The Sound Of Settled Science

Safe and Effective Science Unsettled Science 68 Comments

The Illusion of Consensus

The project of science calls for rigor, humility, and open discussion. The pandemic has revealed the stunning magnitude of the political and institutional capture of science. For this reason, both of us — Rav and Jay — are launching a podcast devoted to investigating the concoction of pseudo-consensus in science and its ramifications for our society. To start — and for quite some time — they will be examining the illusory consensus during COVID. However they will soon branch out into issues pertaining to transgender care, mental health, psychiatry, and nutrition — topics that have been wholly corrupted with one monolithic consensus that has proven to bear many costs on our society.

68 Replies to “The Sound Of Settled Science”

  1. Refinitiv….. The outfit behind ESG scores.. Who the Fk are they and why do companies give a shit about ESG scores.. Social Credit Scores.. I don’t have the brains or memory to do a deep dive into these scumbag outfits.. Please, someone do the legwork on this.. We are headed into a dark hole because of outfits like this.. DIIA Ukraine is showing where this is headed, and I guess I am at the right time in my life to disappear, because I hate to see where we are headed. My younger family are headed straight into 21 century Gulags..Speak up ,those of you who want to keep their head down.. You silent majority(?) are our only hope.

  2. Please please please do ‘climate science’, where ‘the consensus’ (well, the ‘vocal consensus in media/social media’) would have you believe that stepping outside will result in one’s immediate immolation.

      1. Right. Have you noticed that this is the first Pope the left has ever approved of? Tells me all I need to know about Francis the Commie Pope. Benedict was cancelled for his honesty.

    1. The Lancet – seriously??????????? That crap organization has been discredited repeatedly since their stupid 800,000 dead Iraq civilian study 20 years ago, when that equated to 5000 / day when the max was 100s. Don’t quote Lancet – it’s crap

        1. I would look for a journal that doesn’t consistently print bogus studies about gun control, just as a start. The Lancet has been particularly objectionable in that regard, as has JAMA.

          If they’ll bend science for the anti-gun lobby, and they do, won’t they bend it for others? Is one not in fact forced to assume they have done so in every case? Fruit of the poison tree, you know.

          1. So you have no solid sources of information.

            Why, then, do you believe what you believe?

          2. “The Lancet has been particularly objectionable in that regard, as has JAMA.”

            Don’t forget the New England Journal of Medicine…they are right up there with all the other politicized medical publications.

          3. Quoth the Marmot: “So you have no solid sources of information.”

            Virus science is not my area of expertise, but I know a bad study design and crooked data when I see it. If you want to see some bad studies, go look up the ones that “debunked” hydroxychloroquine. Some of them used fabricated data and had to be withdrawn. That’s as solid as it gets, outside one’s professional field.

            “Why, then, do you believe what you believe?”

            Because I have seen the Lancet, JAMA, NEJM, CMAJ and many more print and defend papers which are utterly fraudulent in fields where I -am- an expert. One recent non-gun example, the journal articles claiming that gas stoves are the cause of 12% of childhood asthma. I happen to know a good bit about stoves, and asthma, and study design. The studies do not show what they claim to show. They are lying.

            Therefore if I -know- they are lying about guns, and I -know- they are lying about gas stoves, two completely unrelated subjects, I would be a fool to assume they are truthful about something politically loaded, like hydroxychloroquine.

            Which by the way I’ve seen work in Real Life, so I know for sure they’re lying about that one as well.

            How many drops of P spoil the soup, O Marmot?

          4. Phantom:

            If you’re so much smarter than these scientists publishing in peer-reviewed papers, surely you must have published your own critiques of their studies.

            Where are those critiques, precisely? Please cite them.

            Really, Phantom, if it comes down to choosing between the former and you, it’s an easy decision.

          1. I have looked for them, in part right here on this site.

            And they are on the whole rubbish, making all the mistakes that the scientific method has learned to avoid over the three hundred years.

        3. Lancet is garbage – it’s not up to me to cite something else, you go for it.

        4. The power of the thought process. Let’s say the experts and environmentalists tell us that we are at the beginning or the mids of a mass extinction event due to humans. Ask yourself how many mammal and bird species can you name right now that went extinct during the last 100 years? How many can you name after researching for an afternoon searching the Red-list or CREO? You might learn that most of the few species had been island species and there are less than 10 species that went extinct during the last hundred years that lived on a continent. So where are the corpses of all those supposed extinct specie than? Do we really need credentialed grifters telling us in journals what is supposed fact?

