There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences. The reproducibility crisis, as pointed out by the statistician W. M. Briggs, is close to universal. Across the academy, there is a plague of faulty and fraudulent studies being produced. Worse yet, the systems for controlling fraud seem to be encouraging it. Peer review now means nothing more than politically acceptable in the soft science fields.
Briggs offers one reason for what is happening. He notes that engineering is not having this problem. The reason is the bridge has to actually work as predicted or the engineers suffer a heavy price. Engineering is not science, but it relies upon the sciences to produce practical things. Those practical things must hold up to reality, which controls what comes out of engineering as accepted theory. In other words, everything in engineering gets tested against reality.
The academy, on the other hand, never has to face reality this way. Even in the hard sciences, reality avoidance is common. Theoretical physics has entered a world that is beyond the ability to test. Math is still math, but much of what is done is purely speculative or requires unproven assumptions. In the soft sciences, the rules have collapsed entirely and most of what comes out is narrative framing. The “science” is limited to providing cover for current fads.
Another reason for the crisis in the sciences is modeling. Anyone who has worked with models knows that the model maker can quickly become a god. He creates a model of the world based on what he would like it to be rather than as a reflection of the bit of reality he is trying to understand. Of course, model makers often have a boss who needs to be pleased. That boss could be in a corner office or the boss could be an angry mob of blue-haired harpies patrolling campus.
The point is you can make models do anything. The model maker is like a script writer in that he can make the rules do what he needs to reach his desired end. Bad script writers use clunky plot devices to solve problems for their characters. Bad model makers create a set of rules and data selection methods to close the gap between theory and reality. Since the model will never be tested against reality in the soft sciences, bad model makers can quickly become stars.
Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends? Has the steady decline of standards in society dragged down the academy or has the corruption of institutions subverted society, including the people in the sciences? Is it simply the natural product of multiculturalism, which needs narratives to hold it together, due to the lack of natural social bonds found in homogenous societies?
You can model this many ways, depending upon how you as the model maker feel about these topics. The last bit is a clue to the problem. The rise of narratives in social discourse tracks with the rise in diversity. Read anything from a century ago and it is free of the narrative structures we find common today. A story about an athlete was mostly the facts about his life. He was not cast as a character in a drama about social justice or the fight against exploitation.
The ubiquity of narratives gets lost in the flood of them. There is a real war going in Europe and the political class speaks of nothing but narratives. They have meetings followed by press conferences to inform the public on the status of their latest narratives and the battle of narratives surrounding the war. Meanwhile, the Russian army slowly grinds down the Ukrainian army. The same can be said of the energy crisis, which is ignored in favor of narratives about climate change.
You get the sense that the people talking about their narratives and messaging, a subset of narrative framing, think that if they get enough people to believe their story, reality will bend to that story. Put another way, if they can model reality with a set of rules and assumption in such a way that only their preferred conclusions are possible, then reality will have no choice but to comply. Like the model makers, the narrative creators have become gods in their creations.
This does not answer the question of causality, but it is clear that the problem of modeling in the sciences has a related problem in the public realm. In elite society, the focus is no longer on the things that are true, like the axioms of mathematics, but rather on the things that are true within the context of accepted rules, like the equity in the distribution of advanced degrees in the sciences. One is true whether you believe it or not, while the other is only true if you accept the assumptions.
A century ago, smart people understood this difference. Models of realty had to account for those things that are axioms of the universe. Over that time a steady shift has gone on where objective reality is excluded from the discussion of the narrative and at the same time, the narrative challenges objective reality. Put another way and getting back to the Briggs post, models are no longer tested against reality, but reality is being tested against the models.
This helps explain why supposedly serious academics sit in front of congressional committees and claim to not know the definition of a woman. They are not simply clinging to fashionable politics. At the heart of it is the claim that reality simply does not comport with the new model of society, so we have to dismiss that bit of reality, in this case biological sex. Just as the model makers can feel like a god, the narrative makers believe they can bring reality to heel.
There is a lot here that deserves further examination, but it is clear that the crisis in science correlates with the crisis in the West. The causality is not clear, but what is clear is that what passes for the smart fraction is no longer willing or able to accept that there are things that are true regardless of opinion. They are questioning the very basics of reality by claiming there is no difference between relations of ideas, their models and narratives, and matters of fact and observable reality.
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No one’s denying that academia has gone to the dogs, but I remember Michael Woodley of Menie and Ed Dutton arguing that the crisis in replication is widely exaggerated. It should make sense that cutting edge research, the sort of things we are not all that certain about and we put most often under test, is pretty shaky.
If researchers would try to “prove” already established facts, we’ll have no replication problem. But neither original, interesting research.
Another interesting post. It touches on several aspects of politics, reality, the narrative, etc.
“The narrative makers believe they can bring reality to heel.” Well, they can; if they can shape public opinion to support their narrative. Public opinion will then influence political action and create the “reality”.
In “Truth & Politics” an essay written in 1961 Hannah Arendt posits – “that the political realm possesses the exclusive ability to ‘guarantee reality’ to mankind. It’s how human affairs move forward in western society. If this realm ‘guarantees reality’, then it follows that when the reality of factual truth disrupts the political realm’s pursuit of change, those seeking change will distort factual truths to forge the reality least disruptive to their aims.” In essence, facts are expendable in the political arena.
I know readers of this post’s idea of reality is hard reality (that you ignore at your peril). The left is playing a different game. It would a good start understand that if you want to challenge their reality.
A big part of the problem is the more corrupt the science the more it works as propaganda.
White people more than any other tribe need constant confirmation that they are good, smart people.
It makes them very easy to manipulate. There is nothing most Whites loved more than to feel superior to Trump who was a bad, stupid person unlike Obama who was good and smart.
“There is nothing most Whites loved more than to feel superior to Trump who was a bad, stupid person unlike Obama who was good and smart.”
Not sure who you hang out with. Most whites voted for Trump. He even won a majority among white women.
If only whites could vote, Trump in 2020 would have had almost 500 electoral votes. If only white men could vote, he would have had 535.
It only takes a sentence or two, inserted in the guidelines for proposals, to corrupt the academy.
“Please demonstrate how your proposal is related to [woke shibboleth]”
or
“Proposals related to [woke shibboleth A] or [woke shibboleth B] are especially encouraged.”
That’s it. I saw at first hand how this instantly made all research woke at a major Australian humanities department in the early 2000s.
I’ve run thousands of academic (social science) peer review processes in my time – everyone knows the system is not perfect. It helps that it’s double-blind, but true-enough, when the reviewers themselves are biased then the whole thing is worthless.
Social science faculties have gone woke at an astonishing rate over the last ten years. Check out Queen Mary University Business School (part of the University of London) – https://www.qmul.ac.uk/busman/staff/academic/. It’s composed entirely of immigrants, feminists, and gays. Pick anyone at random and you’ll see the woke agenda they are pushing. There’s even a professor dude whose name is “Perri 6”. Not gay obviously.
I have a question though. The professors, associate professors, readers, assistant professors, senior lecturers and lecturers who are busily brainwashing society – are they the ‘elite’ or the ‘dirt people’ in the scheme used around here? It’s never been clear to me where the line is drawn.
Because I am a well-published, known in my field senior rank professor (Humanities, so you can thank my folxes for a lot of the current intellectual turd soup metastasizing into other fields), I really ought to be pretty cloudy. But because I am actually very DR and superbased, I must dwell with the rest of you humus types. I hope you appreciate my cloudy edges at least.
When the time comes for the midnight arrests and filling the cattle cars, my guess is they’ll be called “expendable,” or less charitably, “the useful idiots.” A review of the history of Stalin’s purges or comparable episodes in modern history are quite instructive.
You can have equality or quality, but you can’t have both.
You are right, of course, Eric, and the West has chosen equity, which explains why Western Civilization is dying. Equity is treasured above all else even to the sacrifice of quality. Better to live in squalor, like everyone else, ruled over by plutocrats, than to stand out and to seek out a life of quality, distinction, and achievement.
Truth, beauty, arete, excellence? How quaint. How white. Give us Mediocrity! Equity!
Technically you CAN obtain both, by lowering the standard until all meet the rubber standard of “quality.” This seems to me at least, how Liberals/Progressives in fact “succeed” in most of their programs (viz, public education).
You can have equality or you can have liberty, but not both as they are antonyms.
The United States was founded “To secure the blessings of Liberty…”
30+ years ago, theoretical physicist, and experimentalist, Kip Thorne wrote about how to test for gravity waves using huge lasers spread apart by large distances. (Gravity waves are very long wavelengths making them difficult to detect…if they even exist). 30 years later, we detect gravity waves using Thorne’s proposed detector. Same issue with the Higgs Boson – believed to be a crackpot theory in the 60’s – eventually renamed the God particle. It, too, has now been detected. In both cases, the theories are slowly being validated experimentally. The problem is the theories are exceptionally difficult ($$$ and technology) to test. Einstein’s general relativity (specifically, deflection of light around stars caused by warping of space time) wasn’t proven, and Einstein’s theory not embraced, until Sir Arthur Eddington measured* the deflection of starlight around the sun during a 2019 eclipse (in Africa).
*it turns out Eddington’s data was flawed, and he didn’t measure what he though. However, later experiments also verified the theory.
I use these example all the time when mocking the “climate change” freaks. Their theories are not predictive IN ANY VERIFIABLE WAY. And when data emerges proving them wrong, they just ignore it. As I often joke as a Colorado resident, “OK, so where did all the glaciers go?”
Any decent theory can be tested against reality. It may be hard to do, and take a long time, but it CAN be done.
That’s why we never get the full story on the so-called Covid “vaccines”…
1919 not 2019 for Eddington, sorry
Magic 8 ball says ”The Full Story” will never be known.
What was it, 133,000 glaciers in the world in 1960?
And in 2020, there are only 133,000 glaciers left. A disaster!
Generally agree. Relevant to climatology, one of the main criticisms against the climate alarmists is that their computer models have little predictive value. For science, a good theory will have descriptive and, possibly, predictive value. The climate models, apparently, have neither.
An additional problem: If you don’t like the data, change it! This goes by many names, but “fraud” covers it nicely. The climate alarmists have been caught in this already. Of course, it’s an ancient problem. Relevant to the Covid-19 “vaccines,” one of the most blatant (and alarming) is the alleged DMED cover-up that made the news early this year. If the whistleblower’s claims were true, then you have an all-but-certain admission by the Feds that falsifying records (of medical treatments of the military in this case) is A-OK. That could not happen without approval at the highest levels of government.
“the rules have collapsed entirely”
I have observed this firsthand and it was one of what I call the ‘little redpills’ that led me to this side. It got me thinking about how science gets done. It is a cooperative enterprise and has a culture or set of behaviors.
Western countries have been taking bright and capable foreigners into our institutions for a very long time, training them, watching them succeed in a Western system, then sending them back to their own countries’ institutions where they cease to produce anything of quality. Institutional culture matters.
Science in the West used to be overwhelmingly European men who had a shared culture of what I call ‘the trail of truth’. There is a mathematical understructure of physical reality and that our mission is to find out what is true. Most women (yes, there are some) and most non-Europeans (yes, there are some) do not do ‘trail of truth’. So, if you have an all-women institution or an all non-European institutions, generally you will not have a culture of ‘trail of truth’. Some women and some non-Europeans flourished in the old culture but when their numbers grew so great that they changed the underlying culture, the system atrophied.
Our European institutions are collapsing because now they are filled with a critical mass of foreigners and women who not only don’t naturally want to follow a ‘trail of truth’ but are actively hostile to the notion. Christian European masculine culture is the glue that held the enterprise together and without it the enterprise becomes mostly welfare for the credentialed, paid for by manufacture of fiat currency and robbery of the diminishing productive class.
The collapse of the old international financial means that Western countries can no longer afford both their subsidy of higher civilization like scientific research and their bloated diversity welfare virtue signaling. It will be fascinating and entertaining to observe how the conflicts over the distribution of resources for the credentialed play out during the ongoing collapse.
As some have pointed out, not sure if or how long that’s true of engineering, although it may be the last domino to fall. There’s plenty of recent examples of USA infrastructure proving to be 3rd world level.
Hermann Hesse predicted all this in 1946 in The Glass Bead Game. As Europe rebuilds itself in the 25th century, after the Century of Wars, the scholars of Castalia engage is “useless” studies and play a purely intellectual Game. Why? Because the root cause of the Century of Wars was the corruption of the intellect: ideas became subservient to ideologies. The scholars of Castalia serve society as examples of intellectual integrity. Hesse observes, in passing, that when truth is corrupted, it’s not long before the machines stop working and the bridges start falling down.
This point is still systematically ignored on the manly Right, where IQ fetishists routinely denigrate liberal arts and “soft” sciences, and counsel White youth to ignore them and fellate STEM. to avoid “wokeness.” It’s true that the humanities are corrupted, but that is because they have BEEN corrupted, it’s not inherent, and needs to be fixed. And lauding STEM is itself part of the problem. America needs more Sanskrit scholars like Revilo Oliver than more autistic STEM incels. There’s a reason Spengler abandoned teaching math (STEM!) and began studying history (SOFT!)
