system markets “peer review” as some kind of false scientific gold standard, of course pharma will try to get its fake studies published. Fake studies mint billions. But, if “peer review” is to be used as the gold standard, then editors like Wiley must ensure their products are not just a shiny artifice.”
Peer review is problematic. Last year I wrote about this in Peer Review.
“In an age where “the science” has become a laughingstock due to reports of fraud, plagiarism, fudged research, research heavily influenced by corporate and government grants, and where disagreeing with the “consensus” can get you kicked off the university path to a PhD, get you fired or de-funded, and black-balled by mainstream publications, so-called peer review is no longer any guarantee of objectivity or honest review. The “peers” doing the review are all too often in on the scam, and who selects which peers to ask for a review? You guessed it - the media operation that is itself biased.”
Tuco’s Child also added to Jeff Childer’s article on fake science, with “Redux - China’s Fake Science Industry”. I always like visuals - they help my feeble brain get the ‘big picture’, and this one says a lot, except the UK got left out, and from my experience with US science, I suspect the US is greatly under reported here also :
Whether it’s vaccine “science”, nutrition, or climate change - it’s almost always the engineers that have raised the alarms. Those physics brains!!
Sadly, even the engineers are still fooled into thinking only “science deniers” would question Darwinian evolution.
Like you I love a good visual, says a thousand words. The art of deception is so alive and well and being used against us now for much longer than we think, especially by the Chinese, they are masters of it, and taking away the free will of their enemies. The Russians are better at brutish boots. Never a bullet fired, is the saying to always keep in mind.
When your own population and the enemy learn how to exploit your weak spots, especially in the law, at the detriment of the people of a nation then we know we are in trouble. Some people will always take advantage, and when that advantage is somewhat beneficial to all it is acceptable, but when it is a total detriment then it must be stopped.