The Myth of Academic Neutrality (Climategate)

Good article by Gary North on the Climategate scandal and the failure of peer review in academia.

Mr. North is attempting to examine the big picture in this story and I think it would relevant for people on this forum to consider his argument in the context of fitness, health and nutrition.

Consider, if you will, the mainstream “expert” opinions on exercise, fat loss, proper nutrition, supplementation, and particularly the safety of anabolic steroids.

Compare and contrast what the establishment holds to be true in these fields versus what you have come to believe through your accumulated knowledge.

The establishment views originate with peer-reviewed academia and are propagated by the medical-industrial complex.

If the system has failed in one area, how can we trust it to work in any other? I think we have a fundamental failure at hand.

The Government has been conning people for a long long time. They get more brazen as time goes on and they get better at working us. What else is new?

This issue is also strangely under reported it seems. People may be slowly waking up to the sheer size of this scam. This scam was and is the cornerstone for a world government. This collapsing is a giant step back for them IF it catches on. Time will tell.

[quote]Nominal Prospect wrote:

If the system has failed in one area, how can we trust it to work in any other? I think we have a fundamental failure at hand.[/quote]

That’s some wonderful logic right there. I would love to see the sort of semantics that validate universal generalization from a particular instance.

In any case, the situation is far more complex than you make it out to be.

As for your point about how “bad” the relevant fitness-exercise related literature is in academia, I first want to ask if you, or most other people on this board, have ever actually picked up a peer reviewed journal at all and read the articles. If not, than you are going on second, third, fourth, whatever hand information and you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Of course, if you are referring to the sort (often poor) health and diet guidelines that come out of academically-informed government panels you have to put all of that stuff into context as well. The information that comes through those sorts of things isn’t the latest or most thorough research. It’s material that has been dumbed down, made applicable for certain purposes. Is it often wrong? Sure. I’m certainly not trying to defend the current state of health-research, since I don’t even know what it is. I’m just pointing out that you have to look at everything in context.

Besides, using health-related research fields as a paradigm of the success of peer review or academia is a horrible idea. It just isn’t. That sort of research, compared with say physics, is just beginning. If you want to see what a success professional academia and peer review is you just have to look at mature fields like mathematics, physics and engineering. (

Look, of course there are problems with the peer review system in academia. The fallacy though is to point to a few bad instances and yell that those elitist snobs can’t be trusted. The other fallacy is to confuse professional academia with government guidelines. The two are quite different.

Great post porcupine. As much as I despise the idiocy propounded by gov’t panels and “experts” given credence in health mags and newspapers, all this has to be put in context, and it is simply irresponsible to extrapolate from those “experts” to the peer-review process in general and especially the universal generalization. I agree with you thoroughly.

Yeah but it did happen, right?

I just want to be clear, and obviously you and I are friends, Aragorn, so I’m not picking a fight with you here.

But the peer review process, in this this case, it did fail, right?

And the stakes in this case are so very, very high.

[quote]Cortes wrote:
Yeah but it did happen, right?

I just want to be clear, and obviously you and I are friends, Aragorn, so I’m not picking a fight with you here.

But the peer review process, in this this case, it did fail, right?

And the stakes in this case are so very, very high.[/quote]

Sure, it happened. The peer review process fails all the time. I don’t know how many shit articles I’ve read only to wonder who was patting who on the back when the article went through “blind” review. Again, given the fact that a few failures doesn’t discredit the entire system I fail to see the point. Unless you are going to be constructive your obtuse criticism isn’t helpful at all. Besides, when you say that “the stakes in this case are so very, very high” you do realize that the door swings both ways, right? While overzealous economic regulation could have disastrous consequences, the consequences of not responding to a real problem of global climate change are equally if not more so dire. What is just as disturbing as the falsified data is the right’s blind and uninformed reaction against that falsified data. People who couldn’t even tell you what data was actually falsified (uh, it has to do with temperature man!) have been obnoxiously claiming that this falsification “debunks” man-made global warming. Oh well.

Peer-review…when all the peers are on the take…

If I can’t see something or verify it for myself, fuck it.

AIDs is a scam. Global warming is a scam. Yet all the scientists are right because their work is ‘peer-reviewed’. Well, so was the work of Dr. Mengele.

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Nominal Prospect wrote:

If the system has failed in one area, how can we trust it to work in any other? I think we have a fundamental failure at hand.[/quote]

That’s some wonderful logic right there. I would love to see the sort of semantics that validate universal generalization from a particular instance.

In any case, the situation is far more complex than you make it out to be.

