Scientists never lie. Holy Journals never publish total BS.
Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have recommended that 31 papers from a former lab director be retracted from medical journals.
The papers from the lab of Dr. Piero Anversa, who studied cardiac stem cells, “included falsified and/or fabricated data,” according to a statement to Retraction Watch and STAT from the two institutions.
Last year, the hospital agreed to a $10 million settlement with the U.S. government over allegations Anversa and two colleagues’ work had been used to fraudulently obtain federal funding.
canpakes wrote:Are you trying to draw some sort of parallel between publications that attempt to weed out crap, and the ones that exist to promote it?
Er, yes. I do believe he is.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
I think it's good to have a healthy level of skepticism of everyone and everything. Everyone seems to have an agenda. In court, "experts" will say what their side wants. It's funny how when I am up against a bank, the bank's appraiser will value a property as high as seemingly possible while my appraiser likes to come in as low as possible. Perhaps this phenomenon happens in other areas, like scientific research? Some drugs that get FDA approval turn out to be very dangerous like Vioxx was. The "experts" backing Vioxx were obviously wrong in that case.
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen
It's not hard to understand what's going on with the Dog. He was once a true believing apologist defender of all things Mormon. If you look at the form that amateur apologetic arguments take, it looks very much like the form that science denier arguments take. Critics of the church argue from the totality of the evidence. Apologists shy away from the totality of the evidence, using excuses like "oh, that's anti-mormon literature" to avoid even considering it. Apologists use the "Explain this" form of argument:
If the church is false, then explain this:
Parallels Chiasmus Witness testimony Smith was an uneducated dummy Early Modern English Lion Couch
And on and on.
Water Dog rejected Mormonism, but he hasn't rejected the apologetics he relied on in the past. Rejecting Mormonism doesn't come with a free brain transplant. They don't automatically change from unreasonable people to reasonable people. And they don't automatically abandon apologetic arguments for realism based on evaluating the totality of the evidence.
Water Dog is still an apologist. He's just switched from Mormonism to climate science denial. Over and over again, he posts little snippets of information as if they contradict the science itself. Explain this graph. Explain this quote. Explain what this blogger says. At the same time, he refuses to even learn the basics of what the science actually says. That refusal is obvious, because he says things and make claims that no one familiar with even the basics of climate science would ask.
And I think, under his bravado and bluster, he senses that because he massively projects what he's actually doing onto others. No one has made the claim that journals are "holy." But his refusal to even learn what the science says and why it says it is akin to treating Lindzen and the handful of others he relies on as infallible prophets.
People who have confidence in science (not individual scientists) as the most reliable method for finding out how the world works understand that what the science says is found in the published literature -- not in some guys blog or some guy's thesis or random graphs copied from the internet. Dog is attempting to denigrate the science by attacking the concept of literature in general. That's what makes him anti-science. If science won't give him the answers he wants, then the science has to go.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Exiled wrote: ... Some drugs that get FDA approval turn out to be very dangerous like Vioxx was. The "experts" backing Vioxx were obviously wrong in that case.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Please be careful with expressions like 'obviously wrong' in cases like this. In matters of practical judgement, decisions have to be made in a finite time, and with limited resources. It is perfectly possible for people to say in retrospect:
"Knowing what I know now, I would not have made that past decision in the same way. But on the basis of the information actually available under the circumstances that the decision had to be made, I would make the same decision again."
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Exiled wrote:I think it's good to have a healthy level of skepticism of everyone and everything. Everyone seems to have an agenda. In court, "experts" will say what their side wants. It's funny how when I am up against a bank, the bank's appraiser will value a property as high as seemingly possible while my appraiser likes to come in as low as possible. Perhaps this phenomenon happens in other areas, like scientific research? Some drugs that get FDA approval turn out to be very dangerous like Vioxx was. The "experts" backing Vioxx were obviously wrong in that case.
Of course it's good to have a healthy level of skepticism. The trick is in figuring out what is "healthy." And, in my opinion, what is healthy is what Neil deGrasse Tyson said: question the claim but embrace the evidence. When a true sceptic sees something in the data that doesn't appear to fit with current understanding, he channels his inner scientist and goes to work trying to figure out what's going on. When a denier sees something that doesn't appear to fit, he screams fraud and attacks the entire field.
Research on new pharmaceuticals has been particularly problematic in terms of sloppy practices and fraud. But drug trials are a little different than other scientific research. They involve evaluation of a single drug, with a pass/fail result. A wider body of research isn't developed until after the drug is on the market and a larger number of users have taken it over a period of time.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Exiled wrote: ... Some drugs that get FDA approval turn out to be very dangerous like Vioxx was. The "experts" backing Vioxx were obviously wrong in that case.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Please be careful with expressions like 'obviously wrong' in cases like this. In matters of practical judgement, decisions have to be made in a finite time, and with limited resources. It is perfectly possible for people to say in retrospect:
"Knowing what I know now, I would not have made that past decision in the same way. But on the basis of the information actually available under the circumstances that the decision had to be made, I would make the same decision again."
Yes, I am looking at Vioxx in hindsight, but it got through the supposed government gate keeper when it shouldn't have. Perhaps there are too many conflicts of interest inside the FDA? Money has an interesting way of influencing people and government officials love getting cushy jobs with the very industries they regulate after their government service is done. Also, in the Vioxx case, Merck created a false journal for P.R. purposes in order to push its questionable drug. https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/merck-published-fake-journal-44190. My point is that we should be more questioning of what may seemingly be settled science, especially when the settled science is used for monetary gain.
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen