Summary (click to expand): Reader warning: The following is a rambling, philosophical post. i. Why Science™ Cannot Exist At Notebooks of an Inflamed Cynic, Jon holds up a mirror to the follies of Western science, i.e. Science™, in general. In a recent, revealing post, he points out that the very theory Science™ chose to pillory as the 20th-Century exemplar of state-sponsored dogma dressing up as science — Lysenkoism — has now become entirely valid in the eyes of Science™.
Back in 2015 Scott Adams' blog was interesting in terms of understanding why Trump was such a great persuader. Then Adams seem to go complete wingnut and I stopped reading him.
Until recently, when I watched his complete "apology" video. I found it largely incomprehensible except for him blaming it on his penis. I almost never use the word "disgusting" but I would definitely apply it to that performance, but not because of the penis. Slandering Isaac Newton was just the icing on the cake.
"It should not have been hard to form a movement based around a simple, robust argument against..."
That is where you are wrong. All the Westerners live with several background-running mind control programs in their thinking all the time.
The purpose of which is to prevent the formation of functional movements.
For example, a lot of people believe (mind control program) that the workers used to be at the mercy of the owners of the industry and they, the workers, enacted political changes that made the State pass legislation that reined in the abuses of the capitalists pigs. The truth is different. Workers were used as part of a narrative to cartelize industry and destroy the rapidly moving free market dynamics that tend to reduce all prices and ruin the capitalists. The capitalists hate free enterprise more than anyone else. There is no security in free enterprise. But they couldn't pass laws that says: hereby all free market dynamics are to be destroyed to protect the new rich industrialist class at the expense of the working class. They needed to run a huge theater play called "the commies are coming!" so that the masses would accept getting economically slaughtered by decree.
Many people have explained that better than me, and the victims of lefty mind control still don't understand it.
This is just one example of many about why (purposely) disorganized groups have great difficulties in forming an effective movement, even in such an obvious case as the farce of covid.
Obviously, I lean to the anarcho-libertarian side of almost every issue, and I have problems seeing the "mind control" checks that probably exist in my intellectual spehere. I have detected one so far, thanks to the covid fraud: even the most motivated thinkers can fail to overcome the normalcy bias, by which I mean the need to not be a complete social pariah by diverging too much from the mandated general opinion.
Another detection: libertarians in general do not question their own bias to believe the USG plans to kill people, and therefore they swallow hook, line and sinker the GOF false narrative, and will never question it. They won't see that it is a distraction designed for them. There was never a covid or its agent pseudovirus and they cannot get over that.
And that leads me my last tangent: what moves me away from anarcho-libertarianism is the complete lack of curiosity (healthy curiosity) from other specimens of my persuasion to verify by themselves the claims of biology.
The Heresiarch Tom Cowan is far from being an anarcho-libertarian, yet he seems far more interested in preserving the life of individuals, their health, their property, their natural rights than any anarcho-libertarian who ever existed, ***precisely because*** he revises thoroughly all the "truths" of biology, including virology, immunology, cellular ultrastructure, genetics, and the fundamentalist claim of materialism in science as it is commonly understood. At least, that is my impression these days.
I think this lack of curiosity in my tribe is the tell of a mind control program. I want to overcome it. Why would anyone who aspires to live in liberty not question the scientific foundations of the Therapeutic State?
In sum, I'm aware of the difficulties in normies to organize themselves exist also, and more intensely, in intellectually driven individuals.
My basic thoughts on science, as a practicing engineer and a minister of the Gospel, are this:
The Scientific Method has one great power, the power to falsify a hypothesis. We can, for physical and chemical and mathematical, propositions confirm them false if we can find the right experiment and perform it to a sufficient level of accuracy and precision(replicability).
The Scientific Method cannot determine anything to be true, or likely, or valid. It can determine things to be false. Thus, 'Science'-knowing-is at direct odds with the Scientific Method, unless you mean knowing that something has been experimentally demonstrated to be false which no one means that when they say knowing something scientifically.
Anything that is 'known scientifically' has either been directly observed, statistically derived, or made up. 'Directly observed' is actually a pretty small group of phenomena and generally derided by the Faucis of the world as 'anecdotal'. 'Statistically derived' is mostly bullshit. Statistics that are not bullshit should be regarded with enormous scepticism. Good data is not easy to collect. My lab experience tells me that most results have more to do with experimental error than with any great truth. Good data is not cheap to collect, in time or money. No one wants to waste time or money. Once the data is collected finding someone like Brian, in the near to hand example of Immunology, who understands what it means and can report it honestly and clearly, can't be guaranteed even with time and money. The 'Right Guy for the job' is really a very elusive thing. Finding the 'Right Statistics Guy' like Igor is about as rare. Look at all the bad statistics on Alt-Covid Substack and remember that Pro-Narrative world has less talented, less thoughtful people and know that very little truth comes out of statistics. I was hella good at math in my younger days and I frequently find statistics deceptive. It's very easy to get messed up and very hard to get it right. It's easy to kick the cat but actually doing it better is not so easy.
