…versus cargo-cult science:
When the attorney general of Virginia sued to force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.” Feynman’s — and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”
According the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia, “science,” and indeed “scholarship” in general, is no longer an attempt to establish truth by replicable experiment, or by looking at evidence that can be checked by anyone. “Truth” is now to be established by the decree of powerful authority, by “peer review.” Wasn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment to avoid exactly this?
That old “Enlightenment” thing is for fogies. We’re all postmodernists now.
I don’t “carry much water” for the Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever-they-call-it-this-week movement.
But the VA AG wanted these data for another purpose than testing competing scientific hypotheses on global temperature. When an AG “asks” for something, that request has “teeth” in it.
I believe that Professor Michael Mann is a complete weenie as the next person around here apart from our Usual Suspects. But it is one thing to be a weenie, another thing to be standing trial at the defendant’s bench in court. What the AG is doing in Virginia, to me, is crossing over into “witch hunt” territory. I want to fight the Global Warming hysteria, but not by the heavy-handed exercise of state power.
don’t want state oversight don’t take state money
But the VA AG wanted these data for another purpose than testing competing scientific hypotheses on global temperature. … I want to fight the Global Warming hysteria, but not by the heavy-handed exercise of state power.
The Attorney General is investigating possible misappropriation of government funds based on what some of us consider to be fraudulent research. If Mann were claiming to have a perpetual motion machine and defrauding investors based on claims of “Free electricity!” would the AG be out of line in wanting to see some proof?
Feinman is sorely missed in these times
We need a Re-Enlightenment.
What we need is to get fedgov’t money the h3ll out of education, at every level. I can see an argument for a focused application based on perceived needs for nat’l security and a limited number of other reasons but since it’s been made abundantly clear that DC is incapable of acting in those terms, the second best solution is to just #$%^ing stop, already.
The NIH has an office of research integrity, which has conducted forensic investigations into scientific
Thatvwould be better
In other words: nothing to see here peons, move along…