Tag: science

Shoot the scientists

They’re now openly embracing technocratic world totalitarianism:

Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child’s play compared to needed changes in the way we behave.

A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

Scientists have been on the wrong side of every political movement of the 20th century. Because they are narrowly educated elitists almost completely unschooled in both logic and history, they tend to be heavily inclined towards top-down authoritarianism. And there is absolutely no reason to believe they will be on the right side of any of the geo-political issues of the 21st century.

Scientific Dilbertism

Remember, this is the very process by which most secularists believe society should be governed:

The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday’s report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles’ speed.

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible “effects” may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector’s master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos’ flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA’s particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.

What is clear from all of this is that the scientists and science fetishists fantasizing of a technocratic dictatorship that will usher in the shiny, sexy, science fiction, seculatopia of their dreams haven’t realized is that their totalitarian vision will ultimately be a dictatorship of the IT department.

In which I quote Instapundit

HE’S A SCIENTIST — you can’t expect him to be good at math:

Heh. Of course, in fairness, given that Gleick only has a B.S. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from Berkeley, there is a very good chance that he never took much in the way of math or statistics courses.

As I’ve previously noted, one of the dirty secrets of science education is that most science majors study very little in the way of logic, history, math, or statistics, which is why they so often reveal themselves to be every bit as clueless as the average individual whenever they venture outside their very narrow areas of education and professional expertise.

A dance of desperation

In addition to proving the old adage about scientists finally struggling up to reach the final peak of knowledge, only to find the philosophers already ensconced there, this latest attempt to dance around The Great Why shows the increasing desperation of the scientific godless:

It is, perhaps, the mystery of last resort. Scientists may be at least theoretically able to trace every last galaxy back to a bump in the Big Bang, to complete the entire quantum roll call of particles and forces. But the question of why there was a Big Bang or any quantum particles at all was presumed to lie safely out of scientific bounds, in the realms of philosophy or religion.

Now even that assumption is no longer safe, as exemplified by a new book by the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss. In it he joins a chorus of physicists and cosmologists who have been pushing into sacred ground, proclaiming more and more loudly in the last few years that science can explain how something — namely our star-spangled cosmos — could be born from, if not nothing, something very close to it. God, they argue, is not part of the equation….

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

There is a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from? Are they born with the universe, or is the universe born in accordance with them? Here Dr. Krauss, unhappily in my view, resorts to the newest and most controversial toy in the cosmologist’s toolbox: the multiverse, a nearly infinite assemblage of universes, each with its own randomly determined rules, particles and forces, that represent solutions to the basic equations of string theory — the alleged theory of everything, or perhaps, as wags say, anything.

There is, of course, a fourth type of nothingness. And that is the amount of scientific validity contained in Krauss’s desperate attempt to use a fraudulent veneer of science to avoid the obvious conclusions driven by the relevant philosophic logic. This isn’t even science fiction, it’s just purely evasive fantasy. If I were to seriously propose that full-grown unicorns, little rainbow-colored horned equines, could simply pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, ex nihilo, people would rightly dismiss me as a fantasist and a possibly insane one at that.

But substitute “universes” for “unicorns”, and suddenly, we’re talking science!

Science has consequences

The inherent unreliability of science, and the fact that scientists know perfectly well how unreliable it is, is clearly demonstrated by the ongoing court case in Italy:

The courthouse in L’Aquila, Italy, yesterday hosted a highly anticipated hearing in the trial of six seismologists and one government official indicted for manslaughter over their reassurances to the public ahead of a deadly earthquake in 2009 (see ‘Scientists face trial over earthquake deaths‘ and ‘Scientists on trial: At fault?’). During the hearing, the former head of the Italian Department of Civil Protection turned from key witness into defendant, and a seismologist from California criticized Italy’s top earthquake experts….

The hearing also included some true scientific debate when Lalliana Mualchin, former chief seismologist for the Department of Transportation in California, testified as an expert witness for the prosecution. In 2010, when news about the indictment broke, Mualchin was among the few experts who openly criticized — and refused to sign — a letter supporting the indicted seismologists signed by about 5,000 international scientists.

Mualchin said that seismic hazards were not properly assessed in L’Aquila. “Italy is one of the countries with the best seismic knowledge in the world. And yet look at what a 6.3 earthquake has done to this city. That knowledge was not used, and scientists are responsible for that. They were conscious of the high risk in the area, and yet did not advise the people to take any precaution whatsoever,” he said.

One of the reasons that I consider many scientists to be both hypocritical and despicable is that they regularly expect everyone else to accept their scientific declarations as some sort of perfectly reliable magic eight-ball while resolutely refusing to take any responsibility whatsoever for the accuracy of those declarations. Now, the significant gap between the reliability of science and the public’s perception of that reliability isn’t always the scientists’ fault, as there are many examples of the science media and the mainstream media taking a perfectly reasonable statement by a scientist and turning it into an assertive declaration that brooks no possible doubt.

But when the public is paying their salaries, they have a right to expect material results from scientists, just as they have the right to expect that the public bus drivers will, in fact, drive the bus along the bus route. If the best that scientists can do is say “we have no idea what you should do”, then they probably shouldn’t be funded in the first place. And if they’re going to say that something is safe, then they are most certainly liable for any damages incurred if they are incorrect and people were harmed as a result of the misinformation provided.

