Profile of a Nonconforming Scientist

MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist:

Because climate change is invisible, only the experts can tell us whether the planet is sick or not. And because of the way funds are granted, they have an incentive to say that the Earth belongs in intensive care.

For an insight into the life and mind of an independent thinker, read the article. Especially the type of attacks on Lindzen. It appears clear that principled discussion of certain dogmas is not possible for those who are invested in them.

Some sciences are dominated by gods, unequivocal truth sayers. That's not how science is supposed to be. It was designed to eliminate truth sayers and replace them with factoids about the universe, factoids which are objectively replicable by anyone thereby allowing those factoids to be installed as inductive, contingent knowledge which has been objectively obtained and verified. Many of the modern sciences have veered away from objective knowledge of inductive knowledge. This has been facilitated with the use of technology, such as space telescopes with mass spectrometers (etc), Very high energy particle accellerators, and exotic supercomputers.

But nothing about the use of these devices is objective. And little of it is truly discriminatory induction. Science has become dominated by the high priests which science has tried to displace. Yet it is demonstrated over and over that the sayings of these truth sayers is often not truth; sometimes more often than it is true, even contingently true.

Science is now the dubious domain of government paid drones and corporate shills, at least in part. Enough so that the entire enterprise is tainted by the structural defects upon which it is based. Publishing false papers is epidemic; most papers conclude with the whine for more funding. Only fundable projects get researched; there is very little verification of previous work done because it is not glamorous and not fundable. The entire base of some sciences is collapsing under the weight of false science (e.g. pharmaceuticals). And almost every science is suspect due to the non-reproducibity of those sciences which dominate the scene.

The term “scientists say” is now met with ridicule after the decades of failed scientific pronouncements that tended to be alarmist: eggs will give you heart attacks; so will salt; fats will make you fat; coffee will stunt your growth; DDT kills birds; polar bears are going extinct; pharmaceuticals never harm anyone; vaccines are never tainted. The list of phony scare science is almost endless, and the list of phony scientific endeavors is growing. (note)

Science is being ruined by the charlatans who haunt it. They are so many in number that it makes all of them who practice science suspect.

But gone are the days when Boyle’s Law could be double checked in the classroom. Now we must believe the gods of science, those who truthsay and expect deference to their truthsayings because of their godship (and the unavailability of particle accellerators to high school labs). Or we wait for actual evidence to appear: eggs won’t really kill you because they don't; quarks are of no consequence to any reality that we experience; global warming can’t be proved or disproved for many decades.

As a consequence of their own malfeasance, the white coated gods will be taken with a few grains of salt, which won’t kill you.

Note: My favorite is the British push to combine human genes with various animal genes in embryos, a program that was approved in Parliament.