I think you are slandering and misrepresenting STEM. STEM is not the way it is portrayed in comedy series like “The Big Bang Theory.”
Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game” is one of my favorite novels and undoubtedly his most profound. The game itself involves a synthesis of musicology, math, linguistics, “hard” philosophy, and astronomy. It is an aesthetic ideal played by ascetics. The kind of humanities and liberal arts taught in today’s universities play no part (but you do point that out).
Hesse himself of course had no real background in the exact sciences and he was probably the kind of dilettante he excoriates in “The Glass Bead Game.” Today Hesse is known as one of the luminaries of the 1960s counter-culture, with lower-middle-brow novels like “Siddhartha” and “Steppenwolf.” “Like, man, have you read Hesse? He’s groovy and deep.”
There’s nothing “lower middle-brow” about “Steppenwolf” and “Siddharta”. They date from the 1920s and they are clearly German literary novels of a man born in the 19th century, so I don’t see how they could be. The novels became fashionable to name-drop among dopeheads of the 1960s, but that is not a reflection on Hesse. (Incidentally, if we are rating novels by brows, I might place Le Carre as middle-brow and his airport-novel writing imitators as lower middle-brow. It’s laughable to put Hesse in that company.)
Of course we need “soft” sciences. Hell, everyone can benefit with some proper understanding of what used to be called liberal arts. But STEM “pays the bills” as they say in a first world, technological society such as we aspire to. The problem is how much of each is necessary and who pays.
Liberal arts need not be “soft”—a derogatory term at best, but unfortunately it has been hijacked and has way too much ideology, rather than science taught in such coursework. Hell, this battle has been fought since I was a student with the controversy over Western history and culture being taught…”hey, ho Western Civ has got to go” was the first thing I heard approaching the Admin Building to register.
So the term “soft” is unfortunately appropriate in it’s derogatory use.
Kind of like “soft as puppy shit”.
“Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends? Has the steady decline of standards in society dragged down the academy or has the corruption of institutions subverted society, including the people in the sciences?”
I would say that this outcome occurs because the predominant American vice is impatience. Efficiency experts have a long history in America (hell, we elected one to the presidency), and this impatience is vaguely implicit in progressivism (which has a notion of movement towards something). This impatience drives us towards getting things done quickly, often without regard for quality, and that includes science. Meme culture and market trading thrive here because our culture is always looking for the next trend, for fun and profit. This is undoubtedly easier for Americans and other new world colonies because there’s no millennia of custom and tradition that weighs things down, and the early settlers moved here because it was fashionable and exciting rather than an extension of history and tradition. Thus, we prize speed and novelty over patience and tradition, and the information age ratchets this effect considerably.
Speaking to a black yesterday about the feudal fever dream of the WEF’s “sovereigns” lording it over the “commons”*, I noted that the WEF is white people, that this is a Bwana’s dream.
He replied that someday soon, there will be no more white people, only a mix, free of white racism, rich and happy- the Star Trek dream.
Last night, watching motel cable tv (our generations Bible), I said to myself, “See? The tv gods are singing our Star Trek / Star Wars future into reality.”
As Severian tells us,
a Juggalocracy — rule by Juggalos.
*****
WEF comment at Kunstler’s:
“Some of their plans from ‘AI simulations’ were apparently recently leaked out (and reported several days ago on
theBurningplatform.com). and they supposedly plan to take the property of all with net worth under $10million, and designate them as commons; over 10mil are the ‘sovereigns.’ (Sovereigns keep their money and can trade markets and own things privately.) Commons will receive $1000 per month and rent homes and cars. There will be ‘fines’ for bad behavior and credits for ‘good’ behavior (max of $1500 in commons’ back accounts).
looks like ‘Enforcing Climate Mandates’ will be the main tool the WEF will employ to disposses ‘The Commons.’”
Kill the men and rape the women. This is the fundamental rule of war since recorded history (and undoubtedly pre-historically). It’s how less viable populations secure the DNA of more evolutionarily fit populations. When they say ‘Diversity is our strength’ part of what they mean is ‘your DNA will soon be our DNA.’ Anything that prevents this is ‘white racism/white supremacy’.
“It’s how less viable populations secure the DNA of more evolutionarily fit populations.”
That is so good. Plateau evolution.
Perhaps then, as I said to black dude, our fate is to be Neanderthals- only a thread of chromosomes in creme-coffee flesh.
Plateau evolution is when AI machines are used to guide CRISPR gene editing technology to create super beings, the great reset! Silicon tech merges with DNA editing tech!
Trans-humanism FTW, baby!
Do we have Delany’s radiation- scarred astronaut “neuters”, or are they nonbreeder Hive drones?
“He replied that someday soon, there will be no more white people, only a mix, free of white racism, rich and happy- the Star Trek dream.”
Bro, I dunno if you realized it, but the kneegr0w threw down the gauntlet atcha.
The kneegr0w is intuiting as a properly darwinian creature: The White man shall be denied access to the White womb, ergo the White race shall vanish into extinction.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the kneegr0w’s position and Thoreau’s red ants versus black ants.
https://americanliterature.com/author/henry-david-thoreau/essay/the-battle-of-the-ants
BTW, the juice have precisely the same innate personality type as do the kneegr0ws: They’re purely darwinian hominids, instantiating a subhuman psychology of “Eat or be Eaten”.
The sooner the White man wakes up to the underlying nihilistically darwinian nature of the foes he faces, the better the White man’s chances of surviving the coming maelstrom which is now lurking just beyond the horizon.
http://www.europeanamericansunited.org/school1/Fiction/kipling/awakened.htm
there will be no more white people, only a mix, free of white racism
—
First, he’s leaving out a great number of people who are not white or black. Second, there are already countries like that and they’re hardly peaceful or free from ethnic strife.
As I said below, “Wait, next you’re going to try to tell me world isn’t flat…”
Next time you see him, remind him that without white people he’d be living in a hut framed with sticks and dried cow dung for siding.
So the asshats who are worth say 1-5 million are just gonna say,”ok, you win”?
It’s one thing to think something, it’s quite another to do the deed.
Add that to the people with 2.1 million to 9.9 million, who might be on their way to 10 million plus.
Interesting post today. I can only speak about the hard sciences and even here only briefly. To my mind there have been two main forces at work: 1)The tendency toward abstraction, and 2) The bureaucratization of science.
With regards to abstraction, it probably started with Newton’s mechanics and its subsequent casting in Lagrangian and Hamiltonian forms (which served as the springboard for quantum mechanics). This re-casting involved further abstractions such as the calculus of variations. Then the thermodynamics and electrodynamics of the 19th century, where the later was eventually clothed in the language of vector calculus and then (in the 20th century) the exterior calculus. All of this classical physics — mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, and fluid mechanics — is useful to the engineer. So is the quantum mechanics of the early 20th century. But then physics started to go baroque, and the math used increasing abstruse — differential geometry, fiber bundles, Lie groups, and so on. And the connection of theoretical physics with the experimental increasingly tenuous. To my mind theoretical physics has not gone anywhere for fifty years, maybe longer.
The bureaucratization is the other main driver. Academics have to “publish or perish” if they want a job in the bureaucratic institution that is today’s university and under this pressure what gets produced is meretricious but pompous garbage dressed up in obscure technicalities.
Since science replaced religion, scientists have become the new priests. But quite a few people are correctly noticing they have no clothes on.
“the scientists have become the new priests.”
Very true, but the rot set in via the social sciences (psychology and sociology notably) and then moved into the hard sciences. Psychology and sociology have been corrupted and used for political purposes rather than scientific purposes for decades, and this alone accounts for much of the resulting lack of replicability. To witness a psychology researcher and/or sociology researcher in act is to witness the preferred result guiding the analysis every step of the way. It’s difficult enough even if you want to be objective in such ‘sciences’; it’s impossible if you don’t want to be objective at all but instead want your results to advance a political aim, including the introduction of quasi-religious narratives into the collective psyche of the people. Most social science is bunk, and best appreciated as an aesthetic adventure in humbuggery.
Effectively, the social sciences and humanities have become activism masquerading as scholarship.
“Science has proven ….” or “Research has demonstrated …” Yeah, sure.
As posted earlier, I’m a big fan of Magic 8 Ball.
It’s real!
What is published in my field hasn’t for the most part been worth reading since the early 1960s. Humanities is an intellectual wasteland of labyrinths within labyrinths leading nowhere.
Agree with you in general but fell compelled to point out that the social “sciences” began as political projects rather than subsequently get corrupted. With sociology and psychology the idea is to dress up what is essentially political ideology and activism in some statistics. With economics it goes further, and the kind of math used in physics is transplanted to economics with utterly farcical results (and the charlatans who do this well are awarded the Nobel Prize in economics). I’m reluctant to cite Foucault as he was a J and a homosexual, but he explained clearly and at length how much these social “sciences” are really ideological and expressions of elite power and propaganda. And how they originated this way.
Foucault was a fudgepacker alright but he was not a Joux.
It’s a spiritual matter at root, Ali
Either truth and honesty are held in the highest regard, perhaps the end all and be all, or they aren’t
And if they aren’t, everything that depends on these things as their bedrock will fall down. This should probably be obvious. But it isn’t obvious, and now everything is falling down.
Science has religious roots, because it was founded on truth, and truth at those times had a fundamental religious basis. Science and morality are highly interwoven. Perhaps why the sciences blossomed and came to their highest fruition in the Christian West where God was held to be eternal truth. It needed that soil to grow.
I think one of the conceits of our age is to think that science and its pursuits could be sustained in an areligious society. It’s not the schools, the people, the professors, these are the effects.
“I think one of the conceits of our age is to think that science and its pursuits could be sustained in an areligious society.”
The *idea* of science became the new dogma. Again, paucity of time precludes my going deeper into this but many of the earlier “scientists” (they would never call themselves such) were really occultists — Newton saw himself as an alchemist, Kepler was an astrologer, and so on. The science of today was an outgrowth of the study of the occult. Frances Amelia Yates goes into this deeper in her books. For the occultists of that period, math turned out to be one of the master keys of the universe. It revealed some of the hidden connections of the world — mechanics revealed the connection between the terrestrial and celestial, electrodynamics the connection between lightning and magnetized stones, and so on. The *idea* of science today is a curiously sterile, inert, and lifeless one, promulgated by people who know nothing of it, how it grew out of occult work, or its various accomplishments.
Scientists were a bit like your crazy uncle’s interpretation of Christianity. Call them what you will, occultists, magicians, alchemists, but what’s important is that they were accepted into the bosom of a Christian society. Because no matter what they were, they had the pursuit of truth as their imperative. And because of that most people were going to see in them their spiritual cousins and brothers, the same family, and so they were allowed to roam and do their thing. So the spirit of that age was a pursuit of truth, which is how the scientists and the believers were able to coexist because they breathed in the same air. Yes they fought and argued, if I have to qualify myself for the likes of Karl Van Hungus, but I think most know what I mean.
And as went religion, so went the corruptibility of the sciences. I bet we could graph out, if the data were somehow quantifiable, the correlation in the decline of religious belief and feeling with the increasingly bizarre paths that science was taking.
Let me put it this way to make my point. If a man holds truth to be of utmost importance, that if he thinks if he lies or cheats or falsifies anything that he is going to suffer in some way, be it in hell or even through karma, then he isn’t going to go along with the current program. He’s not going to lie to keep his job, make false statements to get a grant, fudge his numbers to make the world look like it’s melting. He’s not going to publicly lie though his teeth that a man in a dress is a women. And likeminded people are not going to let him get away with it and would punish him in some way if he did. Because that’s how moral people act and is what they do.
When lying has no consequence, it means science dies. It means society built on Christian morality crumbles. It’s that simple. All the other stuff are consequences of the spiritual and hence moral decline. When God is no longer watching you, if you believe that, you get what we have today. A bunch of feral animals, and no disrespect meant to actual feral animals. Even they have a core.
“but what’s important is that they were accepted into the bosom of a Christian society. Because no matter what they were, they had the pursuit of truth as their imperative.”
They were barely tolerated and many kept their leanings and pursuits to themselves to avoid getting burned at the stake. They were heretics because the Christian Church had scant tolerance for alchemy, for magic, and for whatever grew out of them. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo barely avoided the same fate.
The idea of “truth” is a curiously modern one and one which most working occultists and scientists stay shy of — that there is some objective reality that one can somehow either get to grips with or get close to.
The idea of a scientist today — a caricature if ever there was one — is of someone in a white lab coat holding up a vial or test tube and using the ‘scientific method” (whatever the hell that is) to “discover” the truth.
Brilliantly said.
Truth is a modern concept, Ali?
Not in Europe it wasn’t. If it were you wouldn’t have had the pursuit of it.
Can’t chase after what isn’t there
Agreed &
Well said
Some of the people here could have their own blogs.
