Bruce Charlton's Notions

The basic and best method is apprenticeship - attach yourself (somehow) to a Master: someone who can do it already. Help them with their work (without pay), and in return they may teach you, advise you, or you may pick up an understanding of how to do what they do.

Read into the subject. Talk or write about what you read and try to get some feedback. Valuable feedback from a competent 'Master' is very, very rare however - it may come seldom and in little scraps, and the apprentice must be alert so as not to miss it.

Don't be too impatient to find a specific problem to work on - allow the problem to find you. Francis Crick proposed the 'gossip test' - that which you gossip about spontaneously, is probably contains a possible problem to work on.

When you are interested in a *problem*, you can usually find some aspect to work-on which you personally can do with your resources of time and effort, and without lavish material resources or manpower.

Publication is a matter of informing people who are genuinely interested in the same problem. This might be done by letter, as in the 17th Century. The internet has solved the problem of making work accessible to those who are interested.

If you are honest/ can earn trust, produce useful work or provide some valuable function, you will be admitted to the 'invisible college' of self-selected people working on a problem.

If you are not trustworthy, lack competence, or are unproductive, then you will not be allowed into the invisible college - because an invisible college is a synergistic group sustained by mutual benefit. If you don't provide benefits to the group, and show no prospect of providing any in the future, then you are merely a parasite and need to be excluded.

The respect of an invisible college is the currency of science - it is the invisible college which evaluates work, and develops and sustains understanding through time.

A scientist needs to want to understand  reality - this entails believing in reality, and that one ought to be truthful about it.

The belief in reality is a necessary metaphysical belief, which cannot be denied without contradiction - nonetheless, in modern elite culture it is frequently denied (this is called nihilism), why is why modern elite culture is irrational, self-contradictory (and self-destroying).

But obviously, a real scientist cannot be a nihilist - whatever cynical or trendy things he might say or do in public, in his heart he must have a transcendental belief in reality.

Science also involves a metaphysical belief (i.e. a necessary assumption, not itself part of science) in the understandability of nature and the human capacity to understand. Without this belief, science becomes an absurd and impossible attempt to find the one truth among an infinite number of erroneous possibilities.

Nonetheless, in modern elite culture, a belief in the understandability of nature and human capacity is routinely denied - another aspect of nihilism. Among many other consequences, this denial destroys the science which makes possible modern elite culture.

Explaining reality is a second step which may follow understanding, but explaining needs to be preceded by the desire to understand - again because there are an infinite number of possible explanations, none of which can be decisively refuted.

Modern science is undercut by many things - one is the difficulty for modern scientists of living by the proper motivations and beliefs of a real scientist. The transcendental beliefs are difficult to hold in isolation; it is difficult to refrain from asking *why* is it that should humans have these beliefs and motivations? Difficult to avoid the idea that they are arbitrary or delusional beliefs.

Committed scientists in recent decades have often justified themselves by emphasizing that science is enormous 'fun' - but this is a foolish and desperate line of defense. Many things are 'fun' for the people who happen to like them, but science was supposed to be about reality.

Hitler and Stalin seemingly enjoyed being dictators, perhaps found it ‘fun’  – but does that justify them?

Of course the ‘science is fun’ line is mostly trying to avoid the ‘science is useful’ trap. Because the usefulness of science is something intrinsically accidental and unpredictable. And of course science might well turn out to be harmful – fatal.; so usefulness cannot be guaranteed . If you try to get usefulness directly, you won’t get science – aims such as usefulness need to be set aside when a scientist is actually trying to understand reality.

Likewise explanations, predictions and so on – these are second order, contingent aspects of scientific discovery. Understanding must come first.

There never will be many people who are genuinely motivated by a desire to understand, and successful science also requires ability and luck.

Not just ability and luck: faith. Doing real science is an act of faith that if the scientist approaches his problem in the proper way and with sufficient effort, he will be rewarded by understanding.

(Rewarded not necessarily with the understanding he expected, but something just as good, or better.)

This is a religious kind of concept; a concept of just reward for proper devotion.

So real science is, at heart, a spiritual vocation – although this may be expressed in a variety of languages, with different levels of insight, and often indirectly.

Obviously it would be best if scientists did *not* talk about their spiritual vocations too much, especially in public. However, if they *are* going to speak honestly about the motivations of real science, then this is the kind of language they would need to use. This is the kind of language they did, in fact, use until about 50 years ago.

But when, as now, the language of spiritual vocation is ruled-out from public discourse (as foolish or fanatical) then scientists will inevitably be dishonest and misleading in public on the subject of science – blathering-on about usefulness when asking politicians and bureaucrats for money, and emphasizing fun when entertaining undergraduates .

In the end, by excluding all mentions of transcendentals or metaphysics, scientists end-up being untruthful with themselves – which is of course fatal to science. Bad motivations will yield bad consequences. The just reward of understanding reality, of understanding the truth, is not given to those whose devotions are dishonest.

"Unfortunately, we have no way to determine whether a theory survives because it is true or because of our own inability to devise the appropriate tests."

From "Pure" by Mark Anderson

...Or because we can't be bothered to test it, or because it is inexpedient to test;

...or because it *has* been tested and the theory failed to pass the test but we ignore the result, or prefer to pick holes in the test's limitations.

No test of a theory is ever perfect, therefore each test of a favoured theory may be methodologically isolated and demolished on grounds of strictest rigour. This process can be continued without limit.

When a theory is favoured it can never be empirically refuted - neither by experience nor by formal testing.

When a theory is favoured for whatever reason (political, financial, moral) it will survive all assaults.

Testability neither demarcates nor defines science. Indeed nothing defines science, there is no specific methodology - it is (merely) a sub-specialty of philosophy, which is love of wisdom (truth seeking, truth speaking) - and philosophy is itself an emphasis on one specific transcendental 'good'. Push too hard and the whole things crumbles in your hands.

If not methodology, what then accounts for the spectacular success of science (up until the past few decades)?

Perhaps two things: the emergence of groups of honest, motivated and competent people working to solve problems, and the development of a multi-generational tradition so that these groups can hand-on their accumulated experience.

i.e. working together across generations rather than working alone during a single lifespan. That's all. 

 In other words, science was a fortuitous and fragile state of affairs; now long past.

Supposing you were an honest, highly motivated young person; and you wanted to be a real scientist - what would be the best careers advice, given that a career as a professional scientist is obviously out of the question?

The best approach would be accept that you will be an amateur scientist, and think about how best to fund your work.

In other words, in future real scientists will need to regard their work rather as a serious poet or classical msuic composer does - as a vocation - and to forget about 'making a living' from the vocation.

The traps for a real scientist are nowadays the same as the traps for a poet. There are quite a lot of professional 'poets' who are paid to *be* a poet (writers in residence) - but actually none of them are real poets. Instead, in order to get the jobs, they have had to write what passes for poetry among the people who dish out the writers in residence jobs, which isn't actually poetry.

