Truth vs. Science: three big problems for the future
Ever wonder why you keep reading/hearing about all these new scientific discoveries year in year out, but the only changes you actually see in your life are faster phones and internet?
Well, there is an open secret in the scientific world that the mainstream media doesn’t want YOU to know about, and boy, is it a doozy!
(In all seriousness, if you are a card-carrying, pen-in-the-pocket NASA fanboy/fangirl and you haven’t already heard what I’m about to tell you, you may need to brace yourself. Expect to experience some denial, anger, bargaining and depression before you accept any of this.)
According to Nature (2016), the published results of 70% of modern, peer-reviewed scientific studies are completely non-reproducible. The majority of the 1500 scientists interviewed say that this is a “significant crisis” and were unable to even reproduce their own previously published results.
In layman’s terms, most “science” has NOT undergone the scientific method. Most of the new “discoveries” and “theories” and “possibilities” you gobble down each week that are being touted as advancement and progress is actually the opposite.
They are publishing results that, for the most part, have not been proven by systematic, repeated observation and experiment.
It’s NOT science!
Personally, I would even go so far as to say that most of modern “science” is a Ponzi scheme of maybe’s, might-be’s and muppetry. (You’ll see why.)
Like the stage magician, they have us watching the left-hand with the bright-green frog puppet telling us that Uranus smells like farts (yes, that is a legitimate NASA claim), while the right-hand continues to take enormous quantities of federal funding out of the tax-payer’s back pocket.
(For perspective, the annual U.S. budget for scientific research and development is more than enough to cover free college tuition for all six times over!)
Now, believe me, I was just as angry as you are to discover this.
I’ve been a huge science-fiction fan my whole life. Star Wars. Stargate. Star Trek. I was still a teenager and far from a literary snob when The Phantom Menace came out in 2001, and I actually thought that pod-racing and gungans and Anakin Skywalker’s immaculate conception were unbelievably cool concepts to add to the whole narrative.
Sure, I was a little nonplussed as to why we still haven’t gone back to the moon in thirty… forty… fifty years now, when every U.S. President since then has promised that we would, but I was still an A-student in all my science classes in high school.
I have always been very motivated to understand how the world worked, and the core principles of the scientific method; seeking truth based on observable, repeatable experiment, were logically sound to me.
The problem is, that is no longer how the majority of science operates.
Science has become overly politicized. Science has become too dependent on pleasing the opinions of the party in power to get your funding and feed your family.
We like to play like Science is this entirely noble pursuit and that the people in the white lab coats are beyond reproach, but I’ve entered several professional environments now that I viewed with at one-time with rose-colored glasses and you know what I’ve learned?
Nobody is beyond reproach.
There are flawed people everywhere. People lie. People cheat. People steal. People fudge results. People bend rules. We all understand that it’s wrong, but, well, white lies have taught us to hide our true opinions to save face.
Most cops might be trying to keep the peace, but somewhere there is a dirty cop using excessive force on people who don’t deserve it.
Most doctors might feel some allegiance to their hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm”, but somewhere there is a doctor turning away parents with vaccine-injured children because they get more kickbacks from the pharmaceutical company if 100% of their patients continue to vaccinate.
I like to think we’re all slowly waking up from this giant social spell; that the majority of people are trying to move beyond this fundamental societal problem. In fact, the initial premise of this article, that hundreds, even thousands of scientists are coming forward to reveal these inconsistencies, is actually a really hopeful sentiment.
As a father of young children, teaching them to “make it right” when they make a mistake is fundamentally important to us in our family dynamic. We use the A-B-C-D principle.
A- Admit you were wrong.
B- Be sorry.
C- Correct your mistake.
D- Don’t do it again.
I think the scientists we see trying to come forward with these behind-the-scenes clarifications of what’s actually going in the peer-reviewed scientific community are a form of collective contrition, trying to correct their mistakes. It gives me a tremendous amount of hope for the future.
But to really fix these problems going forward, we need to first see where we’ve gone astray. I suggest the following three places.
- Baconian science vs. Keplerian science
Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is widely credited as having devised the scientific method;establishing reliable patterns of truth through observation and repeated experiment. It is this same method that Newton used to establish his laws of motion. This is an effect I see in the world, and through repeated experimentation with controls and variables, I can establish a rule.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) altered this Baconian scientific method in a key way that created the wiggle room for the problems we see today. He created the hypothesis-method. This is the method that has been used for basically all of modern paleotontology, geology, evolutionary science, pharmacology, astrophysics, theoretical physics, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, etc. This is an idea I have about the world and how it might work, and through mathematical formulas and some data sets taken from the real world, I can establish evidence as to why I am right.
