If you torture the data for long enough, it will confess to anything.
Oh how far we have fallen. And when I say ‘we’, really I mean our ‘betters’, those in positions of power and their enablers. Once proud institutions that stood for truth against all odds now pander to the whims of the highest bidder… provided always that their whims fit within the ever changing limits of allowable opinion.
The latest example is no worse or better than many other examples, but relevant since it’s being used by governments around Australia to justify their latest mad brainwaves.
Matt Barrie of Freelancer has done an outstanding job of breaking down the problems with the Doherty Report in this exceptional Medium opinion piece. I’m not going to disrespect him by repeating it here, click through and read it all, it’s simply outstanding.
Here is this ‘modelling’ being lauded as showing us the way forward… and the models aren’t even complete? They literally cut off right when it matters most?
It’s because this report was never about discovering the truth, or using an honest data-driven approach to discerning the best course of action… it was about reaching the conclusion that suited those who commissioned the report.
We’ve seen this before, and I’ll give you specific examples in a moment, but let’s discuss the dynamic at play here.
You may be familiar with the quote:
Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.
James Kavanagh QC (Tv character in a tv miniseries by the same name.)
I’m sure that’s a quote and a concept that’s been around long before it was used in that TV drama, so let me put my own spin on it and bring it up to date with modern Australian politics:
Never commission a report you don’t already know the conclusions of.
Reports and studies are no longer used to discern the truth, they are used as weapons of manipulation, or at worst as cudgels, to bend and beat those who do not agree with your preconceived conclusions.
My first exposure to this awful practice was during my 3rd ever video, a 2 part series all about bringing water from Tasmania to Melbourne (sounds crazy, but isn’t!)
As part of my research I discovered that the Victorian Government had in fact commissioned a feasibility study on the idea… and had deliberately ensured the idea would fail by making the terms of reference absurd.
They didn’t want to know if it was feasible, they wanted to ‘prove’ that it wasn’t. I discuss the whole idea in these two videos from 11 years ago:
Some time later I had the good fortune of being recommended (thanks to the outstanding Jennifer Marohasy) an astonishing book by Prof Aynsley Kellow (University of Tasmania) titled ‘Science and Public Policy, the Virtuous Corruption of the Virtual Environmental Sciences’.
I bought a hard copy and own it to this day. It’s an extraordinary piece of work and was worth every penny of the $100+ I spent on it.
What it lays bare, with meticulous research and devastating reasoning, is how ‘modelling’ has become an exercise in reaching your desired conclusion, rather than an exercise in learning something new.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Put simply, models, studies, and reports, are all prone to what can be variously described as ‘Noble Cause Corruption’, or in a milder form simply ‘Confirmation bias’, whereby people for reasons good and noble seek to arrive at a particular conclusion rather than letting the evidence speak for itself.
If they don’t arrive at the desired (or at least ‘expected’) conclusion, they assume the model must be faulty and go looking for a way to ‘fix’ it. But of course if the model tells them what they want and expect then… all well and good! A job well done, find someone to ‘peer review’ (actually just rubber-stamp) it and get it published ASAP.
The trouble is that these esteemed academics, scientists, researchers, are all just human beings. And whilst we would LIKE to believe that their methods are more meticulous than those used by your ‘crazy uncle’ who rants about lizard people at Christmas time (c’mon, we’ve all got one of those) the sad reality is that when you look at their WORK, and how often they are wrong, it quickly becomes apparent that something inside the world of academia, something inside the world of ‘reports’ and ‘studies’, is horribly horribly wrong.
But I haven’t yet shared the most astonishing example of all, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I had the pleasure of interviewing the Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, author of ‘The Delinquent Teenager’, which reveals how one of the most respected climate change bodies, the IPCC, whose periodic ‘Assessment Reports’ are considered ‘Gospel’ among governments and environmental groups world-wide, is actually just an empty shell.
It’s a tiny cabal of highly compromised individuals who then abuse the trust of the public and the words of thousands of researchers and scientists to create the appearance of a huge organisation full of scientists that ALL agree that mans CO2 emissions are heating the planet dangerously…
In reality most of the scientists who work on these Assessment reports are never asked whether they agree with the underlying thesis or not… they are simply commissioned to conduct a particular model based on the input data from the central group (There’s that ‘garbage in, garbage out’ problem again) and they get paid to do it, so of course they do it!