          1. If I understand this right, you’re going to use your own powerful intellect to rebut hundreds of papers by authors who have gone out and measured what’s happening.

            Alrighty then.

          2. But, but, but … those sweet-face cuddly Polar Bears are going extinct … right? The Discovery Channel told me. Over and over and over … so did the BBC … with the dulcet tones of Sir Richard Attenborough’s narration!! All the cute mammals are dying! Like sea otters. We’ve killed everything ‘cuddly ‘with that killer oil and gasoline. We MUST live in a pristine planet. My Prius is pristine, it’s you and your filthy truck that has to go.

        5. “And they are on the whole rubbish, making all the mistakes that the scientific method has learned to avoid over the three hundred years.”

          That would be the same ‘scientific method’ that both the vaccine zealots and the climate change industry absolutely *refuse* to use, right?

        6. Is the former editor of the Lancet a sound source?
          ““The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”

          Lancet Editor Richard Horton

      1. I’ve heard a lot of claims about how COVID vaccines are dangerous. What I haven’t seen is solid evidence, stuff that withstands a decent tire kicking.

        If you have such evidence, present it. This is your chance.

        1. “I’ve heard a lot of claims about how COVID vaccines are dangerous. What I haven’t seen is solid evidence, stuff that withstands a decent tire kicking.”

          I’ve heard a lot of claims about how all the young, healthy athletes suddenly dropping dead all over the world are *not* due to the COVID-19 ‘vaccines’. What I haven’t seen is solid evidence of a different cause, stuff that withstands a decent tire kicking.

        2. Every time I hear someone demand “Show me the evidence,” my response is always the same.
          “Get your head out of the sand, and uncover your eyes and ears.” The evidence is all there, right in front of your face. You just have to have the courage to see and hear what’s really happening. Don’t be limited by your biases. Open your mind and seek out the truth, the real truth, and not just what ultimately turned out to be nothing more than propogandist lies being spoon-fed to you by corrupt government agencies.
          I’ve seen both sides of the argument. Believe me, I had to, because so much was at stake. I finally had to make a choice, and despite the consequences (and there were many), I believe I made the right choice.

          1. Why do think medical science has advanced so much over the last few centuries years? It’s because medicine evolved into a true science, including huge randomized, controlled, double-blind studies. Before then it was based on people’s hunches based on their own direct experience, which led to blood letting and blaming cats for plagues.

        3. If you believe I made the wrong choice, well then… SHOW ME *YOUR* EVIDENCE! I’ve made my choice already, but I’m willing to let you have the opportunity to prove to me that I was wrong.
          You see, it’s never too late for me. I can still change my mind and go out and get the jab any time I want to. You’ll just have to convince me that is the right thing to do. Can you?
          Unfortunately for you, You do not have that luxury. Maybe that’s why you have to convince everyone that you made the right choice. Because the more people you can convince, the more you can convince yourself that you did the right thing.

        4. killer assHole(AKA unDORK)
          Small town near here, first shot , guy suffered some paralysis , my friend’s sister got here 2nd shot, so they would admit her to hospital, dead 48 hours later, on line friend , lives near Orlando Fl, got both shots, has been OFF work for more than a year now, friend’s daughter got married last August, her boyfriend (now husband) suffered heart problems, 3 weeks before wedding , is that enough for you A$$HOLE

          1. VOWG:

            My “ignorance” is based on examining the preponderance of scientific evidence, which I cite freely.

            What is your ignorance based on? Listening to some guy with a blog and an attitude?

    3. Dear Marmot, you seem incapable of accepting the notion that the studies and the journals themselves are being called into question because they keep printing things that turn out to not be true. They do it knowingly. It only takes a passing familiarity with the subject at hand to see that. Current example the Covid vaxx, not safe and not effective, and put forward by people who knew that at the time.

      Furthermore the raw data all these studies are based on are CORRUPT. Deliberately so. Corrupted at the individual hospital level by the people collecting the data. A cancer death with a positive Covid test was counted as a Covid death, and to my knowledge still is.

