A stub. “Covid-19 has made it clear how many people worship Science as a god without having any idea what it means. They say, “Listen to the science,” but what they mean is that if we should be slaves to someone with a PhD in anything labelled “Science”.
A big point I should make is that nobody can rightly say, “This is scientifically correct: listen to the scientific consensus” unless they can tell me what d/dx 3x^2 is. That is, unless they remember a little bit of high school calculus, they are too ignorant to understand who is speaking scientifically and who is just pretending. Arguments to authority are actually justified, for ignorant people. But if you’re not just ignorant, but foolish, you pick the wrong authorities. And there are an awful lot of people who fall down and worship at the altar of Science who really are falling down before the altar of Quackery.
There are also a few people who wrongly worship real Science, but they’re a tiny minority. Peter Dawkins– I’m looking at you. I don’t want to use the same term for them, so maybe we should reserve Scientism for the people who worship anything with the label “Science” and reserve “Rationalism” or some better term for the materialists who know a lot about science. On the other hand, the people like Dawkins, tho a tiny minority, are so much smarter than Scientism Slaves that they probably do matter a lot more in the end. The Scientism Slaves are just sheep, who are manipulated by smarter people.
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The most striking difference between liberals and conservatives is cognitive. Liberals are conformist and authority-loving, oddly enough. When it comes to believing their eyes or an “expert” they’ll pick the expert every time, especially if he utters the word “scientific”.
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The Sordid History of Scam Science
Robert E. Wright
– July 17, 2020
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Love Canal and Other “Cancer Clusters:”
Dioxin, the main chemical culprit at the Love Canal site, was claimed to be so toxic that 3 ounces of the stuff would kill one million people. When 3 pounds of it was accidentally spread over a 700-acre town near Milan, Italy in 1976, though, the worst that came of it were cases of acne, even in the resident who had the highest level of the substance ever found in a human body.
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Radon Panic:
The so-called precautionary principle kicked in and the next thing you know the EPA mandated testing and set a limit of just 4 picocuries per liter of air even though miners exposed to 12,000 picocuries showed no adverse health effects, forcing homeowners to spend billions on radon mitigation technologies.
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Peak Oil: Remember when the earth was proclaimed to be just a few years away from maximum oil production and a rapid rise in oil prices followed by a production collapse due to an absolute dearth of the stuff?
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Superstorm Hell: Global warming was supposed to cause a spate of tropical superstorms that would wipe out coastal areas time and again.
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Air Pollution Armageddon: For all the talk of Greens, one would think that air quality is steadily degrading. In fact, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, and various volatile organic compound emissions have been steadily decreasing for decades.
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Turns out that “acid” rain, which sent me scurrying inside as a yute in the 1970s and 80s, was just slightly more acidic than regular rain. Although some predicted that acid rain would destroy all the forests in Germany by 2002, acidic rain did little to no net environmental damage then and has since become as rarified as smog.
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And what happened to the “hole” in the ozone layer that Neil Young ranted about in his 1989 song “Rockin’ in the Free World?” and that Newsweek likened to “AIDS in the sky?” It was always seasonal and limited to the earth’s three “poles” (North, South, and Himalayas) and now scientists say it is “closing,” showing that environmental “damage” need not be permanent. The ban on the main human-produced causal agent of ozone depletion, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), was relatively easily achieved because cheap substitutes were available. To this day, however, scientists have not shown that the “hole” was primarily man-made or that it caused any ill effects on humans or any ecological systems. And because CFC substitutes are less energy efficient, they may contribute to global warming.…
Overpopulation:
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Ecological destruction: Ecosystems were supposed to collapse, leading to mass extinction.…
Death by Eggs: About the same time, the media made eggs seem akin to a tasty poison, like alcohol. It is okay to have one or two every now and again but if you developed an egg habit, you were a goner. Then eggs became okay as scientists began to differentiate between “good” and “bad” cholesterol. Now many consider eggs a “super food.” Would I be less fat today if I had eaten eggs as a kid instead of “healthy” food like Sugar Coated Gluten Flakes? We’ll never know.
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Death by Apples: I also avoided death foods like apples “tainted” with Alar, an allegedly poisonous chemical applied to apples to slow their ripening. Until, that is, the manufacturer withdrew it under regulatory pressure after a slick media blitz coordinated by an environmental activist group in 1989. Turns out, though, that Alar was way less dangerous than the high fructose corn syrup I consumed instead of my daily apple juice. To induce cancer in lab rats, scientists had to have them ingest the human equivalent of 19,000 quarts of apple juice … per day, every day, throughout their lives!…
Rachel Carson: As Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss showed in their 2012 edited volume Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson (Washington, DC: CATO), any of Carson’s remaining mystique is sheer mysticism. Except for lung cancer, cancer deaths are down and were even trending that way when Carson, a marine biologist, scared the bejesus out of almost everyone about the dangers of DDT, a pesticide that extended half a billion human lives by killing disease-carrying mosquitoes.
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Paul Ehrlich: In 1968, predicted the explosion of a Population Bomb that would kill most of humanity through disease, starvation, and war before 2000. That didn’t even happen in Africa much less globally. He claimed that life expectancy in America would drop to 42 years by 1980, a surprisingly exact prediction considering how far off the mark it was. This famous entomologist (insect scientist) also bet Simon that the prices of metals would increase and, infamously, lost. Yet Ehrlich remains an environmental guru.
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Paul Krugman: Has been wrong about almost everything since he won the Nobel in 2008 for his work on international economic trade theory and concentrated his efforts on the newspaper columnist career he began in 2000. His biggest errors are in labor economics, including the effects of minimum wage policies. See Contra Krugman by Robert Murphy for details.
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