How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science
By Allysia Finley, Oct. 1, 2023, WSJ
Scientists were aghast last month when Patrick Brown, climate director at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., acknowledged that he’d censored one of his studies to increase his odds of getting published. Credit to him for being honest about
something his peers also do but are loath to admit.

In an essay for the Free Press, Mr. Brown explained that he omitted “key aspects other than climate change” from a paper on California wildfires because such details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival,
Science, want to tell.” Editors of scientific journals, he wrote, “have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives.”

Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, denied that the journal has “a preferred narrative.” No doubt the editors at the New York Times and ProPublica would say the same of their own pages.

Mr. Brown’s criticisms aren’t new. In 2005 Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote an essay titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He contended that scientists “may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a
scientific theory or commitment to their own findings.”

“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” Dr. Ioannidis argued. “Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for
no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.”

In addition, many scientists use the peer-review process to suppress findings that challenge their own beliefs, which perpetuates “false dogma.” As Dr. Ioannidis explained, the more scientists there are in a field, the more competition there is to
get published and the more likely they are to produce “impressive ‘positive’ results” and “extreme research claims.”

The same dynamic applies to Covid research. A July study in the Journal of the American Medical Association purported to find higher rates of excess deaths among Republican voters in Florida and Ohio after vaccines had been rolled out. Differences in
partisan vaccination attitude, the study concluded, may have contributed to the “severity and trajectory of the pandemic.”

But the study lacked information on individuals’ vaccination and cause of death. It also didn’t adjust for confounding variables, such as underlying health conditions and behaviors. Charts buried in the study’s appendix showed excess deaths among
older Republicans started to exceed Democrats in mid-2020—well before vaccines were available.

Despite these flaws, the study was published and pumped by left-wing journalists because it promoted their preferred narrative. The peer-review process is supposed to flag problems in studies that get submitted to journals. But as Dr. Ioannidis explained
in a Sept. 22 JAMA editorial, the process is failing: “Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society.” Those “stakeholders” include the
scientific journals themselves, which he notes have among the highest profit margins of any industry—by some estimates, about 40%.

Journals often don’t compensate peer reviewers, which can result in perfunctory work. The bigger problem is that reviewers often disregard a study’s flaws when its conclusions reinforce their own biases. One result is that “a large share of what is
published may not be replicable or is obviously false,” Dr. Ioannidis notes. “Even outright fraud may be becoming more common.”

As scientists struggle to publish against-the-grain research, many are turning to preprint servers—online academic repositories—to debunk studies in mainstream journals. Yet even some of those sites, such as the Social Science Research Network, are
blocking studies that don’t fit preapproved narratives.

In Jan 2022, Johns Hopkins Univ. economist Steve H. Hanke reported that Covid lockdowns had little effect on deaths. When he attempted to publish the findings on SSRN, the site turned him down. “Given the need to be cautious about posting medical
content, SSRN is selective on the papers we post,” a rejection notice informed Mr. Hanke.

That’s the same response the site gave UC San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad when rejecting his studies debunking widely cited Covid studies, such as one claiming Boston schools’ mask mandate reduced cases. SSRN is run by the company Elsevier,
which also publishes prominent medical journals that uniformly promote Covid orthodoxy.

Scientific journals and preprint servers aren’t selective about research quality. They’re selective about the conclusions. If experts want to know why so many Americans don’t trust “science,” they have their answer. Too many scientists no
longer care about science.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-preapproved-narratives-corrupt-science-false-studies-covid-climate-change-5bee0844

============

The Censoring of Science and the Road to Serfdom
LETTERS, Oct. 8, 2023, WSJ
Thanks are due to Allysia Finley for alerting the public to the censorship of counternarrative science (“How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science,” Life Science, Oct. 2). An account of censorship perpetrated by Social Science Research Network
and medRxiv is provided in a new article in Econ Journal Watch by Jay Bhattacharya and Steve Hanke.

In one chapter of “The Road to Serfdom” (1944), Friedrich Hayek writes of the urge toward censorship in antiliberal regimes. “Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed,” he writes. Propaganda from the government is not
sufficient: “The plan itself in every detail . . . must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism.”