I was approached to tutor stats at Uni. The reason they couldn’t grasp stats was because they hadn’t grasped any of it’s precursors: including basic arithmetic and simple algebra. Yet they were taking these kids’ money via student loans. An entire sector of society interpreted the fact that college grads earned more money on average than high school grads meant that minting college grads would lift up entire cohorts out of poverty.
There’s whole mind set that’s needed before math, or physics, or statistics can really be learned. People brought up in Europe don’t think about it any more than a fish does about the water that makes its survival possible. But when you come from an alien culture you begin to realize how much the the Western “way of being” and “way of seeing” is necessary before one can grapple with Western science (in the real sense). This is why I think that the science created by the Europeans can never really be transplanted to other societies except in two forms: 1) inert and lifeless dogma, or 2) through its engineering artifacts.
Totally agree
I think learning a different language is akin to what you describe — learning math and science coming from an alien culture.
Even learning basic Latin gives an English speaker a newfound appreciation of the language. Doors open up you never knew were there. I think if I were to learn German I’d also see English from a fresh perspective.
Language is a window into the person and his culture. How they arrange the words, in what sequence, speaks to who they are and how they think at a basic level. Putting the adjective before the noun in Italian, though seems fairly basic, but it does shine a light into what may be described as a fundamental difference between the Southern Europeans and the northern. Where the aspects of the thing, the object, lead you into an understanding of the thing itself, gives you a moment of pause before the hammer falls, as it were. It’s a more delicate way of expression. Then you take English where the noun com3 out and hits you in the head first, then come the qualifiers. It’s more forceful. Then giving nouns a feminine or masculine character, that also says something about the Latin mind.
All very interesting if you ask me. And why the EU is destined to collapse, as a side note.
Oops I meant the other way around with noun and adjective. I’m hungry and not quite with it he he
On a side note this has also meant the steady erosion of academic standards — even for the exact sciences. Just look at the high school syllabi and curricula in the year 1900 to understand how precipitously standards have fallen. Arguably most of today’s college graduates would fail the high school entrance exams in 1900.
On another side note, the number of freshmen and sophomores taking remedial math (and English) courses is large — and much of the material being covered should have been mastered not in high school but middle school.
A concomitant of the erosion of standards is grade inflation and credential inflation. Many (most?) degrees mean next to nothing now.
Although you are not an IQ fetishist, most analysis I’ve seen show a pretty good correlation of race, as in minority status and lack of college prep. Whites still do pretty good if they come from non-minority areas. But HS all over is terrible due to need to pass out degrees.
And now we have employment quotas, which will also be disastrous. They appear to be trying to make this fly by encouraging a team-based approach to all work, whereby the limitations of one or more team members are mitigated by the strengths of another. But how this doesn’t result in resentment and conflict is anyone’s guess. The psychological manipulation techniques of the Socio-Emotional Learning movement seem to be the next big thing to address such issues. I’d love the Zman to spend an episode or article digging into this movement as I think the religious aspects of our ruling cult are revealed in its teachings. As opium of the people go, it puts previous religions in the shade for its manipulativeness. It may fail the ‘true religion’ test as its aims are too contaminated by political goals, but it seems designed to fill the vacuum left by Christianity’s demise in our society.
I think the whole black thing was the early progressives trying to turn what was in fact something of a lack of will power, returning them to their homeland, that they tried to turn those lemons into lemonade. So instead of admitting, “we were weak,” they built a mythos around it to cover up that fact.
“Hmmm…. How can we turn this around and flip it over so that we don’t show that we were weak but instead show that we did it because it was always our intent? That’s right! We can say that we were just trying to live by the rule of egalitarianism! “
Then they never could let it go, so the story ends, and instead they’d massage it and turn it over in their hands like soft clay, shaping it, and the whole world went to the dogs.
Not so sure I agree with you. Most of what we would call Classical Physics has been shown to be macro level cases of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. If you want to get a physicist excited, ask him to show you how F=ma and Maxwell’s equations are approximations of quantum theory applied to large objects moving very slow. It’s actually pretty cool to see this done.
The abstraction you describe largely flows from the total weirdness of quantum theory (and yes, it’s still just a theory). In order to communicate it requires abstraction. And crazy maths, and maths are also an abstraction.
I do think you are right that theoretical physics has been hitting dead ends for decades. Mostly because they’ve solved, and proved, most of the things that can be solved and experimentally proved. We can’t test the center of a black hole or probe parallel universes, for example.
Agreed on the bureaucratization of science, which has a corrosive and sclerotic effect on scientific inquiry.
That being said, most of the problems in the “soft” sciences is their inability to apply even basic maths to what they are doing. And, when they try, their predictions are always wrong.
In 2009 I was an MBA student at a large public university. The professor was droning on and on about the many equations connecting government spending to things like GDP and unemployment. The problem for him? I plugged all the Obama/Bush “stimulus/TARP” Keynesian numbers into his (and the textbook’s) equations and NONE of what the equations predicted actually verified.
I told him this in a classroom setting. Then I talked about Einstein and relativity being proven right countless times to 7+ decimal places. He told me to stop trying to make the class political.
When the reality doesn’t match their theory, they ignore reality and preach the theory.
“When the reality doesn’t match their theory, they ignore reality and preach the theory.”
Good summation of the post-reality world.
Much wisdom in your words. As a similar influence, I see the ever-increasing role of the State in directly funding education, especially higher education, as well as funding research. Your comment that “science replaced religion” is very true at least in the sense of what a government directly funded. Now, I’m sure that there is some government funding of religion still, but I’ll bet it pales in comparison to funding for public universities and government funded research, whether those be academic grants or via contracts to private corporations.
Until relatively modern times, the few who got university educations did so at their own (or a patron’s) expense. Many great discoveries similarly were made via a wealthy man’s hobby or perhaps an artist with a wealthy patron.
The bureaucratization of academe on a mass scale could not have begun before the 19th century. In any case, for sure we have profited from many discoveries that likely could only have been done with such massive funding (e.g. the space program). It’s probably unavoidable that such systems became entrenched special interest groups.
Torture some numbers statistically until an anomaly can be made to appear, then elaborate that into a fantasy and amplify it in a cornucopia of bullshit. Cut and paste that into a grant application and the ticket to an all expense paid study trip abroad beckons. Published bullshit becomes the basis of a narrative which, if repeated frequently enough, matures into genuine dogma.
Yep. Like the news reports a few years ago about how new IQ “studies” show that teachers and reporters have the same level of IQ as engineers. I remember a news article discussing a groundbreaking study that showed that medical doctors’ IQ was no higher than the general population.
In college, our anthropology professor asked the class of about 50 students to raise your hand if you think men have bigger skulls than women. Like everyone, I hesitated for a moment, thinking it must be some counter-intuitive trick science question. Them I’m all, nah man, I know what my eyes have seen for the last 21 years. So I raised my hand. Along with maybe 1 or 2 other students out of freaking 50. We were right of course. I forget what his point was. But looking back I wonder if he was a free spirit professor and the question was his way of measuring how frighteningly PC and delusional his students become each passing year.
Also I remember an article in Slate around 2008 about a new study that “showed” women don’t actually talk more than men.
Newsflash: New studies show that taller is actually shorter. Ugly is pretty. And jokes aren’t funny.
“Newsflash: New studies show that taller is actually shorter. Ugly is pretty. And jokes aren’t funny.”
I’ve read these studies, and I must say I remain largely unconvinced.
A new study shows that most studies are fake.
I think a lot of it is caused by the fact that basic research has moved from the private sector into the universities. The private sector is very good at this. Bell Labs, Dow, 3M, RCA and the auto makers come to mind. All had huge research labs as did most large manufacturers. Even small companies would pool their resources with other small firms and create a basic research company to do research related to their industry. Researchers in these organizations had to convince their bosses that the research was ultimately going to drive profitability for the firms.
The academy relies mostly on government funding, which makes academic research political. Even the measure of success is different. In industry and private research, success is measured by an improvement in production, improving existing products or innovation of new products. In the academy, success is decided by the number of “citations” in “peer-reviewed” journals.
If it didn’t pay it would go away.
Stop the State funding and 80% of the bullshit stops.
They really have used the printing press to forge ahead and implement Modern Monetary Theory without formally declaring it.
I think the woman (last name Brinton?) who invented the theory realizes this since she kicking back and posting cat pics to her social media.
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The failure of all social policies and coercions designed to achieve equal outcomes between whites and blacks, as well as women and men, in certain areas of achievement has broken science in the Globo-Homo American Empire. At first the blank-slate social engineers and their coreligionists in the academy accepted the overall framework of science and its methodology for constructing an ever improving body of knowledge. As this methodology invariably resulted in disconfirmation of their foundational premises about the nature of reality, that their experiments in social engineering never failed to fail, their religious convictions left them no choice but to abandon reason and science, or at least do so whenever the methods of reasoning and scientific inquiry confront them with something that challenges their fundamental articles of faith. That catalogue of challenges now includes even basic arithmetic and sex differentiation.
The fact that these unhinged fanatics have risen to the highest levels of power in GHAE and have access to nuclear weapons must be considered an existential crisis to the other powers in the world. If I were in their shoes I’d be desperately looking for some internal leadership material to assist in removing the threat to human civilization GHAE presents.
If the Yankees weren’t so arrogant and hostile to southerners they could have been given a great education on the reality of blacks. And the conversation would have been thoughtful and cordial but very honest.
But Nooooooo. They had to go play their stupid games and win their stupid prizes.
Like I have noticed, these people went to Disney World and went on the ride “It’s a Small World After All” and came out changed. It must have been like a religious conversion experience. And no wonder Disney is now their Mecca. All the b.s. they believe in in one place.
I think that’s a little unfair, given who wanted African slaves by the millions. Just sayin’
The Delta plantation (((owners))), who contested with the (((shippers))), to bankrupt their hajnal competitors and gain dominance in King Cotton’s brokerage?
(And lending for both chattel assets and short-term corporate industrial charters- bridges, canals, toll roads, rail, etc)
Seems those bankrolled both Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis, so that the Duponts could get rich selling gunpowder to both sides.
Always work both sides of the war, for the last 200 years, so that no matter who wins, you win.
Sorry. Not helpful. But I don’t think that after fighting Indian savages and malarial swamps, white people looked around and said, “You know what this place really needs? Lots and lots of Africans.”
Ummm, the North got as many as the South and frankly none got as many as the Middle East.
When I was a kid, I saw black people in numbers in two places: northern cities and the South, and the cities were a result of internal migration.
“… and frankly none got as many as the Middle East.”
That’s because the Arab slavers lopped their newly enslaved Africans testicles off. I read an estimate of the death rate of 50%. The Arab perspective was that they wanted zero chance of their women being impregnated by an African slave, and that 50% was an acceptable loss rate because ‘plenty more where that came from.’
The slave owners were a tiny fraction of the people
Yet even they ended up learning the hard way, and that learning is what they could have imparted to the Yankees.
But again, Noooo, the Yankees knew better. I want you to see the face of John Kerry right now and tell me that is a man who doesn’t think he knows everything, and he’s only a trained monkey Yankee. But he was trained well, and humility is not in their training or DNA.
There’s a lot that goes unsaid. The North was willing to tolerate slavery for the sake of union, so the moral high ground of anti-slavery is BS.
Economics might explain the Civil War, but that doesn’t explain Reconstruction and ignores runaway slaves and the freedman question.
The Great Migration preceded Civil Rights and the New South.
BLM and race riots preceded what will end up being the suburbanization of the South.
You won’t hear a word about the sentiment that drives any of it, though. Too bad, because Southerners might better understand Northerners, and probably vice versa. Instead, we’re all Yankees, which is as reasonable as thinking all Southerners owned slaves or loved slavery.
Slaves and witches. WTF.
Correct. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there was almost immediate conflict between the remnants of the aristocracy and the Southern middle and working classes. The former wanted blacks to stay in the South for the cheap labor, and those who were not wealthy planters wanted them gone and driven out. Radical Republicans in the North wanted them to stay in place and join the aristocracy as a bulwark against the racially enlightened Southerners.
A compromise was reached with the Black Codes, whereby the upper crust got to keep their cheap black labor and acknowledged it was far too dangerous to be given the liberty to roam among those who wanted them gone. As an aside, I have always thought these fault lines in the South would have deepened even and maybe especially if the Confederacy had prevailed. Proximity is knowledge and only wealth can buy enough distance be it physical or at arms. We see this fully today.
Still, the Black Codes indicated the planters knew full well they had dangerous field hands and agreed to impose limitations on them that ultimately manifested in segregation, which ended only under the force of arms a second time due to the Yankee-infested Supreme Court and the emotion-drenched Lady Boys of New England.
In fairness, the initially ignorant Northerners grew to learn what these savages were and attempted Black Codes of their own, as Karl mentioned, with housing and deed restrictions that resulted in effective de facto segregation.
