Have I Ever Told You About Preconceptual Science?

By Rich Kozlovich

 

My now passed friend Dr. Jay Lehr was at Princeton when Einstein was there, and he told me when Einstein first came to Princeton he delivered a series of lectures, and I think it was seven, but five for sure.  He said at the first couple of those lectures you couldn't buy or steal a seat in that room it was so packed, but by the last lecture there were plenty of seats.  

 

I was a bit surprised and asked why.  He said a lot of these people, many of whom were among the smartest people in the world, didn't have a clue what he was talking about, and clearly they didn't dare suggest is was Einstein who didn't know what he was talking about.  Can you imagine what that must have done to their egos?

 

Over the course of my almost 78 years respect for science has gone from the top of Mt. Everest to the toilet, and for good reason.   During and right after WWII science exposed the world to the atom bomb, sputnik, men to the moon, and amazing medical advances at disease prevention.  And as a result some scientist could look up from his microscope, or turn from his blackboard with all sorts of gibberish only they and their peers understood, and mumble out incomprehensible babble almost no one would understand, but everyone would be sure to believe.   And it might be true, and it might not.

 

As my friend Mike Shaw noted:   

 

Science, once indistinguishable from a search for truth—has become fatally corrupted by academia in a rapacious search for dollars.

 

With all the scientific jargon, and arrogant ivory tower isolation, we just didn't know any better, but time and truth are on the same side, and before now we just didn't know scientific integrity has always been a serious issue.

 

Evolution was at the heart of much of it, and was the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated on humanity, until global warming, and this fraudulent coronavirus pandemic, and worse yet, the shots they forced on much of humanity they fraudulently called "vaccines".  The negative health consequences as a result of these vaccination mandates of are world wide, and will continue for decades.

 

Let's try and get this once and for all. Government grant money has made

 

Nothing has changed, and in point of fact it's getting worse, and will get far worse in the coming years because now any nitwit, or group of nitwits with computers and a "twitter" account can force science to reject anything they don't like. Nitwits are now part of the peer review process.  The article about the study in question went on to say:

On January 4th, the paper "Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average," was accepted to the journal. That same day, the abstract was published with the notice that the "final, formatted version of the article will be published soon".

Apparently the average IQ for college undergraduates has dropped, and a lot from "around 120 to 102, just slightly above the average of 100."  Let's  not delude ourselves, that's huge, and apparently it's true.  The authors went on to point out the ranks attending college is no longer from the higher IQ members of society, and as a result, "academic standards and curricula might have to be adjusted."  After what we've seen at Harvard, does anyone doubt that?

Well, this set up a fire storm of protest because they really didn't like the author's "tone".  It was demeaning, and lacked sensitivity, and criticized the peer reviewers for not finding fault with their paper, including the Frontiers in Psychology handling editor.  

The editor  of that journal, Eddy Davelaar, overrode all that and attempted to refute the evidence presented, and he did so....... with his opinions.......and has refused to respond to challenges over his actions and his opinions.  

But none of that changes the fact these young academics are dumber than ever, and are no longer required to perform mentally challenging tasks.  Academia is more about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion than it is with honest education, that teaches critical thinking, versus Critical Race Theory.

Diversity without accomplishment is philosophy without form and incompetence without consequence.  Unfortunately, as with all these schemes, humanity pays the penalty, and in the future the consequences are going to be dramatic.  Negatively dramatic.  

One more thing, this whole Preconceptual claptrap mentality doesn't just apply to science.  It works for economics also. 

Over 500 scientific papers to be withdrawn by publisher

October 1, 2022  By Thomas Lifson

By Thomas Lifson

There’s good news that a major publisher of scientific journals is cleaning out the stable of papers whose review process appears corrupted, but the bad news is worse. Not only were these papers published in the first place, but the easily-corrupted system of peer review – which is supposed to be the quality assurance mechanism for the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge – remains in place with no additional safeguards.

Retraction Watch reports:............To Read More...

Is peer review bad for science?

By David Wojick @ CFACT 

After studying the popular practice of peer review of scientific journal articles for several years, I have reluctantly concluded that peer review is bad for science. While the practice has its good side, there are several ways that it greatly impedes progress, and the bad greatly outweighs the good.

To begin with, let’s look at what peer review tries to do. The obvious thing is to block the publication of fake science. However this appears to be a rare event in most sciences. There are several million journal articles published each year, all peer reviewed, typically by two or three reviewers. Clearly these many millions of reviews did not keep any of these myriad articles from being published.

Paradoxically, however, most of these articles were in fact rejected based on peer review; many were rejected many times. Top journals often boast of having high rejection rates, like 80% or so. If this is the general practice then the average article must be submitted to something like five journals before it is accepted and published. If each submission is peer reviewed then that is a lot of reviews per article, perhaps ten to fifteen on average.

Given that all of these multiply rejected articles eventually get published, something other than simple gate keeping must be going on. This something looks to be an extremely laborious sorting process, whereby each article eventually finds the “right” journal. It is hard to see any value being added by these many millions of peer reviews. Given modern search technologies, which journal an article ultimately appears in no longer seems very important.

