Tag: science

The philosophical failure of science

If he’s not careful, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Scientists is going to round up James Delingpole for excess public brutality. His demolition of the BBC and its so-called science experts borders on pure sadism:

The Beeb constantly resorts to ‘experts’ whose arguments are bigoted, feeble, fatuous, fallacious and stupid

‘Well, you’re arguing facts against opinions. OK, I
mean, the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has rocketed
up since the Industrial Revolution, and continues to rocket up, is a
fact. Now, it’s so much a fact that even the climate change deniers look
away from it and don’t deny it.’
— Professor Steve Jones, Feedback, BBC Radio 4, 18 October

Have a look at that last sentence. It represents such a cherishably
stupid, rude, fatuous, crabby, bigoted, ignorant, petulant, feeble,
fallacious, dishonest and misleading argument that if it turned out the
speaker in question was a professor of logic or philosophy you really
might want to shoot yourself in despair.

Can you see what the problem is? Let me explain. This angry professor
character wants us to believe that there are people called ‘climate
change deniers’ who are so far outside the pale of reasonable discourse
that even when they are right it’s another sign of just how wrong they
are.

Atmospheric CO2 has been rising since the Industrial
Revolution, Jones is telling us, but those pesky deniers are so slippery
that they refuse to deny this fact. If they did, presumably, it would
make Jones’s job a lot easier because then he’d be able to provide a
clear example of these wrong ‘opinions’ deniers supposedly hold.
Apparently, though, Jones is unable to produce such a clear example. So
instead he has to fabricate one and — in the very next breath — to
discount it by conceding that actually this is a point on which ‘even’
the ‘deniers’ agree.

It’s a bad sign for the state of science when the average anklebiting blog troll can produce arguments that are more coherent, credible, and convincing than the official mouthpieces of scientific consensus. But then, that’s what happens when scientists show they are more dedicated to scientistry than scientody.

Appeal to authority are inherently problematic. But appealing to the climatological authority of a biologist whose specialty is snails? It requires years of J-school to produce that quixotic form of genius.

The Economist notices bad science

I look forward to all of the science fetishists who have shrieked with outrage every time I pointed out the uncomfortable fact of the increasing departure of scientistry from scientody finally realizing, with all due horror, that I was correct about modern professional science, all along as the mainstream media begins to repeat my previous criticisms. Science has gone wrong, badly wrong. And it has done so by abandoning the method that gave it its reputation.

A simple idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties….

One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern
academic research took shape after its successes in the second world
war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists
numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m
active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their
taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish
or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is
cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in
2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for
every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other
people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And
without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.

As in the case of university degrees, scientistry has been badly diluted. Scientists of a wide variety of disciplines are cashing in on the reputations of physicists from more than sixty years ago.  The science of Bohr and Feynman is simply not the pseudo-science of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

This is not a surprise. I’ve been reading Kuhn’s landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it is eminently clear that we are rapidly approaching a crisis in biology, the sort of crisis that has historically led to new scientific paradigms. It may take a long time for the crisis to resolve itself, but this Second Crisis of Darwin should be sufficient to put the theory of evolution by natural selection in the dustbin of scientific history with phlogiston, heliocentrism, and other erstwhile scientific “facts”. Instead of salvaging Darwinian theory through a synthesis, the continued refinement of Mendelian genetics will destroy it once and for all.

And it’s not a coincidence that the growing awareness of bad science is occurring as the global warming debacle continues to unravel. Those who attacked the skeptics of global warming and staked science’s reputation on the idea that Man was cooking the earth are directly responsible for the public’s increasing dismissal of scientific authority.

CERN’s Research Director on the climate debate

Unlike the climate “scientists” and their political defenders, the physicist Pierre Darriulat considers the climate debate and finds there is both reason and justice underlying the charges of scientifically unethical behavior made by the AGW/CC skeptics:

A third category of posts found in the climate science blogs is from people interested in the economical and political dimension of the debate and from people interested in its social and human dimension. Those having financial, economical or political interests are among the most passionate and biased participants and their contributions are not very constructive – except in a few instances – and usually do not help much in raising the level of the debate.