Consider the following sentence of Hayek’s in light of the Covid experience, along with the asides I insert: “The basis of unfavorable comparison [the savaging of Sweden’s minimal lockdown policy], the knowledge of possible alternatives to the
course actually taken [e.g., focused protection], information which might suggest failure on the part of the government [the lockdown study by Prof. Hanke and co-authors, information about vaccine safety and efficacy, etc.]—all will be suppressed.”

Down the road to serfdom, in the sciences themselves, Hayek says, the “search for truth cannot be allowed” and “vindication of the official views becomes the sole object.” In scholarly disciplines, he continues, “the pretense that they search
for truth is abandoned and . . . the authorities decide what doctrines ought to be taught and published.”

Hayek sounded the alarm because he saw how things unfolded on the European continent. The further we go down the antiliberal road, the more fragile and vulnerable are official narratives to criticism. As a result, Hayek says, “intolerance . . . is
openly extolled” by the mind-guards and minions of official narratives.

Hayek’s point was not what Yogi Berra had in mind when he said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” But the point fits.

Prof. Daniel Klein, George Mason Univ., Chief Editor, Econ Journal Watch

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-science-censorship-hayek-fa5c568b

=================

Thomas Sowell on the Trouble With ‘Social Justice’
By Jason L. Riley, Oct. 6, 2023, WSJ
Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago,
where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and
intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999).

In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit
assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men�
�but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”

The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as
poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which
nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”

Mr. Sowell has been a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution since 1980. In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as “the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we
would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.”

He says that’s an assumption based on hope rather than experience or hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to
competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” he writes in the book’s opening chapter on “equal chances fallacies.” He acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination exist and
contributed to disparate outcomes. But he notes that “these vices are in fact among many influences that prevent different groups of people—whether classes, races or nations—from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other
terms.”

For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a
state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group,
Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.”

To illustrate the point, the book’s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. “Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race—either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of
racial discrimination,” Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering “systemic racism.” Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people
who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks.

The book cites Clay and Owsley counties in Appalachian Kentucky, places “that are more than 90 percent white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but
also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole.”

It’s been true for some time, Mr. Sowell says, that black behavioral patterns play a bigger role in racial disparities than racism does. Black married couples have had poverty rates in the single digits for more than a quarter-century. And black
married couples “in which both husband and wife were college-educated earned slightly more than white married couples where both husband and wife were college-educated.” He adds that in a landmark 1899 study of blacks in Philadelphia, the race
scholar W.E.B. Du Bois “said that if white people were to lose their prejudices overnight, it would make very little difference to most black people. He said some few would get better positions than they have right now, but for the mass it would be
pretty much the same.”

Noting today’s black-white wealth disparities, authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi have advocated reparations in the name of social justice. So have such prominent organizations as the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.
Mr. Sowell can’t take their arguments seriously. “The situation of slavery in some ways is much like the situation of conquered people,” he says. “There’s no question whatsoever that conquered people have been treated in a terrible way. Being
conquered by the Romans was not a fate you would wish on anyone. But the fact is that the net result has been that those parts of Europe conquered by the Romans have been the most advanced parts of Europe for centuries.

“Similarly, when someone black says... ‘I’m worse off because of slavery,’ there’s no way in hell you can say that with a straight face. If you’re going to base reparations on the difference between where blacks today would be if it were not
for slavery, then blacks would have to pay reparations to white people.”

Mr. Sowell is no stranger to poverty, prejudice or discrimination. He was born in segregated North Carolina in 1930, orphaned as a toddler and raised in Harlem from age 9. He never finished high school and earned his GED after serving a stint in the
Marines during the Korean War. The GI bill enabled him to enroll in college, first at historically black Howard University, before moving on to Harvard, Columbia and finally the University of Chicago.

He says that whether social-justice proponents are pushing for slavery reparations or higher taxes on the rich, their real agenda is the confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Enthralled by what he calls the “chess-pieces fallacy,” progressives
treat individuals like inert objects. “I got that from Adam Smith, who had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who feel they can move around people much as one moves around chess pieces,” he says.

