107 Comments
Jan 5·edited Jan 5Liked by Christopher F. Rufo

Just anecdotally as a former grad student at Harfraud, data contrivance and model "overfitting" is ubiquitous, especially in anything "social science" oriented. I can't tell you how many graduate theses I saw that were fundamentally verificationist in methodology: only supporting data is cited (or sorted) to verify a sloppy thesis. Only falsifiable hypotheses are scientifically valid (which is not to say they are true however! Just feasibly testable.) But postmodern verificationist thesis "research" (as it's always called) is just ideologically driven garbage. Data is almost like, an aesthetic at this point – the fetish of graphical modeling and crap; Mattias Desmet hits this nail on the head in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Both academia and corporations are obsessed with the aesthetic of data; big surprise. When so much has been cleverly rationalized with sophisticated modeling nowadays then you have to trust your nose: if it smells like bullshit, it probably is. The 21st century has to be navigated by scent way more than I'd like!

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From "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" by Mattias Desmet: Totalitarianism is "gaining strength and speed with each generation--from Jacobins to the Nazis and Stalinists..." I agree that today's progressivism is a form of totalitarianism. The two main forms of totalitarianism--communism and fascism--are virtually identical; Hitler was a socialist who borrowed many of his ideas from Karl Marx. My recent "2026" Substack discusses "The Ideology that Captured Our Culture" at https://2026.substack.com/p/the-ideology-that-captured-our-culture

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Thank you for this clear explanation. The Nazis were National Socialists and they had heavy control over the country.

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Exactly. The Nazi Party was officially named the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Today, progressives would be more appropriately named the National Neo-Marxist Party and they have heavy control over the U.S.

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Great book

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Maybe Bill Ackman and Len Blavatnik are Nazis.

Look into it. Or they might be something else.

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The bigger problem in my opinion is that studies based on data and "curated" with p-values often are not replicated. If a finding is valid then others should be able to use a different but plausible analytical approach, or apply the same methods to new data under different settings, to see if the results still stand. That is why honest researchers share their data and computational code with others (some journals already require this). Although there has been a lot of talk about the replication crisis, the professional reward for researchers who replicate the studies of others is not great.

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You're spot on – I totally agree.

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"Ideologically driven garbage" sums it up nicely.

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I think you give them too much credit calling it ideology. I believe it's driven by avarice and niggardlyness!

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Many thx; well explained!

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She was hired by Jews because it was antiwhite to do so, then she was fired by Jews when the mob they created came for them.

Anybody who doesn't explain it this way is lying. Only the schools with non-Jewish presidents were interrogated in front of Congress. Jewish money controls Harvard, even after Jeffrey Epstein.

Rufo won't say that because he's a coward.

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The logical fallacy that "correlation = cause" also has a long history as a tool of manipulation in the sciences, medicine, and psychology. The more orders of inference required in order to confidently assert a conclusion--and the more threadbare the foundation of factual knowledge--the more vulnerable the extant raw data is to manipulation. Correlations are closely aligned with causation in structural engineering, say, or electronics design; it's fairly easy to establish the limits of "tolerance" in those endeavors. Once the topic turns to (for example) AI, that reliable linkage is upset. Consider the "large-language model" of AI; it's entirely correlation-based! which explains how hilarious some of the declarations of AI programs can get. The more "advanced" large-language models aren't really improved in terms of their cognition; they're merely programmed to demur, deflect, and deny more often, about their ability to give an answer. The programmers of the algos at least have to be given credit for finally acknowledging how badly wrong a correlation-reliant model can potentially get, even with a stupendously massive data set to draw on.

Numbers provide an illusion of Objective Authority, because they're entirely denotative. But the most important thing is not the numbers; it's the nature of the question(s) being asked, and the limitations of the ability of the data set(s) to provide cogent answers. Ask bad, clueless, woefully incomplete, biased questions, and the accuracy of a mathematical result doesn't matter, as far as its worth as an answer.

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Super astute and perfectly stated!

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"... what they show is only a correlation, not a causal relationship.

"... this leads to a correlation in the data—without any causal effect from the election of black representatives.