      Funny how you keep dodging that. One speculates you have an interest here.

        1. There are many….look for them. Tick, tick, tick, tick….

          “However, emerging evidence suggests that the reported increase in IgG4 levels detected after repeated vaccination with the mRNA vaccines may not be a protective mechanism; rather, it constitutes an immune tolerance mechanism to the spike protein that could promote unopposed SARS-CoV2 infection and replication by suppressing natural antiviral responses. Increased IgG4 synthesis due to repeated mRNA vaccination with high antigen concentrations may also cause autoimmune diseases, and promote cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in susceptible individuals.”

          https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/11/5/991

          1. What part of the word “may” did you not understand? It expressed a possibility, not a certainty. Can you state the degree of possibility? No? Then shut your pie hole about things you don’t understand.

          2. So you have a tentative propopal that there may be an immune tolerance mechanism to multiple injections of the vaccines, which even if true might not override the benefits of the vaccines.

            Better than the usual fare. At least it’s a published paper. But you have a long way to go.

          3. One thing I don’t understand about that paper.

            “Vaccines” claims it’s a peer-reviewed journal. But the paper was received April 2, 2023 and accepted May 15, which is 43 days. That is spectacularly fast for a peer-reviewed paper.

            I’m not sure what that means.

        3. A$$HOLE KILLER
          Check out the insurance studies, that they do because of the higher pay out rate since covid “vaxxicnes” have been used. They are some of the most comprehensive studies out there.

          1. Gym: Cite those studies. Claiming that “there’s studies out there” doesn’t cut it.

          1. Yes, sometimes papers are retracted, and sometimes other researchers fail to notice that retraction.

            What’s your point?

      2. “Dear Marmot, you seem incapable of accepting the notion that the studies and the journals themselves are being called into question because they keep printing things that turn out to not be true. ”

        LOL at ‘FACTCHECK.ORG’ (and their cherry-picked vaccine death stats), for one. I’ve yet to see even one of these ‘fact check’ outfits *not* funded by the left, and/or doing any ‘fact checks’ that don’t exclusively target the right.

        1. Looks like a pretty good fact check to me, with a ton of work going into it. The interviews and email conversations with six experts in the field is particularly convincing, plus the six independent papers and website postings from medical centres cited at the end.

          What sources of information do you have?

          1. “What sources of information do you have?”

            Ones that aren’t being paid to push one (and only one) viewpoint. They are available to you as well, if you could put aside your own biases and take a good, objective look. But you’re simply incapable of doing that, as your previous posting history here clearly indicates. You probably even get your political news from CNN and the New York Times, don’t you?

          2. Fred from BC:

            And yet you don’t cite these terribly objective and open-minded sources. Someone more skeptical than I might wonder if they actually exist, or if they are so weak they don’t withstand even casual scrutiny.

    5. Fat Rodent

      The lancet article used the Skronowski et al (2022) paper. About 1.5 million test subjects in Quebec and B.C. – for B.C. 17,835 covid infections, 537 hospitalizations in the fully vaxed. Not particularly impressive against covid if you ask me. Nobody died from Covid-19 in Skronowski et al, vaxed or unvaxed. Yet the lancet authors incorporated Skronowski et al into their analysis to calculate vaccine effectiveness against death? How reliable is that if nobody actually dies? And without Absolute Risk Reduction, the Relative Risk Reduction, which is being used in the lancet paper, is utterly misleading. The correction that Skronowski et al had to make to their ethics statement also makes interesting reading. Then there is the matter of labeling the vaccinated “unvaccinated” if they exhibit covid infection in the first three weeks of being injected (in B.C.). But I’m sure the lancet paper is totally reliable.

      1. That’s Mr. Fat Rodent to you.

        The paper says that their mortality statistics were based on only ten papers — presumably those that recorded mortality in a useable form.

  4. Consensus = Weasel words.. The majority of vested interest arseholes have spoken.. What even is that anyway?.. The activists have declared themselves right and the media and politicians roll over like little unquestioning lap dogs?..

    Monopolies for your friends.. Really?.. Things must be awfully good for a lot of people to believe such shameless horse SCHT.. As if the pain and suffering they want to inflict on others will never touch them :)..

