It felt so good when that MIT study came out. I looked at that chart and thought, "I'm following over half of those accounts, I have to be pretty well informed".
It felt so good when that MIT study came out. I looked at that chart and thought, "I'm following over half of those accounts, I have to be pretty well informed".
“most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, not an institution.”
leveling this as though it were an accusation was deeply telling. could there be any clearer sign of woo-woo than the claim that science is an institution and that the commoners should keep their grubby hands off of it and leave such endeavor to their betters?
I showed the MIT paper to people I still chatted with at the time to explain "here's the people who write the stuff I keep sending to you" - none of them fanatics, really, just aggravatingly "go along to get along" (to the point that I was eventually bad for their social status), and even they said, "I don't understand the argument of this paper. Aren't the things they're saying how science is supposed to work?"
Next thing some clown from the patent office without formal accreditation is going to think he can just write papers about the propagation of light and the nature of space-time. Jerk.
While the US Patent Office serves useful purposes, they do get some ribbing as some very questionable things have been patented. One is for a device that allows for speeds (data transmission maybe?) faster than the speed of light. And yes, I verified that. You can too. Google patent "faster than light" and read at your leisure.
If you can't periodically go back and "re-run" an old experiment that "proved" something, then you're not doing science.
In fact, scientists should - just for the fun of it - pick an old experiment each year and re-run it. Show the kiddies how the current scientific consensus was built. And heck, sometimes you may find that you can't reproduce an experiment. At which point, you should do some serious thinking...
You would be shocked (or perhaps not) how pervasive the "reproducibility crisis" really is. It is present in basically every single discipline for which peer-reviewed research publication exists, and I find it weird that more people aren't freaking out about its implications, one of which is that most of the conclusions drawn from the last 75 or so years' research is wrong or unprovable.
To real scientists, the reproducibility crisis should be the equivalent of finding a dated "first draft" of the Bible in ancient Hebrew, complete with editor's markup, where Moses built a rocket ship instead of an ark and Jesus was originally written as a fat smuggler with child support payments: an existential disaster.
i used to hear fellow grad students how they were trying to amplify a gene segment or isolate an entire gene, followed someone else's methods, and just couldn't get it to work -- not even in the same cell line or in the same species. that made it all sound super sketchy right there.
then, when DNA sequence analysis was becoming a typical thing to do in evolutionary biology, i read so many papers in which the researchers would "align multiple sequences by eye". it actually took a hardy group at Merck to create a usable script that would actually automate the alignment process and comparison so the "by eye" nonsense could be squashed. the joy of being a peer reviewer and thrashing that part of the methods, "you should be using script X", was unparalleled. lol.
Now imagine how many papers got published before sequence alignment technology, and are still out there, still cited, and have never been subsequently tested for repeatability.
now let's ponder all those things under microscope lenses.
Harold Hillman, an electron microscopist and neurobiologist, was convinced that a lot of what was being published as "X" was actually a consequence of staining and tissue prep techniques. He had a list of questions for the scientific community, none of which anyone was prepared to answer. He eventually became person non grata because he dared to challenge the protocols.
I often argue that a more serious crisis is where dogma has banned certain scientific thought. We discuss some of those issues here (e.g. the true facts surrounding the Covid-19 "pandemic"). However, if one looks, one can find curious cases of politics pushing reality off the stage in fields as diverse as education, sociology, criminology, anthropology, medicine and no doubt many more that I'm unaware of.
What I speak of above are the problem of willful ignorance, or even enforced conformance to an established acceptable belief, in the hard(er) sciences. The problem is far worse in the softer areas of human thought, e.g. philosophy, religion and such. No matter one's sincerely held convictions, I assert that almost everyone believes as true certain beliefs that are barking-at-the-moon, batshit crazy, if subjected to rigorous analysis.
Agreed. Not every experiment is easy to reproduce. But in education, ideally students are shown some of the basics. For example, I've done some basic chemistry. In biology classes I've peered through a microscope and seen actual pond creatures swimming around, or [dog] blood cells affected by varying saline levels, and similar phenomena. In an astronomy class we had the opportunity to look through telescopes at heavenly bodies, although I preferred the nubile female variety on campus. Do they even do this for more recent generations (I'm a latter Boomer).
So when are scientists today gonna run an experiment and say, "Whoops, my bad, actually I completely and totally disproved my own hypothesis. It's actually not a good idea to inject mRNA into your veins!"
There is a banned Ted Talk in which Rupert Sheldrake describes a hobby he had looking up reports about the speed of light that reported different findings on the measured speed. It is very funny and raises a lot of uncomfortable questions about dogma and catma in Science.
