Posted by timr 2 days ago
All the talks they were invited to give, all the followers they had, all the courses they sold and impact factor they have built. They are not going to came forward and say "I misinterpreted the data and made long reaching conclusions that are nonsense, sorry for misleading you and thousands of others".
The process protects them as well. Someone can publish another paper, make different conclusions. There is 0 effort get to the truth, to tell people what is and what isn't current consensus and what is reasonable to believe. Even if it's clear for anyone who digs a bit deeper it will not be communicated to the audience the academia is supposed to serve. The consensus will just quietly shift while the heavily quoted paper is still there. The talks are still out there, the false information is still propagated while the author enjoys all the benefits and suffers non of the negative consequences.
If it functions like that I don't think it's fair that tax payer funds it. It's there to serve the population not to exist in its own world and play its own politics and power games.
This can directly undermine the scientific process.
There has to be a better path forward.
We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim. We shouldn't beleive anything unless it has strong arguments or data backing it. For science, we need the scientific method applied with skeptical review and/or replication. Our tools, like statistical methods and programs, must be vetted.
Like with logic, we shouldn't allow them to go beyond what's proven in this way. So, only the vetted claims are allowed as building blocks (premises) in newly-vetted work. The premises must be used how they were used before. If not, they are re-checked for the new circumstances. Then, the conclusions are stated with their preconditions and limitations to only he applied that way.
I imagine many non-scientists and taxpayers assumed what I described is how all these "scientific facts" and "consensus" vlaims were done. The opposite was true in most cases. So, we need to not onoy redo it but apply scientific method to the institutions themselves assessing their reliability. If they don't get reliable, they loose their funding and quickly.
(Note: There are groups in many fields doing real research and experimental science. We should highlight them as exemplars. Maybe let them take the lead in consulting for how to fix these problems.)
> We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim.
If you can't trust eyewitness claims, if you can't trust video or photographic or audio evidence, then how does one Find Truth? Nobody really seems to have a solid answer to this.
Next, we need to understand why that is, which should be trusted, and which can't be. Also, what methods to use in what contexts. We need to develop education for people about how humanity actually works. We can improve steadily over time.
On my end, I've been collecting resources that might be helpful. That includes Christ-centered theology with real-world application, philosophies of knowledge with guides on each one, differences between real vs organized science, biological impact on these, dealing with media bias (eg AllSides), worldview analyses, critical thinking (logic), statistical analyses (esp error spotting), writing correct code, and so on.
One day, I might try to put it together into a series that equips people to navigate all of this stuff. For right now, I'm using it as a refresher to improve my own abilities ahead of entering the Data Science field.
Scientists that have studied this over long periods of times and diverse population groups?
I've done this firsthand - remembered an event a particular way only to see video (in the old days, before easy video editing) and find out it... didn't quite happen as I remembered.
That's because human beings aren't video recorders. We're encoding emotions into sensor data, and get blinded by things like Weapon Focus and Selective Attention.
Much of what many learned about life came from their parents. That included lots of foundational knowledge that was either true or worked well enough.
You learned a ton in school from textbooks that you didn't personally verify.
You learned lots from media, online experts, etc. Much of which you couldn't verify.
In each case, they are making eyewitness claims that are a mix of first-hand and hearsay. Many books or journals report others' claims. So, even most education involves tons of hearsay claims.
So, how do scientists raised, educated, and informed by eyewitness claims write reports saying eyewitness testimony isn't reliable? How do scientists educated by tons of hearsay not believe eyewitness testimony is trustworthy?
Or did they personally do the scientific method on every claim, technique, machine, circuit, etc they ever considered using? And make all of it from first principles and raw materials? Did they never believe another person's claims?
Also, "scientists that have studied this over long periods of times and diverse population groups" is itself an eyewitness claim and hearsay if you want us to take your word for it. If we look up the studies, we're believing their eyewitness claims on faith while we've validated your claim that theirs exist.
It's clear most people have no idea how much they act on faith in others' word, even those scientists who claim to refute the value of it.
Today the elites rule the plebs by saying "Science sasy so, so you must do this".
Author doesn't seem to understand this, the purpose of research papers is to be gospel, something to be believed, not scrutinized.
There is a reason scriptures were kept away from the oppressed, or only made available to them in a heavily censored form (e.g. the Slaves Bible).
In the past, the elites said "don't read the religious texts, WE will tell you what's in them."
Catholic and Orthodox Christianity do not focus as much on the Bible as Protestant Christianity. They are based on the tradition, of which the Bible is only a part, while the Protestant Reformation elevated the Bible above the tradition. (By a tortured analogy, you could say that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are common law Christianity, while Protestantism is civil law Christianity.)
