These People Have No Idea What They Are Doing.
This verdict on the corona virus crisis was offered by the ex-Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption in an article under the above title in The Mail on Sunday of 21/6/20. He opened his article by asking, ‘does the Government have a policy for corona virus’ and he answers it by stating that ‘indeed it does’; and that ‘in fact, it has several’. ‘One for each month of the year, and none of these properly thought through’ He then observes that ‘governments have to change tack in attending closely to a changing situation’; but that ‘this crisis has exposed something different and more disturbing: a dysfunctional Government with a deep-seated incoherence at the heart of its decision-making processes’. He claims that ‘the root of the problem is the uncomfortable relationship between the Government and its scientific advisers’; that the Government has repeatedly claimed to be guided by “the science“; that ‘this has in practice been a shameless attempt to evade responsibility by passing the buck to scientists for what are ultimately political, and not scientific, decisions’; that ‘scientists can advise what measures are likely to reduce infections and deaths’ but that ‘only politicians can decide whether those measures make sense in economic and social terms too’. He then concludes the introduction to his article by stating that ‘Sage, the committee of scientists advising the Government, has been very clear about this’; that the minutes of its meetings show that these scientists ‘are not willing to become the Government’s human shield or the fall guys for its policy misjudgements’; and that ‘ministers press them for the kind of unequivocal answers that will protect them from criticism’; that ‘the scientists cover themselves by giving equivocal answers which reflect the uncertainty of “the science”; and that ‘the Government responds by avoiding any decision for which it would have to take political responsibility until the pressure of events becomes irresistible, when it lurches off in a new direction’.
At this point, I refute Lord Sumption’s description of science by reference to my definition of science as the source and store of unequivocal, indisputable and non-debatable knowledge of the reality in which we live and act. On this definition, anything which is equivocal, disputable and debatable is not science, but belief, yet to be reality-validated or reality-refuted (as hypothesis) to positive or negative knowledge of this reality by experimentation in this reality. Thus, I assert that non-scientists including high court judges and a good many self-styled “scientists” have yet to recognise my newly definitive differentiation of the dichotomies of knowledge/belief, truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad which have enabled me to define the opinion/counter-opinion dichotomy as that of belief/ counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and news/ false-news no set of which amounts to debate terminating conclusive knowledge as explained by my third book and this website. Lord Sumption merely describes the belief-only governmental plans respecting Covid-19 as Plan A of March 3 which ‘concentrated on providing medical and other essential services and on advising rather than coercing the public’, Plan B as ‘an abrupt U-turn’ which ‘on March 18, announced the closure of schools’; ‘on March 20 closed pubs, cafes and restaurants’; and on March 23 ‘announced the full lockdown for which the Government had made no preparations at all’, and ‘without including a lockdown power in the Corona Virus Bill which was then going through Parliament’, an omission ‘it was forced to amend by questionable use of public health legislation designed to control the movements of infected people, not healthy ones’, which ‘even then took another three days to prepare while it pretended such regulations were in force when they were not’.
Lord Sumption, says that Sage ‘was unenthusiastic about closing down the hospitality industry, forbidding large gatherings or closing schools’; that to Sage ‘the real threat was to people over 70 with serious underlying medical conditions’; and that ‘since March 5 their advice was ‘to “cocoon” those with the disease and those in the same household’. Lord Sumption concludes that ‘this advice would have left the economically active population free to earn their livings and sustain the economy’; that ‘indiscriminate lockdown was a panic response to the now-notorious statistical model produced on March 16 by professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College’; that ‘panic responses leave little room for refection’; that ‘no serious consideration appears to have been given to the potentially catastrophic side effects’; that ‘the Imperial team did identify the main problem of a lockdown as its tendency to ‘push all transmission to after its lifting’; that ‘a vaccine would be needed to lift it’; that ‘its maintenance would involve “enormous” social and economic costs’; that ‘the Government nonetheless justified its Plan B as a temporary measure to delay the peak until the NHS had caught up’; that its Plan C of May 10 ‘dropped the NHS from its slogan’ but ‘instead of lifting the lockdown, merely nibbled at its edges’; that ‘Plan D of June 12 involved a general return to work’; but that ‘it was stymied by maintenance of the two-metre distancing rule’. I conclude that Lord Sumption merely continues the debate without resolving it; and that he is thus one of those he identifies in the above title. 25/6/20.
Article 14The Recovery Of Control.