This is very basic. For many people who work with data, such considerations about possible alternative hypotheses are the first thing we think about. But for some reason it was not considered in the paper, which means that the conclusion it makes about causality is invalid."

BINGO: The Left assumes cause that fits their view & vision without considering perfectly logical alternatives. Thomas Sowell (& others) have repeatedly shown & specifically debunked that the Left assumes correlation is cause.

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Unless it's about adverse effects of the covid vaccines THEN of course it is ABSOLUTELY NOT causation! Never!

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It isn't just "the Left" that indulges in the logical fallacy that "correlation = cause."And it isn't a problem that's confined to sociological topics.

What I'm noticing is that the era of Big Data is overawing people- including professional researchers who should know better. It's so easy to do data correlations these days, often generated from huge data sets. This is done in some fields of science and medicine as much as in any academic social discipline or humanities field. One of the newest data fads is a heightened focus on "regression analysis and causative inference"- generating conclusions based on counterfactual hypotheses. The tool doesn't entirely lack value, but it's inherently limited. It can provide useful guidelines to follow a fruitful avenue of research, but it isn't probative. Yet it's increasingly being treated as if it was- or, at any rate, its findings are often assigned much more value than they possess.

There's also an increasing amount of swooning over "data forwarding"- drawing conclusions about future trends projected from assorted multivariate vectors that already exist in data sets. (Numbers! Big ones!) I'm noticing a lot of this in regard to projections of economic behavior, and also the "public mind" on other questions, like political questions. The researchers and readers of those findings need to increase their wariness, not their credulity. . Correlations drawn from a whole lot of numbers and a whole lot of factors crunched together do not add up to Prescience, much less Omniscience.

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Please, Christopher, after you are finished, do law schools next. I went to a no name night school and when I sat down to take the Ca. bar, the person next to me asked a very basic evidence question. I was stunned but he explained that at USC, evidence was an elective. I’m not the brightest bulb I admit, but I couldn’t, and still can’t fathom how one can be a lawyer without even a passing knowledge of evidence.

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And then take on medicine!

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DEI is an intellectual death spiral. Ideological purity requires moral bankruptcy that leads to intellectual depravity. The result is dysfunctional institutions that progressively fail from incompetence which attempt to compensate for the failures by increasing requirements for intellectual depravity that worsen the incompetence. This closed intellectual system ends in collapse unless interrupted by rational outside actors who break the trance. We are at a moment of truth that will determine whether our civilization survives.

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As an exhausted, brain-fog-riddled mother of 5 I can clearly understand the preposterousness of her thesis based on the info given here. Why was this not caught 20 years ago??? As the kids say, "I can't even"...

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founding

When the guy says this is "very basic", he means basement-level basic. There's no way she (and those who hired her) didn't know that this was sloppy, disingenuous work.

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And speaks volumes about why she was really hired.

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Affirmative action. Only requirement is non-white.

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You're giving her too much credit. She isn't smart enough to know that it's sloppy, disingenuous work. Seriously. She probably didn't even write those papers. Anyone can copy and paste. Affirmative action means not smart. She's an affirmative action hire and doesn't have the capacity to think.

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Don't stop now, please. With more questions such as these, she'll lose her tenure as well.

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It'll be a cold day in hell when a black woman loses tenure. Affirmative action means you don't have to actually be qualified for the job in the first place.

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Being black means never having to say you're sorry.

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I doubt if Gay actually wrote anything. She's an affirmative action hire and was an affirmative action student. They don't have to pass tests, write legitimate papers and dissertations, or know anything. They get "degrees" because they are black. Pretending she wrote it is absurd. Additionally, anyone who "peer reviewed" her stuff wouldn't find fault with any of it because she's black!

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Who hired her?

Who fired her? Who is behind all of this? Who has the power and money at Harvard to do this?

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Jan 20·edited Jan 20

The "elite" whites who're paid by the socialist/communist, plutocrat cabal to destroy everything white (Western civilization) by hiring foul, incompetent, immoral, affirmative action pukes like Gay. It's the same ones who put dumb, doddering Biden as the head puppet in D. C.

