Category Archives: Science

Why people don’t admit they’re wrong

The no longer know how to think critically

Todd Hayden has written an article (“Admit You’re Wrong, Or Die“) in which he observes that people are less able to admit they’re wrong than they used to be.

What is this? I am a pretty old guy, and I do remember a time when people were more flexible. Sure, no one likes to admit they’re wrong, but they actually used to do that, at least occasionally.

He looks for reasons:

I will stick to the idea that much of this resistance to absorbing the evidential truth and changing minds accordingly has to do with a decades-long priming. People in general no longer know up from down—as they blindly navigate the bizarre-o streets of the 2000s. Not much that their senses pick up is automatically, as it used to be, identified accurately.

He blames technology:

Anything our senses are asked to evaluate as evidence is rejected as such, like in a magic show. Nothing can be trusted anymore, until some certain type of authority says it can be. There’s the catch.

He also, briefly and obliquely, touches on education:

If you have nearly no system of determining reality (your senses and common sense), and have never been taught to critically think so you can ascertain truth with a blindfold on, then you are going to be looking for someone to whisper in your ear to describe what it is you are looking at but cannot see. [My emphasis, PwG]

I am currently reading a book by Gary North, his last, called “The Biblical Structure of History”, in which he lays out that modern historians, not basing their study on the presupposition of a creator God, have no way of referencing their perception of the past to anything fixed. Therefore, their history becomes something totally random and relative.

This perception of history became dominant soon after the first world war. It has by now percolated throughout society. The result is that people no longer know what to believe, but still must make their way through society and life. And so they latch on to “some certain type of authority” who tells them what’s up and what’s down, what’s right and what’s wrong. No matter how much it contradicts their “common sense”. And they believe it, and act accordingly.

How to make the world a better place

Another great talk with Jordan Peterson

A talk with Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer

Leftist politicians and the “intellectual elite” prioritize a vague plan for saving earth over the lives of struggling people all over the world. Governments are being forced to press their citizens, straining already fragile economic and agricultural systems, in order to appease a globalist utopian vision. Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer sit down with Dr Jordan B Peterson to discuss the faults in this plan, and the people who are suffering because of it.

Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, having written numerous books on climate change such as “False Alarm,” “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” and “How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.” He is the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center that focuses on doing the most good, for the most people, with increasingly limited budgets. Previously, Lomborg was the director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute.

Ralph Schoellhammer is a scholar and journalist operating in Europe who has diligently covered overlooked stories such as the Dutch Farmers Protest. He is also an assistant Professor of international relations at Webster Vienna Private University, and produces a podcast following political psychology and institutionalism called the Global Wire.

Superabundance

We are entering an age of plenty, say authors Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley

The video of the discussion between Dr. Jordan Peterson and the authors of the book with this title is here.

Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley are co-authors of the new book, “Super Abundance”. They sit down with Dr Jordan B Peterson to discuss their studies into overpopulation, the myths surrounding the subject, and how academia has created a new philosophy that demonizes modern man simply for existing.

Marian Tupy is the co-author of “Super Abundance”, as well as “10 Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know” and “The Simon Abundance Index”. He is the current editor of humanprogress.org, and is a senior fellow at the center for global liberty and prosperity.

Gale Pooley is the co-author of “Super Abundance,” and is also an Associate Professor of business management at Brigham Young University in Hawaii. He has taught economics all over the world, and earned his PHD from the University of Idaho. He is also well known for his role in the development of the Simon Abundance Index.

Lockdown and the price of suppressing dissent

In times of crisis, we need more debate – not less

Article by Fraser Myers

Excerpts:

This week, we learned that this shushing of debate and silencing of questions went right to the top of government. Speaking to the Spectator, former chancellor Rishi Sunak claims that even he was unable to get a hearing for his concerns about lockdown.

An omerta on lockdown harms was quickly established in the spring of 2020. Ministers were told not to talk publicly about potential trade-offs. According to Sunak: ‘The script was, oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’

[…]

Although there was an apparent consensus in SAGE in favour of lockdown, Sunak says this isn’t the whole truth. When difficult questions or disagreements were raised in the scientists’ meetings, these were simply edited out of the minutes before they reached ministers. Dissent was excised. It is only because Sunak had a Treasury official listen in to the SAGE calls that he knew there was often a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty among the scientists.

