http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_myatVP9TM&NR=1
is worth taking a look because it shows the Canadian dimension even before Harper took it to the new extreme.. And what follows in the next episodes is bad too.
Brian
Science is a political and economic tool, results can be changed if necessary.
Tue, 2010-10-19 01:06
#1
Science is a political and economic tool, results can be changed if necessary.
Tue, 2010-10-19 05:55
#2
Whistle blowers weren't faring very well in Canada under a Liberal Government apparently.
“The aggressiveness of corporate science has placed academic science in an increasingly zero-sum relationship. The former comes with money to the university and prospects of personal profit to the professors.... Academic science, with its custom of open exchange, its gift relationships, its willingness to provide expert testimony that speaks truth to power, its serendipitous curiosity and its nonproprietary legacy to the next generation of student-scientists, differs significantly from corporate science, which is ridden with trade secrets, profit-determined selection of research, and awesome political power to get its way, whether by domination or servility to its payers.”
It's an environment that sanctions corporatism over individuals. Shiv Chopra knows this to be true after stepping on the wrong toes. Unfortunately I think the respect for persons side of things has a long way to go toward overthrowing utilitarianism. Capitalism is only purported to promote individuality in society. But in practice it is individualism to extremes of appalling greed of the few over the rights of the many and corporatism reigning supreme. Corruption, as we can see in the Health Canada vs Monsanto case, is rampant. Corporate science is narrowly focused toward profit driven goals and often away from legitimate human needs.
Here's an ethical dilemma I once read somewhere. Is it okay to tell a white lie if it means no harm done and that another person will be spared from being hurt by the truth?
Wed, 2010-10-20 00:13
#3
"Here's an ethical dilemma I once read somewhere. Is it okay to tell a white lie if it means no harm done and that another person will be spared from being hurt by the truth?"
A former girlfriend told me not to analyze my feelings before answering the question, "do you love me?" "are you in love with me?" and variations of the theme. (Sometimes the question gets asked when your are royally pist off (in the moment) at the person)
She said that for the next girlfriend, it was far better to give an instant answer, even if on reflection it turned out to be a white lie. Anyway, I am not the only emotionally challenged man out there. And men are not good at multitasking emotions either.
Anyway, that series of videos is quite shocking. One interview piece shows that a piece of Monsanto research got "peer reviewed" but the peers found it really shitty and lacking necessary detail. But it got published as peer reviewed anyway!
I am amazed at how few views it got. It is such an eye opener. Check out parts 9 and 10. Scary TRIFFID corn growing in the great center of corn biodiversity in Mexico. They suspect that agents from a large US ag chemicals company are sneaking in the seeds so they can own all the mexican corn too! (If gm pollen gets on your corn, Monsanto owns your next crop!) Thats the LAW.
As some babblers know, I have a few alternative techniques out there (that have only been checked out and proven by private individuals) and I have come to the conclusion that all scientists need a gift of a rectal thermometer every Christmas. Just to wake them up to the fact that there are people outside of the walled in community that they are in and they have ideas too.
Scientists ONLY work on stuff that they get funded to work on. They are no better than lab rats in a maze. The politician says "run that way" and apart from the very few good men and women, they all run exactly where the master tells them to go.
99% of them do not have any curiosity about the real world. Its just the routine and paycheck that keeps them there.
Wed, 2010-10-20 00:22
#4
About 'do you love me' - the trick is 'what do you mean by 'love'? - it's my experience that what *I* mean and what *she* means are usually so divergent they bear almost no resemblance.
About not many views of the Monsanto thing - I did look at the first one, but these things are nothing new - in capitalistland, it's become understood that 'truth', including 'science', is a pretty - ahhh - shall we say 'malleable' idea, depending on the needs of the 'owners of production' (including producing 'truth' apparently) at any given time. Just one more reason to fight the bastards.
Wed, 2010-10-20 22:31
#5
The things for me that is new is that she interviewed around the world and also interviewed several of the scientists who had been diligently going about their jobs and reporting the results of their experiments. They were quite in shock after being dismissed in disgrace. The chicken shit scientific community no longer spoke to them. So she showed the true scale of the thing to me for the very first time.
