Thursday, November 06, 2008

Michael Crichton, 1942-2008

"I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."


Aliens Cause Global Warming.

5 comments:

Caleb said...

And a little more, later in the article:

"Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. "

Dad said...

Good stuff. But wait 'til Robert Kennedy, Hugo Chavez's bootlicker, is head of the EPA and Al Gore is Secretary of the Interior. None of it will matter. Science will be determined by two of the biggest flakes on this, our small planet.

I don't think I've ever read any of Crichton's books. Maybe i should.

Luke Murphy said...

Arthur Jones:

"Once accepted, myth is very difficult to remove.

Remember; less than a hundred years ago, the scientific community believed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible.
Which raises a question: were these people unaware of things like birds? Or did they believe that birds were inflated
by helium? Fifty years ago, very few in the scientific community believed that flight in space was possible.

A very large part of this continued ignorance is a direct result of the so-called peer-reviewed scientific journals; which
are supposed to assure that anything published in a journal is true, but which in facto generally have an opposite result.
Things that are believed (right or wrong) are usually published, because they support the bias of the people who review
all studies that are submitted for publication; while anything that is different is usually rejected for publication, because
it puts the lie to the bias of the reviewers.

Even a moment of consideration should make it obvious that the very idea of a peer-review journal is based upon an
impossibility: if something is new, then how many people are there who are qualified to judge it? How many peers did
the Wright Brothers have? Or Edison? Or Einstein? Or Tesla? Or hundreds of others?

Almost without exception, the people who have changed the world have been laughed at, or ignored, by the scientific
community; because their ideas did not agree with then-accepted scientific opinion.

In the meantime, while ignoring facts that could be demonstrated in simple manners, these same scientists continued to
believe many things that were nothing short of ridiculous.

Too strong? Quite the contrary, not strong enough; while it is certainly true that a few things (damned few) of value
have resulted from the work of scientists, it is also true that most of the things of value that have been discovered during
the last several centuries came from people who were not a part of the scientific community. The Wright Brothers were
bicycle mechanics, Einstein was a patent clerk, Edison went to the eighth grade, Tesla had almost nothing in the way of
formal education."

Dad said...

"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?"

Anonymous said...

Climate scientists allied with the IPCC have been caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating

http://www.prisonplanet.com/ipcc-scientists-caught-producing-false-data-to-push-global-warming.html