154 Scientists at Los Alamos Nuke Lab Defected to China

September 23, 2022 by Daniel Greenfield 17 Comments

Defected of course implies that they ever worked for any nation other than China. It’s a good thing that the Biden administration corruptly shut down the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Communist China from spying on us, manipulating us and robbing us blind to avoid offending anyone… like Beijing.

“We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the “China Initiative” fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only heightens these concerns.”

Goodbye China Initiative and U.S. National Security...........There’s a huge difference between Chinese immigrants opposed to the regime and those who are supportive or loyal to it. We used to make those distinctions with Russia, we threw them away with China. Does anyone even bother asking the folks with top clearance to denounce the regime? Or would that also be too offensive?..... To Read More....

Too Many Experts, Too Little Knowledge

David Waugh   Byron B. Carson, III – January 27, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

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 We are all epidemiologists now. But we have lost an appreciation for the personal, intimate knowledge acquired from our own experiences. Our decisions are increasingly guided by expert recommendations and scientific data, with less reliance on local conditions and individual experience. 

We now know what a coronavirus is and how it spreads. We have all tracked changes in prevalence and mortality rates, or, perhaps, we have become inured to them. And we know the length of a coronavirus (measured in nanometers) and whether that paisley bandana allows the virus to pass through. And then there’s the average age of people who die from Covid-19, as well as the statistical likelihood of death given a relevant comorbidity.

In our efforts to learn more about Covid-19 and limit its transmission, however, we ignore local knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge where we make plans to obtain a goal and continually, marginally adjust those plans. Only individuals can access this knowledge, e.g., whether you prefer apples to oranges, your normal activities and behaviors, what your goals are for the day and your life aspirations; who your close friends and family are, where you can buy a cheaper lunch, which café has nicer chairs, etc.

Both scientific and local knowledge influence the choices we make every day—even choices related to health and how we spread infectious diseases.

Scientific and Local Knowledge Complement Each Other

Scientific and local knowledge are useful in many ways but particularly because they can identify causal mechanisms that enable individuals to improve some aspect of their life. Whether it is scientific or local knowledge, individuals strive to acquire relevant knowledge — where individuals define what is and what is not relevant — to better pursue their plans.

Dan Klein makes a related point that when individuals make decisions they actively seek relevant information: “In small simple social settings including the family, club, church, or shop, the decision maker is usually the one most motivated to ensure that her decisions will have the results intended, and consequently she is most motivated either to know herself what course of action will best serve her intentions or to search out and appoint an agent with such knowledge.” The discerning, choosing individual is the key part here.

Imagine that we wanted to lessen anxiety and depression, and you learned that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol might be an appropriate scientific prescription. With just that knowledge however, it is unclear how any one person will subsequently act. Should we start subsidizing alcohol consumption? That would probably lead to some unpalatable and unintended consequences.

As an individual, however, you might start logging more hours at your local brewery if you really liked their new raspberry wheat beer. Alternatively, beer might be harder to find in places with fewer bars, so you might try to find substitutes. Of course, you might not even like beer so you might try your hand at bourbon. The context of your situation, your plans, and your knowledge influences what is appropriate. For example, you will have a tougher time getting bourbon if you live in a state that maintains a monopoly over the sale of alcohol. For people who live under state-run alcohol monopolies, they might resort to enlisting friends in other, more economically liberal states to do some shopping.

Still, there is a complementarity between scientific and local knowledge. The science about moderate alcohol consumption is of limited use in some cases; at the same time, science informs a person’s decision so they can pursue their goals as they see fit.

Joel Mokyr and Rebecca Stein (here and here) show a part of this logic in their work on the changing norms of hygiene and mortality rates during the latter part of the 19^th century. As the germ theory of disease developed, people began to understand more and more about infectious diseases and germs and, more importantly, how their own choices influenced health. How individuals went about making use of that scientific knowledge depended on their own circumstances. Many people, women in particular, began to clean more; others improved the quality of baby food; others improved their diet.

All of these choices helped to improve private and public health outcomes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they were choices informed by local and scientific knowledge.

Covid-19 and Knowledge

The complementarity between scientific and local knowledge even matters for our private and public responses to Covid-19. 

Scientists, epidemiologists, and public health scholars often produce important work identifying causal mechanisms regarding the spread of infectious diseases, especially under predetermined conditions. That scientific knowledge is necessarily of limited use, however, when individuals alter those predetermined conditions and especially when individuals make choices based on their local knowledge.

For example, suppose you live with someone who is immunocompromised. In this situation it would make sense for you to skip the gym, limit grocery visits, etc., because you recognize the risk contracting Covid-19 would have on your roommate’s health. On the other hand, if you are a healthy young person who lives alone, it would make less sense for you to drastically alter your lifestyle in order to avoid a virus. 

That people have plans and make choices based on expected costs and benefits as they perceive them are extremely undervalued notions, but they are essential to understand why and how people respond to changing circumstances and to changing prevalence and mortality rates. Allison Schrager and Jessica Hullman recognize the importance of individual choices when they advocate for improvements in how prevalence and mortality data are presented. To the extent such data convey objective measures of risk, they should be intelligible measures of risk.

Furthermore, Charles Kenny argues that people engage in various kinds of preventative behavior in response to Covid-19, among other diseases. Such responses occur because it is human nature to choose and to alter behavior in response to incentives — even when prevalence and mortality rates change — not necessarily because government officials say so. Importantly, how people alter their behaviors in response to infectious diseases depends on local knowledge.

