JB muses on the limits of science:
It’s funny how the same bad epidemiological science (weak and inconsistent macro correlations instead of hard causations) that underpins the disaster of modern dietetics is also responsible for the entirety of the case against smoking. Confusion also arises on both issues when experiments conflate the effects of processed, unfresh, adulterated ingredients with fresh, unadulterated ones, and forget to factor the rise of industrial processing into their timelines.
These massive scientific errors have caused untold premature deaths. The entirety of western civilizational diseases, including cavities, heart disease, cancer and diabetes, could be eliminated in an instant by returning to a paleolithic high or all meat diet. This is indisputable: the onset of all these diseases has been observed in paleolithic societies switching to western food.
But then, the fifth highest cause of death in America is medical error. And global warming scientists recently attempted to construct a framework for world government on a knowingly fraudulent premise. So we should all be wary of science.
What else has science disastrously gotten wrong? Ah yes, psychology, politics, history, sociology, the family, gender relations, economics… better to ask what science gets right: Physics. Math. Engineering. Repeatable, testable, non-human endeavors.
Human-heavy fields are still too filled with biases and complications and dynamism for one to trust the scientific consensus to be correct, much less the popular consensus. It is necessary to read widely and with a mind not only open but eager to absorb ideas intelligently presented but patently insane. Otherwise one will never escape the idiosyncratic mental strictures of one’s time and place.
With the singularity approaching before the next century, human brains will soon be regarded as little more than go karts in a world of F-15s. Now why would one blindly trust a consensus of go karts?
I have always found it amusing that science fetishists seldom realize how hopelessly wrong their understanding of material reality is. For example, they genuinely believe that technology is the fruit of science, when both history and logic conclusively demonstrate that science is the result of technological advancement. They have the basic relationship between the two precisely backward.
Given their inability to understand such a simple and obvious fact, to say nothing of all of the many manifest failure of the scientific method in areas where its application is either complicated or simply inappropriate, their confidence in it as the only method of human understanding or “progress” is not only remarkable, but risible. Hence the quasi-religious aspect of scienceology, which should never be confused with the actual scientific method.