I remember something similar about masks. The anti-mask group actually knew the data and was perfectly happy to recite it back. This was a big problem for those who wanted us to just blindly believe what they were saying.
Yeah, I don't pay attention to Berenson anymore. He's gotten...weird. Seemed to morph straight into a persecution complex with the twitter battle, than a God complex after winning, while still somehow keeping the persecution complex. He did do some yeoman's work on covid though, and I will always appreciate him for that.
Look, in spite of whatever it is about Berenson that compels him to say and do awkward and weird stuff sometimes, I'm still paying attention to him because he has exposed some pretty important stuff - and he'll probably keep doing it for a while. I mean look at what came to light from his Twitter fight about how the White House was telling Twitter who to censor - that's illegal, and it's documented and public now. So yeah, I'm still following his work . . .
I also follow Alex. But he is whinny. I love gato: without gato malo I would have sunk into depression. I need gato’s strength and encouragement. Alex gives good info but he’s whinny and a drama queen. Adding more drama to this whole situation is counterproductive.
Yeah. I recently stopped following him myself for that very reason. He can still come up with good stuff, but most of the time he just whines. I follow VivaBarnesLaw on Locals and they post links to good Berenson articles and I figure that's all I need from him. I found boriquagato through VivaBarnesLaw too.
Right. If I hadn't seen Berenson in mid to late summer of 2021 showing that Israel was the canary in the coal mine, I probably wouldn't have discovered the Bad Cat, Eugypyius, and many others. The comments sections of most of these substacks have been my fortress of solitude from the Branch Covidians. He has good takes on the 'rona and vaccines, but not much else. I just don't understand his obsession with Twitter. It's a leftist Clown Show.
I get your point of view, Alex just got too tiresome for me to care about on a regular basis. Like you mention, he still puts out worthwhile things but they usually end up showing up in places I do still have my eye on, so I usually still catch his important stuff without having to sift through all his posts directly all thanks to people like yourself that still follow Berenson closely. It works for me.
Right. I mean, we're not mind-numbed robots who take marching orders. We're smart enough to know what not to listen to.
Alex starts talking about Trump and the 2020 election, I tune him out. He has no credibility on that subject. Ditto Alex and IVM. Ditto anyone supporting LIV golf.
For example, when EGM starts talking about dogs... ;-)
Berenson seems to have the same problem Trump has, namely, Twitter lives rent free in his head 24/7. He needs to get over it. Twitter probably has the lowest signal to noise ratio of any social media anywhere. Getting banned should be a badge of honor.
I still value his covid research and articles and he was the first skeptic talking about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns and masks and lead me to other Substacks like this one.
However, despite how skeptical he is about everything regarding covid, he still buys the media lines about other issues and frequently posts some very weird takes. His random attacks on Dr. Malone are strange and unnecessary. We should all be on the same side.
It seems to eat at him that he's no longer part of the elite club at the New York Times. He's resentful that his paying audience has members that are conservatives and Trump supporters. He occasionally displays disdain and attacks his own paying customers out of nowhere.
I guess you can take the author out of the NYT, but you can't take the NYT out of the author.
Agreed. I was a paying subscriber several months, but quit after the Malone attack. I've checked in a few times since, but do not see much material that I would read, even for free. This is rather odd for a man who specialized in medical reporting for one of the premier newspapers of the world for several years.
This what happens when "they" keep telling us useless eaters to follow the science! We all followed the science alright, but not the science they wanted. Political science is not actual science😎
It felt so good when that MIT study came out. I looked at that chart and thought, "I'm following over half of those accounts, I have to be pretty well informed".
i really enjoyed writing the jane goodall explores MIT piece.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/science-is-a-process-not-an-institution
“most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, not an institution.”
leveling this as though it were an accusation was deeply telling. could there be any clearer sign of woo-woo than the claim that science is an institution and that the commoners should keep their grubby hands off of it and leave such endeavor to their betters?
I call that network chart, " A thousand points of light." I'm a tiny white dwarf on there somewhere. Congratulations on your supernova status.
I showed the MIT paper to people I still chatted with at the time to explain "here's the people who write the stuff I keep sending to you" - none of them fanatics, really, just aggravatingly "go along to get along" (to the point that I was eventually bad for their social status), and even they said, "I don't understand the argument of this paper. Aren't the things they're saying how science is supposed to work?"
Next thing some clown from the patent office without formal accreditation is going to think he can just write papers about the propagation of light and the nature of space-time. Jerk.
"Sorry, I listen to actual physicists."