[…]

Many opponents of lockdown suspected that SAGE was being overly alarmist throughout the pandemic, and this was confirmed beyond any doubt in December 2021, when the government defied SAGE’s recommendations and refused to implement new restrictions. A predicted bloodbath of 6,000 deaths per day simply did not materialise.

Throughout the pandemic, the government and the scientists tried to hide their uncertainty. The media demonised dissenters and Big Tech cracked down on them. All of this was apparently to the end of showing a unified front, preserving the integrity of science and pushing a singular, easy-to-follow public-health message. We were essentially told that in times of crisis it is better to put up and shut up than to undermine the authorities.

But look where that has got us. An economic crisis, a health-service crisis and an education crisis are now engulfing the nation – all of which were, at least in part, fuelled by lockdown. We are standing in the smouldering wreckage of our elites’ terrible decisions. We have paid a heavy price indeed for suppressing debate and dissent.

Why Britain’s water industry stinks

The sewage crisis is a damning indictment of the water firms and our state bureaucracy.

Article by James Woudhuysen, who is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University.

Excerpts:

The smell around the water firms could hardly be more pungent. At the same time as they dump effluent into our rivers, the chief execs are earning hundreds of thousands of pounds in bonuses alone. They can even top up these salaries by sitting on the boards of each other’s companies.

So how did we get here? The blame cannot be placed on the water companies alone. The corporate failures are undoubtedly legion. But they have been compounded by an opaque web of state regulators and non-governmental organisations who also manage and monitor the water industry.

[…]

One thing that binds the regulators and the water companies together, and more or less ensures that problems go unsolved and the public’s needs are ignored, is an obsession with climate change.

The corporate water sharks and the bureaucrats agree that climate change is at the root of all evil. And as we have seen recently, both dry spells and heavy rain can be blamed on climate change. Regulators and companies tell us to save water when it’s dry – because of climate change. And then when it suddenly gets wet, the sewage overflows are also our fault – because we’ve failed to do our bit to stop climate change.

[…]

The first step to ending the outrage of sewage spewing into our waters is to reject this self-serving narrative, to reject the intimate relations between the state, water companies and environmentalists, and to hold all three fully to account. Britain’s bloated and ineffectual water bureaucracy – not climate change, nor the people – is the real problem here.

Back Off, Oh Masters of the Universe

Big corporations like Deloitte are leading us down the path to totalitarianism, says Jordan Peterson

Deloitte have produced a study about climate models and say that urgent action is needed. Psychologist and polymath Jordan Peterson has an appropriate answer.

A written version is here:

https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/2022/08/15/peddlers-environmental-doom-have-shown-true-totalitarian-colours/ [close the gap between “telegraph.” and “co.uk”]

Excerpts:

And what will it take to do so? Here’s the most alarming part: nothing more than “a coordinated transition” that “will require governments, along with the financial services and technology sectors to catalyze, facilitate and accelerate progress; foster information flows across systems; and align individual incentives with collective goals.”

A clearer statement of totalitarian inclination could hardly be penned. 

The one thing the Deloitte models guarantee is that if we do what they recommend we will definitely be poorer than we would have been otherwise for an indefinite but hypothetically transitory period.

Yet any reduction in economic output (however “temporary” and “necessary”) will be purchased at the cost of the lives of those who are barely making it now. Period.

Why eco-alarmists are wrong about almost everything

The Great Barrier Reef is not dying, and the world is not coming to an end.

Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Excerpts:

The ‘somewhat surprising’ news about the reef’s good health – as one newspaper diplomatically describes it – is a very serious blow to the apocalyptic scaremongering of the eco-elites. 

[…]

Eco-alarmists aren’t only wrong about the death of Earth – they’re wrong about life on Earth right now. The message they constantly send is that everything is dire. The big, disgusting ‘human footprint’ on poor Mother Earth is causing heatwaves and storms and death on an unprecedented scale, they say. It is all so overblown. We are actually safer from nature’s violent whims than we have ever been. The number of people dying in natural calamities fell from around 500,000 a year in the 1920s to 14,000 in 2020. That’s a 96 per cent drop. The percentage of human beings living in poverty fell from more than 80 per cent at the start of the 19th century to less than 20 per cent in the 2010s. Deaths from disease and war have also declined dramatically in the modern era. Child labour, too. Life expectancy, meanwhile, has shot up. In Europe, it went from 34 years to 79 years between 1770 and 2019. That is, at the exact time that mankind was having industrial revolutions and allegedly being a plague on the planet, the health and prospects of humanity improved in a way our ancestors could only have dreamed of. It’s almost as if modernity is good for us.

We must never let the anti-industrial rage of the elites blind us to how brilliant our impact on the planet has been. We haven’t destroyed Earth – we have tamed it and civilised it; we have unlocked its secrets; we have transformed this wild and unpredictable ball in space into a planet that can happily host eight billion people, and more besides. Occasionally bleached coral is a very small price to pay for the liberation of humanity from death and drudgery, wouldn’t you say?

Of course things are far from perfect. We’re heading into a serious economic and energy crisis. It will hit the working classes in the West and the people of the South hardest of all. But this crisis is not an indictment of modern human society. On the contrary, it’s an indictment of the elites’ turn against modern human society. Decades of eco-doom-mongering, of fury against fossil fuels, of constant demands for a slowing down of economic growth and for a violent shrinking of the ‘human footprint’, have unquestionably helped to drag us into this worrying new reality of energy crisis and shortages. It isn’t the ‘human impact’ on the planet we should be worried about – it’s the establishment’s hostility to the ‘human impact’ on the planet. Mastery of nature is essential if we are to continue improving human life. It will also help us to look after nature itself, including its greatest wonders like the Great Barrier Reef.

Green Myths and Hard Realities: Sri Lanka as a Warning

What you get when you mindlessly hand over power to distant technocrats

Article by Joseph Solis-Mullen.

Excerpts:

With Sri Lanka’s short-lived green revolution of 2021 having quickly devolved into a real revolution just one year later, complete with the ouster of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s incompetent and authoritarian government this past week, now is a good time to hammer home not only why the effort failed, but why so-called ESG (environmental, social, and governance) policies and the green energy movement more generally are hopeless and destructive wastes of time.

That modern life is totally reliant on carbon-emitting fossil fuels is no reason to lose one’s head. And even though human-caused climate change is a virtual certainty, that is no reason to mindlessly hand over power to distant technocrats who promise to fix anything if only given the authority to engage in their dubious to morally outrageous social-engineering projects. Nor is it any reason to plow money into so-called ESG funds, which are thinly veiled shams, featuring virtually the same equities as most general S&P index funds but with substantially higher fees.

[…]

Demand reliably produces supply. Already many entrepreneurs and corporations are pioneering devices that will help to mitigate or even reverse the effects of climate change. Things may get worse before they get better. I don’t know what the future holds, and neither does anyone else. Respecting the limitations of knowledge and of the human ability to control things is central to allowing free exchange, the foundation of the capitalism that has made us all richer and better off than we would otherwise have been. The alternative is looking like Sri Lanka.

Our woke civil service is frustrating democracy

A "regime of managers" is taking hold

In 1941, an American author called James Burnham wrote a very perceptive book called “The Managerial Revolution”. Basically, he said that “regime of managers” was taking over the world. Meaning, in government, civil servants and, in business, the managers in the classical sense.

They were taking away power from the politicians (the representatives of the people) and from the business owners.

The result is a self-centred short-termism. This is on full display in the examples described by Ian Acheson here. He mentions the scandal of the Tavistock Centre for gender-identity services.

During her time as equalities minister, Badenoch was assured by senior officials that everything was just fine at the clinic and that there was more than a hint of ‘transphobia’ in the many concerning reports that were leaking out. She writes that she was advised ‘repeatedly’ that meeting Keira Bell, one of the victims of this state-funded ideology, would be ‘inappropriate’.

This is a familiar theme from my years as a senior government official. Civil servants will sometimes do everything possible to stop or at least slow the designs of the elected politicians who are supposed to be running their departments.

[…]

This Whitehall groupthink will be a problem for the new administration when we get our next prime minister. Many senior public-sector leaders now take their instructions on policy from internal networks of activists. This is not endemic, but it is entrenched. Myriad publicly funded pressure groups, like Stonewall, are now a part of the policymaking machine. But even the current government’s efforts to divest from them will not be enough. Officials that don’t agree are still held in thrall to these groups through fear of career-cancelling allegations of anything ending in ‘phobia’.