A Philosophical Prose-Poetry-Article thoughts upon the darkening present and ominous future of our world in which we live as that which all Humanity shall soon realize and be forced to endure.
Please do scrutinize, carefully contemplate, and digest the import's impact of the Evidential Footnotes I have provided for my readers below:
1 Free Thinker — A True Free Thinker by Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham: https://allpoetry.com/journal/16056345-A-True-Free-Thinker-by-Flynn-de-Graham Or, https://www.writerscafe.org/writing/FlynndeGraham/2820114/
2 Dumbed-Down — dumb down| dumb somethingdown (disapproving) to make something less accurate or educational, and of worse quality, by trying to make it easier for people to understand https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/dumb-down
3 Gomer Pyle USMC — “Gomer Pyle was a sweet but not-too-smart U.S. Marine from Mayberry, North Carolina who was stationed at Camp Henderson near Los Angeles, California. Gomer's innocence, naivete, and low-key demeanor often got him into trouble ...” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057752/
4 Intelligently-Stupid — A terminology of my own creation's self coining ...
5 Humans Are Devolving — “We are all mutants,” proclaimed a headline on Science Daily. “First Direct Whole-Genome Measure of Human Mutation Predicts 60 New Mutations in Each of Us.” The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute press release reported 60 new mutations per individual, received from parents – a “striking value” the article characterized the “unexpected findings”. The genomes of children from two families were inspected in this first-ever test of generational mutation. “This fascinating result had not been anticipated, and it raises as many questions as it answers,” the article exclaimed without offering an explanation of how evolution could deal with this high a mutational load. See also the 06/05/2011 entry, “Genetic Entropy Confirmed.”
Note: the Sanger Institute is named after geneticist Fred Sanger, not (thank goodness) Margaret Sanger, the racist-eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood. She had thought eliminating the unfit would be improve humanity. Would that Sanger, Hitler and other believers in eugenics had known what John Sanford revealed so clearly in his book Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome; all attempts to stop the tide of mutations are hopelessly ineffective. Not even extreme genocide of all the perceived unfit could stop the downward trend.
Even one or two mutations per generation is cause for alarm, let alone 60. John Sanford’s book is must reading to realize two things: (1) Natural selection can never find enough beneficial mutations to overcome the flood of deleterious ones, most of which are nearly-neutral mistakes that accumulate, like typographic errors, to cause genetic deterioration. (2) Humans could not possibly have lived for millions of years at this rate of mutational degradation. This story only reinforces with empirical data a worry about the future of our species that has long been known by population geneticists. We are not evolving, despite improvements in medicine; we are all less fit than Neanderthals and ancient Romans. Unless the Lord intervenes, the human genome is doomed.
https://crev.info/2011/06/110621-humans_are_devolving/
6 Science: The Religion That Must Not Be Questioned — Science: the religion that must not be questioned
It's time for the priesthood to be taken to task – and journalists aren't up to the job
Henry Gee
Thu 19 Sep 2013 02.30 EDT
180
You'd think from the way that science tends to be reported in the popular prints, as they used to be called, that Professor Helsing von Frankenstein goes into the dungeon laboratory of his castle one morning, dons his white coat and – by elevenses, and working completely alone – discovers a way to kill all known germs, tautologically. He gets his assistant, Igor, to set up a press conference at lunchtime, at which the professor emphasises that the research raises more questions than it answers. By teatime he has won the Nobel prize and his magic nostrum will be available on the NHS next morning. It's always a "he", by the way – received wisdom finds no place for female scientists, unless they also happen to be young, photogenic and, preferably, present television programmes.
Well, as we all know, science doesn't work like that. Scientific research gets trapped in more box canyons than the Lone Ranger; does more U-turns than the average government; falls to certain death more often than Wile E Coyote; has more women in it than you might at first imagine (though probably not nearly enough); and generally gets the wrong answer.