One english scientist later found out that there were 2 calls to his headquarters from tony blairs office immediately after he published the results. Blair got him canned! And all he did was publish results of rats eating gm potatoes. (Pre cancerous cells proliferating). He was interviewed in a restaurant and also mentioned that monsanto used old rats in their experiments. Aparently you have to use young rats. He could tell they were old from the colour of their livers. It is a clear example of a scientist been hung up like a crow to scare the others into submission.
About not many views of the Monsanto thing - I did look at the first one, but these things are nothing new - in capitalistland, it's become understood that 'truth', including 'science', is a pretty - ahhh - shall we say 'malleable' idea, depending on the needs of the 'owners of production' (including producing 'truth' apparently) at any given time. Just one more reason to fight the bastards.
Thu, 2010-10-21 00:20
#6
Well the answer to the ethical dilemma given by two out of three philosophers and ethics experts in regard to the white lie dilemma is this. If we sanction the white lie, where does it end? We eventually end up with a society in which no one can be sure if anyone else is telling the truth or not. Not unless we are mind readers.
I posted a CBC video in another thread with Wendy Mesley interviewing US doctor of public health, Devra Davis. Davis explains how difficult it is to do science without financing from one source or another. Mesley asked Davis whether scientific opinions are for sale. Davis says that it's more complicated than that, but that scientific studies can be designed from the outset to produce certain kinds of results favourable to whoever is paying for the study. I think it would be a very difficult thing for a scientist to fudge the data outright. If they were being paid enough money, though, they could do the deed in more subtle ways and still be caught red-handed doing science. Very often it's 'corporate science', but apparently it's still considered science from a legal standpoint, or something like that.
Fri, 2010-10-22 00:39
#7
Thanks Fidel, I do not agree. I think my Xgirlfriend is right. There is no One and Zero in this. It takes judgement. It is like drink and driving. Some people can drive and be competent with 4 beers inside them. Some can drink one and be a threat to life if they drive. Most are somewhere in the middle. And so society sets a "best fit" so that people can still socialize and mostly get home safely too.
Edited to add. The "truth" is fuzzy like any measurable thing. Finding absolute truth is like trying to measure the momentum of an electron. The act of measuring affects the truth and changes it a bit.
By the way it is much easier than you think to fudge a science experiment. All you need is money. Just run it a hundred times and use the tail of the normal distribution that suit your needs. It seems to me that the peer review process does not repeat the experiments anymore. (I could be wrong on that) They just look at the figures like accountants. Well, if true, thats not good enough.
Actually I was at a meeting recently when scientific journals and peer review came up. They were saying that the person who does the initial experiment has to pay for peer review. Is that really the case? And peer review has got much more expensive over the years. Even though many of the journals are digital and never get printed. Also, they charge a Whole lot for anyone to get a subscription of journals now too.
So basically you pay to be reviewed and you pay again if you want to read the review.
Apparently the universities spend a large fortune to keep their subscriptions up to date and the info is very tightly controlled. You cannot just distribute it to all your students, for instance. The person who told us this was saying that the journals were making themselves irrelevant by going this route.
But he really misses being in uni and having access to all that information.
Subscriptions by the universities are being cut now so some journals will disappear.
Sun, 2010-10-24 12:25
#8
Scientists ONLY work on stuff that they get funded to work on. They are no better than lab rats in a maze. The politician says "run that way" and apart from the very few good men and women, they all run exactly where the master tells them to go.99% of them do not have any curiosity about the real world. Its just the routine and paycheck that keeps them there.
Why would you embarass yourself posting something totally idiotic on a subject you know nothing about? Is it your goal to turn people off babble by posting absolutely ignorant nonsense attacking a decently broad sector of society?
If "99% of them" (the use of that number is a good indicator of ignorance) had "no intellectual curiosity" then they would not be scientists. It's a difficult job to achieve, with a lot of steep competition on the way.
You need to put aside The National Post, or The National Review, or whatever MSM piece of garbage you choose to derive your false knowledge from and try and base your opinions on objective reality.
Sun, 2010-10-24 13:11
#9
Catchfire
Apples, your last comment is out of line. If you disagree with something Brian has posted, how about phrasing it less abusively? "In my experience as a scientist, that is not true..." etc. Thanks.
Sun, 2010-10-24 13:16
#10
In my experience as a worker and union activist, and after having subtracted all the abusive phrasing, I agree with 500_Apples.
Sun, 2010-10-24 13:19
#11
You have NO IDEA what you are talking about. I have a great project for the 3rd world that has been unresearched by institutional science for over 2 decades. A student in ontario did a TINY bit at a university last year.
Mat in Cornwall did FAR MORE and he is just an individual. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf1-7fL_UIk
I do not know what scientists do in their spare time but the community has not lifted a finger about this project.
I have another project that is super simple. It is designing a better solar cooker for unattended use for Haiti etc with the solar design t-square.
Anyone with half decent physics education could weigh in on this. They do not.
Another one is the tracking solar accumulator. Only help on that one is David Williams, retired 70 ish, Canadian. Really good at math. Robert Israel at UBC indirectly helped.
So yes, 99% of scientists only care about their paycheck. And I guess the paycheck is so big that they do not have any time to comment on real stuff in their spare time.
I have not done a survey to confirm the 99 percentile thing. My videos (which are based on doing and demo-ing low tech hobby research) have got about 450, 000 views so far. So at least some people thing that the half cycle of politician-funding committee-research grant-happy scientist should be replaced with something that has feedback. One of my contentions is that scientists have no input into what gets researched other than as a lobby group. If you look at the video from the French lady, or go to an occasional conference about climate change or poor country aid, you will see exactly what I mean.
Scientists ONLY work on stuff that they get funded to work on. They are no better than lab rats in a maze. The politician says "run that way" and apart from the very few good men and women, they all run exactly where the master tells them to go.99% of them do not have any curiosity about the real world. Its just the routine and paycheck that keeps them there.
Why would you embarass yourself posting something totally idiotic on a subject you know nothing about? Is it your goal to turn people off babble by posting absolutely ignorant nonsense attacking a decently broad sector of society?
If "99% of them" (the use of that number is a good indicator of ignorance) had "no intellectual curiosity" then they would not be scientists. It's a difficult job to achieve, with a lot of steep competition on the way.
You need to put aside The National Post, or The National Review, or whatever MSM piece of garbage you choose to derive your false knowledge from and try and base your opinions on objective reality.
Sun, 2010-10-24 15:17
#12
You have NO IDEA what you are talking about. I have a great project for the 3rd world that has been unresearched by institutional science for over 2 decades. A student in ontario did a TINY bit at a university last year.
Mat in Cornwall did FAR MORE and he is just an individual. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf1-7fL_UIk
I do not know what scientists do in their spare time but the community has not lifted a finger about this project.
I have another project that is super simple. It is designing a better solar cooker for unattended use for Haiti etc with the solar design t-square.
Anyone with half decent physics education could weigh in on this. They do not.
Another one is the tracking solar accumulator. Only help on that one is David Williams, retired 70 ish, Canadian. Really good at math. Robert Israel at UBC indirectly helped.
So yes, 99% of scientists only care about their paycheck. And I guess the paycheck is so big that they do not have any time to comment on real stuff in their spare time.
I have not done a survey to confirm the 99 percentile thing. My videos (which are based on doing and demo-ing low tech hobby research) have got about 450, 000 views so far. So at least some people thing that the half cycle of politician-funding committee-research grant-happy scientist should be replaced with something that has feedback. One of my contentions is that scientists have no input into what gets researched other than as a lobby group. If you look at the video from the French lady, or go to an occasional conference about climate change or poor country aid, you will see exactly what I mean.
OK - so because you don't have floodgates of busy scientists buying into your idea as the next great thing we should all believe that 99% of scientists are frauds? Do you not realize you sound like the random, sporadic people that email me and everyone else I know claiming to have refuted Einstein and to have found the next great theory of gravity?
