This is the best article I have read in sometime. Bravo to the author.
“As a way of generating knowledge, it is the pride of science to be falsifiable”
This quote chimes with me after reading the twitter exchange between Graham Medley and Fraser Nelson earlier in the week – if the modelling process has been done through the whole pandemic in the way that Medley suggests then none of the projections/predictions/scenarios/guesses (pick your favourite) are falsifiable and therefore shouldn’t be seen as scientific in anyway.
But again as mentioned above the journalists and media we trust to portray the facts are so scientifically illiterate (and/or wilfully blind to contrarian arguments against the accepted opinions) that these issues aren’t discussed and SAGE models treated as gospel parables of the good lord “science” written in stone.
I think I could create a long list. But I think I have already answered it – the S in SAGE stands for science and for anything to be scientific it must pass the first tenet of the scientific method and be falsifiable.
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” Karl Popper
Which simply illustrates what I’ve said above – the word ‘science’ is used solely to silence cynics. While some in SAGE may be regarded as scientists, the modelling work has scant connection with science.
“none of the projections/predictions/scenarios/guesses (pick your favourite) are falsifiable and therefore shouldn’t be seen as scientific in anyway.” Precisely so, but I’d go further and deny they’re made by scientists anyway. These are the products of statisticians with bio-pharmacological knowledge. They are statistical models based around specific assumptions (which we are rarely fully informed about).
I cannot see what an attempt to model the behaviour of large numbers of people in the presence of a virus with assumed characteristics has to do with ‘science’. It’s more analogous to an art or a heuristic skill. So when we’re told “we’re following the science” my eyes glaze over as that is just said by scientifically illiterate politicians to a largely scientifically illiterate population with the word ‘science’ included simply to lend authority in the hope of avoiding any questioning.
So far that has been successful as none of the questions are ever about the correctness or otherwise of what SAGE says.
I could not agree with your statement more. I think it is moreover human hubris to believe we can understand let alone confidently effect complex systems such as virus replication and transmission.
This goes back to governments and their advisors having to do “something” because in times of fear and uncertainty the media and large swathes of the public demand action – when sometimes the bravest, most sensible thing is to do nothing.
I hope with Boris’ delay in bringing back restrictions he is buying himself time for the picture to become somewhat clearer.
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
This article has stood the test of time, but what leapt out at me is IFR. It surely is not 1% – the last I read was about .26% but I am happy to be corrected. Even this percentage could be quite high considering the vast numbers that have been infected.
I particularly enjoyed the Science as Authority section and this:
“The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it. That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the tradeoffs. But it can’t make the necessary choices for us. By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.”
You can’t get people to vote for Marxist totalitarianism, so you tell people that scientist have voted on it and agreed it would be a good idea. You don’t get a vote and anyway the debate is over.
The IFR varies according to age – from 0.004 for 0 – 34 year olds to 28.3 for 85+ year olds.
See : Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications Levin December 2020 Eur J Epidemio.
Yes, it varies widely according to age, but there is an average overall. The very low IFR for children and the youth is one of the reasons why so many of us are alarmed that vaccines are being encouraged for them.
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Excellent essay; the best thing I have read in Unherd. It is fascinating to watch people starting slowly to realise that the quality of the “science” behind climate change and behind pandemic management are of the same standard, including the insults to and attempted exclusion of heretics (indeed, in bringing back the concept of heresy in the first place).
Inevitably, such an environment selected for certain human types, the kind who would find such a life appealing. A healthy dose of careerism and political talent was required. Such qualities are orthogonal, let us say, to the underlying truth-motive of science.
This is true of pretty well any large-scale corporate endeavour. When I think of the various places I have worked over the last 35 years, I can’t think of many where the CEO was conspicuously the smartest cookie. Much more often, he simply resembled all the other cookies and relied on the work of much smarter people lower down. CEOs are usually amiable in a bland way, they like sport, are rarely witty, and are no better than anyone else at their job on the way up. They just fit, somehow. The only exception I can recall is John Browne of BP. Friends tell me the armed forces are very similar. The best officers never make it past colonel, because the reason they’re good is that they think differently; generals are generals exactly because they don’t.
Their equivalents are in charge of Science, and it’s as good as you’d expect.
The success of certain people in large corporate or quasi corporate/political structures can also depend on where they fit in respect of the psychopath/sociopath scale. From what I have read psychopaths represent approximately 3% of the population, yet an estimated 30% of these creatures are to be found in corporate management.