While the US Patent Office serves useful purposes, they do get some ribbing as some very questionable things have been patented. One is for a device that allows for speeds (data transmission maybe?) faster than the speed of light. And yes, I verified that. You can too. Google patent "faster than light" and read at your leisure.
Another one of those crazy phlogiston deniers. These anti-aether nutcases are spreading dangerous misinformation and must be stopped.
their response is so 16th century papal
Me-Fuckin-eow!!😹
Bad Cat, Bad Cat, what you gonna do, what you gonna do, when he comes for you??
i'll slip through streets
while everyone sleeps
getting bigger and sleeker
and wider and brighter
i'll bite and scratch and scream all night
let's go and throw
all the songs we know
into the sea
you and me
all these years and no one heard
i'll show you in spring
it's a treacherous thing
"you missed me", hiss the badcats...
If you can't periodically go back and "re-run" an old experiment that "proved" something, then you're not doing science.
In fact, scientists should - just for the fun of it - pick an old experiment each year and re-run it. Show the kiddies how the current scientific consensus was built. And heck, sometimes you may find that you can't reproduce an experiment. At which point, you should do some serious thinking...
You would be shocked (or perhaps not) how pervasive the "reproducibility crisis" really is. It is present in basically every single discipline for which peer-reviewed research publication exists, and I find it weird that more people aren't freaking out about its implications, one of which is that most of the conclusions drawn from the last 75 or so years' research is wrong or unprovable.
To real scientists, the reproducibility crisis should be the equivalent of finding a dated "first draft" of the Bible in ancient Hebrew, complete with editor's markup, where Moses built a rocket ship instead of an ark and Jesus was originally written as a fat smuggler with child support payments: an existential disaster.
i used to hear fellow grad students how they were trying to amplify a gene segment or isolate an entire gene, followed someone else's methods, and just couldn't get it to work -- not even in the same cell line or in the same species. that made it all sound super sketchy right there.
then, when DNA sequence analysis was becoming a typical thing to do in evolutionary biology, i read so many papers in which the researchers would "align multiple sequences by eye". it actually took a hardy group at Merck to create a usable script that would actually automate the alignment process and comparison so the "by eye" nonsense could be squashed. the joy of being a peer reviewer and thrashing that part of the methods, "you should be using script X", was unparalleled. lol.
Now imagine how many papers got published before sequence alignment technology, and are still out there, still cited, and have never been subsequently tested for repeatability.
now let's ponder all those things under microscope lenses.
Harold Hillman, an electron microscopist and neurobiologist, was convinced that a lot of what was being published as "X" was actually a consequence of staining and tissue prep techniques. He had a list of questions for the scientific community, none of which anyone was prepared to answer. He eventually became person non grata because he dared to challenge the protocols.
Yep, and that's why no one else does today.
I often argue that a more serious crisis is where dogma has banned certain scientific thought. We discuss some of those issues here (e.g. the true facts surrounding the Covid-19 "pandemic"). However, if one looks, one can find curious cases of politics pushing reality off the stage in fields as diverse as education, sociology, criminology, anthropology, medicine and no doubt many more that I'm unaware of.
What I speak of above are the problem of willful ignorance, or even enforced conformance to an established acceptable belief, in the hard(er) sciences. The problem is far worse in the softer areas of human thought, e.g. philosophy, religion and such. No matter one's sincerely held convictions, I assert that almost everyone believes as true certain beliefs that are barking-at-the-moon, batshit crazy, if subjected to rigorous analysis.
Agreed. Not every experiment is easy to reproduce. But in education, ideally students are shown some of the basics. For example, I've done some basic chemistry. In biology classes I've peered through a microscope and seen actual pond creatures swimming around, or [dog] blood cells affected by varying saline levels, and similar phenomena. In an astronomy class we had the opportunity to look through telescopes at heavenly bodies, although I preferred the nubile female variety on campus. Do they even do this for more recent generations (I'm a latter Boomer).
Interesting read - how the speed of light was first measured / approximated in 1676:
https://gizmodo.com/how-the-speed-of-light-was-first-measured-1138348467
Related, the Michaelson-Morley experiment: They disproved their own hypothesis, though, that the luminiferous ether actually existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
So when are scientists today gonna run an experiment and say, "Whoops, my bad, actually I completely and totally disproved my own hypothesis. It's actually not a good idea to inject mRNA into your veins!"
There is a banned Ted Talk in which Rupert Sheldrake describes a hobby he had looking up reports about the speed of light that reported different findings on the measured speed. It is very funny and raises a lot of uncomfortable questions about dogma and catma in Science.
It's not really banned, you can watch it at this page. I gave this one to my students to watch.
https://blog.ted.com/the-debate-about-rupert-sheldrakes-talk/
There's copies on youtube, too.
