Call me cynical if you like. I bristle against the appeal to authority, especially when it comes to studies. Credentialing yourself with lab coats, degrees, and dubious studies doesn’t get far with me. Actually, you are probably starting off on the wrong foot. Maybe even worse are those who say, “Well I’m not a scientist, so… ,” They are implying and believing that they lack the ability to think for themselves. There is a reason why a soap opera actor could do commercials in a lab coat and preface his product recommendations with, “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.” Come on people, use that gray matter.
Let’s reflect a bit historically on what was recommended and done widely based upon trusting the experts, scientists, and studies.
- Drink radioactive water for vitality (1920s)
- Have your healthy teeth pulled to cure mental illness (1910s)
- Smoke cigarettes for your throat, on doctor’s orders (1940s)
- Give your child heroin to treat the child’s cough (1890s)
- Eat lead paint chips as a calcium supplement (decades of this)
- Give thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness (1960s)
- Eat margarine for your heart (1970s)
- Lobotomize your loved ones for being unhappy (1940s and 50s)
- Spray DDT on the children in the playground (1950s) which perhaps manifested into what was called Polio, etc.
- Avoid all fat to lose weight (1990s)
- Replace butter with trans-fat spreads on the doctor’s recommendation (1990s)
Every generation has its medical catastrophe dressed up as health advice, endorsed by the experts, printed in the textbooks, recommended by your doctor, and featured on the front of the magazines in the waiting room.
That post that I referenced and from which I took an excerpt, didn’t include; the food pyramid, mercury in your teeth, fluoride in your drinking water, or, Heaven forbid, vaccines. I even hesitate to mention that last one here for opening a can of worms that many of you won’t be able to handle due to your programming. (If that troubles you, you should probably just take your Soma and move along.) So rather than get into that, let’s focus on the potential issues with studies and peer-reviewed studies.
In practice, you might assume that peer review is a good thing as your peers should hold you accountable to rigorous standards. One would expect that should work well enough in a culture of high morals and integrity. However, it is also likely more prone to protecting each other, the status quo, and a potentially corrupt establishment. You could have protection racket of sorts, a “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” environment. They could just perpetuate the process, get each others’ studies reviewed, approved, and funded in reciprocity, etc., continue the cycle, and the gravy train of funding rolls along. It can reasonably be expected that there might be somewhere between a little and a whole bunch of this “back scratching” going on. Rather than speculate about motives or competencies, let’s talk about hard metrics. In the post “The Decay Function of Professional Science” and further detailed in his book “Hardcoded” Vox Day/Theo Beale explores this in mathematical detail. He looks at: a field of science’s publication rate, its replication rate, its correction mechanisms, and critically, its citation dynamics. Beale models the accumulation of unreliable findings over time. The results are not encouraging for our highly-respected experts.
I do encourage you to read the post and the book, especially if you are mathematically and statistically inclined. However, spoiler alert,… he finds that based upon the hard data, approximately 50% of published studies are unreliable and/or non-replicable. Further, the correction rate is extremely low and the retraction rate is almost nonexistent. It gets even worse when you consider how new researchers are trained with them using and citing the unreliable studies. When this is considered, you get an amplifying effect with 94% of the citation-weighted training coming from unreliable papers. Perhaps I have a good basis for being cynical, not trusting the the claimed experts nor what they are selling.
Maybe I am stating the ridiculously obvious here. Don’t be fooled by lab coats and degrees. That PhD Influencer on high doses of TRT calling himself “Doctor” might have some serious emotional maturity issues, lack any beneficial knowledge, and have very questionable motives. Do they have a dog in the fight, a profit motive, and an industry-supported company-funded unreliable study? What are the odds?
All of this reminds me of a quote from the movie Good Will Hunting, “… you dropped $150,000 (probably 4X that now) on an education that you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” Lies, damnable lies, studies, and ignorant arrogant (potentially corrupt) over-educated dummies/influencers.
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