Sometimes real poets can get jobs pretending to teach poetry to people who want to become writers in residence; but no real poet would want to do these jobs - which are usually poorly paid anyway.

In the fairly recent past, some real poets have been school teachers and librarians - although the nature of these jobs has changed and perhas become more hostile to poetry. I know of dedicated amateur musicians of a high standard who do all kinds of jobs - so long as these jobs leave evenings and weekends free.

So the careers advice would be to use one's talents and choose a job that is paid highly enough per hour that the job can be done part-time - leaving enough time and energy in which to do real science. Such jobs usually require _some_ training, and the training itself costs time, money and motivation - so there will need to be a careful calculation and prediction and avoidance of prolonged and expensive training programs with uncertain job prospects (e.g. a PhD in an arts subject).

There is some shrewd careers advice around: e.g. http://www.martynemko.com/ - there are so many jobs nowadays, that there might well be something suitable that you have never even heard of.

It is also useful to know something about the economics of employment: e.g. "Why men earn more" by Warren Farrell explains that in the private sector you are usually paid more either when you do a job which has to be done but few people can do it (like anything involving numbers or computers); or to do what most people do not want want to do - working in an unpleasant or dangerous environment such as a prison or outdoors in winter.

Or the aspiring scientist could try to find a sinecure i.e. "a position or office that requires little or no work but provides a salary" - in other words, something in the public sector. High status sinecures are hotly competed for (as are all 'cool jobs) and they may be paid little or nothing (because so many people want to do them) - but low status sinecures may be available, doing 'joke jobs', the kind whose title provokes a snigger.

The real scientist will not care too much about the nature of their job or what other people think about it, so long as it provides a reasonably secure income without involving them in activities that interfere with their science, because their vocation is not in the job but in science.

Until recently I usually described science as being mostly a matter of devising theories which had implications, and these implications should be tested by observation or experiment.

In other words, science was about making and testing predictions.

Of course there is more which needs to be said: the predictions must derive from theory, and the predicted state should be sufficiently complex, so as to be unlikely to happen by chance.

But it is now clear that this sequence doesn’t happen much nowadays, if it ever did. And that there are weaknesses about the conceptualization of science as mostly a matter of testing predictions.

The main problem is that when science becomes big, as now, the social processes of science (i.e. Peer review) come to control all aspects of science, including defining what counts as a test of a prediction.

This is most obvious in medical research involving drugs. A loosely-defined multi-symptom syndrome is created and a drug or other intervention is tested. The prediction is that the drug/ intervention ‘works’ or works better than another rival, and the test of prediction involves multiple measures of symptoms and signs. Within a couple of years the loosely defined syndrome is being diagnosed everywhere.

Yet the problem is not at the level of testing, since really there is nothing to test – most ‘diagnoses’ are such loose bundles that their definition makes no strong predictions. The problem is a the level of coherence.

Science is a daughter of philosophy, and like philosophy, the basic ‘test’ of science is coherence. Statements in science ought to cohere with other statements in science, and this ought to be checked. Testing ‘predictions’ by observation and experiment is actually merely one type of checking for coherence, since ‘predictions’ are (properly) not to do with time but with logic.

Testing in science ought *not* to focus on predictions such as ‘I predict now that x will happen under y circumstances in the future’ – but instead the focus should be – much more simply – on checking that the statements of science cohere in a logical fashion.

It is an axiom that all true scientific statements are consistent will all other true scientific statements. True statements should not contradict one another, they should cohere.

When there is no coherence between two scientific propositions (theories, 'facts' or whatever), and the reasoning is sound, then one or both propositions are wrong.

Scientific progress is the process of making and learning about propositions, A new proposition that is not coherent with a bunch of existing propositions may be true, and all or some of the existing propositions may be false indeed that is the meaning of a paradign shift or evolutionary science: when new incoherent propositions succeed in overturning a bunch of old propositions, and establishing a new network of coherent propositions.

(This is always a work in progress, and at any moment there is considerable incoherence in science which is being sorted-out. The fatal flaw in modern science is that there is no sorting-out. Incoherence is ignored, propositions are merely piled loosely together; or incoherence is avoided rather than sorted-out, and leads to micro-specialization and the creation of isolated little worlds in which there is no incoherence.)

***

Using this very basic requirement, it is obvious that much of modern science is incoherent, in the sense that there is no coherence between the specialties of science – specialties of science are not checked against each other. Indeed, there is a big literature in the philosophy of science which purports to prove that different types of science are incommensurable, incomparable, and independent.

If this were true, then science as a whole would not add-up – and all the different micro-specialties would not be contributing to anything greater than themselves.

Of course this is correct of modern medical science and biology. For example ‘neuroscience’ does not add up to anything like ‘understanding’ – it is merely a collection of hundreds of autonomous micro-specialties about nervous tissue. This, then that, then something else.

These micro-specialties were not checked for consistency with each other and as a consequence they are not consistent with each other. Neuroscience was not conducted with an aim of creating a coherent body of knowledge, and as a result it is not a coherent body of knowledge.

‘Neuroscience’, as a concept (although it is not even a concept) is merely an excuse for irrelevance.

It is not a matter of whether the micro-specialties in modern science are correct observations (in fact they are nowadays quite likely to be dishonest). But that isolated observations – even if honest - are worthless. Isolated specialties are worthless.

It is only when observations and specialties are linked with others (using theories) that consistency can be checked, that understanding might arise - and then ‘predictions’ can potentially emerge.

Checking science for its coherence includes testing predictions, and maximizes both the usefulness and testability of science; but a science based purely on testing predictions (and ignoring coherence) will become both incoherent and trivial. 

Analgesia - pain-relief, especially in the broadest sense of relief of suffering - was for most of history the primary interventional benefit of the physician (as contrasted with the surgeon) in medicine.

Among the primary benefits of medicine, perhaps prognosis is the greatest benefit - that is, the ability to predict the future; because prognosis entails diagnosis and an understanding of the natural history (natural progression) of disease.

Without knowledge of the likely natural history of a patient, then the physician would have no idea whether to do anything, and what to do.

However, through most of history, physicians were probably unable to influence the outcome of disease - at least in most instances they would diagnose, make a prognosis then try to keep the patient comfortable as events unfolded.

Keeping the patient comfortable. Relief of suffering. In other words: analgesia.

Much of medicine remains essentially analgesic (in this broad sense), even now.

But relief of actual pain is the most vital analgesic function: because at a certain level of severity and duration, pain trumps everything else.

So, perhaps the most precious of all medical interventions are those which relieve pain - not just the general pain-killers (of which the opiates are the most powerful) but the effective treatments of specific forms of pain - as when radiotherapy treats the pain of cancer, or when GTN treats the pain of angina, or steroids prevent relentless itching from eczema and so on.

The *irony* of modern medicine is that while it has unprecedented knowledge of analgesia, of the relief of pain and suffering - these are (in general) available only via prescription.

So, someone who is suffering pain and seeks relief, and effective analgesia is indeed in principle available, must *first* convince a physician of the necessity to provide them with relief.