From a Catholic or Orthodox perspective, there is a living tradition from the days of Jesus and the Apostles to present day. Some parts of it were written down and became the New Testament, but the parts that were left out were equally important. You cannot therefore understand the Bible without understanding the tradition, because it's only a partial account.
The argument is that if you have a company, in the original meaning of a group of people working together with people individually paid per item they produce, where "new employees" (between quotes because they're not paid at that point) essentially train with more experienced employees to start producing more. The idea of management, introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor, is to have people specifically dedicated to studying and improving the workflow of people, to become experts at making the workflow better, now known as "Taylorism". That justified middle management, in that this optimization would increase a company's productivity, and that lead to people doing what middle management still does. Before Taylorism, outside of the company owners, employees competed for wages in a competition like in "Monsters, Inc", with no-one reporting to anyone.
There's a slight issue: Frederick Winslow Taylor was a con man. The experiment, introducing management, in reality lowered productivity by about 20%. It did not raise it. He kept "scientific records", measurements of productivity in a notebook and that notebook was presented to the owners of the railway. Turns out, he faked the numbers, both directly by just presenting fake numbers and by paying the company (as in the individual workers) more by faking accounts, resulting in a temporary boost in productivity. Oops.
Repeated experiments showed the same. Having everyone in a company directly responsible for the functioning of the company as a whole, by being held responsible, financially, for their own work, works ... better than having management layers, according to the experiments done on the subject. You will find the social sciences defend an entirely different view. Oops.
Has psychology or social sciences changed social sciences (specifically organizational psychology's) view on either Taylor or Scientific Management? No. They used it as one of the bases of the rest of psychology, of the rest of social sciences as if it was good science.
This was not the first, not the last, and certainly not the most serious problem in psychology or social sciences.
Some other famous problematic science. The Stanford prison experiment was faked [1]. Oops. No, that is not why people attack each other, it turns out it works far more direct. The Freudian view of psychology is not only thoroughly discredited, it is now strongly suspected that Sigmund Freud deliberately created this view to allow raping of women [2] (Freud is the person that created modern psychoanalysis, and he earned the equivalent of billions of dollars for getting rapists of the hook in court, he even had a few "successes", cases were rape victims got imprisoned, by order of a court that knew they were rape victims, in cases were the rapist was on trial. He got paid the very big Guilders for that). With that, of course, comes the reality that Freud was not an innocent scientist that came up with a wrong conclusion but a con man who caused incredible suffering for thousands of women, and hundreds of men (usually girls and boys that got raped). Autism is not an explanation of a condition of the human mind but, in the words of the creator/discoverer of Autism, Hans Asperger "serves to purify the genes of the noble Aryan race" [3] (note: yes, Autism's purpose was to purify genes by executing children). We know that being the victim of a crime raises the odds of the victim later imitating the perpetrator and committing the same crime, and to make matters worse this is a strong effect in unrelated adults, but it's stronger in adolescents, and also again stronger within families compared to between unrelated people. Note: this is not revenge, it's imitation. Victims commit the crime they were victimized by against other people, NOT the perpetrator (although if you look at it game theoretically it explains why human societies choose revenge punishments). Oops.
Psychology and social sciences are not positivist sciences. The purpose is not to explain the human mind, but to justify predetermined outcomes. Especially the "discovery of Autism" illustrates this perfectly. Autism does not explain the behavior of some children, not back then, not now, and back then it justified the locking up and even executions of undesirable children, something the political climate between the two world wars really wanted to happen. Yes, you see the reverse now, but only because the political climate has changed again, not because the attitude of those sciences has changed, and you should not be surprised that if Trump stays and, say, Le Pen gets into power in France, new "psychological discoveries" will ... suddenly turn out to justify what ICE is doing, and no doubt, worse. In fact I'd argue that's exactly what's starting to happen [4].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_Coverup (although frankly, look up what Freud's theory actually says and do you really need someone to tell you that is bullshit? Freud claims the only source of motivation for men and boys is to kill their father and rape their mother. And the only source of motivation for women and girls is to seduce men to rape them, preferably their own family. The point of Freud's theories, according to Freud's colleagues, is that it played really well in court: if a father raped his daughters or granddaughters or nieces or ... then he could not help it, it is human nature, and those daughters and nieces (and occasionally sons and nephews) really were really behind getting him to do it. Hence how does it make sense to punish him? Oh and Freud also offered services to treat/imprison those children/girls/women, of course at very high prices)
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/children-genetics-race...