I like science. Despite what the popularity of astrology columns, ancient, Chinese and expensive curatives and transmundane furniture moving might tell what the commonly senseless call common sense, so do most of our fellow human beings. Scientists get their PhDs and wear their white coats and reach into the meaty innards of reality and bring us facts. These facts may then be handed over to technology-fairies who make us nice toys like cell phones with the computational power of the population of Lithuania and dolphin-flavored combined oral contraceptive pills. I like toys, and the extended family of the man on the street loves them. But above and beyond toys: Facts. Truth. Knowledge. Most non-idiots have a healthy craving for all those things. Scientists smile and say “Why, we have all those things! Here you go!” to people. People adore scientists. It seems like a good deal.
Scientists disagree, of course. This might be a bit unsettling to those who hope scientists will hand them Truth, but that problem is easily solved by the “scientific consensus”. This neat concept allows us to ignore the scientist outside it, and we sleep easy knowing that while individuals may be flawed, the system will throw them aside like a person inspecting objects and discarding the ones of inferior quality. (Presumably apples.) Those who do not agree with the consensus are unscientific and, if they claim that some scientists lie, conspiracy theorists.
Conspiracy theorists are, as we all know, bad people. They are the ones who sit on Internet forums all day and explain why blood-drinking lizards from outer space caused 9/11. What people often forget, though, is that there was a conspiracy behind 9/11. Conspiracies commonly accepted as non-imaginary are however rarely called “conspiracies”, interestingly enough. But I think the term “conspiracy theorist” is often misused even if we ignore that. I think I’d prefer the term “lie theorist”, at least applied to myself. Conspiracies demand that at least two agents work together, lies only require one single agent with a method of communication.
Every person with half a brain and the skills to use it knows that scientists lie. No-one knows how many scientists lie, or how often. But I can give you a single interesting data point. When my girlfriend was making her “bachelor’s paper” (I have no idea if it’s called that in English but I think you get the idea) and got some results of her statistical analysis that seemed to confirm her null hypothesis, her instructor (a well-known and respected scientist) simply told her to manipulate the statistical analysis to get results that better matched her hypothesis.
Now, this scientist had nothing to gain from telling his students to, well, cheat. No grant money, no respect, no career was on the line. It seems to me as if cheating simply was what came natural to him, that lying was easier than not lying even when he had nothing or little to gain. Now imagine this scientist in a situation where he needs to confirm his hypothesis, or he won’t get any more grant money. Scientists being paid by organizations to reach certain conclusions are commonplace, and seldom does the media, the public or other scientists call them out on it. Smutsigt Mjöl recently wrote (in Swedish) about one of these scientists, Olof Liberg, whom she claims is the one to blame for the recent moronic slaughter of wolves in Sweden.
Ideally, other scientists are supposed to repeat every experiment to make sure that no cheating is happening. That’s the standard response to the claim of the title of this little rant. Yeah, right. As if they are going to waste time they could be using on trying to get grant money on stuff like that. And when data from different scientists tell different stories… well, heads seldom roll. We can all think of some examples. Everyone just continue on as before, ignoring the conflicting data.
I see this as the big failure of the “skeptic” community: The inability to not blindly trust scientists. Scientists lie. Everyone lies. If someone would benefit from it, assume that person is lying. The world is full of backstabbers, cheats and general scum who will kill you and eat your corpse and tell the judge it was in self-defense. So become as great as me - distrust everyone, and think for yourself. Become a lie theorist.
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