Those who find an interest in the sociological dimension of the debate are much more interesting to me. It is indeed something new, and likely to be of unprecedented importance, to have a public debate on science-related questions that are of major relevance to our future on such a large scale. It seems to me to be overlooked – or at least insufficiently appreciated ­– by the establishment, such as academies of sciences, learned societies, editorial boards of major science journals, mass media, etc. The so-called “skeptics” often claim that they are better scientifically minded, meaning having a better sense of scientific ethic than the so-called “warmists” and I think that any neutral observer must recognize that they have a point there.

After having sorted the wheat from the chaff – which is relatively easy but obviously considered as criminal by the chaff – one is left with a very respectable and informative set of statements, which simply cannot be ignored. The politization of the debate has undeniably resulted in unscientific practices. The difficulty to publish a case that dissents from orthodoxy is real. I have refereed many articles for several journals and I know that there is always some unconscious subjectivity in our judgement, well-known authors obviously enjoying a favourable prejudice.

I have also experienced myself, when having changed field from a domain where I was well known to a new one where I was unknown, that it takes time to be accepted by the new community and by the referee who evaluates your article – one to two years. The present machinery of our system of social interactions is not prepared to properly handle the new situation. How to depart from the black and white segregation of clans such as warmists, activists, alarmists, deniers, skeptics, etc, some publishing in Internet, some in traditional scientific journals, some in popular mass media? Sociologists are rightly delighted to witness what is happening and to see there a very rich ground for their investigations….

Something that strikes me is the parallel between the way the climate
debate is received by the general public and the way the nuclear debate
has been. I am neither pro- nor anti-nuclear but I understand
reasonably well the issues that are at stake. In the nuclear case purely
emotional and irrational arguments have been exploited by green
activists up to a point where several countries have now banned nuclear
energy. In the climate case, the green activists are with the
establishement rather than being against, as they were in the nuclear
case. But this is almost irrelevant.

What I am witnessing is the same arrogance in the establishment, the
same irrational and emotional fear in the general public, amplified by a
majority of popular media. In both cases, wrong decisions are being
taken under the pressure of political and financial interests. What is
completely new, however, is the existence, with Internet, of a forum in
which the debate is taking place on a very large scale. Obviously, as
few people read these blogs as those who read the scientific
litterature, the majority relies on newspapers and television for their
information. Yet, somehow, it seems to me that the debate that is going
on there contains enough popular wisdom to mark a change in our practice
of communicating, exerting democracy and taking decisions and deserves
serious attention.

What is most striking to me is the total hypocrisy of the warmists. They religiously apply the genetic fallacy to every anti-warmist site and scientist, while stubbornly proclaiming their faith in the pure devotion to science of well-funded institutions and individuals blithely, and in many cases, nonsensically, proclaiming the IPCC party line.  Either the genetic fallacy applies to both sides equally or it does not; given that it is an identified logical fallacy, I would suggest that it should not be applied to either side and the science, such as it is, should stand or fall on the basis of its own successes and failures.

Why those who support the IPCC agenda refuse to engage on those grounds, I leave up to the reader. Being an elite member of the scientific establishment, I think Mr. Darriulat is perhaps a little too ready to excuse its observable failings.

Jews who are not Jews

It appears neither the Semitic origin theory of the Ashkenazi “Jews” nor the Khazar theory are genetically correct:

The origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial. Like Judaism, mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders. However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders, ~40% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but assimilated within Europe.

Overall, we estimate that most (>80%) Ashkenazi mtDNAs were
assimilated within Europe. Few derive from a Near Eastern source, and
despite the recent revival of the ‘Khazar hypothesis’,
virtually none are likely to have ancestry in the North Caucasus.
Therefore, whereas on the male side there may have been a significant
Near Eastern (and possibly east European/Caucasian) component in
Ashkenazi ancestry, the maternal lineages mainly trace back to
prehistoric Western Europe. These results emphasize the importance of
recruitment of local women and conversion in the formation of Ashkenazi
communities, and represent a significant step in the detailed
reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.

