The scourge of Wikipedia

Searching my files, I see that Wikipedia has featured quite often on my blogs; the article titles illustrate some of the stimuli:

Knowledge, understanding — but then there’s Wikipedia;  The Wiles of Wiki; Health, Wikipedia, and Common Sense; Facebook: As bad as Wikipedia, or worse?; Lowest common denominator — Wikipedia and its ilk; The unqualified (= without qualifications) gurus of Wikipedia; Another horror story about Wikipedia; The Fairy-Tale Cult of Wikipedia;  Beware the Internet: Amazon.com “reviews”, Wikipedia, and other sources of misinformation.

Four decades ago, as the Internet was coming into general use, the anticipated benefits and drawbacks were being discussed quite assiduously, at least in academe. Enthusiasts pointed to the advantages of low-cost, rapid publication of research; skeptics wondered what would happen to peer review and quality control. But I am not aware of any voices that foresaw just how abominable things would become as the cost of blathering on-line is virtually zero and there is no control of quality, no fact-checking, no ethical standards, and pervasive anonymity. No one seems to have foreseen the spate of predatory publishing of purportedly scientific research.

It has always been almost impossible to undo the consequences of lies, as too many people believe that the presence of smoke always proves the presence of fire; now, in the Internet age, it has become totally impossible to eradicate the influence of lies because of the speed with which they spread. I have too many friends who pass along stuff that strikes me immediately as unlikely to be true, and that snopes.com reveals to be not true, yet this stuff comes to me no matter how often I ask my friends to check snopes first.

I don’t use Twitter, Snapchat, or any other social media, though I am formally listed in LinkedIn and Facebook after I didn’t want to offend friends who asked me to join. Having tried Facebook and found it nothing but time-wasting obsession with trivia, I tried to disconnect from it. It wasn’t straightforward, but eventually I seemed to have succeeded as a screen assured me that I had successfully closed my account. But the next statement undercut that: I was assured that any time I wanted back in, I could log on with my old password and would fine all my material still there. When Facebook boasts of its huge membership, I wonder how many of those they count belong to my group, people who don’t use it at all and tried to get off.

At any rate, I recognize purely as a outsider how the damage done on the Internet is abetted and exacerbated by Twitter, with its encouragement of thought-bites to shorten attention spans even more, or by something like Snapchat where evidence disappears as soon as the alternative fake news has been disseminated. The contemporary political hullabaloo about fake news and alternative facts brings home that a sadly significant portion of the population exercises no skepticism or critical thought when statements are emotionally congenial.

All this is whistling in the wind, so I was pleased to find a large-circulation British newspaper laying out the faults of Wikipedia in considerable detail: “The making of a Wiki-Lie: Chilling story of one twisted oddball and a handful of anonymous activists who appointed themselves as censors to promote their own warped agenda on a website that’s a byword for inaccuracy”.

Admittedly, the Daily Mail is no TIMES, and some of its content competes with tabloids and the ilk of National Enquirer; and its ire was aroused not by the intellectual damage done by Wikipedia but by a smear that labeled the Daily Mail as an unreliable source — shades of pots and kettles.

The Daily Mail story, credited to Guy Adams, deserves wide dissemination for its valuable analysis that includes detailed biographical information about someone who might well be iconic of trouble-making trolls on the Internet; and for its exposure of how Wikipedia is impervious to correction, is controlled by largely anonymous and often self-appointed “editors”, and is rather scandalously dishonest about its finances: the governing Foundation, which advertises itself as non-profit and solicits for donations on many Wiki pages, has about 280 staff with average salaries of ~$110,000, a former executive director having garnered ~$320,000.