The Spectator of 13/6/20 contained a Leader entitled ‘Take Back Control’ which I now analyse for my readers as I previously analysed the accompanying article by Toby Young. I start by quoting the Leader. It begins by stating that ‘there is a grim inevitability to the trickle of round-robin letters from scientists who feel aggrieved at the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis’; that ‘from the beginning the Prime Minister gave scientific advisers a very public platform at the heart of government’; and that he ‘realised that if it became necessary to impose the most severe restrictions on personal freedom any government has had to introduce in peacetime, it would help if the public could see policy was being shaped by experts who understood the threat’; but that ‘as time has gone on, it has become increasingly clear that there is no such thing as “the science” – a mythical set of incontrovertible truths’; that “scientists” are as divided as politicians and the general public on how to tackle Covid-19’; that ‘there is no better demonstration of this than the World Health Organisation’s about-turn this week over the issue of whether asymptomatic individuals – who some evidence suggests may make up 80 percent of cases- can spread the virus’; that ‘at first a WHO official said such transmission is very rare’; that ‘later the organisation rescinded this advice and said it wasn’t sure’; and that ‘meanwhile a Californian study claimed up to 45 per cent of Covid-19 cases may have been spread by asymptomatic people’. the Leader then asks, ‘how a government is supposed to make sense of this’ in concluding that ‘the extent of asymptomatic infection is crucial to the effectiveness of the test and trace system in which it has invested millions’; and that ‘science as yet can supply no definitive answers’.
Thus, according to the Leader ‘the essential problem is that as Covid-19 is a new virus’ which ‘we still know little about’; that ‘evidence is coming through in dribs and drabs much of it contradictory’; that ‘in the absence of real proof we have modelling’; that ‘the models are worlds apart in their conclusions’; and that ‘in imposing lockdown, the government followed the advice of a modelling team at Imperial College London, which estimated there would be 250,000 deaths if drastic measures were not taken’; that ‘had the government preferred the model of a rival team from Oxford which suggested the infection could have been widespread before lockdown was imposed, it could have come to a different conclusion and followed a path more similar to that of Sweden’; and that either could be said to have been informed by “the science”’.
This Leader goes on to state that ‘individual scientists have changed their minds: some drastically so’; that ‘over the past week Professor John Edmonds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a member of the Sage committee, has complained that the government is relaxing lockdown too early’; that ‘many lives could have been saved had restrictions begun a week earlier’; that ‘the same Professor Edmonds gave an interview on 13 March – ten days before the restrictions were imposed – in which he said: “ the only way to stop this epidemic is indeed to achieve herd immunity”’; and that if the government was late in imposing a lockdown it was because they were following the advice of Professor Edmonds and his colleagues’. Having made these comments the Leader states that ‘it suits the government’s opponents to try to establish a narrative that a reckless Prime Minister has ignored “the science” that ‘it helps too that No 10 struggles to defend itself’; that ‘the claim is still false’; and that ‘on the contrary, Boris Johnson’s fault has been to display too much reverence for epistemology and to take too little advice from other quarters, such as from economists who could have warned him of the debilitating effects of lockdown on the economy; from educationalists who could have warned of the damage it can do to a child’s life chances if formal education is withdrawn for a long period; from psychologists and social workers who could have warned about the effects of isolating the seven million Britons who live on their own’. It then goes on to reveal that ‘the bodies of some elderly people have been discovered a week or two after their deaths as a result of their usual pillars of community support having been removed by lockdown’.
In conclusion, this Leader states that ‘Johnson needs to take back control from the scientists who have no definitive answers’; that ‘the skills required of scientific adviser and Prime Minister are wholly different’; that ‘while the former has to drill down on one narrow question at a time, the latter has to balance all manner of competing demands from medical, to economic, to moral’; that ‘one difficult issue has been how much access to allow people to relatives who may be sick or dying’; and that ‘a blanket exclusion of visitors from all hospitals might be the safest policy, but hardly the most humane’. In contrast, I conclude that this Leader unconsciously shows ‘the science’ and politics itself to be merely debatable beliefs and opinions; and that this absence of knowledge will be corrected only when knowledge replaces belief and opinion in all specialist disciplines as this website intends. 21/6/20.
Article 13Protesters Have Brought Down The Lockdown.
In his Spectator article of 13/6/20 under the above title, the self-styled lockdown-sceptic Toby Young expressed his pleasure in observing the inconsistency of the activities of Black Lives Matter protesters and of those who introduced the Covid -19 lockdown. To focus on this inconsistency he asks, ‘why are police officers, who were so zealous about enforcing the social distancing rules until last week, now getting down on one knee to the BLM demonstrators? and why is Sadic Khan, who has been urging Londoners to remain in their homes to suppress the spread of the virus, expressing his solidarity with the “progressive” activists thronging White Hall and Hyde Park in their tens of thousands?’
He then goes on to say that ‘for months he has been blogging away at lockdownsceptics.org., pointing out that the public health argument for suspending our liberties on a scale never seen before, even in wartime, doesn’t hold water’; while excusing his failure to prevail by opining that ‘the case against lockdowns is often quite technical and so doesn’t have much cut-through with the general public’. However, further to illustrate his scepticism he reports that ‘he has written thousands of words on why he thinks the infection rate of Sars-CoV-2 has been over-estimated’; that ‘the virus is likely to kill fewer people world-wide than seasonal flu did in 2017-18’; that ‘he has published an article by an ex-Google software engineer criticising the code used in the apocalyptic Imperial College computer model that spooked Boris Johnson into imposing a full lockdown’; and that ‘he has even published two lengthy papers by Mikko Paunio of the University of Helsinki which pour scorn on the World Health Organisation’s dire warnings and claims that the populations of large cities, including London, are close to herd immunity’; but that ‘while some of these arguments have been taken up by other journalists, none of them have moved the dial’; and that ‘the British public has remained stubbornly attached to their own confinement, until now, that is’.