As my learned colleague Dr Sylvia McLain, who is both a scientist and a person of the opposite sex, explained here just the other day, this is business as usual. All scientific results are in their nature provisional – they can be nothing else. Someone will come along, either the next day or the next decade, with further refinements, new methods, more nuanced ways of looking at old problems, and, quelle surprise, find that conclusions based on earlier results were simplistic, rough-hewn – even wrong.
The problem is that we (not the royal we, but the great unwashed lay public who won't know the difference between an eppendorf tube and an entrenching tool) are told, very often, and by people who ought to know better, that science is a one-way street of ever-advancing progress, a zero-sum game in which facts are accumulated and ignorance dispelled. In reality, the more we discover, the more we realise we don't know. Science is not so much about knowledge as doubt. Never in the field of human inquiry have so many known so little about so much.
If this all sounds rather rarefied, consider science at its most practical. As discussed in Dr McLain's article and the comments subjacent, scientific experiments don't end with a holy grail so much as an estimate of probability. For example, one might be able to accord a value to one's conclusion not of "yes" or "no" but "P<0.05", which means that the result has a less than one in 20 chance of being a fluke. That doesn't mean it's "right".
One thing that never gets emphasised enough in science, or in schools, or anywhere else, is that no matter how fancy-schmancy your statistical technique, the output is always a probability level (a P-value), the "significance" of which is left for you to judge – based on nothing more concrete or substantive than a feeling, based on the imponderables of personal or shared experience. Statistics, and therefore science, can only advise on probability – they cannot determine The Truth. And Truth, with a capital T, is forever just beyond one's grasp.
None of this gets through to the news pages. When pitching a science story to a news editor, a science correspondent soon learns that the answer that gets airtime is either "yes", or "no". Either the Voyager space probe has left the solar system, or it hasn't. To say that it might have done and attach statistical caveats is a guaranteed turn-off. Nobody ever got column inches by saying that Elvis has a 95% probability of having left the building.
Why do we (it's the royal we this time, do please try to keep up at the back) demand such definitive truths of science, but are happy to have all other spheres of human activity wallow in mess and muddle?
I think it goes back to the mid-20th century, especially just after the second world war, when scientists – they were called "boffins" – gave us such miracles as radar, penicillin and plastics; jet propulsion, teflon, mass vaccination and transistors; the structure of DNA, lava lamps and the eye-level grill. They cracked the Enigma, and the atom. They were the original rocket scientists, people vouchsafed proverbially inaccessible knowledge. They were wizards, men like gods, who either had more than the regular human complement of leetle grey cells, or access to occult arcana denied to ordinary mortals. They were priests in vestments of white coats, tortoiseshell specs and pocket protectors. We didn't criticise them. We didn't engage with them – we bowed down before them.
How our faith was betrayed! (This is the great unwashed "we" again.) It wasn't long before we realised that science gave us pollution, radiation, agent orange and birth defects. And when we looked closely, "we" (oh, I give up) found that the scientists were not dispensing truths, but – gasp – arguing among themselves about the most fundamental aspects of science. They weren't priests after all, but frauds, fleecing us at some horrifically expensive bunco booth, while all the time covering up the fact that they couldn't even agree among themselves about the science they were peddling us like so much snake oil. And if they couldn't agree among themselves, why should good honest folks like you and me give them any credence?
Witness the rise of creationists, alien-abductees and homeopaths; the anti-vaxers and the climate-change deniers; those convinced that Aids was a colonial plot, and those who would never be convinced that living under power lines didn't necessarily give you cancer; ill-informed crystal-gazers of every stripe, who, while at the same time as denouncing science as fraudulent, tried to ape it with scientific-sounding charlatanry of their own.
If the once-inaccessible scientists had been defrocked, why couldn't just anyone borrow their robes? Announce that camel turds are the latest miracle super-food; put on a white coat and mumble impressive nonsense about zero-point energy, omega fatty acids and the mystery third strand of DNA; and you're in business, ready to exploit fool after fool at a bunco booth of your own making.