Yes, sorry. I did not notice that my internet had cut out for a short period unexpectly when I tried to find it again and re-read.
I remember something similar about masks. The anti-mask group actually knew the data and was perfectly happy to recite it back. This was a big problem for those who wanted us to just blindly believe what they were saying.
It inspired me to go out and get the ones I had been missing at the time.
Yep
its a pity berenson went off at certain folks on our own team like malone, i had to stop listening to his bs then
Yeah, I don't pay attention to Berenson anymore. He's gotten...weird. Seemed to morph straight into a persecution complex with the twitter battle, than a God complex after winning, while still somehow keeping the persecution complex. He did do some yeoman's work on covid though, and I will always appreciate him for that.
Look, in spite of whatever it is about Berenson that compels him to say and do awkward and weird stuff sometimes, I'm still paying attention to him because he has exposed some pretty important stuff - and he'll probably keep doing it for a while. I mean look at what came to light from his Twitter fight about how the White House was telling Twitter who to censor - that's illegal, and it's documented and public now. So yeah, I'm still following his work . . .
I also follow Alex. But he is whinny. I love gato: without gato malo I would have sunk into depression. I need gato’s strength and encouragement. Alex gives good info but he’s whinny and a drama queen. Adding more drama to this whole situation is counterproductive.
Absolutely agree. I will always appreciate Alex because that’s how I found el gato malo.
Yeah. I recently stopped following him myself for that very reason. He can still come up with good stuff, but most of the time he just whines. I follow VivaBarnesLaw on Locals and they post links to good Berenson articles and I figure that's all I need from him. I found boriquagato through VivaBarnesLaw too.
Yes to ^^^^all of this!
Right. If I hadn't seen Berenson in mid to late summer of 2021 showing that Israel was the canary in the coal mine, I probably wouldn't have discovered the Bad Cat, Eugypyius, and many others. The comments sections of most of these substacks have been my fortress of solitude from the Branch Covidians. He has good takes on the 'rona and vaccines, but not much else. I just don't understand his obsession with Twitter. It's a leftist Clown Show.
Berenson will forever have my gratitude. He took the big risk early on re Covid.
He's right about the harm of commercialized cannabis too.
I get your point of view, Alex just got too tiresome for me to care about on a regular basis. Like you mention, he still puts out worthwhile things but they usually end up showing up in places I do still have my eye on, so I usually still catch his important stuff without having to sift through all his posts directly all thanks to people like yourself that still follow Berenson closely. It works for me.
Right. I mean, we're not mind-numbed robots who take marching orders. We're smart enough to know what not to listen to.
Alex starts talking about Trump and the 2020 election, I tune him out. He has no credibility on that subject. Ditto Alex and IVM. Ditto anyone supporting LIV golf.
For example, when EGM starts talking about dogs... ;-)
Berenson seems to have the same problem Trump has, namely, Twitter lives rent free in his head 24/7. He needs to get over it. Twitter probably has the lowest signal to noise ratio of any social media anywhere. Getting banned should be a badge of honor.
i do not follow berenson! too high on his narrowness.
His woo woo factor has grown exponentially in recent days.
I still value his covid research and articles and he was the first skeptic talking about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns and masks and lead me to other Substacks like this one.
However, despite how skeptical he is about everything regarding covid, he still buys the media lines about other issues and frequently posts some very weird takes. His random attacks on Dr. Malone are strange and unnecessary. We should all be on the same side.
It seems to eat at him that he's no longer part of the elite club at the New York Times. He's resentful that his paying audience has members that are conservatives and Trump supporters. He occasionally displays disdain and attacks his own paying customers out of nowhere.
I guess you can take the author out of the NYT, but you can't take the NYT out of the author.
i think you hit the nail on the head there!
Agreed. I was a paying subscriber several months, but quit after the Malone attack. I've checked in a few times since, but do not see much material that I would read, even for free. This is rather odd for a man who specialized in medical reporting for one of the premier newspapers of the world for several years.
I still read Berenson's substack occasionally, but he'll never get a dollar from me due to his unsavory actions.
Me too...
Me too!! And they even wrote “ they use data to persuade” - or equivalent. I laughed my ass off.
This what happens when "they" keep telling us useless eaters to follow the science! We all followed the science alright, but not the science they wanted. Political science is not actual science😎
Will someone please link to this MIT study? I'm unable to find it online.
I got you, dawg:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993.pdf
el gato has a link in his comment above to his own post on it, and within that theres is a link, its a pdf and im not clever enough to post that here
Hmmm I didn't see that link or wouldn't have bothered everyone. 🙄
how the mighty have fallen