He then concludes that ‘many of the same politicians, public health panjandrums and celebrities who’ve been telling us that if we emerge from under our beds we risk a second spike and all of our sacrifices will have been for nothing, are now enthusiastically endorsing the BLM protests’; that ‘this is quite incredible, given that almost 150,000 people across the UK have participated in them so far’; and that the number will probably swell by tens of thousands over the weekend of 20-21/6/20’. He then asks, ‘how it can be that the virus poses such a threat that we are not allowed to hold weddings and funerals or send our kids to school, but it’s perfectly acceptable to attend mass rallies to protest about the killing of a man 4000 miles away?’. Again, he asks ‘why are the same progressive journalists who were so indignant about Dominic Cummings driving 260 miles to Durham with his sick wife and child, now publishing handy guides to attend the nearest demo’. He then opines that ‘the public will smell a rat and conclude correctly that “the science” on which the lockdown is based is not an uncontested body of knowledge which dictates a number of unambiguous government interventions including the insistence on people remaining two metres apart until a vaccine is available’; that ‘it is a constantly evolving hodgepodge of competing hypotheses (beliefs) a few of which will (might) turn out to be right and most of which will be wrong’; that ‘in this scientific potpourri, experts cherry-pick those theories (beliefs) that fit most closely with their ideological biases and ignore the others which explains why they can condemn anti-lockdown protestors as granny killers but applaud the BLM activists as brave warriors for social justice’; and that, ‘in other words, we no longer need to take them seriously’.
Thus, on the foregoing analysis, Toby Young concludes that ‘by insisting in the little people remaining in their homes unless they have “reasonable excuse” to be outside, the holier-than-thou elites found an opportunity to remind us of their role as custodians of our welfare’; but that ‘their “scientific” advice has now been trumped by another bossier, even more self-righteous form of virtue signalling – namely anti-racist sermonising’; that ‘the fact that the two are completely at odds with each other does not bother them in the slightest, so long as they can wag their fingers in our faces; and so long as they can turn puce at us, they are happy’. In contrast, however, my analysis of the foregoing topics is that “the science” is not science at all; that it is a transient belief-consensus arrived at by the on-going debate of opinion/counter-opinion; that all political debate and all media commentary thereon is never more than belief/counter-belief supported by inconclusive facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false-news; that this lamentable situation will be rectified only by public pressure for all beliefs to be replaced with conclusive knowledge wherever such is available, or by recognition of the need for its acquisition by the scientific method of designed experimentation which reality-validates beliefs (hypotheses) to positive knowledge, or reality-refutes them to negative knowledge, as these terms have been defined and thus definitively differentiated in my third book and in this website. 19/6/20.
Article 12 BScience Is Non-Debateable Knowledge.
The need for my Campaign for definitive knowledge to replace definitive belief in policy-making is more than adequately demonstrated by an article jointly authored by Sir Paul Nurse (a Nobel Laureate) and Lord Saatchi (a former Chairman of the Conservative Party) which appeared in the Daily Telegraph of 6/6/20 which fails to recognise the non-debateable nature of science; and which fails to recognise the presence of such debate as being conclusively indicative of the absence of science. This jointly-authored contribution to debate opened by stating that ‘science and politics is not a marriage made in heaven’; that ‘both now need a marriage counsellor’; that ‘difficult marriages lead to unhappy outcomes’; that ‘in this case, it may be the worst death toll in Europe and soon the worst recession ever’; that ‘the couple should fix their relationship as we move forward to the next stage of this long and painful journey’; and that these authors ‘have some advice for them’.
This ‘important’ advice is that the public should not ‘be treated as children’ because ‘they are grown-ups. These authors then accuse the politicians of having ‘the scientists centre-stage with their slides, charts, graphs and diagrams’; of ‘putting “the science” in the limelight’, and of ‘diluting responsibility over decision-making’. They then proceed to state that the politicians say they are following the “scientific evidence; that this is ‘Good’; but ‘they should let the public see it too’ because ‘people want clear accountability which means clarity about the governance arrangements and the demarcation of advisory versus decision-making roles’. Again they state that ‘the public wants to know who is in charge; and that ‘there are too many organisations, too many cooks in the kitchen’; that ‘communications are also important’; that ‘the scientific case should not be distorted by the messaging’; and that there should be more respect for plain English’ that “tested” does not mean tests in the post; that “died of virus” is different from “died with virus”; and that ‘scientists should not be used as cover for politicians who are ultimately responsible for policy’; that ‘sometimes politicians have to make difficult decisions; that ‘they may choose not to follow scientific advice’; ‘but if they do they should give their reasons for doing so; and that this ‘is part of being a leader’.