John Kerry, far enough removed from his less-heeled Yankee brothers and sisters, was perfectly comfortable with subjecting them to what his forebears forced working and middle class Southerners to endure. Indeed, Kerry knows nothing and assumes he knows everything, and that type infests the Northern upper classes. They are far more dangerous and disgusting than even the most depraved sociopathic inner-city blacks. Their time has arrived, too, although it is cold comfort.
Slavery may have been America’s first sin, but racial ignorance and delusion have proved its most deadly. Those White Southerners who rose up and demanded expulsion should have been heeded.
i think people in the north were pretty realistic about the nigs. they didn’t ban them from their neighborhoods for no reason.
Talking about the decision-makers, Karl. Isn’t that obvious? If not, then let me qualify my position.
But don’t make this poor man waste his energies footnoting everything he says. I wouldn’t do that to you.
The modern manifestation of this hypocrisy is the meme of the gated community of million plus dollar homes with manicured lawns sporting signs saying “Hate has no home here” and “Black lives matter.” And the kids go to a high quality public school or if not available, a tony private academy.
In a sense, the south lost the argument to the north about what constituted brotherly love. The abolitionists argued not merely that all men should free but also that no one should be rejected since that would be inconsistent with the love one owes to one’s fellow man.
The problem is, forced acceptance isn’t brotherly love either. That argument has yet to be made successfully in the public sphere. At best, forced acceptance (especially through means like psychological manipulation) will always contaminate the ends (brotherly love; “it’s a small world after all” global harmony.) No one likes to be on the receiving end of a bad means to achieve a questionable end. To love one’s neighbor as oneself one must be free to do so, not forced or manipulated to do so. However, no materialist utopian will ever accept this limit.
Yesterday I mentioned to an acquaintance (retired nurse, mid-60s) that the WHO web site all but claims that men can menstruate, get pregnant and give birth. She seemed shocked. 🙂
Actually, the causal relationship is quite clear. The very notion of narrativity springs from French postmodern theory, which was adopted, en bloc, by American academia beginning in the second half of the 60s, and then disseminated throughout the rest of society. Without this chain of causality, and the ensuing epistemological mayhem it spawned, there would be no multiculti, no AWR, and the hard sciences would still be precincts of empiricism.
As it is, every “discourse” (including science and the history of Western civilization) is considered a situationally variable congeries of symbols that is untethered from any objectively real substrate. And when the very concept of truth has been thus radically decentered, we get madness such as gender fluidity and the notion that sub-Saharan primitives are the master race.
I’m afraid I can see no end to the catastrophes springing from the postmodern conquest of the American, and now Western intelligentsia.
Before Derrida and Foucault there was the Frankfurt School. What’s the saying? “Nuturing a viper. . .?”
It was chronologically before, but it had no influence on them, or really on any French philosophy. Even a globohomo zombie like Macron recognizes “wokeness” as a weird foreign imposition.
The Frankfurt School was American—a product of the American government, largely. The French weren’t fooled by the name and stuck with actual German philosophy (Nietzsche and Heidegger). Foucault eventually became an American libertarian and Deleuze was a fan of American literature, but that’s all they have to do with us.
Someone will note that Foucault is the most cited philosopher in English.
Jesus is the most cited socialist.
But the Frankfurters sprang from an expressly Marxian tradition, and by no later than the late 50s had become political quietists (Marcuse excepted). In other words, while still opponents of capitalism, they no longer believed it could be defeated. They felt that the time for revolution had passed. Defeated, they busied themselves with largely apolitical aesthetic theorizing, or, as with Horkheimer, actionally became conservative. The reputation and supposed impact of the Frankfurters is wildly overblown.
The intellectual roots of the pomos, OTOH, were in Nietzschean nihilism and relativism. These people were and are far less concerned with relations of capital than they are with language and culture. Marxism never could have given rise to multiculti; pomo could do nothing but.
I’m inclined to agree w/ much of what you say, But you have to look at the university system in the US, and tenure track, and how various passé intellectual “factions” made their way into the mainstream and became entrenched.
It may sound simplistic, but this happened in two ways. First, as the pomos came to dominate the departments in Soc Sci/Humanities, they simply rewrote the scholarship in their fields according to postmodern, and most important, anti-white, views. Concomitantly, the textbooks quickly came to reflect those positions as well.
Second, the professors inculcated their beliefs in their students through what and how they taught their courses. Students thus received a double blast of indoctrination from what they read, and what they heard.
Over the course of decades, this produced the diabolical results we see in virtually every sector of society. There used to be a yawning chasm between town and gown. Alas, the town has been smothered by and assimilated to the gown.
“Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends?”
It’s just skinsuiting. The liars and deceivers noticed that people trusted science after the advances of 1940s-1970s, so they infiltrated science, gutted it and dressed Saul Alinsky in a lab coat.
And people still fall for it. The true religion of the modern age is Progressivism, the idea that everything new is automatically better. “But we’ve never used loose cotton masks to thwart a virus before! That means it works!”
Deferring to Line just below, re reality deniers, this is the result of enemy action.
Those who rewrite the past, forget then that they rewrote it. Having a false past then means that they can only see an imaginary future. They are unmoored, learning nothing.
The Netherlands, today? At the end of WWll, an island, once called Doggerland, was blasted with 7000 pounds of high explosives; then, the Allies pounded that island for a full decade with bombers. They, for some reason, wanted to erase all traces of what had once been there, and in its tunnels.
And now, they simply must seize the farmlands. Why? Because of Frisians. The Frisians are the last of the Freyans.
And Crimea, as well? Why, Crimea is not only home to the last Tatars, but more urgently, the last Goths.
A century has been spent studiously ignoring our globe-spanning ancestors, Scythians, Goths, Germanics, Saxons, of archaic white colonies from New Zealand to the Americas, across the Himalayas, the Bosphorous, and all around the Med.
The far-ranging, world-rim walkers, sons and dottirs of Arya and Freya, must be forgotten. The reach of their greatness, the munificence of their kind, must be erased, their light extinguished.
People on our side sometimes try to articulate what sets us apart from liberals or progressives. These discussions are sometimes framed as, “What makes someone right wing? What makes someone a conservative?”
Conservatives often say that the difference is that they believe in God or the Constitution. Dissidents sometimes say that the difference is that they believe in a natural hierarchy.
For my part, the basic distinction between us and them is that we know that our wishes do not change reality. We must conform to the rules of the world because the opposite simply can’t be sustained.
My distinction puts civic nationalists, for example, in the liberal category because of their belief that shared values are deeper than racial tribalism, which is clearly false.
Although one must give credit to the deniers of reality for the power that they have seized. I guess my faith is that this must fail eventually. It will be funny if my faith that reality cannot be defied turns out to be false.
How much is down to the rear-guard action of the progressives? Conservatives did a very poor job at defending institutions from psychos and progressives do an outstanding job of defending the institution from normal people. This is how they took over everything. As normal people left or retired, the progs made sure only other progs got in.
The question is not if, but when reality reasserts itself. Could be next week, could be a century from now. My personal guess is we are in decade counting territory at best.
Funny, huh? I’ve got a feeling we won’t be slapping our thighs.
LineIn: “My distinction puts civic nationalists, for example, in the liberal category because of their belief that shared values are deeper than racial tribalism, which is clearly false.”
Racial Tribalism. Agree. An essential distinction in thinking between us and them. Another dividing line would be Consensus. The Left and CivNats want to stay within the safe graces of their class and the classes above them. I guess I’m just describing Political Correctness. It could be called Class Correctness.
The biggest error that conservatives made was underestimating the competition. They themselves had a ‘reality is different than what progressives say it is’ mentality too but underestimated that a lot of damage can be done by motivated fanatics. ‘Get woke go broke’ is a classic example of this line of wishful thinking. I can’t hold conservatives completely to blame – the madness of the modern left has to be seen to be believed – but there is a decided Pentheus effect at work here. Even the sober minded and lawful buckle under the onslaught of the mad.
Just so. And more specifically, the Right–such that it was–failed to appreciate the fact that the New Left was vastly more virulent than the old-school liberals and even the Marxists they had dealt with prior to ca. 1965. The New Leftists had no interest in old fashioned notions such as honesty, due process, fair play and even–ridicule dictu!–free speech. Their only objective was to gain a monopoly on power and use that power to impose their perverse views upon society. Any form of compromise was out of the question, or at most, an artifice to buy time which would be used to attack more effectively in the future. The Right’s failure to grasp the nature of the adder that was fattening under its feet proved fatal–metaphorically, anyway–for us all.
Z: “At the heart of it is the claim that reality simply does not comport with the new model of society, so we have to dismiss that bit of reality… They are questioning the very basics of reality by claiming there is no difference between relations of ideas, their models and narratives, and matters of fact and observable reality.
I saw a Steven Pinker interview yesterday where he was vaguely asked why some cultures have so fewer words than other cultures. Pinker realizes it’s the question about why certain cultures are more discriminating in how they apply words to things. As always, he skirts the hot button questions by making reality conform to his “science”.
He gives the example of Eskimos were once thought to have around 200 words for the same thing, snow. But now we know they have about 12 to 20 words for it.
“If you think about it, English has a lot of words for snow too. We’ve got avalanche, blizzard, hard pack, powder, sleet, and slush. So we’re not really that far behind the Eskimos.”
His egalitarian hand wringing for the Eskimo works against itself. As a linguist, he certainly knows that the English examples he gave for snow don’t mean snow. Especially “avalanche” and “blizzard”. His examples aren’t synonyms for snow. They more precisely delineate the forms that snow can take.
He goes on. “This isn’t to deny the point. That if you’re an expert in something you’re going to have more jargon words for it. But I don’t think because you have all these jargon words it means you think more thoughts, or more finely discriminating thoughts. I think if you, uh, know a lot about something you, uh, invent the words to express them.”
I like how he dismisses the richness and clarity of an advanced culture’s language as just so much “jargon”. And how he essentially says (Directs us to believe from on high.) that the more adjectives DOES NOT MEAN the more discriminating.
Ummm, yes it does. Yes…it literally…does.
What a squishy fake this guy.
At 2:25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZDeYe93rFg&t=235s&ab_channel=ThinkingAllowedTV
“sex” vs “gender”. They used to be synonymous. The left drives a wedge in the culture, inventing a new meaning for the term ‘gender’ as cover for mentally-ill men to get off on Drag Queen Story Hour for toddlers, secondarily to enjoy the rage among dirt people.
TBH, if one has studied a foreign language (German or French) the articles are anything but intuitive. (La, Le, Der, Die, Das.)
This really is linguistic skullduggery at its worst. If humanity survives the cataclysm to come, treatises will be written about the level of sophistry required to mess with humans’ minds this way.
One feels bad for calling Pinker bad names. He’s such a simpatico and interesting fellow. Public intellectuals like him can’t say certain things. Can’t take the logic of their thoughts into politics. But at least they’re helping to shift Overton. However slowly and slightly.
Let me cut to the chase.
At the root, everything discussed in today’s post is dysfunctional because the normal (read ancestral) feedback mechanism for correction is absent. In the olden times, when you fucked up, you got an immediate feedback that you made a mistake. Sometimes that feedback was terminal, but more often than not, it was a hard-knocks lesson that you did not soon forget. And it doesn’t take many of these incidents to spread the wisdom widely among others. “Grog tried to pet the lion and it ate him. Now no more Grog. Don’t pet lion.”
This is what needs to be restored if we are to fix what ails us. There needs to be a return of reality-based feedback. It could be the proverbial 2×4 upside the head or in some cases the Grog terminus. For example, when Germans are freezing their ass off this winter, the ministers who instigated this debacle should get the Grog cure. Publicly and accompanied by cheering in the streets. The disease cells must go.
How can we possibly come back from a society that believes a man in a dress is really a woman in the wrong body? There is no coming back from that.
“society” does not really believe any of that.
the beaten down sheep all move along to avoid getting beaten down harder; making the approved sounds to get another meal.
Soon, the entire house of cards will fall and some thing will come about. This will not be fun. Reality- Nature- will impose itself once again. And Enoch Powell’s forecast will come about.
Agreed. However, the reality isn’t much better. What kind of society allows moon-barking lunatics to man every rampart in existence? That fact that AINO’s “elites” are, almost to a woman, morally perverse and psychologically disturbed speaks very poorly of the commoners, whether they actually buy into the deranged pronouncements from on high or not.
It’s the ultimate misogyny, reducing a woman to her clothing and appearance.
No miscarriages, no monthly bleeding, no hormones, no hollow pouch in your gut, no natural maternal feelings.
No childbearing. Or as my wife artfully put it, trying to shit out a watermelon.
No, just put on a dress and talk with a lisp, and voila, you’re a woman now!!! Yay !!!!! See how easy that is?
I suppose me wanting women to come to the same conclusion on the absurdity of it all may be asking too much, but men have to start making noise. We can’t let our wives and moms and daughters be insulted and reduced to absurdity and jokes by these people. This is on us. I know it makes my blood boil. At some point I am going to lose it on these people, and I am sure I am not alone.
