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‘Science Is the Belief in the Ignorance of Experts’
Whenever I see the term “expert”, I think of Richard Feynman’s (Feynman is a brilliant Nobel Prize winner in Physics) National Science Teachers speech in 1966:
We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields–radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The linked article talks about a tweet by Paul Graham which states:
If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.
Well, no. You “trust” engineers, and all the people in the chain that built and tested the many thousands of components in the aircraft, the mental health and competence of the pilots, ATC, other pilots, the people that produced the fuel … a nearly infinite chain of trust. Or, basically, you are taking a “leap” that isn’t really “faith” because most have not thought about any of this. Nor should you really, because a life that can actually be lived is based on all sorts of unconscious assumptions.
It would be very good however if many more people were aware that we all live by faith (usually unconscious), all the time. If more people realized that, we would likely be somewhat kinder to others.
“Science” is a method, a tool. It makes hypotheses and tests them. Very few of the people in that long chain to your flight were “scientists”. They were “experts” in some sort of discipline generally blindly following the “rules” (standard procedures) of that discipline.
In this world, the “experts” are imperfect and often fail. The passengers on the 737 Max trusted the chain of “experts” and the chain failed. The list of “expert failures” is endless … in these times it often starts with the Titanic. My favorite example is Trofim Lysenko whose “expertise” combined with political ideology resulted in millions of deaths.
Do the “experts” creating and pushing the new mRNA vaccine know what they are doing? We certainly hope and pray that they do. We do know that pushing a new technology to millions of people has significant risk. In software, we say “never take the first release.” Even in cars, many people want to wait a bit on a new model because there is a good deal of evidence there will be one or more “recalls,” some of which may be significantly dangerous.
The real world is often harsher to the new technology than the theories, early testing, and politics hoped it would be.
So before you “trust the science,” be aware that what you are trusting is the bureaucratic system that decided on “Operation Warp Speed” and decided that they had to roll out the vaccine quickly. Fortunately, there were only seven people on the Challenger when it “had to launch” on the cold morning of January 28, 1986.
Interestingly, Feynman was the person that discovered the technical cause of the Challenger Disaster.
The root cause was believing in “experts” (rather than understanding their ignorance), and the application of those beliefs by a bureaucracy to the launch decision.
Published in Technology
I don’t find it significant that Bill Gates predicted that a global pandemic of a respiratory disease could possibly kill millions of people. Zillions of other people have been saying the same thing for years because that is exactly what happens every few decades. I could have predicted that and I don’t know a thing about epidemiology.
Back in the early days of the epidemic, there was a lot of discussion about why some people were seemingly unaffected by the virus. One doctor claimed that there were genetic markers that make specific groups more vulnerable. He discussed it in some detail and I never heard from him again. He claimed the virus was engineered to affect those groups. Either he was a nut or somehow persuaded to shut up. I have no idea which is true. Now that I think about it, there is a third possibility and that is that the media decided not to give him any more attention.
More like sterilization. And he is a proponent of vaccines. He thinks they can help with population control. Why on earth would he think that?
If the mass hypnotized 50% of the nation would wake up from their somnambulism, & join us in our demand we be given these actual remedies, & demand the firing of Fauci plus all who follow him, we could restore our nation over night.
For the record, I am far more concerned about tradeoffs than you are. By your accepting dishonest “authorities,” you are trading off not only our health, but our ability to remain free from the clutches of the New Society being brought forth by the Davos/WHO/ GAVI/World Bank/Bill& M Gates crowd in which “by 2030 you won’t own a thing, but you will be happy.” You are perfectly willing to accept the idea that we continue to do what we have been doing, which is not working, and continue to expect a different outcome. (Einstein declared this the definition of insanity.)
This is based on a desire to believe in various dishonest, totally corrupted hospital spokespeople, hospital admins, local county public health officials, because you believe them to be authorities. Did you not read my piece on remdesivir – that a real part of the reason for last year’s high COVID fatality rate was due to this drug being the only COVID drug Fauci allowed American doctors to use? It destroys a human being’s kidneys, so its use ended up killing off the COVID patient population once they were in the hospital.
You cannot have an effective vaccine against a respiratory infection, as vaccines work by being in the blood and respiratory infections hit the alveoli of the lungs. Period.
