January 14, 2018

THE UGLY AND UNACCEPTABLE FACE OF SCIENCE David Robert Grimes / Steven Novella / David Gorski The long read: an in-depth analysis of the problem

Author biography: I studied Biological Sciences at Oxford University, and I live in Vancouver, Canada.

CONTENTS OF ARTICLE Prologue

Part 1 – Introduction Part 2 – Introduction to DRG and Cancer Research Part 3 – ‘Six Stubborn myths about Cancer’, revisited Part 4 – Critique of DRG’s follow-up article on Cancer Part 5 – Summary of inaccuracies and logical errors of Grimes, Novella, and Gorski

Prologue It has been said that ‘tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance’. I would go a step further and say that it is both: (1) the deliberate removal of nuance when nuance is sorely needed; and (2) the deliberate piling on of nuance to obfuscate and distract from the ratification of a likely truth, a simple fact, or a simple principle. Scientists who use nuance to keep society trapped in endless, pointless, and unhelpful rounds of ‘proof-seeking’ are playing ‘God of the Gaps’.

To illustrate the danger to society of drawing things out Ad nauseam, consider the reticence of Grimes, Novella, and Gorski to promulgate on the importance of good food for health – and their absolute denialism when considering the specific role nutrition can have in preventing and treating serious diseases like cancer. They would say, ‘’we are just holding out for solid evidence’’. But, when will we get unequivocal evidence, if ever? 20 years? 30 years? Whilst we wait for solid experimental evidence, we can use evidence from logic and first principles in biology to reach provisional – yet plausible – conclusions, and these can be used to inform public health policy. This approach is what’s known as the Precautionary Principle, and it would be adopted by any sane and intelligent person who genuinely cares about peoples’ health – not just how many glossy academic papers they can publish, or how they can advance their careers, on the back of sickness and misery.

Tragically, the thinking of public scientists and journalists like Grimes, Novella, and Gorski doesn’t abide by the Precautionary Principle. It is for this reason – a deceptively simple yet catastrophically profound difference in how they approach medicine – that they are a danger to public health. They don't understand a basic aspect of logic, and ethics, which implores us to place the burden of proof according to the scientific plausibility of a claim. If something is scientifically plausible - e.g. that chronic exposure to pesticides and other agrochemicals (and their synergistic effect) is harmful to humans - the burden of proof is NOT on the claimant, but on the manufacturers and scientists who champion the use of such chemicals. Erroneously, and incredulously, Grimes, Novella, and Gorski think in the opposite direction. It's irresponsible, and grossly negligent.

Whether such dogmatic skeptics appeal to nuance within a given topic, or whether they appeal to the simplicity in said topic, depends on the argument they’re trying to support or negate. They are forever virtue-signalling reason, logic and evidence – but their actions reveal an obvious inconsistency and bias which renders them untrustworthy and intellectually-deceitful.

Dogmatists like Grimes, Novella, and Gorski are Merchants of Doubt, rather than harbingers of truth. They obfuscate, rather than clarify. Instead of seeking solutions, they waste inordinate amounts of time, and their privileged media platforms, on intellectual one-upmanship, which, given their paucity of intellectual rigour, can only be achieved by picking the low-hanging fruit and by focusing on fringe topics – the proponents of which are already castigated and ridiculed by the masses in society.

Dogmatic skeptics are loath to risk being exposed for their shoddy reasoning skills, and so they simply avoid debating bright people. And, they also stay clear of challenging orthodox positions in science, e.g. the deeply troubling problems within mainstream medicine and Big Pharma. They stay clear of these issues, even though they deserve orders of magnitude more scrutiny and overhaul than anything swirling around in the alt-med camp.

Yes, the erroneous logic and quackery surrounding homeopathy is a problem. But the hundreds of thousands of people dying from iatrogenic medicine and the correct use of pharmaceutical drugs is a much, much, bigger problem. Grimes has spent vast amounts of time, and media space, on homeopathy. But he hasn’t touched the tragic issues within mainstream medicine.

To reiterate, dogmatic skepticism is insidsuous and dangerous to public health because it stalls the implementation of reasonable health measures - i.e., the frivolity of intellectualising ‘’skepticism’’ becomes seen as more important than the much-needed and down-to-earth pragmatism of the precautionary principle. Also, and ironically, it paves the way for scientists to become lazy thinkers, even unscientific. This is because the knee-jerk and incessant ‘call for evidence’ encourages skeptics to focus on whether something is true or not, rather than how it could be true.

It inculcates a lack of critical thinking and, more importantly, it works against fostering a systems-thinking approach to complex epidemiological questions in medicine. Grimes, Novella and Gorski are stuck in immature black-and-white thinking, in part due to their aversion to logical evidence and first principles and their compulsive, unquestioning, appeal to an intransigent and limiting definition of 'evidence' - and due to their obsequious worshipping of the high priesthood of science at the altar of the orthodoxy. They accept pro-industry consensus positions in medicine uncritically, even though many of those consensus positions have a relatively poor evidence base, and even though they have been reached on the back of decades of wrangling, corruption, and propagandising [via media 'Astroturfing' (see main article)] by Big Industry interests - as highlighted by Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration. In other words, they accept consensus positions as best evidence, even when they are repudiated by higher authorities in science, such as the Cochrane Collaboration.

Yes, believe it or not, consensus in medicine, and the views of the Cochrane Collaboration, are often at odds. As I discuss in the main article, consensus in mainstream medicine / academia is regularly conflated with best practice - whereas, in truth, and often, consensus positions in medicine reflect the monopolisation of treatment - as prescribed and lobbied for (using tyrannical authority) by the Medical-Industrial-Complex (see main article) - rather than what really constitutes the best overall systems-approach for treating (and preventing) chronic disease. These skeptics will tell you they’re in it for the public good and – bizarrely – they will use their lauds and prizes received from Big Industry interests to try to convince you of this! Gorski has been funded by Bayer (a major pharmaceutical company), and Grimes’s John Maddox award for ‘standing up for science’ came from Sense About Science (SAS) – which receives funding from pharmaceutical interests.

The prize would more accurately be called ‘standing up for corporate science’.¹⁾

I was heartened to see John Horgan – a well-respected figure within the scientific establishment – take on the absurdity of the dogmatic skeptics of science in his 2016 article for the Scientific American: Dear ‘’Skeptics’’, Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More. It should be noted here at the beginning of this article that this call for action for skeptics to focus on critical issues - rather than relatively trivial and clickbait topics - has been around for at least a decade. For example, Dan Hind for The Guardian wrote this brilliant piece back in 2007, titled The Real Enemies of Reason.

Link ²⁾. Horgan and Hind were speaking out against the implicit bias of supposed ‘’skeptics’’ in science (the quotation marks are his) who are highly selectively critical of certain ideas (e.g. alternative approaches to standard medicine) but who remain bizarrely uncritical of other ideas - ideas which deserve a lot more attention and scrutiny (e.g. iatrogenic death or injury as a direct result of medical practice – as highlighted by Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre – and the paradoxically poor evidence base for a lot of modern medicine, as also documented by the Cochrane Collaboration).