All research is bunkum

​Friday Funny: Study claiming psychotic traits linked to conservatism gets reversed–finds liberalism more likely to have those traits

This is beyond funny it is hilarious. Unfortunately it is hilarious with our money, and it is a magnificent waste of our money.

​More below.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

I've been writing about this for a while, sadly it does not seem to be sinking in. Scientific research is bunkum, especially research in the social sciences, psychology, medicine, and lifestyle "sciences." The hard sciences mostly have dodged this although even they get clobbered once politics enters the fray, so climate science is really just a pseudo-science, or, honestly, a nescience. Research papers arising from these nesciences have devolved into religion, occasionally they do not, but how one would go about finding the golden needle in the stack of dross hay is unclear. 

Here is a listing of some of my prior articles:

Category: Research Studies Are Always Wrong

There are many more.

Usually the errors in these research papers are less surprisingly silly than the errors in the paper above.

"Researchers have fixed a number of papers after mistakenly reporting that people who hold conservative political beliefs are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness.

As one of the notices specifies, now it appears that liberal political beliefs are linked with psychoticism. That paper also swapped ideologies when reporting on people higher in neuroticism and social desirability (falsely claiming that you have socially desirable qualities); the original paper said those traits are linked with liberal beliefs, but they are more common among people with conservative values.

The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychotics are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative."

Thus, reaffirming the old axiom, "One should know how to use a gun before putting barrel up to one's eye and pulling the trigger."

That seems to be a lost art in so many of the sciences today. And so we are left with the metaphoric brains of innumerable sciency harebrains splattered about the halls of the Academe. I am beginning to think they possess only metaphorical brains. 

"Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia not involved with the work … said:

‘I don’t find this paper at all convincing, indeed I’m surprised it was accepted for publication by a leading political science journal. The causal analysis doesn’t make any sense to me, and some of the things they do are just bizarre, like declaring that correlations are “large enough for further consideration” if they are more than 0.2 for both sexes. Where does that come from? The whole thing is a mess.’

Pete Hatemi, a political scientist at Penn State University and co-author on three of the papers, explained why the swapped political beliefs and personality traits do not affect the conclusions . . ."

It goes on with some sentences generated by a random BS generator. Hatemi, is a political scientist which explains nearly everything. That's just code for "flapdoodle." Look, you simpleton, getting everything backwards matters, it always matters. 

The politicization of science has been proceeding apace for a very long time. The communist/socialist movement, which spun off the progressive movement in the US needed science to become the lap dog of politics, and it has become so. Erik Hoffer discussed this in The True Believer:

"There is more to the similarities, according to Hoffer. All mass movements “demand blind faith and single hearted allegiance.” Although they differ in their doctrines, they all “draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind.”  Hoffer speaks of the art of “religiofication, the art of turning practical purposes into holy causes.” (15)"

What Eric Hoffer tells us about “true believers” : Dangerous Intersection

Religiofication is the appropriate word for this act. Michael Bellesiles was caught making up porky's and larding his "histories" with them and was run out of the Academe. It did not hold of course, and he is being allowed back in, he is one of the boys, he believes the right things. Here is a nice takedown of Bellesiles, and his comeback. Both Bellesiles, and the authors here made up porky's to truthify a narrative which they sought to extend. By doing so they were "turning practical purposes into holy causes." 

Amazing Disgrace | Inside Higher Ed

There is no reason to tolerate this web of deceitful nescience. It needs to be called out for what it is, and the authors taken to task. One error is of little consequence, but it is seldom a one off, instead there are patterns of lying, falsifying, fudging data, or like the recent Katie Couric scandal creative, and fraudulent editing, essentially associating data which should not be associated.

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Couric has always been a fart sniffer, but she used to be cute, which provides cover for many mistakes. No longer cute, she failed to understand that her protection has evaporated, and so now she stands in the public accountability dock just as Gunga Dan stood so long ago. Optimistically her fate will be similar.

These manifesto's of nescience are becoming more common, and more annoying. Each seems determined to outdo the last in attention to the inane. Yet each time the media pick up on these as if they are pearl of wisdom. Surely our betters will tire of beclowning themselves? It seems not. And God knows I never tire of pointing out the Lolly Knobs. Heh! 

But the entire Academe is walking rough ground here. An incredible expanse of the sciences is churning out what amounts to political hot air, and secular religious rubbish, all at the publics expense. And the public is sitting up and taking note, CAGW has lost its buoyancy, and is beginning to sink, the sciences we've discussed here are in tatters, and the mass of people seem to be much less inclined to listen to even the hard sciences. 

Credibility once lost is dear to recover. The cost to the entire Academe for what these fools are doing will be profound. Perhaps it is time for the real scientist in the Academe to awake, and throttle the nescientists. 

I am bullish today on tar, feathers, stout rope, and street lamps, between the scientist, bureaucrats, and politicians these commodities will boom!