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Jews aren't white

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Yes, they're Caucasian. Askenazi Jews are of Russian origins and believed to have converted to Judaism.

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No. Jews aren't white. It doesn't matter how much anyone lies about this.

If that were true, when antiwhite politics are pushed at Harvard, including the hatred of whiteness by Jews like Noel Ignatiev, they would have had it shut down. They didn't because they're not white.

When Israel gets criticized, they shut it down immediately. Because they're not white. They are Zionist Jews, and that is the bedrock of their identity.

You're just not smart enough to see understand what's going on and how Jews operate.

Lol "elite whites." You don't get accusations of "antisemitism" if you do that because everyone understands what's going on. When I start discussing the Zionist Jews who control Harvard, "antisemitism" accusations start immediately. Because whites don't control Harvard.

Just stop it. The jig is up and I'm tired of stupid people.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/liel-leibovitz/jews-are-not-white/

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Yes they do...the standards are just far lower. Which is the whole point of DEI.

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If the standards don't measure up to what "regular" standards for a job are, there's not much point in having standards that are inferior.

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Bo Winegard for Harvard President ! ✌️✌️✌️ This can only constitute an improvement, anyway 😅

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It's a little bit confounding the dance they do with intersectionality. Because it is simultaneously all about race and not really about race. You can see that with the treatment of Larry Elder or Clarence Thomas or any black conservative. We're all for you, but if you disagree then we're done with you big time. Which means it's really about ideology, and an anti-western one, because they view the west as white, which in large part it has been, even if not completely.

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Whites created Western civilization.

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A much larger issue where the liberal elite confuse correlation cause and is climate change. They insist that the observation that earth surface temperature and CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing together proves that a minuscule amount of CO2 — 0.04% of total atmospheric gas — is the root cause of climate change and vigorously ridicule and suppress any explanation of how they may instead be correlated. The commonly held notions that CO2 somehow creates an insulating blanket over the earth or somehow “reradiates” heat back to the earth is based on profound misunderstanding of the ideal gas laws and basic thermodynamics. Another example on a grand scale of the left assuming correlation is cause!!

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Environmentalism rejects the notion of progress and wants to somehow take civilization back to its pre-industrial state or hasten the demise of Homosapiens in favor of other, oppressed ("endangered") species. Humanity is Satan . . . the nonhuman world is Paradise. It is yet another Millennialist cult that's sprung up to fill the void left by the murdered Christian God.

Remember "The Hellstrom Chronicle"? They're rooting for the cockroaches.

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Environmentalism is simply cleaning up the mess after it has been made. Like wiping your ass after taking a dump. Maybe the news hasn't reached you yet on the QAnon board. We all have to live here together,clean up after yourself,did you miss that lesson in 2nd grade?

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OK, let's say "environmental activism" or "the environmental movement."

There's a difference between environmental stewards looking for real, pragmatic solutions to pollution and the degradation of the natural world, attempting to find a stable ecological balance between the man-made and the natural world, versus religious zealots who chain themselves to statues, deface old paintings, block rush-hour traffic, run around in Puritan women's dresses, and so forth, allegedly to "raise awareness" about global warming--an issue that has spawned hysterical responses to predictions of future conditions that may or may not come to pass. This "problem" has given environmentalists more reason to demand anti-human policies like those batted around at Davos by Darth Schwab and his ilk.

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You are right there is a difference. I'm thinking you and I are part of your first example. Your language suggests you care as do I. I live in the US West and am an avid year round outdoor participant. Your second example I would respond by saying," Who cares!" Show me any group and there will be the extremists within,usually a very small part of the group. I try not to live my life worrying about those folks with their hats and flags and exaggerated language. It's just a distraction. One project I'm doing now is building an off-grid home in the high desert,not because I'm a prepper but to see how energy efficient I can build a comfortable home that is completely self contained. I'm utilizing old and modern technology and local materials. I'm pro-human by the way.

