The intrinsic unreliability of science

Further evidence that science can only be trusted at the point it becomes engineering:

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Fascinating. That’s an 88.6 percent unreliability rate for landmark, gold-standard science. Imagine how bad it is in the stuff that is only peer-reviewed and isn’t even theoretically replicable, like evolutionary biology. Keep that figure in mind the next time some secularist is claiming that we should structure society around scientific technocracy; they are arguing for the foundation of society upon something that has a reliability rate of 11 percent.

Now, I’ve noted previously that atheists often attempt to compare ideal science with real theology and noted that in a fair comparison, ideal theology trumps ideal science. But as we gather more evidence about the true reliability of science, it is becoming increasingly obvious that real theology also trumps real science. The selling point of science is supposed to be its replicability… so what is the value of science that cannot be repeated?

A purge too far

It’s a little-known fact, but I was once selected as the heir apparent to William F. Buckley by his syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate. As he was getting quite old and obviously approaching the end of his run, they’d looked over all the columnists of my generation and decided that I was the one whose intelligence and writing style was most similar to that of Buckley.

The syndication went nowhere; the Dallas Morning News was the only paper to pick up my UPS column – which was the same as my WND column – and we learned that the newspaper editors a) believed that my sentence structure was too complex and my vocabulary was too expansive for the eighth-grade reading level they were targeting, and b) didn’t want another right-wing columnist when they already had Ann Coulter. The outcome might have been very different if UPS sold its columns in package deals the way some of the other syndicates do, but they reasonably believed every column should stand on its own. So, after 18 months, Universal gave up and my second spell as a nationally syndicated columnist came to an end. But it always gave me a small sense of accomplishment, because I’d long been a reader of William F. Buckley’s magazine.

I used to read National Review in the library at college. I liked Commentary as well, but National Review always had a compelling sense of ideological style to it that made it seem both relevant to the times as well as moderately intellectual. I fell out of the habit of reading it after college, but then discovered NRO and The Corner not long after it was introduced online and began reading that on a daily basis. I thought about looking into becoming an NR contributor from time to time, but there was never really any reason to do so since WND’s traffic was already blowing away NRO’s and it would have been a step down in terms of readership even if it was a step up in terms of prestige.

I let my subscription to NR Digital go more out of a general sense that things were ideologically falling apart there than in response to any specific event. I disliked the growing My Party Left or Right theme there, was mystified by the total lack of competence concerning economics, and found the purge of Joe Sobran to be reprehensible. But I still read The Corner every day even though I seldom bothered with the articles on the main page. Readers here will recall that “NRO’S CORNER” was one of the featured Day Trip links for most of the last seven years. But then I read this post by Rich Lowry yesterday:

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

Now, I know Derb, I’ve read his articles, I’ve read his books, I’ve interviewed him, and I’ve exchanged email with him. He is a good, decent, and intelligent man. And since National Review does not wish to associate with him any longer, I do not wish to support it in any way, shape, or form. So, I have removed the link from this blog and will not be reading either National Review or The Corner anymore. I would encourage those who number themselves in the Dread Ilk to similarly remove their bookmarks and ignore what has become an entirely superflous organ of the squishy Republican center.

I’m not doing this solely out of loyalty to Derb. If National Review was still publishing anything of genuine significance or interest, I would have to continue reading it simply for the information. But National Review no longer publishes anything that is remotely controversial, new, or interesting; Derb was last of that breed still remaining there. After all, one hardly requires National Review to be exposed to the following dogma:

1. Israel must be supported at all costs because it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Followed by an article about the Egyptian/Palestinian/Iraqi/Iranian/Syrian elections….
2. Any amount of immigration from anywhere is good for America as long as it is legal.
3. We love [insert race or other interest group here] more than liberals do.
4. Hispanics will turn conservative Real Soon Now.
5. [Insert most liberal candidate running] is actually the real conservative and should be the Republican candidate.
6. Winning elections is more important than purity of principle. Or any principle, for that matter.
7. [Republican] may be bad, but [Democrat] is worse.
8. I am a huge [Yankees/Red Sox] fan even though I don’t follow baseball and am from [city nowhere near NYC or Boston].
9. Support for the troops by finding further occupation for them in as-yet uninvaded Middle Eastern countries. Faster please!

