Don't get your politics all over my beautiful science!

The story of how we developed a system to discover truth, and then poisoned it with a system designed to produce lies.

Science seems to be in an awful mess these days. The Covid policy nightmare we all went through was filled with all manner of “official” scientific nonsense. It’s a sad state of affairs when infamous beagle-torturer Anthony Fauci and his parade of lies is the face of science.

Similarly, I’m sure there is good work done in small corners of climate science, but the official proclamations coming from that field sure don’t seem to be based in reality. Scientific hypotheses are supposed to be subjected to rigorous attempts at falsification. Not in this field! In the modern climate science religion, the conclusions come first, then conforming evidence is sought out. It’s almost the opposite of science.

Physics seems to be at a standstill, mired in the seeming dead end of string theory. We have uncovered a huge pile of amazing quantum questions, but we don’t have much in the way of answers.

But how can it be that the human endeavor of science is screwed up? Don’t the wonders of the modern technological age that are all around us belie that premise?

Well, no. Science and engineering aren’t the same thing. And despite the myth we’ve all heard that “pure science” leads to knowledge that spurs innovation, the work of Terence Kealey and others shows us that the relationship usually works the other way around.

Most of the time it’s engineers and inventors tinkering around trying to get stuff to work that provides the initial (and often surprising) experimental data that causes scientists to try to figure out what’s happening and why.

Don’t get me wrong though, I love me some science. The scientific method is a wonderful system for trying to figure out what’s going on in a systematic and non-biased way.

Careful observation combined with a deep skepticism can take you a long way in the pursuit of knowledge. Allow your imaginative mind to roam free, generating hypotheses about the way the world might work — then test those hypotheses rigorously and from all possible angles.

Good system. I’m a fan.

But there’s another human system I’m not a fan of at all, and it appears to be screwing everything up, science-wise. It’s the political system.

Which of these two systems seems to be driving science these days? The scientific method or the political process?

You already know the answer.

Private companies are of course always engaged in research and development, trying to improve the products and services they deliver to you and me for a profit. This is the good kind of science, and it still works quite well.

But an enormous amount of scientific research funding is supplied by the government (who stole that money from you and me). That money is then doled out by bureaucrats via a political process.

And political processes are about the least scientific thing one can imagine.

Government research grants are given to scientists that are working in fields (and towards conclusions) favored by the biased human minds making these funding decisions.

It can’t go any other way. That’s a basic fact of human nature. It’s this precise aspect of human nature that we invented the scientific method to thwart.

So, how dumb are we? We figure out a system to discover knowledge despite our tendency towards bias. Then we decide which scientists to fund based on our ideological blindness and personal biases.

We are pretty stupid, for such an intelligent species.

So that’s why science seems to be screwed up, especially in areas where there’s a strong coalescence of bias towards one particular conclusion or approach.

If you have the “wrong” scientific hypotheses about Covid, climate change, string theory, or any other area of science poisoned by bias and groupthink, you just won’t get your research project funded.

So what will you do, if you want to keep being a scientist? You’ll play ball, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll join the team that gets funded.

That’s not science. That’s politics.

And it’s why science sucks these days.

Naturally,

Adam

Want to infect your mind with the same knowledge viruses I seem to have acquired? Strip off that haz-mat suit and dive into Liberty Classroom!