Many IPCC AR co-authors have come out and publicly declared their dissent from the conclusions drawn by the ARs themselves… a career ending move in these highly politicised times, but the IPCC still lies and claims that there is near universal consensus, and that their reports are the absolute cutting edge of science on the issue of Climate Change.
You can watch my interview with Donna Laframboise here:
And as one final example, the Covid over-reaction was kick-started in earnest by a report by Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College, a serial alarmist who should have been ousted from his job years ago after ludicrous predictions about the impact of Mad Cows Disease, SARS, MERS, and many others, which someone never managed to come even a teeny tiny little bit close to his mad predictions.
Click Here for a rundown of what you need to know:
You’ve heard of the ‘nine most dangerous words in the world’?
I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
Well let me propose the TEN most dangerous words in the world:
I’m right and I have a model to prove it.
For a model to be right it requires the scope to be designed carefully and with TRUTH as the objective, the input data to be appropriate, correct, and complete, and the methods (and people applying those methods) to have integrity. Only then might you create a study worth the paper it’s written on.
Sadly such an outcome is all but impossible in our hyper political world where our politicians are paying the piper, and instead of a tune they want a headline to feed into our partisan 24 hour news cycle.
There’s not much we can do about it except apply a very high level of skepticism to any and every ‘study’ and ‘report’ released, even the ones that pass peer review.
It’s true that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet, but it’s also true that you mustn’t believe everything you read in a study or report, either.
How far we have fallen.
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The linked article was very interesting. There was this paragraph which piqued my interest in particular:
“The study found that the mean duration of symptoms after initial infection was 8.2 months. 94.9% of the kids had at least 4 symptoms.. fatigue, headache, muscle & joint pain, rashes & heart palpitations, & mental health issues like lack of concentration & short memory problems.”
I had Ross River virus (RRV) going on from late 2015 and only by 2019 had most symptoms disappeared (I still suffer from arthritic problems which is something I never had prior to the infection). Every one of the symptoms mentioned above is par for the course with RRV (and a number of others to boot). What is particularly interesting is that right through all that and even now I have never, not ever, again suffered a cold or flu (the last was in early Spring of 2014) even after heavy exposure to infected people all day long, a continual and recurring feature of living in Victoria and often working in Ballarat. Although RRV is not a coronavirus, it appears to have induced something in my immune system that now makes me resistant to every cold and flu that comes along (I have my own belief as to why that is, having done extensive reading up on the incredible human immune system. On a side note, I have never used vaccines of any sort since childhood where I had no choice.) The worst bug I ever had since 2014 and apart from RRV was a mild tickle in the throat by one evening in mid 2018 which was gone by the next day. I have no fear, whatsoever, of any coronavirus at all and it is possible that I have already experienced two varieties of the current bug over the past year, based on a couple of incidences of mild symptoms I could not explain any other way, with headaches being the predominant symptom but combined with several others that fit with alpha or beta (that was late March 2020) and still other different ones that fit with delta (in mid April 2021). I only figured this out around June 2021 when piecing together what had happened to me and information on symptoms I could glean off the Net, and carefully comparing them with other known viruses, but nothing else really was a good match. I know people often balk at “self diagnosis” but, given the delay after the incidents by which stage I did an investigation and given how mild each incidence was, I certainly did not think I had anything like the “black plague” as the media seem to make the bug appear to be. At this stage, my own guess is that these things have already completely swept through the nation and there are simply viral remnants being picked up by the PCR test in the majority of “casedemic” cases. I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that we already largely have nationwide “herd immunity”. A scientifically conducted nationwide survey using proper blood testing of “unvaccinated” people (instead of the ridiculous PCR) will reveal the likelihood of whether or not herd immunity already exists but, even though the cost would be small compared to losses induced by ongoing pointless lockdowns, etc, and given the government’s active resistance to using cheap and well proven drugs to treat the disease, I doubt that such a survey would be conducted because it will likely reveal the reality of the situation, obviously something tyrannical governments do not want. It is not the bug that is to be feared. It is the complete psychosis of arrogant, narcissistic state and federal government politicians that is causing the greatest concern.