Hi, thank you. Please pass on my best wishes to Kevin, Clodagh and the children.
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The problem is that people assume science is a truth-seeking machine. Actually it is a consensus-building machine. They are very different.
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If I could frame that tweet, I would. Beautifully put. Call me old-fashioned, but I never regarded consensus alone as science at all. I recall the maths version: 1+1=3 because enough of us say so? Yeah...right!
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Thanks. In practice scientific 'peer-review' means a few Profs at the top edit (aka gate-keep) the journals and vet grant applications. If one wanted to influence the direction of science, influencing these 'key opinion leaders' is all one would need to do.
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That's a belief you & I share. The power is v concentrated. As in life, a few largely dictate the agenda to the many. Thread was long enough, otherwise I'd have looked up a damning review of the peer review system itself I saw recently too. Another gaping hole in the science net.
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Yes. And it's not just peer review. Even just holding certain opinions, about the efficacy of antidepressants or the usefulness of statins, or the safety of vaccines for example, are verboten in academic medical research.
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It's funny, even though there's nothing that really surprises me in there, to hear someone in your position express it so clearly, is very striking. Thank you once more.
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You're welcome. It's a strange double-think. Everyone knows, for example, that antidepressants are not much better than placebo. Yet we persist with the fiction that they work and write papers and grant bids that kind of implicitly assume that they do work.
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I must make clear that it's not malice or intentional deception. More a feeling that this is the best we have at the present time.
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Hence her comment on my twt. She has autistic children but wants ppl to believe they were made autistic by childhood inoculations