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There’s a huge problem in higher education that probably has little to do with the heavy viewpoint bias toward progressivism. Peer review doesn’t mean true. Far from it. Data used in a peer reviewed publication is almost never reviewed by the peer reviewers. Please listen to this discussion: Adam Mastroianni on Peer Review and the Academic Kitchen. Abstract below.

https://www.econtalk.org/adam-mastroianni-on-peer-review-and-the-academic-kitchen/

“Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says peer review has failed. Papers with major errors make it through the process. The ones without errors often fail to replicate. One approach to improve the process is better incentives. But Mastroianni argues that peer review isn't fixable. It's a failed experiment. Listen as he makes the case to EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a new approach to science and academic research.”

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And what is this "new approach"?

As an academic scientist (and frequent peer reviewer), I doubt one exists.

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By “new approach” are you referring to the sentence in the abstract above that reads: “One approach to improve the process is better incentives?”

That “one approach” to improve incentives is suggested by the host Russ Roberts.

Adam Mastroianni is the guest.

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I am referring to "he makes the case ... for a new approach to science and academic research". I want the one-paragraph summary of this "new approach".

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I want?

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Well I'm not spending my time listening to a podcast. If a summary is not available, I'll just move on, thanks.

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Pallesen's idea that left-biased things pass peer review more easily was tested when three people hoaxed a whole bunch of sociology/feminist journals six years ago with fake papers the conformed to woke viewpoints: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/10/dog-rape-and-mein-kampf-feminist-text-why-we-hoaxed-journals-terrible

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James Lindsay deserves the Nobel Prize for his work at New Discourses. He has done more to raise awareness of the neo-Marxist capture of our institutions than anyone (Besides Mr. Rufo, that is) and elucidates the ideology thoroughly, clearly, and credibly. Pluckrose and Boghossian, co-authors of the hoax papers with Lindsay, are worthy allies and colleagues.

The affect this capture of our institutions will have on our republic is probably worse than anyone thinks.

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founding

Thank you Chris for shedding even more light on Gay. So now we know Gay is a racist white-hater, a plagiarist, and a p-hacker. Which means she hates, steals, and does fraud.

It appears the emperor (The Harvard board) has no cloths. I just hope others see how nakedly corrupt they are too.

Chris, keep up the great work.

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She wasn't fired for hating whites, Mr. Silverberg.

That's the reason she was hired. She kept her job through antiwhite BLM craziness for that very reason.

She was fired by the Jews who run Harvard because she didn't stop criticism of Israel. That's why she was interrogated by Congress.

Why can't any of you be honest? It's exhausting.

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founding

Kat, I agree she was hired for hating whites (which include jews, and asians). Important distinction. As to being fired by jews who "control" Harvard, I would use the word "influence" instead but having said that, I agree. Of course, Jews are leaving Harvard, are denied entry like Asians -- I myself am embarrassed so many Jews are liberal despite themselves.

(As to the reason why so many jews are liberal, IMHO, it's because most jews are anti-religion. Half assimilate every generation. But religious jews are almost always conservative. This has a parallel with Christians. A great topic, but I digress.)

In the end, to oversimplify a bit, yes, jews who witnessed the backfiring of their own lefty beliefs on themselves, conservatives upset about racism, good people who view islamo-terrorists as a threat, believers in integrity and truth, and a coalition of pragmatic interests, came together to expose the rot and make the ouster of Gay happen. I am at least thankful middle-of-the-road dem jews, despite their continued idiotic leftism, reacted in self-interest. In that respect, it represents a split within the left which should be exploited in its fullest by conservatives to kill DEI, racism, anti-capitalism, globalism, and institutional capture by the left. It could not come too soon.

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Jews are not white. If Jews were white, saying "abolish whiteness" would be illegal to say at Harvard. It isn't. That was celebrated while statues were torn down, whites attacked, buildings burned. Nobody was dragged in front of Congress because whites do not control Harvard (though they founded it) and Jews are not white.

And Asians definitely aren't white. The only way white people can get upset about the takeover of the US by foreign influences is put Asians first. Thanks for proving my point, lol.

