ecosophia | Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 193

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Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 193

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; ~~public health authorities~~ government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.

3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm far from sure I believe that the vast majority of science is honest, or was until recently. The most parsimonious explanation for the replication crisis currently roiling the scientific community is that experimental and statistical fraud have become pervasive in most if not all sciences. Until I see some reason to think otherwise, I think it's wise to assume that the scientific community has become corrupt, the scientific method no longer functions to weed out dishonesty, and any allegation made by a scientist should be assessed for financial and partisan bias, in the same way as an allegation made by a politician or a salesperson.

Most science isn't relevant to factional affiliation. The replication crisis is bad in medicine, social science, and psychology, not to mention corporate toxicology. One reason is that researchers often skew conduct of studies to support their pre-existing biases and profit or power interests. Another is that humans and other animals are complex critters and one group, at one time, actually may behave in a study in a way that another group at another time will not. The fact that another party conducting the same study doesn't get the same result doesn't prove that the first party did anything wrong, much less deliberately.

But if a geological study is looking for oil, where there is gigantic money involved (look at current politics), nobody's going to fake data. You're either right or you're wrong, provably so, and putting out wrong data would be devastating to one's reputation.

And if the study is about the atmospheric composition of a planet several light-years away, or the chemical constituents of rhubarb, or the number of weevil species in New Caledonia, there is hardly any chance that the results are being faked. The only reason to do such a study is because you want to know the reality. The folks doing basic science should not be tarred with the same brush as the worse end of the applied-science crowd. I remember many years ago you wrote that you hoped ecology would survive the downfall of science. That won't happen if anyone who engages in systematic hypothesis-testing or data collection gets demonized as we go down.

If ecology survives the downside of science, it'll be -- as I said at the time -- because it gets taken up by citizen scientists who have no institutional affiliation and aren't being paid for their work. Do you by any chance follow the Retraction Watch website? I do, and what they've reported suggests that the rot has gone far beyond a handful of high-profile and highly partisan sciences. My take at this point is that a combination of collapsing ethics in society at large and increasing publish-or-perish pressures has driven a steady erosion of scientific ethics and led a great many scientists in every field to do what they think they have to do to get and keep research positions, grants, and the other professional rewards that come to those who play the game. That's not "demonizing," it's recognizing that the same cultural pressures that have led to a rising tide of unethical behavior in every other part of our society don't trickle away harmlessly from academe.

I agree with you that ethics are slipping across the board, but disagree that it's worse in most of science, or intellectual pursuits in general, than anywhere else (say, business). An individual paleontologist could be crooked in the same way that an individual roofer could be crooked, but we don't want to give up roofing. Retraction Watch lists thousands of bad papers; they don't list hundreds of thousands of papers that haven't been accused of anything.

Before I started this line of discussion I had not read your ecosophia.net essay yet (forgot it was Wednesday ... glad you're returning to the topic of decline). Had I done so, I'd have quoted your: "one of the core reasons that modern medicine does such a poor job of dealing with so many health conditions, for example, is that our medical researchers try to find a single cause for conditions that are the product of many intersecting factors..."

That's an inherent flaw, or weakness, of science. What really happens is too complex to be studied in any affordable way or feasible timeframe, so people wind up doing studies of genetically identical caged rodents with only a single factor varying at a time. Of course the results of these various studies don't all jibe with each other, because the setup is totally artificial, and if results reflect a generally applicable real relationship, or the lack of one, it's in large part through luck.

I'm starting to wonder if you have an unstated agenda here. Where did I say that scientific ethics are worse than that of the rest of society? Or that I think we ought to do without science altogether? Your rhetoric here seems to be aimed at defining those you disagree with in terms more extreme than their words justify, and that's not helpful, you know.

I don't have any unstated agenda with regards to YOU, and no offense intended there. I'll state the agenda that I don't want to get persecuted, or hacked to death with cowrie shells, in my old age because my own job falls into the category of science as most broadly defined. (Which, to be clear, is not something you are promoting.)

You didn't say that scientists were more unethical than others, but if they're not, then you've got a bigger target ready to aim at.

Um, I think you mean some other kind of shells. You'd have one heck of a hard time using a cowrie shell to hack anything at all:

From my perspective, it's wildly exaggerated to talk about people being hacked to death. What's at issue, rather, is the cultural prestige and government funding that currently go into the sciences. Those are indeed at risk, because rampant scientific fraud isn't just a public relations problem. It cuts to the heart of the scientific endeavor -- and the fact that so many people involved in the sciences focus on insisting that there isn't really a problem at all is not helping the situation any, you know.

Edited 2025-04-17 01:41 (UTC)

I was thinking of Hypatia. What kind of shells were those again? (DuckDuckGo says oyster or abalone.) Thanks for the mollusc education; I'm a long way from a seashore.