Actually, after thinking about what I’ve read at NRO over the last few years, I find myself wondering why I was still bothering to read it at all. The inertia of habit, I suppose. Anyhow, I emailed both Derb and Jonah Goldberg yesterday. Derb appreciated the support although he noted that the retroactive admission that Enoch Powell had been right all along didn’t do Mr. Powell much good. Jonah and I had a civil exchange in which we simply had to agree to disagree, for while he considered the article to have been offensive and indefensible, I think it is very easily defended indeed. But, as I told Derb, the eventual conclusion is obvious: “As was the case with Enoch Powell, it will one day be common knowledge that John Derbyshire was right.”

I think it is very telling already that at most of the sites where Derbyshire has found support, the comments are running heavily in his favor, whereas at most of the places that condemn him, public comments are not even being permitted. My conclusion is that the race card had a lot more power and the equalitarian dogma was much more convincing when most white knowledge of the behavior of the African underclass was theoretical; desegregation, immigration, and smartphone videos means that the equalitarian propaganda is being rapidly trumped by actual experience and observation.

And finally, Derb’s focus on race realism is based solidly on the same reasoning that is shared by numerous observers of societal decline across the political spectrum. The rationale for his actions is probably best explained here, in a section taken from his 2012 speech at CPAC.

This is from Chapter 21 of The Bell Curve[1], in which Herrnstein and Murray are discussing possible consequences of cognitive stratification. Perhaps the most startling of the possibilities they suggest is that, quote, “Racism will emerge in a new and more virulent form.” Here is the passage that follows.

The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes, the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction. Instead of the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement. We realize how outlandish it seems to predict that educated and influential Americans, who have been so puritanical about racial conversation, will openly revert to racism. We would not go so far as to say it is probable. It is, however, more than just possible. If it were to happen, all the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant — more vicious — than anyone can now imagine.

I should explain that by the phrase “the custodial state,” Herrnstein and Murray mean a sort of Indian-reservation policy in which the elites “fence off” the low-IQ underclass.

That our elites might turn racist does indeed sound outlandish. The reigning doctrine on race throughout the Western world today is the Standard Social Science Model, which I’ll just trim down to “Standard Model” in what follows. According to this doctrine, all observed group differences are the result of social forces. The Standard Model says that there is a conceivable, discoverable, attainable configuration of social forces in which all group differences would vanish; and that we ought to strive to shift our own society towards that configuration. Among our political and cultural elites, the Standard Model is universally accepted.

Looking to the future, there are three possibilities. One of them, Possibility One, is that our elites will continue to adhere to the Standard Model. The other two are implied in the extract I just quoted from Herrnstein and Murray: Possibility Two: We may attain “the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed.” Possibility Three: Our elites will revert to “open racism.”

I expect Possibility Three. So does Derb. And the hostile reactions of people towards Derb’s futile attempts to push Possibility Two only underlines the assurance of that expectation. The European elites are already beginning to change direction; once that takes place, the American elites will be quick to follow.

WND column

Republicans nominate Romney

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.
– Narcotics Anonymous

Four years ago, the Republican Party faced what appeared to be a reasonably winnable presidential election. The expected Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, had blundered away what should have been a sure thing by her refusal to take a stand against the unpopular military occupations, as well as the failure of her campaign manager to understand the rules by which Democratic delegates were awarded, and so Republicans were facing a national neophyte who had never won a competitive election at any level.

Reclaiming the crown

It was looking pretty grim there for a while. I took control of the center with my knights, but then launched an attempt on Ender’s king that was thwarted by quick action on the part of his rook. I fell behind by a rook and a knight, but managed to put enough pressure on with the threat of queening a pawn until I could restore the balance and get back in control of the game. He eventually took the pawn, but with my original queen behind his defenses, I managed to force a checkmate with the help of my last rook and an advancing pawn.

This could be getting ugly sooner than I thought, as he asked if I could find him any books on chess strategy. I think tomorrow I’ll insist that we finish our current ASL scenario, which I’ve already got in the bag. It’s hard to take too much satisfaction in winning at chess when your intrepid opponent spends the next hour fighting a space battle in the living room with the X-wings and TIE fighters that serve as pawns.

“He is not here”

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” Then they remembered his words.

When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.
– Luke 24:1-12

Still INTJ

Some of the folks at Susan Walsh’s appear to have discovered Meyers-Briggs for the first time. So, I took the test given at the site they’ve been using and the result wasn’t exactly the biggest surprise.

67 Introverted
88 Intuitive
62 Thinking
78 Judging

However, this wasn’t enough to prevent Ender from beating me at chess for the first time. His knight held the center, he first nabbed one of my rooks when I got a little careless in setting up an exchange of bishops, then managed to use his one-rook advantage to queen a pawn while holding off my desperate attempt to do the same. My rook was too occupied defending my own advancing pawn to make an attempt on his castled king, so three moves later, it was checkmate.