First of all, not every great idea gets researched. Research, weeding out of bad ideas, fixing details, etc. takes a huge amount of effort, something you obviously don't understand as you like to parrot Terence Corcoran of the National Post. On my hard drive right now I have about a dozen research projects that are between 5% and 80% done, and I will only ever get to finishing half of them, if that. It is not because I am gravitating to the nearest paycheck, nor is it because I oppose your ideas of third world development. It is only because I am only capable of putting in ~75 hours a week, and thus I have to pick and choose what I end up seeing through to completion, not that "completion" actually genuinely exists. There's always a huge amount of risk, I choose to do what I think is more interesting, but since research is by definition investigation of that which is not understood, what I think is interesting and what actually turns out to be interesting once I remove the fog are not necessarily the same.
There are lots of great scientific ideas that get conceived but never fully thought out and delivered, great songs that are written but never sung, great films that are scripted but never produced, that's the way it goes, contary to what Hollywood tells you it takes more than a moment of cleverness and a busy guy in a garage to pull off a scientific/artistic miracle. This is not purely because human beings are a bunch of lazy and egotistical assholes as you imply, but because we are extremely creative, we're more creative in our minds and our dreams than we would ever "need" to be if it were only about keeping our hands and feet busy. If you have a dream YOU need to be the front man to turn it into a reality, and you should not be expecting everybody else to put aside THEIR dreams and goals just to assist you with yours. If your project was so trivial that "anybody with a half-decent physics education" could complete it, why are you even looking for help? Do it yourself then.
BTW, if we just wanted a paycheck, we would go work in finance as quants or in patent law.
Sun, 2010-10-24 15:20
#13
Apples, your last comment is out of line. If you disagree with something Brian has posted, how about phrasing it less abusively? "In my experience as a scientist, that is not true..." etc. Thanks.
*I'm* out of line?
My comments were mild-tempered compared to "99% of scientists are in it for the paycheck because they have no intellectual curiosity".
"So Catch,
Why are you a babble moderator?
Is it only because of the paycheck? Is it easier to evaluate other people's posts than to produce your own?"
/sarc
Mon, 2010-10-25 04:17
#14
Since you take it personally, 500 apples, I might as well pay some attention to your comments.
I have no idea who Terence Corcoran is,
"something you obviously don't understand as you like to parrot Terence Corcoran of the National Post".
I thought research was stuff that you got funded to do? I did not know you got to pick and choose what is "interesting". I thought your were bound by contract to follow through?
Are you sure you are fulfilling your obligations to your funding organizations? You see, I did research as an underling on a EU contract years ago and I was not allowed to diverge from the stated aims of the research contract.
"There's always a huge amount of risk, I choose to do what I think is more interesting, but since research is by definition investigation of that which is not understood, what I think is interesting and what actually turns out to be interesting once I remove the fog are not necessarily the same."
Presumably you will be very cautious with your real name. I think your statement below indicates your level of respect for the research involved. Have you concidered going to a 40 hour week and hireing someone to work the other 35 hours? Or alternatively hiring 2 full time people and actually achieving your targets in full?
"On my hard drive right now I have about a dozen research projects that are between 5% and 80% done, and I will only ever get to finishing half of them, if that. It is not because I am gravitating to the nearest paycheck, nor is it because I oppose your ideas of third world development. It is only because I am only capable of putting in ~75 hours a week, and thus I have to pick and choose what I end up seeing through to completion, not that "completion" actually genuinely exists."
"There are lots of great scientific ideas that get conceived but never fully thought out and delivered" I agree with that one. One of the guys in charge of the mecatronics course at UVIC thought that the liquid piston tracker would be "perfect" for a student to research for the course.
But then he discovers that for certification, the research must be on something for a commercial company or for a commercial product. So they will not do it regardless of how "perfect" it is. It is disqualified. There are thousands of these hidden barriers at work. I know I cannot make it myself. I do not have any electronic skills. And you can see why it got disqualified. Because the politicians want the science to be directed towards helping poverty striken Canadian corporations. (Who are too cheap to fund their own product development).
I note that 500 apples did not comment on the subject matter of the thread. He or she attacked me.
I am used to people giving me memorized "opinions" on solar cooking or solar concentration or the efficiency of airlift pumps. "I read it so it must be true" I am used to people defending their positions in society when I suggest changes to the funding committee approach.
I am not surprised. It just makes me sad to see humans behave in this way.