If a physician does not believe the pain, or does not care about the pain, or has some other agenda - then the patient must continue to suffer. They do not have direct access to pain relief - only indirect access via the permission of a physician.

Pain and suffering are subjective, and it is much easier to bear another person's pain and suffering than it is actually to bear pain and suffering oneself.

Yet we have in place a system which means that everyone who suffers pain must first convince a professional before they can obtain relief from that pain.

This situation was bearable so long as there was a choice of independent physicians. If one physician denied analgesia for pain, perhaps another would agree?

The inestimable benefits of analgesia have been professionalized, and that means they have nowadays been bureaucratized since professionals now operate within increasingly rigid, pervasive and intrusive bureaucracies.

So the inestimable benefits of analgesia are *now* available to those in pain only if they fulfill whatever bureaucratic requisites happen to be in place.

If the bureaucracy chooses (for whatever reason - saving money, punishing the 'undeserving', whatever) that a person does not fulfill the requirements for receiving analgesia, then they will not get pain relief.

That is the situation, at the present moment.

Why do we tolerate this situation? Why do we not demand direct access to analgesia? Why do we risk being denied analgesia by managerial diktat?

Because, bureaucracy does not even need to acknowledge pain - it can legislate pain and suffering out of existence. It creates guidelines which define what counts as significant pain, what or who gets relief, and what or who gets left to suffer.

It is so easy to deny or to bear *other people's* pain and suffering, to advise patience, to devise long-drawn out consultations, evaluations and procedures.

Bearing pain ourselves is another matter altogether. Pain of one's own is an altogether more *urgent* business. But by the time we find ourselves in that situation, it is too late for wrangling over prescriptions, guidelines, and procedures.

The one thing that modern medicine hates and suppresses above all else, is a cheap and effective solution to a common problem.

There are scores, indeed hundreds or maybe thousands, of expensive, heavily advertized and *ineffective* 'anti- dandruff' shampoos on sale in supermarkets and pharmacists.

They are expensive non-solutions to the common problem of dandruff - and they are Big Business.

But in my experience ketoconazole shampoo is *totally* effective at stopping dandruff, and an application every week or two will keep it away.

This is because dandruff (and seborrhoeic dermatitis - which is severe dandruff) is caused by a fungus - the Pityrosporum yeast. The ‘cradle cap’ of babies is the same things too, and is also cured by ketoconazole.

The cause and cure were discovered by one of my teachers at medical school - Sam Shuster. (e.g. Shuster S.. The aetiology if dandruff and mode of action of therapeutic agents. Br J Dermatol 1984; 111: 235-242; Ford Gp, Farr Pm, Ive Fa, Shuster S.. The response of seborrhoeic dermatitis to ketoconazole. Br J Dermatol 1984; 111: 603-607.)

In other words, the cause and cure of dandruff has been known for 25 years.

SO - here we have what seems to be a completely effective solution to a problem which affects most adults at some point in their lives - yet the effective treatment is all but secret; presumably because if it were better known then the shelves would be cleared of the scores of ineffective, expensive and heavily advertized rival products.

My point?

In modern medicine, in modern life, it is possible for there to be completely effective and cheap and widely 'available' solutions to common problems, and for these to be virtually unknown.

And it is also notable that discovering the cause and cure of a common disease is not given much credit in medicine nowadays – it made the discoverer neither rich nor famous.

But at the same time there are thousands of rich and famous ‘medical researchers’ who have discovered nothing and cured nothing. Essentially they are rich and famous for ‘doing research’ – especially when that research involves spending large amounts of money.

When ‘medical researchers’ are rewarded for spending large amounts of money, and ignored for discovering the causes and cures of disease, what you end up with is ‘medical research’ that spends large amounts of money but does not discover anything.

And that is precisely what we have nowadays.

Also we end up with ‘medical researchers’ who do not even *try* to discover the causes and cures of disease.

And that is precisely what we have nowadays.

The one thing that modern culture hates and suppresses above all else, is a cheap and effective solution to a common problem.

There are scores, indeed hundreds or maybe thousands, of expensive, heavily advertized and *ineffective* deodorants and antiperspirants on sale in supermarkets and pharmacists. They neither stop odour, nor stop sweat.

They are expensive non-solutions to the common problem of smelly under-arm sweat - and they are Big Business.

But Aluminium chloride solution (which I buy in the brand called Driclor) is *totally* effective at preventing both perspiration and odour, and a single application lasts for three or four days.

The product is very reasonably priced, since a big bottle is about 6-8 US dollars and lasts me for several months.

YET - although it is sold in large pharmacies, it is not usually displayed on the shelves but needs specifically to be asked-for.

SO - here we have what seems to be a completely effective solution to a problem which affects most adults (insofar as most adults use some kind of underarm antiperspirant deodorant) - yet it is not advertized and is all-but hidden.

Presumably because if it were better known then the shelves would be cleared of the scores of ineffective, expensive and heavily advertized rival products. And probably Driclor itself would not survive this process, since the active product (aluminium chloride) is not patent-protected, and the company would no doubt be driven out of business by excess competition.

My point?

In modern medicine, in modern life, it is possible for there to be completely effective and cheap and widely 'available' solutions to common problems, and for these to be virtually unknown.

In the spirit of rediscovered self-experimentation trail-blazed by Seth Roberts -

http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2010/06/04/a-great-change-is-coming-part-1-of-2/

- I thought I would share one of my own discoveries:

i.e. that benzoyl peroxide (BP) cream (which is marketed as a treatment for acne) can treat shaving rash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzoyl_peroxide

By shaving rash, I mean the unsightly spots which come after shaving, especially on the neck. The spots seem to be due to trauma of the beard hair follicles, and sometimes to in-growing beard hairs.

Anyway, an n=1 on-off crossover self-trial over several weeks established that this kind of rash was treatable, indeed curable, with BP.

Benzoyl peroxide is a peeling agent, so it is not particularly surprising that it works to treat this kind of problem.

HOWEVER, BP is also a bleaching agent (not surprizing for a peroxide!); and after a while I linked its usage to the bleached patches that appeared on towels and shirt collars, ruining them.

So, in the end I could not use it to treat the beard rash.

But it works.

Real science was built on a search for truth that was cooperative and competitive at the same time. Popper emphasized the mixture of hypothesis and testing, conjecture and refutation, testing for consistence and predictive ability and discarding of error.

Bronowski emphasized the need for tolerance of honest error, and that contributors to the scientific process should be respected even after their views have been refuted. Otherwise, scientists would not risk being accused/ convicted of being wrong and so would never challenge consensus; and consensus would never yield to refutation. (Which is precisely the situation in mainstream medical research.)

So we still respect Isaac Newton despite him having been superseded by Einstein; and Newton is not usually mocked or derided for having not been correct for all time.

But this balance has been difficult for many scientists, and even more difficult for those outside of science. Lamarck ranks all-time third in importance as a biologist according to Charles Murray's method in Human Accomplishment - behind Darwin and Aristotle - but Lamarck’s views on evolution are often (it seems to me) treated as a joke.

