The comment in the article regarding Michael Levitt is completely uncalled for and a pure ad hominem attack for absolutely no reason. All it does is reflect poorly on the author and his confirmation bias. It is perfectly true that quite a number of Levitt’s predictions proved to be wrong. But then so did everybody else’s, included the lauded good Dr. Ferguson at Imperial whose predictions were not only way off but actually lead to the implementation of disastrous public health policies in the entire Anglosphere. The key is to learn from mistakes.
Ferguson will never learn from his mistakes and is still hard at work creating more. The government is still listening to him and many other fake scientists in other fields. In the field of making scientific predictions the scientists should not use models that have not been confirmed against reality. All the climate and pandemic models are useless.
Ha ha, what a hoot. it isn’t an ad hom attack to point out that Levitt has little ability to predict the future of anything. He is in good company. The reality is that no one has been able to consistently predict the future outcomes of any events that are worth trying to predict. Dr. Ferguson is another example of an incredibly poor modeler whose hubris causes actual harm and has for a really long time.
Another Nobel winner, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues demonstrated that much simpler predictions than climate or disease progression, he was merely dealing with the ability of market experts to predict the market. In his research he found that the experts were no better than monkeys throw darts at a stock page when it came to investment success.
The very idea that Levitt and the rest could predict anything about a disease that was entirely novel, was difficult to diagnose, had no treatments, and little available information of what its cause was and how it was spread, is rich indeed.
It was found the in the case of Ferguson and the Washington State modeling, that their software was outdated, did not function well, was buggy, and predicted the same outcomes when Monte Carlo numbers were input. Their models were pure fiction, just like Mikey Mann or as I like to refer to him, Dr. Fraud.
Totally agree. But the difference with Ferguson and the Washington State modeling is that Governments (or at least the US and UK) took them literally and as a result they caused real damage to the public. In Levitt’s case, however, the powers that be paid no attention to anything he had to say.
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
Why were Obama, Al Gore and the IPCC given prizes? It’s become a bigger joke than Boris.
Vijay Kant
2 years ago
Science progresses by making mistakes and then learning from them. We shouldn’t cancel our mistakes. We should acknowledge them and then move on.
In fewer words, you were far more eloquent than I was.
Jon Redman
2 years ago
I would rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
– Fred Allen (1894 – 1956)
Vic Pearson
2 years ago
The latest winners apart from 1 are climate scientists (what else these days ! ) claiming to have proved manmade Global warming with their latest computer models. Astonishingly we still view them with credibility after 50 years of failed ones. So sadly for science the committee have been coerced by the UN Globalists into doing as they are told with COP26 coming up !?
Al M
2 years ago
Setting aside the Nobel awards of recent years, as a graduate of the natural sciences and sometime professional scientist, how we view those who were lauded at the time, but also profoundly wrong, matters, especially when the consequences ruined or extinguished lives. As Vijay Kant notes below, science is a matter of trial and error; you have to move on from mistakes, but also learn from them. Hubris is a trait found in many scientists who made remarkable progress in their field (and the comparison to the present day is valid), but also present in many failures. If, for example, Edward Jenner’s hunch about smallpox had backfired, how would he be remembered today, if at all? Consider also how many people were killed by early jet planes, or indeed railways.
There is nothing to be gained from cancelling an award such as this, when you consider the academic standards of the time and the intentions of the recipient. If anything, the way to address this is to broaden the science curriculum, to include classes in the history and philosophy of science, which should cover both the academic and political culture of previous eras, along with how professional practice has evolved. Indeed, has it evolved? If treatments for cancer are most likely to be needed for the elderely, is testing them on healthy young people potentially more harmful? These questions should be put to our future scientists and doctors from the outset. Anyway, perhaps this does happen now, but my experience was a 9-5 schedule of lectures, labs and doing your sums for tutorials – no loafing about in bed or spending all day smoking Gauloises and watching obscure French cinema for the likes of us! And surely better than the current screeching (from complete and utter lunatics) demands to ‘problematise’ the likes of Newton, Darwin or Linnaeus, or that we ‘decolonise’ the science curriculum – and replace it with what, for crying out loud?
Last edited 2 years ago by Al M
Michael Loudon
2 years ago
“Should we remove… Moniz’s Nobel Prize.” Serious quibble. I think you mean: Should we ask the Nobel Committee to withdraw Moniz’s NP? Please avoid this “we are all guilty now” mentality.
