http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2008/08/figureheads-ghost-writers-and-quant.html
"From numerous informal observations over the past two decades, it seems clear that high status scientists are no longer required to respond to requests for clarification or to published criticism, but can ignore it with impunity. The traditional default that criticism was regarded as correct unless it was refuted, no longer seems to apply to high status scientists when a criticism comes from a lower-status scientist.
...
And high status scientists are now placed under no obligation to co-operate with their critics in discovering the truth – in the first place high status scientists usually do not need to acknowledge or respond at all to criticism; if they respond they are not compelled to provide relevant refutation but are allowed to bluster, change the subject, and make ad hominem attacks on their critics; requests for extra methodological detail or raw data can be ignored. Sometimes, criticism is met with legal threats – for example accusations of libel."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff152.html
"The State and Science in 1893 Britain"
"Official Geology was the group that had got it wrong. Unofficial Geology had got it right. But what was worse than its error was that Official Geology had suppressed Unofficial Geology and covered up its blunder for decades."
"Murchison had made sure that such contrary opinions did not receive wide publicity in the Geological Society as marginal notes in the minutes of the Council Meetings of that organization suggest. The strong statement of disagreement with and dissociation from Murchison's opinions that Nicol wished to append to his 1861 and 1862 papers was refused publication, and Nicol's achievements received little recognition in his lifetime."
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22.html
"The unusual trustworthiness of science, despite the fact that scientists are humans and humans are not generally trustworthy, exists when (a) hypotheses are falsifiable, and (b) the professional institutions within which scientists operate promote, broadcast, and reward any falsification."
"To understand the impact of increased CO2, we need to know the climate sensitivity. Q: how can scientists, at least Popperian scientists, evaluate the climate sensitivity? A: they can't. There is no falsifiable procedure which can estimate climate sensitivity."
"We also have (one) answer to the first question of the AGW credulists: how a scientific consensus can produce a fraudulent result. The answer is simple: theentire field is fraudulent. In a fraudulent pseudoscience, there is no incentive at all for uncovering error, because the only result of a successful dissent is to destroy your job and those of your peers."
"What we're looking at here is mainstream pathological science. This is a basic and unfixable flaw in the entire Vannevar Bush design for federally-funded science. Once cranks, quacks, or charlatans get a foothold in the NSF and/or the universities, and establish their quack field as a legitimate department of Science, they are there to stay.
The mainstream cranks will not expel themselves, and there is no mechanism by which another department can attack them."
"Cargo-cult scientists have to circle the wagons like this. If they piss off the NSF program managers, their life expectancy as successful grantwinners is not impressive. Real scientists have no such need to be defensive, because their program managers actually want them to expose any errors in their field.
ReplyDeleteThus we answer the initial Hoofnagel question: the source of coordinated error is not, at all, a conspiracy. It is simply the funding source. Nearly every scientist in a field can be working together to promote a falsehood because they all get their money from Joe Romm and company."