Psychopaths have a high threshold of arousal, so they are perfectly suited to an environment which has a high level of politicking, jockeying for position, lying and backstabbing – all the while maintaining complete and perfect composure.
Being a psychopath could be a good or a bad thing in these roles. A mate of mine who is a brigadier reckons it’s helpful for an officer to lack empathy because he has to order people to get killed, but unhelpful because he’ll have impaired insight of how others think, including the enemy, and therefore won’t foresee what they do next.
At all levels in corporates, though, I have observed people promoted faster than others who were totally unimpressive. They worked no harder or better or more productively; their faces just fitted better.
The most extreme example I observed was as a contractor at Enron, a year or so before it went bust. The people revered (and remunerated) as gods were the dealmakers, who would do deals, book the next 20 years’ fantasy profit as revenue that year, then swan off to the next deal while doing nothing to ensure the claimed revenue actually materialised. That job was left to underlings treated entirely without respect by management, but whose efforts to make some actual money flow in were the only reason the whole ramshackle racket didn’t collapse sooner.
John Browne is one of only two appointed CEO I’ve met where I did not think “I, and numerous others, could do your job as well as you, if not better”. The other was a guy who headed up a rapacious commodity trader. Both were extraordinary – thought fast, instant grasp, asked the right questions immediately. The others I’ve met on the whole just stood there while everyone else made everything happen.
The Peter Principle (the unimpressive rising to their level of incompetence) is in full flower in healthcare management, IMHO. Careerism and political talent will get you up the greasy pole a lot faster than actual understanding of what makes for good health care, and what really motivates the nurses and MDs in the trenches.
Yes, some I’ve seen were promoted according to presentation and ‘fit’ – for want of a better word. Some of this fit at the extreme of the word, included equity which has occupied South African space for a long time.
Excluding this, a lot of people I saw promoted to places they should not occupy were the ones who could play the game – were affable, unruffled and insensitive, untruthful, shapeshifting, ruthless, manipulative, consummate actors and fast talkers and loved the cut and thrust of corporate life. Psychopaths.
I was guided by a psychiatrist friend to read a book called Snakes in Suits, to arm myself better. I certainly learned more about psychos, but couldn’t really learn how to play the game and feel comfortable!
Matt Hindman
2 years ago
The biggest problem technocrats have is they have to actually be right once in a while or no one will listen to them anymore. FYI, lying to cover your butt has its limits. People eventually see through it. This seems like it would be basic logic. Unfortunately for them, they are incapable of self-reflection and live in a bubble. Oh well, It’s not like I will feel bad if some self righteous authoritarians start to see their power collapse.
Crawford deserves his Best of the Year for this article.
I wish I shared your confidence, but people still listen to David Icke 30 years after he claimed he was the son of God and that Saddam Hussein (d. 2004) was dead. People still listen to climate psyentists 20 years after “Snowfalls will be a thing of the past” and “50 million climate refugees by 2010“. It doesn’t seem to matter how big the lie or the delusion; when it doesn’t happen, just keep repeating it.
Yep. While I’m more of a classic liberal and not conservative I do listen to conservatives from time to time and one memorable quote from Charlie Kirk stands out. (paraphrased) “The best thing conservatives have going for them despite the progressives being in power now is that progressive ideas are awful and they don’t work.” Biden is proving this true.
I am a conservative leaning classical liberal. Personally, I do not like Burkean conservatism.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt Hindman
Martin Johnson
2 years ago
This makes me think of Fauci’s claim that to criticize him is to attack “science.” He has not practiced medicine or science for 40 years, if then. He is a bureaucrat running a large grant-making agency. But he hides behind “science” while advancing his personal interest and political agenda
I think Fauci is easier to explain: he’s a corrupt sociapath with delusions of grandeur.
Peter LR
2 years ago
One area of science which has long had a political hegemony over dissent is neo-Darwinian evolution. The standard pejorative in use here for dissenters is ‘creationist’. But as a Theory it is, in its total application to life, NOT falsifiable: eg organic life “evolved” from inorganic chemicals, the human mind “evolved”, I even heard J Peterson using this concept in regard to the development of economic theory.
A decade ago Denis Noble of Oxford University wrote a critique of evolution stating: ‘all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved. Moreover, they have been disproved in ways that raise the tantalizing prospect of a totally new synthesis.’ How many of us have heard this said; has it been taken on board? This illustrates the political power which scientism holds over free-thinking dissent.
I have been ridiculed in conversation with educated peers for expressing scepticism concerning neo-Darwinism. For saying nothing more than: “look this is a theory. If you try to make it into a Bible, you are no better than the Christian zealots you look down on.”
