Tag: science

The cure for school shootings

It’s interesting to see how the media has repeatedly attempted to nonsensically blame guns for school shootings while ignoring the fact that most of the shooters have been mentally unstable and on antidepressants. But the truth usually comes out eventually, and in this case, it’s ugly:

Antidepressants can raise the risk of suicide, the biggest ever review has found, as pharmaceutical companies were accused of failing to report side-effects and even deaths linked to the drugs.

An analysis of 70 trials of the most common antidepressants – involving more than 18,000 people – found they doubled the risk of suicide and aggressive behaviour in under 18s. Although a similarly stark link was not seen in adults, the authors said misreporting of trial data could have led to a ‘serious under-estimation of the harms.’

For years families have claimed that antidepressant medication drove their loved ones to commit suicide, but have been continually dismissed by medical companies and doctors who claimed a link was unproven.

The review – the biggest oif its kind into the effects of the drugs – was carried out by the Nordic Cochrane Centre and analysed by University College London (UCL) who today endorse the findings in an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

After comparing clinical trial information to actual patient reports the scientists found pharmaceutical companies had regularly misclassified deaths and suicidal events in people taking anti-depressants to “favour their products”.

“It is absolutely horrendous that they have such disregard for human lives.” Professor Peter Gotzsche, Nordic Cochrane Centre

Yes, it is. And to think that some people think that we should defer to scientists and allow them to run society as they think it should be ordered when they are observably some of the most coldly self-serving people on the planet.

Needless to say, this isn’t the only “unproven link” that will be proven one day, or the only one that will show the average grant-chasing scientist to be less trustworthy than your average used car salesman. I mean, look at this!

So far this month there have been at least 35 inquests with deaths linked to antidepressants. Last year there were more than 450. “I can say, hand on heart, that I don’t remember reading a report of an inquest where a suicide verdict was applied to a child who had never been on any psychiatric medication,” he said.

An r/K theory of war

The Anonymous Conservative predicts the coming fusion of K-strategists:

In the early stage of a K-shift, while threat and harshness are still avoidable and deniable, there will be a period where splintering will occur among the right. As a result, some rightward individuals will cling to aspects of r which give them comfort, while trying to maneuver politically and for social reasons in directions other than the K-strategy, as the Cuckservatives of the US do. Other groups with amygdalae only partly trained to react to a single deviation from one aspect of the K-strategy will focus on one aspect of K, from family values and social conservatism, to nationalism, to demands for freedom from government oppression, each to the exclusion of the rest of the K-strategy. They may attempt to compromise, or reduce conflict stimuli on other aspects of K as a strategic move, driven by their amygdala’s obsessed focus.

As the apocalypse goes down, there will be a reversal of the splintering, leading the right to fuse, but this will only occur as violence and threat become undeniable and a necessity that must be addressed. If real violence and threat were actually present in everyone’s world now, the similar aspects of right-leaning ideologues would unite them as allies against the threat, overwhelming their amygdalae’s present drive to avoid conflict. It would be something which would be actively driven by a cognitive desire of the amygdala to alleviate more thoroughly the massive anxiety produced by the threat. As they say, there is nothing like common enemies.

If Muslims were going to start killing people in greater numbers to the point everyone felt vulnerable, PEGIDA would tightly and proudly ally with the other groups, to amplify their power and increase the ability of their mind to alleviate the angst produced by the threat. If rightward ideologues were conducting violent acts against enemies on a regular basis, and you were either with them or against them, this would also consolidate the K-strategists. Threat avoidance is a great rabbit motivator – far greater than morals.

That level of threat just has not arisen yet, but it will.

We’re already starting to see some of this, as even Cuckservative Central has largely stopped virtue-signaling the Left and attacking the nationalists, and is beginning to start paying more attention to the threat being posed by the anti-nationalist traitors and the invaders.

You’ll know the fusion is complete when the leading Alt Right figures start being given the sort of mainstream platforms from which their predecessors were expelled. Of course, the situation will probably have to be pretty dire by then.

Science SJWs always lie

Orac Knows is always looking for a chance to take a shot at me because I spank him every time he tries to attack  my vaccine skepticism or whatever. He’s a typical scientist, educated, but not very smart, and totally unable to grasp the fact that his science degree doesn’t make him a match for an opponent with a significant advantage in intelligence.

