Isn’t it the peer review process that installs referees with an ax to grind, who then censor papers that disagree with their life’s body of work?
And high government role in funding research, leading to all funding going to the mainstream beliefs?
And total capture by Big Pharma in the case of health and medicine.
I read papers every day and the old ones were much better. They had a clear theory that was tested, and the results were clear. Often they were done with one or two investigators, not 50 or 100.
The new studies are huge and funded by outside parties (Big Pharma) that uses statistical sleight-of-hand and are more geared to getting a particular result that will contribute to a new drug or treatment modality.
Most new studies are completely bogus.
I’m not sure if it was you, Eugyppius, who alerted me to the Science magazine investigation that there has been no progress in Alzheimer’s and that the beta amyloid theory is probably bogus, based upon a study with fraudulent findings done in 2003.
I haven't written about Alzheimer's, but it's funny you mention it, because I've long the amyloid theory was bad – otherwise why would all the pharmaceutical interventions premised on this lead nowhere.
Stalled progress evident in many, many fields. Often hard to tell at the moment, you need like a 10-15 year retrospective.
Because the amyloid is a response to injury. Keep looking into it and you will see amyloid and prions are a leftover mechanism from our hunter gatherer days.
That went severely wrong the last 100 years (sugar...)
In much the same way that the LDL-heart disease hypothesis is in error, as LDL fills the arteries in response to injury. But what is the underlying cause of injury? Surely not LDL.
I seem to remember a study (The Nuns Study?) that illustrated this. Many nuns whose brains were studied after death had copious plaques and tangles, but had evidenced no signs of Alzheimer's while living and working.
I'm paraphrasing, but Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying recently characterized science and medical journal editors as composed of "failed scientists."
Morality and competence - no system can do without them, and the attempt to replace them with "policies" mandating this and forbidding that is failing miserably.
It's an interesting parallel with a well known aspect of violent crime: if you've gotten to the point where you're relying on police repression to not get robbed or murdered, things have already gone over the point of no return. In a healthy society, crime is vanishingly rare. Repressing it is almost an afterthought, as such repression is inefficient and largely ineffective.
Simarly, in any institution, such as a field of scientific research, those in positions of authority need a modicum of objective competence and decency. Modern academia seems to have reached a point where it's almost all rules and networking, and any perceived problems result in calls for more rules and more administrative overhead. This is some people's idea of progress, but to me it's obvious that character can't be codified or imposed or replaced with some surrogate scheme.
How many studies are conducted purely "for the good of humanity" rather than being sponsored to further some drug, treatment or other intervention? And of those, if they exist, how many are published in prominent journals? And of those, how many change the course of the others funded by big money for big profit?
Rhetorical, of course, but I'm thinking the answer is "just about none" if not "absolutely none."
It doesn't seem to matter what field we're talking about, science, art, industry: innovation comes from the outside, and the existing establishment resists it like hell.
Kuhn taught us that science doesn't proceed in linear fashion by building on itself, but by a generation dying off and taking their dying paradigms with them. This is why science seems to stagnate and why true innovators are suppressed and driven out.
Add in funding by powerful industries and the whole enterprise is rigged against "progress" in any meaningful sense.
This is even true in a hard science like physics. It's been attributed variously, but I think it was a physicist who originally said "science advances one funeral at a time".
When will we see this expose of fish oil supplements and their research, which is a big industry now. I see some pushback as far as supplements, claiming rightfully so that much of the fish oil (and probably all the DHA in it) is already oxidized, I think regardless of any antioxidants they may put in them (which what much of the oil might be like closing the barn door after the horse escaped). Supposedly some of them have independent lab testing but I don't necessarily believe the results. Besides which, once it gets in the body it becomes a pro-oxidant unless perhaps you have robust endogenous or exogenous antioxidant protection.
Oh no, I was looking into supplementing. So it's down another rabbit hole first? This is why I can't maintain a normal conversation with my fellow humans in person.
Well, Life Extension has promoted fish oil and EPA supplements for several decades--it seems every month they have another article on the latest research about all the things it improves and protects against. I try to tell them that the studies are driven by commercial interests, mostly, and you don't see studies that show negative effects or they aren't done because of funding bias or publication bias. I may be wrong about fish oil, but my experience with a high DHA's fish oil supplement which I took for about a half a year about 30 years ago confirmed some negative effects I had just previously read in a particular newsletter, but forgot about until they manifested.
Yes, I've come around to being skeptical of fish oil supplements. Better to avoid polyunsaturated oil as much as possible. And emphasizing real food over supplements.
Lard, Baby! Read Nina Teicholz's book "The Big Fat Surprise," and you'll see a perfect example of the scientific corruption discussed here. Plus the fact that saturated fat isn't bad for you. The real killer is sugar. I personally eat a diet heavy in eggs, cheese, meat, butter, etc, and I've got very health blood chemistry. I also eat very little sugar -- no sugary beverages, small amounts of chocolate, and no junk food (chips, pastries, french fries, other carbohydrates). This is how our ancestors ate, and they didn't have all the cancer, diabetes, and other modern health problems. It's time we returned to that.
I'm right there with ya, though I prefer beef tallow to lard (pork fat). Commercial pork is very PUFA-heavy, as is chicken. I try to stick to ruminants whenever possible. I only eat pastured eggs from one of my neighbors.