Of course, ignorant disrespect is part of growing-up. But although it has to be tolerated in teenagers, it is not an admirable trait; being a result of pride and aggression fuelled by insecurity.

Adolescents love to hate, and there are an awful lot of adolescents interested in science and working in and around science and is journalism and as pundits - many of them adolescents of advanced middle age.

Adolescents also form gangs, and gangs assert their status by seeking and beating-up victims (the victims of course ‘deserve’ this – for being who they are).

There is an awful lot of ignorant disrespect in science nowadays, and an awful lot of gangsterism. Real science used to be all about individuals – it really did! – but now science is all about gangs.

The reason for so much ignorant disrespect in science is mostly that there is so much ignorance, due to the abundance of low quality people and their micro-specialized perspective. Such have no concept of excellence higher than the standard, prevailing technical practices of their micro-discipline; anyone who does not adhere to these prevailing practices is regarded as either incompetent or wicked - hence despicable hence deserving of punishment. They deserve ‘what is coming to them’ – in gang parlance.

There is always disagreement in science, but the basis of real science was that scientific disagreement was conducted by scientific means. What is *not* acceptable to real science is that scientific disputes should be settled by non scientific methods.

Scientists must be allowed to make mistakes, to be wrong, or science cannot function.

This is necessary because in the first place they may not really have made a mistake and they may be right (or partly right) – but this may not be apparent for a while. Mainstream science may be in error, but this situation may be recoverable if dissent is tolerated.

However, in a system of real science, mistakes are tolerated only when they are *honest* mistakes – lying and deceptions are absolutely forbidden in real science; and will lead to exclusion from the community of real scientists. And incompetent errors are simply a waste of everybody’s time. So dishonesty and incompetence are rightly sanctioned by leading to a scientist’s work being disregarded by others in the field as probably unreliable or unsound.

This is why the dishonest thugs of modern pseudo-science always try to portray dissent and disagreement as always a result of incompetence or dishonesty.

The gangsters of pseudo-science cannot acknowledge even the *possibility* of an honest and competent scientist reaching a different conclusion from the one they themselves support. This is because the gangsters are transparently looking for an excuse to attack and to coerce; after all, gangsters need to make public displays of their power, or else they would soon lose it.

Gang-leaders need to beat-up dissenters, and they need people to know that this is happening, and they need these dissenters to be portrayed as deserving victims of attack.

Consequently the whole concept of honest and competent disagreement has been banished from modern bureaucratic pseudo-science.

In the world of bureaucratic pseudo-science there are only two kinds of view – the correct view which is defined and enforced by the peer review cartel; and wrong views which are held by those either too stupid to understand, or those corrupted by evil.

Lysenko was a scientific gangster in the Soviet Union – Stalin’s henchman - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko. His scientific sin was to suppress scientific opposition using non-scientific means; up to and including jail and death for his opponents. The justification for Lysenko’s use of coercion to suppress and silence dissent was that the opponents’ opposition was harmful to people, caused millions of death etc.

Modern science is just a couple of small steps away from full-blown Lysenkoism. Scientific opposition is suppressed using non-scientific means ranging from defunding, exclusion of publications and other blocks on dissemination, public humiliation, sacking and other legal threats. In many areas of science gangsterism is rife, with intimidation and threats and the administration of media ‘beatings’.

What does it mean? Many would regard the situation as regrettable – but it is much worse than regrettable. It is conclusive evidence of non-science.

A field in which the use of non-scientific modes of argument are rife is simply *not a science*. Not a science at all. It does not work. Gangsterism is incompatible with science.

For example, ‘climate science’ is not a science *at all*; as a field it does not function as a real science, it uses intimidation and coercion as a matter of routine. Therefore nothing in it can be trusted, the good and bad cannot be discriminated.

To clarify - because in general terms climate science does not settle disputes using scientific methods, but by using extra-scientific methods, therefore it is not a real science, but actually is whatever the main influence on its content happens to be: politics, mostly.

The main innovation of ‘climate science’ has been to legitimate the mass use of the hate-term ‘denialism’ to signal who ‘deserves’ a punishment-beating from the gang.

Let us call the phenomenon of labeling and beating up ‘denialists’ by the name of ‘anti-denialism’.

Anti-denialism is no accident, nor is it eradicable without massive reform because anti-denialism is functionally necessary for the cohesion of modern bureaucratic pseudo-science. Without victims to gang-up on, the gangs would fall apart into warring sects. They would fight each other because these gangs are composed of ignorant, egotistical, power-worshipping adolescents. What best holds such people together is pure hatred, and pure hatred needs victims.

With the phenomenon of anti-denialism rife in mainstream discourse, we are just a couple of small steps away from full blown Lysenkoism. We already have systematic intimidation of scientific opposition at every level short of the physical. But I have seen demands from the gangsters of science that the sanctions against denialists be escalated. Destroying livelihoods is no longer enough. Soon, perhaps very soon, unless the tide turns, we may be seeing scientists jailed for their views.

Since honest and competent dissent is not recognized, anyone who disagrees with the peer review cartel is either labeled as too stupid to understand or as competent but wicked. It is the competent dissenters who are most at risk under Lysenkoism, since disagreement with the mainstream coming from a competent scientist marks them out as evil and deserving of punishment.

Anti-denialism needs high profile victims. Lysenkoism needed to punish top scientists like Vavilov, who died following three years in prison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov.

On present trends we may expect to see prominent denialists and dissenters jailed for being ‘wrong’ (as judged by peer review), jailed for the public good, jailed ‘to save ‘millions of lives’ – but in reality jailed for opposition to the ruling gangsters of bureaucratic pseudo-science, and because anti-denialists absolutely require a continuous supply of victims to beat-up on.

The answer is - very little.

A highly intelligent and motivated individual can get 'up to speed' in a subject, and begin work in it, in a matter of weeks.

Of course it takes much longer than this to make a significant contribution to a field - often ten years or so of persistence - but this is why it is very important to get started young working on your problem. And starting young means skipping the hyper-extended specialist preliminary 'training' which is the norm nowadays.

This is obvious from the fact that early scientists had never had any formal specialist training because it did not exist.

Further evidence comes from the example of the many physicists and mathematicians who changed field and made major contributions to, for example, biology. They were able to do so because physicists and mathematicians are the most intelligent people (i.e. the group with the highest average general intelligence or IQ) - which means they can learn and remember new material extremely rapidly compared with most of us.

Of course, modern academia insists (usually) on prolonged specialist training. But this is mostly due to careerism and restrictive practices. Major work is continually being done in biology and medicine by people without this training, indeed many of the best ideas come from outside of academia, and often from clever and motivated amateurs (such as investigative journalists). Much of this is published outside the professional literature – in books, not papers.

Intelligence is mostly inborn (i.e. the ability to reason abstractly and systematically cannot be inculcated but is - mostly - either there, or not there); and the extra discipline and baseline knowledge which is provided by education is mostly acquired during development - before college age.