So mostly, we believe the Science that matches our beliefs. Like all marketplaces the 'Marketplace of Ideas' has a natural tendency to monopoly. Markets love monopolies because monopolies are more efficient, less risky. They are a guaranteed ROI, and our society is terrified of risk. Science, as a guide to truth, really is just 'In Fauci we trust'. It is better if you can swap it out to, 'In Maxwell we trust', or Gauss or Dalton, but(removes engineer hat puts on preacher hat) systems and laws always fail as guides because systems and laws are smaller than and inferior to people. The Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath. Adam was given dominion over creation not creation over Adam. And when you reverse it, when you make Law or Science or any system bigger and higher and better than people, made in the Divine Image, you booger it up. What is needed is some people who will stop hiding behind the Science and, shepherd the Science to the right answer. Life will always come down to a single, or at best a few, people with integrity and talent and every attempt to automate or systematize or evade that is at best a slow motion failure.
Very well rambled. I would only add that “Science” was well suited for this sort of branding because of the association with the scientific method, an empirical method for proving cause and effect relationships. The other side of that coin is the Latin root, which essentially translates to “knowledge”, and between the both, it’s fertile ground for obfuscation. The word itself is practically doublespeak, when you apply the scientific method to natural phenomenon and conduct systematic experimentation, you can conclusively prove things. However, it’s application is extremely limited. So we end up in a world where to the layperson, a chemist and a psychologist are both “scientists” but the reliability of their conclusions can drastically differ. Discerning folks can suss out that difference, but I would argue that the term still wields a powerful subconscious connotation, which has been weaponized. Replace the word “science” with “God” and I think you can see the impact, and how there’s really little historical difference in the way power uses language to control (without speaking to the specific veracity of any particular “science” or “God”).
Climate change.. Started as "Global Cooling+the next Ice Age", then Science™️ discovered it was really "Global Warming+polar bears afloat"and now Science™️ knows it's "Climate Change+crabby inconvenienced humans everywhere". Each face of Global Doom birthed in order to open funding faucets.
Jan 30, 2023·edited Jan 30, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Excellent!
The instinctive cry of both the gut-instinctivists and the more logically-inclined has always been "The Covid vaccines are experimental gene therapy with unknowable long-term effects."
You have correctly identified that this natural response was with the wave of a wand and at a state propagandistic level deemed simply inacceptable - a forbidden argument. They furthermore accused any who would make such an argument of that which they themselves are guilty of: being "anti-science". So yes, this has sent so many of us scurrying for scraps of "more scientific/statistical" proof to bolster our entirely legitimate opening argument which was thrown out of court right at the beginning as illegitimate.
=Aside= I literally posed these points to the doctor before I received my first (and last) Covid gene therapy product. He did not even try to deny the point I was making, it was simply deemed mute, superfluous. I kid you not, I felt in that moment in a kind of trance, powerless in the face of an almost magical thinking that had swept across the land. It all seemed somehow inevitable and to my eternal shame I shrugged my shoulders and relented.
After I left the medical surgery it was like a cloud suddenly lifted and I came to my senses. To my horror I realised that what had happened had not been my conscious will but an acquiescence. As soon as I got home I redoubled "do your own research" and never went back.
I sometimes joke I now belong to the select group of long-term single dosers who chose apostasy early on and remain in a vaxxed, anti-vaxxer limbo, treated with suspicion by all sides :)
Jan 30, 2023·edited Jan 30, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Great article! I think that in government, public health, media and many social media personalities, even some medically trained ones, there's been an abject failure to reason objectively, most notably on the issue of vaccine safety and effectiveness.
In pretty much every case they have failed to make a proper individualised risk benefit decision even for themselves, yet they feel intellectual and moral superiority to pass judgement, or even coerce people accordingly.
It should be patently obvious there's been no proper open debate on vaccine safety, the required level of safety should have been set in stone while the vaxx was being developed, then all should have been given clear, relevant, timely and unbiased information and allowed to make a decision for themselves. To quote the Japan Ministry of Health on their own website:
'Vaccines will never be administered without the recipient’s consent. We urge the public never to coerce vaccinations at the workplace or upon others around them, and never to treat those who have not received the vaccine in a discriminatory manner.'
