Site rules stolen from our good friend PAVACA

There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.

Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.

In talking about scientific fraud, I want to start with a comment made by TheseTruths LINK.

Dr. Fauci’s Disturbing CIA Connection Revealed

If you didn’t already have enough reasons to distrust Dr. Anthony Fauci, here’s a new one, and it’s a doozy.

Newly disclosed documents reveal that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had a formal institutional partnership with the CIA, one that provided cover for the agency’s biological-threat research. This goes well beyond the previously known off-the-books meetings tied to the Wuhan lab origins controversy. Fauci’s ties to American intelligence run far deeper than anyone outside a handful of investigators realized….

Anthony Fauci – Wikipedia

Anthony Stephen Fauci (born December 24, 1940) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022 and as Chief Medical Advisor to the President from 2021 to 2022. He was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was re-elected and his VP was George H. W. Bush of the CIA.

Since the FDA, USDA, EPA and other bureaucracies use ‘The Science ™‘ to validate their regulations I wanted to look at the history of the destruction of science over the last century.

1964 — The Problem-Solving Method They Removed From Every Textbook

In 1964, Richard Feynman was the only person on California’s textbook commission who actually read the textbooks. What he found should have ended careers — publishers sending blank books that still received ratings, first-grade science texts teaching children nothing but empty vocabulary, and an entire system designed to reward memorization over real understanding.This video breaks down Feynman’s forgotten problem-solving framework — the same approach he used to win the Nobel Prize, expose broken education systems from California to Brazil, and coin the term “Cargo Cult Science” in his legendary 1974 Caltech commencement speech.You’ll learn his 12 favorite problems technique (explained by mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota), why estimating before calculating is the single most underrated thinking skill, and how to tell the difference between someone who memorized the answer and someone who actually understands the problem — a distinction that matters more now than ever, because AI can memorize everything, but it can’t think from scratch.

If you’ve ever felt out of step with the system — at school, at work, in a meeting where nobody could answer the question that wasn’t on the slides — this video explains why. And it gives you a method to fix it tonight.🔹 Drop your own “label instead of an explanation” moment in the comments.——————————————————📖

Sources & Further Reading:

“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” — Chapters: “Judging Books by Their Covers” & “O Americano, Outra Vez!” (W.W. Norton, 1985) “What is Science?” — Feynman’s Address to the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 “Cargo Cult Science” — Caltech Commencement Address, 1974 “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” — James Gleick (Pantheon, 1992) Gian-Carlo Rota — “Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught,” Lecture, 1996

I cut the most useful part of Feynman’s method out of this video — it needed pages, not minutes. It’s the test he used to check whether he actually understood something or had only learned its name. Three questions, about 90 seconds, and it fails almost everything most people think they know. That, plus the full 12 Favorite Problems system, is in The Feynman Field Guide to Clear Thinking: https://feynmanarchives.com/

Disclaimer: This video is for educational and informational purposes only. The views expressed are based on publicly available historical sources and the creator’s interpretation. This content does not constitute professional advice in education, career development, or any other field. Always conduct your own research and consult qualified professionals for specific decisions.

Part of the Transcript:

16:37

The reason you always felt out of step with the system is because the system was designed to produce the opposite of you. It produces people who follow the process perfectly right up until reality changes and then they freeze. You’ve seen it in hiring. The candidate with the perfect resume who can’t answer a simple what-if question in the interview. You’ve seen it in leadership. The director who can quote the strategy deck word for word but goes blank when a client throws a curveball.

The system trained them to memorize the runway, not to fly the plane.

Feynman left behind the method the system tried to bury.

— 12 problems always alive.

— Strip every claim down to what you can check.

— Estimate before you calculate.

— Test your understanding by rephrasing the question.

— If you can’t answer it in different words, you never understood it in the first place.

That’s it. That’s what they removed. And now you have it back.

But Feynman’s war on the textbooks exposed something bigger than bad education. He found the same pattern in science, in hiring, in way entire industries collapse when nobody inside them can think from scratch. And when he called it out by name, in front of the most powerful people in the room, they didn’t thank him. [Managed decline anyone? -GC]

….

ROBERT MAXWELL

Which specific U.S. school textbook companies were owned by Robert Maxwell or his companies?