And all this because scientists weren't honest enough, or quick enough, to say that science wasn't about Truth, handed down on tablets of stone from above, and even then, only to the elect; but Doubt, which anyone (even girls) could grasp, provided they had a modicum of wit and concentration. It wasn't about discoveries written in imperishable crystal, but about argument, debate, trial, and – very often – error.
Not that you'd see any of this in the above-mentioned public prints, which continue to display a disarmingly schizoid attitude to science. They are at the same time the wizards with magic bullets against everything from cancer to male-pattern baldness; the charlatans whose behind-the-scenes chicanery is designed to exploit your honest naivety.
Even the more highbrow effusions on science have yet to learn this lesson. TV programmes on science pursue a line that's often cringe-makingly reverential. Switch on any episode of Horizon, and the mood lighting, doom-laden music and Shakespearean voiceover convince you that you are entering the Houses of the Holy – somewhere where debate and dissent are not so much not permitted as inconceivable. If there are dissenting views, they aren't voiced by an interviewer, but by other scientists, and "we" (the great unwashed) can only sit back and watch uncomprehending as if the contenders are gods throwing thunderbolts at one another. If the presenters are scientists themselves, or have some scientific knowledge, be they Bill Oddie or David Attenborough, their discourse is one of monologue rather than argument, received wisdom rather than doubt.
I believe there might have been a time when science journalists would engage with scientists, picking holes in their ideas directly, as if throwing traders out of the temple. I yearn for scientific versions of political journalists of the calibre of Jeremy Paxman, James Naughtie or John Humphreys who could take on scientists on their own terms, rather than letting them drop their pearls of wisdom and wander off unchallenged. For that kind of journalism, TV is more or less a desert, though the blogosphere is better. There are more hopeful signs on radio, with the likes of my former Nature colleague Adam Rutherford, who gave Andrew Wakefield – you know, the MMR-and-autism guy – a thorough working over on the Home Service a while back. But, you might argue, Wakefield is too easy a target. And yet, as science journalists such as Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre have discovered, even those apparently easy targets whose scientific credentials are challenged resort very easily to legislation in the way that politicians never would.
Why is this? The answer, I think, is that those who are scientists, or who pretend to be scientists, cling to the mantle of a kind of religious authority. And as anyone who has tried to comment on religion has discovered, there is no such thing as criticism. There is only blasphemy.
Henry Gee is a senior editor of Nature. He is on Twitter at HenryGeeBooks and his book The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution is published on 21 October by the University of Chicago Press
7 Scientism — When 'Science' Becomes The New Religion, it is time for heresy: When ‘Science’ becomes the New Religion, it is time for heresy.
Thomas P Seager, PhD
https://tpseager.medium.com/when-science-becomes-the-new-religion-it-is-time-for-heresy-f17fb60a11a9
The political masquerade of Scientism is killing science.
One of the greatest inventions of the Enlightenment was ignorance — i.e., the idea that there were some important things worth knowing that could not be found in the canonical texts of the dominant Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) — at least as might be interpreted by the Priests who were the only people capable of reading them.
Without the concept of ignorance, there is no Scientific Revolution. There is no Scientific Method. There is no Science (Firestein 2012).
Although religion and science are both systems of belief, the fundamental distinction between them is the basis for that belief. Science is evidence-based, and thus subject to constant revision and falsification. In contrast, religion is faith-based. That is, religion demands belief in the absence of evidence.
Because there are questions that science cannot and does not attempt to answer, religion and science are complementary systems of belief, although they are often positioned as competitive. In secular societies, such as the United States, the separation of religious beliefs from the institutions of governance necessitates the elevation of science as an alternative system of belief, because in the absence of a system of belief, governance is impossible.
Thus, in times of crisis, when ignorance and uncertainty are at an apex and the citizenry is clamoring for an alleviation of their anxieties, we often hear “We should listen to the scientists!”