No, there most certainly is not. There is only seperation from it. And, contrary to your pessimism, it will happen.
100% agreement. There are 3 feedback mechanisms that produce not only instantaneous, but long lasting results. They are the best educators on the planet, and unfortunately, most in the West are largely insulated again them, hence why lunacy and Clown World are peaking.
Fear, Punishment, and Pain. Full Stop. They are the educators par excellencé and they have no equal.
When nothing has consequences you learn nothing. When there is no accountability you are free to act like an amoral sociopath and in some cases, rewarded for it. Particularly as you climb higher in government.
Until this ceases to be, nothing is really going to change. The light at the end of the tunnel as it were, is that we are now hitting levels of reality warping that simply aren’t sustainable. Once people are cold, starving, and poor, then you will see things turn around rapidly. Perhaps it will be the spark that lights the entire powder keg, one can hope so anyways.
Governent funny-money covers a host of sins, and our tech is so good the fiat money is bouyed by incredible productivity. This means we’ve eliminated the scarcities people really have to worry about: water, calories and shelter. After that, lots of people will feel free to be gluttons, alcoholics and drug addicts, get neck tattoos, sleep around, etc. The correction doesn’t happen until the human stock gets so bad they can’t maintain the tech.
This has been going on in economics for years. The concept of “hedonic adjustment” to a model – You new car has tire pressure monitors, the old one didn’t, therefore the extra $10k you paid is washed out. Or, the “substitution effect” where you went to the store to buy a ribeye, you see the price, and buy the tube of ground beef instead, and you’re just as happy, therefore the price washes out.
Another major distortion is “owners equivalent rent” where instead of using copious and accurate rental information showing that rents increased by say, 11%, you create survey of 90 years olds, who think it’s 1978, and ask them “if you theoretically decided to rent your home, which you’ve never would put on the market, what would it rent for?,” the person scratches their head, and says “$500 a month.”
There’s trillions of dollars riding on models like this. On paper, everyone is happy, because it’s a world where reality was detached from our paper pushing economy years ago, you can do as you please and ignore the collapsing standard of living, and the simmering anger of the population.
Excellent summary of the three main changes in how inflation is calculated, starting in the 1990s. This is why everything you actually buy today seems to have increased at a much higher rate than the official 9.1% figure. Funny how all the adjustments lower the official figure, much like all the adjustments in the climate models raise recent temperatures and low historical temperatures. It’s like the old modeling joke, “here are the conclusions I will use to determine my assumptions.”
De Smet has a useful quote in this context: Any virtue that is institutionalised will eventually turn into its opposite.
Institutionalised science will become anti-science. It becomes a description of a reality that (some) people want, not what is.
I would argue that this is a result of the state of the world. Allow me to explain.
This is the essence, in my view, of Modernity. The modern project sought to unmoor us from the traditional certitudes of life (this goes back to the 15th century, fyi). They thought a new, uniform picture would emerge with the agglomeration of the empirical points of data when we disregard a belief in divine intervention, if we as humans just rise to objectivity through the usurpation of the traditionally assigned role of God.
Practitioners of modernity’s hopes I liken to that Seurat painting, the one of the people in the park (Sunday Afternoon or something). They thought if they placed their little particulars in the “True” place, eventually a picture would emerge like a ‘pop’ and they would understand the world and they would complete each science (see Bacon’s “On the True Interpretation of Nature).” This is the underlying foundation of the Scientific Method that people seem to forget. The idea of being unbiased and gaining empirical points of tiny data is to establish the axiomatic truth. By recording piece of true empirical data, and placing our points of data universally accurate, controlling for all variables, at one point in the future the picture would emerge.
Unfortunately, as we gathered all this empirical data, instead of the pieces of Truth creating a picture that suddenly emerged, we are left with something like a Pollock painting (or a stained bedsheet lol). With all this meaningless data adding up to nothing (Thomas Hardy brilliantly said, “The more we learn of the laws and Nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it to be – and the non-necessity of it”), people instead approach life schizophrenically, stringing together whatever weave of “Truth” they want from the flotsam of the sciences with no logic or vision, just wild eyed association and religious fervor.
That is why nearly all science is crap. They take meaningless pieces of data, of which there is an overabundance with no grounding, and string them together with a narrative as the axiom. They can build whatever house of cards they want out of it. Subjectivity, as a result of the putative rising of man to objectivity, led to this.
Truth is white supremacy
The fact that this notion is being thrown around so much lately should tell us everything we need to know. It’s an assault on truth and everything it undergirds, which includes science.
It’s a religious war dressed up as a political debate. There is nothing political about it in the normal sense. This a battle for the soul of each and every person. If it helps, say a small prayer at night, ask for strength. Either way, dig deep and find out what really and truly makes you tic, and if there is no God there, no hunger to be on the side of truth, then buy some guns. Because everyone is going to need something to protect them from the ghouls.
It could be argued that the vaxx development/approval process was the first narrative-driven public scientific process in US history. A combination of goal-seeking and narrative-driving led to a hasty, incomplete process that ended up approving some vaxxes that don’t work as advertised and may cause harm in many circumstances.
The narrative wasn’t: “we will put our best people on it, hope for the best and examine the data”. Instead it was: “we will develop something and everyone must use it and believe it works, no questions asked, because we say so”.
This is now the model for government operations:
1) identify problem and moralize endlessly
2) develop a narrative that cannot be subjected to the scientific method
3) leap from the narrative into some dubious solution
4) accept no feedback when it doesn’t work
5) move on quickly to the next debacle
Here’s hoping reality gets its ass in gear, shows up, and smacks these delusional rump swabs upside the head – soon.
Yes indeed, the Gods of the Copybook Headings, are -LONG- overdue for their reappearance.
Ah yes the typical right wing dream.
Sitting around hoping someone or something else shows up to do the ass-kicking.
You won’t do the ass-kicking yourself because that would be “wrong”.
You first keyboard warrior, show these sissies how its done! Make sure you do a livestream when you do like the kid in Buffalo. We will wait here and watch your heroics… your posturing is just as lame as that which you decry not to mention pseudo Fed-poasty, but you do you.
“ You first keyboard warrior, show these sissies how its done! ”
Internet LARPER
“Apex Predator” is that because you “own” people in World of Warcraft all day long?
I went to jail and lost years of my life doing exactly what you recommend you absolute fucking retard. And there are MANY Jan 6th poor slobs languishing in prison –right now– for similar reasons. So please keep running your mouth about everything you think should happen. Now tell us of your brave exploits please keyboard jockey.
“You won’t do the ass-kicking yourself because that would be “wrong”.”
Not necessarily. People are cowards who don’t have the will to be first. However, sometimes an unexpected spark flares up and people join in. Lots of historic stories about these type of occurrences. A distinction without a difference? Perhaps.
Causality can be more of a circle than a straight line. What came first — the chicken (the erosion of standards) or the egg (the corruption of our institutions)? Perhaps they both came at roughly the same time and subsequently fed into each other. In other words, maybe cause and effect run in both directions on this particular matter.
Is what z is describing the same thing as the spreadsheet mentality? I feel it’s a lesson that has been taught in the cautionary tales of Lysenko and increasingly of the COVID and electric car rackets
First thought is it began with exhaustion from all of the colonizing, conquering, and subjugation of the 16th through 19th centuries. Putting value judgements aside, that kind of exertion will weaken a body without some rest. But the competition didn’t end, so no rest for the weary. Go until you keel over.
Too much masculine energy, right? Then the crash. It’s no wonder things seem so femmed-up these days.
They want to keep their jobs–
Dinosaur modelers come to mind. They will construct an entire animal
out of a leg bone, and re-model it as they discover more fossil evidence.
The old model gets memory holed, and Science! moves on.
Now do astronomy especially exo-planets.
Good artists renditions though.
That was something that stuck out to me as our son got interested in dinosaurs. The children’s books on them present everything about them as “The Science” but as read they sneak in a lot of “scientists believe” and other hedge words and phrases. In their arrogance, they refuse to admit there is a lot they don’t know and they present the educated and not so educated guesses at authoritative.
Paleontology is actually science working as intended where they adapt their theories as they get more evidence. But this is only because there’s nothing political to gain from the field. If the left got it in their head that dinosaurs had gay sex they’d be busily forcing those same paleontologists to “prove” it with models showing how the T-Rex was able to give handjobs even with the tiny arms.
Great I’ll never get that outa my head
” If the left got it in their head that dinosaurs had gay sex they’d be busily forcing those same paleontologists to “prove” it with models showing how the T-Rex was able to give handjobs even with the tiny arms.”
Holy hell that’s a great line and why I love this place.
There’s nothing wrong with what you describe. Science (a theory) at any given time should take into account all that is known. As old beliefs are proven false or new discoveries made, the theory is revised or discarded and a new better theory is supposed to supplant it.
The problems we battle against might be described metaphorically as if an intact T. Rex skeleton were discovered in a box in the basement but the museum staff insisted that it was a water buffalo’s.
A personal reality check:
gravity holds me in my chair
water is wet
heat is hot
2 + 2 = 4 (but please check my math)
I am a male (you’ll have to take my word for that)
You Sir, are clearly a hater. You need to break free from the shakles of “reality” and accept the changing narratives. I refuse to accept your outdated conclusions.
So there!
Ha! Black guy yesterday told me I and my ideas were outmoded!
So I said, “Wait, next you’re going to try to tell me the world isn’t flat, aren’t you?”
“I am a male (you’ll have to take my word for that)”
Please provide evidence of a degree in Biology for the last claim. 😏
“There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences.”
Well, there’s your problem. The “soft sciences” aren’t sciences. To pretend they are is akin to claiming that men can get pregnant.
After the success of “sciences” in the 18th and 19th centuries, man told themselves, “Wow! Aren’t we special? Look at all the marvels we’ve created. I bet we could do the same with psychology and sociology. Wouldn’t it be great to predict individual and sociological behavior?” And they did make a little progress. In Psychology, Behaviorism became an actual thing and data was collected and results were quantified. In Sociology, TPTB invested in mathematical formulas to make dialectic materialism useful to them, in similar fashion to the pamphlet Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars. But, Psychology and Sociology have too much non-quantifiable data to ever be true “sciences”. Today, they have been reduced to herding the sheep, and admittedly, very successful at that. However, it seems that their success relies on the herds’ need to belong and live a life where they don’t have to think. And those kind of sheep seem to be the most numerous and tend to ostracize those that are capable of thought.
Ahem. Just who was it that, err, invented the “science” of psychology and the study of mind and desire?
Why, they were interested in making us better. Sure they were.
Great post Z-Man. There is a physicist who works at the Stanford particle accelerator who has analyzed the climate models and shown all of the flaws in them. He analyzes the flaws, mostly bad assumptions. One example is an assumption that the atmosphere has positive feedback loops. Real science can demonstrate that if any one of these feedback loops was there in reality, there wouldn’t be an atmosphere. Then he shows how one bad assumption in an inner layer of the model gets amplified as its result propagates outward and gets multiplied by the next set of bad assumptions etc… I have his name somewhere in a spreadsheet when I was researching CAGW. Anyone interested can find him in a back episode on Alex Epstein’s YT channel.
Today’s topic is very rich. Well done. I think there is a chicken and the egg phenomenon at play here. The last one hundred years has seen the rise of ever more make works projects. As serious as the 19th century was – real people doing real work building real things and producing real wealth by taking real risks, the 20th and early 21st century has largely been the opposite of that. So many of the projects of Progressivism have no real utility. Utility is an alignment with reality. Whereas Progressivism is about fantasy and moralizing. It isn’t clear if the fantasy precedes the moralizing used to justify and coerce all of society into the project or if the moralizing produces the fantasy that entices the stupid to chase it.
Progressivism has two main category of projects. One are the technocratic- the welfare state; the energy transition; the war on terror; the war on poverty … …
The second are the patronage projects that produce the brilliant professors like we saw in Congress last week. Solving problems in reality is either extremely difficult such that only outliers in IQ can do it, or hard work that has no glamour or prestige – so valor and character are required in the problem solver. The patronage project narratives exist to thinly veil that a rarified intelligence or a high character person has been substituted with their opposites. We all heard her speak. It doesn’t sound much different than Cornell West or Michael Eric Dyson or any of the other random thesaurus word salad bots posing as thinkers. In short, it is a related grift that buys consensus with prestige.
Back to the question of precedence, I am not sure that it matters. If you look at any of the narratives, they are all moralizing tales of good vs. evil. That tale and its attendant moralizing narrative is necessary to gin up emotion so that people either accept the project as valid or are forced into silence less they be cast as an evil demon for not consenting. Reality cannot be allowed to disobey.
Did you see that Russia is mocking the US again? It is using the photos of Richard Levine and the gay dog fetishist posing as an expert in nuclear technology on a diplomatic mission together in France. The US ruling class spun a narrative designed to create a social credit system that effectively amounts to declaring war on its citizenry. It seemed like a good idea in the ivory tower, except that they essentially declared themselves illegitimate to the people they rule over and the world they have to go into and negotiate with. The narrative creators forgot that when you negotiate with serious people you need to be seen as serious and sober and that you need to be trustworthy. If you despise the nation you claim to represent then the representative has forfeited its legitimacy.