So that is why real vaccinologists like Holland’s VandenBossche stated an entire year ago that we would see Cov Vaxxed patients coming down with COVID, & we would see variants appearing in the vaxxed. So it’s coming out in sworn testimony by hospital workers before governmental groups that the vaccination status of patients is being altered, so it cannot be said that “they have Guillan Barre on account of getting the second jab 2 weeks ago.” That way the entire issue of the vaxxes not working & vaxxes allowing for variants plus causing so much injury and death can be covered up. With many patients’ charts having their vax status altered, the coverup is in place for lies to be told.
Lordy……….
Lucky for us COVID isn’t a respiratory virus, then (although it’s transmitted that way). It affects the vascular system! By your definition, a perfect candidate for an effective vaccine, which we now have — at least two, actually.
And if you’re calling my friends and family who work in the hospital system “corrupt,” I just have one word for you: Nuts! Interpret that how you will.
Say what?
General Patton approves.
McAuliffe, not Patton
Yes, but I’m sure Patton approved. ;-)
It’s good to be reminded of that now and then.
@oldbathos
As far as COVID infections and their stats in terms of numbers of cases:
Have you been following Old Bathos’ accounts of seasonal flu realities?
The flu starts out in the autumn, trends upwards in terms of numbers of cases across the nation between late Nov and early February and then starts to dissipate. You may still fund the flu hitting a bit more in colder regions, like MN, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, et al, even until late April.
In the summer, nary a flu case.
Which I could remember the doctor’s name, he lives in Idaho and has done local presentations about the direct correlations between the flu and vitamin D levels. He has expanded his thesis to include COVID. His thesis is once cold weather hits, most people are indoors more than being outside.
Vit D levels then plunge and then the flu starts to have an impact. When people are back outside – the flu diminishes.
As far as the statistic regarding the 45,000 deaths, I follow the legal aspects of the COVID situation.
So do many other individuals intent on getting the truth. So iot is not surprising that Drs Malone, fleming, Merritt, Simone Gold, Peter McCullpough and others are praising a Calif attorney named Tom Renz for his filing of a major lawsuit in Fed court in Alabama.
The suit charges that unknown to most in the public, the government has created an internal adverse event reporting system.
End Of Part One
@stevenseward
Part Two
So Renz is alleging in his lawsuit, filed on July 19th 2021, that this new reporting system – not VAERS but a different one – now funnels adverse vax events from such agencies as CMS. But that the new reporting system has weeded out some 45,000 deaths.
Here is a link to who and what CMS is: https://www.cms.gov/About-CMS/About-CMS
Note that CMS contains both MediCaid, low income recipients of government health programs and also MediCare.
He found out that in one reporting period, there was an accounting of fatalities for individuals that died within 3 days of getting a COVID vaccine.
Since as even today the VAERS data base holds fewer than 14,000 fatalities, Renz was appalled.
So I initially thought that his lawsuit was going to get to the bottom of this and see that things were straightened out and that if this report of a missing 45,000 fatalities was true, the VAERS data base would then be forced to include them.
However the ramifications are even greater than that. His lawsuit alleges that since we have these additional 45K deaths the entire program must be scrapped. If the court gives him the winning verdict, this shut down on the vaxxes would apply to every state in The Union.
Steven I will try and get back here to address the other points you brought up, which time doesn’t permit me to handle now.
BTW my way of thinking is the absolute norm over on The Conservative Treehouse, theconservativetreehouse.com.
There people take a much more dismal view of what is going on via the TakeOver Of Everything for The Benefit of The Davos crowd, than the “But our government and agency heads and media would not lie to us, would they?” crowd that seems to be in the majority here.
Bill Gates comes from a family of eugenicists. His forebears were into supporting Margaret Sanger, abortion, sterilization and more.
He has often spoken of over population.
This encapsulates him in a nutshell:
What do seasonal flu patterns have to do with how effective the Covid vaccines are?
I’m not interested in legal aspects of the Covid situation. I’m interested in how you came up with 45,000 people dying as a result of the vaccine.
I’m sorry but this statement by Bill Gates is totally opposite to what you claimed he said before when you wrote “You have quotes from Bill Gates in TedX videos claiming that global vaccination efforts can lower the population.” And his forebear’s opinions have no relevance on what his actual opinions are.