He tried to leap on the fact that, according to him, the study cited by the New York Times in the story I linked to yesterday was flawed, and thereby claim that I don’t know what I am talking about.

There was just one little problem with that. I never read the study. I never pretended to read the study. I neither linked to nor cited the study.

From @oracknows: Quoth Vox Day: Antivaxers are more educated. Quoth the study Vox cites: Not exactly…

Vox Day @voxday 
You’re dishonest, Orac. More educated does not mean more intelligent. Look at us. You have more education. I’m smarter.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Of course, it amuses me that someone who is so “smart” didn’t seem to understand what the study he touts actually says. 🙂

Vox Day @voxday
You prove my point. I never read any study. I merely linked to the New York Times. You’re not amused, you’re dishonest.

Orac ‏@oracknows
In other words, to borrow a phrase from @WilliamShatner, I’m laughing at the superior intellect.

Vox Day @voxday 
My intellect is observably superior to yours. And you’re not laughing. You’re posturing.

Orac ‏@oracknows
Nope. I’m mocking you for being so lazy and anxious to believe the NYT version that you didn’t bother to check!

Vox Day @voxday
Why would I check it? I don’t check most news sources I link. The only
person leaping at anything is you. Why attack me, not NYT?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
And you also claimed I cited the study. I didn’t. You even knew I didn’t. You lied. See, YOU, I would check. Because you lie.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Proof @oracknows lied:

1. “Quoth the study Vox cites”
2. “it’s obvious that he just read the news…but didn’t actually look up the paper”

Notice how as soon as he’s busted on his two bait-and-switches – he tries to substitute “more intelligent” for “more educated” and “Vox is stupid because he got it wrong” for “I think the New York Times got it wrong”, he tries to back up and say that he’s just mocking me for excessive credulity in citing the New York Times.

You know, the leading American liberal news standard. Someone had better alert Wikipedia! The New York Times is no longer a reliable source!

This is like me claiming someone doesn’t understand economics because they cited GDP or inflation figures reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s just ludicrously dishonest. But then, Orac isn’t actually interested in correcting the science or he would have focused on the New York Times and not me. He’s just another SJW with such short-term time preferences that he’s willing to throw his own reputation as well as the reputation of a liberal newspaper and a science reporter under the bus just to take an ill-advised shot at me.

The funny thing is that Spacebunny can land a killshot 100x more effective than all the SJWs desperately flailing about, and she can do it with considerably less effort.

UberFacts @UberFacts
A study found that astronauts had more difficulty doing things that required spacial reasoning and motor skills after 6 months in space.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@voxday would come back a vegetable…..

Reliable in what regard?

Jonathan Haidt considers whether an entirely biased social science is capable of reliability:

Truth is a process, not just an end-state. The Righteous Mind was about the obstacles to that process — confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribalism, and the worship of sacred values. Given the many ways that our moral psychology warps our reasoning, it’s a wonder we’ve gotten as far as we have, as a species. That’s what’s so brilliant about science: it is a way of putting people together so that they challenge each other and cancel out each others’ confirmation biases and tribal commitments. The truth emerges from the interaction of flawed individuals.

But something alarming has happened to the academy since the 1990s: it has been transformed from an institution that leans to the left, which is not a big problem, into an institution that is entirely on the left, which is a very big problem.

Nowadays there are NO conservatives or libertarians in most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences. The academy has been so focused on attaining diversity by race and gender (which are valuable) that it has created a hostile climate for people who think differently. The American Academy has become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution. When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down. Political orthodoxy is particularly dangerous for the social sciences, which grapple with so many controversial topics (such as race, racism, gender, poverty, immigration, politics, and climate science). America needs innovative and trustworthy research on all these topics, but can a social science that lacks viewpoint diversity produce reliable findings?

Based on the evidence, the answer is yes, as a social science that lacks viewpoint diversity produces findings that are reliably insane. At this point, the term “social science” has become an oxymoron akin to “military intelligence” or “new Star Wars movie”.

You’re not stupid, you’re just… inefficient

It should be fun to watch all the blank-slatists doing 180s from claiming that intelligence has absolutely no genetic foundation to claiming that everyone can be maximally intelligent regardless of their genes thanks to SCIENCE, which, as we are reliably informed, they f*%*#(! love:

Genes which make people intelligent have been discovered and scientists believe they could be manipulated to boost brain power.