At this point, I observe for my readers that neither of these two commentators recognises that science is anything more than belief and opinion which can be accepted or rejected according to whether or not it complies with opinions or consensual beliefs of politicians or the voting public; that neither commentator recognises that science is incontestable knowledge which politicians and the public reject at their peril; that they do not recognise that “the science” to which they refer is no more than the belief-consensus of those offering it as advice; that they do not recognise that “the science” is not science, though they go on to state that ‘ politicians need to understand the uncertainty in “the science” and to communicate it; that when there are uncertainties, there are speculations’; that where speculation turns out to be wrong, it is important to admit it; and that ‘otherwise members of the public stop believing you’.
In contrast, I say that there is no uncertainty about definitive knowledge; that science treats beliefs and opinions as hypotheses for submission to the cause-effect experimentation which reality-validates or reality-refutes hypotheses to positive or negative knowledge as I explained in my third book and in the Preamble to this Website; that scientific knowledge is thus non-debateable in total contrast to political beliefs and opinions which are endlessly debatable and are only temporarily resolvable to one or other transient belief-consensus by submission to a vote which can always be reversed by further debate and recourse to another vote. 10/6/20
Article 12Government Needs To Treat Us As Grown-Ups.
The Daily Telegraph of 6/6/20 published an article under the above title by Sir Paul Nurse (Nobel Laureate) and Lord Saatchi (a former chairman of the Conservative Party) which opened by stating that ‘science and politics’ is ‘not a marriage made in heaven’; that ‘both now need a marriage counsellor’; that ‘difficult marriages lead to unhappy outcomes’; that in this case, it may be the worst death toll in Europe and the worst recession ever’; that ‘the couple should fix their relationship as we move forward to the next stage of this long and painful journey’ and that they (the authors) ‘have some advice for them’, to the effect that ‘importantly’ they should ‘not treat the public like children because they are grown-ups’. Accordingly the authors state that ‘the politicians have the scientists centre-stage with their slides, charts, graphs and diagrams; and that they ‘put the science in the limelight’, thus ‘diluting responsibility over decision-taking’.
These authors then observe that ‘the politicians are following the science’; that ‘this is good’; but that ‘they (the politicians) should let the public see it too’; that ‘people want clear accountability which means clarity about the governance arrangements and the demarcation of advisory versus decision-making roles’; that ‘the public want to know who is in charge’; and that ‘there are too many organisations, too many cooks in the kitchen’. These authors go on to claim that ‘communications are also important’; that ‘the scientific case should not be “distorted” by the messaging’; that there should be ‘more respect for plain English’; that for example ‘testing does not mean in the post’; that ‘died of the virus is different from died with the virus’; that ‘scientists should not be used as cover for politicians who are ultimately responsible for policy making’. Again, the authors claim that ‘sometimes politicians have to make difficult decisions’; that ‘they may choose not to follow scientific advice’; but that ‘if they do they should make that clear and give their reasons for doing so’, this being ‘part of being a leader’.
These authors then state that ‘scientific understanding of Covid-19 is uncertain and tentative’; that ‘it will change with time’; that ‘though communicating uncertainty is difficult, it is essential if trust is to be maintained’; that ‘uncertainties must be identified and assessed when “scientific” advice is given’; that ‘uncertainties have many causes’; that ‘they arise from problems with the limitation, analysis and interpretation of data‘; that ‘the epidemiological models developed to guide us through the pandemic sometimes had 500,000 dead, and the health service in collapse with no hospital beds for the sick’; and that ‘the assumptions made in them, the range of probabilities associated with different outcomes, the effects of corrective measures, and the range of other models should be explained’. At this point, the authors state that ‘it is the same for the famous R number which is now driving whether we remain in our leave the lockdown’; that ‘it should be explained that “the R number” is an estimate based on modelling’ that ‘it is not a direct measurement and is subject to uncertainty’; and that perhaps ‘the politicians let alone the public do not understand this’. The authors then state that ‘it is not enough for politicians to say they are following the science’; that ‘they need to understand the uncertainty in the science and to communicate it; that ‘when there are uncertainties, there are speculations’; that ‘some are crazy. such as ingesting disinfectant is good for you and 5G towers are bad for you’; that ‘these should be simply stamped on especially when uttered by political leaders’ while ‘others are plausible, but turn out to be wrong’; and that ‘when speculation does turn out to be wrong, it is important to admit it otherwise the public will stop believing you’.
Further to the foregoing, the authors state that ‘trust has to be earned if the public are to have confidence in their political leaders and the scientists advising them’; that ‘trust is only possible if the scientific advice is open, transparent, and properly communicated’; that ‘this allows the evidence on which the advice is given to be publicly assessed’; that ‘being open allows other scientists to challenge the evidence and its interpretation; that ‘this is required when the knowledge is tentative and uncertain’; that ‘there needs to be challenge and debate between scientists to advance knowledge’; that ‘this is how science works’; that ‘differences in opinion should not be hidden, but forced into the open’; that ‘the whole interface between science and public policy needs to ensure public trust’; that ‘we need a more mature relationship between scientists and policy makers’; and that more humility, more honesty, more communication and more trust are all needed now’. From the foregoing, I conclude as can my readers, that these authors present science as the opinion/counter-opinion or transient belief-consensus of a debating society as is politics itself; that in not knowing how science actually works, they fail to recognise it as our sole source of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; and that in writing as they do, they demonstrate its absence from their commentary, and they thus fail to recognise the need for its acquisition, if not already available, to replace belief and opinion as I advocate in this website. 16/6/20.
