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Tuesday, December 26, 2017

The corruption of real science

I stumbled across this book from 5 years ago:
Not even trying: the corruption of real science

Bruce G Charlton
University of Buckingham Press: Buckingham, UK. 2012

Briefly, the argument of this book is that real science is dead, and the main reason is that professional researchers are not even trying to seek the truth and speak the truth; and the reason for this is that professional ‘scientists’ no longer believe in the truth - no longer believe that there is an eternal unchanging reality beyond human wishes and organization which they have a duty to seek and proclaim to the best of their (naturally limited) abilities. Hence the vast structures of personnel and resources that constitute modern ‘science’ are not real science but instead merely a professional research bureaucracy, thus fake or pseudo-science; regulated by peer review (that is, committee opinion) rather than the search-for and service-to reality. Among the consequences are that modern publications in the research literature must be assumed to be worthless or misleading and should always be ignored. In practice, this means that nearly all ‘science’ needs to be demolished (or allowed to collapse) and real science carefully rebuilt outside the professional research structure, from the ground up, by real scientists who regard truth-seeking as an imperative and truthfulness as an iron law.
This is over-stated, but there is some truth to what he says.

3 comments:

  1. The moment a scientist becomes a government employee...they really aren't a scientist anymore. They are a protected species of technical bureaucrat who will do or say pretty much whatever they are told to by their politically appointed bosses in order to keep their jobs. You can serve politics, or truth, Not both, as the compromise required to do so destroys both processes.

    “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

    ― Upton Sinclair

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  2. Look no further than the Psychiatric profession. In the UK, it has commandeered research into the inaply named Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, freezing out proper research. Papers are churned out ad nauseam with certain individuals names appearing on the author list rather often more than chance would dictate as they pursue quack cures with distorted statistical evidence of efficacy and irrelevant associations between potty training and vunerability to future illness.

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