The General Public Should Not Trust Scientists - Here's Why

The article You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster In Japan -- Here's Why from businessinsider.com was published just after the earthquake that destroyed the nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan. The article quotes from an essay by a research scientist at MIT who wrote:

I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.

The article includes the scientist's full essay which gives a long explanation of his reasoning. According to an article in newscientist.com, the essay

... echoed across Facebook and Twitter, where CNBC's Jim Cramer recommended it as the "best piece on the nuke issue". The high-profile sites The Telegraph and Discover cited the essay and Business Insider reproduced it in full, with a headline proclaiming, "You Can Stop Worrying About A Radiation Disaster In Japan – Here's Why".

The newscientist.com article also said that "The blog adaptation of" the essay "had gone viral, gaining more than 50,000 views."

However, since that time, the world has learned that the essay was wrong. In Fukushima vs Chernobyl vs Three Mile Island posted on skeptoid.com we learn the true amount of radiation released at Fukushima:

Where does Fukushima fit between those two? At the high end, about 500 PBq. That's about a million times more than Three Mile Island, and about a third of Chernobyl.

Another article on skeptoid, Are Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Really Over?, also says:

Obviously, the situation at Fukushima is distressing, and not at all something that should be shrugged off.

More evidence that the general public should not trust scientists are the scientific papers that overstate the problems caused by the radiation leaked. All The Best, Scientifically Verified, Information on Fukushima Impacts in deepseanews.com discusses one flawed study:

Are babies in the U.S. dying as a direct result of Fukushima radiation? Michael Moyer is a writer and editor at Scientific American and writes about these concerns (Post 1, Post 2). The first post deals with an unpublished study where “researchers” cherry picked data to fit their agenda. This group revised their analyses and now have a “published study” that is so fundamentally flawed it’s not worth mentioning. Take Home: Babies in the U.S. are not dying from Fukushima radiation. Favorite Quotes: “A check [of the data] reveals that the authors’ statistical claims are critically flawed—if not deliberate mistruths…picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics.” But my all time favorite quote is this baby that comes across as a stern gentlemanly slap to the face, “No attempt is made at providing systematic error estimates, or error estimates of any kind. No attempt is made to catalog any biases that may have crept into the analysis, though a cursory look finds biases a-plenty (the authors are anti-nuclear activists unaffiliated with any research institution). The analysis assumes that the plume arrived on U.S. shores, spread everywhere, instantly, and started killing people immediately. It assumes that the “excess” deaths after March 20 are a real signal, not just a statistical aberration, and that every one of them is due to Fukushima radiation.”

The article Study: Fukushima Radiation Has Already Killed 14,000 Americans in Washingtonblog.com gives an overview of the scientific controversy. The article includes these quotes:

Pediatrician Helen Caldicott said recently:

May I say that North America has received quite a large fallout itself.

***

We’re going to see an incredible increase in cancer, leukemia, and — down the time track — genetic disease. Not just in Japan but in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly North America.

Caldicott also wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed:

Children are innately sensitive to the carcinogenic effects of radiation, fetuses even more so. Like Chernobyl, the accident at Fukushima is of global proportions. Unusual levels of radiation have been discovered in British Columbia, along the West Coast and East Coast of the United States and in Europe, and heavy contamination has been found in oceanic waters.

The article Fukushima Radiation Damages Thyroid Glands Of California Babies published in collective-evolution.com describes, a "... study published in the peer-reviewed Open Journal of Pediatrics has found that radioactive Iodine from Fukushima has caused a significant increase in hypothyroidism among babies in California."

If the scientists themselves can't agree, what basis does the ordinary citizen have for faith in the pronouncements of scientists?

Related Articles:

• The History of Important Scientific Discoveries Initially Rejected and Ridiculed
  
• George Orwell: "... the scientists themselves would benefit by a little education." Darwin agrees.
  