I’d be interested in hearing more about this. I am not sure the examples you give work – yes, there is nothing in Darwinism that explains where life came from, but neither can physics explain the Big Bang either, other than by sophistry. Both claim only to describe what happens afterwards. I’d be interested to know which bits of its reasoning are wrong.
Jon, my main point is the impossibility of falsification; yet the theories are communicated as fact, especially to the non-scientific community.
There is evidence for the Big Bang from the background radiation which can be measured for instance. Evolution is useful for explanation but explanation is not evidence. When trying to look into the past, the fossil record doesn’t stack up with the theory especially the sudden appearance of body plans in Cambrian strata.
The big test has been as a consequence of progress in Genomics and the understanding of epigenetics. For instance, the theory predicted “junk” DNA; the genome sequencing has found function in over 90%.
No one has managed to explain the human mind and especially consciousness. Attempts to link it to neurone areas hasn’t succeeded. Neo-Darwinism predicts everything is material based with no place for concepts such as the soul or spirit. Human experience contradicts this. Looking at the available evidence, the theory no longer works. Where evidence is sparse then its good to use the principle of ‘inference to the best explanation’. Neo-Darwinism is no longer the best.
I think that because as a theory it has bolstered secular atheism, then there is political pressure to censure dissent as Graham commented on above.
Indeed, scientism even equivocates the very word ‘evolution’ to be rendered so plastic as to explain everything about life – from Darwin’s ignorance of what his ‘blob of protoplasm’ actually consists of to today’s epic fallacious factualising of a crumbling theory, determined to shatter the careers and integrity of honourable scientists describing observable data that offends the status quo.
Andrew Dalton
2 years ago
Excellent piece!
In trying to formulate some idea that explains just how the modern world is operating, from industry cartels to supra-government organisations, NGOs and internet driven feedback loops, one idea that I keep getting back to is Jerry Pournelle’s iron law of bureacracy.
Pournelle suggests that eventually an organisation will be controlled by those with an interest in the organisation rather than those with an interest in the goals of the organisation.
I would strongly argue that the public health bureaucracy and climate research institutions are both completely beholden to the behaviour Pournelle predicted.
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago
Brought back memories of hill rambling in the Scottish Highlands. One sets off across the heather to walk to the hill peak way off, and high above; through broken ground and heavy going – and then – finally one is almost there; the top, and a deserved rest to look over the vista…. but it never is – instead you crested a main ridge, and ahead, and even further and higher is the top, and so head down and on and on, and then – Again you find you crested another ridge, and further ahead lies the top, and….
J Hop
2 years ago
Articles like this are why I subscribe to UnHerd, from the States.
Julian Farrows
2 years ago
I pay to read UnHerd articles, not because they confirm my world view (I disagree with much of what I read here), but because they question powerful media narratives that have become all too pervasive. I also find the commentators here to be quite diverse in their thinking which is often a good sign that ‘dissidence’, no matter how crudely expressed, is tolerated. Many websites that allow comments, such as the Guardian, often ban dissident views and so become echo chambers. I am drawn to UnHerd because I get to hear different viewpoints even those I disagree with. If it is a bubble I am not sure what ideology it seeks to propagate and which ones it stifles.
Michael Coleman
2 years ago
Excellent work! Crawford correctly points to many factors, including the size of research efforts and the society-wide deterioration of authority, as causes of the corruption crisis in science. As important however, is the recent, and now explicit, abandonment of the scientist-as-objective-observer “ideal”. It’s clear that pre-1960’s scientists had biases that distorted research objectives and results, but the discreditable nature of those biases was uniformly recognized. But in the last half century it became increasing acceptable (and expected) to become an advocate in some scientific issue (environment, CFCs, CO2 in order); The role of scientist as advocate has inevitably contributed greatly to the corruption of science.
Douglas Proudfoot
2 years ago
The “Democracies” in the West are democracies in name only. Almost all of the key decisions are “expert” bureaucratic regulations which are unratified by legislatures. Government by the consent of the governed is considered obsolete, based on the idea that “experts” can make superior decisions compared to the collective decisions of representatives elected by the people.
I think regulatory “experts” have gotten out of hand. I think legislature should have to pass all regulations as laws. This would bring back accountability for both regulators and legislators. Legislatures could consider the regulations with limited time for debate and no amendments, then give them an up or down vote. In the US, the regulations passed by law would then go to the president as a bill to be signed or vetoed. Congress could override the president’s veto, just like any other bill.
