| Science is Broken | ||
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Gary Novak Basic Reality Global Warming Prions Relativity Big Bang Asteroid Intelligent Design ATP Heart Cancer Geology Earth's Core Tornadoes Windmills Transgenic Crops Fluoride |
Science is Broken
Very little money is spent on science. An actual number cannot be produced, because the costs are integrated into mountains of administrative complexities. Looking at the published science, it would cost about $2 billion per year. That's excluding peripheral science and technological studies, like how to run a nuclear reactor. This view does not include the big expenses, like the Hubble Telescope, human genome project or atom smashers, which are not instruments but cities. Nor does it include relativity, which is not science but a welfare system for physicists. The point is that shamefully little is spent on the science that shapes the modern society. When scientists apply for grants, most are rejected or required to be redesigned. Bureaucrats pretend they are setting standards for science by requiring everything to be done the way they want it. It isn't science when they do. Science cannot be dictated. Standards are determined through a processes of interaction between scientists. Bureaucrats are not on that map. All bureaucrats can do is play Captain May I. May I take a scissor step; no take a banana step. It's not a question of looking after the taxpayers' money. There aren't enough scientists to squander a significant amount of the taxpayers' money, and they couldn't squander it more thoroughly than the bureaucrats do. Science requires total freedom. Probing the unknown is the most complex task in society. To get in the way of a scientists is like a janitor trying to clean an operating table while a surgeon is doing a heart transplant. If a scientist has a deficiency, it isn't going to be corrected in Washington. The deficiencies of science are evaluated and dealt with by scientists, not outsiders. Washington is outside science. It isn't a question of degrees; it's a question of process. Science is not a process of deriving a hypothesis and testing it, as kiddies are taught, and secular humanists remind us. Tools are not available for testing hypotheses. If tools of testing are available, the subject is technology or engineering, not basic science which probes the unknown. The way science really works is that new methods of acquiring information are created, and data is collected. The resulting data is always surprising and never entirely predicted. This type of science has been almost totally destroyed by the corruptions which have overtaken science. An example is the contrivance of prion proteins being the supposed cause of Scrapies-like diseases. Bureaucrats dried up funding for all related research and financed one laboratory only. The laboratory started with the prion hypothesis and tested it. The tests were junk science, and the interpretations were shaped by predetermined conclusions. Junk science is pulling a test off the shelf for answering a question. There are no such tests for complex questions in science. It's like going to the moon and renting an automobile. Knowledge in science evolves slowly through thin lines of evidence acquired from a wide variety of sources. The focus sharpens as evidence accumulates. After Stanly Prusiner conducted about a dozen junk science tests, he got the Nobel Prize. Then other laboratories were allowed to study the subject. They couldn't reproduce Prusiner's results, because there isn't an objective and reproducible result to junk science tests. But supposedly, the Nobel scientist was right, and the others were wrong. Now hundreds of such junk science tests are conducted—all supposedly showing that prion proteins create diseases. One of the main differences between junk science and objective reality is logic. There is no science without logic. Logic is the relationship between realities. The most important realities are the basic principles. Frauds contradict basic principles as if observations were so infallible that they don't require logic. Relativity set that standard in stone by contradicting all related principles of science and concepts of logic. Science is extremely labor intensive. If a scientist wants to waste his time and that of employees, let him show other scientists what he is worth. It won't cost the taxpayers as much as the fraud of bureaucrats supposedly purifying the experimental designs. When scientists can make their own mistakes, they will be involved in a process that produces results. There are a lot of laboratory failures, but failures are sources of information in science. There are thousands of important questions that need to be studied by science. But they are not being studied, because scientists are not allowed to. Bureaucrats want them to do something other than that. External accountability is totally essential in science and everything else. Without it, corruption is the invariable result. The public needs to be looking over the shoulders of scientists, with journalists producing criticisms. In case the difference isn't readily apparent for total freedom vs. external accountability, I'll point out some elements. One difference is to preempt. There is no pre- in real science. Decisions are so numerous that they have to be made in response to conditions in a laboratory, not at a desk. Accountability is post-, not pre-. After a person does something, you disgrace him with criticism instead of preventing him from doing it. Another difference is the process of criticism. With criticism, the process is infinite, and the truth gradually evolves. By contrast, the preemptive process of purifying cuts something short removing the whole process from all but the mind of one or a few dictators. Nothing but truth ends corruption. Produce the truth, and corrupters fix their own problems. What then should Congress be doing about frauds in science such as relativity, prions, energy misdefined, etc.? First, they should produce truth. Everything constructive Congress does is limited by and directed by the truth, though there are some murky frauds which sneak past the view of the public. After the truth is produced, the answers will be obvious. |