Profiles in intellectual courage

The NRO crew provides some striking profiles in intellectual courage:

“Does @NRO want to be associated with someone who publishes racist trash like this? I know I don’t”
– Ramesh Ponnuru

“For the record, I find my colleague John Derbyshire’s piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn’t written it.”
– Jonah Goldberg

“Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.”
– Rich Lowry

“Why National Review must fire John Derbyshire“
– Josh Barro

Apparently these various National Review writers want Americans to remain trapped in the same clueless, post-racial, Orwellian delusion they have inhabited for the last fifty years. And yet, John Derbyshire’s article that has inspired such rabid ritual denunciation is little more than a calm and perfectly reasonable collection of observable realities of race in America:

(6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been pleased that I write for WND and not NRO. Now, in the past, I have been urged by some to abandon what they errantly consider to be my “support for segregation”. What they fail to understand is that I don’t support segregation per se. I don’t actually have a position on it, any more than I have a position on gravity or oxygen. There is nothing to support, there is only an observation to be made: Humanity is intrinsically and naturally self-segregating. It is desegregation that is unnatural, that requires the imposition of force to maintain for even brief periods, and which is both inherently unstable and antithetical to the collective will of every people on the planet.

My own perspective should be perfectly clear, but I shall elucidate it anyhow. Due to past desegregation imposed by force of one kind or another, be it private action or government policy, rapid large scale segregation is going to take place because the vast majority of people on every possible side find it to be desirable. That future segregation is going to be either voluntary or involuntary, and will be either violent or non-violent. Therefore, government policies should, to the greatest extent possible, be strongly biased towards voluntary, non-violent, and gradual segregation in order to reduce the risk of rapidly destabilizing multi-ethnic and multi-racial societies.

Multiculturalism is dead. Desegregation is dead. MLK’s dream is dead, and more importantly, it was never more than wishful thinking anyhow. Racial equality is the same failed myth as every other aspect of human equality, none of which have ever been shown to exist in any tangible form. And all that dropping weak-kneed to one’s fainting couch or clinging to the oft-disproven canards of the racial equalitarians will achieve is to increase the level of violence and amount of involuntary cooperation that will eventually be required to recreate the historic balances that were originally brought about by the natural processes of group behavior. The American black/white situation is only one, and one of the smaller and less problematic, of the resegregations that should probably be anticipated in the medium term.

Ponnuru, Goldberg, Lowry, and Barro have humiliated themselves with their craven responses. John Derbyshire is not merely right, but it is not even remotely reasonable to pretend that he is incorrect in any significant detail. The truth is what it is, and it will usually come out in the end no matter how desperately the children try to cling to their fairy tales. Pointing and shrieking “RACISS” is the modern equivalent of crying “WITCH” at the height of the Salem witch trials… and is not going to change the probable course of future events in the least.

Mailvox: the divine metric

G asks a question that is much easier than many who ask it suppose it to be:

I was brought up in a Presbyterian church and settled in Church of God (national headquarters to boot). I have been a staunch believer and keeper of the faith for well over 30 years. I have begun to question why the Bible is the Truth. I’ve spoken with members of more than a few faiths (and others without faith) & as we know they all KNOW their God is the true & powerful force in the universe, all galaxies, clusters, solar systems, planets, but most significantly our lil inhabitable asteroid. I was raised a Christian and the only way to get to the promise land is through Christ. Allah and others have a different plan for the ultimate prize. Folks are dieing and have killed for gods that their parents told them was real and true. Why am I blessed to have parents that taught me the “right” religion. My Jewish pal & atheist pals are more than pleased with what they have been taught.

As far as the Bible,(noted that I did not do the research myself) tis my understanding that several books were left out or added to the original work? That a group of men decided which books would be in the teachings that the world would learn and preach as the truth. Some say they were guided by a divine hand (no free will?). Also, I know it is a tired argument but I have not ever received a answer that quite satisfies me- the talking serpents, forbidden fruit, adam and eve- who recorded they info,a rib, much of Jesus’ time written about was well after his death (accuracy?). Some things are to be taken litteraly & some are fables – which ones – who decides – each church and divisions within have different interpretations. I seem to get the “He works in mysterious ways & some things we’ll never know”. That is a whole cart load of bison dung. I don’t know- guess im rambling now with errant thoughts but I’m beginning to question my faith as measured by others faiths & those with a lack of a belief in a god or gods. Using Occams Razor, it is pretty well deduced that I well have been wasting my time. I non-trivially pray that I’m wrong and will once again see the light.