“Experts” need a check on them. Rule by decree has to stop. Legislatures have to demand their right to approve or disapprove. The people have a right to representation in regulatory decisions. If they don’t get representation, things could get ugly. Do I have to remind people of a certain tea party in Boston, by people who didn’t have representation?
Michael Cavanaugh
2 years ago
This short piece deserves to be counted as a major exercise in the sociology of science. Big Science/Little Science (a la Popper, Merton, de Solla Price) is now in ongoing tension with BIG Science, and this tension has identifiable secular causes: mistrust of expertise is generalized, particularly by the internet, such that gatekeeping, blue-ribbons and peer review break down, and research cartels respond creatively by aligning with a culture of ad hominem moralism. (“victim-sage” is a nice touch.)
Last edited 2 years ago by Michael Cavanaugh
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
I’m sorry, I just stopped reading when we got to Galileo. It looked promising up to that point, but no, sorry, by now everyone knows that Galileo got hauled in because he peed behind the palace door, and in Renaissance Italy, when you did that, you got a slap. And the slap he got from the pope stung a hell of a lot less than the one he would have got had he tried it in Florence or Mantua.
He was not tortured. He was put under house arrest in a villa. He’d never have got anything like such lenient treatment in any other Italian state of the time.
Rasmus Fogh
2 years ago
This points to a number of important problems. Yet, like the constitution of the USSR, it leaves unbelievers (like me) with an uncomfortable feeling that the real meaning of this is somewhat different from what you would normally get from the words.
I would ask some questions in return:
How do you base yourself on kitchen physics and individual curiosity if the active research fields all require input from large numbers of people. Do you stop pursuing them?
How do you establish and propagate scientific truth or consensus in the face of large, fanatic and well-financed groups of activists with full access to your internal papers, no compunctions about lying, and no reciprocal commitment to transparency or truth?
How do you distinguish between scientific conclusions with vehement enemies but solid scientific underpinnings (like epidemiology or climate research), and scientific conclusions with no factual basis at all (like critical race theory)?
Who determines, and how, that liberal freedoms require us to take a course that the most knowledgeable people think will cost tens of thousands of lives?
Jerome Berryhill
1 year ago
“The development of mRNA vaccines represents a breakthrough of real consequence.” Yeah, no kidding. Ten-year-olds dying of heart attacks. Real medical progress, that!
John Riordan
1 year ago
“But in reality, science is hard, and there is a lot of it. We have to take it mostly on faith. That goes for most journalists and professors, as well as plumbers.”
To be honest, most plumbers would probably understand complex science concepts a great deal better than many journalists if given the time to do the work involved. One thing that has become very obvious over the past few years is that the journalists who spend their time popularising controversial scientific concepts don’t merely fail to understand the subject matter, they reveal themselves as incapable of ever understanding it. We are therefore in the ludicrous situation whereby the journalist’s audience is often better informed than the journalist ever will be on a subject where honesty and competent analysis could not be more crucial.
Other than that, this is an excellent, though terrifying, article. It gives form to so many fears and concerns of my own lately that have been too amorphous so far for me to articulate, and I am grateful to the author for having done so instead. This article ought to be compulsory reading for everyone in the political class quite frankly but, as we know, the ones that need this lesson the most are the most protected against the risk of being exposed to it.
Last edited 1 year ago by John Riordan
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
There is a simple experiment everybody can do at home to prove that the greenhouse effect does not exist. One description is that the sun can only heat the earth’s surface to -18C but the average is 15C. The difference in these temperatures in 33C, said to be the greenhouse effect. Many quantities can be added like mass, volume and length, but temperatures cannot be added.
If you believe they can then take two cups of water at 50C and put them in a bigger container to get boiling water. The temperature of the two together, the total temperature will be 50C, so the average must therefore be 25C. Doesn’t make sense, does it? There is no total temperature and no average temperature. End of climate alarmism with a simple experiment.
I have an actual greenhouse and two actual thermometers inside and outside and have actually measured 33C difference. It works! Temperatures are not added – they are just measured.
Let’s ask a basic question. Who says today’s climate is optimal? Historical records show vineyards in Roman Britain. Today’s climate is too cold to allow vineyards there. The Roman Warm Period was an estimated 2° C warmer than it is now, which was a good thing for humanity, not the disaster global warming alarmists are always predicting from warmer temperatures. Why should we impoverish ourselves for a suboptimal global temperature?