Who could object to such a reasonable suggestion?
Except that in such times, there is typically no shortage of scientists willing to abandon the principles of doubt, skepticism, and ignorance on which their profession is founded, and adopt instead the confidence of an idealogue.
Presidential election years are often such times.
For example, several groups of scientists published characteristically un-scientific political endorsements of nominees in the 2020 US Presidential Election. One of them is a group of eighty-one Nobel Laureates who, according to their undated open letter, are all American citizens recognized by the prestigious Nobel prize committee for their contributions in Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine, and “wholeheartedly endorse Biden,” because “he has consistently demonstrated his willingness to listen to experts, his understanding of the value of international collaboration in research, and his respect for the contribution that immigrants make to the intellectual life of our country.”
Another is the Editorial Board of the highly-regarded New England Journal of Medicine who took the unprecedented step of issuing their own political endorsement in October 2020, by publishing the accusation that “Instead of relying on expertise, the (Trump) administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.”
While the Editors are not specific about making public policy recommendations that might have improved COVID policy response, they estimate the “number of additional American lives lost because of weak and inappropriate government policies, is at least in the tens of thousands… .”
In their political endorsement, the NEJM reference China’s COVID policy response as an example to emulate in the United States. Although the success of these policies in China is difficult to measure, given the changing definition of what constitutes a COVID case, several scientific sources corroborate the fact that the Chinese lockdown was effective at limiting COVID transmission. Presumably, a Chinese-style lockdown is one of the measures the NEJM endorse as capable of saving thousands of American lives.
Nonetheless, the NEJM fails to acknowledge that the Chinese-style lockdowns are concomitant with Chinese-style human rights abuses. According to an interview published in the journal Health and Human Rights, “China’s government initially withheld basic information about the coronavirus from the public, underreported cases of infection, downplayed the severity of the infection, and dismissed the likelihood of transmission between humans. Authorities detained people for reporting on the epidemic on social media and internet users for “rumor-mongering,” censored online discussions of the epidemic, and curbed media reporting. In early January, Li Wenliang, a doctor at a hospital in Wuhan where infected patients were being treated, was summoned by police for ‘spreading rumors’ after he warned of the new virus in an online chatroom. He died in early February from the virus.”
Further, TIME magazine quotes Thomas Bollyky, the director of the Global Health Program at the Washington D.C.-based Council on Foreign Relations, as saying “No other nation (western or otherwise) can or should seek to replicate China’s actions. The disregard for civil liberties and human rights that the government has demonstrated in its quarantine and censorship activities are inseparable from the policies and actions of the government that contributed to the outbreak in the first place.” Only by ignoring both the enormous cost of a Chinese-style COVID response and dissenting voices in the scientific community about the long-term efficacy of such an approach, can the NEJM assert that Chinese governance systems might be suitable for the United States.
Neither is Singapore a model of humanitarian mitigation measures, despite expressions of NEJM admiration. According to an article published in OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, “part of their initial success on the COVID-19 confinement is attributed to the dexterous political climate, which allows their government space to quickly institute drastic measures, which is near impossible in other democracies.”
In Singapore, the immigrant populations that the Nobel signatories presumably deem worthy of “respect” have been especially abused by the COVID response policies. While the Singapore strategy was an exercise in class-based sacrifice, South Korea forced removal of “asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients” from their homes, into isolation “at community treatment centers — often dormitories for training institutions of South Korean companies transformed into centers used for monitoring patients without utilizing acute care resources.”
Holding up autocratic, East Asian countries as exemplars of COVID-19 mitigation for the United States is not an indictment of the current US administration, nor a basis for allocating political power to an insular group of selected American scientists. It is a distortion of science for the purpose of electioneering, and the Editors should be ashamed.
In contrast to the distorted views espoused in the NEJM endorsement, scientists in other publications long ago described a more constructive set of criteria for evaluating pandemic response policies. For example, a 2006 article in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism suggests three:
Do available data or experience suggest the measure will work?
