110 Science on the Edge

Could Artificial Intelligence be pushing Science towards a precipice?

[seaknightvirchow]

Thank you for putting this together. Hirsi hit the ultimate point in that Christianity has to be replaced by something and it is a beast. After WWI, Yeats wrote The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The ideas of the post Enlightenment, Lyell, Darwin, Marx, Dewey, Freud, Wellhausen eventuated in a vacuum which would be filled with a culture destined for misery. Dawkins recently opined that he definitely preferred a Christian culture over what is replacing it while he vigorously undermines the substance of it. Contemporary American culture is a far worse culture than the one I grew up in.

[TheMwinnett]

Excellent! You are really getting down to the root of the problem. Thanks once again.

[tychonian]

This was one of the best. Thank you for digging out the gold for us in the current scientific discussions.

[sifundogumede]

Once people turn there back on God, there is no end to the stupidity

[kenvanwyck]

Amazing Brother Stott that even the Secular Scientists are calling out fraud keep calling them out!! God Bless!

[babrightlight]

Another excellent video! Perhaps an alternative title would have been, "Welcome to the Age of Deception!" It's not like the apostle Paul (nor Jesus Himself) didn't warn us. The challenge today is not people perishing from a lack of knowledge--we have access to the world's libraries via our Smart phone. The challenge of today is discerning what is true. Learning and discerning are different skill sets. The latter requires wisdom, and wisdom begins with Fear of the LORD (Prov 9:10). Without that foundational reverence towards our Creator, one is an easy target to be led astray.

[BrettCoryell]

I like this episode. Naturally, I am disturbed and outraged whenever liars lie and cheaters cheat. They should all get their just desserts, after being afforded a full and fair due process of investigation.

Having worked in several Universities, I thought I would offer some additional perspective that maybe most would not have. One reason it can look like no action was taken is because there really are such things as false allegations. I think one of the studies showed 87% of allegations were found to be false. That needs to be taken into account. Also, faculty are often not part of administrative decisions (most have no interest at all and would fight to avoid that duty) so there would be no faculty knowledge or involvement in some types of fraud. At other times, it's necessary because the allegation requires world-leading knowledge in a very specific field to investigate.

Another reason we don't see action sometimes is because organizations (universities and commercial companies) are loathe to talk about personnel actions. Merely mentioning that someone has been placed on "final written warning" status or that someone has had their duties or privileges reduced is grounds for a lawsuit. I've seen many multimillion dollar lawsuits for defamation and loss of reputation. A small number warranted. A larger number of them won. All of them expensive.

There are volumes to say, but I'll just offer four more.
1) Most of the time we catch fraud, it's the people in the same field who catch them. Science catches most of the known science fraud. Same for history. Same for economics. I assume it's the same for theology departments.
2) With 10, 000 known retractions recently, that would be less than 0.4% of the papers published in 2022. It's a lot on an absolute scale, but tiny in relative terms.
3) There are more than 30, 000 academic publications. To get a PhD, my school will only count papers published in about 300 journals. I'm sure some fraud makes it into the best journals. That's true in every field because everything has an error rate. But most of it is going to be in bad journals that aren't advancing the field of study anyway. Case in point: The journal that published the paper Sabine reviewed is ranked 201st by reputation among Physics journals. It's ranked 1 point higher than a free magazine given when I was a Physics student. That's not holding back science.
4) I repeat: people who lie and cheat should be punished with swiftness and severity, even if it isn't preventing new science from being discovered or current science from being verified. Punish the wicked.

[sparkyy]

Stanley Plotkin deposition
time stamp 2:15

"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there.  Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices.  It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.  I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

[PyrBen]

Oh wow, I'm extra early to this one!

[leawilliams]

Just recently Jewish scientist Eliezar Masilah was found to have doctored papers for decades in his Alzheimer’s research. All linked to big pharma. He continues to work without bearing any consequences.