As for your point about how “bad” the relevant fitness-exercise related literature is in academia, I first want to ask if you, or most other people on this board, have ever actually picked up a peer reviewed journal at all and read the articles. If not, than you are going on second, third, fourth, whatever hand information and you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Of course, if you are referring to the sort (often poor) health and diet guidelines that come out of academically-informed government panels you have to put all of that stuff into context as well. The information that comes through those sorts of things isn’t the latest or most thorough research. It’s material that has been dumbed down, made applicable for certain purposes. Is it often wrong? Sure. I’m certainly not trying to defend the current state of health-research, since I don’t even know what it is. I’m just pointing out that you have to look at everything in context.

Besides, using health-related research fields as a paradigm of the success of peer review or academia is a horrible idea. It just isn’t. That sort of research, compared with say physics, is just beginning. If you want to see what a success professional academia and peer review is you just have to look at mature fields like mathematics, physics and engineering. (

Look, of course there are problems with the peer review system in academia. The fallacy though is to point to a few bad instances and yell that those elitist snobs can’t be trusted. The other fallacy is to confuse professional academia with government guidelines. The two are quite different.
[/quote]

No, it is not the maturity of the field; it is ideology.

When ideologies have followers, and hence money and power, they can influence which fields and ideologies prosper and which will fall out of existence by merely cutting off funding to the upstarts.

Why do you think Keynesianism is so popular with establishment economists?

Back to the topic at hand…

Did you read the actual story and check the accompanying links? The point is, where was the peer review when the numbers were being cooked. Was the incentives to this particular segment of the academic community too great for them not to skew the data? After all, if there is not a problem then “poof.” There goes the money.

I sometimes look at this situation and compare it to Wall Street and the finance community. People debate constantly about the pros and cons of government regulation and free markets capitalism. I have always leaned toward the free market side. Of late, I have been rolling around a question in my head.

Capitalism, as we tend to generally think of it, was a philosophy born out of the Age of Enlightenment. Reason was king and freedom to live for ones own self interest was an idea whose time had come. Agrarian society was at the end of its run and the Age of Industry was in its birth stages. Real, tangible production was the key. Open markets and limited interference were certainly key for this stage.

Now we have moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Industry had real, hard, tangible inputs and outputs. Manipulation was limited to what you could do with productivity, natural resources and distribution. What I am getting at is that rewards were based on real and tangible production. In the Information Age, these past limitations no longer hold true, at least in some cases. The most prominent example would be in the world of finance. We are in a world of fiat currencies and monetary systems that are to a large degree made up of 1’s and 0’s in a web of computers. Here, manipulation are not limited to real tangible inputs. This is why we can have such things as fiat currencies and fractional lending. Can you imagine being able to produce 10 times an output with only 1/10 of the raw input? Could you produce ten cars with the steel and plastics that it takes to make one?

This is why a company such as Goldman Sachs can make such huge profits by what is essentially just moving around money. And again, in our current system, they are simply manipulating data.

Before you finance wizards come at me with guns blazing, I admit this is an overly simplistic overview. I am simply putting it out there for discussion. To tie things back to the original discussion, capitalism and the industrial age were regulated to a large degree by natural laws. It goes back to the old saying of “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

The question that then comes to mind is if this is still true in the information age. Can you have your cake and eat it too? Economies are driven by the cycle of addressing problems and coming up with solutions. What happens if in some instances, such as the academic/climatology industry and the financial industry, you can create and solve the problems all by manipulating information?

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:
Yeah but it did happen, right?

I just want to be clear, and obviously you and I are friends, Aragorn, so I’m not picking a fight with you here.

But the peer review process, in this this case, it did fail, right?

And the stakes in this case are so very, very high.[/quote]

Sure, it happened. The peer review process fails all the time. I don’t know how many shit articles I’ve read only to wonder who was patting who on the back when the article went through “blind” review. Again, given the fact that a few failures doesn’t discredit the entire system I fail to see the point. Unless you are going to be constructive your obtuse criticism isn’t helpful at all. Besides, when you say that “the stakes in this case are so very, very high” you do realize that the door swings both ways, right? While overzealous economic regulation could have disastrous consequences, the consequences of not responding to a real problem of global climate change are equally if not more so dire. What is just as disturbing as the falsified data is the right’s blind and uninformed reaction against that falsified data. People who couldn’t even tell you what data was actually falsified (uh, it has to do with temperature man!) have been obnoxiously claiming that this falsification “debunks” man-made global warming. Oh well.

