My last couple of pieces have really got me thinking about heresy and paradigms and authority. And data.
I’m a staunch supporter of the majority of scientific ‘orthodoxy’. It’s not based on any belief, as such, but on assessments of the facts and the data, as I understand them. Might my assessments be wrong? Of course. In some ways, in science, being wrong is sometimes more powerful than being right.
What emerges across all fields of science is a massive degree of consistency and coherence. The genetic ‘code’ at the heart of every living cell, for example, is not an anomaly but consistent with what we know from other, disparate fields. Physics, chemistry and biology all combine to give us a very detailed (but still incomplete) understanding of what DNA is and what it does.
The worldview that science has, painstakingly, built up over the centuries is a magnificent structure - physics, chemistry, biology and all of the many sub-disciplines (like geology, for example, or microbiology) do not contradict one another. They’re all mutually consistent. As they have to be when we get the worldview ‘right’. Nature isn’t going to have different ‘rules’ for chemistry and biology, say.
This consistency, it has to be said, does not mean our worldview, our current scientific picture, is wholly correct or complete. It does, however, make it enormously difficult for some ‘new’ worldview to gain traction. It has to be able to explain everything that the previous worldview did, with at least the same level of quantitative support, and it has to be consistent with facts drawn from all of the varied disparate disciplines.
That’s something of a tall order.
There is a sense in which quantum mechanics and relativity could be said to have ‘destroyed’ the old paradigms - and that would be a legitimate perspective. But it’s also true to say that the old paradigms are ‘emergent’ approximations from a more detailed and interesting picture of reality. It’s a bit like stippling in art where a picture is made up of dots and light and shade are created by varying the density of the dots. Zoom out and you get a nice picture. Zoom in and you see the ‘real’ structure that the ‘approximate’ picture is made of.
QM and relativity explained all the stuff the ‘old’ theories did - and much more besides. But the old theories, the old paradigms, are still extensively used and give the right answers when used in their domain of application (they are still really good approximations for things like orbits and machines and stuff that doesn’t move with a significant fraction of the speed of light).
The great ‘revolutions’ in physics, QM and relativity, haven’t really been a case of throwing everything away and starting from scratch1 - more a case of zooming in to see how the previous paradigm emerges from a more detailed and powerful perspective.
Of course, when it comes to physics, I’m a bit biased. The great New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford was well-known for his down-to-earth and tongue-in-cheek pronouncements, and I kind of agree with him when he said all science is either physics or stamp-collecting.
Today, we are drowning in scientific data. It’s amazing, to me, just how far earlier scientists were able to go with such a (relative) paucity of data.
Every time you fire up your GPS, for example, you’re relying on the relativistic corrections that have to be made to get the desired accuracy. In a sense, on your way to lovable, but potty, Aunt Mabel and her afternoon tea with pickled herrings in chocolate, you’re testing the predictions of general relativity.
Data is never wrong2. If your thermometer is mis-calibrated so that it reads 2 degrees higher than it should - the data is correct for the ‘system’ comprising
actual temperature + mis-calibrated thermometer
What can be wrong, very wrong, is our interpretation of the data.
For covid, and increasingly for the climate hysteria, I find myself on the “non-orthodox” side of things.
But this is not ‘inconsistent’. As scientists we have to follow wherever the data takes us or, more accurately, wherever our best interpretation of the data takes us.
It’s not some special property of ‘scientists’, though. Isn’t this what we all do everyday? We operate and make decisions based on our current best understanding and interpretations of our current situations.
Scientists have just had a bit more training, and maybe have a few more tricks up their sleeves, that allow them to interpret data in more rigorous ways - at least ideally.
Data, then, is the key to everything. How we interpret that data, and how we use it are also critical - but without the data in the first place we’re micturating in the wind.
The scientific method, in my view one of humanity’s greatest ‘discoveries’ or ‘philosophies’, is founded upon data. The principle behind it is that the jolly clever idea wot u has just thunked has to be consistent with the data. Otherwise it’s not so jolly, nor so clever.
How many graphs of infections in masked vs non-masked places do we have to see before we realize that the ‘jolly clever idea’ that masks have a significant impact is about as jolly as syphilis and as clever as a bowl of porridge?
Not to mention the many examples of where masks failed to do anything (the “it would have been so much worse” clowns notwithstanding).
Confounders, my arse. If masks work, they would, erm, well, erm, work. And it would be as obvious as flatulence in an elevator - which your mask doesn’t protect you from, either - even if you wear one round your arse.
Rutherford is also credited with another of my favourite tongue-in-cheek statements about science
If your experiment needs statistics - you should have done a better experiment
For much of the covid freakshow we’ve been inundated with stats and graphs and data. Here’s a scare graph for covid deaths in the UK and Sweden
You can see how the lockdown measures and masks in the UK helped Sweden, which didn’t lockdown or mandate masks, to turn around their pandemic3
Here’s much less of a scare graph indicating how Sweden actually fared (in this case compared to France) over 2020 and 2021.