Not actually that rambling; good, in fact, very good. To paraphrase: do not counter propagandists on their own terms. Call out their BS from first principles (e.g. irrelevant whether draconian NPIs will cause this much or that much harm - they are wrong, full stop).
PS. Not sure Lysenkoism's greatest crime was to have a Lamarckian outlook? I think the far greater failing was being ideologically wedded to courses of action that - however well meant - failed spectacularly and created hitherto unthinkable collateral damage!
But I actually think many of the substackers would agree with you that all vaccines should be called into question. I think they are stuck in the efficacy argument because they are trying to prove the first and easiest piece of evidence they can get their hands on. It’s a flawed approach and I agree with you because it still wont change minds and it fails to point out the bigger argument. I think they were trying to stop the mandates with anything they could get a hold of.
As for the first box option- I also think it is part of science- it isn’t unusual to think a researcher would even use their own biases to further test some evidence they found and then in the process uncover something new. Box 2 with the government/pharma/media is part of current science but should be jettisoned. Your example of Fauci is a great example of that taint. Wow, he really is a cockroach.
On a side note, I have to admit I felt completely deflated when I read that Dr. Kahneman supported mandating the covid jabs.
Also on a side note, I think Scott Adams appears depressed. He is using humor but his affect and demeanor are jarring. I hope he is ok.
Jan 29, 2023·edited Jan 29, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
There is plenty of "sciences" where, despite occasional reversals of scientific thought, there is an undeniable progress of finding true, verifiable scientific findings. Physics, chemistry, mathematics (which is a whole separate thing not exactly the same as other "natural" sciences) are full of useful findings that are confirmed daily and used for centuries.
The closer "science" gets to human beings, their needs, or preferences, the less reliability, fidelity, honesty, verifiability etc.
I am not a science hater or denier, I love science, and that's why I am upset at what is happening in the covid vaccine world.
Jan 29, 2023·edited Jan 29, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Phlogiston anyone? But, err, if you were summarising your main point in a sentence, what would it be?
Is it that the absolute pursuit of truth within the realm of “operational” science has been essentially hijacked (and largely negated) by politically correct, philosophically driven “scientism”, aka The Science TM?
Also see https://www.eugyppius.com/p/more-on-what-is-wrong-with-the-science. This Unglossed post is an excellent complement.
It is paywalled, though.
Back in 2015 Scott Adams' blog was interesting in terms of understanding why Trump was such a great persuader. Then Adams seem to go complete wingnut and I stopped reading him.
Until recently, when I watched his complete "apology" video. I found it largely incomprehensible except for him blaming it on his penis. I almost never use the word "disgusting" but I would definitely apply it to that performance, but not because of the penis. Slandering Isaac Newton was just the icing on the cake.
"It should not have been hard to form a movement based around a simple, robust argument against..."
That is where you are wrong. All the Westerners live with several background-running mind control programs in their thinking all the time.
The purpose of which is to prevent the formation of functional movements.
For example, a lot of people believe (mind control program) that the workers used to be at the mercy of the owners of the industry and they, the workers, enacted political changes that made the State pass legislation that reined in the abuses of the capitalists pigs. The truth is different. Workers were used as part of a narrative to cartelize industry and destroy the rapidly moving free market dynamics that tend to reduce all prices and ruin the capitalists. The capitalists hate free enterprise more than anyone else. There is no security in free enterprise. But they couldn't pass laws that says: hereby all free market dynamics are to be destroyed to protect the new rich industrialist class at the expense of the working class. They needed to run a huge theater play called "the commies are coming!" so that the masses would accept getting economically slaughtered by decree.
Many people have explained that better than me, and the victims of lefty mind control still don't understand it.
This is just one example of many about why (purposely) disorganized groups have great difficulties in forming an effective movement, even in such an obvious case as the farce of covid.
Obviously, I lean to the anarcho-libertarian side of almost every issue, and I have problems seeing the "mind control" checks that probably exist in my intellectual spehere. I have detected one so far, thanks to the covid fraud: even the most motivated thinkers can fail to overcome the normalcy bias, by which I mean the need to not be a complete social pariah by diverging too much from the mandated general opinion.
Another detection: libertarians in general do not question their own bias to believe the USG plans to kill people, and therefore they swallow hook, line and sinker the GOF false narrative, and will never question it. They won't see that it is a distraction designed for them. There was never a covid or its agent pseudovirus and they cannot get over that.
