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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – fake papers and fake editors This is where the worship of “expert” peer review science gets us — a science crime syndicate.
Once science stopped being about winning arguments and became just the-number-of-papers-someone-published, it became an empty shell. And once billions of dollars, depended on sacred ‘experts’, it was doomed.
Long gone are the days when papers were hardly ever retracted and pal review was “the big problem? Now, fake papers and fake editors are so rife they are their own specialist industry. Networks of brokers connect paper-mills up with authors and publishers and place batches of papers in journals with ‘friendly editors’. When Richardson et al analyzed PLOS ONE, they found 33 editors who seemed to have an extraordinarily high rate of retractions. One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted.
– Jo Nova
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I am reminded of the words of the (recently) late, great, Tom Lehrer…
As far as I know Lobachevsky was a truly original and very good geometer.
OK, I gotta go to a funeral soon so I’m a bit short on time (not as short as Godfrey…) But… I’m sure I’ve seen climate change papers that regard results from computer simulations as the same nature of data as actual physical measurements. Please dig down on that one because that is damning.
Too many Children of the Elite, in this particular case scientists, chasing too few opportunities for status jobs. So more and more shortcuts and corruption are exploited.
Wash and repeat for Media, University jobs, QUANGOs and NGOs, charities, Civil Service and Public Servants. The theory of Cliodynamics predicts that the end of the old Elite includes the Children of the Elite scrabbling for a limited supply of Elite Jobs, and the whole shebang ending in a period of chaos (of perhaps 10 years duration) before a new Elite emerges.
I wonder how far along in the period of chaos we are?
NickM
My condolences on your loss.
Treating the opinions of other academics as “evidence” is indeed “group think” with no scientific basis – and, yes, treating computer models (which produce the “results” the were programmed to produce) as if they were real world data, tears up the basic principles of science.
It is not just the desire for funding (although that it is part of it)- it is also a world view, pushed in education from childhood, that objective truth does not really matter, perhaps does not even exist. That what matters is consensus – consensus around being “Progressive”, around “Social Justice”, about “helping people”.
It started by taking over the humanities and social sciences (if I may use that term) with such subjects as history and economics utterly twisted and made into hollow mockeries of the truth, and now it is taking over the physical sciences as well.
Include medicine – as we witnessed during Covid, where doctors and medical scientists who wanted Early Treatment were viciously persecuted, and the establishment pushed Lockdowns (which “SAGE” scientists admitted were for a “Social Justice” agenda – NOT for reducing deaths from Covid) and then pushed “vaccines” which were NOT vaccines – and have caused deaths and long term illness.
And now we have chatGPT to make sense of all this…..😵💫😬
Seriously, the whole PR system in western academia is broken. How to fix it?
Johnathan Pearce.
It is not just the peer review system – it is academia in general that is broken.
How to fix it?
The first step would be to cut off all taxpayer funding – including government backed “student loans”.
Only the first step – but a vital first step.
@Paul Marks
Mrs DJ and I have already talked about how we should speak of a future university education to our granddaughter (aged 9) for fear of encouraging a poor choice. At one time only 5% of school leavers went on to university, tuition was free, and a degree was a pathway to a ‘good’ job. Nowadays more than 40% go to university, rack up debt for tuition, and have difficulty in finding a ‘good’ job. Some careful thought is required.
Johnathan Pearce –
A simple start to fixing the fake papers and editors problem, at least in STEM subjects, would be for institutions to stop subscribing to the journals that suffer from the problem the most (and preferably to announce the fact). Any journal that wished to remain respectable would take note, and the rest would disappear. That would not help so much in the sort of subjects where “good” and “correct” are matters of opinion, and the “critical studies” type subjects were of course a lost cause from the start.
When good advice for choosing a university includes “stay away from that place; I hear they still take ‘Innovations in Made-up Results and Baseless Conclusions'” we will be starting to see progress.
Paul Marks –
Unfortunately, simply cutting off student loans would at this stage drop us into a situation where only the children of the wealthy would have access to university; we might be back to 5% of the population going there, but not the most talented 5%. For best results a scholarship system could be substituted, providing enough money for tuition and minimal living expenses on the basis of exam results – and real exams, not dumbed down ‘everyone a winner’ ones or ‘continuous assessment’ where class teachers can mark their own pupils’ work.
As usual of course this is all a pipe dream until university leadership has been kicked into prioritising academic excellence over wokeism. Or of course a future Government could simply close down the whole thing, but I’m optimistic that there is still a baby somewhere in the filthy bathwater.
A solution for universities would be to retain the current system of student loans but force universities to insure against the risk them not being repaid. The cost for insuring a decent STEM degree would be minimal, the cost for intersectional basket-weaving studies would be unbearable. Useless courses and universities would disappear.
The problem with that is that journals are going ‘open access’, no longer getting subscription income from libraries but ‘advance publication fees’ (APCs) from authors (or their funders).