The problem here, as should be stunningly obvious to you, is that most of modern science not only follows the Keplerian protocol for establishing scientific “facts”, assuming it to be synonymous with the Baconian method, but it further assumes previously established “facts” as givens in the formulation of new hypotheses.
As a really simple example of what I’m talking about, Bob has a hypothesis carrots are green. He plants a dozen different carrots seeds in his garden and waters them. The carrots sprout. They all appear green. Therefore carrots are green. This is an established scientific theory. Then Bill comes along and has a theory that based on Bob’s research, in fact, all vegetables are green. He plants potato, cucumber, zucchini, turnip, radish, snow peas, green beans, lettuce, cabbage, spinach, ginger, garlic, onions, and some of carrot seeds as a control, waters them all, and everything that grows is green. Therefore Bill has an established scientific theory that all vegetables are green.
It seems stupid, but this is a one-to-one allegory of how modern science works and this is precisely why I have labelled it a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi (or pyramid) scheme usually involves a few criminals at the top who get insanely rich by convincing a whole lot of well-meaning individuals to play along with their business enterprise, which, because of the “foolproof” structure, seems legitimate, well-built and destined for success.
But don’t just take my words for it.
In the immortal words of Nikola Tesla, “today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.”
Pop-astrophysicist Michio Kaku has in recent years publicly stated, “In science, we always say that you make observations, you have a theory, you make more observations, and it’s a very, very tedious process. Wrong. Nobody that I know of in my field uses the so-called “scientific method”. He also stated that, “in Cosmology, we are off by a factor of ten to the one-hundred-and-twenty; that’s a one with one-hundred-and-twenty zeroes behind it. This is the largest mismatch between theory and experiment in the history of science.”
If we are to fix Science as a whole, we need to first fix the Scientific Method. - The Peer-Review Problem
Imagine that you’re a chef.
You’re a professional. You’re creative. You know your craft. You’ve spent years honing your skills so that you can make a real contribution to the world.
And now imagine that you’ve come up with some revolutionary new dessert that’s going to fundamentally change the way that people not only eat, but think about dessert.
And now imagine that before you’re allowed to start serving this dessert to the world, you need to submit it to some anonymous panel of so-called experts you may have never even heard of, who have the ability to reject your dessert and stop it going out to the world, whom you’re certain based on your years of experience would love it.
And now imagine that, because they as your peers are also your competitors, they do reject it on the basis that it’s not suitable for dessert, or for the world, or some other stupid reason, and that nobody, not even yourself in your own restaurant are allowed to serve this dessert in the future.
And then imagine, because you haven’t come out with a new meal or dessert frequently enough, because they’ve been knocked back by this panel of so-called peers, that you lose your job and your restaurant altogether.
Seems really stupid, huh?
Well, that’s essentially the exact problem in academic and scientific circles right now.
There is an unspoken threat hanging over most of their heads.
Academics/scientists are often hired on the basis that they publish regularly and contribute to their particular field in an ongoing fashion. But then their ability to publish relies on pleasing the people who peer-review their papers for publishing, who are either their direct competitors or aren’t peers at all and lack any credentials whatsoever to approve or veto the publishing of the paper.
Dr Andrew Kaufman, who has come under a lot of public scrutiny this year for speaking out against the basic premises of virology in the midst of this manufactured crisis, has also opened up in interviews about the nature of the peer-review process from behind the scenes.
He has stated that he was approached to be a peer-reviewer for a medical journal. That no remarkable merits or accomplishments are needed to qualify one to be a peer-reviewer. That because it is an unpaid position, journals are always losing peer-reviewers and desperate to find more.
Perhaps even more alarming is the confession that the majority of the medical studies Dr Kaufman reviewed in his time as a peer-reviewer all used the same logically-flawed statistical model, and so, in an effort to combat this problem, he pioneered a new type of experiment with a new form of statistical model designed specifically for the experiment, which was then rejected by peer-reviewers and ultimately never published because “they obviously didn’t understand it”.
This should be shocking to all of us. How can our science ever be considered sacrosanct or even innovative again, if it relies on the approval of our intellectual inferiors?
As someone with an IQ higher than 90% of medical doctors, I personally find most of them to be overly-worked, overly-stressed, overly-taxed, overly-in-debt, overly-focused in one or two overly-narrow medical fields, and overly-worried about malpractice suits and pleasing their masters.
Augustine of Hippo said it thus, “a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
The current medical system has churned out professionals who have spent so many years trying to memorize and regurgitate all the information they’ve been busy cramming (because otherwise they won’t be allowed to practice medicine) that they’ve never once stopped to question the fundamental premises of modern medical science when it remains that no germ or virus has ever been proven (by observable scientific means) to fulfil any of Koch’s postulates or be the cause of any disease.