Our time is coming. The narratives and the projects they have justified and enabled can no longer evade reality.
> Did you see that Russia is mocking the US again? It is using the photos of Richard Levine and the gay dog fetishist posing as an expert in nuclear technology on a diplomatic mission together in France.
“Having a clown government is one of the ways America antagonizes the world I believe. It’s a ‘gaslighting’ maneuver. America will menace you with some kind of horrific aerial assault, and send Hillary Clinton or some other bizarre clown to “negotiate.” Normal groups of people don’t have any idea how to respond to such things, so anything they do will be “wrong” within the parameters of the rigged psychological game.
It’s like Caligula making you salute his horse who has been made a “general,” and if you don’t he’ll torture you to death or invade your territory.”
–Thomas777
I think this is giving too much credit. I just think this is very stupid people who have credentialized themselves with college and internships and NGO jobs. They have then failed their way up in government or HR. In so doing, they never developed the ability to think through cause and effect. When history is just a morality play of good vs. evil, and your moralizing and credentialed sense of entitlement makes you on the right side of history, you never give a first thought to cause and effect.
The Empire has no clothes. (That is not a typo) Lambs of the Empire sit at the table with Lions from the Hinterlands.
I recall seeing similar takedowns of the Michael Mann models. One was that he uses tree rings as proxies for temperature readings for historical periods that predate the invention of thermometers. His models switch over to actual readings when they became available. But someone took his tree ring data and kept updating it through today, and it shows no warming at all. Someone else took the actual raw temperature readings without adjustments, and showed similar flat temps. All the adjustments lowered historical temps to create the hockey stick graphs.
Even worse, his tree rings model was found to be based on one- yes, one, in all of Siberia- one tree.
Standardized testing has been catastrophic in that regard. Since all grades are padded you probably can’t see it in the numbers, but anyone teaching in the mid-2000s knows exactly what I’m talking about — you can easily identify kids who went to high school pre- and post-No Child Left Behind. The ones after were like dumber versions of the grinders who were in the SAT prep pipeline from birth. To that kind of kid, there are only four possible answers to any question — A, B, C, or D; “all / none of the above” isn’t an option — and “education” consists entirely of learning how to game the very odd, very particular rules of that closed system. He is “smartest” who figures out the most clever way to game the system.
I noticed this reviewing a ben Shapiro book. It was as if someone wrote a bit of software to emulate a student and that software then wrote a book. His book read like he proving that he memorized the material, rather than he learned useful things that will allow him question his teaching and infer new knowledge from the world.
It is a phenomenon that people have observed in the martial arts. No one in a particular school dares question the master, so none of the things he teaches are ever tested. The only tests are within the narrow context of the rules inside the school. Inside the school, students may come to believe they can break a man’s neck with a hand chop. There is no way to test this and question the assertion is not permitted, so acceptance is the default.
It got so bad after a while that even a different *word order* would throw them. The powerpoint slide says “The Soviets won the Battle of Stalingrad.” If the exam question reads “___ won the Battle of Stalingrad” they’d do fine. Switch it around, though, and a lot of them miss it: “The Battle of Stalingrad was won by ____.” Ask them to extrapolate from other information, and it’s a total crapshoot — the answers to “Who lost the Battle of Stalingrad?” are more or less random, so long as you give them the standard four choices and all four names appear in the “World War II in Europe” unit. (Need I even add that this was true even at pricey private schools?)
“Who lost the Battle of Stalingrad?”
Pshhht, that’s easy: Joe Biden.
You want fun? Watch the grinders with a string of certification letters behind their name show up for a tech interview. Ask them to flowchart or pseudo code:
The FizzBuzz problem (Take the numbers 1 – 100. If the number is evenly divisible by 2, print/display “Fizz”. If the number is evenly divisible by 3, print/display “Buzz”. If the number can be divided by 2 and 3, print/display “FizzBuzz”)
The palindrome problem (I give you a text string “Madam I’m Adam”. Prove to me this string is a palindrome via code)
Sit back and watch the results 😬.
Basic stuff. I’m not asking you to write a webpage. I want to see you noodle out basic logic issues. But there are people out there that if it’s not on the cert test and asked as presented on the test the mental gearing jams up like shifting a car’s transmission from Drive to Reverse at 50 MPH.
We always talk about “The map is not the terrain”. Can we add “The test is not real life?” Real life throws you stuff that you need to figure out yourself. And it’s not going to be A, B, C, or D.
FizzBuzz and the palindrome problem are questions for juniors. yet, I have met alleged seniors who couldn’t solve these questions.
I like the following interview question: “If you drop a bowing ball from a boat over the deepest part of the ocean, how long will it take it to reach the bottom? To simplify, ignore changing pressures, currents, etc.” Most people cannot even start an equation to solve it. But it is very simple. If you assume the deepest area (Mariana Trench) should be similar to the highest mountain (Everest), you can just estimate 30K feet. Then just visualize a bowling ball dropped in an 8 foot swimming pool. It will hit the bottom in about two seconds. Simple math then returns an answer of about two hours. Obviously, the weight of the ball, currents, pressure, etc. could vary this by an hour or two. But the whole point is to see if someone can create a simple model rather than not even trying.
The fun part of FizzBuzz is giving intentionally stupid answers. Like hard coding all the answers in as static strings, or making it one big printf line.
Of course this assumes one’s goal is to waste the time of Amazon recruiters, not to get the job.
Shapiro delenda est
I’ll admit that I’ve never been sold on the “badness” of standardized testing. Maybe the current format of the testing is flawed and/or leads to less-desireable results in the long-term, but I still think that establishing standards and making sure that students meet them is a good thing. For example, we expect doctors and engineers to pass a series of standardized tests.
Maybe I’m applying too broad a brush but my background and various careers have always required completion of specific standardized tests. They are clear indicators that the person has “qualified” to do the work and everyone respects those who do qualify.
The problem is the what the testing seeks is fallacious. Reading and writing are tested by multiple choice (even the essay is graded by a robot). To truly evaluate someone’s ability to read, you have to give them something to read, and then let them respond freely. If you want to know how someone writes, you have let them write freely. Of course, this would require too much time and effort and freedom. Instead, we have an ersatz evaluation, where the answer is given (after all – multiple choice gives the answer), and we suppose the ability to answer correctly is a representation the ability to read and write.
I do not like to divulge much personal information, but please allow me to say that this is a subject I am very, very familiar with, and have been for some time. The OP and Z are completely correct.
I agree with you – standards are important, but the way those standards are evaluated is the problem.
I will give an analogy. These tests ask is students know the rules of reading and writing, but they are never asked to actually do the task. I read books a great deal and do not stop every two sentences and answer a question. I write regularly without stopping every two sentences and including techniques as requested. What is missing is the holistic process. Open a modern school book. Nowhere is the ‘flow’ found. Every paragraph a student reading a story has to stop and answer questions. This allows them to pass the test. Ask them what the text is about open ended, and you will see blank stares. It is like drilling a student on the rules of the road so that they can tell you every law and rule. But you never let them drive? Thus, on paper it looks like they know how to drive. Of course, they do not. So it is with schooling.
There’s a way to do standardized tests that come much closer to testing actual mastery. They’re big complex honkers of multiple choice questions that give you menus of roman numerals, such that the standard A-D answer options look like this:
A. I and II only,
B. I, II and III
C. II and IV
D. IV only
Where I, II, III, and IV are themselves big long conditional statements. Securities license exams used to look like that. Is such and such a trade legal under the Glass-Steagall Act? (or whatever; it’s been a long time since I helped my gf (at the time) study for the stockbroker’s exam). Questions like that are a bear, but it works. Needless to say those are NOT the kind of questions that appear on the SAT or the state Department of Ed standardized tests.
No, and they won’t appear on most college level course testing—faculty being such lazy bastards. 🙁
The FSOT and LSAT did a variation of this until recently, using multiple choice answers within multiple choice questions.
But, diversity and empty chairs.
The use of Roman numerals alone ensures a high rate of failure. Add an analog clock to finish the job.
I think there’s much validity in that claim. In education that is encapsulated in the criticism that “We teach the children to pass the standardized test.”
And even the Black Slate crowd may have a point. Years ago, one friend since high school who was liberal then and in his adult years continued on that path (His home proudly displays a photo of him and his wife with President Clinton). He might be described as a blue collar junior member of the Swamp Elite. He parroted the shibboleth “IQ tests only measure the ability to take tests.”
As with anything else, a test may be useful, so-so-, or counterproductive. And at best, it probably only measures a fraction of the total talent of an individual.
The model says races are equal but the reality of crime does not fit the model.
The dust bowl of the 1930’s wiped out thousands of farmers at a time where there was no climate change model, yet this years drought must fit the climate change model.
And we all know about the gender models that don’t fit reality.
We in the dissident movement have the truth.
And the truth and reality will eventually win out.
I think that is where the battle lines are being drawn. You are either on Team Truth or Team Lies.
And insofar as God is eternal truth and man is eternal imperfection, that this dovetails with one being on either Team God or Team Man
And by Team Man I don’t mean old-fashioned humanism which was more honest in its outlook and that was imbued with the residual morality of a Christian people. Even old-school atheism had this same residual morality because it looked to science to prove or disprove things, and science at that time was built on truth. What we have now is Team Man being completely amoral and untethered to anything resembling or containing a kernel of truth. I wonder if the term nihlism even applies? Because that seems to imply a resistance and challenge to truth and goodness, there for some kind of shock value, not a wholesale abdication of it.
I’d wager that pretty soon even Artificial Intelligence proves more honest than these people.
AI already is more honest. That’s why these mendacious liars are so exercised when the AI program “notices” and takes into account factors and realities that are streng verboten under the ever-shifting PC narrative. A Struggle Session with the AI which has absorbed all of these factors and realities ensues. It’s hilarious on one level, and horribly sobering on another.
For those who may have missed this:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/x-raying-race/
James Thompson has a review of a study on AI distinguishing races from their x-rays. AI is smarter than we think. People are too, but they’ve been cowed into denying observable reality for so long it’s hard to tell what the hell people think from what they say.
All we got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth.
The problem in science is bad enough that I have become very skeptical of science that does not lead to demonstrable engineering.
SCIENCE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k
I keep hearing that “astrophysicists” are still looking for “dark matter” and “dark energy” because the observed behavior of the universe isn’t matching their models unless they posit some magical stuff to make the numbers right. This magical stuff that makes their models work has never been observed by astronomers. But it has to exist, otherwise their models are wrong.
I think their models are wrong, and it’s about time reality took all these arrogant nerds to the locker room.
I’d argue that what you seem to be deriding is, in fact, a snapshot of precisely how science is supposed to work. No scientific theory should ever be claimed to be the final truth. At best, a successful scientific theory is a model of observed reality that adequately describes all known phenomena with no contradictions. The model may also have predictive power.
In the absolutist sense, yes, all theory and models are “wrong” in the sense that they’re incomplete. But are they usable? Often they are, sometimes to an amazing degree. Examples abound. Euclidean geometry is indispensable, yet you’ll be hard pressed to find a true line or a point in the real world. Newtonian physics was superseded by Einstein, yet even though “wrong,” for everyday use it predicts reality with near perfection.
As I understand it, “dark matter” is believed to be a significant fraction of the known universe. In simplest terms, dark matter has absolutely no interaction with “normal” matter, except by gravitation. The “missing mass” had been a problem in cosmology going back decades. And this is what the excitement over the Higgs boson was, a few years past, as I understand — a sighting of a very rare particle that may be a form a dark matter.
I know even less about dark energy. According to a few articles I’ve seen, apparently the universe is not only expanding, but it’s expanding at an increasing rate. That goes totally contrary to older theory.
Some physicist [I forget] said “I have a sneaking suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but it’s queerer than we CAN suppose.”
I do believe the chap may have been onto something.
Ed Dutton say average IQ has dropped 20 points since 1880. Throw in the vast expansion of universities since WWII and you have a vast army of morons with graduate degrees running everything.
The educated idiot phenomenon is real. Compounding it is the fact that people can find something clever on-line and then think they are clever for finding it.
Yes, and yes. I witness kids who went to one of the top high schools in the country on a regular basis. I just went to a graduation there. The level of stupidity, sloth and lack of work ethic that I witness is astounding. You have low or zero information people who also have no ability to think. At the graduation, the speeches given by Yale, Harvard and Penn class of ’26 kids, had the heft and cliche value of the gratitude cards we wrote for our parents in 2nd grade with heavy doses of wokesterism woven in.
After we showed our literary infantilism, our 2nd grade teacher taught by showing us the difference between Hallmark cards and Shakespeare, Virgil and Homer. Based on the speeches I heard, that never happened. The math scores are high, but I don’t think they are a comprehensive enough measure of the ability and knowledge required for true excellence and high civilization.