And that leads me my last tangent: what moves me away from anarcho-libertarianism is the complete lack of curiosity (healthy curiosity) from other specimens of my persuasion to verify by themselves the claims of biology.
The Heresiarch Tom Cowan is far from being an anarcho-libertarian, yet he seems far more interested in preserving the life of individuals, their health, their property, their natural rights than any anarcho-libertarian who ever existed, ***precisely because*** he revises thoroughly all the "truths" of biology, including virology, immunology, cellular ultrastructure, genetics, and the fundamentalist claim of materialism in science as it is commonly understood. At least, that is my impression these days.
I think this lack of curiosity in my tribe is the tell of a mind control program. I want to overcome it. Why would anyone who aspires to live in liberty not question the scientific foundations of the Therapeutic State?
In sum, I'm aware of the difficulties in normies to organize themselves exist also, and more intensely, in intellectually driven individuals.
Good 3 arguments
My basic thoughts on science, as a practicing engineer and a minister of the Gospel, are this:
The Scientific Method has one great power, the power to falsify a hypothesis. We can, for physical and chemical and mathematical, propositions confirm them false if we can find the right experiment and perform it to a sufficient level of accuracy and precision(replicability).
The Scientific Method cannot determine anything to be true, or likely, or valid. It can determine things to be false. Thus, 'Science'-knowing-is at direct odds with the Scientific Method, unless you mean knowing that something has been experimentally demonstrated to be false which no one means that when they say knowing something scientifically.
Anything that is 'known scientifically' has either been directly observed, statistically derived, or made up. 'Directly observed' is actually a pretty small group of phenomena and generally derided by the Faucis of the world as 'anecdotal'. 'Statistically derived' is mostly bullshit. Statistics that are not bullshit should be regarded with enormous scepticism. Good data is not easy to collect. My lab experience tells me that most results have more to do with experimental error than with any great truth. Good data is not cheap to collect, in time or money. No one wants to waste time or money. Once the data is collected finding someone like Brian, in the near to hand example of Immunology, who understands what it means and can report it honestly and clearly, can't be guaranteed even with time and money. The 'Right Guy for the job' is really a very elusive thing. Finding the 'Right Statistics Guy' like Igor is about as rare. Look at all the bad statistics on Alt-Covid Substack and remember that Pro-Narrative world has less talented, less thoughtful people and know that very little truth comes out of statistics. I was hella good at math in my younger days and I frequently find statistics deceptive. It's very easy to get messed up and very hard to get it right. It's easy to kick the cat but actually doing it better is not so easy.
So mostly, we believe the Science that matches our beliefs. Like all marketplaces the 'Marketplace of Ideas' has a natural tendency to monopoly. Markets love monopolies because monopolies are more efficient, less risky. They are a guaranteed ROI, and our society is terrified of risk. Science, as a guide to truth, really is just 'In Fauci we trust'. It is better if you can swap it out to, 'In Maxwell we trust', or Gauss or Dalton, but(removes engineer hat puts on preacher hat) systems and laws always fail as guides because systems and laws are smaller than and inferior to people. The Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath. Adam was given dominion over creation not creation over Adam. And when you reverse it, when you make Law or Science or any system bigger and higher and better than people, made in the Divine Image, you booger it up. What is needed is some people who will stop hiding behind the Science and, shepherd the Science to the right answer. Life will always come down to a single, or at best a few, people with integrity and talent and every attempt to automate or systematize or evade that is at best a slow motion failure.
Very well rambled. I would only add that “Science” was well suited for this sort of branding because of the association with the scientific method, an empirical method for proving cause and effect relationships. The other side of that coin is the Latin root, which essentially translates to “knowledge”, and between the both, it’s fertile ground for obfuscation. The word itself is practically doublespeak, when you apply the scientific method to natural phenomenon and conduct systematic experimentation, you can conclusively prove things. However, it’s application is extremely limited. So we end up in a world where to the layperson, a chemist and a psychologist are both “scientists” but the reliability of their conclusions can drastically differ. Discerning folks can suss out that difference, but I would argue that the term still wields a powerful subconscious connotation, which has been weaponized. Replace the word “science” with “God” and I think you can see the impact, and how there’s really little historical difference in the way power uses language to control (without speaking to the specific veracity of any particular “science” or “God”).