(They basically created a Keplerian hypothesis that there were viruses causing disease, and once they created a more powerful microscope, they saw these smaller particles and basically said, that’s it, we’ve proven the proven the virus.)
But to paraphrase David Parker and Dawn Lester, authors of the revolutionary new book, What Really Makes You Ill, just because you see firetrucks at the scene of every fire does not mean they are the cause of the fires.
(It is not the purpose of this article to prove viruses don’t cause disease. The burden of proof lies with the one making the affirmative claim. It should be noted that in recent years, however, Dr Stefan Lanka won a case in German Supreme Court backing up his claim that no viral particle has ever been scientifically proven to be the cause of measles. Those who question these assertions need to do a lot more of their own research. I recommend David Parker and Dawn Lester’s book as a well-cited resource with which to begin your journey.)
If we are to fix Science as a whole, we need to first fix Peer-Review. - Paradigms, Politics and Philosophy
This is a somewhat obvious problem that was touched on previously in the article but it’s worth some reiteration as its own aspect of the fundamental problems with science.
Politics and philosophy are essentially two sides of the same coin that is one’s own worldview (or paradigm).
Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the world was flat. The earth was obviously stationary. The heavens above obviously moved. They could track and predict the movements of the celestial bodies with essentially the same accuracy that we can today. And there was no possible way that within that paradigm, the earth could have just come to be as the result of chance.
However, after the works of notable Catholic/Jesuit scholars, Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo, a new paradigm was created in which the earth moved and the sun was stationary. This paradigm allowed later philosophers and scientists to posit a world not created by some all-powerful God to whom they owed some moral allegiance, and eventually theorize an entirely new conception of a universe spinning and circling like a clock bigger than mortal comprehension; the result of a giant cosmic accident in which everything exploded out of nothing and order came out of chaos.
Since that time, many such philosophical divisions have occurred. Scientific debate does not merely rest upon globe-earth vs. flat-earth or creationist vs. atheist. Gone are the days in which the label “scientist” applies to people of a uniform gender, race, religion, etc.
A gay, atheist, Marxist, Jewish man and a straight, Christian, conservative, Caucasian woman can both be psychologists and successfully treat identical patients with fundamentally different approaches and worldviews.
Yes, there have been obvious attempts to pigeonhole science into a particular set of political, social and religious values, but if anything, this has contributed more to the current problems in science than helping anything, and the manifold current schisms in the scientific community are a manifestation of inherent push-back from within.
In fact, if not for politically- and materially-motivated corporations, players and bad actors continuing to finance research into agenda-driven media paradigms, it is reasonable to suggest that much of our science, particularly engineering and medical science, would be decades ahead of where it is at present.
Dr Jason Lisle, notable young-earth creationist astrophysicist and creator of the anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC) model for the speed of light, has spoken publicly about how he can see all the same data sets as any other astrophysicists and it leads him to wholly different conclusions because he has fundamentally different baseline assumptions that affect the way he interprets the data, much like wearing a different set of colored glasses.
While most readers here will likely scoff at the idea that the earth is only a few thousand years old, it remains an unreputed fact that, in truth, none of you can say with certainty anything that happened before you were born. You can make your own conclusions based on your own experiences and/or your beliefs in the reliability of others’ words, but you can’t ever know for yourself unless you experience it.
It is in fact, this very level of knowing, of awakening to the fact that there are indeed problems with Science, that has prompted a modern-day flat-earth movement. Many people who reject the mainstream scientific paradigm are reclaiming the label flat-earther because all they know by their own experience is that the earth doesn’t feel like it’s moving and the horizon appears to be endlessly flat.
Now, again, the purpose of this article is not to debate a controversial topic like flat-earth. My purpose in bringing it up, however, is to point out that this is ostensibly where we need to return to scientifically in order to establish “Science” as the actual catch-cry that is thrown about in modern mainstream media.
This might seem laughable to many, but, as this year is proving out, people are aware that they are being lied to on a grand scale, with more and more of them waking up every day.
If things progress to some form of societal collapse, as is being predicted by a number of economists and modern political-philosophers who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crash, there’s a significant chance our science is going to have to be reworked from the ground up anyway.
If we can control that, it’s likely to be far less painful for society as a whole.
If we are to fix Science as a whole, we need to first fix the current political and philosophical paradigm surrounding it.
If we cannot actively fix these three things, and yes, they are fundamental problems that need to be addressed, I predict that the rest of the twenty-first century is going look a lot more like a teen dystopian novel than the Marxist utopia the mainstream media wants us to believe.
