There is a fine article by James B. Meigs in City Journal: “Unscientific American – Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology”
The article is framed around the decline of Scientific American but branches out into discussion of the decline of the scientific American, and, indeed the decline of the scientifically-minded citizen of the world.
You used to read about such people everywhere. You used to meet such people everywhere. Every nation had them, not that they set much store by nations. They were not scientists themselves, but they were scientifically-minded. They knew how to make a “crystal set” out of old bits of junk so they could build a clandestine radio in Stalag Luft III, and how to build a copper still if they fell through a timewarp. Their heroes were the scientists they read about in Scientific American and New Scientist, the ones who would not fudge an error bar to save their lives, the ones whose dogged refusal to let an anomaly go unexplained led to great discoveries.
They were good chaps, these not-quite-scientists. Well, most of them were chaps. I declare myself a sister of the brotherhood by repeating that the hypothesis that men are on average better at science was not disproved when Larry Summers was fired as president of Harvard for saying that the possibility should be considered. That was the point Summers was making: the true scientist is not afraid to follow the facts wherever they lead. And just behind the actual scientists in this quest came the journalists and popularisers of science and just behind them came the scientifically-minded men and women who thought the future would be full of people like them – but the future turned out differently…
One of the few science journalists who did take the lab-leak question seriously was Donald McNeil, Jr., the veteran New York Times reporter forced out of the paper in an absurd DEI panic. After leaving the Times—and like several other writers pursuing the lab-leak question—McNeil published his reporting on his own Medium blog. It is telling that, at a time when leading science publications were averse to exploring the greatest scientific mystery of our time, some of the most honest reporting on the topic was published in independent, reader-funded outlets. It’s also instructive to note that the journalist who replaced McNeil on the Covid beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed open hostility to investigating Covid’s origins. In 2021, she famously tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” It would be hard to compose a better epitaph to the credibility of mainstream science journalism.
It may actually be improving. Steve Sailor says that, after not being invited to speak anywhere for ten years, he’s had ten speaking engagements this year. Murray’s “The Bell Curve” is being discussed openly.
People are becoming more willing to mention the unmentionables. I think it’s because of Woke overreach – they tried to make too many things unmentionable, and people finally started to notice.
Well, Steve Sailer is an antisemite, so nowadays he can come out from under his rock.
So true, I genuinely LOL’ed
FWIW, I think that science has rarely been the pure hearted, white coated search for truth. Science has always had a little bit of fudging of the error bars. Scientist are not pure hearted searchers for the truth because they are people with egos and ambitions and funding needs and competitive spirits and delusions of grandeur and propensity to make mistakes. The scientific method works ultimately because it is a competitive ethos. “I say cold fusion works” you “say, dude, I tried it and you are full of it.”
The problem with science today is an old one — huge amounts of science is funded by the government, and in science as in everything he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Science in large corporations is generally honest science because it has to be to make a profit. Government science also makes a profit for its masters, it is just that the profit is not in dollar sales, but in the accumulation of power, the expansion of budgets and responsibilities and the re-election of incumbents.
Yeah, that’s the problem with government funding of science. In theory, it could work … the government could say “investigate this question and tell us if there is any merit to it, yes or no.” That might be fine, although even there you would expect the inefficiency and waste that come with spending Other People’s Money.
But instead the government says “tell us why the answer to this question is X”, or even “demonstrate that theory Y is correct” or “find evidence that theory Y is correct”, and all three of those approaches lead inevitably to error.
Antisemitism is certainly not something I immediately associate Sailer with although my experience of his writing has largely been confined to Takimag where there are more obvious examples of that phenomenon.
Assuming it to be true he represents a variant of the Top Trumps game in that, rather than being an intersectional competing for the twins crowns of moral superiority and zero accountability, he is a protected class speaking inconvenient truths and having the gall to back them up with hard data. As truth is out of fashion nowadays I suspect he will have to turn the antisemitism up to at least eleven merely to hold his position.
From the article:
“Unfortunately, progressive activists today begin with their preferred policy outcomes or ideological conclusions and then try to force scientists and journalists to fall in line…. This pre-Enlightenment style of thinking…”.
Sounds like a lot of religions and political philosophies. First you assert your god(s) or goal(s) exist and then you find ‘evidence’ to support your presuppositions. And then you burn people at the stake or cancel their social existence if they don’t fall in line with your presuppositions.
Academic, and Corporate, “science” now rejects the idea of objective and universal truth – and, instead, pushes political and cultural agendas.
This anti science “science” is actually much older than Frankfurt School Marxism – it goes back to the American “Pragmatist” philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (for example John Dewey – who President Eisenhower denounced – arguing that the decline of American education, which was becoming clear even as far back as the 1950s, on the influence of John Dewey and other Pragmatists) – indeed one can trace it all the way back to Sir Francis Bacon (of whom Thomas Hobbes was a follower).
According to Francis Bacon, people who taught, for example, that the Earth went round the Sun, should be punished. The purpose of science, according to Bacon, being not the search for objective and universal truth for-its-own-sake, but rather the purpose of science, according to Francis Bacon, was to “make nature yield what it has never before yielded” in terms of production – in short a political and cultural agenda.
The political and cultural agenda of today is international “governance” (de facto world government) – and everything, from pandemics to “Climate”, is used for this purpose.
If “scientists” “have to” tell lies, for example about historic temperature figures or about Covid (“there are no effective Early Treatments, the virus came from some animal in a wet market, lockdowns will save lives, cloth masks work, the injections are safe-and-effective”) then they lie – as, remember, to them there is no objective and universal scientific truth that should be sought for-its-own-sake, only the political and cultural agenda.