It’s worth noting that scientists are usually at their most assertive when there is little chance of being held to account. But the reluctance of scientists to be held accountable in any way for their vaunted consensuses is further evidence that science should be considered fundamentally and intrinsically unreliable until it reaches a state that is more commonly described as “engineering”. Note that one can be held legally liable for the quality of one’s engineering, so what does it say of those who do not believe a scientist should be held legal liable for the quality of his science?

Proving the opposite

A professor of mathematics complains that unlike the fortunate Chinese, America does not enjoy the benefit of being ruled by scientists:

For complex historical reasons, Americans have long privately dismissed scientists and mathematicians as impractical and elitist, even while publicly paying lip service to them. One reason is that an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs and scientists are sometimes tone-deaf to the social environment in which they state their conclusions. A more politically sensitive approach to problems and issues, on the other hand, often leads to positions that simply don’t jibe with the facts, no matter how delicately phrased….

Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate scientists cooking up the global warming “hoax,” the health establishment using vaccines to bring about socialism – it’s hard to imagine mainstream leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.

I always enjoy the left-liberal arguments which revolve around the idea that because someone, somewhere, might be laughing at an idea, it must not be true. And, of course, given that there is no global warming and climate scientists did cook up one of the most colossal scams in human history, the professor manages to explain more cogently than he imagined why Americans, for all their flaws, still aren’t dumb enough to vote for scientists.

The problem isn’t so much that “an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs”, it is that ideology hidden under a veneer of an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with readily observable reality.

Americans don’t refuse to vote for scientists because they think scientists threaten their beliefs, Americans refuse to vote for them because they conclude, on the basis of considerable evidence, scientists are foolish and stupid.

There is still no global warming

I hope the readers here will never, ever forget how the AGW/CC story has played out, especially the next time that the usual suspects start babbling about another “scientific consensus”.

The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

I hope you will also remember this the next time that critics complain that I think I am smarter and more likely to be correct about a scientific matter than the scientists who actually specialize in the subject. How can I possibly assert that I am correct when all the experts say otherwise? Because, as has been chronicled in some detail, I was the last time. And the time before that. And the time before that….

What people often tend to forget is that scientists are people. And while one may not have the wherewithal to examine the actual scientific experiments or assess the relevant facts, one always has the ability to observe the behavior of the individuals citing them as evidence. There are a plethora of indications that an individual is not telling the straightforward truth, be it in person or in print. An ability to read those signs is all that is required to recognize when scientists are attempting to skate on their perceived authority rather than on any actual science, in which case one can always safely conclude that their claims are false. Observing the behavioral patterns was how I was able to correctly conclude that Man is not causing global warming because there is no global warming.

Scientists spend an awful lot of time being stunned because they are some of the most naive, credulous, and easily manipulated beings on the planet. That’s why they tend to inordinately fall for every nonsensical philosophical and political ideology that crosses their paths. The average reader of The National Enquirer probably has a better and more-developed sense of skepticism than the average scientist.

UPDATE – Even some of the former champions of global warming are now turning against the fake science.

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

Mailvox: questions for a conference

RR asks if anyone has any suggestions for questions he might ask at an evolution speech:

I was wondering if you and the ilk could help me come up with some questions to ask a speaker at an upcoming speech entitled “Evolution, Education, and Intelligent Design“?

I thought the following would generate a certain amount of brain-twisting and possible red-face and sputtering:

1. Could you tell me the practical advantages in scientific experiments that knowledge of evolutionary theory brings that would not be available to someone holding to some theory of intelligent design or young-earth creationism?

2. What predictability advantage comes from a thorough adherence to evolution rather than intelligent design theory?

These are good questions. As anyone who follows science knows, biology tends to follow one of two tracks, either the “do something useful with genetics” track or “keep attempting to prove TENS track”. There is very little, if any, connection between the two, and in fact, one could make an excellent case for the fact that wasting resources in attempts to prove TENS through “consistent with” results has been a much greater hindrance to advancing genetic science than the sum total of anti-scientific political efforts of the last fifty years.

And since the subject directly concerns education, another pair of useful questions might be these:

3. Since most biological science does not utilize evolutionary theory and because only a very small percentage of students will go on to study biology in college, why should any high school students be forced to study either the theory of evolution by natural selection or the intelligent design hypothesis?

4. A significant and increasing percentage of high school students are unable to read or do math at an age-appropriate level. What is the benefit of teaching evolutionary theory or intelligent design to a student who cannot read or do the necessary math that is required to understand even the most basic scientific concepts.

Anyone else have ideas?

The deathwatch begins

Never let it be said that we are anti-science here. Let the record reflect that we have observed, we have hypothesized, and now we shall test the Curie-Hultgreen syndrome’s performance as a predictive model:

It is not a region known for its promotion of equal rights for women. However, a 28-year-old woman from Dubai has struck a blow for her Arabic sisters after becoming a train driver for the city’s Metro system. Not only is Mariam Al Safar the first female in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to get behind the controls of a train – she is also the first in the Middle East.

A pioneer! A female pioneer! I daresay I am more genuinely excited than the most hardened feminist about this. Needless to say, I shall be keeping an eye out for the eventual reappearance of Ms Al Safar’s name in the news.

No global warming since 1997

As I have been repeatedly saying from the start, global warming has never been anything but another scientific hoax and an excuse to push global government:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Everything about the scientific consensus has been wrong, right down to their basic foundational assumption that CO2 levels produced higher temperatures. They don’t, and moreover, the conceptual model behind the theory has always been false.

This underlines one of my previous assertions. Science can only be trusted at the point when it becomes engineering. Which, of course, is another way of saying that science per se is not intrinsically reliable.