In my field, economics, the peer review system has been identified as broken for some time, though few have any real ideas what to do about it.
So it shouldn’t have been surprising when, two years ago, virtually en masse, leading academic economists declared that shutting down production would not really have a very negative effect on the economy.
Only a handful foresaw that increasing the money supply while stopping production would lead to out-of-control inflation. No, I’m serious.
just read. This is aligned with what I posted re Alex Marianos Better Skeptics. A way to push review out more broadly.
Of note with BS, is it failed as one of the reviewers was corrupt (the subject was fact checking a video of (I think) Robert Malone and Bret Weinstein). I see this as the challenge with 'distribute everything,' tho I like the concept. My post suggested perhaps blended, rotten tomatoes approach, have both 'professional' reviewers and also crowd sourced reviewers
Ooo I like this idea a lot TK. This is why we need a think tank for problem solvers and action seekers. Really sharp stuff. Do you happen to have a link for the Better Skeptics stuff you are talking about? I would love to read more. Thanks!
decentralization is good of course but it may not go too far for this particular issue, because it's rooted in the profound tendency people have to *voluntarily* play copy-the-leader. So even in a fully peer publication model you would probably still tend to have monolithic, sanctified ideas emerge
Can you please cite one source showing that? Because in every decentralized model I have studied the opposite effect happens. There is no leader to play follow the leader in a decentralized model. Also, in a well thought out system - results should not be shown right away. So if you are running an experiment on a drug, and I am at the same time - we should not see each other's results in real time.
well consider bit coin vis-a-vis other technically superior crypto (e.g. ZCash). The same effect is already noticeable in the new decentralized social media. It's wrong in general to assume that decentralization alone is enough to prevent monolithic organization from emerging.
Not showing results immediately is the *opposite* of how a truly decentralized system would necessarily be organized: some central arbiter somewhere has set a specific rule for the whole system (a good one in this case but a rule nevertheless).
Of course not. But decentralized systems EVOLVE at a much much faster rate than any other system can. So they are the best at protecting against corruption. And every time they are attacked they grow stronger and stronger. Your example on crypto is a perfect example.
As for rules, they don't have to be centralized at all. Are you familiar with DAOs?
the cryto example so far shows the system settling into a fairly monolithic and distinctly sub-optimal state.
As far as publication goes without some sort of enforcement mechanism no DAO is going to prevent early publication of results *somewhere* to grab mindshare if doing so is perceived as advantageous. A publication system has to somehow be robust to *all* transmission, not just transmission on it's imagined lines
I learnt everything I know about economics from Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The leaf was adopted as legal tender, and they all became immensely rich. They did run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, the going rate was something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut. So in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, they embarked on a massive defoliation campaign, and ...er, burnt down all the forests.
Those in finance were so stupid and greedy they quantitatively eased again and again until money now ceases to have any meaning. I tell myself it's ok as money was only ever a means of not having to carry chickens about our person in order to barter. We still have the same amount of chickens, but our counting beans need to get real again. We should follow Iceland's example and get rid of our politicians and financiers.
This is exactly that. Building a parallel system - really to try and integrate and save the current ones at first. But also to act alone if needed. We can't allow everything to break first. From chaos it is too risky to try and make this rise up. It is much easier to invent a new system, plug it into the existing one, save the good parts and reinvent the bad. And what is bad? The corruption.
This article might explain it better especially since you seem to get it, whereas I spend a lot of my time trying to explain the idea to people who are oblivious:
The Case for Building a New, Open, Digital Democratic System Online
How decentralized technology is a way to get the power back to the people from the special interest groups that have corrupted our system; & the lessons we've learned from the Sunflower Revolution.
The most troubling thing about The Science® is that so many people believe that it is a thing unto itself, wholly apart from the people who practice it. There is this popular notion that science is something existing out there that is just waiting to be discovered by smart people. The fact of the matter is that science wasn’t discovered by scientists so much as it was invented by them. The Science® in all its forms is a human invention that we use to help us understand our observations of the physical universe. As a human invention it is subject to all the biases that other human endeavors are.
That the average person on the street doesn’t understand that is one thing. But somewhere along the line, scientist themselves lost perspective on that. Science is not truth. Truth is truth. Science is our rough estimate of truth.
right on. science is at best an institutionalised practice that spits out results, some of which (mostly, in the increasingly distant past) turned out to be quite useful.
It's funny that we've gotten to this stage given that the history of science is most notable for its revolutions, triggered by radical (often disagreeable) thinkers. Every major figure from Galileo onward gets painted (rightly or not) as bravely standing up against a closed-minded status quo.
In the same way most every major thinker about the methods of science has come to a similar conclusion. From Bacon and Hume to Popper, Quine, and Kuhn, the need to test, criticize, and overthrow claims that are by nature provisional and epistemologically fragile has been the essence of the whole activity.
The whole things has shifted on its base from exploration and criticism to a cult of careerists.
Meanwhile the IFL Science! crowd who worships these fat bureaucrats in labcoats will go on to tell you why it's totally scientific that you wear three masks and take four barely-tested mRNA shots.
Science rarely advances by consensus and team building does it not?
But it excels in dogma!