I thought it was interesting that Doron Behar, the scientist responsible for the claim that the four most common mitochondrial DNA lineages came from the Near East “said he disagreed with Dr. Richards’ conclusions but declined to explain his reason.”  Notice that even on the male side, the most that can be said is that there “may have been” a Near Eastern connection; that’s a remarkably strong negative statement given the potential sensitivities on the subject.

The fascinating thing is that instead of being of Israelite descent, the Ashkenazis may actually be Italians, as their closest genetic match appears to be Northern Italians. Which would certainly put an interesting spin on the concept of the Third Rome in Jerusalem. It might also help explain the historical Italian affinity for Ashkenazis during WWII, as 80 percent of Italy’s Ashkenazis survived the Nazi persecution despite the German military occupation.

The lesson of p. punctatus

Immigration advocates never seem to take into account that the putative benefits of immigration depend entirely upon the characteristics of those entering the society en masse.

In a recently published paper in PNAS Early Edition, Dobata and Kazuki Tsuji demonstrate what they believe is the first observed public goods dilemma observed in a non-human and non-microbial system.

By using the social ant Pristomyrmex punctatus, they were able to show the fitness consequences to the colony and track the shifting genetic make-up as cheaters invaded and took hold. Researchers have recently evaluated these questions in systems involving viruses and cells (where cells may secrete protective substances, or self-destruct to form a spore-dispersing stalk) but not in multicellular organisms before. Yet the results are so similar, write Dobata and Tsuji, that they believe universal principles are at play.

P. punctatus is a curious species. The queen caste, morphologically and functionally distinct in most social insects, has been secondarily lost. All workers are involved in both reproduction and cooperative tasks like foraging. There is still a division of labor, among age groups. Young workers take care of inside-nest tasks, which include asexual (thelytokous) reproduction. Older workers ease out of reproduction and shift to tasks outside the nest, like foraging.

But there is a third kind of P. punctatus. A group of cheaters, made of a single intraspecific lineage in the field, that engage in very few tasks, save for reproduction.

The researchers found when these genetic cheaters infect a colony they have better individual fitness than the workers, both in terms of survival and brood production. They reduce worker survival and reproduction, as more young workers shift to tasks outside the nest to effectively pick up the slack. Eventually, the cheater hordes take over. The authors call the cheaters a kind of  ”transmissible social cancer.”

In cheater-only colonies, more eggs are initially produced, compared to worker colonies, but they are neglected. Eggs begin to rot and the nest becomes a dirty, unhygienic place. Eventually, the nest dies. For a group, cheating is an evolutionary dead end.

Compare the global North to the global South. Then consider whether the immigrant communities of today more closely resemble meticulous productive ant nests or dirty, unhygienic places. Ants might not be able to anticipate the idiocratic consequences of allow a “transmissible social cancer” to take root in their colonies, but one would have thought that human beings could do better.

When a society’s social policy is a scientifically predictable evolutionary dead end, it should invite rethink. Instead, questioning it is deemed akin to blasphemy. This is not the hallmark of a society destined for survival.

“Peer review is a joke”

The non-author of a sting paper peer-reviewed and published by Science points out that the open access sting published by Science is conclusive proof that so-called peer review is the problem, not open access publication:

Although it comes as no surprise to anyone who is bombarded every day by solicitations from new “American” journals of such-and-such seeking papers and offering editorial positions to anyone with an email account, the formal exposure of hucksters out there looking to make a quick buck off of scientists’ desires to get their work published is valuable. It is unacceptable that there are publishers – several owned by big players in the subscription publishing world – who claim that they are carrying out peer review, and charging for it, but no doing it.

