Tag: science

Scott Adams on scientific consensus

And the limited value of facts and logic in changing people’s minds:

The author, Tim Requarth, correctly points out that facts and logic have limited value in changing anyone’s mind about climate science, or anything else. He speaks from experience because he teaches workshops on how to better communicate science. I like this guy. He’s on the right path.

But the thing that got my attention was this bit from the article:


“Kahan found that increased scientific literacy actually had a small negative effect: The conservative-leaning respondents who knew the most about science thought climate change posed the least risk. Scientific literacy, it seemed, increased polarization. In a later study, Kahan added a twist: He asked respondents what climate scientists believed. Respondents who knew more about science generally, regardless of political leaning, were better able to identify the scientific consensus—in other words, the polarization disappeared. Yet, when the same people were asked for their own opinions about climate change, the polarization returned. It showed that even when people understand the scientific consensus, they may not accept it.”

Notice how the author slips in his unsupported interpretation of the data: Greater knowledge about science causes more polarization.

Well, maybe. That’s a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems incomplete. Here’s another hypothesis that fits the same observed data: The people who know the most about science don’t think complex climate prediction models are credible science, and they are right.

Scientists, just like everyone else, are more easily persuaded by rhetoric than by dialectic. And the scientific consensus is not science, which is why those of us with a better grasp on the distinctions between scientody, scientistry, and scientage are much more likely to reject the scientific consensus than the average individual even though because we understand it better.

Scott nails it here: In my opinion, the conservatives who know the most about science are looking at it from an historical perspective, and they see a pattern here: Complicated prediction models rarely work.


Bingo. And the progressives, who have the collective memory of an amnesiac on LSD, can’t understand that historical perspective because they make a practice of ignoring absolutely everything that happened before yesterday.

Science vs Galileo

As most readers of this blog know, the “Flat Earth Church vs Galileo” narrative is mostly revisionist history that has been completely mischaracterized by atheists who fucking love science because they believe it disproves the existence of the Baby Jesus. But what is interesting is that there was a considerable amount of scientific opposition to Galileo at the time as well, which is of course ignored by the ahistorical atheist narrative:

In 1614, when the telescope was new technology, a young man in Germany published a book filled with illustrations of the exciting new things being discovered telescopically: moons circling Jupiter, moon-like phases of Venus, spots on the Sun, the rough and cratered lunar surface. The young man was Johann Georg Locher, and his book was Mathematical Disquisitions Concerning Astronomical Controversies and Novelties. And while Locher heaped praise upon Galileo, he challenged ideas that Galileo championed – on scientific grounds.

You see, Locher was an anti-Copernican, a fan of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, and a student within the Establishment (his mentor was Christoph Scheiner, a prominent Jesuit astronomer). Locher argued that Copernicus was wrong about Earth circling the Sun, and that Earth was fixed in place, at the centre of the Universe, like Ptolemy said. But Locher was making no religious argument. Yes, he said, a moving Earth messes with certain Biblical passages, like Joshua telling the Sun to stand still. But it also messes with certain astronomical terms, such as sunrise and sunset. Copernicans had work-arounds for all that, Locher said, even though they might be convoluted. What Copernicans could not work around, though, were the scientific arguments against their theory. Indeed, Locher even proposed a mechanism to explain how Earth could orbit the Sun (a sort of perpetual falling – this decades before Isaac Newton would explain orbits by means of perpetual falling), but he said it would not help the Copernicans, on account of the other problems with their theory.

What were those problems? A big one was the size of stars in the Copernican universe. Copernicus proposed that certain oddities observed in the movements of planets through the constellations were due to the fact that Earth itself was moving. Stars show no such oddities, so Copernicus had to theorise that, rather than being just beyond the planets as astronomers had traditionally supposed, stars were so incredibly distant that Earth’s motion was insignificant by comparison. But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.

Locher thought much was up in the air and ripe for study. In light of the star-size problem, he thought that the Earth clearly did not move; the Sun circled it. But the telescope made it clear that Venus circled the Sun, and that sunspots also went around the Sun. Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.

Granted, Locher didn’t imprison Galileo. But then, he didn’t have the power to do so, nor had Galileo treacherously turned on him, disregarded his wishes, and intentionally made him look like an ass in his published dialogue. The true lesson of Galileo and the Church is not one of religion and science, but rather, the price of being proud, stubborn, and socially retarded.