I saw a video where a doctor explained it took the colleges or boards (depending on where you live) 25 or more years to change direction to the latest medical advances. We just saw SSRI's get trashed just WAIT until the whole statin/cholesterol farce gets exposed.
It's ALL about the sugars, bad fats and inflammation but sure wait until the medical orthodoxy comes around. I've been 20 years ahead on nutrition science and it's not hard to do, the science is out there!
Some people seem highly carb.-tolerant. The oldest man in the world (Japan, of course) reached 116 and seems to have eaten a HCLF diet. Others might benefit from eating HFLC from birth.
Nutrition research seems to be just as full of confounders and bad science as pharmaceutical trials. In one trial, apparently the main investigator knew what he believed and was determined that the experiment would prove it. It didn't and he seems to have parted company acrimonously with his colleague(s).
I think I trust Stephan Guyenet, Robb Wolf and Chris Masterjohn. There are more I'm sure but those three seem prepared at times to admit that they're not sure.
Some part of this is surely publication pressure - the demand that researchers publish as many papers as possible, maximizing their h-indices and otherwise burnishing their metrics. Several years ago there was a study that demonstrates that, based on this dynamic alone, sloppy work would proliferate and render the literature unreliable.
Compare to the 19th century, when many scientists would spend a decade not publishing anything, before coming out with a transformative monograph. No one does that anymore.
Establishing an incentive structure that rewarded quality over quantity would go a long way to fixing this. Unfortunately quality is inherently difficult to quantify, meaning that the administrators who run the contemporary university will never be sold on the idea.
My favorite paper on SARS-CoV-2, the most important to the whole pandemic, one that gives you lots of important answers was retracted a few months ago.
The retraction letter states it was literally because the author argued using the Spike Protein could lead to bad outcomes. Literally the sole reason. Not the methodology, not the findings, not anything else, but half of a paragraph.
As someone who strictly follows science I can tell 90%+ of academics don't. In fact both sides of the conversation don't follow science.
As a complex theorist wrote in the comments of my Substack, most people and I argue every single damn "academic" should learn complex theorizing at the very least. It would have saved us from this mess.
Wow. Worse than I thought. Can’t question the spike protein means you can’t investigate the spike protein. How is that not just straight up censorship?
In a totalitarian society, that's what you do to get published.
If you do it right, those who can read between the lines will understand what you really mean. Happened in the Soviet Union. Happened in Nazi Germany. Now it's happening here.
What I wonder is to what extent it was happening years ago, when I still believed what I read.
My field is ancient history. Ancient historians in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could choose a subject to write about which by itself had nothing to do with current life but which had clear implications for those who thought. If you just wrote about an esoteric academic subject, you could probably get away with it. How much attention would political commissars pay to writings on ancient history? If you were unlucky, they could. Stalin paid inordinate attention to linguistics. But you probably would get away with it. Nowadays, with woke political commissars, I suspect it's harder.
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein damages Hematopoietic Stem/Progenitor Cells. If you have medicine, biology knowledge and like connected the dots I would stay away.
If you don’t and will just read the paper and that is it, check it out.
"The COVID-19 pandemic saw a massive mobilization of the scientific workforce. We evaluated the citation impact of COVID-19 publications relative to all scientific work published in 2020 to 2021, finding that 20% of citations received to papers published in 2020 to 2021 were to COVID-19–related papers. Across science, 98 of the 100 most-cited papers published in 2020 to 2021 were related to COVID-19. A large number of scientists received large numbers of citations to their COVID-19 work, often exceeding the citations they had received to all their work during their entire career. We document a strong covidization of research citations across science. This may have major repercussions for research priorities and the evolution of research on COVID-19 and beyond."
Covid is literally the one ring to rule them all, absolutely dwarfing every other scientific discipline in terms of literature output and number of scientists/academics involved.
Also, banning most doctors from publishing literature might not be such a bad idea:
JAMA Study: Doctors diagnostic judgements are "mathematically incoherent", "ie, formally illogical and mathematically incorrect"
"Findings In this survey study of 215 physicians, most respondents (78.1%) estimated the probability of a medical outcome resulting from a 2-step sequence to be greater than the probability of at least 1 of the 2 component events, a result that was mathematically incoherent (ie, formally illogical and mathematically incorrect)."
Science is the new priestcraft. Scientists are the new priests. Thin men and nervous ladies suffering from mass hysteria and myopia with far too much control, projecting their nervous dispositions onto all of us and imagining themselves wise.
"a deluge of new publications entrenches top-cited papers, precluding new work from rising into the most-cited, commonly known canon of the field." Spamming, botting, DDoS attacks in fact. Jamming a channel with noise, silver foil chaff to confuse targetting.
Like every other instance of government attempting to replace the free market, the virtually 100% state financing of "science" has led to mediocrity (at best). Most "scientists" now excel in pursuing public funding by writing grant requests, which success depends on adhering to the politically correct "consensus". If Edison had been publicly funded, we'd still be using candles for light.
One of the strengths of the free market is that the profit motive, along with the normal human virtues like wanting to make the world a better place, inspires people to pursue their own vision of what will work. The market rewards those ideas that actually do work, along with the entrepreneurs who funded and performed the work. The ones whose ideas didn't make the cut are forced to cut their losses and go on to other things.
