Better hypothesis
For a long time I've been trying to figure out why Scientists hate facts.

Careful sidenote: I'm not talking about everyone who works in science. I'm talking about the public face of Science, the Big Scientists of Quantum, Climate, Cosmology, Social "Sciences", and Evolution. The Scientists who have the ear of governments and media, the Scientists who are rewarded with big money for being Official Experts. Outside of this realm, in engineering, agriculture and medicine, there are many folks doing good honest science and even getting paid for it sometimes.

A couple of vicious semantic-shifting articles this week gave me a better explanation.

Here, Scott Johnson defends the models of the Climate Criminals by saying "Trust the experts, don't trust your eyes."

Here, Naomi Oreskes pulls an especially slithery trick, trying to recast the Wegner continental drift episode as an example of building consensus, not an example of breaking consensus. Predictably, Serpent Oreskes then casts the Climate Criminals as the modern equivalents of Wegner.

Here, an author tries to show that Quantum makes sense with several examples of light behaving as a wave. This one is puzzling. The examples disprove his point. All are nice normal pre-Quantum phenomena, purely explainable by wave action, purely familiar to an 1890 physicist. Is the author trying to 'define deviancy down'? Or is he so completely lost inside the Quantum bubble that he doesn't know the difference?

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Leads me to this new hypothesis: Big Scientists don't hate all facts, they hate obvious facts, because obvious facts can't sustain priestly mystery. Their main motive is to maintain their monopoly on the sacred doctrines, and you can't maintain a monopoly when any old Denialist Halliburtonist Yokel can look at Nature and draw his own conclusions.

Examples.......

In geology: Continental drift is obvious. You can see it on the map. Therefore it had to be anathema.

In physics: Newton is obvious. Wave behavior is obvious. You can see them in every aspect of reality. Therefore they must be killed and replaced by mysterious Trinitarian nonsense, where everything is here and not here, matter and wave at the same time; and matter must be subordinated to the nonexistent mystery of "dark matter".

In climate: The sunspot connection is obvious. You can see it on any graph, and people have been seeing it for 400 years. CO2 as a trailing variable is also obvious. Therefore both of these connections have to be anathema, replaced by the mysterious homeopathy of CO2 as controller.

In social "science", innate human differences are obvious. Every aspect of human behavior shows innate qualities clearly. Therefore innate qualities must be anathema, and we must develop infinite worlds of absurd epicycles and reversed causation to "explain" human behavior as purely random happenstance, without ever touching the obvious.

In evolution, design is obvious. Anywhere you look, you find structures and structure/behavior pairings that could not have developed gradually and randomly. Therefore design must be anathema, and we must build infinite epicycles to "explain" these structures by random happenstance.

But even some parts of evolution are too obvious for the experts. Natural selection is obvious and observable, so we must invent the impenetrable mystery of "biodiversity" to cancel out natural selection. We must declare that certain species possess Angelic Powers, requiring us to poison everything else in the area, or allow fire to burn millions of non-angelic animals, so a Chosen Species can maintain its monopoly despite its demonstrated unfitness.

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Only an expert can understand the constantly changing details of the invented epicycles. Never let the peons read the scriptures.

Labels: Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 4:01 AM