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Science vs Academia

Posted by CaptainKirk 2 years, 2 months ago to Politics
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We have a serious problem, and thanks to the member who posted the Joel Salatin video).

The problem is discerning between Science and Peer-Reviewed-Academia.

The modern person confuses the two. Yet, their differences couldn't be more stark.

Science, to be clear, is a process of finding the truth, by questioning, creating hypothesis, and testing the resulting hypothesis in a repeatable manner. through this process we have discovered many "laws" of science (conservation of energy, momentum, etc.).

They key attribute to Science is that there are no Sacred Cows. All it takes is one Black Swan to prove that all swans are not White!
This is the inequality of evidence. It only takes one City to do a lock down, and not get the stated results, to remove the argument that Lockdowns Work! It took one Cruise Ship to show the spread of Covid, and the true risk of death. It was far lower than we were later told. It took ONE Military ship to tell us how much less it affects our military.

Science leaves evidence behind that can be evaluated. And any Scientist worth their salt will change their minds when new evidence arises!
[NOTE that not doing so is simply a human failure, usually caused by an income stream in the original line of thinking!]

Science said, early on, that early treatments work, against Covid.
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Now lets compare Academia. In Academia, there is a rule... Publish or Perish. If you cannot publish anything useful, you will NOT be in Academia for long. This creates a challenge. Because Peer-Review was originally designed to break down the math/stats/approach to make sure it met proper rigor, and we were simply not being lied to. Effectively telling us "If these numbers are real, the conclusions should be".

But it goes one further. There are very few gate keepers in publishing this information. And if they all believe in Climate Change. You will probably not publish much that challenges that paradigm. Worse, they will publish almost anything that promotes that paradigm.

To the point, there are regular groups of people who submit papers for publication, that are utter BS (by design), and clearly BS. And the Academic Peer-Review process continually Publishes them, and then sees them as facts.

==
Good Science will produce Predictable Results. Peer Reviewed Papers often do not! Especially when it comes to Economics, and Medical.
Most Medical Studies CANNOT be reproduced. And BS Science (the NOCEBO Effect) are created from Whole Cloth to hide problems with drugs.

We all know that about 1/3rd of medical results can be attributed to the PLACEBO effect. So this is where RCTs are used, and signals above a Control Group are required. But we had a problem. We had so many people complain of side-effects of the drugs, that the drug companies needed a way to discredit these ungrateful sloths... So, they decided they would test people who were and were not given the drug, to see if they complained of those symptoms. And they found (amazingly? Nope), that they did. The people on the PLACEBO group, not getting the drug, were complaining of the very issues people getting the drug were. Therefore, these are not real issues.

NEWSFLASH... It's a rigged system! (I know, I know, your shocked Face is showing)

Let me explain how Statin Drugs are tested (known for their side-effects, like a 10% increased risk of T2D, Muscle Pain, etc)
First, they give all participants the drug for an X Week Period. And this causes many people to wash out due to the side-effects.
Cool, we do not Count them. This is the preview portion of the study. LMAO

Now, we do a RCT, and give half the drug, and half the placebo. Now, more people wash out, because the issues become more severe.
Their complaints must be recorded, and the timing. If it is bad enough. Cancel the study, and use a new, longer washout Period.

Okay, during the RCT, many patients will report issues. T2D is detected by blood work, so it is not targeted as a problem. Just not widely discussed. But joint pain. That, and its severity is user reported....

So, after the study. they take the group off the medicine for some Y Weeks. To get it out of their system.
Then they run the NOCEBO test. And they re-randomize these people. (now, I am not sure if they adjust the number of people, etc.).
Regardless. You have some people who may still have the drug or side-effect going on. And even though they are now on the PLACEBO, they report the pain/issues.

The geniuses then count these people as NOCEBO induced pain... Disproving their first claim about the pain.

These numbers get crunched by massive algorithms, and are then put in the best possible light for the person who paid for the research.
And that gets published.

The unsuspecting public believes that Statins give each patient a 60% reduction in the risk of a heart attack.
But crunching the numbers, you see quickly that the NNT is like 300 people (300 people have to take the statin, for 1 to not have a heart attack. And that 10% increase in T2D means we will create 30 T2D to save one person a heart attack). All done with Relative Risk.
==

The point is that Peer-Review allows for a lot more than "Science" to be published, and should never be used as a truth measurement.
Anything Can and Will be published in Peer-Reviewed Journals.

Science, on the other hand, is Durable. It is Repeatable. And when it isn't, new theories are sought to explain the differences.
Science is also predictable.

Show me a model that always fails, and I can show you a Peer-Reviewed Model.

Show me Science that always fails to predict, and I will show you a Blown Hypothesis.

Final comment... An example.