Otherwise, many thanks for this interesting article.
I’ve noticed this trend in the media too. It’s a gimmick to make readers feel complicit by the use of the word ‘we’.
Chris Mochan
2 years ago
The public tend to misunderstand the Nobel Prize as a gong given out to people on the basis of their general brilliance in a subject, when it is awarded for specific works. As a result, economic arguments usually end up in someone quoting an economist who agrees with their position with reference to their ‘Nobel laureate’ status. The fact that anyone could find the opposite opinion from a different Nobel laureate is never considered.
The Nobel Peace prize is the biggest joke of all, given to the flavour of the month for political reasons. The man currently orchestrating mass rape and butchery in Tigray won it a few years ago.
ralph bell
2 years ago
I wonder how many other medical procedures that were once seen as ground breaking are now obsolete?
Great insightful article.
Scientific “knowledge” has the equivalent of a half-life, depending on the discipline, of typically a few decades, where half of it is found to be false.
This should be seen as one of the strengths of science, not a weakness. I wish people could admit that many of our cherished political ideas will turn out to be wrong
Jorge Espinha
2 years ago
The winner of the Nobel prize ( Egas Moniz) for lobotomy was Portuguese. Keep this in mind, because I’m Portuguese and I do have skin in the game. I’m biased. I don’t understand an article such as this written by a man of science. Moniz didn’t simply “invented Lobotomy” he also mapped the vascular network of the brain (at least in part) developing early imaging techniques by using contrast chemicals (stated in the articles but treated as if it was something trivial). Science is built on the shoulders of giants and part of the present knowledge of the brain was built on research by Moniz. And at the time (as it’s stated in the article) there were no treatments for schizophrenia and the really extreme cases were very hard to take care of. Keep in mind that Moniz took part in a revolution in the treatment of mental patients, up until Moniz’s time, mental patients were treated in the most inhumane of ways.
Science goes forward it’s never finished and at best we get an approximation to the truth.
I’m not a fan of Moniz, he was a left-wing radical, anti-catholic he defended that the Christian faith was to be treated as a mental disease. But he was an important scientist and as it’s often the case he got things wrong.
What pisses me off in articles such as this is the virtue signalling of somebody with the benefit of hindsight. Our ancestors didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.
The comment in the article regarding Michael Levitt is completely uncalled for and a pure ad hominem attack for absolutely no reason. All it does is reflect poorly on the author and his confirmation bias. It is perfectly true that quite a number of Levitt’s predictions proved to be wrong. But then so did everybody else’s, included the lauded good Dr. Ferguson at Imperial whose predictions were not only way off but actually lead to the implementation of disastrous public health policies in the entire Anglosphere. The key is to learn from mistakes.
Ferguson will never learn from his mistakes and is still hard at work creating more. The government is still listening to him and many other fake scientists in other fields. In the field of making scientific predictions the scientists should not use models that have not been confirmed against reality. All the climate and pandemic models are useless.
Well, except in providing jobs and prestige to climate and pandemic modellers. In this their main purpose they are quite effective.
Ha ha, what a hoot. it isn’t an ad hom attack to point out that Levitt has little ability to predict the future of anything. He is in good company. The reality is that no one has been able to consistently predict the future outcomes of any events that are worth trying to predict. Dr. Ferguson is another example of an incredibly poor modeler whose hubris causes actual harm and has for a really long time.
Another Nobel winner, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues demonstrated that much simpler predictions than climate or disease progression, he was merely dealing with the ability of market experts to predict the market. In his research he found that the experts were no better than monkeys throw darts at a stock page when it came to investment success.
The very idea that Levitt and the rest could predict anything about a disease that was entirely novel, was difficult to diagnose, had no treatments, and little available information of what its cause was and how it was spread, is rich indeed.
It was found the in the case of Ferguson and the Washington State modeling, that their software was outdated, did not function well, was buggy, and predicted the same outcomes when Monte Carlo numbers were input. Their models were pure fiction, just like Mikey Mann or as I like to refer to him, Dr. Fraud.
Totally agree. But the difference with Ferguson and the Washington State modeling is that Governments (or at least the US and UK) took them literally and as a result they caused real damage to the public. In Levitt’s case, however, the powers that be paid no attention to anything he had to say.
Why were Obama, Al Gore and the IPCC given prizes? It’s become a bigger joke than Boris.