So, whatever formal specialist training a scientist needs before tackling his problem ought to be done at school, in the teenage years - and *not* done at college, in the twenties.

Analgesia = pain-killing.

This is our culture, now. The culture of analgesia - in which relief of pain and suffering is primary - and not a means to an end.

In medicine, the relief of pain is, or ought to be, of central importance - but on examination it is not primary. The primary goal of medicine is to preserve life and functionality - and this only makes sense where life and functionality themselves have an implicit goal.

(This implicit goal of life is not a part of the concern of medicine as a specialty - but medicine as a human activity only makes sense if it can be assumed that people have something significant to do with their life and functionality. In the past this could be taken for granted - but not any more.)

Medicine is not and never has been a matter of 'first of all, do no harm; because harm is always a risk in trying to preserve life or functionality, or in relieving pain and suffering.

The primary imperative for modern secular democratic liberalism is the avoidance of suffering. Lacking any rationale or context for this, the definition of suffering has expanded without apparent limit.

In particular, hedonism - pleasure-seeking - is now re-labeled as analgesia; since there is an element of suffering involved in *not* being able to indulge one's desires.

The suffering involved in thwarted desire or the necessity for self-restraint is now inflated to a cosmic injustice, so encompassing as to trump almost anything and everything.

Any of the petty humiliations of everyday existence (being forbidden, sneered at, patronized, made to feel inferior, rejected, ignored) are amplified infinitely, and can indeed become the focus of whole life views.

To suffer *offense* is automatically to require, to deserve, analgesia - reparations, compensations, special consideration.

Sensitivity replaces morality.

In the culture of analgesia, life in both its strategy and its moment-by-moment existence, becomes a serial seeking after pain relief. A search for losing oneself, for forgetting, for tranquillization, or at least for distraction.

Ah! - to live a life of serene analgesia varied by serial pleasurable distractions…

(then to die, to sleep and *not* to dream)

- this is, in a sense, the ulimate goal of modernity.

Could it be that the differentiation of Church and State, the development of universities (secular in their essence, even when staffed by religious), the process of specialization itself – that all these are actually first steps on an _inevitable_ path to where we are now (i.e. on the verge of a self-inflicted - almost self-willed - collapse of 'the West')?

Universities can be seen as by now vastly inflated institutions, not just parasitic but actively destructive in many ways. On the other hand Universities used to perform some functions which were essential to those aspects of modernity which we most admire: philosophy in the medieval university, classics in the next period, science (Wissenschaft) in the 19th century German universities and so on.

But, in retrospect, all these golden ages of scholarship and research were more like brief transitional periods en route to something much worse.

For instance, the flowering of science (as a specialized, largely autonomous, social system) for the couple of centuries up until the mid twentieth century was a period of constant institutional change until science became - as now - *essentially* a branch of the state bureaucracy.

It seems that useful/ efficient specialization (including separation from State and Religion) leads to over specialization (or micro-specialization) which is increasingly less efficient, then less effective - and all this seems to lead back to re-absorption of science into the State (or into Religion, in principle).

For instance the London Royal Society became more and more autonomous in its conduct until maybe the mid-twentieth century, then became progressively reabsorbed back into the State until now the Royal Society gets about ¾ of its funding directly from the UK parliament, and the organization functions like a department of the UK civil administration.

If we go back and back to find the point at which this *apparently* unstoppable yet self-undermining process began in the West - I think it may lead to the difference between (say) medieval Orthodox Byzantium and Catholic Western Europe.

To scholasticism, perhaps? That was when the divergence became first apparent - when an academic, pre-scientific discipline (i.e. philosophy) became increasing autonomous from Religion (in the West the Religious hierarchy already was separate from the State hierarchy - although sometimes the two cooperated closely. In the East, Church and State formed an intermingled, single hierarchy).

Indeed, my impression is that Thomistic scholasticism may itself be self-undermining – and that this can perhaps be seen in the history of the Roman Catholic Church and even of some specific scholastic scholars – for example Jacques Maritain or Thomas Merton? (They began as traditionalists and ended as modernizers.)

It seems that institutions can grasp the essence of Thomism, and yet the process of understanding does not at all prevent – indeed it perhaps encourages – the continuation of the process until it has destroyed the system itself. As Peter Abelard found, once the process of sceptical analysis has begun, there is not clear point at which it can be seen necessary to stop – and the only point when it is known for sure that things have gone too-far is when the system which supported the process has fallen to pieces and by then it is too late.

Something similar may apply to science. The process of science creates a social system which first really reinvents itself due to real discoveries, then later makes pseudo- discoveries in order really to reinvent itself, then finally makes pseudo-discoveries in order to pseudo-reinvent itself. At which point the full circles has been turned, and all that remains is to drop the pretence.

Of course, differentiation of society led initially to greater strength, based (probably) on frequent breakthroughs in science and technology which drove increased economic productivity and military capability. But as differentiation proceeded to micro- and destructive levels, the real breakthroughs dried up and were replaced with hype and spin, then later pure lies. Real economic growth was replaced with inflation and borrowing. Progress was replaced with propaganda.

We have already observed the whole story in the atheist and supposedly science-worshipping Soviet Union – which in Russia is maybe now returning to the more stable and robust pattern of Eastern Christian (Byzantine) theocracy - and the pattern is merely being repeated in the capitalist and democratic West.

(With the difference that the secular West will probably - in the medium term - return after the collapse of modernity to segmentary, chaotic tribalism, rather than large-scale cohesive theocracy.)

In sum, perhaps the process of social differentiation is unstoppable hence inevitably self-destroying? The increasing rate of science and technological breakthroughs from (say) 1700 to 1900 looked like progress in the conduct of human affairs until it wasn’t. The faster social system growth and differentiation proceeds, the faster it destroys itself.

Rapid growth and differentiation is therefore, in fact, intrinsically parasitic – whether or not we can actually detect the parasitism. At any rate, that's what it looks like to me.

One intractable debating point in science is the question of whether some things should *not* be researched.

And indeed, there can be very few people who don't have some topic or another which they would prefer not to be researched - although the specific topic varies widely, and indeed diverges - and the method by which research should be discouraged or prevented is also variable.

So that the people who believe that research should not be done on human embryos or human stem cells are likely to be different from the people who believe that research should not be done on chemical weapons or genetically-modified crops.

The reason for prohibited topics of research is that science is not, ever, the primary value system; and therefore science is inevitably subordinated to whatever *is* the primary value system. For most of human history the primary value system would have been religion - nowadays it might be politics.

And by 'value system' is not meant (as some people imagine) merely a moral or ethical system - but the whole system of 'goods', the positive versus negative evaluations - or what may be called transcendental values - virtue is one, beauty another, truth another and wholeness or unity is yet another possible 'good'.

So presumably, what gets done in science ought to reflect in some specific way, that which is good in some general way.

But does it? Of course not!