Barbarus – it is true that the wealthy send their children to “elite” universities in order to “network” in order to get “good jobs” in the government, and corporate, bureaucracy – let us be honest, no one sends their children to Harvard, Yale and so on, out of a love of learning and scholarship (that is not what these places are about any more – they were once, but they are not now).
But this is dangerous – as having the minds of your children filled with evil (and it is evil) nonsense, can have terrible consequences.
Do you really want poor children to be given scholarships to such places – to have, like the rich, their minds filled with evil nonsense.
Would it not be better if getting a “good job” did not depend on going to one of these Collectivist indoctrination factories and accepting, as truth and goodness, all the evil that they teach?
Discovered Joys.
Your daughter is nine (not 60 like me) – as she is young she still has a chance.
Make sure that your daughter learns a practical trade – one that she can “fall back on” in hard times, even if your daughter decides to go down the road of some other line of work.
The Bavarians are correct about this – a person may choose to do all sorts of things in their life, and they may read philosophy and so on, and go to listen to lectures from great thinkers – BUT……….
But – they must have a skill which they can fall back on, training for some trade or occupation that can undertake (to sustain themselves – and help sustain their families) in hard times.
And hard times are coming – indeed they have already started.
Joseph Wright (the tutor of J.R.R. Tolkien) is the classic story of the working man who becomes a leading academic – teaching himself to read and write, and walking hundreds of miles to attend university lectures (and so on).
But what would be the point of giving Joseph Wright a scholarship today (2025)? He would be driven out of university if he expressed “sexist” opinions, or any opinion the left disapproved of. And his academic work (in his case Germanic languages) would have to aid the Progressive Social Justice cause – or it would be considered worthless.
And if he went into the physical sciences it would be the same – the question would not be “has this man found out something that is objectively true?”, it would be “how does this person’s work aid the cause of Progressive Social Justice?”.
There is no good point in having places like that – they do not do good, they do harm.
There a handful of universities were the above is NOT true – but only a handful.
And in the United States they are, mainly, the places that do not accept government backed student loans – because they know about the strings that come with them.
There are many issues with conflating “results” from computer models with actual empirical data. It’s a messy and complicated business – and, yes, I do know a bit about it. But… Forget that and think how modelling and funding conspire. Not that long ago climatology was, “Like whatever!” It was Cinderella in wellies, not glass slippers. Now it’s the Belle of the Ball! It’s gone from being at the back of the bleachers to Cheer Captain.
How did a stunningly dull. “I’ve got a nice ice-core sample to show you…” go from “Never won fair maiden” to sexy?
Cash.
Don’t do a PhD in climate-modelling and conclude, “Things are OK”. How does the funding juggernaut roll with that sort of thinking? It doesn’t. It is really that simple. Catastrophe gets cash. Why does “The Guardian” headline not even “climate change” but “climate crisis”?
When I was an undergrad I wrote a paper on philosophy of science (got a solid first for it too!) My prof was really impressed by one of my arguments that, essentially, whilst models do have their uses nobody doubted the Trinity Test.
Paul, thanks for your condolences. You are very right that practical skills matter. I’m good with electrics* and my wife is good on practical horticulture. Everyone needs plumbers, nurses, carpenters… Nobody has ever needed an expert on Hegelian dialectics in a tight spot.
A prime case here is Karl Marx. “Workers of The World Unite!” as stated by a git who never did a day’s work in his life. He was so idle he actually got boils on his arse from sitting on it pondering “things”. I don’t exactly blame Marx for the horrors of Lenin, Stalin, Mao et. al. That is not letting Marx off the hook as such but that he simply lacked the vigour to actually, “Make it so!”
*Although if Ed Milliband gets his way… “There was once a Great Power in this land that flowed through the metals of the skies and was controlled by Mighty Wizards…”
Paul,
I’ll see your Joseph Wright and I’ll raise you Sir Peter Mansfield FRS. And yes, I was on first name terms with him. A brilliant man and great fun to be around. He really cared about the undergrads and as I was undergrad staff/student rep for two years that’s how I knew him. He got us excellent sandwiches and seriously pucker orange juice for the meetings. Top bloke!
But.. Let’s go for the straight flush shall we? George Green. I’ve been to his fully restored windmill in Sneinton, Nottingham. Oddly enough, in it’s way, a windmill that really produced electricity!
From Wikipedia.
NickM – very good examples Sir, thank you, thank you indeed.
These were people for whom finding out the truth (the truth – not “their truth”) was a passion.
You and your wife will survive – I will not, but that is my own fault.
As for Sir Keir Starmer keeping Ed Miliband in post – that shows that Sir Keir agrees with (wants) the harm that Secretary of State Miliband is doing.
Britain is not dying a natural death – Britain is being murdered. The government, elected and unelected, know the harm they are doing – and they are doing these things (higher taxes, more regulations and so on) because they wish to do harm.
No amount of peer review would have altered the fact that Isaac Newton’s alchemy was bunk.
No amount of peer review would have grasped the significance of Newton’s maths and physics, as it was beyond the minds of his peers.
Mr Ed – yes indeed Sir.