The British Guardian did neither itself nor the public a service by covering the Wikipedia dissing of the Daily Mail by treating Wikipedia as though it were more factually reliable and more ethical than it is: Jasper Jackson, “Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as ‘unreliable’ source” (8 February 2017). People who have tried to get errors corrected on Wikipedia are unlikely to agree that “No matter how hard Wikipedia’s volunteers work, wrong and sometimes defamatory entries will inevitably appear, with editors engaged in a game of whack-a-mole to correct them” (Jasper Jackson, “‘We always look for reliability’: why Wikipedia’s editors cut out the Daily Mail”, 12 February 2017). Some of the editors work to preserve the defamatory stuff. See my blog posts cited above for illustrations.

The Unending Human Tragedy—and Scientific Scandal— of HIV/AIDS

The need to check facts carefully has become something of a shibboleth with respect to present-day political discourse in the United States. Only voices crying in the wilderness, however, have pointed to the need for fact-checking what society gleans from the scientific community — see my Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland, 2017).

The title of this blog is also the title of my review of How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France, a 2012 film and 2016 book, both of which received enthusiastic plaudits from the mainstream media and which repeat and thereby entrench the mistakes of HIV AIDS theory and practice.

The opening and closing paragraphs of my review reflect that the Journal of Scientific Exploration, in which it is published, specializes in anomalistics which refers to such topics as Loch Ness Monsters, Bigfoot, UFOs, psychic phenomenon, that are ignored and denigrated by mainstream science.

HPV does not cause cervical cancer; HPV vaccination can be deadly

(Cross-posted from http://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/)

Evidence continues to mount that the presumed connection between HPV and cervical cancer is no more than a statistical association, not a causative relationship:

The Gardasil controversy: as reports of adverse effects increase, cervical cancer rates rise in HPV-vaccinated age groups

Annette Gartland

“The Gardasil vaccines continue to be vaunted as life-saving, but there is no evidence that HPV vaccination is reducing the incidence of cervical cancer, and reports of adverse effects now total more than 85,000 worldwide. Nearly 500 deaths are suspected of being linked to quadrivalent Gardasil or Gardasil 9.
As Merck’s latest human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil 9, continues to be fast tracked around the world, the incidence of invasive cervical cancer is increasing in many of the countries in which HPV vaccination is being carried out.”

Once again independent scientists without conflicts of interest are maltreated by bureaucratic organizations with conflicts of interest to commercial interests, drug companies in particular:

“This article was updated with information from the AHVID  on 14/09/2018.

Update 15/9/2018:

Peter Gøtzsche has been expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration. Six of the 13 members of the collaboration’s governing board voted for his expulsion.
. . . . .
‘This is the first time in 25 years that a member has been excluded from membership of Cochrane. This unprecedented action taken by a minority of the governing board . . . . ‘
In just 24 hours, Gøtzsche said, the Cochrane governing board had lost five of its members, four of whom were centre directors and key members of the organisation in different countries.
Gøtzsche says that, in recent years, Cochrane has significantly shifted more to a profit-driven approach. ‘Even though it is a not-for-profit charity, our ‘brand’ and ‘product’ strategies are taking priority over getting out independent, ethical and socially responsible scientific results,’ he said’”.

OFFICIAL! HIV does not cause AIDS!

The World Health Organization has issued a press release reporting that Swiss researchers have demonstrated that HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS because the so-called isolates of HIV routinely used in studies of HIV and of AIDS do not actually contain live infectious particles of a retrovirus.
Reporters have so far being unable to get responses to questions they have addressed to a variety of institutions and individuals:
The World Health Organization was asked why it had ignored its own sometime epidemiologist who had pointed to the fudging of data to create apparent epidemics [1].
Robert Gallo was asked where he regretted having described as flat-earthers [2] the scientists who had disagreed with him.
Anthony Fauci was asked whether he regretted threatening journalists who covered dissenting voices about HIV [3].
Dr. Nancy Padian was asked why she had not recognized the significance of her failure to observe during ten years any transmission of HIV among sexually active couples of whom one was HIV+ and the other not [4].
The Centers for Disease Control were asked to explain how they could have issued patently wrong statistical information.
The Food and Drug Administration were asked how they could have approved the use of toxic substances as purported medication for a non-existent virus.
The drug company Gilead Sciences was asked to explain how it had decided that its drugs were capable of killing a non-existent virus.
…………….