Is the disease mitigation measure feasible?
What are the possible unintended adverse societal consequences?
By contrast, when evaluating different COVID policy proposals and endorsing the political leaders who promulgate them, the NEJM attempts to rewrite its own publication history.
For example, a March 2020 article in the NEJM claimed “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate (CFR) of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS” — a prediction that proved prescient, given that early estimates of the COVID CFR have later been discovered to be “unusually exaggerated.”
And, in making their endorsement, the NEJM overlooked the controversy surrounding their own April 2020 article that claimed, “In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic” — an assertion made all the more interesting by the June 2020 follow-up in which the same authors attempt to rewrite their original article by stating “We understand that some people are citing our Perspective article (published on April 1) as support for discrediting widespread masking. In truth, the intent of our article was to push for more masking, not less.”
How embarrassing for these authors, who diminish their original well-reasoned scientific analysis to the state of a morbid April Fool’s joke, when their own anxiety causes them to later write “Universal masking helps to prevent such people from spreading virus-laden secretions, whether they recognize that they are infected or not.”
While the implication is that subsequent studies caused these scientists to change their minds, the data they cite as definitive is from a 3 April 2020 Nature article that found there was “no significant reduction in detection in aerosols” for influenza and “for rhinovirus, there were no significant differences between detection of virus with or without face masks, both in respiratory droplets and in aerosols.” The only benefit to surgical masks the study discovered was a reduction in the dispersion of ordinary coronavirus droplets, suggesting that universal surgical mask mandates might reduce the risk of being spit on in public.
The Editor’s political exhortations, to the contradiction of evidence, is not the product of science. It is a political ideology masquerading as science, to the advantage of the High Priests of the New Religion — the Editors themselves.
Leveraging the institutions and credentials of science for the political exploitation of doubt is not science.
It is scientism.
“Scientism” (Hayek, 1942) no longer concerns itself with evidence, because it must become pre-occupied with authority. In the journal Religious Studies, Mikhael Stenmark (1997) writes that “at least some forms of scientism seem to offer a substitute for traditional religions and thus present science itself as a religion or world view.”
When science is held to be the only pathway with access to reality, or to contain everything that is worth knowing about reality, then everything “beyond the reach of scientists cannot count as knowledge” (Stenmark 1997).
Under these conditions, epistemic questions such as “How do we know what we believe?” can only be resolved by the new High Priests of Scientism and the internal, political deliberations that adjudicate our beliefs. In the case, the Scientific Method will devolve into opinion contests, personal attacks, and power struggles, rather than evidence.
Under such conditions, the Enlightenment is undone, the “scientists” shed their intellectual humility, and debate becomes preoccupied with who belongs, which opinions “count,” and what penalties of ex-communication will be levied against those who fail to show adequate deference to their Scientism superiors.
In a secular form of government like that imagined by the Constitution of the United States, in which religion is specifically excluded from government institutions, we must guard against the danger that “science” becomes refashioned like a Trojan Horse, usurping the mechanisms of secular governance and inserting Scientism as the New Religion of the techno-bureaucracy.
Currently, those safeguards are entrusted to the institutions and organizations of science itself, so that the same communities entrusted with the apparatus of our evidence-based beliefs are the very people who will profit from its exploitation for political, economic, or ideological gains.
Several other scientific groups disagree. Among them are the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, who levy specific and scathing critiques of lockdown policies, and another group of medical practitioners calling themselves America’s Frontline Doctors, who claim “We exist to counter the massive disinformation campaign regarding the pandemic.” In contrast to NEJM, however, neither of these groups of experts were trying to persuade Americans on how they should vote. Ironically, each has been censored by major publication outlets.
The censorship and politicing have turned science upside-down. Curiosity has been supplanted by politics, and what was once the noble pursuit of a closer approximation of the truth has been reduced to a Cult of Scientism.