Researchers have believed for some time that intellect is inherited with studies suggesting that up to 75 per cent of IQ is genetic, and the rest down to environmental factors such as schooling and friendship groups.

But until now, nobody has been able to pin-point exactly which genes are responsible for better memory, attention, processing speed or reasoning skills.

Now Imperial College London has found that two networks of genes determine whether people are intelligent or not-so-bright.

They liken the gene network to a football team. When all the players are in the right positions, the brain appears to function optimally, leading to clarity of thought and what we think of as quickness or cleverness.

However when the genes are mutated or in the wrong order, it can lead to dullness of thinking, or even serious cognitive impairments.

Scientists believe that there must be a ‘master switch’ regulating the networks and if they could find it, they could ‘switch on’ intelligence for everyone.

There must be? Or is it merely that they desperately want there to be one? Regardless, that is my new favorite insult that will reliably go over the target’s head: it appears your cognitive network is remarkably inefficient.

This actually makes sense, though, as one of the chief differences I notice between the highly intelligent and the moderately intelligent is speed of processing. As Ender once described a young mathematical genius of our acquaintance, some take the slow, winding path to the mountain peak, some climb straight up, and then there are those few who can simply fire up their jet pack and fly right to the top.

Fortunately, he apologized

Was said of no public figure in the last decade:

Dr. Marcy was mentioned only a few weeks ago as a potential Nobel Prize honoree. But he also left a trail of complaints and rumors about inappropriate behavior over the years.

This summer, in response to a formal complaint by four former students, the University of California concluded that Dr. Marcy had violated its policies on sexual harassment. The violations, spanning 2001 to 2010, included groping students, kissing them and touching or massaging them inside their clothes.

Dr. Marcy was informed that another harassment violation would leave him subject to immediate suspension or dismissal — a decision that was not widely known until BuzzFeed News reported it last week.

On the eve of the report’s release, Dr. Marcy posted an apology on his website, disagreeing with some aspects of the harassment complaints but saying he took responsibility. “It is difficult to express how painful it is for me to realize that I was a source of distress for any of my women colleagues, however unintentional,” he said.

But his apology and the university’s response were widely seen as not enough and lacking in sensitivity to the victims of his actions, some of whom have since left astronomy. The Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy declined his request that the apology be published in its newsletter, according to the Women in Astronomy blog.

Houston, we have convergence! Anyhow, just in case it’s not clear, an apology is not going to save you.

“This should put sexual harassers on notice: No one is too big to fail,”
Joan Schmelz, a former chairwoman of the American Astronomical
Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, said on
Wednesday.

Nothing, NOTHING, is more important than preventing insufficiently attractive men from touching women. Not science. And certainly not astronomy!

Surprise! The models were off

As anyone who has been paying attention knew, the AGW/CC models were incorrect:

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly. He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says.

“Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.

Dr Evans says his discovery “ought to change the world”.

“But the political obstacles are massive,” he said.

His discovery explains why none of the climate models used by the IPCC reflect the evidence of recorded temperatures. The models have failed to predict the pause in global warming which has been going on for 18 years and counting.

“The model architecture was wrong,” he says. “Carbon dioxide causes only minor warming. The climate is largely driven by factors outside our control.”

The fact that the models were wrong has been totally freaking obvious for years because they completely failed as predictive models. That is supposed to be the sign to throw them out, or at the very least, try to fix them. But since “the science is settled”, tens of thousands of credulous buffoons who blindly accept any pig-in-a-poke that is marketed as “science” are still insisting that if you don’t take these inept and incorrect models seriously, you are an uneducated climaphobic Nazi denialist.

Or, as I prefer to pronounce it, “science-literate”.

The adjective modifies the noun

I wonder if all those people who were going on and on about how I hated and didn’t understand science are going to come back and apologize now that my skepticism about scientistry is being supported by dozens of failed attempts to confirm previously published studies? I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.

Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

“I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented,” said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

More than 60 of the studies did not hold up. Among them was one on free will. It found that participants who read a passage arguing that their behavior is predetermined were more likely than those who had not read the passage to cheat on a subsequent test.

Most “social science” is not science at all. It’s nothing more than science-flavored fiction concocted by people who look and talk like scientists, but are merely mimics.

Now, my dear critic, are you still entirely comfortable with your decision to dismiss out of hand my various other controversial statements about science? Are you still certain that your feelings trump my logical conclusions?