First, G reveals that his “research”, such as it is, doesn’t even rise to the level of reading Wikipedia about the major world religions. He hasn’t actually spoken to “members of more than a few faiths”; we know this because only a very small number of religions are even monotheistic and therefore make the sort of claim of God that G erroneously declares they do. Of the five religions with a globally significant number of faithful, precisely two of them believe in a ruling divinity, Christianity and Islam.

And it is a tremendous misapplication of Occam’s Razor to think that it favors atheism in any way. The correct divine metric is to compare the truth claims of a religion or anti-religion with observable reality. Is it true, for example, that the poor will always be with us or was Marx correct and the elimination of poverty is merely a matter of first establishing the worker’s paradise? Does Man have free will, as the Bible teaches, or are two of the leading New Atheists right to declare, like the Muslims, that he does not? Is Sam Harris correct in insisting that religion is the greatest current threat to human existence, and if so, how has it failed to destroy the planet for the previous 8,000 years of recorded human history?

The Bible says “seek and ye shall find”. But, of course, it is necessary to do so in a genuine spirit of honest inquiry. If it is patently obvious to me that G’s “search” has hitherto been superficial and unserious, I tend to doubt it is capable of fooling God. Furthermore, before attempting to wrestle with the queen of all sciences, I strongly suggest G cut his teeth on some easier ones. The fact that he appears to believe that he presently dwells upon an “inhabitable asteroid” suggests that his ability to correctly distinguish between fact and fiction is rather limited.

Contortions and the Crucifixion

After the most recent Team Calvin exercise, The Responsible Puppet felt that he had caught me committing a Calvinist-style X=Not X contortion:

I looked at his Chain of Events and saw these two statements:

(A) The Father draws everyone.

(B) Some . . . do not permit themselves to be drawn.

Later he agreed to the statement “Some who God draws are not drawn.”

This, I maintain, is a contortion at least as bad as what he claims the Calvinists make.

Setting aside the obvious lack of conflict due to the intrinsic difference between subject and object, Jamsco assumes my statement must be a contortion because he cannot conceive of a difference between a successful draw and an unsuccessful one. To him, the very act of drawing is enough to ensure the success of the action. But he is wrong. For, when we consider what Jesus Christ himself said of the event that we celebrate today, Good Friday, it is abundantly clear that my interpretation of the concept “draw” as a resistible call rather than an irresistible pull is the correct one.

“Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.” – John 12:31-33

When he was lifted up to his death on the cross, Jesus Christ drew everyone to himself. His sacrifice was offered on behalf of everyone, not merely John Calvin’s “elect”. And yet, Jesus was perfectly clear that not everyone would be saved despite of his sacrificial atonement for Man’s sin. Therefore, it is not possible to escape the conclusion that even though both Jesus and God the Father have drawn everyone, salvation is not solely accomplished by the will of the Father or the Son. Salvation requires the will of the repentant sinner as well.

There is no need to go off onto tangents concerning the theoretical limits of divine capability and various metaphors of mortality when Jesus Christ’s own words make it clear that the sinner must act of his own free will, repent, and accept the sacrifice offered on his behalf, if he is to be saved.

God did His part by sending His Son. Jesus did his part by accepting his death. And the protestations of Team Calvin notwithstanding, the question that you must ask yourself is if you are willing to do your part and accept the gift of life that was offered on this day some twenty centuries ago.

People don’t care about politics

I had a similar revelation some years ago, when it occurred to me that the “cable news giant”, Bill O’Reilly, had a viewership that represented, at the time, about one percent of the voting electorate. It gets even more absurd when one considers that a “big blogger” has a readership that is less than one-tenth the size of these viewerships.

Jon Stewart pulled in a whopping 1.372 million viewers Monday, which only looks good when compared to Stephen Colbert, who pulled in less than a million. Here’s the list. As you can see, something called “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” and “Bad Girls Club” beat both of America’s satirists pretty handily. So did cartoons … and reruns of cartoons.

What I love about these posts that prove our clown-emperors are not only naked but media-created emperors, is that people get all angry over my reporting of this fact. I know, I know — I’m supposed to be so outraged by Bill Maher that I don’t focus on these two sacred cows, but I just can’t help myself.

Stewart can be funny at times while Colbert is simply stupid. But both of them are largely irrelevant. When one considers how little impact something as large and splashy as the Tea Party has had, one quickly realizes that the liberal clowns are almost totally devoid of significance despite their media hype.