The whole motivational system of science is broken, there is no overall moral or ethical system except that the consensus of the powerful scientists is always right. In science, the consensus that matters is that of the peer review cartel of dominant scientists – since peer review controls scientific evaluation.

Scientists’ choice of topic and methods of work now passively reflect consensus; and the consensus is always changing, consensus has no direction, but still consensus is always right.

In other words, there is no concept of the good in modern science - since consensus is simply a word for an arbitrary and shifting outcome of social interplay among those with power to enforce their views. In other words, consensus is peer review, and peer review is consensus.

(Those who contrast science with consensus are therefore mistaken when it comes to modern science – although of course real science is *in a sense* the opposite of consensus.)

There is no concept of the good as a cohesive system located anywhere in the motivational system of science. There is therefore no responsibility.

Instead of ‘the good’ – an eternal ideal - there is an ethic of obedience to whatever is the outcome of undirected social interplay – even (or especially) when this outcome is arbitrary and ever-changing.

The advocacy of peer review as a gold standard is precisely this: that scientists must submit - swiftly, willingly, happily! - to the outcome of peer review, and that the outcome of peer review is intrinsically valid.

Even though peer review is unpreditable, changeable, and lacks any rationale: all the more *vital* that submission be swift, willing and cheerful!

***

The main method of enforcing scientific prohibition is 'defunding' - which can be done covertly by peer review on the pretext of 'scientific standards'. Also there is the failure to allocate award jobs, promotions, publications, memberships and prizes to those whose topic and/ or views transgress the accepted boundaries.

After all, any job application, any paper, any grant request can be rejected on quasi-plausible grounds.

Many of the greatest scientists have been rejected from jobs, many of the greatest ideas in science have been rejected by peer review, many of the major breakthroughs in science we turned down for grants - all on the grounds that they 'weren't good enough'.

Modern scientific evaluations equate lack of funding with illegitimacy – so defunded science is not merely ignorable science but *bad science*. That which is rejected by peer review is not merely unfashionable or mistaken science but *bad science*. Work done by people outside the peer review cartel is intrinsically *bad science* whenever and to whatever extent it conflicts with the intrinsically authoritative views of the power brokers.

It's an easy sophomoric trick of the half-educated. There has never been a paper in the history of medicine which could not be torn to shreds by a zealot with a Masters degree in epidemiology. The evaluation procedures are over-inclusively negative. The evaluation procedures always imply rejection. The question is merely when to apply the evaluation procedures, and when quietly to set them aside…

Sheltering coercive consensus behind the defense of ‘standards’, mainstream power-brokers and their apologists for prohibition can continue to advocate libertarian ideals.

Craven conformism masquerades as idealism.

And the potentially subverting self-knowledge of moral bankruptcy is deferred for yet another day…

Scientists generally assert their right to study anything they want-to study ('blue skies') as contrasted with the subject matter or direction research being dictated by government, corporations and other organizations.

Yet over the past few decades scientists have tamely allowed the subject matter and direction of their research to be dictated by the funders of science and the peer review cartel who apply funding criteria.

Worse than this, scientists have colluded with evaluation criteria which measure inputs rather than outputs, so that for career purposes externally-funded science is seen as intrinsically superior to unfunded or self-funded science. Well funded pseudo-science is privileged infinitely above unfunded real science (because unfunded science is discounted altogether, or sometimes negatively - as evidence of un-seriousness or disloyalty or misplaced effort).

So we have ended-up the worst of both worlds: the uselessness of arbitrary subject matter and the dullness of merely applied science.

My prime exhibit is mainstream medical research which is useless in the sense that it (almost) never discovers anything of medical/ clinical value (i.e. nothing useful in diagnosing or treating illnesses) - but it is plodding, incremental and organized on an industrial scale just like the most mundane industrial or military R&D.

Mainstream medical science is, in effect, R&D applied to useless and trivial (and dishonest) pseudo-medical subjects.

But IF medical research was motivated by the genuine interests of either the scientists who do it (i.e. amateur science) or by the wants and needs of patients (i.e. clinical science - usually done by clinicians) - then it might stand some chance of making (either) significant jumps in progress of science or of medicine (or both).

As it is, mainstream medical research is at the same time trivial science and useless medicine.

While wanting to know the truth does not mean that you will find it; on the other hand, if scientists are not even *trying* to discover the truth - then the truth will not be discovered.

That is the current situation.

'Truth' can be defined as 'underlying reality’. Science is not the only way of discovering truth (for example, philosophy is also about discovering truth - science being in its origin a sub-class of philosophy) - but unless an activity is trying to discover underlying reality, then it certainly cannot be science.

But what motivates someone to want to discover the truth about something?

The great scientists are all very strongly motivated to ‘want to know’ – and this drives them to put in great efforts, and keeps them at their task for decades, in many instances. Why they should be interested in one thing rather than another remains a mystery – but what is clear is that this interest cannot be dictated but arises from within.

Crick commented that you should research that which you gossip about, Watson commented that you should avoid subjects which bore you - http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/12/gossip-test-boredom-principle.html - their point being that science is so difficult, that when motivation is deficient then problems will not get solved. Motivation needs all the help it can get.

Seth Roberts, in his superb new article (which happened to be the last paper I accepted for publication in Medical Hypotheses before I was sacked) makes the important point that one motivation to discover something useful in medicine is when you yourself suffer from a problem -

http://sethroberts.net/articles/2010%20The%20unreasonable%20effectiveness%20of%20my%20self-experimentation.pdf

Seth does self-experimentation on problems which he suffers - such as early morning awakening, or putting on too much weight (he is most famous for the Shangri-La diet). He has made several probable breakthroughs working alone and over a relatively short period; and one of the reasons is probably that he really wanted answers, and was not satisfied with answers unless they really made a significant difference.

By contrast, 95 percent (at least!) of professional scientists are not interested in the truth but are doing science for quite other reasons to do with 'career' - things like money, status, security, sociability, lifestyle, fame, to attract women or whatever.

The assumption in modern science is that professional researchers should properly be motivated by career incentives such as appointments, pay and promotion – and not by their intrinsic interest in a problem – certainly not by having a personal stake in finding an answer – such a being a sufferer. Indeed, such factors are portrayed as introducing bias/ damaging impartiality. The modern scientist is supposed to be a docile and obedient bureaucrat – switching ‘interests’ and tasks as required by the changing (or unchanging) imperatives of funding, the fashions of research and the orders of his master.

What determines a modern scientist’s choice of topic, of problem? Essentially it is peer review – the modern scientist is supposed to do whatever work that the cartel of peer-review-dominating scientists decide he should do.

This will almost certainly involve working as a team member for one or more of the peer review cartel scientists; doing some kind of allocated micro-specialized task of no meaning or intrinsic interest – but one which contributes to the overall project being managed by the peer review cartel member. Of course the funders and grant awarders have the major role in what science gets done, but nowadays the allocation of funding has long since been captured by the peer review cartel.