All government endeavors are pretty much as you describe. Even with benevolent intentions, their decisions are always political compromises that rarely come close being to the best solution. More importantly, when their solutions don't work as planned, more money, personnel, and resources are allocated.
Yes the demise of corporate research groups has been quite short sighted, although one could question if Xerox Palo Alto would be a flagship for lousy corporate management. With resources diverted to government we see failures. DARPA has been a success largely because they fly low. and combine industry money with government money. They also seem to do the least micro-management.
You wanna propagandize and indoctrinate our youth, do it on your own dime. Otherwise, get a job in the real world where you have to provide actual value.
Also, remove the requirement to publish for the university faculty. These arbitrary requirements (e.g. 5 publications per year) result in a lot of rubbish papers being published - plus, tons of potentially valuable IP annihilated.
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy" states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.[80](wki)
It is true that any institution is subject to corruption. But this kind of broad-based corruption is in need of an explanation beyond chance or bad luck.
No, the overwhelming cause here is socialism, and the ensuing hollowing out of competitive institutions in civil Society. For this, we need to resort to the insight of the great Austrian economists, Rothbard, Mises and their intellectual descendants. Why them? Because they identified the problems of socialism, particularly the failure of rational economic calculation.
We live in a society where the vast majority of funding of universities, medical institutions, research boards and research comes through the State, or institutions that receive at least a plurality of funds from the State. And through Medicare and Medicaid (and European "single payer" systems), the State also envelops ostensibly private medical providers.
Applying the theory: the more an institution receives artificial subsidy from tax revenues (or printed money) from a state, the more it becomes subject to the problems of monopoly and socialism. They are insulated from losses--and therefore are not punished for mistakes that would be punished in the market--and suffer from calculation problems because they do not operate on a standard profit and loss model.
If you do not operate on a profit-and-loss model (N.B., this applies to private "non-profits" as well, for they must meet their costs too), then why do you need to serve consumers? Or rather, who are your consumers? In this, it would be the provider of the subsidy - the State and its most trusted lackeys. The State, in our societies of today, is interested in power more than any other object. Truth and accuracy are completely subordinate.
Many people resist these conclusions because it undermines longstanding institutions that have broadbased support. For example, public funding of libraries, universities, research and schooling. But economic science doesn't lie. In each of those cases, there is no profit and loss (just tax/spend limits from the State), and no need to answer to what consumers would otherwise demand in a free market. Choices and decisions as to curriculum, research topics, books to offer, etc., are imposed. Feedback, if any, is through political channels, and deeply insulated from economic feedback based upon consumer demand.
Failed liberal ideologies of "equality" and egalitarianism are historically used to justify such institutions. But they cannot escape economic science, no matter their merits. As Thomas DiLorenzo identified in his book, "The Problems of Socialism", the quasi-monopolies and oligopolies that result from socialist funding ultimately means that these institutions will not produce reliable products, or demanded products, comparable to any corollary examples in the free market (which itself is corrupted by being crowded out by State funding).
Universities have become increasingly unreliable sources of truth, in virtually any subject, because of the lack of consequences for falsehood. Democratic political management, filtered through endless permanent bureaucracy with entrenched legal protections, is about as inefficient a mechanism to correct errors in the institutions as I can imagine. A monarch would be much more preferable in this regard.
Even with all of its inefficiencies, some semblance of decent work can come out of existing institutions because they "compete" amongst themselves, and in some jurisdictions, political feedback, while very diffuse, is not completely broken. But the maelstrom of bad "products" from our establishment institutions was accelerated by raw State power in 2020. They aggressively augmented every pro-regime, pro-authoritarian voice, and pushed for every available measure to be used to silence and punish dissent.
The answer is to start to deconstruct the monsters we created. We need to understand that equality doesn't mean creating mega-states that rob from Peter to put Paul's kids in bad schools. Recognize the failures of liberalism - that John Stuart Mill's idea of protecting against "harm" was exploited to mean imposing real harms on free people to mitigate imagined harms -- that freedom means freedom from any authority (moral, parental, etc.) -- or that equality means "creating equal opportunities", an intellectual impossibility if there ever was one.
Isn’t it the peer review process that installs referees with an ax to grind, who then censor papers that disagree with their life’s body of work?
And high government role in funding research, leading to all funding going to the mainstream beliefs?
And total capture by Big Pharma in the case of health and medicine.
I read papers every day and the old ones were much better. They had a clear theory that was tested, and the results were clear. Often they were done with one or two investigators, not 50 or 100.
The new studies are huge and funded by outside parties (Big Pharma) that uses statistical sleight-of-hand and are more geared to getting a particular result that will contribute to a new drug or treatment modality.
Most new studies are completely bogus.
I’m not sure if it was you, Eugyppius, who alerted me to the Science magazine investigation that there has been no progress in Alzheimer’s and that the beta amyloid theory is probably bogus, based upon a study with fraudulent findings done in 2003.
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Shocking but this is going on all the time, and is a perfect example of what your essay is talking about.
I haven't written about Alzheimer's, but it's funny you mention it, because I've long the amyloid theory was bad – otherwise why would all the pharmaceutical interventions premised on this lead nowhere.
Stalled progress evident in many, many fields. Often hard to tell at the moment, you need like a 10-15 year retrospective.
Because the amyloid is a response to injury. Keep looking into it and you will see amyloid and prions are a leftover mechanism from our hunter gatherer days.
