Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

My 'career' was always unconventional, and by conventional criteria pretty unsuccessful in terms of promotions, power, prestige and financially! I spent a fair span of the middling period 'doing' epidemiology and public health - beginning in 1991, peaking in activity with three years as a lecturer in Epidemiology and Public Health (publications from 1993-7), and extending through approximately to the end of my editorship of Medical Hypotheses in 2010.This period was very valuable in many ways - although as early as 1995 I moved towards a focus on (successively)  Evolutionary Psychology, Psychopharmacology, Systems Theory and then Intelligence and Personality.  
One thing I learnt was the increasingly monopolistic and dishonest leftism and managerialism of social science and medicine; which is now blatantly obvious with the birdemic, its response and the peck agenda. I experienced how rapidly science was moving away from truth-seeking and truth-speaking; and towards being absorbed into the administrative apparatus - driven by financial, official and careerist imperatives.  I worked a couple of days a week in the NHS (National Health Service) - at two levels of seniority - and this was a revelation concerning how bureaucracies and managers operate; and their contrast with real science. I saw how policy flowed down from government; and was never challenged. How nothing ever was learned from experience. How discourse was dominated by coercion, bribery and propaganda. And how actual health and actual truth had no place at all in these considerations. As well as picking-up the foundations of basic, solid knowledge concerning infectious disease and epidemics; technically, I learned a great deal about understanding medical and health data - and distinguishing fundamental from superficial issues. In particular, I pursued a line of work on the nature of randomized controlled trials, and the use of very large data sets in medicine; which led me to to articulate (I think for the first time) the ineradicable problems and limitations of what was becoming (from 1994) overwhelming trend in health practice under the slogan of Evidence Based Medicine. 
In many way, being a professional epidemiologist/ public health physician was mostly a negatively salutary experience: certainly I was left with a very low opinion of the field and of its practitioners - especially of the most famous, influential and highly-regarded leaders and opinion-formers - especially in the UK (a horrible bunch of mediocrities, craven fools, psychopaths and political Quislings). All of which was excellent preparation for seeing-through the fakery of the birdemic, its response and 'the peck' and its programme; the reality of which was extremely obvious from an early stage and without any difficulty. I presume this extreme bogosity was also evident to many thousands of others with similar, or much greater, experience and knowledge of basic, solid epidemiology and public health than myself... Or rather; it would have been obvious had they not, long since, discarded personal responsibility; eagerly accepted the Big Lies of Leftism; embraced the expedient dictates of external authority; and consequently become unable and unwilling to think and reason coherently.