Another outstanding piece of journalism - kudos Paul Thacker! I really loved the image your words conjured in the prefacing paragraph of today's post - "a commensal herd of science writers and their scientific sources roaming across the journalistic landscape". How poetic, and oh so apt... Thanks for your ongoing effort to shed light on this great flaw in science journalism; it's much appreciated -- and needed.
“Beware of the tempting trope of an outsider who claims to have a revolutionary new understanding or a fix for some disease or problem but is being thwarted by the establishment.Sometimes this is true: The theory of plate tectonics was rejected by most geologists at first, and Galileo was convicted of heresy for saying the Earth moves around the Sun. But as his biographer Mario Livio says, “Galileo wasn’t right because he was an outsider — he was right because he was right.” It takes a lot of evidence to overthrow the scientific consensus.”
Of course, in the era of captured agencies and licensed toxic junk invading every aspect of our lives Galileo may not be the main point. It is apart from anything else as Eisenhower warned six decades ago, we simply have corporate interests posing as scientific arbiters (and Hellmuth is very posy). In this case science or scientific consensus is generally about the rubber stamp of a bought out bureaucracy.
Of course, at a facile level if you want to be superior you will think like this gang but at the end of the day they are public relations people pretending to be intellectuals. What they tell you is “this is what you should believe if you don’t want to look foolish”, just like the swindlers in the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. Meanwhile, the long term ability of human frame or the world to sustain all this tech garbage is gravely in doubt.
Another outstanding piece of journalism - kudos Paul Thacker! I really loved the image your words conjured in the prefacing paragraph of today's post - "a commensal herd of science writers and their scientific sources roaming across the journalistic landscape". How poetic, and oh so apt... Thanks for your ongoing effort to shed light on this great flaw in science journalism; it's much appreciated -- and needed.
Paul
Fine article. I also noted from Hellmuth:
“Beware of the tempting trope of an outsider who claims to have a revolutionary new understanding or a fix for some disease or problem but is being thwarted by the establishment.Sometimes this is true: The theory of plate tectonics was rejected by most geologists at first, and Galileo was convicted of heresy for saying the Earth moves around the Sun. But as his biographer Mario Livio says, “Galileo wasn’t right because he was an outsider — he was right because he was right.” It takes a lot of evidence to overthrow the scientific consensus.”
Of course, in the era of captured agencies and licensed toxic junk invading every aspect of our lives Galileo may not be the main point. It is apart from anything else as Eisenhower warned six decades ago, we simply have corporate interests posing as scientific arbiters (and Hellmuth is very posy). In this case science or scientific consensus is generally about the rubber stamp of a bought out bureaucracy.
Of course, at a facile level if you want to be superior you will think like this gang but at the end of the day they are public relations people pretending to be intellectuals. What they tell you is “this is what you should believe if you don’t want to look foolish”, just like the swindlers in the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’. Meanwhile, the long term ability of human frame or the world to sustain all this tech garbage is gravely in doubt.
GAVI. Gates. Geneva. A building surrounded by shark-invested waters. More poweful than the U.N. Source: Astrid Stuckelberger, W.H.O.