Article 11No.10 Is Hiding Behind Sage Pseudo-Science.
I was much encouraged by an article in The Daily Telegraph of 21/5/20 under the above title, in which Sherelle Jacobs became the first journalist in my experience to refer to ‘the science’ as pseudoscience. She began her article by stating that ‘Downing Street’s use of Covid pseudo-science to justify lockdown could be the greatest scandal of our time’; that ‘granted, the initial decision to shut down the country was taken in a gormless panic of bug-ridden modelling and media hysteria’; but that ‘since then, the Government’s strategy has become more sinister’. She went on to claim that ‘there’s almost a whiff of superstition about No. 10’s secretive “evidence-based” approach to lifting lockdown’ that ‘Ministers are peddling an esoteric assortment of “precautionary” measures, from a scientifically baseless two-metre rule to a pointless 14-day holiday quarantine;’. that ‘they are obscure and enigmatic on risks and trade-offs’ and that ‘in the daily press-conferences they continue to bewitch an already hyper-paranoid public with lurid graphs and charts which propagate bogus science’. A very thorough criticism, indeed. Furthermore, she states that ‘No. 10 has failed to publish the full advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage)’ which ‘has apparently been so influential in its decision-making’; that ‘it is worth taking in the full weight of this particular point’; that ‘we are trapped under virtual house arrest; that ‘judging by the spiralling care-homes tragedy, this may not even have been effective at preventing deaths; that ‘we are trapped in a lockdown which may yet trigger thousands of non-Covid tragedies and wreck millions of lives for decades to come’; and that ‘the Government refuses to publish in its entirety the “scientific advice” which informed this seismic decision, while failing to share with us the up-to-date recommendations which supposedly justify the lockdown’.
She goes on to state that ‘it gets murkier still, as the goalposts slide from “flattening the curve” to “driving down the R number, the Government has yet to share with us whether our basic national goal is suppression or management of the virus’. Then again, she suggests that ‘this secrecy may be a hint of what is really going on’; that ‘perhaps No. 10 is reluctant to publish Sage documents because these might expose a scandalous truth’; which is that, ‘in the absence of reliable uncontested science, it has pursued a political strategy, selectively exploiting ‘scientific’ advice and using Sage as a smokescreen’; that after all, it doesn’t take a genius to realise the political logic of the Government’s move to ditch herd immunity and ‘its extreme caution over lifting lockdown, as a care-home inquiry looms’ while the public fixates on a second wave.’ Again, she claims that ‘it doesn’t take an “expert” to twig that the “science” being peddled by No. 10 is guff’; that ‘its move to traveller quarantine makes no sense at this point in the pandemic, given the UK no longer has a lower infection rate than many EU countries’; that the two-metre rule is a rule of thumb unsubstantiated by “scientific evidence” – unlike the one-metre rule used in other countries that is at least informed by studies in clinical settings’; that ‘it is further discredited by the lack of agreement over the extent to which Covid is airborne’; that ‘despite the fact that “driving down the R number is now at the forefront of the nation’s collective mission, No. 10 still won’t tell us which R number Sage is providing’. ‘Is it the basic R number which tells us how many people a Covid-positive person infects’ or simply the number of contacts; that ‘if the former, it assumes everyone is susceptible to the disease, no contact being immune’; and that if the latter, ‘from where exactly is Sage getting this data?’
Again, she states that ‘we know even less about Sage’s deliberations on the likelihood of a second wave’; that ‘this is a vital question, not least because Covid-19 seems very different from the pandemic viruses which inform second wave theories’; that, ‘in particular, Corona virus, in the fashion of a seasonal outbreak, has disproportionately affected the elderly; and that ‘pandemic viruses from Spanish flu to swine flu over the last hundred years have tended to disproportionately affect younger people’; and that ‘this is why Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine supports the theory that corona virus is a late seasonal effect on the back of a mild seasonal influenza-like illness’. Thus she asks ‘whether or not Sage has considered this possibility’. She concludes that ‘No. 10’s ruse of “following the science” slowly unravels with each day’ and asks ‘when the gig is up, can it shift to a more honest and nuanced position after brainwashing the public so effectively with its one-sided account of this pandemic’. I can only respond to the foregoing by saying that such mishandling can only be rectified in this and in all other policy areas, by the replacement belief-only policy-making with knowledge-only alternatives as advocated by my third book and by this website; and that Sherelle Jacobs has unconsciously done more to encourage the public to effect this replacement than any other media commentator thus far.
31/5/20
Article 10Sage Advice.