One negative aspect of peer review is well known. This is where gate keeping keeps great new ideas from being published. Max Planck, who discovered the quantum nature of energy, put it very nicely, saying something like “Your ideas will (only) be accepted when your students become journal editors.” This is the dark side of peer review blocking science, the novel good ideas get blocked as bad ideas.

But there are several other bad things that flow from peer review that I have not seen mentioned. These down sides are features of the incredibly time consuming and laborious nature of the practice.

First there is the huge time delay between the time a paper is written and when it is finally published. Let’s say that peer review takes four months, which is probably pretty fast. If the average paper is reviewed five times then that is almost two years of reviews before it is finally accepted. (Also, there are many other steps between these reviews, so the average might be more like four years from first submission to final publication.)

If two million papers are published each year, with an average delay of say two years each, due to peer review, that is an accumulation of four million years of delay every year. It is reasonable to believe that eliminating this vast tide of delay would dramatically speed up the progress of science.

Then there is the cost. Organizing and managing the peer review process is probably the greatest expense that journal publishers face. Keep in mind that given an 80% rejection rate, something like five articles will be reviewed for every one published. At three reviews each that means fifteen reviews per published articles.

The high cost of journals and articles is a major obstacle to access by all but the richest universities and researchers. This to probably greatly impedes the progress of science.

Then there is the huge amount of time that researchers spend reviewing each other’s articles. Reviews are expected to be comprehensive, so they probably take from 10 to 20 hours each, maybe more. If there are fifteen reviews per article published that is 150 to 300 hours of review time.

Multiply that by 2 million articles published and we get an incredible 300 to 600 million hours a year devoted to reviewing, rather that to research. Assuming that a work year is 2000 hours, this is like taking 150 to 300 thousand researchers off the job, just to peer review each other’s papers. Think of what that amount of research might create. Again, this is a huge loss to the progress of science.

Conclusion: Peer review adds an enormous amount of delay, cost and distraction to the process of science. It does not do enough good to justify these huge adverse impacts on the rate of scientific progress. Thus on balance peer review is bad for science. Author

Scientific Integrity is an Oxymoron: The Peer Review Problem

By Thomas P. Sheahen

Recent news reports have observed that a lot of published scientific papers are worthless and not true, with initial claims turning out to be false. This is particularly worrisome where newly invented medicines are concerned. The problem also affects published results in fields as diverse as psychology and global warming.  We ask “what’s wrong?” The problem seems to be that the system known as “peer-review” is not doing its job properly.

The process of peer review is a cornerstone of scientific integrity, the guarantee of quality in a scientific research paper. Catch phrases like “holy grail” come to mind. When a researcher accomplishes something, the concluding step is to publish the results in the scientific literature. Enroute to publication, the paper must undergo peer review..........Read more

Science Is In Deep Trouble, New Paper Shows

Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals
 

A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals the extent to which current policy-making is reliant on untrustworthy peer-reviewed research, much of which cannot be replicated and “may be simply untrue”. “Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals,” says Donna Laframboise, the study’s author and the investigative journalist behind the 2011 exposé of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) entitled: The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert. The report, entitled Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential, describes the peer-review process as “haphazard and byzantine”, raising serious questions about the state of modern science and casting doubt on policies that claim to be ‘evidence-based’. --Global Warming Policy Foundation, 31 October 2016

We’ve all heard the buzzword. Whether it’s an anti-bullying program in Finland, an alcohol awareness initiative in Texas, or climate change responses around the globe, we’re continually assured that government policies are ‘evidence-based.’ Science itself guides our footsteps. There’s just one problem: science is in deep trouble. Last year, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, admitted that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” In his words, “science has taken a turn toward darkness.” Government policies can’t be considered evidence-based if the evidence on which they depend hasn’t been independently verified, yet the vast majority of academic research is never put to this test. If half of the scientific literature “may simply be untrue,” then half of the climate research cited by the IPCC may also be untrue. --Global Warming Policy Foundation, 31 October 2016

It is startling for non-scientists who actually visit the sausage factory of science for the first time. There, peer review proves to be an often biased, prejudicial, and perfunctory process contrary in every respect to popular expectations about science. It is clear that people who have never studied the history of science, or have never been on the unfashionable side of a scientific debate are in for a shock upon encountering this messy and sordid reality for the first time. The field of climate science could supply a rich harvest of examples of this crisis of scientific credibility all on its own. Yet it is the scandal that dare not speak its name. The discussions of the crisis in peer review in Nature, Science, the Economist and elsewhere studiously ignore any examples from climate science. Why is this? It is an article of faith among certain scientists and science journalists that because climate scepticism is also a position supported by those on the right of politics, so nobody in science must give fodder to the sceptics. This is nothing less than the modern manifestation of gatekeeping continuing its ancient legacy, driven by sheer ignorance and self-delusion, to keep the forces that actually advance science away from the door. Scientific research stretches human faculties to their limits, and it is at such limits where human frailties become most prominent. --Christopher Essex And Matt Ridley, Global Warming Policy Foundation, 31 October 2016