If you believe science, then you disbelieve 2/3 of science.
In 2017, the BBC reported on a major problem in science in medicine: two-thirds (67%) of all scientific and medical studies cannot be replicated. Via BBC:
Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests.
Two years earlier, in 2015, a major study found the same problem, with nearly the same numbers, involving psychology. Over 60 percent of peer-reviewed, psychological “facts” cannot be proven by independent third parties.
Policy makers, teachers, and doctors confidently apply these false “facts” as if they were true and accurate. And, because science believes that the most recent studies are more reliable than any that came before, this situation creates a double-dose of danger for you and me. Our lives are ruled by increasingly false “science.”
(Ironically, older scientific facts are actually much more reliable than newer “facts” because the older studies have been replicated and have withstood the test of time.)
Bad Science Led to COVID-19 Pain #
We’ve seen this in the COVID-19 hysteria plaguing the planet.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations, or IHME, produced doomsday predictions for the effects of COVID-19 on the United States. We’ve covered their miserably failed projections before. An interesting coincident is that the IHME projects were about 2/3 BS and 1/3 accurate. In other words, the IHME was no more wrong than the field of “science” over all.
Policymakers relied on IHME’s bad “science” to destroy the US economy. Therefore, two-thirds of the negative effects on the US economy were unnecessary. Which means that 2/3s of the misery and pain caused by COVID-19 lockdowns was caused by IHME’s bad science.
From this, we can safely describe there cost of these errors:
- 20 million people were thrown out of work for no reason
- The expected 9,000 of the anticipated 12,000 business failures were unnecessary
- $4 trillion of the $6 trillion in various federal bailouts and loans were unnecessary
IHME and its “scientists” should be held collectively and individually responsible for 2/3 of the economic damage caused by their bad science. And they should pay from personal assets and income until the multi-trillion debt is satisfied or until they’re dead, whichever comes first.
How to Think in the Post-Scientific World #
It is safer to reject all “scientific facts” than to believe all “scientific facts,” because about 70 percent of “scientific facts” are false and potentially dangerous.
Which gives us an axiom to live by:
Two-thirds of scientific “facts” are false.
And a corollary:
Any scientific study published in the past 10 years is probably false.
Just as we teach people to assume every gun is loaded with a round in the chamber, I encourage people to treat every scientific “fact” as false. It’s the safe and responsible way to view science, given scientists themselves believe 70 percent of scientific “facts” are invalid.
Lay people can’t possibly know which scientific “facts” have replicated and which have not. Therefore, we need to use simple thumb-rules to decide what to believe. And, since the vast majority of scientific “facts” are false, we must, at first, reject them all and believe only those we, ourselves, can verify have been replicated by a neutral third party.
Since very few of us have the time or the research skills to independently verify that every “scientific fact” replicates, and because we know most “scientific facts” are false, practically speaking there is no such thing as science.
Cogito, ergo non est scientia.