Sneaky inquisitors
Two purges in similar fields. In both cases the headlines are dangerously deceptive.

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First example:

Wansink, the 'food behaviorist', has been purged for misusing statistics. From the headlines I thought he was just another "social" "scientist" who probably deserved to be retracted. The headlines were deceptive. A deeper article by Inquisitor Hamblin shows the reality.

Wansink describes himself as a “pracademic,” an academic aimed at practical problems and workable solutions, and “a professor whose mission is to help transform people’s lives by finding the small changes that make the big difference.”

Exactly right. That's what science SHOULD be doing.

The Inquisitor demanded recantation:

I asked Wansink about his insight from the ordeal, and how the system and future aspiring and young scientists could learn from his mistakes. He wrote that he still believes being “a scholar and an academic is an unbelievably great calling. It is totally enriching, and don’t let these events dissuade you from a great career.” He is insistent that existing policies based on his work are sound since, he argues, his fundamental conclusions were correct and will be proven so: “We made a number of mistakes, but they didn’t change the basic conclusions (even if they might have been retracted).”

Wansink refused to recant.

While Wansink is generally contrite and apologetic, it’s still not clear if he has internalized that ethos. “You can do research for other academics, or you can do research to solve problems,” he wrote to me. “Doing it for academics is more prestigious, but doing it to solve real problems in the real world is more gratifying—enriching, as I said. Having people say, ‘I do something differently because of your research, and it works’ takes away the sting of someone pointing out the degrees of freedom in an F-test were wrong.”

He has not "internalized the ethos" of consuming billions of dollars to torture and kill people more effectively. Good.

What should we do differently?

The question is how to disconnect scientific work from the buzz cycle—to let people conduct experiments to answer questions in an environment as free as possible of any incentive that would bias that process. Please tell me if you have the answer. What I know is that it involves more public funding of science, not less, as President Trump has called for.

EXACTLY WRONG. LETHALLY WRONG. More funding means more murder. Scientists who work in industry have to justify REAL PROBLEM SOLVING RESULTS if they want more money. Some parts of academia, like agriculture and medicine, are still closely tied to real solutions. Inquisitor Hamblin wants to purify those realms by removing all connection to HELPING PEOPLE. In his "mind" the sole purpose of science is to RUIN MINDS AND EXTERMINATE PEOPLE.

Wansink served REAL SCIENCE by persuading people to eat less, and by showing that INTUITIVELY REASONABLE methods help us to eat less. The lethal theorists INTENTIONALLY DESTROY our intuition so they can yank us back and forth with "correct" "information" that changes daily, makes no sense, and can't be processed by a RATIONAL MIND. See Github. See Comrade O'Brien.

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Second example, less dramatic and much less famous but equally deadly.

The headlines said that an "evidence-based medicine" group had kicked out one of its leaders for failing to be "evidence-based". Okay, sounds like a good move.

Again the details are opposite.

The expulsion of Peter Gøtzsche sparked accusations that the Collaboration is too friendly toward the drug industry. Four other members of the organization’s governing board resigned in response, citing concerns that the action “goes against Cochrane ethos.”

The vote appears to have been 6 of 13 in favor of the move, according to statements from the board members who resigned and Gøtzsche — short of a majority but enough to pass because only 11 voted.

What was Gøtzsche's crime against the "ethos" of science?

Gøtzsche, the director of the Nordic Cochrane Center, in Copenhagen, Denmark, has cast doubts about the safety of a vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), a cause of cervical cancer, and says psychiatry has “gone astray” by coercing patients into taking medication, such as antidepressants, they don’t want to use and that cause “brain damage” over the long run. “The way these drugs are used today cause[s] more harm than good. So it would be better for us if the drugs didn’t exist.”

On the vaccine, he wasn't anti-vax, he was simply questioning whether one particular vaccine had been tested properly.

His critique of psychiatry is PRECISELY CORRECT and INFINITELY NECESSARY.

In other words, he was kicked out of the "evidence-based" group for BASING HIS VIEWS ON EVIDENCE. The "evidence-based" ethos is now exposed as nothing more than a kickback-based ethos. Evidence is a synonym for bribes.

Labels: Ethics

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