[/quote]

This is nonsense. You expect huge industries to be regulated by people who couldn’t run a popsicle stand.

Ever heard of ‘chaos theory’? (sarcasm) You want people who use continuous functions to model data over hundreds of years (how laughable is that?) to regulate dynamic chaotic systems. Well, sorry brah, the only way to attempt that is at gunpoint. Watch your world descend into fascism.

Capitalism, the only system that embraces chaos theory and has thus produced abundance, is to be crushed under the heels of seedy little bureaucrats who shriek ‘But I’ve got a model!!’.

I hope that some industrialist will burn down his factory, leaving an open field. Put up a big sign for all the fascists to read: I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. Its yours.

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:
Yeah but it did happen, right?

I just want to be clear, and obviously you and I are friends, Aragorn, so I’m not picking a fight with you here.

But the peer review process, in this this case, it did fail, right?

And the stakes in this case are so very, very high.[/quote]

Sure, it happened. The peer review process fails all the time. I don’t know how many shit articles I’ve read only to wonder who was patting who on the back when the article went through “blind” review. Again, given the fact that a few failures doesn’t discredit the entire system I fail to see the point. Unless you are going to be constructive your obtuse criticism isn’t helpful at all. Besides, when you say that “the stakes in this case are so very, very high” you do realize that the door swings both ways, right? While overzealous economic regulation could have disastrous consequences, the consequences of not responding to a real problem of global climate change are equally if not more so dire. What is just as disturbing as the falsified data is the right’s blind and uninformed reaction against that falsified data. People who couldn’t even tell you what data was actually falsified (uh, it has to do with temperature man!) have been obnoxiously claiming that this falsification “debunks” man-made global warming. Oh well.

[/quote]

This is nonsense. You expect huge industries to be regulated by people who couldn’t run a popsicle stand.

Ever heard of ‘chaos theory’? (sarcasm) You want people who use continuous functions to model data over hundreds of years (how laughable is that?) to regulate dynamic chaotic systems. Well, sorry brah, the only way to attempt that is at gunpoint. Watch your world descend into fascism.

Capitalism, the only system that embraces chaos theory and has thus produced abundance, is to be crushed under the heels of seedy little bureaucrats who shriek ‘But I’ve got a model!!’.

I hope that some industrialist will burn down his factory, leaving an open field. Put up a big sign for all the fascists to read: I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. Its yours.[/quote]

You have no idea what I expect and have clearly read into my words whatever naive intentions you want to see. As always, you have seen the smallest hints of disagreement with your view and have attacked. All I said was that if there is something to man-made climate change then the consequences of not acting are dire, as as I take it Cortes’ point was that if there is nothing to man-made climate change then potentially harmful economic regulation will be for nothing. I said no more and no less than that. The point is that what we don’t need right now, whether the issue be climate change, healthcare, gay rights, etc., is the sort of blind evidence grabbing that quickly dismisses the entire institution of professional science, just as we don’t need falsified data from politicized, grant-happy scientists.

Perhaps that sort of sober reasoning doesn’t fit into your perspective though.

[quote]JEATON wrote:

Did you read the actual story and check the accompanying links? The point is, where was the peer review when the numbers were being cooked. Was the incentives to this particular segment of the academic community too great for them not to skew the data? After all, if there is not a problem then “poof.” There goes the money.

[/quote]

Form the link:

This sums everything up.

The questions that skeptics should be asking is just where do we stand on climate research? In the grand scheme of climate research, how big is this? Just in what way was the data twisted? What raw data just made up? Was only some data taken into account? What exactly was wrong.

Given the well stated quote above, these are exactly the sort of questions that should be asked. Unfortunately, no questions are being asked. Instead, people are blinding assuming the worst. They are more worried about making up names like “climategate” then actually asking those questions. The right is just happy to have some reply, no some excuse, to the climate research.

In the end it might be that this all has thrown man-made global warming out the window. The point is that that’s exactly the question, and as quick as many on the left are to dismiss this the right is to jump on it.

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Cortes wrote:
Yeah but it did happen, right?

I just want to be clear, and obviously you and I are friends, Aragorn, so I’m not picking a fight with you here.

But the peer review process, in this this case, it did fail, right?