    I say bring it.. What we cant give away lets make it black and gay.. I have no desire to keep the lights on for these fraudulent clowns..

    1. Consensus certainly exists about specific things in science. There is a very strong consensus about gravitation. However you have a point when confronted by a claim for which there is no empirical evidence. That’s the case with climate change. As such, climate change is merely a claim for political purposes. Gravitation is an unpleasant reality when we fall. The two things are entirely different, and it is the lying of the AGW kultists to try to confuse the two things.

      1. “As such, climate change is merely a claim for political purposes. Gravitation is an unpleasant reality when we fall. The two things are entirely different, and it is the lying of the AGW kultists to try to confuse the two things.”

        One of the more obvious differences is that no one is being paid to push the theory of gravity, and any scientists who disagreed with the consensus would not be threatened or have their livelihoods taken away if they didn’t shut up.

        (they might be laughed at, though…)

        1. The Flat Earth Society still exists. As do the morons who believe there never were men on the moon. As do the morons who believe that the fall of the twin towers was orchestrated by the CIA. Lots of people push lots of silly ideas and always have.

          1. “Lots of people push lots of silly ideas and always have.”

            Yup. Too bad the internet and social media make it so easy to do now. In the old days, they would just rant on street corners and such…

        2. “Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period”.

          Michael Crichton 2003

          1. “Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. ”

            Good quote, I’ve used the same sentiment a lot. Didn’t know it was from Crichton.

      2. cgh,

        thee consensus for gravity is ONLY that it exists, not what it is, that is still up in the air!

  6. Killer Varmint is particularly incited to defend the nonsense tonight. I wonder if he’s paid by the word or letter. It certainly not by the people convinced by his “arguments”.

    1. By the word. I’m going to be test driving Lambos tomorrow.

      But I didn’t ask anyone to respond to my original post.

        1. There’s something in the male psyche that compels us to kick the ant hill.

  7. Here’s 300 for a start.
    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2023/05/28/unfollow-the-science-300-covid-articles-pulled-many-over-lack-of-ethical-standards-n1698691
    Anybody seen the test data on the trials of Moderna and Pfizer? No, because they don’t have to release it all until 2025. The little they did release did not look good. But they told you it’s 100% effective, then 93%, then 85% and so on. But your government told you it was safe and you have to get it to work, travel and live in their country. Supposed to be our country, not theirs. That’s exactly not why we have governments.
    Let me know when they start a study showing how many healthy teenagers died in their sleep before 2021 and after.

  8. Killer Marmot While I don’t agree with you I do appreciate you sharing your viewpoints and trying to have a discussion.
    Can’t buy into a vaccine (even if a journal says it is safe) that doesn’t give me much protection against the virus, or protect others around me given that I am vaccinated.

    1. The COVID virus has weakened so much that younger people are (probably) no longer in serious danger from it, and I think a good argument can now be made to skip the vaccine.

      Very old people, or people with existing medical conditions, are something else again. The protection the vaccines give against severe COVID symptoms is worth it.

      1. “The COVID virus has weakened so much that younger people are (probably) no longer in serious danger from it,”

        They NEVER WERE in any danger. Nice try.

        1. This is a paper from the early days of COVID:

          https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7228328/

          It says that symptoms for youth were far milder, but also…

          In the largest child case series so far, 14 more than 90% of the 2,143 children diagnosed with laboratory‐verified or clinically diagnosed COVID‐19 −19 had asymptomatic, mild or moderate disease. Of the remainder, 5.2% had severe disease and 0.6% had critical disease. According to the disease severity classification used by several Chinese publications, severe disease was defined as dyspnoea, central cyanosis and an oxygen saturation of less than 92%. Critical disease required respiratory failure, sometimes with acute respiratory distress syndrome, shock and signs of multi‐organ failure, such as encephalopathy, heart failure, abnormal coagulation and acute renal failure.

          So less than 1% were critically afflicted, but those that were had dire symptoms that were obviously life threatening if not treated,

  9. I had lunch at a golf course in Kelowna last week. There were these strange creatures digging holes everywhere, grabbing golf balls and running off with them, just being really annoying pests. Being Kelowna, they could do nothing about it (trap or shoot).

    I asked what these animals are? Apparently, the Marmots have been cross-breeding with the Gophers, creating little Maophoers.

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