Fun

Broken Science Initiative Event — 18 February, Phoenix

I’m late (as usual) posting this. All the text below, with my paragraphifications, is from the Broken Science Initiative event page.

Reserve Your Ticket

You are cordially invited to The Broken Science Initiative’s February 18, 2023 event in Phoenix, AZ. We are living through a time where critical thinking is discouraged, drugs are routinely approved and pushed to market despite evidence that they work and politicians are telling us to “believe in the science.”

Validating and replicating results are no longer standard practice. It is estimated that more than 50 percent of medical research cannot be replicated and that number only increases when we look at cancer treatments, dementia drugs and other critical areas of care.

Science, once thought of as the empirical branch of knowledge, is in a full fledged crisis. We’ve become complacent and tolerant and it’s time to wake up and take notice of how academic science has lost its way.

The Broken Science Initiative is here to expose this corruption, malfeasance and negligence. We have identified the roots of these problems in the philosophy of science. We’ve traced them through history up to our present day. While many people have become more aware of these issues with handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the erosion of science for political and financial gains began long before 2020.

The BSI is offering anyone interested in an alternative to this mess a way to identify these problems and perhaps even apply simple methods to make better decisions for themselves and their families. We have no hope of fixing this for the world. It is too deeply entrenched. However, we are dedicated to teaching any individual with the will to learn how to spot these problems. The power of critical thinking is available to anyone wanting to take back his or her right to think for themselves. It all begins with an understanding of what science is and what it is not. The BSI is here to define science and show how it was broken.

On February 18, 2023 James Franklin, Thomas Seyfried, Malcolm Kendrick, William Briggs and cofounders Greg Glassman and Emily Kaplan will discuss how predictability has been replaced by consensus in science. The speakers will begin their talks at noon and there will be a reception for all guests with open bar and light refreshments following the presentations. We hope you will join us. Specific details on the venue will be emailed following individual registration.

The venue and set up for this event is for adults only and families who plan to bring kids 15 years old and younger are encouraged to inquire about babysitting services at the hotel. Thanks for understanding.

Capacity is limited; please reserve your ticket to ensure you are able to attend.

*The speakers are subject to change and others may be added or substituted.


For those who can’t make it, which is most of mankind, I anticipate videos of the event will be available. This is not an academic conference, and is meant for an intelligent audience, like regulars here.

BSI’s founders Greg Glassman and Emily Kaplan are both absolute sweethearts and know as much, or more, about this subject than anybody.

I’m excited to finally meet James Franklin in person. He is David Stove’s literary executor, among other fame. Quoting from his page:

James Franklin is the author of The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, What Science Knows and other books. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics appeared in 2014. The Worth of Persons: The Foundation of Ethics in Oct 2022 and Catholic Thought and Catholic Action in 2023.

I learned logical probability first from Jaynes, then Stove, then Franklin. See especially his “Resurrecting logical probability“. He has graciously allowed me to host one of Stove’s “controversial” (meaning unliked) essays “The Intellectual Capacity of Women.

I don’t know Thomas Seyfried or Malcolm Kendrick, but know of them. They have been prominent voices during the panic—and of course at other times.

As you can see, I’ll also be there. Title of my talk is “Uncertainty” (surprise!). It will go something like this:

The language of uncertainty in Science, and everywhere, is Probability. So what is Probability? How does it relate to Randomness and Chance? And Synchronicity and Coincidence. Everybody says Correlation is not Causation, but only when it is the other guy’s Correlation. And how do these help us understand what Science is about?

Maybe I’ll see you there.

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Categories: Fun

8 replies »

  1. People are always wondering what can be done against the seemingly unstoppable march of Globostupido? Well here you go. The Broken Science Initiative is a great example of our power to build the good, true, and beautiful despite all the despair and doom porn. Hooray! I especially like this bit:

    The BSI is offering anyone interested in an alternative to this mess a way to identify these problems and perhaps even apply simple methods to make better decisions for themselves and their families. We have no hope of fixing this for the world. It is too deeply entrenched. However, we are dedicated to teaching any individual with the will to learn how to spot these problems. The power of critical thinking is available to anyone wanting to take back his or her right to think for themselves.

    Yes!!! That’s the way out of this mess, build it brick-by-brick, man-by-man and disregard the naysayers and doom merchants. Of course, we’re going to have to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about how we created this mess so we don’t rebuild it on the same rotten foundation. But Americans have always been a can-do people and we can-do it again, first rebuilding one’s own connection to God and truth, then building strong families and strong communities. We have that power.

    Kudos, props, Emmy’s, Oscar’s, and Nobels to all involved in this brilliant endeavor. And Briggs you get to put down your snow shovel for a few days in balmy Phoenix while Building Back Better — how great is that!?

  2. Briggs, maybe you could wear a necktie this time so Lee Phillips can’t mock you as a shlub.

  3. The challenge of critical thinking is that irrational thought spreads exponentially while critical thought requires an internal switch on and individual to be triggered. That internal switch cannot be triggered externally with anything resembling consistency. Sometimes the trigger is a step that suddenly throws your back out (i.e. not picking up a heavy load, just a routine step). Sometimes, it is seeing an event that shouldn’t have happened happen. Sometimes, it is watching a television show and just asking “Can that happen?”

    It is possible for someone to trigger it in someone else. It just doesn’t happen at anything resembling linear. Maybe square rootish? Pareto Distribution…

  4. Wish I could go, but no.

    But I will offer a prediction: it will eventually be widely accepted in science that pattern based AI (e.g. chatGPT now) will be sociopathic in the sense of valuing truth and falsehood about equally because the inputs (mainly text/images) do not tie directly to reality (e.g. chatGPT feels neither hunger nor pain nor tiredness) – and that much of publish-or-perish science from about the mid 1970s on increasingly suffered from the same problem.

  5. Broken science has been cracking the dam with its chisels, and Newsweek has finally admitted that things are pouring out.

    It’s Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives | Opinion

    As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

    I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

    I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

    But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

    https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630

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