Modern science is non-science

I’ve been saying this for years, simply on the basis of informed observation. But now there is hard evidence that nearly all – not just most – modern “science” is, in truth, literally nothing of the kind:

Fewer than 1 percent of papers published in scientific journals follow the scientific method, according to research by Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong. Professor Armstrong, who co-founded the peer-reviewed Journal of Forecasting in 1982 and the International Journal of Forecasting in 1985, made the claim in a presentation about what he considers to be “alarmism” from forecasters over man-made climate change.

“We also go through journals and rate how well they conform to the scientific method. I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field … were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method” said Armstrong in his presentation, which can be watched in full below. “People just don’t do it.”

Armstrong defined eight criteria for compliance with the scientific method, including full disclosure of methods, data, and other reliable information, conclusions that are consistent with the evidence, valid and simple methods, and valid and reliable data.

Science, like so many other institutions across the West, has been converged. And, as per the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence, it has lost its ability to perform its primary function.

A theory, falsified, again

One wonders how many times evolutionary biologists are going to see their hypotheses falsified before they finally give up and abandon ship on their pet theory.

Before the advent of rapid, accurate, and inexpensive DNA sequencing technology in the early 2000s, biologists guessed that genes would provide more evidence for increasing complexity in evolution. Simple, early organisms would have fewer genes than complex ones, they predicted, just as a blueprint of Dorothy’s cottage in Kansas would be less complicated than one for the Emerald City. Instead, their assumptions of increasing complexity began to fall apart. First to go was an easy definition of how complexity manifested itself. After all, amoebas had huge genomes. Now, DNA analyses are rearranging evolutionary trees, suggesting that the arrow scientists envisioned between simplicity and complexity actually spins like a weather vane caught in a tornado.

In summary:

  1. Biologists predicted genome size would increase over time, and that was wrong. 
  2. Biologists then predicted that gene number would increase over time, and that was wrong. 
  3. Biologists predicted that complex body parts would develop after simpler body parts, and that was wrong.
  4. Biologists have now found that the oldest living ancestor of animals, comb jellies, already had brain, nervous system, and muscles, and that sponges later lost those genes. Complexity was there at the start. 
  5. Biologists have also found, through experiment, that most mutations cause a loss of complexity.

The latter is particularly important, because it renders evolution statistically improbable to the point of impossibility. How many scientific theories can produce so many predictions that are completely proven wrong, so many hypotheses that are falsified, and still be considered orthodox dogma that one must be a madman or a barbarian to question?

I don’t have the answer, but frankly, at this point, I am more inclined to believe in the possibility either alien breeding programs or the grand simulation hypothesis I am in the combination of abiogenesis and the neo-Darwinian synthesis. The combination is not only too temporally difficult and statistically improbable, but reliably produces incorrect hypotheses. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it isn’t science, merely that it is bad and outdated science that is unlikely to ever have any engineering relevance.

Mailvox: the necessity of Christianity

Stickwick had some thoughts about the IQ-related video I posted yesterday.

I found the Rushton video interesting. During the Q&A, someone astutely asked Rushton why the difference in terms of societal output between whites and higher-IQ Asians. Rushton said the answer is not known, but he’s wrong. The answer is well known amongst historians of science: it’s Christianity.

Pearcey and Thaxton, in their book, The Soul of Science, explain in great detail that it was the ideals and assumptions of Christianity that led to science and thus greater technological advances.

These ideals and assumptions include:

  •     Belief that the universe was created and ordered by a transcendent, rational mind
  •     Belief that the universe is lawful and knowable
  •     Belief in the reality of the physical world
  •     Belief that the physical world is of value
  •     Viewing physical work as noble, as a divine calling
  •     The Biblical admonishment to test claims
  •     Viewing the study of nature as a proper form of worship
  •     Belief in linear time
  •     Belief that mathematics forms the substrate of the physical world

Every non-Christian culture lacks at least one, and usually several, of these, which are all necessary for the development and advancement of science. This is why the intellectually advanced Greeks, and the technologically advanced Romans and Chinese, did not develop science, while the “backwards” medieval European Christians did.

The implications are obvious:

  1. If progressives are ever successful in completely secularizing the West, we will be relegated to second-world status.
  2.  If Asians, with their superior IQs and self-discipline, ever become Christian in sufficiently large numbers, they will eat our lunch in terms of scientific and technological advancements. 

This is why any efforts to make America and Europe great are doomed unless they are centered around Christianity.