You have to wonder if America and letting commoners finally express themselves didn’t result in a surge of widespread intelligence
People were held down for so long, that once they were given a shot to make something of themselves, all that bottled up intelligence and wisdom came bursting through.
But then it ran out.
May be that keeping people down has some positive effects on those people in terms of their resilience and hardiness and problem solving abilities. They have to learn to make do with limited means. And this builds up over time. But then it was given an outlet, and now it’s run out. And life became easy, so minds went to sleep.
My hunch is that there is always a finite supply of genius, no matter the number of people. And high intelligence is a like a remnant of genius, a little fleck of it gets dropped into the blood. You keep adding people, then there is less and less of it to go around.
So in sum, I suspect that historical circumstances and all of its pent-up suppressed intelligence combined with a population that keeps growing and where a finite supply of genius cannot keep up, may play a significant role in our current situation. To the dismay and consternation of many, I’d also add that having children at later and later ages may also play a part for the simple fact that our best stuff is our freshest stuff, and our best and freshest stuff (sperm and eggs) is when we’re young. But isn’t there also research that says women having their first kids in their 30s raises the possibility the kid will have serious health problems?
I think other things are in play too, but those jump out at me as main factors. AndI am speaking only of white people. How blacks blacks figure into our decline seems to be spiritual in nature, as I have expressed before, and affects us mostly in the moral sphere.
Exactly! I propose “pathological egalitarianism” as a primary causal agent. Prior to WWII, we had 6% of the populous attending post secondary education, i.e., college. That perhaps was a bit smallish. However, a few years ago I read that now 50% of the latest generation (of age) had attended and completed some level (they got degrees/certifications) of post secondary education. That’s ridiculous.
Since Dutton has been referenced, he also states that the ability to attain some sort of meaningful STEM degree requires an IQ somewhere around 120. That means that perhaps 10% of the population can handle the rigors of a meaningful, hard science, technical, post secondary education—and of course, such “reality” leaves out most of our current minority population.
What does PE do when faced with this conundrum? It ignores it and states that the only reason one does not succeed in college is due to some sort of bias and we must root out such bias wherever the numbers drop below our modeled expectations. Fantasy bumped into reality and reality gave way.
How did reality give way? Colleges and universities created faux courses of study—Women’s Studies, Black Studies, “Grievance Studies” whatever, etc. The traditional “soft sciences” like Sociology, Psychology, etc, got even weaker. This was a twofer for the university—a meaningless, weak course of study which would be taught by weak minority faculty thereby increasing the numbers of minority staff overall. And I have not even begun to include the ever expanding layers of minority administration hired in tow to manage such diversity.
My last university was graduating several hundred “psyc” majors every year, albeit there were no jobs in the field, but all the “scarecrows” now had a piece of paper that said “I’m smart”. Colleges of “Education” graduated minority teachers with less knowledge than a typical HS graduate in the 50’s. For an example, take a look at Jill Biden or our former First Lady, Michelle Obama for people graduating way above their level of competence.
Hard sciences finally followed suit by lowered standards for admittance and completion in degree areas. For example, the engineering college at my last university created a degree major “Engineering Management”. The darling of minorities and lazy Whites where mathematics was limited. (Why learn to build bridges when you can tell others how to do it and place an engineering “degree” claim behind your name to boot.)
Where they could not simply lower the standards, they played tricks with the course grading. One particular despised change was in creating “group” projects and therefore group grading—no more than two minorities to a “team”.
I could go on, but why? I’m feeling depressed enough and I’ve been out of the game for years. Hell, as I think about it, I wonder if I should have been in the game myself.
It’s why Russia will prevail and will carry the torch of western civilization, which may mean Western marries into Eastern to survive in some hybrid fashion. But in Russia, and I suppose China, you either have the smarts to make it at high levels of instruction and learning or you dont’. Their university degrees actually mean something, from what I understand.
And Russia with her supposedly weak economy can produce more armaments in one year than we could in 10 years. And a fraction of the cost. And they are so stupid they had this crazy idea that it would be better to be in charge of the resources and food you need to sustain your country. Didn’t anyone tell them they would be better off being dependent on foreign adversaries for those things?
And what are we going to do? Put LaQuisha in charge of R&D? In charge of manufacturing?
No, signing on and jumping into bed with blacks will be the death of us. It’s already at the first or second stage of a terminal cancer. Among many other problems. But blacks are always the most obvious target. Especially in a dark room where all you se are their teeth and eyes. Ok, I’m being mean. Bad Falcone!
Russia actually dumped the EU’s Bologna model for higher education and went back to the old Soviet methods because they noticed a sharp drop off in the quality of their STEM grads.
Yes, I heard that listening to the Duran
And my grandfather and uncle went to U of Bologna.
What a shame. We need to start getting angry and ripping back our civilization from these scum.
If you’re not allergic to reading stuff written by government historians, NASA has a pretty extensive archive of free books covering all sorts of topics; including some stuff on the Soviet/Russian space program. I’m currently reading through “Rockets and People”.
https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_detail.html
One of the remarkable things of Russian engineering was never innovation nor particular originality, but practicality. The Soviets produced engineers and designers that made stuff that just plain *worked well*. Their space program reflected this and, for all intents and purposes, they won the so-called space race.
When the USSR broke up, many of their brightest faculty came over here. Things in the former USSR were in chaos. H1B VISA’s were used to get these now unemployed faculty who were top notch engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and the like in the old USSR.
Son went to Kettering University and was taught by these old former “commies”. He was greatly impressed. Indeed, it was all he talked about. In that I learned a valuable lesson that shaped my thinking/understanding (more below).
These old gezzers came into class and pulled no punches. Son—and others—were called lazy and spoiled. Tirades against American students not working hard and taking it easy were common fare in class.
These former commies were damn grateful to be in America, but were stunned by the motivational level of the best of students in one of the best engineering schools this country had to offer.
The lesson learned for me was that the best students only become the best when they are challenged—not having their hands held or their esteem supported. These old commies ran their class like a drill Sargent runs his Marine platoon. No mercy.
Son graduated top of class—not because of me, but because of some damn old commie refugees from a country that had no room for codling incompetence. Son doesn’t design products that fail and create national inquiries and wiki entries. Indeed, he flys to other countries to exam their products for such flaws.
Tell me again about that evil country Russia? They’ll eat our lunch.
Templar-
I think the Soviets came up with plenty of unique designs. The Alfa-class subs stand out in my mind.
Compsci-
I had a Russian PhD for one of my engineering labs in undergrad. If you were late to lab, you failed, no exceptions.
Yeah, it’s weird. Growing up we boomers always assumed Western civilization would destroy itself in thermonuclear war then large swaths of the world would depopulate through the resulting effects. Cleansing by fire, so to speak. Nah, turns out the cleansing will be through black mold spreading through the foundations and walls.
black mold
—
I see what you did there
The large number of adjustable parameters in complex mathematical models allows the modeler to achieve almost any outcome desired. The LOVECLIM climate model has something like twenty adjustable parameters. I knew an outstanding experimental physicist in grad school who liked to say, “You can model an elephant wiith three adjustable parameters. With four, you can make its trunk move.”
That quote is a garbled version of something that is usually attributed to John von Neumann. Did you know JvN is graduate school?
“…if they get enough people to believe their story, reality will bend to that story.”
This sounds like it’s derived from Orwell’s “Thoughtcrime”. Our modern brainwashers have invested heavily in the idea that if hostile thoughts are made literally unthinkable, the negative things the thoughts represent will be unable to exist. They might have had some success in the field of emotional reactions: like desensitizing therapies, you might be able to brainwash people to remove feelings of revulsion from repellant behaviors. But naturally, these people have no idea where to stop, so now they’ve carried it to the point of trying to imagine away reality.
I think this is likely to boomerang in the worst way on those who farcically consider themselves in charge. When reality crashes through their carefully constructed fantasy defenses, they will be unable to “snap out of it” fast enough to respond constructively. They’ve proudly distanced themselves from vulgar Nature, and will not have time to relearn the natural responses that could save them from destruction.
The problem is, Dr. M, that since they’re in charge they will take us down with them.
Our task is to construct our lives so they can’t.
Eisenhower warned about a scientific industrial complex and centralizing science. The scientific universe will bend towards the largest source of dollars. The number that really matters in the climate debate isn’t temperature but the really large wad of cash bestowed on the model makers over the last couple decades.
Cui bono?
After we lost the war in Afghanistan, we needed another one. How about Ukraine?
Headline. “Lockheed wins a multi billion dollar contract for new jet fighters.”
More F-35s. Splendid.
I think that narrative framing and reality, practically defined, can be compatible. Take the “what is a woman” nonsense. The narrative or category of “woman” now includes “non-women,” but if you need a historectomy, you aren’t going to quibble about definitions.
My friends know, because they’ve experienced it, that the vax offers no protection against covid. The most boostered are the ones most frequently getting covid around here. Everyone acknowledges it. Still, to take part in most activities, you need to be “currently” boostered according to the CDC’s advisory. This is just cognitive dissonance applied to the given narrative.
When I was a grad student, it was taken for granted that your findings would promote your career goals. People weren’t cynical about it. It was just the way it was.
Does the corruption of language precede or post-cede the corruption of thought? I’m guessing both. Most narrators seem to realize that their narratives are slanted frames some whihc, intentionally or incidentally, conform to reality practically speaking.
Language always has been one of the strongest influences on how people see reality, not so much by what it includes but by what it omits. For example, in Greek there are several different words for kinds of love (eros, philia, agape, etc.). English is not as rich in this regard, which gives an avenue for equate sexual lust with selfless love.
The transformation of terms like woman to be completely separated from biology will, in time, make it so ambiguous as to be meaningless. There may come a time when the phrase “Marriage is between a man and a woman” will just be a nonsense phrase because man and woman have no concrete meaning. One could argue with the modern dilution of the word Marriage in the past 50 years, it already doesn’t have any meaning with a large number of people.
Great points. A similar level of corruption happens in the private sector. Rather than reviews being used to provide constructive feedback so that people can do more of what they do well and improve on what they do less well, the approach is more often a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. People don’t get accurate input and then promotions come out of that process.
Giving and receiving constructive criticism is an art and a skill that is vital for growth, improvement and promotion of the most deserving. The ruthless pursuit of self interested termites keep chewing away at the foundations of the high rise whose penthouse they all want to reside in.
The politicization of science became prominent with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and its demonization of DDT. Shortly thereafter there was a great concern over mercury in fish, as if one could get rid of his mother-in-law by feeding her Lake Superior trout five times a week. The biggest impetus was the “ozone hole” of the 1970s. In spite of the total ban on chloroflourocarbons in most of the developed world, there is still a fluctuation in the ozone layer, as if anyone can actually know how much ozone there is anywhere. There are now many politically derived scientific “facts”, like AGW and the Chinese flu, requiring huge responses at an international level. The latest, and funniest, is the determination that the level of testosterone in the blood is what determines an individual’s sex.
You’ll notice that none of these things can be observed or analyzed with the use of the human’s five senses. They all require esoteric machinery accessible to only a few trained technicians. Elizabeth Holmes can tell you all about the reliability of sophisticated scientific measurement devices.
Thomas Sowell loves the distinction between the engineer and the intellectual. He and Walter E. Williams are/were great Americans.
Man, you CivNats love Sowell and Williams. “Look, everyone, it’s two black guys who say that I’m not racist so quit calling me names!”
You do realize that neither Saint Thomas nor Williams ever acknowledged or even postulated that there are average differences in IQ and other personality traits among the various races of the world. Both of them blamed black underperformance on culture.
Hell, Saint Thomas had the gall to blame black underperformance on blacks picking up the culture of Southern whites, i.e., rednecks. Yep, according to Saint Thomas, it’s blacks acting like the “worst” whites that causes black underperformance.
You don’t have to live under the other side’s morality.
I used to listen to Walter Williams occasionally when he would guest-host on Rush Limbaugh’s show. He was a big proponent of free trade, which along with mass immigration has been a huge line of division between conservatives, with paleoconservatives on the protectionism/immigration restriction side.
Williams was your run-of-the-mill libertarian/CivNat. He was fine with legal immigration as long as the people came to adopt our values without ever questioning why those values came about in the first place. (Hint: they fit a certain white ethnicity – American settlers of Anglo-Saxon descent.)
He believed that black underperformance was due to culture and bad public policy. Of course, he was partially right, but why did blacks, in particular, succumb to these forces so much more than whites or Asians or, even, Hispanics? Williams never thought to answer that obvious question.
I don’t have anything against Williams or Sowell. They’re no worse than dozens of white economists who spout the same nonsense. I just get annoyed by the colorblind CivNat crowd that just loves to reference them because they’re black and agree with them. It’s pathetic and, again, shows how much CivNats have embraced the morality of the other side.
(Hint: they fit a certain white ethnicity – American settlers of Anglo-Saxon descent.)
Yes, the primary value being to kill Catholics, Irishmen, native Americans and anybody else anywhere that didn’t go along with their program.
