Last night, after watching The Avengers for the dozenth time, I decided another movie just might be in order. I couldn't find the DVD to the movie I desire to watch, but I suggested The 13th Warrior and the menfolks grunted assent, or what I took for assent and popped the movie into the barely used DVD player. It was at this point the Double Xers in my household noticed the neighbors had a fire going in their firepit and went over there for beer and stories. I was actually too bloated from good red beans and rice to actually move from the couch, so there I stayed.
As I watched the movie I realized that I had the book somewhere and that some sort of joke or something "off" had been involved with its writing. I couldn't remember, so I actually got my butt up off the couch to look for the book. In an amazing coincidence, it was on the bookshelf, at eye level, when I turned on the light and entered our "library" (read small room at the end of the laundry room with built in shelves and desks). This is where I keep my dead tree editions of books. Some are text books from the many many years ago my husband and I attended college, others are high school year books of the entire family, and some books that will most likely never be electronically produced but will be read again and again. Since there is a particular book that I have been searching for, for over a month, and have YET to find, the fact that the book I was looking for was "right there" when I desired it, was a little overwhelming to me. It was much the same kind of amazement when someone gets you the present you want and need, exactly when you want and need it.
Michael Crichton began writing the book as a dare from a college buddy who was teaching comparative lit or some other useless liberal arts class. As recently as 1994 he admitted he could not remember which annotations and bibliographies were real and which were made up, even after several attempts at researching his own notes in public libraries. He wrote a faux-scholarly book and then could not remember what was fact and what was fiction. He'd played his game a little too well, for he says of the says spent trying to decide which was which, "I mention this because the tendency to blur the boundaries of fact and fiction has become widespread in modern society. Fiction is now seamlessly inserted into everything from scholarly histories to television news."
Sound familiar Anthropological Global Warmers?
I am pretty certain that most scholarly publications today are pretty much akin to Michael Chrichton's Eaters of the Dead without the actual existing person on which he based his tale. If you doubt me, take a look at what passes for Peer Review in Liberal Arts publications and to my everlasting shame, scientific ones. Back in my day, publications the Scientific American New Scientist and Science News (an amalgamation publication of recent published works) were the standard by which all scientific publications were judged. In all honesty I believe that the only quasi-scientific publication that still adheres to anything resembling provable truth may be the CDCs Morbidity and Mortality World Report (which subscription I finally nixed 10 years ago due to boredom, but I look it up online when something is going on epidemiologically).
I cancelled subscriptions to all of my trade journals and scientific journals, with the exception of Astrology, because they were so clearly in the tank for AGW. I railed against it, tried to argue with those clueless, ass covering mofos for years and then just turned in my scientist card, because these people were going to ruin the purity of scientific discovery for all time and damned if the retards at East Anglia didn't do just that. But it's not just the purely scientific journals, you can read pure crap in The Lancet, JAMA, Psychology Today and every scientific, liberals arts, engineering even, journal out there. Because once you made proof obsolete, you removed the very foundation of scientific validation. Once they made it almost mandatory to put in all grant requests with the words "... and its effects on Global Warming" at the end of your abstract, it was over. Science is no longer the bastion of truth, it became the search for the almighty dollar to keep stupid, lazy scientists from having to do real work, like proving their hypotheses.
Look at it like this, I write a paper for peer review called "Desktop Cold Fusion and Its Effects on Global Warming" and I put in there that I observed it happen, but I can't make it happen again and nobody running like experiment can reproduce it, it would be soundly accepted by those now in the scientific community as proof I had done something, even though I had not. All I had to do was say I saw it, and thus it happened. In the past scientific world if it cannot be reproduced, it never happened. NEVER. Today, all you have to say is that you really felt like it happened, so therefore it must have and just shrug when someone asks why you can't make it happen again.
This is the worst kind of intellectual fakery. Just like the buried trauma scam of the 90s where therapists, evidently trying to drive up the number of idiots seeking therapy got people to "remember" their parents doing horrible thing that they had never done. Yet these people were paraded on TV and newspapers and scholarly journals as some kind of saviors... until one person woke and realized she'd been had.
The problem with it all is, ordinary people still tend to believe that science and scientists are honest, truthful people, since their entire lives are dedicated to seeking the truth of the Universe. If a scientist says something is so, too many are ready to believe them. Once the scientific world jumped on the liberal arts bandwagon of feelings and subjective reality, they became nothing more than snake oil salesmen.