But it’s nuts to construe this as a problem unique to open access publishing, if for no other reason than the study, didn’t do the control of submitting the same paper to subscription-based publishers (UPDATE: The author, Bohannon emailed to say that, while his original intention was to look at all journals, practical constraints limited him to OA journals, and that Science played no role in this decision). We obviously don’t know what subscription journals would have done with this paper, but there is every reason to believe that a large number of them would also have accepted the paper (it has many features in common with the arsenic DNA paper afterall). Like OA journals, a lot of subscription-based journals have businesses based on accepting lots of papers with little regard to their importance or even validity. When Elsevier and other big commercial publishers pitch their “big deal”, the main thing they push is the number of papers they have in their collection. And one look at many of their journals shows that they also will accept almost anything.

None of this will stop anti-open access campaigners  (hello Scholarly Kitchen) from spinning this as a repudiation for enabling fraud. But the real story is that a fair number of journals who actually carried out peer review still accepted the paper, and the lesson people should take home from this story not that open access is bad, but that peer review is a joke. If a nakedly bogus paper is able to get through journals that actually peer reviewed it, think about how many legitimate, but deeply flawed, papers must also get through. Any scientist can quickly point to dozens of papers – including, and perhaps especially, in high impact journals – that are deeply, deeply flawed – the arsenic DNA story is one of many recent examples. As you probably know there has been a lot of smoke lately about the “reproducibility” problem in biomedical science, in which people have found that a majority of published papers report facts that turn out not to be true. This all adds up to showing that peer review simply doesn’t work.

He’s referring to John Bohannan’s article “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?“, in which the author submitted an obviously fake paper describing the anticancer properties of a chemical extracted from a lichen that was nominally written by Ocorrafoo Cobange, a fictional biologist at the nonexistent Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara, that was accepted by 157 open access journals and rejected by only 98. As Slashdot describes it: “The article reveals a ‘Wild West’ landscape that’s emerging in academic publishing, where journals and their editorial staffs aren’t necessarily who or what they claim to be.”

This sting highlights the vital difference between scientody and the scientistry which is, most of the time, a fraudulent parody of what non-scientists believe science to be. Not only are scientists mere men rather than the white-coated demigods purely devoted to science they like to believe themselves to be, but due to the extraordinarily perverse incentive system to which they are subject, they are provably less honest in their occupations than the average individual.

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that you cannot take intelligent design seriously because it isn’t peer reviewed or that you can soon expect to cook pasta in the Atlantic because the scientific consensus is 95 percent certain that Man is causing the oceans to boil. The fact is that scientistry has become increasingly disconnected from scientody, peer review is a charade, most published science papers are not reproducible, and what passes for science is simply not what you probably believe it to be.

The irony is that the Science article is, in itself, bad scientody. Bohannan did not utilize a control group; he did not submit the fake paper to a single conventional subscription journal. He also did not send it to the majority of open access journals on the grounds that they do not require article processing charges.

Science not only is not the sole arbiter of truth, the assertions of scientists shouldn’t even be taken seriously until the “science” is transformed into something that is actually reliable, which is to say, engineering.

The return of Aristotelian anti-reductionism

And the intellectual surrender of scientific naturalism. Edward Feser considers the implications of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos as well as Philip Kitcher’s response to it at the New York Times:

Like other Nagel critics, Kitcher agrees that reductionism has failed.  The “Newtonian vision” promised a “cosmos in which everything would be explained on the basis of a small number of physical principles.”  But this, Kitcher says, is not what science has actually delivered.  It has given us “no grand theories, but lots of bits and pieces, generating local insights about phenomena of special interest.”  And the future of science promises to continue in this vein, taking us beyond “the illusion of unity” and replacing it with “an enormous and heterogeneous family of models.”

What about the specific aspects of nature emphasized by Nagel?  Kitcher doesn’t seem to dispute that they have not been explained the way reductionistic science and naturalistic philosophy promised.  He acknowledges that “we lack a physico-chemical account of life” and indeed that the problem of giving such an account “hasn’t been directly addressed by the extraordinary biological accomplishments of past decades.”  And he allows that scientists have an “incautious tendency… to write as if the most complex functions of mental life — consciousness, for example — will be explained tomorrow.”