Red pill and the Alt-Right

Many men ask me how they can red-pill the women in their lives. I suspect everyone is a little different, but Tara McCarthy said on Gab that this is the video that did it for her:

For some reason, cucks and cons don’t argue that we should leave the mentally handicapped and crazy people to their own devices, and indeed, should practice affirmative action to ensure that they are represented in appropriately statistical proportions in science, academia, corporate boards, and publishing. But, for some reason, they insist that this is not only desirable, but a moral imperative when it comes to a group of people with an average IQ of 70. It is ironic, to say the least.

Now, I have to admit, I don’t personally tend to perceive one group of people as being all that very much different than the next. Whether they are “low-IQ” Africans or “high-IQ” Jews, they all tend to look more or less the same – which is to say, functionally retarded – from my UHIQ perspective. MPAI. However, it is readily observable that every human society is primarily shaped by three factors:

  1. Average IQ
  2. Structural support for systematically exploiting the conceptual contributions of the intellectual extreme.
  3. Spiritual self-confidence

All the various theories about the superiority or inferiority of one form of government, religion, ideology or another largely boil down to how it affects those three factors. The current problem with the West, of course, is that all three factors have been undermined. The trend is downward.

To save the West, those three factors must be successfully addressed. Everything else is secondary at best. Which, of course, is why the Alt-Right, and the Christian Alt-Right in particular, that currently offers the only solution for saving it.

Socialism still doesn’t work

One of the many reasons I am so skeptical of “self-correcting” science is that humans quite observably learn absolutely nothing from history, even when logic, theory, evidence, and experience all line up conclusively in harmony:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In a statement, the government said the bakers had been selling underweight bread and were using price-regulated flour to illegally make specialty items, like sweet rolls and croissants.

The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. However, in a tweet on Thursday, price control czar William Contreras said only 90 percent of baked goods had to be price-controlled products.

We shouldn’t be too contemptuous of the Venezuelans, though. They fell for socialism. We fell for feminism and civic nationalism. All three concepts are equally stupid, as all three fly completely in the face of our current understanding of the relevant sciences as well as thousands of years of written human history.

Group-thinking is not smarter

Researchers debunk the idea that diversity makes groups more intelligent or more effective:

What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). Here we report tests of this model across three studies with 312 people. Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. Reading the mind in the eyes (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test). The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.

This falls into the category of science confirming common sense. Women and gamma males, both of whom tend to be obsessed with rules and process, almost invariably get in the way of the smart individuals who drive accomplishment. Sounding boards are useful, but they are vastly overrated, particularly by the kind of people who are incapable of fulfilling a proactive role themselves.

Anyone can critique an idea or offer a nonsensical spin on it. In most cases, it is not “helping” to do so, but distracting, if not demoralizing. That is one reason why I crack down hard on those whose immediate reaction to any announcement is to try to come up with an alternative or an improvement.

My rule of thumb is this: if someone doesn’t explicitly ask me what I think about something, I try to avoid telling them what I think about it. “Congratulations” or “I hope it goes well” is by far the most useful thing you can tell anyone who tells you about a new idea or a new product.

Guilt is the SJW engine

Two psychologists have determined that moral outrage is self-serving and is a means of attempting to assuage guilty feelings:

For each study, a new group of respondents (solicited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program) were presented with a fabricated news article about either labor exploitation in developing countries or climate change. For studies using the climate-change article, half of participants read that the biggest driver of man-made climate change was American consumers, while the others read that Chinese consumers were most to blame. With the labor exploitation article, participants in one study were primed to think about small ways in which they might be contributing to child labor, labor trafficking, and poor working conditions in “sweatshops”; in another, they learned about poor conditions in factories making Apple products and the company’s failure to stop this.
After exposure to their respective articles, study participants were given a series of short surveys and exercises to assess their levels of things like personal guilt, collective guilt, anger at third parties (“multinational corporations,” “international oil companies”) involved in the environmental destruction/labor exploitation, desire to see someone punished, and belief in personal moral standing, as well as baseline beliefs about the topics in question and positive or negative affect. Here’s the gist of Rothschild and Keefer’s findings:

  1. Triggering feelings of personal culpability for a problem increases moral outrage at a third-party target. For instance, respondents who read that Americans are the biggest consumer drivers of climate change “reported significantly higher levels of outrage at the environmental destruction” caused by “multinational oil corporations” than did the respondents who read that Chinese consumers were most to blame.
  1. The more guilt over one’s own potential complicity, the more desire “to punish a third-party through increased moral outrage at that target.” For instance, participants in study one read about sweatshop labor exploitation, rated their own identification with common consumer practices that allegedly contribute, then rated their level of anger at “international corporations” who perpetuate the exploitative system and desire to punish these entities. The results showed that increased guilt “predicted increased punitiveness toward a third-party harm-doer due to increased moral outrage at the target.”
  1. Having the opportunity to express outrage at a third-party decreased guilt in people threatened through “ingroup immorality.” Study participants who read that Americans were the biggest drivers of man-made climate change showed significantly higher guilt scores than those who read the blame-China article when they weren’t given an opportunity to express anger at or assign blame to a third-party. However, having this opportunity to rage against hypothetical corporations led respondents who read the blame-America story to express significantly lower levels of guilt than the China group. Respondents who read that Chinese consumers were to blame had similar guilt levels regardless of whether they had the opportunity to express moral outrage.
  1. “The opportunity to express moral outrage at corporate harm-doers” inflated participants perception of personal morality. Asked to rate their own moral character after reading the article blaming Americans for climate change, respondents saw themselves as having “significantly lower personal moral character” than those who read the blame-China article—that is, when they weren’t given an out in the form of third-party blame. Respondents in the America-shaming group wound up with similar levels of moral pride as the China control group when they were first asked to rate the level of blame deserved by various corporate actors and their personal level of anger at these groups. In both this and a similar study using the labor-exploitation article, “the opportunity to express moral outrage at corporate harm-doing (vs. not) led to significantly higher personal moral character ratings,” the authors found.
  1. Guilt-induced moral outrage was lessened when people could assert their goodness through alternative means, “even in an unrelated context.” Study five used the labor exploitation article, asked all participants questions to assess their level of “collective guilt” (i.e., “feelings of guilt for the harm caused by one’s own group”) about the situation, then gave them an article about horrific conditions at Apple product factories. After that, a control group was given a neutral exercise, while others were asked to briefly describe what made them a good and decent person; both exercises were followed by an assessment of empathy and moral outrage. The researchers found that for those with high collective-guilt levels, having the chance to assert their moral goodness first led to less moral outrage at corporations. But when the high-collective-guilt folks were given the neutral exercise and couldn’t assert they were good people, they wound up with more moral outrage at third parties. Meanwhile, for those low in collective guilt, affirming their own moral goodness first led to marginally more moral outrage at corporations.

These findings held true even accounting for things such as respondents political ideology, general affect, and background feelings about the issues.

Instead of repenting or going to confession, SJWs act out about their moral outrage. Which, of course, explains their quasi-religious fanaticism. As well as all the white people waxing outraged about “white privilege” and genuflecting before “Black Lives Matter”.

Genetic politics

It is futile to deny the impact of identity politics, given that both science and history are pointing towards the observable influence that genetics and demographics have at the macrosocietal level:

Here we identify very recent fine-scale population structure in North America from a network of over 500 million genetic (identity-by-descent, IBD) connections among 770,000 genotyped individuals of US origin. We detect densely connected clusters within the network and annotate these clusters using a database of over 20 million genealogical records. Recent population patterns captured by IBD clustering include immigrants such as Scandinavians and French Canadians; groups with continental admixture such as Puerto Ricans; settlers such as the Amish and Appalachians who experienced geographic or cultural isolation; and broad historical trends, including reduced north-south gene flow. Our results yield a detailed historical portrait of North America after European settlement and support substantial genetic heterogeneity in the United States beyond that uncovered by previous studies.

In short, their giant sample and rich genealogical data allowed them to detect large patterns of shared ancestry in living Americans. And, as expected the American nations clearly emerge from the genetic data.

How did this pattern emerge? In short, this is ultimately the result of the four British folkways of Albion’s Seed. Here the genetic data show that they remain alive and well. Previously, in my post Genes, Climate, and Even More Maps of the American Nations, we saw that the founding British colonists came from distinct parts of the British Isles and settled in different parts of North America. The founding British stock are themselves visible in the genetic data, as we saw from fine-scale analysis of Britain

So what then do the clusters of Han et al mean? While the original colonial ancestry of the country has been overrun by subsequent migrants, the founding stock remain as a genetic undercurrent – a common genetic thread – within each American nation. This is especially true in the nations of the American South, where the colonial settlers received less subsequent migration and the original stock remains strong.

Neither conservatism nor progressivism can account for the patterns and trends being observed. This is why it is vital for the Alt-Right to resolutely resist the temptation to lock itself into an ideology that will ultimately doom it to the same sort of ludicrous denial that we so often see from communists, socialists, feminists, free traders, multiculturalists, Churchians, conservatives, neo-Nazis, and others whose political identity requires them to rely upon anti-scientific, anti-historical denial.