We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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 One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted.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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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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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.