@ap - Well, clearly the large space agencies and university groupings are fraudulent, like everyone else - but astronomy has a lot of dedicated amateurs who would tend to keep things honest.
@jorgen - Much/ most of what is said about past science is clearly dishonest as well as incompetent; due to the untrustworthiness of sources. But this, of course, emphasizes how honest and competent the old scientists mostly were.
24 March 2022 at 06:55
Erika said...
As someone who has advanced degrees in physics and mathematics (though i am a housewife now)..i have watched aghast at the flimflammery ongoing with the climate "science" and the "birdemic".I knew the sciences were becoming corrupt, because after undergrad i spent time working in some big name research universities and government facilities and saw the inanity. Biological scientists are usually hopeless at math. There is usually one individual in the department they rely on to help them manipulate the statistics to reach the appropriate predetermined conclusion so that they can receive their grant money.
With the birdemic the constantly changing definitions, changing metrics, and changing experimental protocol (in the middle of a trial) was really shoddy and would get most people flunked out of any decent science course.
I had to keep asking my husband if i was seeing things or losing my crackers..because NONE of it made sense.
@Erika - We agree - but I don't believe that real biologists need to be good at math. Most of the best biology in history did not involve any math at all, because the best biological observations/ experiments are designed to be qualitatively (not quantitatively) valid.
And on the other side, most of the worst abuses of biology are perpetrated by people who are technically expert at *doing* math (or statistics, at any rate) - where there errors are in the *application* of numbers to reality - and failure to understand when this is - and mostly is Not - appropriate.
Given the difficulties, biology would do better to ban all math and statistics - including averaging! (see Claude Bernard on the hazards of this apparently simple calculation) than to try and combine two such different ways of understanding reality.
Goethe seems to have understood this way back at the dawn of modern biology - but was ignored (and usually misunderstood).
25 March 2022 at 12:02
Erika said...
@Bruce Charlton I think you may be right. Even though i am not as erudite as you are.
Another example of mathematics being applied dangerously is that of the Quantitative analysts during the 2008 derivative debacle..(and finance is artificial to begin with so we have a double layer of unreality being applied) Any area of study using mathematics can be prone to this, even physics.
This is something I have pondered as well..the mapping of a purely abstract system unto reality.
I sometimes wonder if at some level the scientists and philosophers who are put forward as the “thoughtleaders” and whose dogma is pushed are chosen because their assumptions contain some fundamental error rendering the whole dangerous, or whether it is in fact the case that it is the error of using purely mental constructs mapped onto an ineffable reality that causes the error.
@Erika, i love your expression of 'unreality being applied'
The mapping of abstract systems unto reality could be a more elegant way of describing a crucial part of what i have started to call the shift of empiricism in the broadest sense, as the primary basis of science, to a model based one. Which took a very critical wrong turn when it started to 'fudge the data' to make reality 'fit to the model' instead of the other way around. It is an expression of control rather then measurement and exploration, because the option that the 'mapping process' is suffering from incomplete data, or translation error (or both), is apparently unacceptable. How dare the world disagree with my calculations?
@l - What 'scientists' nowadays call 'models' are merely statistical summaries of past data - and (obviously! Simple common sense tells us) models have zero causal validity unless and until they have been tested for predictive value.
But this never happens before implementation - so long as the model serves dominant propaganda purposes.
This happens from a lethal mixture of ignorance, stupidity, and dishonesty - which is shared by everyone concerned in the process - bottom to top.
28 March 2022 at 19:35
For someone who is honest and well-motivated it is often easy to discover that very-nearly all of self-styled science is fraudulent.
'Science' 2022 is analogous to the proverbial house (or grandiose mansion, in this case) built on foundations of quicksand. Consequently, it does not matter how intricate, elaborate, or carefully-crafted the building may be, when its foundations are non-existent. In terms of science; this translates to meaning that when the foundational assumptions are false or absent; everything that derives from these foundations is wrong... (Because there are a boundless number of ways of being wrong - but only one Truth; so if you are not even aiming for Truth, you will Not find it.)
This is how anybody can know that the climate or birdemic/ peck stuff is not just incompetent and fake science - it is not science At All. The fact that the simplest and most basic foundations of these vast structures of words and numbers are non-existent, and the fact that there is not even an attempt to identify and remedy this situation - tells you literally everything you need to know. What puts people off is the distraction of truly colossal quantities of 'research' that are completely irrelevant - firstly because nobody involved is even attempting to discover or speak the Truth; and secondly because the foundations are quicksand - so even-if the research was honest and competent (which it isn't), it is still literally meaning-less.