The Deal That Reshaped the Market: Maxwell Buys Macmillan and Joins McGraw‑Hill

Robert Maxwell purchased Macmillan Inc. in the late 1980s, a transaction that positioned him as owner of one of the United States’ largest textbook publishers at the time; reporting from the period documents the acquisition and the creation of a joint venture combining Macmillan’s school publishing units with McGraw‑Hill’s to form Macmillan/McGraw‑Hill School Publishing Co. in 1989, a company that became the second‑largest U.S. textbook publisher [1] [2]. The joint venture pooled Macmillan imprints like Glencoe and units such as Science Research Associates (SRA) into a single school publishing operation, reflecting Maxwell’s strategy of consolidating academic and educational assets under his Maxwell Communication Corporation umbrella, and contemporary sources note that McGraw‑Hill assumed sole ownership of the joint operation by 1993 after Maxwell’s death, indicating the Maxwell family no longer retained operational control

𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝘅𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹, [𝗚𝗵𝗶𝘀𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝘅𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹’𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝗱] 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁 AND DESTROYED IT.

Eye of the Storm Ep. 138 (Badlands)

1:04:20: They show a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience (3 min clip)

The guy talking is Eric Weinstein: The Mathematician turned Physicist & Economist (It is an interesting article about Dr Weinstein.)

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT

ERIC: … Maxwell figured out how to DESTROY SCIENCE and MAKE A FORTUNE. So he diluted the quality of the editorship of the leading journals. This was a high quality informal enterprise. Now most of the destruction of science in terms of how high quality it used to be, has taken place relatively recently. POST ROBERT MAXWELL. Because we now have an enormous number of journals staffed by people who can’t spot publication cartels, where we agree to cite each others work and we agree to publish stuff, you know Pay for Play. ALL the nonsense you see with irreproducible research…

The peer review thing got woven in so that people think that the scientific method and peer review ARE THE SAME THING. Where ONE IS THE UNWANTED INFECTION FROM THE BIOLOGICAL BIOMEDICAL UNIVERSE, which had peer review much longer than anything else…”

From the article:

One of these ideas is what he calls👉the DISC (Distributed Idea Suppression Complex) which explains how disruptive and innovative ideas that challenge the status quo are suppressed.👈 Keeping institutions safe from individuals who create change….

Pergamon Press – Wikipedia

Pergamon Press was an Oxford-based publishing house, founded by Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, that published scientific and medical books and journals. Originally called Butterworth-Springer, it is now an imprint of Elsevier.

History

The core company, Butterworth-Springer, started in 1948 to bring the “Springer know-how and techniques of aggressive publishing in science”[1] to Britain. Paul Rosbaud was the man with the knowledge. When Maxwell acquired the company in 1951, Rosbaud held a one-quarter share.[1] They changed the house name to Pergamon Press, using a logo that was a reproduction of a Greek coin from Pergamon. Maxwell and Rosbaud worked together growing the company until May 1956, when, according to Joe Haines, Rosbaud was sacked….

This illustrates the larg problem we now have.

Barkerjim  May 25, 2024 07:38

So much for “peer review” — Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers

By Jo Nova

Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.

Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.

Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on ‘breast cancer’ becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a ‘naïve Bayes’ classifier became a ‘gullible Bayes’. An ant colony was labeled an ‘underground creepy crawly state’.

And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it ‘signal to noise’. The nonsense never ends….

Bring Them All To Justice – Market Ticker

Yes, that’s a strong headline.

But this is not really about the recent virus; it goes back a very long time.  Scientific fraud — not accident, not error,  intentional misrepresentation — has been all over medicine and specifically pharmaceutical trials for decades.

Cuppa

November 2020 — External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-CoV-2 reveals 10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level: consequences for false positive results

URL = Researchgate Pub

[I get access denied due to rapid clicks…?? So here is the archived version LINK – GC]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here are ‘Peer-Reviewed” studies and comments from medical journal editors. My list is so long I am going to cut it in half and put the rest in my next article. However since this type of information has a tendency to disappear, I want it documented.

August 30, 2005 — Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Source: BMJ-British Medical Journal

US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies. Fraudsters are also more likely to be “repeat offenders,” the study shows.

Summary

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias…..

May 29, 2009 — How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data

ABSTRACT

….A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified dataor results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12%< (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.

Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.

March 20, 2012 — Former NEJM editors on the corruption of American medicine (NY Times) from https://participatorymedicine.org/

As we said in December, an e-patient essential is sorting out what writings to trust, whether we find them online or in print. There’s an important update on this in the New York Times today, an interview with Marcia Angell MD, an author we’ve quoted before, and her husband Dr. Arnold Relman – both long-time editors of one of the world’s top journals, the New England Journal of Medicine. It contains some eye-poppers.