That was me and I’m sorry you don’t believe me.
https://youtu.be/wfstBe1buaA
you could have found it yourself. 2:35 is the money quote. How vaccines help to lower the population is a mystery to me. It might lower birth rates, but that’s because it increases the rate of children surviving to adulthood. That shouldn’t lower the population.
I remember that. “Reproductive health services” mean contraception and abortion. That’s just thrown in there along with vaccination.
Right. But why include vaccinations as one of the means to lower population? Gates is a smart guy. He knows how to sort. And by common understanding, one of these is supposed to not be like the others…
He’s lying. He’s including vaccines with reproductive health, which is true-ish. He’s saying reproductive heath will lower global population, which is a strange way of saying contraceptive medicine. will lower global population. Therefore vaccines as a part of contraceptive medicine will be part of reducing global population. There fore vaccines will reduce global population.
It’s like saying water will dehydrate you because it’s a necessary part of a dry meal, and everybody knows dry meals dehydrate you. So water dehydrates you. Sounds logical.
Sorry, I misattributed the quote to CarolJoy.
I watched the video and it kind of says what you are saying, but not quite. Here is the quote:
Bill Gates: “Now the World today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job, on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of, ah, about 1.3(%).”
First of all, he is specifically talking about lowering the rate of increase of world population, not the “killing off” of existing people. To emphasize, he throws in at the end of the sentence “but there we see an increase of, ah, about 1.3” which is the approximate percentage of yearly world population growth at the time he did the Ted Talk in 2010.
Second of all, Gates says that new vaccines and “healthcare” will help to do this, without explaining how. It is kind of a weird statement to suggest that vaccines and healthcare will slow down population growth, but it is a totally nonsensical assertion that vaccines and healthcare will end up killing people. It could have been some sort of mental slip that caused him to say that, but I think more probably he meant, without explaining the details, that modern medicine and vaccines have contributed to higher living standards in the West where as a result, people stop having so many babies. That is a common thought in the population debate.
The fact that this tiny sentence has been pounced upon by many of the Bill Gates haters is emblematic of today’s world where famous people’s recorded words are looked at with a microscope to find tiny nuggets of contradiction or malfeasance. It would be a different story if you can find Gates actually explaining himself on this in more detail. My guess is that he does explain it better in other videos or interviews, but few people want to dispel the myth that he wants to kill people.
Methinks Gates is a fool when he pontificates on things like Global Warming and such, but I don’t think you can pillory him on this one.
Sterilizing people is not killing off and reduces the rate of increase.
I haven’t seen the word “sterilization” attributed to Gates in this post so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he has publicly commented on sterilization.
Didn’t Gates say “reproductive health” will bring the increase down? That includes contraception and sterilization, and is actually the preferred euphemism for abortion in the US. And he includes vaccination as a part of reproductive health, which sounds at first glance appropriate enough. That’s why that sentence is so weird.
Why do vaccines support lower global population? They are in his parsing part and parcel with abortion and contraception.
Sterilization is the entire reason why I’m a hold out on new vaccines.
Did that need to be spelled out to you? I’m not Carol and Carol isn’t me. I brought up the Gates stuff because of the sterilization issue, not because I thought he was going to kill people off. One of these is far easier to hide and have plausible deniability on.
Edited to add: I do think people who lack a certain amount of humility may reap far more than they intended. And scientists fiddling with things they pretend to be experts in is ripe for such an event.
The African Globe has a couple articles about stealth sterilization adding hCG to its tetanus vaccine being given to only young fertile females. I will link them after the NIH report. Last I looked perhaps a year ago, Snopes said it didn’t happen (which means it did). Sterilization has been talked about for years world-wide, so it is reasonable to assume “reproductive health” mean sterilization as well as contraception and abortion.