To illustrate the ubiquitous failure of media and public to understand the nature of science, I hereby quote the leading article which appeared under the above title in The Spectator of 23/5/20. It opened by stating that ‘from the outset of the Covid-19 crisis, the government was determined that scientists would play a central and highly visible role’; and that the Prime Minister set the tone in his first daily press briefing, when he addressed the nation flanked by the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser; and that the message was clear: this was a government that cherished and not rejected experts’. It then went on to state that they were not going to be kept in a back room, but would be present to explain the reasoning behind all policy-making’. At this point in my quotations from the leading article, I interject to observe that not all experts act as scientists, though they may self-style themselves as such; and that this is continually revealed in courts of law when both prosecution and defence call such expert witnesses in support of their respective opinions/counter-opinions while science provides non-debatable knowledge and consequently does not debate opinions with counter-opinions for elective choice.
Nonetheless, the leading article goes on to state that ‘this new relationship between government and the scientific establishment risks going sour’ that ‘Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College advised the government that Covid-19, if left un-confronted, would take 500,000 lives: almost as many as are killed each year by all other causes put together’ while ‘lockdown would limit this to about 20,000’; that ‘Ministers started to publish charts comparing the UK favourably with other nations; and that ‘they stopped doing this when it became clear Britain had somehow ended up with more Covid-19 deaths than any other European country’The leading article then asks ’what went wrong’ and responds that ‘it’s not so much that Professor Ferguson’s advice was incorrect: it almost certainly was, but that everyone, in the early stages, was simply making their best guess’; and that ‘Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer would regularly remind us of how little we knew for sure’. In this vein the leading article goes on to state that ‘Ministers kept repeating that they were following the best scientific advice, yet that advice, mysteriously, was usually kept confidential, perhaps because it simply laid out options and emphasised how little certainty their actually was’. Indeed, the leading article states that ‘scientists stressed that decisions were made by politicians, who must also gauge the effects of non-scientific issues such as school closures, economic hardship, and lives damaged by both lockdown and the virus’.
The leading article then quotes Sir Adrian Smith, president-elect of the Royal Society as summing up his colleagues frustration in saying that ‘politicians must make the ultimate decisions; and that there is danger in politicians saying that they are simply doing what scientists tell them’. The leading article then reinforces this position by asserting that ‘advisers advise and politicians decide; that is what we pay them for; and that they ought not to hide behind the advice they receive whether it is from a paid scientific adviser or a doorman at No.10’; and that ‘if this advice is not published’ we have ‘a form of black box democracy, where decisions are taken on advice which is never shared or scrutinised’; and that ‘such an approach is a recipe for bad decisions’. For the benefit of the author of the leading article, of Sir Adrian Smith and of their readerships, I assert that there is nothing wrong with politicians doing what scientists tell them provided what they tell them is non-debatable scientific knowledge as I have defined it in my third book and in this website. There nothing wrong with acting on reality-validated knowledge and nothing right with acting on belief. Political action only comes to the fore when the issue is one of opinion/counter-opinion which I have shown to be no more than belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence, or news/ false-news, no set of which is debate terminating conclusive knowledge, though such opinion is all too often presented as science by those who ought to recognise and reject it as unreliable pseudoscience.
As to the term ‘advice’, I define this as opinion which recognises the existence of the counter-opinion which it seeks to overcome by emphasising selected facts and suppressing counter-facts by the long-established tricks of rhetoric. Thus, I hereby declare that such ‘advice’ has always been proffered and erroneously accepted as science by politicians when it suits them to do so; that, as I personally recall, scientists who refuse to comply with this means of acquiring influence never get a look-in; and that when I acted as a referee for scientific journals, the process involved ensuring that the experimental method of acquiring the stated result was fully adequate to its verification while the refereeing of pseudoscience consists of agreeing with the proffered result despite the absence of any experimentation as is ubiquitously observable in much of what is now uncritically and erroneously accepted as science.
14/6/20
Article 9The Daily Ministerial Briefings On UK Response To Covid-19.
In each and every broadcast of these Daily Briefings, ministers attempted to assure the public that they acted on the advice of their science advisory group (Stag), while until the week beginning Monday 25/5/20, their flanking advisors did nothing to cast doubt on this assurance. However, in that week such doubt was cast when in responding to a question from a media representative, one of these advisors refused to answer on the grounds that what would have been his response had not yet been approved either by the advisory group or by ministers, thus suggesting that neither the Stag nor the cabinet were dealing with definitive incontrovertible science but were engaged in the usual political debate of opinion/counter-opinion i.e. of belief/counter-belief. Again, in this same week, another of the flanking advisors responded to a question by saying that while she could not say what the policy might turn out to be, she could say what the advice would be, thus again revealing that whatever is alleged to be ‘the science’, the policy is decided by debating belief/counter-belief to one or other belief-consensus in the general and ubiquitous failure to recognise the absence of conclusive knowledge.
However, to enable such knowledge to replace belief-consensus, I recall that my third book (published in 2010) definitively differentiated the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad for the first time ever; that belief (hypothesis) can be converted to positive or negative knowledge only by observing its compatibility or incompatibility with reality; that this reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge has been the basis of our craftsmanship from time immemorial and of our science and engineering from the seventeenth century onwards; that the injunction ‘to do unto others and you would have them do to you’ is the knowledge which harmonises our innate selfishness with our innate need for cooperative social cohesion as the group-species we are; and that our rejection of the foregoing differentiations causes our politics to be no more than the endless debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and news/false-news, no set of which ever amounts to conclusive knowledge. Thus, on the basis of my third book, let us now consider the specific benefits of replacing belief with knowledge in respect of our current Covid-19 problem and of much else besides.