Science is being used as a slogan, not a word describing a discipline. This is science. Everything else is sloganeering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY
Climate change.. Started as "Global Cooling+the next Ice Age", then Science™️ discovered it was really "Global Warming+polar bears afloat"and now Science™️ knows it's "Climate Change+crabby inconvenienced humans everywhere". Each face of Global Doom birthed in order to open funding faucets.
Excellent!
The instinctive cry of both the gut-instinctivists and the more logically-inclined has always been "The Covid vaccines are experimental gene therapy with unknowable long-term effects."
You have correctly identified that this natural response was with the wave of a wand and at a state propagandistic level deemed simply inacceptable - a forbidden argument. They furthermore accused any who would make such an argument of that which they themselves are guilty of: being "anti-science". So yes, this has sent so many of us scurrying for scraps of "more scientific/statistical" proof to bolster our entirely legitimate opening argument which was thrown out of court right at the beginning as illegitimate.
=Aside= I literally posed these points to the doctor before I received my first (and last) Covid gene therapy product. He did not even try to deny the point I was making, it was simply deemed mute, superfluous. I kid you not, I felt in that moment in a kind of trance, powerless in the face of an almost magical thinking that had swept across the land. It all seemed somehow inevitable and to my eternal shame I shrugged my shoulders and relented.
After I left the medical surgery it was like a cloud suddenly lifted and I came to my senses. To my horror I realised that what had happened had not been my conscious will but an acquiescence. As soon as I got home I redoubled "do your own research" and never went back.
I sometimes joke I now belong to the select group of long-term single dosers who chose apostasy early on and remain in a vaxxed, anti-vaxxer limbo, treated with suspicion by all sides :)
Great article! I think that in government, public health, media and many social media personalities, even some medically trained ones, there's been an abject failure to reason objectively, most notably on the issue of vaccine safety and effectiveness.
In pretty much every case they have failed to make a proper individualised risk benefit decision even for themselves, yet they feel intellectual and moral superiority to pass judgement, or even coerce people accordingly.
It should be patently obvious there's been no proper open debate on vaccine safety, the required level of safety should have been set in stone while the vaxx was being developed, then all should have been given clear, relevant, timely and unbiased information and allowed to make a decision for themselves. To quote the Japan Ministry of Health on their own website:
'Vaccines will never be administered without the recipient’s consent. We urge the public never to coerce vaccinations at the workplace or upon others around them, and never to treat those who have not received the vaccine in a discriminatory manner.'
https://japan.kantei.go.jp/ongoingtopics/vaccine.html
Now THAT is an example of how it should be done. 👍👍👍
Not actually that rambling; good, in fact, very good. To paraphrase: do not counter propagandists on their own terms. Call out their BS from first principles (e.g. irrelevant whether draconian NPIs will cause this much or that much harm - they are wrong, full stop).
PS. Not sure Lysenkoism's greatest crime was to have a Lamarckian outlook? I think the far greater failing was being ideologically wedded to courses of action that - however well meant - failed spectacularly and created hitherto unthinkable collateral damage!
But I actually think many of the substackers would agree with you that all vaccines should be called into question. I think they are stuck in the efficacy argument because they are trying to prove the first and easiest piece of evidence they can get their hands on. It’s a flawed approach and I agree with you because it still wont change minds and it fails to point out the bigger argument. I think they were trying to stop the mandates with anything they could get a hold of.
As for the first box option- I also think it is part of science- it isn’t unusual to think a researcher would even use their own biases to further test some evidence they found and then in the process uncover something new. Box 2 with the government/pharma/media is part of current science but should be jettisoned. Your example of Fauci is a great example of that taint. Wow, he really is a cockroach.
On a side note, I have to admit I felt completely deflated when I read that Dr. Kahneman supported mandating the covid jabs.
Also on a side note, I think Scott Adams appears depressed. He is using humor but his affect and demeanor are jarring. I hope he is ok.
There is plenty of "sciences" where, despite occasional reversals of scientific thought, there is an undeniable progress of finding true, verifiable scientific findings. Physics, chemistry, mathematics (which is a whole separate thing not exactly the same as other "natural" sciences) are full of useful findings that are confirmed daily and used for centuries.
The closer "science" gets to human beings, their needs, or preferences, the less reliability, fidelity, honesty, verifiability etc.
I am not a science hater or denier, I love science, and that's why I am upset at what is happening in the covid vaccine world.
Phlogiston anyone? But, err, if you were summarising your main point in a sentence, what would it be?
Is it that the absolute pursuit of truth within the realm of “operational” science has been essentially hijacked (and largely negated) by politically correct, philosophically driven “scientism”, aka The Science TM?
As for Fauci starting in 1984... Wow, just wow.