***
HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World
Abstract
In 1993, WHO announced a “birth-control vaccine” for “family planning”. Published research shows that by 1976 WHO researchers had conjugated tetanus toxoid (TT) with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) producing a “birth-control” vaccine. Conjugating TT with hCG causes pregnancy hormones to be attacked by the immune system. Expected results are abortions in females already pregnant and/or infertility in recipients not yet impregnated. Repeated inoculations prolong infertility. Currently WHO researchers are working on more potent anti-fertility vaccines using recombinant DNA. WHO publications show a long-range purpose to reduce population growth in unstable “less developed countries”. By November 1993 Catholic publications appeared saying an abortifacient vaccine was being used as a tetanus prophylactic. In November 2014, the Catholic Church asserted that such a program was underway in Kenya. Three independent Nairobi accredited biochemistry laboratories tested samples from vials of the WHO tetanus vaccine being used in March 2014 and found hCG where none should be present. In October 2014, 6 additional vials were obtained by Catholic doctors and were tested in 6 accredited laboratories. Again, hCG was found in half the samples. Subsequently, Nairobi’s AgriQ Quest laboratory, in two sets of analyses, again found hCG in the same vaccine vials that tested positive earlier but found no hCG in 52 samples alleged by the WHO to be vials of the vaccine used in the Kenya campaign 40 with the same identifying batch numbers as the vials that tested positive for hCG. Given that hCG was found in at least half the WHO vaccine samples known by the doctors involved in administering the vaccines to have been used in Kenya, our opinion is that the Kenya “anti-tetanus” campaign was reasonably called into question by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association as a front for population growth reduction.
***
(And a partial for 500 words, from the NIH)
Tetanus vaccine may be laced with anti-fertility drug. International / developing countries
Abstract
PIP: A priest, president of Human Life International (HLI) based in Maryland, has asked Congress to investigate reports of women in some developing countries unknowingly receiving a tetanus vaccine laced with the anti-fertility drug human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). … the Pro Life Committee of Mexico was suspicious … excluded all males and children … only women of reproductive age. … Similar tetanus vaccines laced with hCG have been uncovered in the Philippines and in Nicaragua. ….
***
Mass Sterilization: Kenyan Doctors Find Anti-Fertility Agent In UN Tetanus Vaccine
Is The WHO Using Vaccines To Secretly Sterilize Women In Africa
Thank you so much for these sources! I had found this information in a completely different way but my sources weren’t regarded as legitimate (one being a president of an African country banning vaccines from his country).
Need to bookmark this page now :p
You’re very welcome.
Oh, by the way, Gates is involved in the hCG spiked tetanus vaccines. And I have looked for the past year for the interviews with quotes of the priests who first became suspicious and the details of the testing process that were used, and how and when, but I haven’t been able to find it,
Per the African Globe site:
“It should be noted that UNICEF and WHO distribute these vaccines for free, and that there are financial incentives for the Kenyan government to participate in these programs. When funds from the UN are not enough to purchase yearly allotments of vaccines, an organization started and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, provides extra funding for many of these vaccination programs in poor countries.”
And here is another that might be the one I was looking for. It has more detail in what was unusual about the vaccine adinistration:
http://www.africanglobe.net/africa/sterilization-plot-kenyan-doctors-find-anti-fertility-agent-tetanus-vaccines/
It is possible that the quotes from priests that you are looking for don’t exist. I wouldn’t get too enamored with this “African Globe” website. When I followed the links to their articles, they looked very suspicious, so I did a little digging.
It looks like the “African Globe” has hardly any Internet footprint at all. There is not a trace of anything about the site written by them or by others, except for a list of its articles. It seems like a blog by somebody who assembles articles from different people. Some articles are not credited. The only author who pens multiple articles is a guy named Lucius Gantt who was once arrested for beating a cop in Tallahassee, Florida. If you look at some of their articles you will see that the site espouses Critical Race Theory, the omnipresence of White Supremacy, Reparations, the demonization of Trump and conservatives in general, and rails against police. It claims that murder by police is a leading cause of death for Black men and boys. It also proposes that Jimi Hendrix was killed by the U.S. government and the mafia.
Oh, the surprises of the Internet!
So not much different from America’s media. Good to know.
Just how is it that you decide what is credible and what isn’t?
You have Twitter testimony of the delta variant? I have Twitter testimony of post-vaccination miscarriage. You have doctors testifying to increase in hospital visits from unvaccinated? I have doctors testifying to increase in miscarriages. You have faith in a corrupt government and greedy men to put forward a completely safe product their first time out the door. I have faith in men screwing up and greedy men covering it up and corrupt governments shielding them. Government officials are rich for a reason. I’m also taking Gates’ plain words as plain as how he meant them.