All that is a fable, of course, or rather a parable — it is not true literally but it points to important truths.
Perhaps it may serve to drive home the important insight that it is quite inconceivable, quite impossible, that any official institution would admit that HIV/AIDS theory is wrong, it would raise too many unanswerable questions.
And yet the evidence is so copious and clear-cut that the theory is in fact wrong (The Case against HIV).

That hugely important fact about the role of science in the modern world, that a wrong theory could become generally accepted, reflects what President Eisenhower warned against more than half a century ago, namely, that public policy could be captured by a scientific-technological elite.
That has now actually come to pass not only in the case of HIV AIDS but also over the theory of human-caused global warming and climate change (Anthropogenic Global Warming, AGW, and ACC).
For that latter case, Christopher Booker [5] recently offered Groupthink as explanation for how an elite group could come to believe and promote a faulty belief.
Booker came upon the concept of Groupthink in the work of psychologist Irving Janis [6], who had discussed the idea in explaining how disastrous failures in American foreign policy had come about, for example in Vietnam and the muffed invasion of Cuba.

A crucial part of the context that makes for Groupthink is that it would be fatal for the elite group if its belief were not accepted.

That’s the point of the fake news story with which I began this blog post: It illustrates that it would be an act of collective suicide for the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, innumerable charities and foundations, and many activist groups if they were to admit that they had been wrong in what they had vigorously promoted and defended for several decades and which had led to expenditures of tens of billions of dollars. The credibility of leading institutions would be shattered and innumerable individuals would be publicly shamed and their careers and livelihoods destroyed.

The analogy with high finance is straightforward: HIV/AIDS theory is simply “too big to fail”.

So that will not be allowed to happen. Rather, the mainstream HIV/AIDS behemoth will continue to sweep aside challenges by ad hominem polemics (labeling dissenters as morally despicable denialists) and by mis-direction on substantive points, for example, claiming that even temporary recovery of health by some sick HIV+ individuals proves that antiretroviral drugs are effective and that HIV had caused the illness.

———————————————

[1]    James Chin, The AIDS Pandemic, Radcliffe 2007

[2]    Robert Gallo, Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: a Story of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books, 1991, p. 297

[3]    Anthony Fauci, “Writing for my sister Denise”, AAAS Observer, 1 September 1989, p. 4

[4]    Padian et al., “Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Northern California: results from a ten-year study”, American Journal of Epidemiology, 146 (1997) 350–7

[5]    Christopher Booker, GLOBAL WARMING: A case study in groupthink — How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time, Global Warming Policy Foundation, GWPF Report 28, 2018. A summary is in “Groupthink on climate change ignores inconvenient facts”, 21 February 2018

[6]    Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (1972; Groupthink (1982), both Houghton Mifflin

Disproving HIV/AIDS theory

After an old friend, a notably successful scientist, had read my book, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland, 2007), he remarked that the trouble was that it would lead to undermining trust in science overall.

But he was assuming, as do so many scientists, and so many of us who have been promoting HIV/AIDS dissent and AIDS Rethinking, that it is the facts of the matter that count; that evidence and factual reality are bound to carry the day in public discourse and public policies. That is simply not so nowadays.

Perhaps it was not so far from the truth in times past, when there was a “basic” or “pure” science carried on by relatively disinterested truth-seekers who were able to command sufficient research resources that came without strings attached.

Was that a purely mythical past?

Not really. During my student days and early faculty jobs at an Australian university, technical facilities were automatically available to the faculty: glass-blowing and other technical needs were provided by permanently employed service people; routinely used chemicals were on hand; reasonable sums of money were provided for purchase of more exotic items; publication was supported by secretarial staff, and of course in those times one’s articles were published in journals that did not demand “page charges” or other fees. We studied what interested us, what we thought would be fruitful, not what others told us to study.

