Blinded by Doomsday Predictions
Masquerading as Science
American Thinker,
by
Andrew Gilbertson
Original Article
Posted By: andyboy,
5/10/2020 8:40:34 AM
Conservatives? Anti-science? No way! Science created fuel-burning engines, harnessed electricity, and ushered in an industrial revolution that transformed the world. Science found cures for malaria, tuberculosis, and polio; expanded the world's food supply many times over; significantly lengthened life expectancy; and put men on the moon.
No, folks, we have no quarrel with science. But we have a serious problem with something masquerading as science: the manipulation of facts and data to create fearful predictive models.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
franq 5/10/2020 8:46:42 AM (No. 406835)
What the sheeple don't realize is that what is called "science" is really "propaganda". But as long as they get their check and still have a functioning smart phone, they're content.
12 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
tsquare 5/10/2020 8:56:51 AM (No. 406848)
Engineers created fuel burning engines, harnessed electricity, and ushered in the industrial revolution. Give science its due...and recognize Westinghouse, Edison, Tesla, Benz, as examplars of skilled and dedicated engineers who imagine a future and build it.
10 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Delilah 5/10/2020 9:41:48 AM (No. 406893)
Math is not science. I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and a Bachelor of ARTS in Mathematics. Thus statistics is an art, not a science and any on versed in math/statistics should know that.
6 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
red1066 5/10/2020 11:44:45 AM (No. 407018)
Trump was between a rock and a hard place on this virus stuff. He let the governors decide how to run their states, without adding do it by Constitutional law. He had to use CDC guidelines which were based on BS models, because he was following medical recommendations even if those recommendations would kill the economy. However, Trump will have a boat load of campaign commercials showing demoslut and rino governors acting like dictators showing what the country would be like under demoslut control.
3 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
DVC 5/10/2020 12:13:40 PM (No. 407052)
Now we start to see that "computer models", which have been causing a LOT of serious economic harm for decades in the MMGW/climate change scam, are turned on us in the 'pandemic'.
As someone who had a career making high quality, accurate engineering computer models for almost 40 years, this is very, very frustrating. In fields where the science is well known, and where the lab experiments can be done to accurately define the critical coefficients of the mathematical equations which drive these models, they can be accurate and useful.
When "computer modeling" is applied where the REQUIRED experiments to measure the coefficients CANNOT BE DONE, then you move into voodoo and scam rather than engineering and science.
This is massive, dangerous, STUPID misuse of a powerful tool, no different than using a chain saw to trim your toenails. No way that could go wrong.
5 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
stablemoney 5/10/2020 12:26:15 PM (No. 407069)
Masks and social distancing are being universally applied--- but no one knows if it works for preventing the spread of the virus. We only know for sure that it wrecks the economy.
1 person likes this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
jeffkinnh 5/10/2020 12:43:57 PM (No. 407092)
I agree that the predictive sciences are inherently dicey. They depend on models that are simplified sketches of real situations. In some cases it would trying to determine if a person's arm was swollen by examining a stick figure "model" of their body. Such models are also based on current understanding. If future circumstances are different, the model is useless. Further, models need input data. As has been made very clear by the COVID crisis, the data gathered is very poor. How many people have had the disease. We really don't know. How many people have died from it? We really don't know. No wonder the outcomes don't follow predictions.
The issue is, we should KNOW THAT and stop trying to make policy based on such unreliable predictions. However, the people that do this kind of work are pulled in front of the cameras and predict disaster with no caution as to the reality of their predictions. Many of them work in government. Many have good intentions and are truly concerned but, THEY ARE WRONG. Others are being manipulated deliberately by politicians to scare the public into submission.
Science became corrupted when it was adopted by politics. Politicians put forth the money for academics to get paid and come up with the answers they wanted. Then the politicians could claim that "science" was on their side. It also bound scientists to the politicians that used them. In real science, when new information comes up, eventually it is incorporated into the body of knowledge. Even that can be slow to happen because of the threat to prestige and egos. Now with politics bound in, declaring you were in "error" will get your funding cut off. That means that the university you are associated with will suffer as well. There is enormous pressure to NEVER, EVER admit being wrong. On the other side, there is enormous pressure to generate the kind of "science" that politicians are willing to pay for and find useful. Under such pressures to prestige, career, and ego, it is an easy choice to keep the pablum flowing.
4 people like this.
Yes, many of the developments attributed to "science" were initiated by inventors who were quite ignorant of formal science. Some of them were later improved by applied scientists. Real science is a slow process of gradual observation and correction, not usually appropriate for setting public policy.
Scientists who try to predict future events have a laughable lack of success. When they have a political agenda they should usually be ignored. Science fiction writers often do better, but they as frequently do worse!
The author could easily extend the list of failed predictions back to Malthus, who predicted global starvation around 1800. Well-know scientists dismissed the possible usefulness of electric power and the possibility of exploiting atomic energy. He could also include the British Astronomer Royal who, around 1930, dismissed space flight to the moon as an impossible fantasy. A well-known friend of mine wrote a paper proving that it would forever be impossible to tape-record television about six months before the first commercial TV recorder went on sale. He changed fields and became a pure mathematician!
2 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
DVC 5/10/2020 3:25:29 PM (No. 407268)
And SOMEHOW, Paul Ehrlich sells books and is invited to speak at public places, despite having been spectacularly, massively, totally wrong about many huge "coming apocalypse" books and predictions of starvation, running out of resources and overpopulation.
People never learn. Paul Ehrlich should have been fired from his job at Stanford long ago, and yet he is still there, still being paid for being ALWAYS WRONG.
3 people like this.
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What a price we are paying for relying on the faulty predictions of a "scientific" statistical model.