I applaud your gusto in dogging this issue.

I would recommend a short book I just finished. Kuhn vs. Popper : The Struggle for the Soul of Science by Steve Fuller. It’s only 132 pages in length, and a quick read.

I’d been reading more of Karl Popper lately and stumbled upon this book in a Barnes and Noble. It highlights much of the issues with scientific discovery that got Karl Popper animated and in my opinion they apply in the case of the Lancet study you are picking apart. I believe that if you read it you will find much to back up your righteous anger over the perversion of science.

After accusing the researchers and the Lancet of fraud
and treason, Shannon Love is back with another accusation. The latest crime he accuses them of is…

The things I do for science.

If it looks and smells like crap you probably shouldn’t be tasting it or putting it on your hair.

Here’s how it works. You want a circtain conclusion; and you do your “feasibles” in order to reach your conclusion.

It’s not quite Kosher.

The Lancet, as a general rule, doesn’t screw up like this. And, most screw ups don’t get caught LIKE THIS.

Ah, “that’s the rub.”

In the real world, we ask “compared to what?” The @ 2 million people Saddam killed? Or is it 2 million plus 2,985? Or compared to every other war ever fought, all of which evidently went perfectly from start to finish?

The Pentagon calculates the number of innocent casualties it thinks will result from an action. One can say “They do it to minimize the loss of life as much as humanly possible.” Or you could say “They dryly calulated the ‘acceptable’ number of innocent deaths.” Or you could even say ‘The Pentagon plans to murder x number of innocent civilians in cold blood.’

Let’s say you have a loan program. 99% of white applicants get a loan. 98% of black applicants get a loan. You can say “What a great program; almost no one is turned down, regardless of race.”
Or you can say “What an outrage; blacks were turned down at twice the rate of whites–call Jesse Jackson!”

Agenda-driven science gets people killed. Think of Kinsey, who portrayed himself as a disinterested observer of the mating habits of Amazonian wasps.

Turns out he was a radical pervert who
a. based his stats on prison inmates, not the general public,
b. whose favorite source was a literal serial baby-raper,
c.who slept with his wife, his employees, their wives, their hairdressers, the hairdresser’s cousin the organ-grinder, the organ-grinder’s monkey, the monkey’s uncle, etc., etc.
and who d.) enjoyed inserting coat-hangers into his organ until it turned black an fell off.

Other than that, he was dedicated scientist and a close personal friend. Meanwhile, 50 years later, there’s a world-wide AIDS epidemic, Hugh Hefner can’t or won’t get out of his bathrobe, and we get to watch genital herpes commercials with our TV dinners. I’m thinkin’ ‘Dude, I’m all broke up about your herpes and all, but I’m trying to eat dinner here. You mind?’

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about contracting it, because, according to the commercials, you get to have an attractive partner and spend your days bicycling and picnicking.

Stick to your guns, Shannon; if it looks like crap, smells like crap, tastes like crap and doesn’t get your hair clean when you shampoo with it, odds are, it’s crap.

I’ve been reading “Big Bang” by Simon Singh, and read about the torturous route taken on the road to current theories. One thing that surprised me was that ancient Greek astronomers discussed the theory of the sun-centred solar system and rejected it – it wasn’t that no-one thought of it or that the Catholic church was to blame, scientists managed to muck it up by themselves.

http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040322-3.shtml

A small group of publishers hold a near monopoly and consequently have very high margins. Neither scientists who publish papers nor those who read them have an incentive to demand lower prices, as they don’t pay. The government pays both for the science and for the published journal subscriptions.

With the internet, I believe it would now be possible to do an open peer review, with papers submitted for comment by anyone who wishes to comment (or if this is abused, anyone who has certain qualifications, and whose right to comment is withdrawn, when it is obviously abused), and only a subset getting a “seal of approval” by a committee of eminent scientists as being of particularly high standard.

The paper would then initially stand on the track record of the authors and of the institution they are employed by, and if particularly significant, would then also stand on the number of times it is quoted, and committee endorsements. Universities would have an incentive not to have rubbish published in their name, and would therefore likely have internal review procedures even before putting a paper out for open comments.

As to this particular paper and the Lancet, it hasn’t helped the Lancet’s reputation in my eyes, and it also has the MMR debacle as a black mark against it.

It is terrible for the Lancet to “expedite” peer review to meet an election deadline, because even if the peer review were still of a high standard, it gives an impression of impropriety and publishing science for its political impact value rather than its accuracy.

Here’s recent examples of politics deciding trumping science in ways that can hurt people:

http://webexhibits.org/bush/7.html

http://www.citypages.com/databank/24/1203/article11776.asp