Look up the Wikipedia entry for Paleoclimatology. The graphs shows the earth has had both no ice and been an ice ball. In neither case did man exist as a species yet. The extremes in the paleoclimate record show that natural variation dominates any alleged man-made climate change. Before we spend tens of trillions of dollars, shouldn’t we try to understand the natural forces that change climate over geologic time?
It is statistical folly to use about 100 years of data to extrapolate climate cycles that last hundreds or thousands of years. Only the gullible or math challenged believe in the statistical validity of models built on 100 years’ worth of data, that have failed to predict future temperature patterns.
This is the best article I have read in sometime. Bravo to the author.
“As a way of generating knowledge, it is the pride of science to be falsifiable”
This quote chimes with me after reading the twitter exchange between Graham Medley and Fraser Nelson earlier in the week – if the modelling process has been done through the whole pandemic in the way that Medley suggests then none of the projections/predictions/scenarios/guesses (pick your favourite) are falsifiable and therefore shouldn’t be seen as scientific in anyway.
But again as mentioned above the journalists and media we trust to portray the facts are so scientifically illiterate (and/or wilfully blind to contrarian arguments against the accepted opinions) that these issues aren’t discussed and SAGE models treated as gospel parables of the good lord “science” written in stone.
Because SAGE is producing the models they’ve been told to produce.
Maybe ‘Julie’ missed all the news yesterday.
Please read
PI-M modellers: a response to our critics – in Speccie
I think I could create a long list. But I think I have already answered it – the S in SAGE stands for science and for anything to be scientific it must pass the first tenet of the scientific method and be falsifiable.
“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” Karl Popper
Which simply illustrates what I’ve said above – the word ‘science’ is used solely to silence cynics. While some in SAGE may be regarded as scientists, the modelling work has scant connection with science.
“none of the projections/predictions/scenarios/guesses (pick your favourite) are falsifiable and therefore shouldn’t be seen as scientific in anyway.” Precisely so, but I’d go further and deny they’re made by scientists anyway. These are the products of statisticians with bio-pharmacological knowledge. They are statistical models based around specific assumptions (which we are rarely fully informed about).
I cannot see what an attempt to model the behaviour of large numbers of people in the presence of a virus with assumed characteristics has to do with ‘science’. It’s more analogous to an art or a heuristic skill. So when we’re told “we’re following the science” my eyes glaze over as that is just said by scientifically illiterate politicians to a largely scientifically illiterate population with the word ‘science’ included simply to lend authority in the hope of avoiding any questioning.
So far that has been successful as none of the questions are ever about the correctness or otherwise of what SAGE says.
I could not agree with your statement more. I think it is moreover human hubris to believe we can understand let alone confidently effect complex systems such as virus replication and transmission.
This goes back to governments and their advisors having to do “something” because in times of fear and uncertainty the media and large swathes of the public demand action – when sometimes the bravest, most sensible thing is to do nothing.
I hope with Boris’ delay in bringing back restrictions he is buying himself time for the picture to become somewhat clearer.
This article has stood the test of time, but what leapt out at me is IFR. It surely is not 1% – the last I read was about .26% but I am happy to be corrected. Even this percentage could be quite high considering the vast numbers that have been infected.
I particularly enjoyed the Science as Authority section and this:
“The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it. That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere. It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the tradeoffs. But it can’t make the necessary choices for us. By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority. It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.”
Well said – science is hijacked by technocrats to undermine democratic institutions. Well said.
You can’t get people to vote for Marxist totalitarianism, so you tell people that scientist have voted on it and agreed it would be a good idea. You don’t get a vote and anyway the debate is over.
The latest figure for the IFR for Covid was stated in the U.K. House of Commons to be 0.096%
I suddenly love the UK House of Commons!
The IFR varies according to age – from 0.004 for 0 – 34 year olds to 28.3 for 85+ year olds.
See : Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications Levin December 2020 Eur J Epidemio.
Yes, it varies widely according to age, but there is an average overall. The very low IFR for children and the youth is one of the reasons why so many of us are alarmed that vaccines are being encouraged for them.
Excellent essay; the best thing I have read in Unherd. It is fascinating to watch people starting slowly to realise that the quality of the “science” behind climate change and behind pandemic management are of the same standard, including the insults to and attempted exclusion of heretics (indeed, in bringing back the concept of heresy in the first place).