And the stakes in this case are so very, very high.[/quote]

Sure, it happened. The peer review process fails all the time. I don’t know how many shit articles I’ve read only to wonder who was patting who on the back when the article went through “blind” review. Again, given the fact that a few failures doesn’t discredit the entire system I fail to see the point. Unless you are going to be constructive your obtuse criticism isn’t helpful at all. Besides, when you say that “the stakes in this case are so very, very high” you do realize that the door swings both ways, right? While overzealous economic regulation could have disastrous consequences, the consequences of not responding to a real problem of global climate change are equally if not more so dire. What is just as disturbing as the falsified data is the right’s blind and uninformed reaction against that falsified data. People who couldn’t even tell you what data was actually falsified (uh, it has to do with temperature man!) have been obnoxiously claiming that this falsification “debunks” man-made global warming. Oh well.

[/quote]

This is nonsense. You expect huge industries to be regulated by people who couldn’t run a popsicle stand.

Ever heard of ‘chaos theory’? (sarcasm) You want people who use continuous functions to model data over hundreds of years (how laughable is that?) to regulate dynamic chaotic systems. Well, sorry brah, the only way to attempt that is at gunpoint. Watch your world descend into fascism.

Capitalism, the only system that embraces chaos theory and has thus produced abundance, is to be crushed under the heels of seedy little bureaucrats who shriek ‘But I’ve got a model!!’.

I hope that some industrialist will burn down his factory, leaving an open field. Put up a big sign for all the fascists to read: I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. Its yours.[/quote]

You have no idea what I expect and have clearly read into my words whatever naive intentions you want to see. As always, you have seen the smallest hints of disagreement with your view and have attacked. All I said was that if there is something to man-made climate change then the consequences of not acting are dire, as as I take it Cortes’ point was that if there is nothing to man-made climate change then potentially harmful economic regulation will be for nothing. I said no more and no less than that. The point is that what we don’t need right now, whether the issue be climate change, healthcare, gay rights, etc., is the sort of blind evidence grabbing that quickly dismisses the entire institution of professional science, just as we don’t need falsified data from politicized, grant-happy scientists.

Perhaps that sort of sober reasoning doesn’t fit into your perspective though.
[/quote]

More nonsense. What would you propose to do, even if all of this could be proven? Pass a law? Again, you EXPECT a particular result from a particular ‘solution’. Yet history is replete with disasters where humans try to regulate other humans. The world is too chaotic.

Pass laws to restrict drilling for oil off Cali/Florida? Price shoots up and ruins economy. Pass laws forcing factories to be ‘clean’? They move to China and we have massive unemployment.

And don’t get me started on the Soviet Union, China, NK, on and on.

Yeah, let’s pass a law and regulate everything!! Yeah!!

When will you people ever learn?

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

More nonsense. What would you propose to do, even if all of this could be proven? Pass a law? Again, you EXPECT a particular result from a particular ‘solution’. Yet history is replete with disasters where humans try to regulate other humans. The world is too chaotic.

Pass laws to restrict drilling for oil off Cali/Florida? Price shoots up and ruins economy. Pass laws forcing factories to be ‘clean’? They move to China and we have massive unemployment.

And don’t get me started on the Soviet Union, China, NK, on and on.

Yeah, let’s pass a law and regulate everything!! Yeah!!

When will you people ever learn?
[/quote]

Nonsense? If the claims of man-made climate change are true, then certainly the consequences of not acting are to great. Who cares about the economy if Europe enters an ice age, or coastal cities like New York are swallowed by the sea?

You’re argument that we can’t know the effects of our actions implies that we should not act is what is nonsense. Your reference to the Soviet Union is a clear red herring as well. Just what exactly does the Soviet Union’s failure to totally regulate their economy have to do with the potential success of economic regulations at curving ecological disaster? Besides, no one ever proposed that the sort of economic reform potentially needed would be painless. The point is that potentially without it our world will be a very different place.

You see, the man-made global warming system can’t be falsified.

Even if it gets colder – e.g. the above-mentioned Ice Age – the AGW crowd is proven right.

They have it set up where nothing, no matter what it is, can according to them prove them wrong. Not more heat, not more cold; not more hurricanes, not less; not more drought, not more rain. Not a melting ice cap, not a re-freezing ice cap; not more polar bears, not less polar bears; not a given decade matching predictions they made before it happened, not a given decade not matching their predictions. Not anything.

Actual science involves theories with testable predictions of outcome and with the theory admitting of being wrong if the outcomes are different than predicted.

While there are science aspects to climate study of course, the grand AGW dogma/paradigm is most certainly not science.

I think AGW is starting to look like a “cosmic teapot.” There may be an effect on the global climate due to man. There almost surely is. But not one that is measurable, quantifiable, and especially not suitable to modeling.

Weather can’t even be accurately predicted 5 days out. We were recently told the biggest West swell of the last 40 years was going to slam into the coast of California and swell forecasters had accurate measurements of both the fetch and near-shore bathymetry and they got their predictions badly wrong. Badly.