So, what then is Kitcher’s alternative answer to the questions reductionist science and naturalistic philosophy have failed to answer, and to which Nagel offers a (partially) neo-Aristotelian answer?  He doesn’t have one.  Instead he suggests that we stop asking the questions.  More precisely, with respect to the nature of life, he proposes: “[D]on’t ask what life is (in your deepest Newtonian voice); consider the various activities in which living organisms engage and try to give a piecemeal understanding of those.”  He recommends taking a similarly piecemeal approach to answering questions about mind, and forgetting about whatever won’t succumb to this method.  “With luck, in a century or so, the issue of how mind fits into the physical world will seem as quaint as the corresponding concern about life.”  For “philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them.”

Well, “get over it” is, needless to say, not an answer we would accept in other contexts.  When you give the cashier a twenty for the three dollar coffee you just purchased and he hands you back seven dollars, “Get over it” is no answer to the question “Where’s the other ten?”  When you go into the hospital for an appendectomy and awaken to find your legs missing, “Get over it” is no answer to the question “What the hell did you do to me?!”  And, needless to say, “Get over it” is no answer Kitcher or any other naturalist would accept in response to criticism of a theological proposition.  So why should we give naturalists a pass we wouldn’t give to theologians, surgeons, and cashiers?

It’s worse than that, though.  For when someone offers you a unified explanation of the world — as Nagel does, in a very sketchy way, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition does in a rigorously worked out way (and a way that can incorporate what we’ve learned from modern science, as present day representatives of the tradition have shown) — it is no response whatsoever to say: “Well, I’ve got this alternative view of the world on which there is no unified explanation.”  The only thing to say to that is: “Um, thanks for sharing, but I’ve just given you a unified explanation.  So what you need to do, if your rejection of it is going to be rational, is to show me exactly what is wrong with it, and not just question-beggingly assert that there is no explanation, or that acceptable explanations have to fit into your Procrustean philosophical bed.”

Actually, it’s worse even than that.  For the main philosophical selling point of naturalism has, of course, always been the idea that it can explain everything its rivals can but in a more economical way.  The original claim was that we don’t need all that Aristotelian metaphysics (or the Cartesian, idealist, or other non-naturalistic metaphysics that replaced it) in order to account for rationality, sentience, life, etc.  Ockham’s razor and all that.  And Ockham’s razor, of course, says: Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.   It doesn’t say: Don’t multiply entities when doing so would be tantamount to an embarrassing admission that naturalism can’t after all perform as advertised.  And if it turns out you do need the entities for explanatory purposes, then multiply away.

Nagel’s proposal is like that of the honest salesman who gives you a refund when his product doesn’t do what he said it would do.  I’m sorry ma’am, here’s your money back.  You should have stuck with Aristotelianism rather than that new-fangled Elixir of Materialism I was peddling.  In fact I now rep the Stagirite brand myself!

Kitcher’s proposal, by contrast, makes of naturalism (whatever his own intentions) something of a bait and switch.  Naturalism will explain mind, life, etc.?  A unified metaphysical picture of the world?  Did I say that?  Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell, lady.  Must’ve been some other salesman.  Anyway, the check’s cashed and you already signed the contract.  But hey, have a look at these really interesting recent findings of molecular biology.  Might lead to some new pharmaceuticals…

As usual, the scientists and their gaggle of male science fetish groupies are well behind the philosophers. Over the years, I’ve gradually come to understand that scientists have a lot more in common with IT guys than they do with software developers and designers. They’re pretty good with pushing the right buttons and fixing the little things, but they have no idea what is going on under the surface and don’t understand what the developers are talking about when they raise questions related to intent, purpose, and meaning.