• Study Suggests More People Willing to Believe in ESP When Told It's Been Scientifically Disproven
  
• The Science Scam
  
• Charlatans, Demagogues, and Scientists
  

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Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Charlatans, Demagogues, and Scientists

Charlatans, Demagogues, and Scientists

You often hear people complaining about spiritual scams such as charlatans who pretend to be psychic, or religious leaders who pervert religion to suit their thirst for power. But one of the biggest scams is hardly even recognized. This is the scam perpertrated by scientists who deny the reality of ESP and the afterlife. The evidence for ESP and the afterlife is overwhelming and the claims of materialist pseudoskeptics to the contrary don't stand up to a close examination of the facts. What could be more important to science than the huge gaps in scientific understanding revealed by ESP and the afterlife? What could be more important to humanity than the knowledge that we survive death? What would the world be like if everyone understood that they survive death and they are responsible for what they did while living on the earth? - The world would be a much better place. When you consider this, you see that Science is a huge scam, has done immense harm, and is a colossal and repeated failure to itself and to humanity.

This scientific scam was first perpetrated when philosophical naturalism was incorporated into mainstream science and it has been perpetuated ever since by scientists and other materialists who claim moral authority from science.

The scientific scam makes other scams possible.

The charlatans who pretend to be psychic are small time operators. Compared to the scientific scam they haven't influenced society significantly. But the scientific scam is also partly responsible for the harm done by these charlatans who pretend to be psychic. Because scientists dissuade people from believing in psychic phenomena, they prevent the government from developing a licensing process for psychics like there is for doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and electricians. By pushing the psychic industry out of the mainstream and into the shadows, they make it harder for people to get reliable information on the industry. By calling everyone a fraud they obscure the fact that psychics are genuine and the charlatans are only pretending to psychic.

If scientists had allowed themselves to take up the study of psychic phenomena such as mediumship the way Nobel prize winning scientists such as Charles Richet, Pierre Curie, and Marie Currie, and many other scientists such as Sir William Crookes, wanted to, much harm would have been avoided.

Scientism exonerates religion.

Religious leaders who pervert religion to quench their thirst for power do immense harm. However the fact that the science scam perverts science into the religion of Scientism shows that you can't blame religion in general for the abuses that some people perpetrate. No one would blame the scientific method for the lies of Scientism and so no one can blame the phenomenon of religion in general for the problems caused by those who abuse religious belief.

Scientists who are the priests of Scientism, who put themselves up as intermediaries between the public and Truth, use science to control people, to keep them from accessing other sources of information. Mediums, near-death experiences, aliens, alien technology, and alien contactees are all sources of truth that threaten scientist's power. Similarly, scientists try to suppress information about intelligent design and even unorthodox theories like cold fusion. In order to protect their position of power, the priests of Scientism are doing everything they can to suppress access to sources of information that will demonstrate current science is incorrect or incomplete.

There are many people who dislike anything that has to do with religion and look to science to protect society from the harm they think religion does. However the same evil they claim is inherent in religion is found in Scientism. They can't blame religion for the problems they complain of because similar problems result from science and from political philosophies. The problem is not religion or science, or political philosophy, the problem is human nature. Power hungry demagogues will use whatever ideology happens to be convenient to gain power over others. The fact that science is perverted into Scientism by people who want to maintain a position of power is the proof of this.

A religion, Spiritualism, has succeeded where Science has failed: in bringing the truth of psychic phenomena and the afterlife to the public.

I have been a member of several Spiritualist churches. I never encountered cold readers, hot readers, or any other type of charlatans at these churches. The mediums I saw giving demonstrations at Spiritualist church services were expected to give veridical evidence of survival. If a medium did not have the ability to give meaningful, verifiable evidence that they were communicating with a spirit, they wouldn't be working for the church.

I know some people would like to blame Spiritualism for the charlatans pretending to be mediums and who have committed fraud, but that is a double standard. No other field is blamed for the charlatans who pretend to be practitioners. Even though science is abused by those who turn it into Scientism, science is not discredited by fraud. Scientific fraud only creates stronger arguments for stricter adherence to scientific principles, it does not discredit those principles. By the same logic, it is incorrect to blame Spiritualism for the charlatans who pretend to be mediums.

In the realm of psychic phenomena, Spiritualism is a clear case where an organized religion has outshone any other segment of society. Spiritualists have kept alive the knowledge of psychic phenomena, they have taught many people to develop and use psychic abilities, they have certification programs for mediums and healers, they help educate the community about psychic phenomena through lectures, demonstrations and classes, they provide demonstrations of mediumship and healing services to the community for free (or for whatever one puts in the collection basket).

Compared to the religion of Spiritualism, science is a fraud and a failure. In an area where Science has failed miserably and has been a force for ignorance and deceit, Spiritualism has been a force for reason, truth and light.

Copyright © 2013 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.