Jenin Younes also recognizes how local knowledge influences behavior: “…epidemiologists are no better equipped to weigh the competing values that inform how one chooses to live during the coronavirus era than individuals are to make their own choices.” And so does Roger Koppl: “The knowledge we need in normal times and crisis times alike is distributed. It’s out there in thee and me and in all our habits practices and experience. It is not a set of instructions and doctrines coming from on high. It arises of its own from our many decentralized interactions.”

Such approaches to knowledge ultimately suggest caution about what we imagine science alone can help us achieve.

Going Forward with Science and Local Knowledge

Will sweeping restaurant and school closures save lives? Are country-wide mask mandates effective? Do large gatherings of people cause super spreader events? The science and evidence is still developing (here, here, here). Regarding super spreader events, for example, we can easily observe these mass gatherings, imagine how diseases could spread, and then empirically assess the magnitude of such events (here and here), but we should also imagine how people might alter their preventative behaviors given local knowledge.

The kind of information people acquire in their myriad interactions with others is often undervalued as a means of preventative behavior. As helpful as science is for understanding causal mechanisms — and it is — it should not be the only source of knowledge that informs your behavior, let alone policy. 

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David Waugh

David Waugh joined AIER in 2020 on the editorial team and is a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College where he received a BA in Economics.

While at Hampden-Sydney, he was a Senior Fellow with the Center for the Study of Political Economy and worked in the Economics department as a teaching assistant.

David previously held internships with the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and Seven Cedars Financial.

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Byron B. Carson, III

Byron Carson is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Business at Hampden-Sydney College, in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia. He teaches courses on introductory economics, money and banking, development economics, health economics, and urban economics.

Byron earned a Ph.D. in Economics in 2017 from George Mason University and a B.A. in Economics from Rhodes College in 2011. His research interests include economic epidemiology, public choice, and Austrian economics.

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500 Scientists Write U.N.: ‘There Is No Climate Emergency’

Breitbart 

More than 500 scientists and professionals in climate and related fields have sent a “European Climate Declaration” to the Secretary-General of the United Nations asking for a long-overdue, high-level, open debate on climate change.

Just as 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York accusing world leaders of robbing her of her future, scientists were begging the United Nations to keep hysteria from obscuring facts.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the declaration states. “Scientists should openly address the uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real benefits as well as the imagined costs of adaptation to global warming, and the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of mitigation.”..........To Read More.....

Stop the Cyberbullying of Scientists

By Alex Berezow — March 15, 2018

Stephan Neidenbach is a middle school technology teacher. To counter the barrage of misinformation about biotechnology on the internet, he began a Facebook page called We Love GMOs and Vaccines. He quickly gained prominence among science communicators.

Anti-biotechnology activists – especially those who are on an ideological bender against genetically engineered crops – are trying to destroy the careers of scientists who work on or publicly advocate for GMOs. Their favored tactic is to target academic scientists with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, then fishing through e-mails for any evidence that the scientists are “corporate shills.” Finding none, activists pull quotes out of context, fabricate conspiracies, and cyberbully scientists online. University of Florida plant geneticist Kevin Folta was ruthlessly harassed in this way for years. Ultimately, the goal is to destroy scientists professionally or personally, preferably both.

Fed up with their antics, Mr. Neidenbach decided to fight fire with fire. He submitted FOIA requests against scientists he suspected of collaborating with the organic food industry. That gained him notoriety among the anti-biotech activists, who turned their ire against him.

Their first coordinated campaign against Mr. Neidenbach targeted his Facebook page. Facebook capitulated, temporarily blocking his page and banning Mr. Neidenbach – for the “crime” of promoting biotechnology. His page was soon reinstated, but their success only served to embolden the activists.

Their most recent tactic is to try to get Mr. Neidenbach fired from his school, so they have accused him of stealing from his students and mocking people with intellectual disabilities. Of course, neither of these are true, but that hardly matters. As a “public figure” – a middle school teacher with a blog – people can say whatever they want about him with no consequence. That’s why Medium blogger Ena Valikov is allowed to call him “Walmart trash” and a Nazi.

Then, the trolls took it to another level: They targeted his family. That’s when Mr. Neidenbach decided to call it quits. Nothing was worth risking the happiness and safety of his family. To appease his critics, he unpublished his Facebook page. But it didn’t work. The cyberbullies told him they would continue their attempt to destroy him, so he republished it. He’s a brave man.

Amazingly, Mr. Neidenbach’s experience is hardly unique. The reputation of the aforementioned Dr. Kevin Folta was so thoroughly tarnished online, that the New York Times repeated the allegations against him, insinuating that he was working as a public relations agent on behalf of biotechnology firms. In response, Dr. Folta filed a defamation suit against the author, Eric Lipton, and the New York Times.

Most other science communicators, however, do not have the resources to launch such a counteroffensive. I have received veiled death threats on Twitter – including a photograph of a person with a bullet hole in his head – and, aside from complaining to Twitter, there is very little I can do.

Being cyberbullied online is simply considered a routine hazard of the job.

But that’s outrageous. While criticism is healthy and vital to scientific debate and our democracy as a whole, there is no place for unsubstantiated smears and intimidation. Cyberbullying has real-world consequences, from damaging a person’s professional aspirations to harming his mental and physical well-being.

If a person stood on a street corner and shouted obscenities and made defamatory comments about people walking by, he would be arrested for disturbing the peace. But if the same person goes online, he’s welcomed as a useful contributor to the national dialogue. This needs to change.

The United Kingdom takes cyberbullying seriously. Posting humiliating, manipulated images or inciting people to harass others – what they call “virtual mobbing” – are offenses that can now result in prosecution. The U.S. should consider implementing similar laws.

Until then, science communicators will need to keep fighting. Giving up only emboldens the trolls.