As to this consideration, the voting public must recognise and correct its on-going failure to differentiate knowledge from belief by reference to the presence/absence of my co-defined reality-evaluation of belief (hypothesis), and its corresponding failure to recognise the need for reality-validated cause-effect science to replace all of the belief-selected ‘cause-effect’ parameters of pseudoscience. Again, correspondingly, it must recognise that reality-validated cause-effect science is not debateable because it terminates debate with its conclusive knowledge; that non-cause-effect pseudoscience arbitrarily selects its correlated ‘cause-effect’ parameters on the basis of belief-only and is thus endlessly and futilely debatable to one or other transient belief-consensus; and that ministers and the members of Stag are currently engaged in pseudoscience rather than in science while other pseudo scientists who are not members of Stag may well favour other beliefs which are also without reality-validation or reality-refutation by the experimentation which differentiates science from pseudoscience.
As to the question and answer sessions which follow each daily briefing, I invite my readers to recognise that neither the questioners nor the responders recognise that they are simply continuing the futility of belief/counter-belief debate in which facts and counter-facts contend for attention. Indeed, in some cases the selected facts have no identifiable counter-facts. Thus, when a questioner asks why the government did not supply the required levels of PPE or why it permitted the NHS to discharge hospital patients back to their care-homes without testing them for the presence of Covid-19, there are no citeable facts counter to such failures because these are already factually documented. Again, while there was much initial talk in the media about achieving herd immunity by letting the infection spread freely to achieve it, there was clearly no recognition of the likely numbers to be hospitalised and to die in securing it, and no provision made for these numbers, the Nightingale hospitals having been provided only after such a need had passed with hospitalisations and deaths already diminishing. Indeed, I invite my readers to share my amazement at the failure of politicians and their ‘scientific’ advisers to share with the public ‘the science’ on which their policies are supposedly based, and at their failure to answer specific questions with specific references to this ‘science’. Each evening, I waited in vain to hear a questioner respond to the invitation to ask a further question, by saying that he or she had no further questions, the one already asked having as yet received no answer.
7/7/20.
Article 8Is There Any Science In ‘The Science’ Alluded To By Policy-Makers?
Ministers and government officials continually refer to the guidance of ‘The Science’ with which they always comply in their Covid-19 policy-making. However while they fail to reveal the details of this ‘science’, their audience is entitled to have doubts as to whether it is science or merely political belief. These doubts are reinforced when we are told that this science is based on a mathematical model. However, my readers know or ought to know by now, that mathematical equations do not of themselves produce new knowledge; that mathematical analysis merely rearranges mathematical equations to make the knowledge which they contain applicable to other tasks; and that this analysis proceeds through a sequential series of equality signs which confirms that nothing is being added or subtracted in any of the sequential transitions of the initial equation. In contrast, however, many press articles reveal that the model which underpins ‘the science’ which underpins official policy respecting the spread of Covid-19 and the shutdown response to limit this spread has been shown to give differing results to the same inputs and differing results when run on different computers; that none of the papers discussed by the scientific committee on which ministers rely have yet been made public; and that the public is thus entitled to treat ‘this ‘Science’ as pseudoscience on the basis of my definitive differentiation thereof.
As I have demonstrated elsewhere in the main body of this website and in the articles of this section of it, science is the body of cause-effect knowledge which as been accumulated by the reality-evaluation of beliefs (hypotheses) to positive or negative knowledge through use of the designed experimentation which eliminates all possible causes other than the one being thus reality-evaluated; and that instead of proceeding thus, pseudoscience believes the cause which it has arbitrarily selected to be of the cause of the effect; and that consequently it conducts no experiment designed to reveal the actual cause of the said effect before proceeding to alter the magnitudes of the former to measure the corresponding changes in the later and from this relationship to acquire the mathematical equation which relates the one to the other in such a way as to enable the latter to be calculated form the former and vice versa, for ever after.
As to the science of Covid-19 we know that infectious diseases are spread by close contact between the infected and the as yet non-infected, but we also know that not all such contacts result in a transfer the infection; and that the rate of transfer will rise at a rate dependent on the number already infected in the early stages of transfer and on the number yet to be infected in the later stages of transfer; that the rate will rise in the early stages and decline in the later stages; and that isolation of those as yet unaffected will prevent their infection. Thus, we know from the recorded diagnoses and death rates that its spread-related increase in the early stages of the lockdown must have been dependent on the large numbers then open to infection; and that at the time of writing this article (19/5/20) the number of new infections was declining, though we were not told whether this decline was due to the lockdown itself, or to the reducing number still open to infection-transfer. Accordingly, we didn’t know as of 19/5/20 which of these possibilities was and is operative, or the relative extents to which both of them might be. However, ‘The Science’ appears to have concluded that the currently reducing rate of diagnoses and of deaths is due entirely to the lockdown, but it also appears to believe that tipping all of the previously isolated individuals into the pool of infection will not cause them to be infected to the extent of raising the diagnosis and death rates a second time.