Scientistry is not scientody

Nature reports how more rigorous documentation requirements are demonstrating the intrinsic unreliability of scientistry (the profession of science) and showing how the substitution of scientistry for scientody (the actual scientific process) makes what subsequently passes for science unreliable.

The launch of the clinicaltrials.gov registry in 2000 seems to have had a striking impact on reported trial results, according to a PLoS ONE study1 that many researchers have been talking about online in the past week.

A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000. Study author Veronica Irvin, a health scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says this suggests that registering clinical studies is leading to more rigorous research. Writing on his NeuroLogica Blog, neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, called the study “encouraging” but also “a bit frightening” because it casts doubt on previous positive results.

Irvin and her co-author Robert Kaplan, chief science officer at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Maryland, focused on human randomized controlled trials that were funded by the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The authors conclude that registration of trials seemed to be the dominant driver of the drastic change in study results. They found no evidence that the trend could be explained by shifting levels of industry sponsorship or by changes in trial methodologies.

Translation: there is good reason to be dubious about more than 7 in every 8 historical corporate sponsored medical trials. Keep this in mind when you are basing an argument in support of the safety and efficacy of vaccines on research published by the pharmaceutical industry.

This higher standard of documentation is very welcome, but it underlines the way in which that the human factor is the weak link in the scientific process. No amount of “training” can substitute for forcing scientists to be completely transparent about their work.

Nature beats nurture

Genetic science is not only destroying the last 50 years of educational policy, but social policy in general. The fact that up to 65 percent of the difference in academic results are genetic also explains why the post-1965 and post-1986 waves of immigration are destined to reduce the USA to Second World status:

Genes influence academic ability across all subjects, latest study shows 

The researchers analysed genetic data and GCSE scores from 12,500 twins, about half of whom were identical. Results in all subjects, including maths, science, art and humanities, were highly heritable, with genes explaining a bigger proportion of the differences between children (54-65%) than environmental factors, such as school and family combined (14-21%), which were shared by the twins.

Comparing the outcomes for identical twins with fraternal twins allows scientists to investigate the extent to which genetics influence a person’s life. Identical twins share 100% of their genes, whereas fraternal twins share on average only half of the genes that differ between people.

So if genetics were a significant factor governing GCSE results, the differences between fraternal twins’ performances would be expected to be consistently greater than those between identical twins – and this is what the scientists saw.

When the scientists factored in IQ scores, they found that intelligence appeared to account for slightly less than half of the genetic component, suggesting that other heritable traits – curiosity, determination and memory, perhaps – play a significant role.

Kaili Rimfeld, who led the study and is also at King’s College London, said: “There’s a general academic achievement factor. Children who do well in one subject tend to better in another subject and that is largely for genetic reasons.”

Plomin said that while talking about genetics and education was no longer the taboo that it was twenty years ago, education professionals were slow to adapt teaching methods in the face of new scientific findings. “It’s a problem with evidence,” he said. “Thirty years ago medicine wasn’t particularly evidence-based. I think education is fundamentally not based on evidence. What programme has been rolled out that has been based on evidence?

The “Blank Slate” theory is dead. It was never anything but political philosophy and science killed it. Every nominal justification for human equality is being gradually eliminated, one by one, as scientists revisit hypotheses that have long been passed off as pseudoscientific facts.

I suspect that what we are seeing here is not unrelated to yesterday’s “cuckservative” kerfluffle, which is only going to get bigger now that Milo is working on a story. Remember, the Ciceronian political cycle predicts aristocracy will follow mob rule that has collapsed into dictatorship, and the anti-equalitarian backlash is going to have the benefit of a much stronger scientific foundation than historical justifications for the rule by the best.

I suspect that those equalitarians who claim to believe that a meritocracy is the best of all possible systems are going to rapidly change their tune once it becomes apparent that material merit is predominantly genetic in origin. Because in a post-Christian world of scientific rational materialism, there is no way that a meritocratic approach will not eventually lead to Eugenics 2.0.

The irony is that it is the equalitarians and anti-racists who will likely cling to the concept of race. Now that genetics gives us far more precise metrics, the new eugenicists won’t have to pay any attention to race at all in order to achieve their desired results. And they can claim, quite truthfully, that their policies are race- and color-blind. For example, if variants of the MAO-A, DAT1, and DRD2 genes are deemed to be unsuitable for an occupation, those possessing the unwanted genetic markers can be banned with absolutely no reference to race at all.