This is true of pretty well any large-scale corporate endeavour. When I think of the various places I have worked over the last 35 years, I can’t think of many where the CEO was conspicuously the smartest cookie. Much more often, he simply resembled all the other cookies and relied on the work of much smarter people lower down. CEOs are usually amiable in a bland way, they like sport, are rarely witty, and are no better than anyone else at their job on the way up. They just fit, somehow. The only exception I can recall is John Browne of BP. Friends tell me the armed forces are very similar. The best officers never make it past colonel, because the reason they’re good is that they think differently; generals are generals exactly because they don’t.
Their equivalents are in charge of Science, and it’s as good as you’d expect.
The success of certain people in large corporate or quasi corporate/political structures can also depend on where they fit in respect of the psychopath/sociopath scale. From what I have read psychopaths represent approximately 3% of the population, yet an estimated 30% of these creatures are to be found in corporate management.
Psychopaths have a high threshold of arousal, so they are perfectly suited to an environment which has a high level of politicking, jockeying for position, lying and backstabbing – all the while maintaining complete and perfect composure.
Being a psychopath could be a good or a bad thing in these roles. A mate of mine who is a brigadier reckons it’s helpful for an officer to lack empathy because he has to order people to get killed, but unhelpful because he’ll have impaired insight of how others think, including the enemy, and therefore won’t foresee what they do next.
At all levels in corporates, though, I have observed people promoted faster than others who were totally unimpressive. They worked no harder or better or more productively; their faces just fitted better.
The most extreme example I observed was as a contractor at Enron, a year or so before it went bust. The people revered (and remunerated) as gods were the dealmakers, who would do deals, book the next 20 years’ fantasy profit as revenue that year, then swan off to the next deal while doing nothing to ensure the claimed revenue actually materialised. That job was left to underlings treated entirely without respect by management, but whose efforts to make some actual money flow in were the only reason the whole ramshackle racket didn’t collapse sooner.
John Browne is one of only two appointed CEO I’ve met where I did not think “I, and numerous others, could do your job as well as you, if not better”. The other was a guy who headed up a rapacious commodity trader. Both were extraordinary – thought fast, instant grasp, asked the right questions immediately. The others I’ve met on the whole just stood there while everyone else made everything happen.
The Peter Principle (the unimpressive rising to their level of incompetence) is in full flower in healthcare management, IMHO. Careerism and political talent will get you up the greasy pole a lot faster than actual understanding of what makes for good health care, and what really motivates the nurses and MDs in the trenches.
Yes, some I’ve seen were promoted according to presentation and ‘fit’ – for want of a better word. Some of this fit at the extreme of the word, included equity which has occupied South African space for a long time.
Excluding this, a lot of people I saw promoted to places they should not occupy were the ones who could play the game – were affable, unruffled and insensitive, untruthful, shapeshifting, ruthless, manipulative, consummate actors and fast talkers and loved the cut and thrust of corporate life. Psychopaths.
I was guided by a psychiatrist friend to read a book called Snakes in Suits, to arm myself better. I certainly learned more about psychos, but couldn’t really learn how to play the game and feel comfortable!
The biggest problem technocrats have is they have to actually be right once in a while or no one will listen to them anymore. FYI, lying to cover your butt has its limits. People eventually see through it. This seems like it would be basic logic. Unfortunately for them, they are incapable of self-reflection and live in a bubble. Oh well, It’s not like I will feel bad if some self righteous authoritarians start to see their power collapse.
Crawford deserves his Best of the Year for this article.
I wish I shared your confidence, but people still listen to David Icke 30 years after he claimed he was the son of God and that Saddam Hussein (d. 2004) was dead. People still listen to climate psyentists 20 years after “Snowfalls will be a thing of the past” and “50 million climate refugees by 2010“. It doesn’t seem to matter how big the lie or the delusion; when it doesn’t happen, just keep repeating it.
Yep. While I’m more of a classic liberal and not conservative I do listen to conservatives from time to time and one memorable quote from Charlie Kirk stands out. (paraphrased) “The best thing conservatives have going for them despite the progressives being in power now is that progressive ideas are awful and they don’t work.” Biden is proving this true.
I am a conservative leaning classical liberal. Personally, I do not like Burkean conservatism.
This makes me think of Fauci’s claim that to criticize him is to attack “science.” He has not practiced medicine or science for 40 years, if then. He is a bureaucrat running a large grant-making agency. But he hides behind “science” while advancing his personal interest and political agenda
I think Fauci is easier to explain: he’s a corrupt sociapath with delusions of grandeur.
One area of science which has long had a political hegemony over dissent is neo-Darwinian evolution. The standard pejorative in use here for dissenters is ‘creationist’. But as a Theory it is, in its total application to life, NOT falsifiable: eg organic life “evolved” from inorganic chemicals, the human mind “evolved”, I even heard J Peterson using this concept in regard to the development of economic theory.