Most importantly, the peer review cartel has captured the ability to define success in solving scientific problems: they simply agree that the problem has been solved! Since peer review is now regarded as the gold standard of science, if the peer review cartel announces that a problem has been solved, then that problem has been solved.

(This is euphemistically termed hype or spin.)

To what does the modern scientist aspire? He aspires to become a member of the peer review cartel. In other words, he aspires to become a bureaucrat, a manager, a ‘politician’.

Is the peer review cartel member a scientist as well? Sometimes (not always) he used-to be – but the answer is essentially: no. Because being a modern high level bureaucrat, manager or politician is incompatible with truthfulness, and dishonesty is incompatible with science.

The good news is that when real science is restored (lets be optimistic!) then its practitioners will again be motivated to discover true and useful things – because science will no longer be a career it will be colonized almost-exclusively by those with a genuine interest in finding real world answers.

Scientific specialization is generally supposed to benefit the precision and validity of knowledge within specializations, but at the cost of these specializations becoming more narrow, and loss of integration between specializations.

In other words, as specialization proceeds, people supposedly know more and more about less and less - the benefit being presumed to be more knowledge in each domain, the cost that nobody has a general understanding.

However, I think the supposed benefit is actually not true. People do not really know more – often they know nothing at all or everything they know is wrong because undercut by fundamental errors.

Probably the benefits of specialization really do apply to the early stages of gross specialization such as the increase of scientific career differentiation in the early 20th century - the era when there was a division of university science degrees into Physics, Chemistry and Biology - then later a further modest subdivision of each of these into two or three.

But since the 1960s scientific specialization has now gone far beyond this point, and the process is now almost wholly disadvantageous. We are now in an era of micro-specialization, with dozens of subdivisions within sciences.

Part of this is simply the low average and peak level of ability, motivation and honesty in most branches of modern science. The number of scientists has increased by more than an order of magnitude – clearly this has an effect. Scientific training and conditions have become prolonged and dull and collectivist – deterring creative and self-motivated people. And these have happened in an era when the smartest kids tended not to gravitate to science, as they did in the early 20th century, but instead to professions such as medicine and law.

However there is a more basic and insoluble problem about micro-specialization. This is that micro-specialization is about micro-validation – which can neither detect nor correct gross errors in its basic suppositions.

In my experience, this is the case for many scientific specialties:

1. Epidemiologists are fixated on statistical issues and cannot detect major errors in their presuppositions because they do not regard individual patient data as valid nor do they regard sciences such as physiology and pharmacology as relevant. Hence they do not understand why statistical knowledge cannot replace biological and medical knowledge, nor why the average of 20 000 crudely measured randomized trial patients is not a substitute for the knowledgeable and careful study of individual patients. Since epidemiology emerged as a separate specialty, it has made no significant contribution to medicine but has led to many errors and false emphases. (All this is compounded by the dominant left-wing political agenda of almost all epidemiologists.)

2. Climate change scientists are fixated on fitting computer models to retrospective data sets, and cannot recognize that retrofitted models have zero intrinsic predictive validity. The validity of a model comes from the prediction of future events, from consistency with other sciences relevant to the components of the model, and from consistency with independent data not included in the retrofitting. Mainstream climate change scientists fail to notice that complex computer modelling has been of very little predictive or analytic value in other areas of science (macroeconomics, for instance). They don't even have a coherent understanding of the key concept of global temperature – if they did have a coherent concept of global temperature, they would realize that it is a _straightforward_ matter to detect changes in global temperature – since with proper controls every point on the globe would experience such changes. If the proper controls are not known, however, then global temperature simply cannot be measured; in which case climate scientists should either work out the necessary controls, or else shut-up.

3. Functional brain imaging involves the truly bizarre practice of averaging of synaptic events: with a temporal resolution of functional imaging methods typically averaging tens to hundreds of action potentials and a spatial resolution averaging tens to hundreds of millions of synapses. There may also be multiple averaging and subtraction of repeated tasks. What this all means at the end of some billions of averaged instances is anybody's guess - almost certainly it is un-interpretable (just consider what it would mean to average _any_ biological activity in this kind of fashion!). Yet this stuff is the basis for the major branch of neuroscience which for three decades has been the major non-genetic branch of biological/ medical science - at the cost of who knows how many billions of pounds and man-hours. And at the end of the day, the contribution of functional brain imaging to biological science and medicine has been - roughly - none-at-all.

In other words, in the world of micro-specialization the each specialist’s attention is focused on technical minutiae and the application of conventional proxy measures and operational definitions. These agreed-practices are used in micro-specialities for no better reason than 'everybody else' does the same and (lacking any real validity to their activities) there must be some kind of arbitrary ‘standard’ against which people are judged. ('Everybody else' here means the dominant Big Science researchers who dominate peer review (appointments, promotions, grants, publications etc.) in that micro-speciality.)

Micro-specialists cannot even understand what has happened when there are fatal objections and comprehensive refutations of their standard paradigms which originate from adjacent areas of science.

In a nutshell, micros-specialization allows a situation to develop where the whole of a vast area of science is bogus; and for this reality to be intrinsically and permanently invisible and incomprehensible to the participants in that science.

If we then combine this fact with the notion that only micro-specialists are competent to evaluate the domain of their micro-speciality - then we have a situation of intractable error.

Which situation is precisely what we do have. Vast scientific enterprises have consumed vast resources without yielding any substantive progress, and the phenomenon continues for time-spans of several human generations, and there is no end in sight (short of the collapse of science-as-a-whole).

According to the analysts of classical science, science was supposed to be uniquely self-correcting - in practice, now, thanks in part o micros-specialization, it is not self-correcting at all. Either what we call science nowadays is not 'real science' or else real science has mutated into something which is a mechanism for infinite perpetuation of error.

Although I was 'brought up' on the religion of science, and retain great respect for philosophers such as Jacob Bronowski and Karl Popper, and for sociologists such as Thos. Merton, David L Hull and John Ziman; I have come to believe that this 'classic' science (the kind which prevailed from the mid-19th - mid-20th century in the UK and Western Europe) - in other words that activity which these authors described and analyzed - was 'merely' a transitional state.

In short: classic science was highly successful, but contained the seeds of its own destruction because the very processes that led to classic science would, when continued (and they could not be stopped) also destroy it.

(As so often, that which is beneficial in the short term is fatal in the longer term.)

Specifically, this transitional state of classic science was an early phase of professional science, which came between what might be called medieval science and modern science (which is not real science at all - but merely a generic bureaucratic organization which happened to have evolved from classic science). But classic science was never a steady state, and never reproduced itself; but was continually evolving by increasing growth, specialization and professionalization/ bureaucratization.

But classic Mertonian/ Popperian science was never stable - each generation of scientists had a distinctly different experience than the generation before due to progressive increasing growth, specialization and professionalization/ bureaucratization.

And indeed Classic science was not the kind of science which led to the industrial revolution and the ‘modern world’; the modern world was a consequence of causes which came before modernity. The modern world is a consequence of medieval science. So, the pre-modern forms of science were real science, and had real consequences.