In 2009, as I was just starting to get educated about healthcare, I posted A Quote I Won’t Soon Forget, which began:

Marcia Angell MD is a well-known, respected physician, long-time editor of NEJM. So it was a bit of a shock today when Amy Romano, blogger for Lamaze International, sent me this quote:

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.

It was from Dr. Angell’s review Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. It continued:

Dana Blankenhorn of the ZDNet health blog called it “a bombshell.” I couldn’t agree more. And I must say, with all the smart people in this community, why on earth haven’t we heard more about this??

And how on earth are we supposed to be empowered participatory patients if we can’t trust the world’s leading journal?

It echoed Richard Smith, 25 year editor of another top-tier journal (the British Medical Journal), in the first issue of our Journal of Participatory Medicine:

…most of what appears in peer-reviewed journals is scientifically weak.

This is no small issue in the life of an engaged patient. e-Patients who bring googled articles to their office visits are often lambasted or subjected to eye-rolls by clinicians who say that we should only trust academic medical journals. But can we trust them??

We got a rude update on why published science is shaky in our January 2011 post The Decline Effect: most published studies are never replicated by another lab! That’s absurd – heck, in high school I couldn’t get a science experiment passed if it wasn’t reproducible, but our journals do that??….

April 2015 — JAMA Intern Med Research Misconduct Identified by the US Food and Drug Administration: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Every year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspects several hundred clinical sites performing biomedical research on human participants and occasionally finds evidence of substantial departures from good clinical practice and research misconduct. However, the FDA has no systematic method of communicating these findings to the scientific community, leaving open the possibility that research misconduct detected by a government agency goes unremarked in the peer-reviewed literature….

Objectives

To identify published clinical trials in which an FDA inspection found significant evidence of objectionable conditions or practices, to describe violations, and to determine whether the violations are mentioned in the peer-reviewed literature.

Design and Setting

Cross-sectional analysis of publicly available documents, dated from January 1, 1998, to September 30, 2013, describing FDA inspections of clinical trial sites in which significant evidence of objectionable conditions or practices was found.

Results: Fifty-seven published clinical trials were identified for which an FDA inspection of a trial site had found significant evidence of 1 or more of the following problems:

falsification or submission of false information, 22 trials (39%);

problems with adverse events reporting, 14 trials (25%);

protocol violations, 42 trials (74%);

inadequate or inaccurate recordkeeping, 35 trials (61%);

failure to protect the safety of patients and/or issues with oversight or informed consent, 30 trials (53%);

and violations not otherwise categorized, 20 trials (35%).

Only 3 of the 78 publications (4%) that resulted from trials in which the FDA found significant violations mentioned the objectionable conditions or practices found during the inspection. No corrections, retractions, expressions of concern, or other comments acknowledging the key issues identified by the inspection were subsequently published.

Conclusions and Relevance

When the FDA finds significant departures from good clinical practice, those findings are seldom reflected in the peer-reviewed literature, even when there is evidence of data fabrication or other forms of research misconduct.

A decade ago, I wrote in another blog “Blogs are now performing the important tasks of scrutinizing papers and conclusions often finding gross mistakes.” That is probably one of the reasons we were shut up during Covid.

June 1, 2015 — Editors In Chief of World’s Most Prestigious Medical Journals: “Much of the Scientific Literature, Perhaps HALF, May Simply Be Untrue”

… “It Is Simply No Longer Possible To Believe Much of the Clinical Research That Is Published”

Posted on June 1, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

Corruption Is Destroying Basic Science

“Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are the two most prestigious medical journals in the world.

It is therefore striking that their chief editors have both publicly written that corruption is undermining science.

The editor in chief of Lancet, Richard Horton, wrote:

*http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1.pdf

Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity [i.e. pervasiveness within the scientific culture] of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale….

Similarly, the editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell, wrote in 2009:

“We can no longer trust Drug company clinical trials”

(Original Article I quote below has vanished… imagine that!)

….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….

In fact, in October 2017, Angell went further – she published an article in the New York Review of books entitled, ‘Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption.’ 

“Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption”

Date Published:

Jan 14, 2009 07:00 PM

Author: Marcia Angell

Source: New York Review of Books

This article in The New York Review of Books, by Marcia  Angell, details the growing concern over the colonization of the medical profession by pharmaceutical companies

The NY Review article is paywalled. Archived Version can be read.

That article points to this:

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs

Another article similar to the NY Review article

Marcia Angell: Drug Co & Doctors: A Story of Corruption

I am going to stop here and continue next week so you focus on reading the last 3 articles. They are DAMNING especially since Angell, spent two decades as the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.