As the lady from “SAGE” said – not all her colleagues were Marxists (as she was and is) but “Social Justice” is what they ALL supported and it was the basis of all their statements.
“Social Justice” (tyranny, plundering and control) NOT science, that is what these “scientists” support – and it was (and is) the basis of their statements on Covid, “Climate”, and everything else (race, sex, whatever).
A political and cultural agenda – this is what the academic and Corporate “scientists” support, NOT science as the search for objective and universal truth for-its-own-sake.
Rule by “experts” who are prepared to LIE to push their political and cultural agenda goes back to the Gold Guardians of Plato – who are prepared to lie about everything, from ancient accounts of the Gods to the movements of the planets.
As for “scientific” “experts” ruling – what we call “Technocracy” today goes back Henri Saint-Simon in the early 19th century (socialism via “capitalists” – or rather via Credit Money bankers), and, again, all the way back to the “New Atlantis” (1610) by Francis Bacon.
None of this stuff, the fake “science”, the endless lies, the lust for unlimited power for “Progressive” ends, is new – what has changed is that it now has a stranglehold on the institutions.
And it has a stranglehold on the institutions because resistance to it collapsed.
My understanding was that what Summers said was not that men per se are better at science, but that because men’s intelligence has greater variance than women’s, there are both more highly intelligent men and more very unintelligent men—and the highly intelligent men do well at science (and so do the highly intelligent women, but there are fewer of them). This works even if mean IQs are the same for both sexes, and I don’t think that Summers suggested otherwise (a difference in mean ability is what I would take “men are better” to indicate).
As far as I know, the difference in variance is well established, though it’s probably not acceptable in academic circles to say so out loud.
Used to be that “All white people were racist”, but now we’re anti-Semitic as well?
Did I miss a required course or something?
John Galt, just self-identify as a non-white woman, preferably a lesbian. Problem solved!
Didn’t work that well for former NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal.
I think it was here that someone pointed out, very concisely, what is wrong with government funded science. Which is more likely to get funding: “A study on the behavioral patterns of squirrels” or “A study of the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the behavior patterns of squirrels.”
All over the world squirrel-ologists are making their living and pursuing their interests with that little compromise.
Where SCIENCE!!! went wrong was when all that power got invested into it.
You have a power source, it gets corrupted. Period. Politics? Business? Anything? Anything, at all?
When science was this minor little thing that some smart people did as a calling, it was not this shit-show we have now. Why? Because, there was no power in it to either influence things or make people do what you want, to force them to dance to your tune.
The minute that changed, the nature of science started morphing over into SCIENCE!!!, and became quasi-religious. The white lab coat became the new priestly garb, and the new holy writ became whatever the SCIENTIST!!! said.
It’s a religious faith, now: Sciencism. There’s no rational thought to it, no questioning of authority: It’s all pronounced from on high, via esoteric studies that they refuse to publish the raw data on, lest someone question them.
Much like anything, you leave that power out there laying around, and people of ill intent are going to glom onto it, in order to achieve their personal ambitions. None of which include the things that the original science-enthused people were interested in.
Look at how long the ancient authorities like Aristotle held sway. People didn’t want truth; they wanted certainty. And, if some ancient authority figure said something, then by God, that must be the truth… Regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
I’m actually surprised that there wasn’t a minor industry in “discovering” ancient sources that said different, more accurate things than what we had handed down to us. Seems like that would have been a no-brainer… “Hey, I just found this old papyrus that says Ptolemy agrees the earth revolves around the sun, not what he wrote over here…”
Frasor Orr – Corporate funding (including from charities – not just commercial companies) now produces the same mess as government funding.
This is a philosophical (philosophical) collapse.
Regarding men being “better” at science: that is not the only thing that influences the numbers in scientific jobs. I recall a recent graduate saying that she was having difficulty finding a job in sales – but had turned down any number of offers for positions as a surfactant chemist (her subject).
Yeah, he’s a writer of unpopular statistics-based analyses who, due to that unpopularity, has to publish where he can – and so he appears next to a lot of rabid anti-Jews.
It’s a bit lazy to reduce him to “anti-semitic.”
“They knew how to make a “crystal set” out of old bits of junk so they could build a clandestine radio in Stalag Luft III, and how to build a copper still if they fell through a timewarp.”
“make nature yield what it has never before yielded”
That’s not science, that’s engineering. Everybody seems to label engineering as “science” which pollutes what engineering really is. And engineering won’t let you futz with the facts, a bridge built according to “feelz” will kill people.
@Barbarus
I recall a recent graduate saying that she was having difficulty finding a job in sales – but had turned down any number of offers for positions as a surfactant chemist (her subject).
Perhaps her personality wasn’t bubbly enough for sales 😀
I wrote the following before looking at S. Sailer’s blog this morning:
After 4 years of reading Sailer regularly, the only antisemitism that i associate with him is his apparent belief that Jews profit, or expect to profit, from multiculturalism.
That *American* Jews expect to profit from multiculturalism, might actually be true, given their voting patterns; but that they do NOT profit (except possibly for a small minority), was evident to me for over a decade, and should have become even more evident in the last few months.
Which is why this is definitely NOT the best time to come out as an antisemite. More like the worst time in this century. So far.
Looking at Sailer’s blog this morning, i found this.
I leave it up to you, gentle readers, to decide whether it is a case of antisemitism as described in my previous comment (i.e. Sailer is presenting evidence — tenuous in my opinion — that Wokeness protects the Jews) or of a more insidious kind (i.e. Sailer is saying: look at all that Jewish violence!)
In any case, Sailer’s last sentence is plain batty:
“Jewish violence” by any name has been all over BBC News for months.
Unlike American antisemitic violence.
“Scientific” “American”