That was half a century ago. There was competition, of course, but it was within civilized bounds. Peer reviewers could make bad decisions, perhaps partly under the influence of bias, but there was not much attempted suppression of rivals just for the sake of personal advancement, and outright fraud was rare indeed. We studied and practiced science pretty much as idealists. A fellow academic of my generation told me about 20 years ago that he still had his graduate students read Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith for its early-20^th-century message of honesty, integrity, disinterestedness.

Younger people will doubtless read the above with incredulity. Nowadays a career in scientific research begins by working on what the scientific consensus considers appropriate. One spends a significant number of years in postdoctoral and other temporary positions waiting for the rare tenure-track slot to open up, competing then with other hopefuls who are also supported by long publication lists and records of research support; or perhaps one goes into “applied” research in industry or government. In any case, the research that gets done and then published is determined by the prevailing scientific consensus, not by the individual inspiration and ingenuity of an intellectual entrepreneur. In 1980, the recipient of a prize for scientific work described the subterfuge needed to get research support for anything novel, unconventional (Richard A. Muller, “Innovation and scientific funding”, Science, 209 [1980]: 880‑883).

No mechanism exists for mainstream science to rethink accepted ideas. Rather, everything works against dissent from contemporary theory. When it comes to HIV/AIDS, a simple thought-experiment will illustrate the point:

Try to imagine how Anthony Fauci, Robert Gallo, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention could possibly manage face-saving explanations for how and why HIV doesn’t really, after all, cause AIDS; how the Food and Drug Administration would find excuses for all its approvals of toxic antiretroviral drugs. Imagine the reactions of all the researchers who had avidly pursued mindless “research”, and all the science groupies and researchers who had defended wrong theory and maligned and persecuted the “denialists” who now turned out to have been right all along. Think about what would be said and done by the Gates Foundation and all the other charities and non-profits who had diligently worked to provide health care for people being made sick not by disease but by medication.

It seems to me simply inconceivable that “the scientific consensus” and its agents could ever retract about HIV/AIDS.

So the task of disproving HIV/AIDS theory is not a matter of offering contradictory facts, which have in any case been available in profusion for decades (The Case against HIV http://thecaseagainsthiv.net). The task is first to persuade society that “science” can get it wrong, even and in particular on a matter that affects such huge numbers of people and huge expenditures by governments and by non-profits and charities.

Society as a whole needs to be disabused of mistaken beliefs about science, in other words. My old friend had it backwards: until unquestioned faith in science is replaced by sensible skepticism and a demand that evidence for claims be openly presented and defended against skeptics, evidence-based criticisms of HIV/AIDS theory will not gain even a foothold in the conventional wisdom, the popular media, the mainstream discourse.

On my other blog, I’ve just posted a detailed discussion of the salient points:

⇒ What has been so damaging is not so much sheer ignorance as beliefs that are wrong (Dangerous knowledge).

⇒ Wrong views about the history of science are rampant throughout society; especially how drastically different today’s science is from the idealized popular view of it — which, as I opined above, was actually not that unrealistic only about half-a-century ago (Dangerous knowledge II: Wrong knowledge about the history of science).

⇒ The popular belief is wrong, that science is infallible and made so by “the scientific method”. The fact is that the scientific consensus always defends itself vigorously even when it happens to be wrong (Dangerous knowledge III: Wrong knowledge about science).

⇒ There exists a vicious cycle: HIV/AIDS dissent (and dissent from any contemporary scientific consensus) is dismissed out of hand because science couldn’t possibly be wrong about so important a matter; but until it is realized that the scientific consensus on many contemporary issues is flawed, dissent in any given case will be dismissed out of hand, preventing the accumulation of the evidence that science nowadays is pervasively untrustworthy (Dangerous knowledge IV: The vicious cycle of wrong knowledge).