There are people who want pogroms. I hope they don't get their way. Perhaps a better comparison for me to make would be to corruption in religion. Oh, boy, is there a lot of it. But there are also plenty of honest, caring, poorly-paid ministers who don't deserve to be attacked or have their churches shut down. FWIW, I agree that cutting back on federal funding of science is a good call--but it does have negative consequences too.

Yes, I thought you meant Hypatia. It still seems to me that you're missing or perhaps evading my point, but I don't allow others to keep flogging the same issue over and over again, and so I try not to do the same thing myself.

Well, if your point is either that science as a broadly defined profession needs to clean house, or that it doesn't merit the level of financial and social support it's gotten in recent decades, I can completely agree with both of those.

Er, that's what I've been saying all along, with one additional point: until science as a profession cleans its house, nobody is going to take anything that scientists say on trust. They had that trust, they abused it, and now it's gone. A lot of hard work and a new openness to public scrutiny from outside the scientific community is going to be needed before anything of the kind can be restored.

If you want to see science survive the twilight of the industrial world, in other words, as a participant in science, you have your work cut out for you. Most of it isn't anything I can do as an outsider -- and a despised outsider, by the way. (You might recall for a moment the kind of rhetoric scientists like to direct toward occultists and practitioners of alternative health care, both of which I am.) It has to be done from within. I'd like to see science passed onto the future, but all I can do is hope that you and people like you will do something about scientific fraud...and not just go around insisting in forums like this one that it really isn't a problem.

If I may - when there is an egregore, and the egregore develops a taint, it is not *just* a question any longer of whether *some* of its practitioners are honest, caring, poorly-paid (as it were) ministers, or researchers, or whatever.

Sometimes a practitioner needs to consider their own relationship to the egregore as a whole - whether to keep feeding it, or attempt to reform it from within, or leave and take their energy into a different egregore, or something I have not thought of... but, regardless, an egregore can become a "being" in its own right, and may simply *use* the honest, caring, poorly paid exemplaries as camouflage to hide the dishonest, brutal, profiteering parts from scrutiny.

A very solid point. Thank you.

If I may add one more tiny thing - it is that, for me, the "taint" of this "science" egregore comes in with language like "control the variables", and generally with the pre-supposition that nature is inert, and the scientist stands somewhere entirely neutral and unconnected, and therefore Nature can be experimented on by Scientist with no consequence and no karma and no ethical "drag".

In terms of leaving the egregore and bringing the "good" energies of science into an entirely different egregore, it strikes me that reviving the concept of "natural philosophy" - which is more a matter of participatory observation of the concatenation of relationships and processes that fall under the rubric of "nature" - would be one way of conserving important aspects of scientific method and enquiry. Ian McGilchrist, just for example, strikes me as an important modern natural philosopher.

"...a combination of collapsing ethics in society at large and increasing publish-or-perish pressures has driven a steady erosion of scientific ethics and led a great many scientists in every field to do what they think they have to do to get and keep research positions, grants, and the other professional rewards that come to those who play the game."

I've gotten to the point where I've started to wonder how much of it they are even consciously aware of.

Having spent time in academic research before dropping out of grad school (in large part due to the issues under discussion), and also spending a fair amount of time around the general liberal-PMC milieu that produces and trusts experts, I sometimes get the impression that what we're dealing with isn't either a lack of reason or deliberate fraud, but rather the consequence of a weird faith that these people have been indoctrinated into their whole lives.

It's hard to explain, but the best way I can describe it is this way: When I was taking graduate level classes and working as a research assistant, I would often ask the wrong questions or point out inconvenient data or confounding variables that threw "correct" answers into question, but the reactions I would get were...strange. People really would look at me like I was crazy. They all knew what the acceptable areas of discourse were, and what sort of answers were the "right" ones, but it didn't seem like they even really grasped that they were manipulating data or dismissing "wrong" perspectives. It was like their belief system of how things "worked" and what the "correct" answers surely were, were all a matter of ingrained belief, and if somebody suggested something outside those parameters they must be confused, and if the data showed something outside those parameters, well, then, the data must be wrong, or the study wasn't set up right, or we must be missing something, or similar.

I'm sure that conscious fraud also takes place, but I also think there is something else going on. What I saw during my time in academia was in some ways more disturbing: an entire industry of well-indoctrinated Good Students who had spent their whole lives chasing the Right Answer, and literally had not concept of how the Right Answer and the actual truth might not be the same thing. The unstated - and I think really almost unconscious - purpose of research was, of course, to get the Right Answer, if it data didn't produce the Right Answer, then obviously the data/method must be wrong, and in need of revising. Again, I'm not suggesting that deliberate fraud doesn't ever take place - but what I saw was more akin to a bastardized religious devotion to "keeping the faith" in a certain world view of how the world worked, and making reality fit the belief system, in a very blind and indoctrinated kind of way. I found the whole thing just creepy.

> I've gotten to the point where I've started to wonder how much of it they are even consciously aware of.