A decade ago Denis Noble of Oxford University wrote a critique of evolution stating: ‘all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproved. Moreover, they have been disproved in ways that raise the tantalizing prospect of a totally new synthesis.’ How many of us have heard this said; has it been taken on board? This illustrates the political power which scientism holds over free-thinking dissent.
I have been ridiculed in conversation with educated peers for expressing scepticism concerning neo-Darwinism. For saying nothing more than: “look this is a theory. If you try to make it into a Bible, you are no better than the Christian zealots you look down on.”
I’d be interested in hearing more about this. I am not sure the examples you give work – yes, there is nothing in Darwinism that explains where life came from, but neither can physics explain the Big Bang either, other than by sophistry. Both claim only to describe what happens afterwards. I’d be interested to know which bits of its reasoning are wrong.
Jon, my main point is the impossibility of falsification; yet the theories are communicated as fact, especially to the non-scientific community.
There is evidence for the Big Bang from the background radiation which can be measured for instance. Evolution is useful for explanation but explanation is not evidence. When trying to look into the past, the fossil record doesn’t stack up with the theory especially the sudden appearance of body plans in Cambrian strata.
The big test has been as a consequence of progress in Genomics and the understanding of epigenetics. For instance, the theory predicted “junk” DNA; the genome sequencing has found function in over 90%.
No one has managed to explain the human mind and especially consciousness. Attempts to link it to neurone areas hasn’t succeeded. Neo-Darwinism predicts everything is material based with no place for concepts such as the soul or spirit. Human experience contradicts this. Looking at the available evidence, the theory no longer works. Where evidence is sparse then its good to use the principle of ‘inference to the best explanation’. Neo-Darwinism is no longer the best.
I think that because as a theory it has bolstered secular atheism, then there is political pressure to censure dissent as Graham commented on above.
Indeed, scientism even equivocates the very word ‘evolution’ to be rendered so plastic as to explain everything about life – from Darwin’s ignorance of what his ‘blob of protoplasm’ actually consists of to today’s epic fallacious factualising of a crumbling theory, determined to shatter the careers and integrity of honourable scientists describing observable data that offends the status quo.
Excellent piece!
In trying to formulate some idea that explains just how the modern world is operating, from industry cartels to supra-government organisations, NGOs and internet driven feedback loops, one idea that I keep getting back to is Jerry Pournelle’s iron law of bureacracy.
Pournelle suggests that eventually an organisation will be controlled by those with an interest in the organisation rather than those with an interest in the goals of the organisation.
I would strongly argue that the public health bureaucracy and climate research institutions are both completely beholden to the behaviour Pournelle predicted.
Brought back memories of hill rambling in the Scottish Highlands. One sets off across the heather to walk to the hill peak way off, and high above; through broken ground and heavy going – and then – finally one is almost there; the top, and a deserved rest to look over the vista…. but it never is – instead you crested a main ridge, and ahead, and even further and higher is the top, and so head down and on and on, and then – Again you find you crested another ridge, and further ahead lies the top, and….
Articles like this are why I subscribe to UnHerd, from the States.
I pay to read UnHerd articles, not because they confirm my world view (I disagree with much of what I read here), but because they question powerful media narratives that have become all too pervasive. I also find the commentators here to be quite diverse in their thinking which is often a good sign that ‘dissidence’, no matter how crudely expressed, is tolerated. Many websites that allow comments, such as the Guardian, often ban dissident views and so become echo chambers. I am drawn to UnHerd because I get to hear different viewpoints even those I disagree with. If it is a bubble I am not sure what ideology it seeks to propagate and which ones it stifles.
Excellent work! Crawford correctly points to many factors, including the size of research efforts and the society-wide deterioration of authority, as causes of the corruption crisis in science. As important however, is the recent, and now explicit, abandonment of the scientist-as-objective-observer “ideal”. It’s clear that pre-1960’s scientists had biases that distorted research objectives and results, but the discreditable nature of those biases was uniformly recognized. But in the last half century it became increasing acceptable (and expected) to become an advocate in some scientific issue (environment, CFCs, CO2 in order); The role of scientist as advocate has inevitably contributed greatly to the corruption of science.
The “Democracies” in the West are democracies in name only. Almost all of the key decisions are “expert” bureaucratic regulations which are unratified by legislatures. Government by the consent of the governed is considered obsolete, based on the idea that “experts” can make superior decisions compared to the collective decisions of representatives elected by the people.