Just ask Per Fraus-Dolus, Professor Emeritus.
As I watched the movie I realized that I had the book somewhere and that some sort of joke or something "off" had been involved with its writing. I couldn't remember, so I actually got my butt up off the couch to look for the book. In an amazing coincidence, it was on the bookshelf, at eye level, when I turned on the light and entered our "library" (read small room at the end of the laundry room with built in shelves and desks). This is where I keep my dead tree editions of books. Some are text books from the many many years ago my husband and I attended college, others are high school year books of the entire family, and some books that will most likely never be electronically produced but will be read again and again. Since there is a particular book that I have been searching for, for over a month, and have YET to find, the fact that the book I was looking for was "right there" when I desired it, was a little overwhelming to me. It was much the same kind of amazement when someone gets you the present you want and need, exactly when you want and need it.
Michael Crichton began writing the book as a dare from a college buddy who was teaching comparative lit or some other useless liberal arts class. As recently as 1994 he admitted he could not remember which annotations and bibliographies were real and which were made up, even after several attempts at researching his own notes in public libraries. He wrote a faux-scholarly book and then could not remember what was fact and what was fiction. He'd played his game a little too well, for he says of the says spent trying to decide which was which, "I mention this because the tendency to blur the boundaries of fact and fiction has become widespread in modern society. Fiction is now seamlessly inserted into everything from scholarly histories to television news."
Sound familiar Anthropological Global Warmers?
I am pretty certain that most scholarly publications today are pretty much akin to Michael Chrichton's Eaters of the Dead without the actual existing person on which he based his tale. If you doubt me, take a look at what passes for Peer Review in Liberal Arts publications and to my everlasting shame, scientific ones. Back in my day, publications the Scientific American New Scientist and Science News (an amalgamation publication of recent published works) were the standard by which all scientific publications were judged. In all honesty I believe that the only quasi-scientific publication that still adheres to anything resembling provable truth may be the CDCs Morbidity and Mortality World Report (which subscription I finally nixed 10 years ago due to boredom, but I look it up online when something is going on epidemiologically).
I cancelled subscriptions to all of my trade journals and scientific journals, with the exception of Astrology, because they were so clearly in the tank for AGW. I railed against it, tried to argue with those clueless, ass covering mofos for years and then just turned in my scientist card, because these people were going to ruin the purity of scientific discovery for all time and damned if the retards at East Anglia didn't do just that. But it's not just the purely scientific journals, you can read pure crap in The Lancet, JAMA, Psychology Today and every scientific, liberals arts, engineering even, journal out there. Because once you made proof obsolete, you removed the very foundation of scientific validation. Once they made it almost mandatory to put in all grant requests with the words "... and its effects on Global Warming" at the end of your abstract, it was over. Science is no longer the bastion of truth, it became the search for the almighty dollar to keep stupid, lazy scientists from having to do real work, like proving their hypotheses.
Look at it like this, I write a paper for peer review called "Desktop Cold Fusion and Its Effects on Global Warming" and I put in there that I observed it happen, but I can't make it happen again and nobody running like experiment can reproduce it, it would be soundly accepted by those now in the scientific community as proof I had done something, even though I had not. All I had to do was say I saw it, and thus it happened. In the past scientific world if it cannot be reproduced, it never happened. NEVER. Today, all you have to say is that you really felt like it happened, so therefore it must have and just shrug when someone asks why you can't make it happen again.
This is the worst kind of intellectual fakery. Just like the buried trauma scam of the 90s where therapists, evidently trying to drive up the number of idiots seeking therapy got people to "remember" their parents doing horrible thing that they had never done. Yet these people were paraded on TV and newspapers and scholarly journals as some kind of saviors... until one person woke and realized she'd been had.
The problem with it all is, ordinary people still tend to believe that science and scientists are honest, truthful people, since their entire lives are dedicated to seeking the truth of the Universe. If a scientist says something is so, too many are ready to believe them. Once the scientific world jumped on the liberal arts bandwagon of feelings and subjective reality, they became nothing more than snake oil salesmen.
Just ask Per Fraus-Dolus, Professor Emeritus.
No comments:
Post a Comment