“That fallacy takes many forms, and taxation is a classic example.” The fallacy is assuming that “tax hikes and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction, when often they move in the opposite direction.” Liberals say, “ ‘We need
more money, so we’ll make the wealthy pay their fair share,’ which is never defined, of course. But the wealthy are not just going to sit there and do nothing.”

A historical example is when “the British decided they would put a new tax on the American colonies. It turns out they not only didn’t get any more revenue, but they lost the tax revenue they had been getting.” In modern times, Mr. Sowell says,
studies have shown repeatedly that people and businesses move their money to avoid high tax rates, and that includes migrating from states with higher levies to states with lower levies.

Although the social-justice vision isn’t new, Mr. Sowell observes that these ideas didn’t have much currency before the 20th century, in an era when intellectual elites mostly talked among themselves and reached a far smaller segment of the
population. Mass communication changed that by greatly expanding their ability to shape public opinion and, by extension, government decisions: “One example was the period between the two world wars, when intellectuals managed to convince a lot of
people that the way to avoid war was to avoid an arms race, and therefore that disarmament was the key to preserving peace.”

The growing influence and arrogance of the social-justice crowd bothers Mr. Sowell, which is one of the reasons he wrote the book. “Someone once said that people on the political left think that they would do what God would do if he were as well-
informed as they are,” he says. He’s especially vexed by the quashing of dissent. “The fatal danger of our times today is a growing intolerance and suppression of opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate
institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and government institutions,” he writes. “Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notions about a
broad swath of issues ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments.”

Mr. Sowell’s own accomplishments cover a broad swath. He’s published more than 40 books, and “Social Justice Fallacies” is his sixth since he turned 80 in 2010. What recommends it is what recommends so many of the others: clear thinking, a
straightforward prose style that combines wide learning with common sense, and an uncanny ability to take our preening elites down a notch.

Mr. Riley writes the Journal’s Upward Mobility column and is author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-sowell-on-the-trouble-with-social-justice-race-economics-black-white-disparities-finance-social-justice-7e2d4a3d

============

‘Even Hitler,’ Says the Palestinian President
By The Editorial Board, Sept. 6, 2023, WSJ
It’s never a good sign when a dictator delivers a rambling historical lecture, in the style of Fidel Castro or Vladimir Putin. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, proved the point on Aug. 24 before the Fatah Revolutionary Council.
His subject? The Jews.

Most media will ignore his comments, which were translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. They don’t fit the liberal narrative that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a clash of two nationalisms that can be resolved in a “peace process�
�� if Israelis make more concessions. The comments also don’t fit the narrative, gaining ground among Democrats, that the Israelis are extreme and the Palestinians progressive.

“The truth that we should clarify to the world,” Mr. Abbas began, “is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism.” He cited the Khazar hypothesis, which speculates that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t descended from the
Holy Land, hailing instead from the medieval Tatar kingdom.

This has been discredited by a century of scholarship; today, it’s a theory one expects to find only in online fever swamps. But its usefulness in denying the Jewish connection to the land of Israel has made it a mainstream claim among Palestinians.

Mr. Abbas kept going. “They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,” he averred. Europeans “fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with
usury, money and so on.”

“Even Hitler,” he added, “said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money.” Yes, even for Hitler, “this was not about Semitism and anti-Semitism.”

Three days before Mr. Abbas’s speech, his Fatah party’s military wing competed with Hamas to take credit for the murder near Hebron of a Jewish preschool teacher, Batsheva Nigri, in front of her child. If you wonder why the Oslo peace process hit a
dead end and stayed there, consider that Mr. Abbas and Fatah have been described for decades as “moderates.”

At age 87, Mr. Abbas isn’t likely to abandon his conviction that Jews are interlopers in every part of Israel. His predecessor, Yasser Arafat, once stunned President Clinton’s negotiators by denying even that Jerusalem had been the site of the Jewish
Temple. Maybe it’s time American liberals stopped being surprised. There’s a reason Arab-Israeli negotiations have moved past the Palestinian veto.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mahmoud-abbas-palestine-israel-fatah-party-c131ddd9

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)