That went severely wrong the last 100 years (sugar...)
In much the same way that the LDL-heart disease hypothesis is in error, as LDL fills the arteries in response to injury. But what is the underlying cause of injury? Surely not LDL.
Could you recommend some readings about that? Thanks
I seem to remember a study (The Nuns Study?) that illustrated this. Many nuns whose brains were studied after death had copious plaques and tangles, but had evidenced no signs of Alzheimer's while living and working.
Worth reading...
https://actaneurocomms.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40478-014-0135-5
I'm paraphrasing, but Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying recently characterized science and medical journal editors as composed of "failed scientists."
Older studies where better because there where higher standards of morality.
Here's a plot twist... Maybe science needs religion for it to function well.
Morality and competence - no system can do without them, and the attempt to replace them with "policies" mandating this and forbidding that is failing miserably.
It's an interesting parallel with a well known aspect of violent crime: if you've gotten to the point where you're relying on police repression to not get robbed or murdered, things have already gone over the point of no return. In a healthy society, crime is vanishingly rare. Repressing it is almost an afterthought, as such repression is inefficient and largely ineffective.
Simarly, in any institution, such as a field of scientific research, those in positions of authority need a modicum of objective competence and decency. Modern academia seems to have reached a point where it's almost all rules and networking, and any perceived problems result in calls for more rules and more administrative overhead. This is some people's idea of progress, but to me it's obvious that character can't be codified or imposed or replaced with some surrogate scheme.
Steady on... LOL
How many studies are conducted purely "for the good of humanity" rather than being sponsored to further some drug, treatment or other intervention? And of those, if they exist, how many are published in prominent journals? And of those, how many change the course of the others funded by big money for big profit?
Rhetorical, of course, but I'm thinking the answer is "just about none" if not "absolutely none."
Peer review = dogma enforcement
It doesn't seem to matter what field we're talking about, science, art, industry: innovation comes from the outside, and the existing establishment resists it like hell.
Kuhn taught us that science doesn't proceed in linear fashion by building on itself, but by a generation dying off and taking their dying paradigms with them. This is why science seems to stagnate and why true innovators are suppressed and driven out.
Add in funding by powerful industries and the whole enterprise is rigged against "progress" in any meaningful sense.
This is even true in a hard science like physics. It's been attributed variously, but I think it was a physicist who originally said "science advances one funeral at a time".
Beta amyloid: an inappropriate emphasis on a correlation without considering causation.
Like thinking you can extinguish a burning house by blowing the smoke away with big fans.
When will we see this expose of fish oil supplements and their research, which is a big industry now. I see some pushback as far as supplements, claiming rightfully so that much of the fish oil (and probably all the DHA in it) is already oxidized, I think regardless of any antioxidants they may put in them (which what much of the oil might be like closing the barn door after the horse escaped). Supposedly some of them have independent lab testing but I don't necessarily believe the results. Besides which, once it gets in the body it becomes a pro-oxidant unless perhaps you have robust endogenous or exogenous antioxidant protection.
Oh no, I was looking into supplementing. So it's down another rabbit hole first? This is why I can't maintain a normal conversation with my fellow humans in person.
Well, Life Extension has promoted fish oil and EPA supplements for several decades--it seems every month they have another article on the latest research about all the things it improves and protects against. I try to tell them that the studies are driven by commercial interests, mostly, and you don't see studies that show negative effects or they aren't done because of funding bias or publication bias. I may be wrong about fish oil, but my experience with a high DHA's fish oil supplement which I took for about a half a year about 30 years ago confirmed some negative effects I had just previously read in a particular newsletter, but forgot about until they manifested.
Yes, I've come around to being skeptical of fish oil supplements. Better to avoid polyunsaturated oil as much as possible. And emphasizing real food over supplements.
Lard, Baby! Read Nina Teicholz's book "The Big Fat Surprise," and you'll see a perfect example of the scientific corruption discussed here. Plus the fact that saturated fat isn't bad for you. The real killer is sugar. I personally eat a diet heavy in eggs, cheese, meat, butter, etc, and I've got very health blood chemistry. I also eat very little sugar -- no sugary beverages, small amounts of chocolate, and no junk food (chips, pastries, french fries, other carbohydrates). This is how our ancestors ate, and they didn't have all the cancer, diabetes, and other modern health problems. It's time we returned to that.
I'm right there with ya, though I prefer beef tallow to lard (pork fat). Commercial pork is very PUFA-heavy, as is chicken. I try to stick to ruminants whenever possible. I only eat pastured eggs from one of my neighbors.
In my field, economics, the peer review system has been identified as broken for some time, though few have any real ideas what to do about it.
So it shouldn’t have been surprising when, two years ago, virtually en masse, leading academic economists declared that shutting down production would not really have a very negative effect on the economy.
Only a handful foresaw that increasing the money supply while stopping production would lead to out-of-control inflation. No, I’m serious.
We need to decentralize in order to fix corruption. Everyone should read the book The Starfish and the Spider. Imagine this for everything:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/decentralize-everything
just read. This is aligned with what I posted re Alex Marianos Better Skeptics. A way to push review out more broadly.