Science progresses by making mistakes and then learning from them. We shouldn’t cancel our mistakes. We should acknowledge them and then move on.
In fewer words, you were far more eloquent than I was.
– Fred Allen (1894 – 1956)
The latest winners apart from 1 are climate scientists (what else these days ! ) claiming to have proved manmade Global warming with their latest computer models. Astonishingly we still view them with credibility after 50 years of failed ones. So sadly for science the committee have been coerced by the UN Globalists into doing as they are told with COP26 coming up !?
Setting aside the Nobel awards of recent years, as a graduate of the natural sciences and sometime professional scientist, how we view those who were lauded at the time, but also profoundly wrong, matters, especially when the consequences ruined or extinguished lives. As Vijay Kant notes below, science is a matter of trial and error; you have to move on from mistakes, but also learn from them. Hubris is a trait found in many scientists who made remarkable progress in their field (and the comparison to the present day is valid), but also present in many failures. If, for example, Edward Jenner’s hunch about smallpox had backfired, how would he be remembered today, if at all? Consider also how many people were killed by early jet planes, or indeed railways.
There is nothing to be gained from cancelling an award such as this, when you consider the academic standards of the time and the intentions of the recipient. If anything, the way to address this is to broaden the science curriculum, to include classes in the history and philosophy of science, which should cover both the academic and political culture of previous eras, along with how professional practice has evolved. Indeed, has it evolved? If treatments for cancer are most likely to be needed for the elderely, is testing them on healthy young people potentially more harmful? These questions should be put to our future scientists and doctors from the outset. Anyway, perhaps this does happen now, but my experience was a 9-5 schedule of lectures, labs and doing your sums for tutorials – no loafing about in bed or spending all day smoking Gauloises and watching obscure French cinema for the likes of us! And surely better than the current screeching (from complete and utter lunatics) demands to ‘problematise’ the likes of Newton, Darwin or Linnaeus, or that we ‘decolonise’ the science curriculum – and replace it with what, for crying out loud?
“Should we remove… Moniz’s Nobel Prize.” Serious quibble. I think you mean: Should we ask the Nobel Committee to withdraw Moniz’s NP? Please avoid this “we are all guilty now” mentality.
Otherwise, many thanks for this interesting article.
I’ve noticed this trend in the media too. It’s a gimmick to make readers feel complicit by the use of the word ‘we’.
The public tend to misunderstand the Nobel Prize as a gong given out to people on the basis of their general brilliance in a subject, when it is awarded for specific works. As a result, economic arguments usually end up in someone quoting an economist who agrees with their position with reference to their ‘Nobel laureate’ status. The fact that anyone could find the opposite opinion from a different Nobel laureate is never considered.
The Nobel Peace prize is the biggest joke of all, given to the flavour of the month for political reasons. The man currently orchestrating mass rape and butchery in Tigray won it a few years ago.
I wonder how many other medical procedures that were once seen as ground breaking are now obsolete?
Great insightful article.
At least Hitler and his scientists didn’t get any recognition.
Scientific “knowledge” has the equivalent of a half-life, depending on the discipline, of typically a few decades, where half of it is found to be false.
This should be seen as one of the strengths of science, not a weakness. I wish people could admit that many of our cherished political ideas will turn out to be wrong
The winner of the Nobel prize ( Egas Moniz) for lobotomy was Portuguese. Keep this in mind, because I’m Portuguese and I do have skin in the game. I’m biased. I don’t understand an article such as this written by a man of science. Moniz didn’t simply “invented Lobotomy” he also mapped the vascular network of the brain (at least in part) developing early imaging techniques by using contrast chemicals (stated in the articles but treated as if it was something trivial). Science is built on the shoulders of giants and part of the present knowledge of the brain was built on research by Moniz. And at the time (as it’s stated in the article) there were no treatments for schizophrenia and the really extreme cases were very hard to take care of. Keep in mind that Moniz took part in a revolution in the treatment of mental patients, up until Moniz’s time, mental patients were treated in the most inhumane of ways.
Science goes forward it’s never finished and at best we get an approximation to the truth.
I’m not a fan of Moniz, he was a left-wing radical, anti-catholic he defended that the Christian faith was to be treated as a mental disease. But he was an important scientist and as it’s often the case he got things wrong.
What pisses me off in articles such as this is the virtue signalling of somebody with the benefit of hindsight. Our ancestors didn’t have the benefit of hindsight.