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Saturday, December 13, 2003 |
Aliens Cause Global Warning
This is a very interesting talk
Michael Chrichton gave at CalTech in early 2003 about the perils of
consensus science. He relates several instances of bad science becoming
common belief --SETI, second-hand smoke, population warnings, etc. And
he also mentions cases where good science ran against the consensus;
including plate tectonics and some others. Good stories all, and he
raises valid complaints. But his proposed solution to the problem is
pretty scary in itself.
Sooner or later, we must form an
independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by
industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals
and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know
who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do
research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be
a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked
by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data
will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it.
If we were to address the land temperature records with such rigor, we
would be well on our way to an understanding of exactly how much faith
we can place in global warming, and therefore what seriousness we must
address this.
It sounds good, but would these guardians of knowledge have even
deigned to look at plate tectonics? Even if they don't know where their
money's coming from, wouldn't societal pressures influence what cases
they take on? It seems to me that he's just replacing "consensus" with
something that sounds different, but could instead be accepted truth?
It's not hard to imagine this becoming kind of a Lysenkoism. Is a group of official guardians of truth really a solution to anything?
11:02:23 AM Permalink
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Our Enemies at Home. America faces a serious threat from domestic terrorists. By Daniel Levitas. [New York Times: Opinion]
And guess what: they aren't leftists,
environmentalists, black panthers. They're on the right, but American's
bought and paid for right wing press won't tell us about them.
9:27:29 AM Permalink
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Bush's Secrets. "The Bush administration has removed from the public domain millions of pages of information on health, safety, and environmental matters, lowering a shroud of secrecy over many critical operations of the federal government." "A five-month investigation by U.S. News and World Report details a series of initiatives by administration officials... [Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]
9:20:03 AM Permalink
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The Supreme Court abandons the Constitution in favor of the latest fad. [OpinionJournal]
It's not hard to have mixed feelings
about recent campaign finance laws. On the one hand, anything
limiting free speech is to be frowned upon. On the other, it's hard to
correlate money with speech. But the funny thing about this Journal
editorial is their rank hyprocisy about the Supreme Court. When the
courts overturn laws, they're accused of being activists; when they
uphold laws they're accused of abandoning the constitution.
9:18:23 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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