Of note with BS, is it failed as one of the reviewers was corrupt (the subject was fact checking a video of (I think) Robert Malone and Bret Weinstein). I see this as the challenge with 'distribute everything,' tho I like the concept. My post suggested perhaps blended, rotten tomatoes approach, have both 'professional' reviewers and also crowd sourced reviewers
Ooo I like this idea a lot TK. This is why we need a think tank for problem solvers and action seekers. Really sharp stuff. Do you happen to have a link for the Better Skeptics stuff you are talking about? I would love to read more. Thanks!
Went to check your Substack and really liking what I see so far.
Thanks man!
decentralization is good of course but it may not go too far for this particular issue, because it's rooted in the profound tendency people have to *voluntarily* play copy-the-leader. So even in a fully peer publication model you would probably still tend to have monolithic, sanctified ideas emerge
Can you please cite one source showing that? Because in every decentralized model I have studied the opposite effect happens. There is no leader to play follow the leader in a decentralized model. Also, in a well thought out system - results should not be shown right away. So if you are running an experiment on a drug, and I am at the same time - we should not see each other's results in real time.
well consider bit coin vis-a-vis other technically superior crypto (e.g. ZCash). The same effect is already noticeable in the new decentralized social media. It's wrong in general to assume that decentralization alone is enough to prevent monolithic organization from emerging.
Not showing results immediately is the *opposite* of how a truly decentralized system would necessarily be organized: some central arbiter somewhere has set a specific rule for the whole system (a good one in this case but a rule nevertheless).
Of course not. But decentralized systems EVOLVE at a much much faster rate than any other system can. So they are the best at protecting against corruption. And every time they are attacked they grow stronger and stronger. Your example on crypto is a perfect example.
As for rules, they don't have to be centralized at all. Are you familiar with DAOs?
the cryto example so far shows the system settling into a fairly monolithic and distinctly sub-optimal state.
As far as publication goes without some sort of enforcement mechanism no DAO is going to prevent early publication of results *somewhere* to grab mindshare if doing so is perceived as advantageous. A publication system has to somehow be robust to *all* transmission, not just transmission on it's imagined lines
I learnt everything I know about economics from Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The leaf was adopted as legal tender, and they all became immensely rich. They did run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, the going rate was something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut. So in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, they embarked on a massive defoliation campaign, and ...er, burnt down all the forests.
Those in finance were so stupid and greedy they quantitatively eased again and again until money now ceases to have any meaning. I tell myself it's ok as money was only ever a means of not having to carry chickens about our person in order to barter. We still have the same amount of chickens, but our counting beans need to get real again. We should follow Iceland's example and get rid of our politicians and financiers.
My field is law, should I stick to it?
Peer review has now become Secret Society influence.
Now that we know the plans of the WEF, what are our counter-plans? Have you seen this?
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/what-we-need-is-a-transparency-movement
This is exactly that. Building a parallel system - really to try and integrate and save the current ones at first. But also to act alone if needed. We can't allow everything to break first. From chaos it is too risky to try and make this rise up. It is much easier to invent a new system, plug it into the existing one, save the good parts and reinvent the bad. And what is bad? The corruption.
This article might explain it better especially since you seem to get it, whereas I spend a lot of my time trying to explain the idea to people who are oblivious:
The Case for Building a New, Open, Digital Democratic System Online
How decentralized technology is a way to get the power back to the people from the special interest groups that have corrupted our system; & the lessons we've learned from the Sunflower Revolution.
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/the-case-for-building-a-new-open
You are speaking my language
The most troubling thing about The Science® is that so many people believe that it is a thing unto itself, wholly apart from the people who practice it. There is this popular notion that science is something existing out there that is just waiting to be discovered by smart people. The fact of the matter is that science wasn’t discovered by scientists so much as it was invented by them. The Science® in all its forms is a human invention that we use to help us understand our observations of the physical universe. As a human invention it is subject to all the biases that other human endeavors are.
That the average person on the street doesn’t understand that is one thing. But somewhere along the line, scientist themselves lost perspective on that. Science is not truth. Truth is truth. Science is our rough estimate of truth.
right on. science is at best an institutionalised practice that spits out results, some of which (mostly, in the increasingly distant past) turned out to be quite useful.
It's funny that we've gotten to this stage given that the history of science is most notable for its revolutions, triggered by radical (often disagreeable) thinkers. Every major figure from Galileo onward gets painted (rightly or not) as bravely standing up against a closed-minded status quo.
In the same way most every major thinker about the methods of science has come to a similar conclusion. From Bacon and Hume to Popper, Quine, and Kuhn, the need to test, criticize, and overthrow claims that are by nature provisional and epistemologically fragile has been the essence of the whole activity.
The whole things has shifted on its base from exploration and criticism to a cult of careerists.
Meanwhile the IFL Science! crowd who worships these fat bureaucrats in labcoats will go on to tell you why it's totally scientific that you wear three masks and take four barely-tested mRNA shots.
Science rarely advances by consensus and team building does it not?
But it excels in dogma!
I saw a video where a doctor explained it took the colleges or boards (depending on where you live) 25 or more years to change direction to the latest medical advances. We just saw SSRI's get trashed just WAIT until the whole statin/cholesterol farce gets exposed.
It's ALL about the sugars, bad fats and inflammation but sure wait until the medical orthodoxy comes around. I've been 20 years ahead on nutrition science and it's not hard to do, the science is out there!
