Category Archives: Miscellanea

As I observed last month, you don’t settle scientific disputes in the court of public opinion. That’s where bullshit artists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Joe Rogan prefer to fight, however, because that avoids things like having no proof. RFK claims Wi-Fi degrades the body-brain barrier but there’s no evidence this is true. However nothing stops RFK from claiming its true and possibly convincing others.

Then we have anti-vax tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, who’s following another tactic used by bullshit artists: he’s not spewing scientific ignorance, he “just happens to disagree with the mainstream narrative,” making it sound as if it’s purely a matter of political stances rather than the mainstream narrative being, you know right. In the words of Robert Parks, “to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right.” And Kirsch isn’t (as various of the links here will confirm).

As LGM points out, it’s legitimate to be suspicious of big pharma. Kirsch and Kennedy, however are pushing political paranoia: claims that covid and HPV vaccines actually increase the risk of disease (I’m not linking to RFK on that point) have nothing to do with serious questions about vaccine policy.

Kirsch has, to his credit, funded research, but when the studies didn’t come out like he wanted, he ignored the results: “If the data is is is bad and doesn’t make sense and the study was badly done, then I have a right to reject it,” said Kirsch. “And so the point is that if a study is well done, you’ll see that I will like the study.” Of course, as Marion Nestle has pointed out, it’s very easy to decide data is bad when you want a specific outcome and don’t get it.

Kirsch’s new solution is to win not in the court of public opinion but in court: launch bullshit suits against hospitals, schools with masking mandates and researchers. Any success, his supporters say, will draw in lawyers eager to make money off more lawsuits. This is a bad thing — and even if the suits don’t succeed, the constant barrage or court cases and legal expenses may make schools or vaccine makers back off. Kirsch will doubtless end up getting lots of people killed through his smug conviction he knows best (“He considers himself an expert in something that he doesn’t have training or experience in, and he’s not following scientific methods to assess data.”).

Then we have Michael Knowles, a pundit with the right-wing Daily Wire. In a variation of Kirsch’s “mainstream narrative” argument, he claims “science is mostly fake” because it focuses on the physical world rather than the spiritual which results in trans people, suicide and depression. And it gets things wrong, like bleeding people to treat sickness and handling mental illness with lobotomies, so why should we trust it?

Knowles is sort-of correct in that yes, science has gotten many things wrong. I say “sort of” because he’s no more concerned with the scientific process and its limits than Kirsch is. Knowles just wants to dismiss everything he doesn’t like in the modern world: that global warming exists, that trans people exist, that contraception reduces the abortion rate (he claims the opposite). It’s the logic of conspiracy theorists; we know government lies, therefore it’s reasonable to believe it’s lying about this specific thing I don’t like (no, it isn’t).

Knowles ignores, like everyone who makes this argument, that scientists didn’t correct these errors by trusting to religion (he’s a conservative Catholic) or to the deep insights of Daily Wire hosts. Science got it right by doing more science. So no, while science is fallible, it isn’t deeply fake.

And of course, it’s not like religion offers us an alternative. Much as right-wing Christianity likes to pretend it has fixed, absolute truths, half of white Christianity thought slavery was godly a couple of hundred years back. Lots of white Christians though the same of Jim Crow, and many still think interracial marriage is against the Bible. Nelson Bell, the father-in-law of the legendary evangelist Billy Graham, was a devout segregationist activist. And the Catholic Church’s coverup of its abuse of children remains ongoing. I’m a Christian; I believe in Christianity; but any religion interpreted and practiced by fallible humans is fallible. So Knowles is full of it

Possibly relevant: a discussion of the SIFT approach for weighing scientific (or other) claims: Stop, Investigate the Source, Find better sources and Trace claims back to their original context.

In other science news:

The Notre Dame fire not only damaged the structure but the cathedral’s sound. At the link, a look at efforts to restore it.

Plants make (probably) involuntary noises when under stress.

“This is how radiation looks,”

“scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it’s pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose?”

Can AI do better math than mathematicians?

If AI art makes use of existing art, can it be protected by copyright?