I read a doctor saying "Omicron will kill just as many people as Delta... Because even though it kills less, it spreads faster!"
Doing any math on that statement leads you to want to shoot this fella. He did not clearly state in a unit of time. (Meaning Omicron may kill as many people as Delta in the average month, because it spreads 5 times faster). But even then. The basic math from the UK was that it was 85% less lethal. That would imply that it would have to spread like 15-20 times faster for that basic statement to be true.

That statement could be considered Peer-Reviewed Truth. But when I attempted to explain this to someone with a PhD and a daughter who is a nurse that repeated this claim... She could not grasp it. Ratios, it turns out, are hard on people. She is also quite fearful of this virus.
==

The take-away... When people quote "Meh, Science", you can retort: "Your Confusing Academia for Science... I can explain it to you!"

HTH in some small way!


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    Posted by $ jbrenner 2 years, 2 months ago
    I am the exception to your "academic" stereotype. I have made enough money and enough positive good will amongst our student customers over 24 years that I am not going to get fired. Nonetheless, I feel very much like Quentin Daniels (minor character in AS that looks at "the motor"), except that he was at the fictional Utah Institute of Technology and I am at the private Florida Institute of Technology.

    I was writing a patent at the beginning of COVID related to a hypothesis on the measurement of cytokines (the immune system's biochemical concentration markers) I developed (and COVID proved consistent with) and watched peer-reviewed references, not just web sites, disappear off of the Internet. There were a grand total of two papers that had been published that I considered particularly relevant, but I did find that one patent by AstraZeneca (as the basis for the drug Fasenra) had many similar characteristics to my hypothesis.

    Ironically, if I were to go after government funding to further confirm my hypothesis, it would be to the NIH's division on allergy and asthma ... which Fauci was in charge of before he was promoted to head all of NIH. To say that my hypothesis is contrary to Fauci is a massive understatement.

    Innovation and invention are the product of a contrarian point of view. Without the ability to express that contrarian point of view, innovation does not happen. This is THE critical reason why free market capitalism is morally superior to all other economic "theories".
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    • Posted by 2 years, 2 months ago
      Bravo, good sir!

      I was not saying that Academia itself was all bad.
      I was contrasting Science from Academia. So that Gulchers have a tool in their belt to remove BS arguments from those very Ignorant among us.

      But, your case is interesting. In that you run RIGHT into the wall I tried to described!
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      • Posted by $ jbrenner 2 years, 2 months ago
        The vast majority of academia is beholden to their governmental funding. Criticism of Fauci jeopardizes their careers. Because I have made enough money on a couple of prior ventures, I don't have to go that route anymore (i.e. becoming a Stadler). The vast majority of academics don't make that choice because the reward system actively encourages becoming Stadlers.

        But it is worse than that. Because my hypothesis (soon to be theory, I expect) explains why hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin work, if I publish that information, even on my own company's web site, I risk my company's survival.

        Is it any wonder that Ayn Rand said that no one outside the Gulch will ever know about the Gulchers' inventions? I have repeatedly made that mistake because there is no real Gulch to retreat to!
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    • Posted by $ Abaco 2 years, 2 months ago
      I've watched valuable information vanish off the internet. Right after I saw that I just happened to go on a long-range fishing trip with an NSA snoop. Hundreds of miles out at sea he opened up to me after lunch one day about what I had seen. Let me tell you...What he told me made me change my habits. The average shmo has no idea how deep we are into the matrix. Very deep.
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  • Posted by starguy 2 years, 2 months ago
    Whenever you hear that science is "settled", or that there is a "consensus" of scientists, you know you are hearing a lying weasel politician, and NOT a scientist.
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    • Posted by 2 years, 2 months ago
      starguy, in defense of others...

      You are sometimes hearing an ignorant person repeat such a lie.
      My mother made this mistake. I simply told her... The only reason to tell me how many people are on the other side of an argument, is to bully me into submission...

      I feel that nuance is important. It is lost on the other side. And if we feel the person is in this latter case, it is on us to question them.
      I loved Candace Owens answer ~"I know something is wrong with their arguments... But it is not a hill I am willing to die on!"
      that is the perfect nuanced view. Climate change has a ton of issues. Not to mention, it needs to keep the name Global Warming...
      So every time we set RECORD NEW LOWS, we can ask... "How is it possible we have record new lows in an ERA of continuous Global Warming?"
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 2 years, 2 months ago
    I could not be less impressed with many people who have PhDs, particularly ones who insist on using the post-fix. It is no longer meaningful.

    I almost will not hire them anymore, at least not without screening them for practicality, arrogance and judgement. I have fired three of them in the last 10 years for essentially technical incompetence.
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    • Posted by 2 years, 2 months ago
      Well Said! And good on you!
      When I was a Teenager, I got a Professional job writing software. A Co-worker had a Masters in Software Development. I struggled trying to pick his brain, and learn from someone so well-educated. (We were coding in Dec Basic-Plus 2).