Carnivore diet changed my whole life. I was in autoimmune hell. Now I train jiu jitsu 6 days a week.
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/jiu-jitsu-competition-carnivore-diet
Some people seem highly carb.-tolerant. The oldest man in the world (Japan, of course) reached 116 and seems to have eaten a HCLF diet. Others might benefit from eating HFLC from birth.
Nutrition research seems to be just as full of confounders and bad science as pharmaceutical trials. In one trial, apparently the main investigator knew what he believed and was determined that the experiment would prove it. It didn't and he seems to have parted company acrimonously with his colleague(s).
I think I trust Stephan Guyenet, Robb Wolf and Chris Masterjohn. There are more I'm sure but those three seem prepared at times to admit that they're not sure.
I believe a scandal has broken out regarding Alzheimer's based on 20 years of fraudulent studies.
I admit I don't follow cancer science much, I'm aiming not to get it in the first place via food and lifestyle.
Sources?
Read Fung's book, The Cancer Code. It is interesting.
Some part of this is surely publication pressure - the demand that researchers publish as many papers as possible, maximizing their h-indices and otherwise burnishing their metrics. Several years ago there was a study that demonstrates that, based on this dynamic alone, sloppy work would proliferate and render the literature unreliable.
Compare to the 19th century, when many scientists would spend a decade not publishing anything, before coming out with a transformative monograph. No one does that anymore.
Establishing an incentive structure that rewarded quality over quantity would go a long way to fixing this. Unfortunately quality is inherently difficult to quantify, meaning that the administrators who run the contemporary university will never be sold on the idea.
Kant didn't publish his first major work until he was 57. Today he wouldn't have a chance
Exactly.
My favorite paper on SARS-CoV-2, the most important to the whole pandemic, one that gives you lots of important answers was retracted a few months ago.
The retraction letter states it was literally because the author argued using the Spike Protein could lead to bad outcomes. Literally the sole reason. Not the methodology, not the findings, not anything else, but half of a paragraph.
As someone who strictly follows science I can tell 90%+ of academics don't. In fact both sides of the conversation don't follow science.
As a complex theorist wrote in the comments of my Substack, most people and I argue every single damn "academic" should learn complex theorizing at the very least. It would have saved us from this mess.
tell us more what 'using the spike protein' means. I'm guessing in the vax ?
Yes using the spike protein for immunization
Wow. Worse than I thought. Can’t question the spike protein means you can’t investigate the spike protein. How is that not just straight up censorship?
It is academic censorship and it's common among other fields too.
There are couple dozen paper were they state how bad the Spike Protein is and finish their conclusion with "get vaccinated".
Either you insert something pro jab in your paper or you don't get published.
In a totalitarian society, that's what you do to get published.
If you do it right, those who can read between the lines will understand what you really mean. Happened in the Soviet Union. Happened in Nazi Germany. Now it's happening here.
What I wonder is to what extent it was happening years ago, when I still believed what I read.
My field is ancient history. Ancient historians in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could choose a subject to write about which by itself had nothing to do with current life but which had clear implications for those who thought. If you just wrote about an esoteric academic subject, you could probably get away with it. How much attention would political commissars pay to writings on ancient history? If you were unlucky, they could. Stalin paid inordinate attention to linguistics. But you probably would get away with it. Nowadays, with woke political commissars, I suspect it's harder.
Which paper?
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein damages Hematopoietic Stem/Progenitor Cells. If you have medicine, biology knowledge and like connected the dots I would stay away.
If you don’t and will just read the paper and that is it, check it out.
Ioannidis published a study "Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite"
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204074119
"The COVID-19 pandemic saw a massive mobilization of the scientific workforce. We evaluated the citation impact of COVID-19 publications relative to all scientific work published in 2020 to 2021, finding that 20% of citations received to papers published in 2020 to 2021 were to COVID-19–related papers. Across science, 98 of the 100 most-cited papers published in 2020 to 2021 were related to COVID-19. A large number of scientists received large numbers of citations to their COVID-19 work, often exceeding the citations they had received to all their work during their entire career. We document a strong covidization of research citations across science. This may have major repercussions for research priorities and the evolution of research on COVID-19 and beyond."
Covid is literally the one ring to rule them all, absolutely dwarfing every other scientific discipline in terms of literature output and number of scientists/academics involved.
Also, banning most doctors from publishing literature might not be such a bad idea:
JAMA Study: Doctors diagnostic judgements are "mathematically incoherent", "ie, formally illogical and mathematically incorrect"
"Findings In this survey study of 215 physicians, most respondents (78.1%) estimated the probability of a medical outcome resulting from a 2-step sequence to be greater than the probability of at least 1 of the 2 component events, a result that was mathematically incoherent (ie, formally illogical and mathematically incorrect)."
https://ashmedai.substack.com/p/study-doctors-diagnostic-judgements
Science is the new priestcraft. Scientists are the new priests. Thin men and nervous ladies suffering from mass hysteria and myopia with far too much control, projecting their nervous dispositions onto all of us and imagining themselves wise.
"a deluge of new publications entrenches top-cited papers, precluding new work from rising into the most-cited, commonly known canon of the field." Spamming, botting, DDoS attacks in fact. Jamming a channel with noise, silver foil chaff to confuse targetting.
in some fields, not hard to imagine that some of these effects are even intentional.