What I mean is that medieval science was an activity which was so diffuse and disorganized that we do not even recognize it as science – yet it was this kind of science which led to the process of societal transformation that is only recognized by historians as becoming visible from the 17th century (e.g the founding of the Royal Society in 1660). But the emergence of classic science was merely the point at which change become so visible that it could not be ignored.

Since modernity it is therefore possible that science has been unravelling even as it expanded – i.e. that the processes of growth, specialization and professionalization/ bureaucratization were also subverting themselves until the point (which we have passed) where the damage due to growth, specialization and professionalization/ bureaucratization outstripped the benefit.

This is good news, I think.

Much of the elaborate and expensive paraphernalia of science - which we mistakenly perceive to be vital – may in fact be mostly a late and parasitic development. Effective science can be, has been, much simpler and cheaper.

When we consider science as including the medieval era prior to classic science, then it becomes clear that there is no distinctive methodology of science. Looking across the span of centuries it looks like the process of doing science cannot really be defined more specifically than saying that it is a social and multigenerational activity characterized by truth-seeking.

I would further suggest that science is usually attempting to solve a problem – or to find a better solution to a problem than the existing one (problem solving per se is not science, but science is a kind of problem solving).

The main physical (rather than political) constraint on science in the past was probably the slowness and unreliability of communication and records. This made science extremely slow to advance. Nonetheless, these advances were significant and led to the modern world.

The encouraging interpretation is therefore that even when modern professional ‘science’ collapses a new version of medieval science should easily be able to replace it, because of the already-available improvements in the speed, accuracy and durability of communications.

In other words, a re-animated ‘medieval science’ (amateur, unspecialized, individualistic, self-organized) plus modern communications probably equals something pretty good, by world historical standards - probably not so good as the brilliant but unstable phase of 'classic science', but better than 'modern science'.

Probably the most important bit of work I did as a scientist was the malaise theory of depression - http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/depression.html .

I worked on this intermittently for nearly 20 years from about 1980 when I first began to study psychiatry. My motivation was trying to understand how a mood state could apparently be cured by medication.

From what I was being told, it seemed as if 'antidepressants' were supposed to normalize mood while leaving the rest of the mind unchanged. Of course, this isn't really true, but that was what I was trying to understand initially. Or, to put it another way, I was trying to understand what was 'an antidepressant' - since none of the standard explanations made any sense at all.

So, how did I 'solve' this problem (solve at least to my own satisfaction, that is!). Part of it was 'phenomenology' (i.e. mental self observation) - especially to observe my own mood states in response to various illnesses (such as colds and flu) and in response to various medications (including some which I was taking for migraine).

But the best answer is that I did not really solve it myself, but only when I had subordinated my investigations to the work of two great scientists - two 'Masters': the Irish psychiatrist David Healy and the Portugese neuroscientist Antonio R Damasio.

This apprenticeship was almost entirely via the written world - and involved reading, thinking-about and re-reading (and thinking about and re-re-reading some more) key passages from key works of these two scientists. That is accepting these men as my mentors and discerning guides to the vast (and mostly wrong) literature of Psychiatry and Neuroscience.

The lesson that I draw from my experience is that real science (which is both rare and slow) is done and passed-on by a social groups comprising a handful of great scientists and a still small but somewhat larger number of 'disciples' who learn and apply their insights and serve to amplify their impact.

But even the great scientists have themselves mostly served as apprentices to other great scientists (as has often been documented - e.g. by Harriet Zuckerman in Scientific Elite).

So, when thinking about the social structure of real science, it would seem that real scientific work is done (slowly, over a time frame of a few decades) by small groups that are driven by Masters who make the breakthroughs; plus a larger number of 'prentices who learn discernment from the Masters ('discernment' - i.e. the correct making of evaluations - being probably more important than techniques or specific information).

But disciples by themselves are not capable of making breakthroughs, but only capable of incremental extensions or combinations of Master work.

And it is best if the Master can be primarily responsible for training the next generation Master/s to carry on the baton of real science. Disciples can - at best - only train-up more 'prentices with the humility to seek and serve a Master.

Science is now, basically, dead (my direct experience of science is inevitably partial - but the same mechanisms seems to have been at work everywhere; even outside of medicine in the humanities some of which I know reasonably well - and the social sciences were essentially corrupt from the word go).

What we think of as science is now merely a branch of the bureaucracy. It would, indeed it does, function perfectly well without doing any useful and valid science at all.

Indeed, modern professional science functions perfectly well while, in fact, *destroying* useful and valid science and replacing it with either rubbish or actively harmful stuff (this is very clear in psychiatry).

I find that I now cannot trust the medical research literature _at all_. I trust a few individual individuals but I do not trust journals, not fields, not funding agencies, not scholarly societies (like the Royal Society, universities, or the NAS) not citations, not prizes (Nobel etc) - in my opinion, none of these are trustworthy indices of scientific validity - not even 'on average'.

The system is *so* corrupt that finding useful and valid science (and, of course, there is some) is like finding a needle in a haystack.

The vast bulk of published work is either hyped triviality (which is time wasting at best), or dishonest in a range of ways from actual invention of data down to deliberately selective publication, or else incompetent in the worst sense - the sense that the researchers lack knowledge, experience and even interest in the problems which they are pretending to solve.

So, what should a person do who wants to do real science in an area? - if (as I think its probably the case) they need to _ignore_ the mainstream published literature as doing more harm than good.

Essentially it is a matter of going back to pre-professional science, and trying to recreate trust based interpersonal networks ('invisible colleges') of truthful, dedicated amateurs; and accepting that the pace of science will be *slow*.

I've been reading Erwin Chargaff lately, and he made clear that the pace of science really is slow. I mean with significant increments coming at gaps of several years - something like one step a decade or so, if you are lucky. And if 'science' seems fast, then that is because it is not science!

This is why science is destroyed by professionalism and its vast expansion - there are too few steps of progress, and too few people ever make these steps. Most 'scientists' (nowadays in excess of 99 percent of them) - if judged correctly - are complete and utter failures, or indeed saboteurs!

So science inevitably ought to be done as a serious hobby/ pastime paid for by some other economic activity (which has usually teaching, but was often medicine up to the early 20th century, and before that being a priest).

Why should anyone take any notice of these putative small and self selected groups of hobby-scientists? Well, presumably if they produce useful results (useful as judged by common sense criteria - like relieving pain or reversing the predictable natural history of a disease), and if the members of the group are honest and trustworthy. But whether this will happen depends on much else - their work may be swamped by public relations.

So, groups of practitioners are best able to function as amateur scientists, since they can implement their own findings, with a chance that their effectivceness might be noticed. And in the past groups of practicing physicians would function as the scientists for their area of interest.

This seems the best model I can think of for those wanting to do science. But science is intrinsically a social activity, not an individual activity. So if you cannot find or create a group that you can trust (and whose competence you trust) - then you cannot do real science.