Guess who pushed the very concept of antiwhiteness in academia? You'll never guess. Noel Ignatiev has something in common with you, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altma, Larry Summers, Alan Garber, Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein, Steven Pinker--just guess!

Criticism of Israel is not tolerated because Jews base their identity on Israel since they're not white. I won't even go into the Holocaust at the moment. Those are the two foundations of Jewish identity.

Come on, now. I didn't fall out of the sky yesterday. This isn't about right vs. left. Jewish donors to Trump were the biggest ones of the Republican party--Adelson, Marcus, Singer (they got the capital moved to Jerusalem, which was considered an impossible dream for years and I didn't hear any "liberal" Jews complaining). Both left and right Israeli politicians agree that angry third world Muslims should be shipped to the West (Rami Ben Barak and Danny Danon, as published in the WSJ).

This is pure, sheer Zionist Jewish power. That covers Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer as well as Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu. That is why Jews have been so successful at their collective identity politics in the US.

Crying about "woke" or DEI or globalism (hmmm....who pushes those things? Larry Fink, George Soros...hang on a minute) won't save you.

Just stop it.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/noel-ignatievs-long-fight-against-whiteness

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founding

Wow Kat, if I say jews are whites it really offends you. First, I was using the term to mean "the left's view of oppressors." I do not care that much about racial groupings.

Second, it appears you think the entire Gay fiasco had nothing to do with left vs right. I agree the "ignition" of the issue was the Oct 7 Hamas massacre and that it led to jewish (and non-jewish) outrage against terrorists and outrage from Palestinian terrorist apologists which exposed their anti-semitism. It is interesting that you point to jewish identity to Israel but that is not universal and your bias excludes you from pointing out Arab and American's pro-palestinian support despite their links to islamo jew hatred. In any event, that "ignition" in the aftermath of the massacre exposed many things, but most importantly, it exposed the left's fundamental flaw when it was unable to denounce anti-semetism. It exposed the left's racialism. Its placement of ideology over academic integrity. Its rot. These issues are unrelated to jews and terrorists and israel. These are left vs right issues. These are purely American issues everyone should be concerned about.

Last, saying I am this guy "Noel Ignatiev" who I never heard of was a surprise so I scanned the New Yorker article you provided, only to discover some woke jewish anti-white activist. All I can say is, no, your assumption I am some lefty commie, white-hating pig based on my name is incorrect. As to "crying about woke won't save you," I do not seek saving. I am quite happy with who I am and suggesting otherwise, well frankly, feels you just enjoy being a prick.

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What's "woke"?

Define it.

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[ note this is NOT about the article itself but merely the reference made to “Dansk industri” as danish trade association, last sentence of the second paragraph.

I stumbled because it didn’t seem like an accurate translation (being Danish so I really began to think and compare structures of big orgs and actors in Denmark lol). So looked it up

According to their own website, DI is “Confederation of Danish Industry”, not Danish trade association, which resonated a lot more with me

https://www.danskindustri.dk/english/

[I’ll continue to read article now]

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The confusion of correlation with causation is so rampant in academia, the news media, and partisan politics- and so often passively accepted- that it's a scandal. It's hardly reserved for any particular ideological "side", either.

One of the aspects I find most troubling about this classic logical fallacy and the lazy assumptions typically connected to it is that it's long been the stock in trade of the racist right wing. If ever there was a Tool Of The Oppressor that can't be trusted to Dismantle the Oppressor's House, the manipulation of correlative findings into causative conclusions is it. Uncritical acceptance of such confusion as if it were slam-dunk probative opens the door to massaging preconceived biases--maintaining shoddy narratives with the authority implied by the "objective" metric data used to fabricate the speculative "conclusions." And, from there, even more extravagant speculative leaps and mean cheap shots have a way of marching through.

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founding

Yes DC, or to put it more simply, there are lies, damn lies, and correlations masked as science.

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The other issue with peer review, according to John Stodden in his book “Science in an Age of Unreason” is that is completely incestuous. The number of “scientists” in many social science fields is so small that everyone knows everyone else and they all scratch each other’s backs. The commenter who said that peer review is broken is correct.

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