I think regulatory “experts” have gotten out of hand. I think legislature should have to pass all regulations as laws. This would bring back accountability for both regulators and legislators. Legislatures could consider the regulations with limited time for debate and no amendments, then give them an up or down vote. In the US, the regulations passed by law would then go to the president as a bill to be signed or vetoed. Congress could override the president’s veto, just like any other bill.
“Experts” need a check on them. Rule by decree has to stop. Legislatures have to demand their right to approve or disapprove. The people have a right to representation in regulatory decisions. If they don’t get representation, things could get ugly. Do I have to remind people of a certain tea party in Boston, by people who didn’t have representation?
This short piece deserves to be counted as a major exercise in the sociology of science. Big Science/Little Science (a la Popper, Merton, de Solla Price) is now in ongoing tension with BIG Science, and this tension has identifiable secular causes: mistrust of expertise is generalized, particularly by the internet, such that gatekeeping, blue-ribbons and peer review break down, and research cartels respond creatively by aligning with a culture of ad hominem moralism. (“victim-sage” is a nice touch.)
I’m sorry, I just stopped reading when we got to Galileo. It looked promising up to that point, but no, sorry, by now everyone knows that Galileo got hauled in because he peed behind the palace door, and in Renaissance Italy, when you did that, you got a slap. And the slap he got from the pope stung a hell of a lot less than the one he would have got had he tried it in Florence or Mantua.
Slap? He was jailed and tortured.
He was not tortured. He was put under house arrest in a villa. He’d never have got anything like such lenient treatment in any other Italian state of the time.
This points to a number of important problems. Yet, like the constitution of the USSR, it leaves unbelievers (like me) with an uncomfortable feeling that the real meaning of this is somewhat different from what you would normally get from the words.
I would ask some questions in return:
“The development of mRNA vaccines represents a breakthrough of real consequence.”
Yeah, no kidding. Ten-year-olds dying of heart attacks. Real medical progress, that!
“But in reality, science is hard, and there is a lot of it. We have to take it mostly on faith. That goes for most journalists and professors, as well as plumbers.”
To be honest, most plumbers would probably understand complex science concepts a great deal better than many journalists if given the time to do the work involved. One thing that has become very obvious over the past few years is that the journalists who spend their time popularising controversial scientific concepts don’t merely fail to understand the subject matter, they reveal themselves as incapable of ever understanding it. We are therefore in the ludicrous situation whereby the journalist’s audience is often better informed than the journalist ever will be on a subject where honesty and competent analysis could not be more crucial.
Other than that, this is an excellent, though terrifying, article. It gives form to so many fears and concerns of my own lately that have been too amorphous so far for me to articulate, and I am grateful to the author for having done so instead. This article ought to be compulsory reading for everyone in the political class quite frankly but, as we know, the ones that need this lesson the most are the most protected against the risk of being exposed to it.
There is a simple experiment everybody can do at home to prove that the greenhouse effect does not exist. One description is that the sun can only heat the earth’s surface to -18C but the average is 15C. The difference in these temperatures in 33C, said to be the greenhouse effect. Many quantities can be added like mass, volume and length, but temperatures cannot be added.
If you believe they can then take two cups of water at 50C and put them in a bigger container to get boiling water. The temperature of the two together, the total temperature will be 50C, so the average must therefore be 25C. Doesn’t make sense, does it? There is no total temperature and no average temperature. End of climate alarmism with a simple experiment.
I have an actual greenhouse and two actual thermometers inside and outside and have actually measured 33C difference. It works! Temperatures are not added – they are just measured.
Let’s ask a basic question. Who says today’s climate is optimal? Historical records show vineyards in Roman Britain. Today’s climate is too cold to allow vineyards there. The Roman Warm Period was an estimated 2° C warmer than it is now, which was a good thing for humanity, not the disaster global warming alarmists are always predicting from warmer temperatures. Why should we impoverish ourselves for a suboptimal global temperature?
Look up the Wikipedia entry for Paleoclimatology. The graphs shows the earth has had both no ice and been an ice ball. In neither case did man exist as a species yet. The extremes in the paleoclimate record show that natural variation dominates any alleged man-made climate change. Before we spend tens of trillions of dollars, shouldn’t we try to understand the natural forces that change climate over geologic time?
It is statistical folly to use about 100 years of data to extrapolate climate cycles that last hundreds or thousands of years. Only the gullible or math challenged believe in the statistical validity of models built on 100 years’ worth of data, that have failed to predict future temperature patterns.