The proportion of such meaningless and dishonest research is 100% in many branches of science, and research more generally. And even in areas where some valid research is still conducted; it constitutes a such very small proportion that it becomes functionally-irrelevant. This makes it - as one example - impossible honestly and competently to teach science at a high level; because the closer one gets to current research, the more must be discarded. It is regarded as intrinsically unacceptable to teach honestly, when that would entail ignoring/ excluding all (or almost all) published research on the topic for (say...) the past 40 years. Yet the fact is that professional science has been destroyed by corruption to such as extent that the whole business is long-since unfit-for-purpose - when that purpose is genuinely Truthful understanding of real-reality. And what is true for 'science' is also true for every other branch of systematic discourse. All are corrupted beyond usage - if one is judging usage in terms of the functionality that (50-100 years ago) would have been taken-for-granted. (Of course, the real and aimed-at usage of 'science' 2022 and all other public and high-status discourses; is ideological and propagandistic.) Law, economics, social sciences, the humanities are all broken, incoherent, functionally-useless - and the few remaining somewhat-functional discourses, such as some branches of engineering, are ever-more-rapidly being destroyed by subversion on multiple fronts... And that destruction being covered up - or presented as progress - by bureaucracies and the media.
Therefore, this is Not a self-correcting cultural pendulum-swing. So long as the decline in cultural functionality is not just ignored and denied, but instead celebrated by the criteria of invert-valuation ideologies, so long will dysfunctionality accelerate towards irreversible global civilizational collapse... A collapse which is actively desired by many including nearly all of those with power to cause it; and also many of those who are the intended victims. In such a situation it is facile but ineffectual - and wasteful of our finite attention and effort - to critique what calls-itself science. It is All Wrong - since even when 'factually correct' - it will be interpreted and/or applied wrongly.
Best forget 'science'; and focus on more important - because eternal - things.
""Overwhelmed" by 'science'? But there was never much Real science, and now there is None"
7 Comments -
What about the state of astronomy? I hate to think that those new ground- and space-based observation tools are for nought.
24 March 2022 at 02:21
@ap - Well, clearly the large space agencies and university groupings are fraudulent, like everyone else - but astronomy has a lot of dedicated amateurs who would tend to keep things honest.
@jorgen - Much/ most of what is said about past science is clearly dishonest as well as incompetent; due to the untrustworthiness of sources. But this, of course, emphasizes how honest and competent the old scientists mostly were.
24 March 2022 at 06:55
As someone who has advanced degrees in physics and mathematics (though i am a housewife now)..i have watched aghast at the flimflammery ongoing with the climate "science" and the "birdemic".I knew the sciences were becoming corrupt, because after undergrad i spent time working in some big name research universities and government facilities and saw the inanity. Biological scientists are usually hopeless at math. There is usually one individual in the department they rely on to help them manipulate the statistics to reach the appropriate predetermined conclusion so that they can receive their grant money.
With the birdemic the constantly changing definitions, changing metrics, and changing experimental protocol (in the middle of a trial) was really shoddy and would get most people flunked out of any decent science course.
I had to keep asking my husband if i was seeing things or losing my crackers..because NONE of it made sense.
25 March 2022 at 03:08
@Erika - We agree - but I don't believe that real biologists need to be good at math. Most of the best biology in history did not involve any math at all, because the best biological observations/ experiments are designed to be qualitatively (not quantitatively) valid.
And on the other side, most of the worst abuses of biology are perpetrated by people who are technically expert at *doing* math (or statistics, at any rate) - where there errors are in the *application* of numbers to reality - and failure to understand when this is - and mostly is Not - appropriate.
Given the difficulties, biology would do better to ban all math and statistics - including averaging! (see Claude Bernard on the hazards of this apparently simple calculation) than to try and combine two such different ways of understanding reality.
Goethe seems to have understood this way back at the dawn of modern biology - but was ignored (and usually misunderstood).
25 March 2022 at 12:02
@Bruce Charlton
I think you may be right.
Even though i am not as erudite as you are.
Another example of mathematics being applied dangerously is that of the Quantitative analysts during the 2008 derivative debacle..(and finance is artificial to begin with so we have a double layer of unreality being applied)
Any area of study using mathematics can be prone to this, even physics.
This is something I have pondered as well..the mapping of a purely abstract system unto reality.
I sometimes wonder if at some level the scientists and philosophers who are put forward as the “thoughtleaders” and whose dogma is pushed are chosen because their assumptions contain some fundamental error rendering the whole dangerous, or whether it is in fact the case that it is the error of using purely mental constructs mapped onto an ineffable reality that causes the error.
26 March 2022 at 18:09
@Erika, i love your expression of 'unreality being applied'
The mapping of abstract systems unto reality could be a more elegant way of describing a crucial part of what i have started to call the shift of empiricism in the broadest sense, as the primary basis of science, to a model based one. Which took a very critical wrong turn when it started to 'fudge the data' to make reality 'fit to the model' instead of the other way around. It is an expression of control rather then measurement and exploration, because the option that the 'mapping process' is suffering from incomplete data, or translation error (or both), is apparently unacceptable. How dare the world disagree with my calculations?
28 March 2022 at 19:25
@l - What 'scientists' nowadays call 'models' are merely statistical summaries of past data - and (obviously! Simple common sense tells us) models have zero causal validity unless and until they have been tested for predictive value.
But this never happens before implementation - so long as the model serves dominant propaganda purposes.
This happens from a lethal mixture of ignorance, stupidity, and dishonesty - which is shared by everyone concerned in the process - bottom to top.
28 March 2022 at 19:35