I hope not, but ‘The Science’ appears not to foresee that the lockdown which it believes reduced the infection and death rates will not increase them again on its removal. If they do increase again we will know that the lockdown was not the sole cause of the earlier reductions in infection and death rates; and that it needlessly risks destruction of our current economic system. Again, while we are considering the failures of ‘The Science’ on which the lockdown policy was based, we might include its failure to provide sufficient PPE for hospitals and care homes; to prevent the discharge of patients from hospitals to care homes without testing whether they were free of the infection it would otherwise introduce to these homes. Furthermore, we may recollect that while much was said about infection testing, we were never told what this testing was expected to achieve. After all, it was clearly possible to diagnose Covid-19 without testing. However, what science could have done with such testing would have been to sample test in specific areas to determine the ratio of infected to non-infected individuals in the samples and thus to understand the progress of the decease through the population, which coupled with contact tracking would have provided knowledge on the efficiency of transmission from the infected to the as yet non-infected, more usefully than does the R value deduced from the doubtful modelling program which has demonstrated itself to have failed to prevent the above policy-failures.
Article 7The Pseudoscientific Belief Which Is Anthropogenic Global Warming.
While science reality-validates beliefs as to cause and effect to positive knowledge of cause and effect or reality-refutes them to negative knowledge thereof by conclusive experimentation, pseudoscience randomly selects a cause for an effect and correlates these two parameters numerically or statistically without conducting any experimentation to demonstrate that the former is actually the cause of the latter. Again, while science thus relates these parameters by a mathematical equation for prediction of the magnitude of the latter from that of the former or vice versa, pseudoscience selects the cause which it wants to belief is the cause, rather than any other which it could just as easily have chosen. Having listened to a lecture by a Royal Society Fellow who attributed a fall in plankton numbers to increasing oil pollution levels in the western approaches to the English Channel, I privately asked him as he circulated afterwards within his audience, whether he had considered any other parameters as the cause of his observed effect, such as, for example, the then current increase in the issuance of television licences. He coloured slightly before turning away. He did not, and could, not attempt a reply.
As to parameter selection, the believers in anthropogenic global warming have selected atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from the burning of fossil fuels as the cause of global warming because they want it to be so, not because they have reality-validated this belief to positive knowledge by suitably designed experimentation. Of course, I agree that it is not always possible to conduct conclusive experimentation, but, I do contend that in such cases science always has recourse to whatever existing knowledge may be capable of supporting a belief or questioning it pending its being reality-validated or reality-refuted by specific experimentation at some future time. As to anthropogenic global warming we know by the experimentation of Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa (1401-64) that the combined weight of a potted plant increased with the growth of the plant; that the increase could not have been acquired from the earth in the pot because this would have been a transfer of internal weight which would not have increased the observed weight; and that the combined increase could have come only from the surrounding air. He subsequently wrote a book on use of the balance in what I now refer to as the investigation of cause and effect by experimentation.
Later, Jan Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644) returned to the experiments of Nicholas de Cusa, coined the word gas to describe that state of matter, confirmed that air had weight and that it was a mixture of different gases, one of which is carbon dioxide which turned out to be the one which caused plants to increase in weight as they grow. Later, it was shown by experiment that without atmospheric carbon dioxide there would be no plants; that plants are little more than embodiments of carbon dioxide, and when they die and decay or are combusted as wood, coal or oil, this carbon dioxide is returned to the atmosphere to be recycled as further plants and so on ad infinitum. Indeed, in so far as animals eat plants and other animals, they too are embodiments of carbon dioxide which on death and decay return this carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for such further recycling. Thus, we know that our anthropogenic recycling of carbon dioxide by our combustion of fossil fuels recycles that which would be recycling anyway had it not been fossilised in the absence of air (oxygen) by intervening geological processes.
As to geological and astronomical processes, we also know that these too have causes and effects; that these in turn have causes and effects; that all of them are open to consideration and to investigation by direct observation or purposefully designed experimentation; and that pseudoscience is counter to all such progress. Thus, we know that the global warming which removed the glaciers which, for example, carved out the mountain and loch scenery of Scotland, was initially attributed to variations in the Earth’s orbit round the Sun and to variation in the angle of tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis by such as J.L. Lagrange (1736-84) who also showed that the gravitational influence of one member of the solar system on another depends not only on their relative positions and masses but also on the dimensions and relative inclinations of their orbits and that the latter produce small-scale orbital disturbances which, exhibit periodic cycles which were/are cumulative, and either self-correcting (periodic) or non self-correcting (secular). Thus, we ought to consider whether such variations could account for variations in the earth’s climate, and because we already know that the north polar ice which covered the British Isles began to melt long before we humans began to burn fossil fuels at industrial levels, and because we already know that sea levels have been rising since before the prehistoric inhabitants of these Isles arrived dry-footed by walking across what is now the English Channel, we ought to consider the current belief in anthropogenic global warming as the pseudoscience which it so obviously is.
16/6/20.