If they can’t even make accurate predictions with simpler problems, why should we believe them when it comes to much more complicated ones?

Some say AWG exists, others say it doesn’t. Both are equally right based on our modeling capability at this point.

Well, don’cha know, while they would find it horribly unfair and unreasonable for the government to say that they must give a prediction for next year’s temperatures and if the prediction is wrong, their funding will be eliminated, it is completely reasonable for us to bear costs of trillions of dollars on account of the predictions some (by no means all) climate scientists have for 40 years out.

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

More nonsense. What would you propose to do, even if all of this could be proven? Pass a law? Again, you EXPECT a particular result from a particular ‘solution’. Yet history is replete with disasters where humans try to regulate other humans. The world is too chaotic.

Pass laws to restrict drilling for oil off Cali/Florida? Price shoots up and ruins economy. Pass laws forcing factories to be ‘clean’? They move to China and we have massive unemployment.

And don’t get me started on the Soviet Union, China, NK, on and on.

Yeah, let’s pass a law and regulate everything!! Yeah!!

When will you people ever learn?
[/quote]

Nonsense? If the claims of man-made climate change are true, then certainly the consequences of not acting are to great. Who cares about the economy if Europe enters an ice age, or coastal cities like New York are swallowed by the sea?

You’re argument that we can’t know the effects of our actions implies that we should not act is what is nonsense. Your reference to the Soviet Union is a clear red herring as well. Just what exactly does the Soviet Union’s failure to totally regulate their economy have to do with the potential success of economic regulations at curving ecological disaster? Besides, no one ever proposed that the sort of economic reform potentially needed would be painless. The point is that potentially without it our world will be a very different place. [/quote]

You’re doing it again. You’re assuming that a dynamic system full of millions of highly-intelligent beings can be regulated (‘curving’). It can’t be done.

You think government regulation is going to solve anything? The only thing governments are really good at is killing people in wars.

Since the many examples I gave aren’t making the point, how about the movie ‘Jurassic Park’? What happened when people tried to regulate a tiny island full of dumb animals? The animals decided they didn’t want to be regulated and began eating the guests instead.

The only solution to manmade GW, if it exists, is freedom.

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Well, don’cha know, while they would find it horribly unfair and unreasonable for the government to say that they must give a prediction for next year’s temperatures and if the prediction is wrong, their funding will be eliminated, it is completely reasonable for us to bear costs of trillions of dollars on account of the predictions some (by no means all) climate scientists have for 40 years out.[/quote]

Yep. Sounds about right.

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

You’re doing it again. You’re assuming that a dynamic system full of millions of highly-intelligent beings can be regulated (‘curving’). It can’t be done.

You think government regulation is going to solve anything? The only thing governments are really good at is killing people in wars.

Since the many examples I gave aren’t making the point, how about the movie ‘Jurassic Park’? What happened when people tried to regulate a tiny island full of dumb animals? The animals decided they didn’t want to be regulated and began eating the guests instead.

The only solution to manmade GW, if it exists, is freedom.

[/quote]

I’m not assuming that millions of highly intelligent beings can be regulated, I’m assuming that to a reasonable extent it is possible to regulate the major manufacturing centers of the country with regard to environmental damage. Clearly the sort of regulation that would be involved in “curving” man-made global warming is feasible, since it’s already in place! What do you think automobile emission laws are in the US? Are you really going to tell me that automobile emission laws haven’t curved… automobile emission laws?

The sorts of examples you are bringing up are examples of total economic regulation. Since we’re not talking about that, I’ll say again that I have no idea what the failure of the Soviet Union to run a planned economy and personally hand bread out to each of its citizens has to be with the ability of the United States or China to enact emission standards? Oh yeah, nothing.

And please, since you’re into examples, how about some examples of how those “highly intelligent” beings have used their “freedom” to the betterment of themselves and others? You know, how millions of Americans, for example, are freely choosing to eat themselves to death at McDonalds. How about how millions of Americans have freely chosen to use their economic power to spend themselves into 100%+ debt? Or what about those Americans who freely chose to purchase half million dollar homes while making 50k a year? The point here is not that people need to be told by the government how to run their lives, but that if people aren’t even able to consider their own immediate and short term benefit how do you expect all those “highly intelligent” beings to make the sort of choices that would curve carbon output? Let’s talk about those emission laws again… are you really suggesting that people, whether automobile consumers or producers, would have over the last 50 years lowered automobile emissions without government regulation? No…