Yes, I should qualify my observation to that effect. Ta.
Like every other instance of government attempting to replace the free market, the virtually 100% state financing of "science" has led to mediocrity (at best). Most "scientists" now excel in pursuing public funding by writing grant requests, which success depends on adhering to the politically correct "consensus". If Edison had been publicly funded, we'd still be using candles for light.
Worse to have much of that health research grant process routed though a very corrupt and powerful sociopath. The damages are immense.
One of the strengths of the free market is that the profit motive, along with the normal human virtues like wanting to make the world a better place, inspires people to pursue their own vision of what will work. The market rewards those ideas that actually do work, along with the entrepreneurs who funded and performed the work. The ones whose ideas didn't make the cut are forced to cut their losses and go on to other things.
All government endeavors are pretty much as you describe. Even with benevolent intentions, their decisions are always political compromises that rarely come close being to the best solution. More importantly, when their solutions don't work as planned, more money, personnel, and resources are allocated.
Yes the demise of corporate research groups has been quite short sighted, although one could question if Xerox Palo Alto would be a flagship for lousy corporate management. With resources diverted to government we see failures. DARPA has been a success largely because they fly low. and combine industry money with government money. They also seem to do the least micro-management.
Stripping the universities of any and all federal funding would be a good start.
New slogan:
DEFUND ACADEMIA!!!
You wanna propagandize and indoctrinate our youth, do it on your own dime. Otherwise, get a job in the real world where you have to provide actual value.
Also, remove the requirement to publish for the university faculty. These arbitrary requirements (e.g. 5 publications per year) result in a lot of rubbish papers being published - plus, tons of potentially valuable IP annihilated.
Might I mention...:
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy" states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.[80](wki)
This is exactly why I say we will never, as a species, get off this rock.
Literally, it must be "The Great Filter."
A paper on the light bulb would never have passed peer review by the best candle makers in the world.
Epurr si muove
It is true that any institution is subject to corruption. But this kind of broad-based corruption is in need of an explanation beyond chance or bad luck.
No, the overwhelming cause here is socialism, and the ensuing hollowing out of competitive institutions in civil Society. For this, we need to resort to the insight of the great Austrian economists, Rothbard, Mises and their intellectual descendants. Why them? Because they identified the problems of socialism, particularly the failure of rational economic calculation.
We live in a society where the vast majority of funding of universities, medical institutions, research boards and research comes through the State, or institutions that receive at least a plurality of funds from the State. And through Medicare and Medicaid (and European "single payer" systems), the State also envelops ostensibly private medical providers.
Applying the theory: the more an institution receives artificial subsidy from tax revenues (or printed money) from a state, the more it becomes subject to the problems of monopoly and socialism. They are insulated from losses--and therefore are not punished for mistakes that would be punished in the market--and suffer from calculation problems because they do not operate on a standard profit and loss model.
If you do not operate on a profit-and-loss model (N.B., this applies to private "non-profits" as well, for they must meet their costs too), then why do you need to serve consumers? Or rather, who are your consumers? In this, it would be the provider of the subsidy - the State and its most trusted lackeys. The State, in our societies of today, is interested in power more than any other object. Truth and accuracy are completely subordinate.
Many people resist these conclusions because it undermines longstanding institutions that have broadbased support. For example, public funding of libraries, universities, research and schooling. But economic science doesn't lie. In each of those cases, there is no profit and loss (just tax/spend limits from the State), and no need to answer to what consumers would otherwise demand in a free market. Choices and decisions as to curriculum, research topics, books to offer, etc., are imposed. Feedback, if any, is through political channels, and deeply insulated from economic feedback based upon consumer demand.
Failed liberal ideologies of "equality" and egalitarianism are historically used to justify such institutions. But they cannot escape economic science, no matter their merits. As Thomas DiLorenzo identified in his book, "The Problems of Socialism", the quasi-monopolies and oligopolies that result from socialist funding ultimately means that these institutions will not produce reliable products, or demanded products, comparable to any corollary examples in the free market (which itself is corrupted by being crowded out by State funding).
Universities have become increasingly unreliable sources of truth, in virtually any subject, because of the lack of consequences for falsehood. Democratic political management, filtered through endless permanent bureaucracy with entrenched legal protections, is about as inefficient a mechanism to correct errors in the institutions as I can imagine. A monarch would be much more preferable in this regard.
Even with all of its inefficiencies, some semblance of decent work can come out of existing institutions because they "compete" amongst themselves, and in some jurisdictions, political feedback, while very diffuse, is not completely broken. But the maelstrom of bad "products" from our establishment institutions was accelerated by raw State power in 2020. They aggressively augmented every pro-regime, pro-authoritarian voice, and pushed for every available measure to be used to silence and punish dissent.
The answer is to start to deconstruct the monsters we created. We need to understand that equality doesn't mean creating mega-states that rob from Peter to put Paul's kids in bad schools. Recognize the failures of liberalism - that John Stuart Mill's idea of protecting against "harm" was exploited to mean imposing real harms on free people to mitigate imagined harms -- that freedom means freedom from any authority (moral, parental, etc.) -- or that equality means "creating equal opportunities", an intellectual impossibility if there ever was one.