You do know that were a number of Irishmen who signed the Declaration of Independence as well as a Catholic.
Regardless, hell yea, those original Anglo-Saxon settlers were a bunch of bad asses. Good for them taking on anyone and everyone who got in their way.
That’s nature’s way. Sadly, we’ve lost that fight in us, so other groups are kicking our ass.
I apologize for nothing that my ancestors did.
Mikey,your “primary value ” is whining.
Irish are like all the other diversity crew: moan and whine but still desperate to live in OUR countries.
The Anglo-Saxons did not have a program they just had a superior culture.
Simply stating a fact is “whining” in your superior culture. It hasn’t always been so superior. Taking over for the Boers in South Africa didn’t turn out very well.
I give credit to the only blacks I know who speak truths and if they don’t cover all the bases or make everyone happy, I’m still good with it.
But Williams and Sowell both avoided the most important truth – that there are genetic differences among the various races (or population groups, if you will) that lead to average differences in performance.
That’s way beyond not covering all the bases. They both looked at racial differences and concluded that genetics wasn’t involved. That’s willfully stupid – because they were not stupid guys. They choose to believe and promote the most important lie in our society either because they couldn’t face the truth or because they didn’t want to deal with the consequences. Hardly heroic.
To their credit, they didn’t blame whites. (Well, Sowell kind of did.) But by refusing to acknowledge genetic differences, they continued the myth that some supernatural force was keeping blacks down. Being on the Right, they said bad public policy. The Left, of course, said racism.
If they were truly as smart and brave as you CivNats say they were, they would have said, “Yes, genetics is the main reason that blacks on average underperform. We need to accept this reality and do our best to create a culture and public policy that allows blacks as a group to achieve as much as possible.”
Could you imagine how important that would have been if either one or both of them had said that. It would have changed the entire discourse on race.
But they didn’t. They hid behind culture and public policy as the reason for black underperformance. There’s simply no way that a reasonably intelligent person – and these two were very intelligent – could look at the evidence and not see that genetics is the primary reason for black underperformance.
You CivNats just can’t admit the truth about Sowell and Williams because you’re desperate for a black friend to protect you against being called a racist by people who hate you.
Sowell would always apologize for race differences in IQ. Would you expect different of a Black man? I don’t hold that against him. But as to other differences, I’m not so sure. He lumped a lot under the rubric of “culture” when in reality he was speaking about IQ and inherent behavioral differences among races.
He wrote entire books on such before it was fashionable. I remember his discussion of German nationals who emigrated from Germany to settle in the English speaking nations of the US, Canada, Australia—even South America. Wherever the Germans went, they brewed beer and were quite successful in their other business endeavors. This he often compared to the native population that were not so successful in business and trade. Ditto for his analysis of immigrant Chinese. He wrote of mixed “cultures” (native and immigrant) clashing and the causes of such animosity (culture here is easily replaced by race).
You can admire Sowell for those reasons, even if he skirted the issue as you/we now see it.
My issue isn’t so much with Sowell and Williams. It’s with the CivNat crowd that deify them and embrace them as a way to avoid being called a racist by people who hate them.
That said, I can’t respect the mind of any man who studies racial differences for decades and doesn’t at least contemplate the possibility that racial differences in performance could be caused in part by genetics.
As much as that milk toast Charles Murray annoys me in many ways, he’s at least honest about racial differences. How is it possible that neither Williams nor Sowell didn’t at least consider genetics? It’s not.
Nope, it’s not possible that Sowell is not acquainted with the alternative explanation to his observations. He’s too smart.
But as I’ve said before, the environment for such discussion is toxic to the extreme. To come out and fight for such understanding would very well have caused Sowell to become an unknown before he became known and we’d have been the poorer for it. What I discuss was never the main focus of Sowell’s body of work. He has other books on the current culture wars, which show great insight.
Even Murray spent years (whole career?) skirting the “in your face” answer including
“The Bell Curve”, but before his last book and even that was tepid given the audience here current understanding.
Well, you also need to distinguish between the larger reality of society and the narrow reality of individuals. The individual reality of our rulers does, in fact, comport with their models.
A PhD candidate in the various soft sciences at one of the top school will get their degree and a job by peddling models and papers that fit the narrative. Their own reality rewards this behavior. The same is true of members of the foreign policy establishment. Their models are disastrous for others but work great for their career.
These people live in nice houses, in nice areas and enjoy great career success. They are honored members of various associations. They have interesting, successful neighbors. Etc. Their use of these models works just fine for their own personal reality.
Until their use of faulty models harms their own personal reality, the game will continue.
A philosophical question that has alluded man since the beginning of time! Freedom of association is not only needed but necessary in that we all create a unique reality since we only have the ability to see fragments of it. Therefore, living with others that see what we see is imperative. Races, generally see reality differently, nothing wrong with that, but it won’t work together. Then you may ask, what model of reality is the clearest to live by? That model is to abide by the laws of nature as much as possible for the continued health and well being of us as a society to continue to further our species.
To me that is the closest to reality that we can come. Social interest, having a family, and living a healthy life is what gives us meaning. When I am around others with those same values all is right with the world!
Last thing, reality is tethered to consciousness. To be truly conscious is to see the world or nature in all its beauty or terrifying suffering. A wise man accepts both!
It’s an empire of lies
>Another reason for the crisis in the sciences is modeling. Anyone who has worked with models knows that the model maker can quickly become a god.
There was a scandal a while back where the someone in the Climatic Institute in East Anglia leaked emails and computer code where they were busy creating climate models.
The main takeaway was, as much as scientists tout about Peer Review, that the statistical code was written by essentially one guy and didn’t even go through the most basic code review process that every decent sized organization uses. It was just a mess of slapdash numbers and assumptions clearly designed to come to a certain conclusion. The worst part was when scientific organizations circled the wagons and came out saying they did nothing wrong.
In a sane world every paper would have, as a minimum requirement, documentation on the software suite used, ALL applicable data, and strict instructions on how to reproduce it. And this does not even get into controls in place to verify the actual data is trustworthy, which should also be a hard rule for any paper that has the possibility to impact social policy.
Using these rules would bring academic papers to probably a tenth of the current output in the sciences, but one needs to ask if this is a feature as opposed to a bug.
A good model needs to be tested. Run your model using historical data. Compare your model results to what happened historically. Repeat these experiments. Each time you run your model you adjust your parameters, until you get a “good” fit. When you are satisfied or run out of money, you have a model useful within the confidence limits you have calculated.
Note. Once you have confirmed your model, you may NOT tinker with it anymore because you don’t like what it predicts.
“Run your model using historical data.” They figured out a way around that as well. Just make adjustments to the historical data. Let’s see, our model is not showing warming in the last 30 years? No problem. We can just say the historical temperature measurements were too high because they were in developed areas that retained more heat. Let’s just adjust those down a few degrees. Well whaddayaknow, the model now shows a warming trend.
That’s called cheating, DLS. In order to make that “adjustment”, you need to create another model to model the effect of development. What about undevelopment that retained less heat?
the release of that source code *should* have been the end of the climate warming scam. that mess was the genuine heart of the argument, with it discredited, there is no “warming”. but nope, all the vested interests kept the scam going.
The Anglia scandal was perhaps less one of programming, but one of collusion to adjust data to produce desired results as predicted by model. IIRC
Lots of back and forth regarding how to address/adjust “bad” data. Medieval warm trends, Medieval cold trends, etc. Tony Heller still produces old data sets and shows how they have been “adjusted” to prove we are getting warmer and warmer and such. Or for that matter how “news” reports that state “unprecedented” weather events are really not unprecedented.
Yep, all the warming is in the adjustments, not the raw data.
I wouldn’t be so sure engineering will remain free of Woke magical thinking.
Medicine is a practical field – treatments must kill fewer patients than the illness or injury does. And medical schools have been overrun with wokeness – “People with uterui”, “All health outcomes that are different between races are due to White racism”, etc., etc., etc..
Yes, but medicine is the one industry where the worse your product works, the more money you make!
Medicine is totally corrupted. It’s not just wokeism, but the incentives are wrong. You doctor will prescribe what gives him the biggest cut, even if it’s bad for you.
I made a personal decision to never go to a doctor again unless I have a serious injury or suspect a serious life-changing disease.
I’d not go that far. Let’s just say that a doctor is not god. He has his shortcomings, you need to be an educated consumer. Ignoring an increasing problem never has its upside. Doctors like to “treat the numbers” shown on their myriad of modern tests. You need to decide if he is doing this and ignore as you feel appropriate. You are more complex than a simple number in a hypothetical 95% CI.
You treat pathology/disease, not numbers. Always ask what is the negative potential results stemming from these “abnormal” numbers and look specifically for pathology. Lots of doctors on the internet discuss these matters better than I can. I find them helpful and reassuring of the profession. But they a not typical.
Sure, however, I can treat a lot of health problems myself. Others can too, as long as they can process existing resources critically (like information on the Web).
As for never going to a doctor again, the final annoyance that pushed me towards that decision was after the Covid vaxx came out. Every single doctor I visited was pushing the vaxx on me, even if my visit had nothing to do with Covid. Just one example: I went to do a vision test for my expired driver’s license renewal and the doctor couldn’t shut up about the shot. I know that they get paid for every injection, because the government didn’t even try to make it secret. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Find another doctor. Shop around. My doctor did the same with vexxination. Even sending direct to me and other clients current CDC recommendations—which were all suspect in my mind, but that’s another tale.
I saw him and never wore a mask. I pay him a yearly fee—money makes us all “whores”. He and his assistant had their “shots”, so they felt “safe” to see this plague spreader. I had Covid twice by that time.
Never asked if he got the pox, but I did state I saw no need now for shots since I survived the disease without issue. Last trip I had blood drawn and analyzed for antigen and antibodies.
According to the analysis, I “glow” with antibodies for Omnicron. 😉 By that time, the vexxination was getting the bad press it deserved and VAER’s was hopping. My doctor no longer mentions it. Memory holed.
I even asked, and he agreed that he’d prescribe therapeutics like Ivermectin upon request as I would not get the jab no matter what. The Legislature here passed a new law prohibiting the barring of Covid therapeutics by pharmacies or the local County health departments.
I, like you, have little use for a doctor, but they are gatekeepers of a sort for drug and medical testing. They prescribe and then insurance pays. But even without insurance, you need a doctor to send you over to private companies for scans and blood analysis.
“Find another doctor.”
The problems with doctors are pervasive. It is possible to find a better doctor, but it’s not easy. Trust has been broken over the past few years and it will be very difficult to rebuild. So far, I have not seen any signs of improvement.
“you need a doctor to send you over to private companies for scans and blood analysis.”
I am lucky to be in a jurisdiction where many tests at private providers are available without a doctor’s reference.
Doctors use google and YouTube for prescriptions like normies use google and YouTube for auto and small appliance repair.
The medical world is just too complicated for one man; specialists can’t see everyone for every ouchie.
Agree. Recommend the book by a doctor called Overdiagnosed. It is about how doctors use preventive care to sell more procedures to more people.
I’m not ready to totally abandon the field, but when my primary wanted me to take Paxlovid a month ago, my eyes were opened. I have not yet “spoken with” the doctor involved and given my lack of tact, might do better not to. I already have the business card of a local MD who writes Ivermectin scripts. Perhaps it’s time to take at last some of my heath business elsewhere.
My alumni mags clearly indicate STEM colleges and universities have been toast for a few years.
They went all-in trying to find novel means of detecting and preventing the coof. All other research is directed towards the implementation of the global digital concentration camp.
Other than that they waste plenty of pages highlighting crazy hair colors on campus and alums who have become TikTok influencers.
Clearly these folks are headed for fruitful careers developing cold fusion reactors.
“Medicine is a practical field – treatments must kill fewer patients than the illness or injury does.”
I’d say Covid if not Wokeness has blown that assumption out of the water. Although I’m sure .gov counts on people continuing to make it.
I think this bridge collapse was using from women engineers. Expect more of this
But all these people with their narratives, the gnostics, the utopians,the Marxist the socialists all the way to the cult of transgenderism is always been about the quest to change the nature of man. That is their fight against reality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse
women of color and peculiar sexual identities. killed a bunch of their supporters when it went, too. guess math isn’t optional, where gravity is involved…
I’ve not seen any discussion of the engineering work being done by an “all” woman team. Perhaps some reference is in order for that particular assertion. Nor from the final report on the failure is there reason to believe that the flaw in design should not have been noticed before failure (like big cracks appearing).
However, the entire fiasco—and that’s what it was—leads one to believe we have exceeded the required smart fraction and are beginning to show societal decline in general ability. Seems there is a more general spread of the incompetence than simply a bunch of female engineers working above their level of competence.
diversity vagineers ftw
muh feels! muh fairness!
Collapse is the cure: a bridge yesterday, a country today, and a civilizational realm tomorrow.
The world can hardly await the
https://affirmationtower.com/
Which, as I understand it, would be designed by an all-Black team.