Scientists aren’t stupid, and for the most part they aren’t midwits like nearly all their groupies are. (If you meet someone who loves, loves, loves science, and swears by it in a quasi-religious manner, but doesn’t work in a lab or research facility, the odds are that he simply didn’t have the brains to cut it.) But perhaps because their training is so specialized these days, scientists often appear to exhibit a strange inability to maintain logical coherency, let alone logical consistency, with regards to their expressed opinions and philosophies, which is something I don’t observe as often in non-scientists of similar intelligence.

A surrender of scientistry

Popular Science can’t take the dialectical heat and flees from open scientific discourse due to the inability of its writers to present arguments capable of standing up to public criticism:

Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off. It wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter….

If you carry out those results to their logical end–commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded–you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the “off” switch. Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

I found it amusing that below this article trying to justify its attempt to claim the right to be “championing science” without protest or criticism from its readers, the very first article listed is: “Republicans Block Proposal For National Science Laureate, Fearing Science”.  Whatever they are championing these days, it is not science.

It is wonderful news that some of the foremost defenders of scientistry are in full-blown retreat from the skeptics and scientodists. Their inability to defend their “bedrock scientific doctrine” and “popular consensus” is the direct result of their abandonment of scientody for ideological dogma and invented doctrine cloaked in an increasingly thin veil of faux science.

Comments aren’t bad for science. Comments are bad for those who are stubbornly clinging to outdated scientific paradigms that are showing obvious cracks.

Science badly needs a cleansing baptism of intellectual fire to burn away all the professional and academic scientistic barnacles that have affixed themselves to the ship of science and are now threatening to sink its credibility entirely. Genuine scientists, as opposed to the posers championed by the likes of Popular Science, may not be able to defend themselves rhetorically, but they have no need to do so.  Science is neither democracy nor holy doctrine, and it is the right of every thinking individual to accept or reject the declarations of scientists as he sees fit.

The Feynman Lectures online

For those who are interested in scientody rather than scientistry, the famous Feynman Lectures on physics are now online. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics was based on a two-year introductory physics course that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech from 1961 to 1963; it was published in three volumes during the years 1963 to 1965, and used as the introductory physics textbook at Caltech for nearly two decades.” In reading them, it’s not hard to understand why he is quite rightly revered as a minor secular saint of Science:

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an
approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far
as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of
approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws
as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or,
more likely, to be corrected.
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following:
The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the
sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of
knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from?
Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it
gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from
these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful,
simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to
experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This
imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in
physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce,
and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are
experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and
guess.
We said that the laws of nature are approximate: that we first find the
“wrong” ones, and then we find the “right” ones. Now, how can an
experiment be “wrong”? First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong
with the apparatus that you did not notice. But these things are easily
fixed, and checked back and forth. So without snatching at such minor
things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong.
Only by
being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to
change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law”
was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is
now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but
appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A
true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one
hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a
million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in
practice one might think that the new law makes no significant
difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly
forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation.
But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more
wrong we are.
Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely
wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to
be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a
very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws.
Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our
ideas.

It’s always fascinating to see how far a cult departs from the ideas of its inspirations. I think Richard Feynman would be even more disappointed to see how far today’s science fetishists have drifted from scientody in favor of scientistry that Jesus Christ would be to see the grotesqueries and abominations that are so often justified in his name. Jesus knew Man was hellbound of his own volition; Feynman was usually a bit more of an optimist.

The “global warming” cover-up

And here we have an excellent example explaining why modern scientistry is corrupted and why science-skeptics are more than justified in remaining skeptical of various government-funded “scientific” consensuses:

Scientists working on the most authoritative study on climate change were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed.

A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft.

Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain.

The politicians justified their attempt to sweep the problematic observations that destroy the hypothesis due to their “fears that the findings will encourage deniers of man-made climate change”.  As they should. Isn’t declaring the hypothesis to be unsupported by the evidence exactly what scientists are supposed to do when the predictive models fail and the observations don’t support the hypothesis?

The skeptics are the real scientists, not the corrupt professionals who practice scientistry rather than scientody and serve as the mouthpieces for power-mad politicians.