8 Evolution — Shattering The Myths Of Darwinism by Richard Milton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcLnjdSAvsI
9 Blind Faith — belief without true understanding, perception, or discrimination. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/blind-faith
10 Those in power — The Mysterious Origins Of Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u__Zm4stnug
11 Reality 101 — Scientists Under Attack: https://filmsfortheearth.org/en/film/scientists-under-attack/ or https://www.denkmal.film/index.php?l=en&page=gekaufte-wahrheit-4
My Review
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Maybe in future our existence will be disproven...maybe we aren't taking an active enough role in this movie of our lives...we just let the projector roll...write rhymes that we cannot believe ourselves...and realize the mind engine is sputtering...
j.
Posted 1 Year Ago
1 of 1 people found this review constructive.
1 Year Ago
Jacob,
Thank you for reading and enduring this absolute ugly a*s piece that is my ver.. read moreJacob,
Thank you for reading and enduring this absolute ugly a*s piece that is my version of a hybrid Prose-Poetry Article with a message ...
I got in a bit of a hurry in posting this piece as I intend to add in Evidential Footnotes in support of that which I share in the piece regarding the reality that Science has left off its search and establishment of factual truths of our common reality ... That day is now long gone ...
In today's modern technological world, Science has become corporate-tized by those Fascist elements within governments around the world, especially here in America, and the result is that Facts & Truths are daily being sacrificed in the name of obtaining research grants, contracts, & scholarly careers that can be ruined and destroyed by simply daring to stand and speak of facts and truths that deviate from the outcome of Scientific research that is being conducted, and, thus serves as a threat to projected & prospective profits from development & marketing in a vast number of areas of what used to be trusted as that revealer of truth called Science, but is no more ...
We are being overtaken-controlled by them who in turn, turn out to be us who in turn refuse our turn because the news station said we would be classified if we did and we found standing in line for a peanut butter cracker much more satisfying than taking the initiative to think. I think. Or perhaps a nice recliner and a virtual reality game of ping pong will soothe the savage soul. Well hell, what is all of this rhyme fuss about anyway. Poetry...that is a different program, please pay your dues to subscribe and quite your damn human being whining. Did I just say that? Who am I? wait a minute, I get it now...your poem has taken control of my mind and now I need to...haiku (whatever that is)
ok, an abstract collection of thoughts expressed in a very creative way. I enjoyed this.
Posted 1 Year Ago
1 of 1 people found this review constructive.
1 Year Ago
Willweb,
Thanks for reading & enduring this Ugly-A*s hybridized Prose-Poetry-Article .. read moreWillweb,
Thanks for reading & enduring this Ugly-A*s hybridized Prose-Poetry-Article of mine that is intended as a wakeup call's message ...
Maybe in future our existence will be disproven...maybe we aren't taking an active enough role in this movie of our lives...we just let the projector roll...write rhymes that we cannot believe ourselves...and realize the mind engine is sputtering...
j.
Posted 1 Year Ago
1 of 1 people found this review constructive.
1 Year Ago
Jacob,
Thank you for reading and enduring this absolute ugly a*s piece that is my ver.. read moreJacob,
Thank you for reading and enduring this absolute ugly a*s piece that is my version of a hybrid Prose-Poetry Article with a message ...
I got in a bit of a hurry in posting this piece as I intend to add in Evidential Footnotes in support of that which I share in the piece regarding the reality that Science has left off its search and establishment of factual truths of our common reality ... That day is now long gone ...
In today's modern technological world, Science has become corporate-tized by those Fascist elements within governments around the world, especially here in America, and the result is that Facts & Truths are daily being sacrificed in the name of obtaining research grants, contracts, & scholarly careers that can be ruined and destroyed by simply daring to stand and speak of facts and truths that deviate from the outcome of Scientific research that is being conducted, and, thus serves as a threat to projected & prospective profits from development & marketing in a vast number of areas of what used to be trusted as that revealer of truth called Science, but is no more ...
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