As I've become of aware of this fact it is spooky the extent to which it applies across all human activity, and I am in no doubt that it is true. Very little (I hesitate to say zero, but it is close) human thought is rational, and that which portends to be rational is simply backfilling narrative to an outcome decided either unconsciously or emotionally.

The Right Answer can never be questioned because it is not actually an answer, but a fundamental tenet of a belief system. JMG's simple observation that Progress is a religion is a much more astute statement with far deeper consequences than it appears.

I at least find it reassuring to see your comment expressing a degree of this understanding here, because I've found next to nobody wants to acknowledge how this works; let alone talk about it.

"And if the study is about the atmospheric composition of a planet several light-years away, or the chemical constituents of rhubarb, or the number of weevil species in New Caledonia, there is hardly any chance that the results are being faked."

Why do you think so? Finding sensational results bring more government money and pays the researchers, which means the system is biased toward cutting corners.

"That won't happen if anyone who engages in systematic hypothesis-testing or data collection gets demonized as we go down."

In case of biology, these days I start with assuming that the researcher is dishonest and then let him prove me wrong. That is what the "natural origin of sars-cov-2" saga and various other retractions of papers not pushing mainstream thesis taught me. Biology as a field is rotten to the core, and ecologists are no exception.

I don't agree. Only the first example claim could be sensational -- e.g., if you claim that a planet's atmosphere is full of DMS so it probably has metabolizing life, one of today's headlines, you'll get media attention. But if a claim is really "sensational" that probably means that it is unexpected, not likely according to current theories (or their holders' belief system). That might get you more access to funding or it might get you less, since the people on the "peer review" panels will be disgruntled with you for claiming something they think unlikely. And they will be highly motivated to critique and pick at your data, so if you faked your analyses or were just sloppy, someone will soon find out and crucify you.

Then, I know several ecologists and would not describe any of them, or their work, as "rotten to the core." (How would any given researcher prove you wrong? What evidence would you accept?) Such rhetoric alarms me. Ecologists are not well paid and the billionaire class mostly wants them to shut up and go away. For decades they have been paying people to tell us that you can't trust those scientists, those sneaky egghead types who tell all sorts of lies, like tobacco causes cancer, Roundup causes cancer, the climate is changing. Etc. I am far more likely to assume that anyone whose net worth has more than seven zeroes is rotten to the core.

How about verb conjugation in non-standard Norwegian dialects? I studied linguistics in university, came across some really odd claims in the course of research for a paper, and when I started trying to investigate found out the claims were most likely fabricated.

If data for papers on something as absurdly unimportant and easily verifiable as that (Norwegian is not exactly an obscure language!) is being fabricated, and no one cared that an undergraduate student found this, I think there is a far deeper problem.

There's no profit to be had by finding one conjugation vs. another and probably no ideology to support, so if it was fabricated, it was probably because someone had to finish a thesis or something really fast or else so just made up text to fill it out. Two other possibilities might be that the source was incompetent and honestly wrote down what they thought they heard, or if the wrong claims are old enough, that the source actually got some of it right but the dialects have since changed to make it wrong. I don't know anything substantive about linguistics so can't guess if that is plausible.

In general, we shouldn't be treating writing as holy writ that must be true because it was published, perhaps a leftover habit from bibleism, but when we see that some of it is wrong we shouldn't flip to the opposite and say all writing is false or all is untrustworthy so we can never know anything. Our knowledge is not just finite but imperfect, which means that it contains some falsehoods, whether accidental or deliberate. Rooting out and removing those falsehoods is an important part of improving our knowledge.

I'm not sure why you want to focus on profit and ideology when my point was that the problems with scientific fraud are much deeper than that. What I'm saying is that even in cases where there is no society wide ideology to support, nor corporate/government profit to be had by finding one thing vs another, we cannot trust the modern system of "scientific" research. If an interested and motivated undergraduate can look at something and say "This doesn't make sense", and upon investigation find evidence of either fraud or specatcular incompetence, and the general response from the academics who study the field is to say "Huh, interesting" and then move on to other things, something has gone horribly wrong.

"Our knowledge is not just finite but imperfect, which means that it contains some falsehoods, whether accidental or deliberate. Rooting out and removing those falsehoods is an important part of improving our knowledge."

Part of this process means identifying when a given source is so untrustworthy as to no longer be worth taking seriously. Given the rampant problems with our current systems of knowledge, and the fact that it does not seem to be self correcting, I'm far from sure it at this point that it is ever reasonable to trust anything that a scientist or any kind of researcher or acadameic says that cannot be personally verified.

Fair enough, but then, are there any categories of people whose factual claims you do consider it reasonable to trust without personal verification? Or do you consider it wisest to adopt a semi-Skeptic posture of only believing that which you have seen? (A true Skeptic would also not believe that which he HAD seen, but that's nuts.)

Yes. I'm happy to trust people who do not lie to me.

But that sounds like you are speaking of people as individuals. How can you identify the truth-telling individuals without verifying their claims?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 193

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