      I wrote a piece of code, and he edited it to test something, and DESTROYED the performance with one line:
      loanNumb$ = num1$(loanNo)

      He put that inside a loop that ran 100k times. And could not understand why it slowed down so much.
      I moved that to inside the CONDITION he was looking for, and the speed came back. He was still dumbfounded.
      I said "That's a very expensive routine, converting a large number to a string, it uses division"... His reply was "Yeah, but doesn't it do that in Assembler"... I was DUMBFOUNDED. I lost all respect for Masters Degrees. This scenario repeated itself a few times over the time I was there... He was the SLOWEST programmer on the team... But the most "qualified"...
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      • Posted by $ Thoritsu 2 years, 2 months ago
        My brother was a co-op and working with a guy with an MS from MIT. The MS guy designed a pumping system to simulate pumping liquid oxygen using "similitude", where non-dimensional numbers are used to scale a system to represent another system. The guy sized an 800 hp pump to pump water through a 3/8 pipe"

        When called into the bosses office, the MIT MS guy was accusing my brother of not towing the line and being argumentative. My brother showed the boss a calculation showing the for this to work the fluid would be moving at 1/4 the speed of light. Needless to say that didn't fly.

        Education is a good thing, but it is no replacement for a solid foundation in fundamentals and good judgement. Trying to cover this up with a lot of math and BS never works.
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        • Posted by Owlsrayne 2 years, 2 months ago
          As a former hydraulics maintenance mechanic many years ago, the pressures that the piping would see would be astronomical, and to my knowledge, there is no known material that could withstand the fluid moving at such a velocity. Also, the pump would destroy itself through cavitation from the enormous backpressure.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 2 years, 2 months ago
    As I've said elsewhere in the Gulch when politics bullied its way into the laboratory, science got up and walked out. I expect the same can be said for academia. That is, when politics bullied its way into academia, critical independent thought got up and walked out. It would seem modern science and academia are both suffering from the same disease. There are notable exceptions, but currently it's not looking good overall.

    Edit add: Thank you for this post, jbrenner!
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  • Posted by $ blarman 2 years, 2 months ago
    Very nice and well-put together! It is a shame that science has ignored what I call the Rule of Jurassic Park: that scientists should NEVER become so preoccupied with whether or not they CAN do something that they ignore whether or not they SHOULD. Science without morality leads us to more people like Mengele and Fauci.
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  • Posted by DrZarkov99 2 years, 2 months ago
    The statement about Omicron is pure nonsense to start with. The lethality of a disease is independent to its rate of spread. If the lethality of Omicron is 99.5 percent less than Delta, even spreading a thousand times faster wouldn't make a proportional difference unless the population affected was identical. That's one of the huge problems with peer reviewed studies, lack of consideration of other affecting factors.

    One famous example is the early studies of the possible affects on health of coffee, involving thousands of people. The initial results appeared to indicate that numerous health problems were more pronounced among coffee drinkers, and much was made of the need to break the coffee habit. However, someone did the unthinkable, and noted that many of those in the study were also smokers. Once the smokers were taken out of the statistics, the remaining coffee drinkers were actually found to be healthier than the non coffee drinking control group.
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    • Posted by 2 years, 2 months ago
      LOL.
      Exactly the point. This is how they sell FEAR... They make it sound "good enough to seem logical".
      The average person reads it, and thinks... "Oh, that makes sense"... [But THE MEDIA was trying to EQUATE death for reasons of driving FEAR]

      Think about the situation we are in. 1/3rd are convinced this is an amazingly LETHAL virus (on par with Ebola)!
      And 1/3rd are scratching their heads. The other 1/3rd are followers to the main message.

      Then think about a bell curve on (IQ and/or Common Sense). I think that explains it all. The Bottom 1/3rd are scared. The top 1/3rd are not. The middle 1/3rd are just not going to rock the boat for fear of what might come.
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  • Posted by MortalMan 2 years, 2 months ago
    I have been trying to explain this to many members of my own profession for several years. Apparently, I am not as concise as CartainKirk.

    "Because Peer-Review was originally designed to break down the math/stats/approach to make sure it met proper rigor, and we were simply not being lied to. Effectively telling us 'If these numbers are real, the conclusions should be'."
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    • Posted by 2 years, 2 months ago
      MortalMan Thank you. Exactly the Point.

      Since you will understand this.
      If I run 1,000 Studies that show Statins are harmful, and don't really help.
      But from those studies, I learn who to eliminate (and I NEVER publish those, and the authors are not allowed to!),
      and create a new study approach, that yields the results I wanted. (Washing out lots of people, etc).

      Can we even ASSIGN the p (Power) value to the study? Should it not include enough details that a washout period,
      and numerous FAILED studies were used to get to this point. Are those facts NOT CRITICAL to the math?

      We cannot trust ANY of the stuff paid for by the people who profit from the results of the study!

      I think our forefathers would have created a system where you submit the study to be done, pay for it,
      it is BLINDLY assigned to researchers... And the results are ALWAYS Published!

      If nothing else, the results should always be published!
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