For both Sweden and France you can see a bit of an uptick in deaths per 100,000 in 2020. France (worse than Sweden) in 2020, for example, had an uptick of less than 5% of the previous 4-year average death toll. I’m not sure why France is significantly worse in 2021, but I suspect there’s something about Sweden allowing people to wander about, getting challenged with small viral loads of covid, that primed their immune systems better to be more resistant to the effects of subsequent outbreaks - or indeed, the effects of something beginning with the letter V.
This small uptick in 2020 was the oh-holy-fuck-we’re-all-gonna-die unprecedented health emergency that our governments talked about.
Even if we assume there’s nothing wrong with the data4 - it's clear to see that the data has been blatantly misinterpreted, and misrepresented, by governments, for some reason.
It’s almost as if they wanted the ‘pandemic’ to appear to be very much worse than it actually was. Don’t get me wrong - it was bad, especially for the elderly or otherwise not in great shape - but it was never emergency-level bad (in overall population terms).
But how else are you going to get millions of people in the UK and elsewhere to get some Pharma PfuckYou Juice squirted into their arms?
As a rough guide, there are about 40 million people under the age of 50 in the UK. A tiny percentage of these could be described as actually ‘needing’ a vaccine for covid - even if they’d actually made one which (a) worked and (b) was safe - which it didn’t and it wasn’t.
Not all ‘heresies’ are equal. Not all struggles against the ‘orthodoxy’ are legitimate, or based on good understanding of the data. Not all orthodoxies are wrong.
Someone trying to convince me that Einstein got it ‘wrong’ is going to have to do an awful lot of convincing - and, ultimately, produce an alternative that reproduces all of the verified predictions we already know about.
I am not aware of either QM or special relativity having failed any of the experimental tests we’ve so far flung at them - and there have been thousands and a great variety of them.
Knocking Einstein off his perch is a heretical battle against the orthodoxy that is going to be very difficult to win, one hell of an uphill struggle - because the data upon which that orthodoxy rests is so very strong and high quality.
The (allegedly) supportive ‘data’ upon which the covid freakshow was established - all the fear, the absurd interventions - was almost non-existent and of very poor quality. As I mentioned in the last piece, it’s even worse than this - the data we did have, built up over years of more careful and measured study (i.e. not subject to the covid panic) and of almost infinitely better quality than the ‘supportive’ data, suggested almost precisely the opposite course of action to the one our governments took.
It really wasn’t an uphill struggle to disprove the covid ‘orthodoxy’ - more of an almost out-of-control gallop down a steep slope.
Being a heretic is fine, and appropriate on occasion. Indeed, I would argue it’s vital that we don’t dismiss every ‘heresy’ out of hand - we need our heretics. They’re going to be wrong 99.99% of the time when it comes to challenging any scientific orthodoxy that has been built on high quality and extensive data. Sometimes it’s going to be obvious why they’re wrong and their claims can be easily dismissed. But every now and then one of them really will turn out to be another Galileo.
But being a proud member of the Covid Heretics Club isn’t really quite the same thing. There was no established orthodoxy here - just a whole load of made up shit, based on the flimsiest of pretexts, that they forced on us and tried to make us believe through propaganda5.
The climate change hysteria is based on substantially better quality data than any of the asinine covid responses but there is a strong propagandistic element which is, after having suffered through the covid freakshow, a massive red flag for me. I am only thinking about joining the Climate Heretics Club - and going along to a few meetings to see if it’s worth membership. It’s looking like it is.
There was a sense in the early days of QM that it was a very radical re-writing, but subsequent work has actually shown some rather deep and profound connections between QM and classical mechanics. They’re rather technical connections, but there nevertheless.
Unless it’s fraudulent.
This is, of course, a sarcastic dig at those who claimed the interventions in the UK did anything in terms of altering the disease dynamics (remember folks, correlation is not causation).
This assumption would not be true in the case of ‘covid’ death where deaths due to ‘covid’ were grossly exaggerated. The Sweden/France figures show that, even with this possible source of error in the data, covid was a long way from being an ‘emergency’. In the case of the alleged covid death toll we have accurate measurements mixed in with ‘fraudulent’ measurements.
If anything, the actual established orthodoxy (pre-covid) profoundly disagreed with what became the official narrative
I now see the same religious fervour among climate change fanatics as I did among the Covid fanatics. They will abuse, censor, deplatform and generally "other" anyone who doesn't believe as they do. If it's actually a matter of belief versus analysis of data then that religion not science.
When I hear someone say "The Science is settled, and not only that, if you challenge The Science you are an evil person who must be shunned and oppressed", my bullshit klaxon starts honking loudly. There's been a lot of that honking over the last few years.
Detailed data for Sweden:
[https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa]
Updated every Thursday. Number of cases, deaths, broken down by gender and shown as graphs over time.
You can get data for local municipality/city area:
[https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/a6d20c1544f34d33b60026f45b786230]
Deaths per year from 1975 to 2021:
[https://www.scb.se/pressmeddelande/antalet-dodsfall-sjonk-under-2021/]
Scroll down and you'll see a table labeled "Antal döda per år" - Numbers of dead per year.
2020 stands out, but the preliminary numbers for 2021 looks like it's back to normal, normal being between 90 000 and 96 000 per year, trending towards 90 000.
Have to go to physio now, will try and post more data-links later if you're interested.