Data is repeatedly manipulated to show associations that don’t exist. Statistics are misused to promote an agenda. Figures & facts are conflated to support false narratives.
Science is about discovery by way of logical reasoning; not about turning censored data into dogma!
By Jon Brock
The article below details the reasons why we need to get data right; and even more so with metadata. Because the combined effect of compiling (bad or inadequate) data does not make it more reliable; it likely compounds the error.
This is particularly problematic in scientific academy within the areas of medicine and nutrition research, as John Ioannidis has clearly exposed in his work.
Scientific data can go “absent without leave” for a number of different reasons:
- Scientists don’t archive their data properly and they lose track of it, can’t make sense of it, or their hard-drive dies and they don’t have a back-up. This happens surprisingly (and embarrassingly) often.
- Scientists begin a study but abandon it before it is completed due to lack of funds, unpromising preliminary results, or other priorities. The data might be useful in combination with data from other studies, but it’s not publishable on its own.
- Scientists selectively publish data that supports a particular theory. Inconvenient data are quietly forgotten.
- Scientists try and publish data but are unsuccessful because the results aren’t considered interesting enough by the scientific journals.
- Knowing how difficult it will be to publish a null result, scientists prioritise writing up studies that gave them more publishable results.
The end result is what’s become known as the “file drawer problem”. The published scientific literature represents only a small and biased sample of the research that has actually been conducted. The rest is stuffed away at the back of the metaphorical filing cabinet.
There’s a lot of wasted effort here — data collected and then not used. But the bigger problem is the bias in what is published.
https://towardsdatascience.com/why-metadata-matters-ab7253ea35c7
By Mark Hornshaw
“Economics studies human choice under scarcity. Humans must act in the present to provide for the future. Informed choice relies on market data in the form of prices—specific prices for specific things, as we assess various different means to satisfy our ends—that is what economics is about.
Macro-statistics such as GDP and CPI, whether they are rising or falling in the aggregate, do not help much with this vital task. These statistics are compilations of vast amounts of data to come up with averages across entire countries and time-periods. It’s a dilution of the data, not an enhancement.
” “What a country wants to make it richer, is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is no want of the former,” said John Stuart Mill, citing Say’s law.
In a tune of rapid change and disruption, we need prices to do their job more than ever so the entrepreneurial process can work. High prices show which industries to move more resources into, and low prices show which ones to move resources out of to free them up for more urgent uses. From the point of view of consumers, high prices show us what we should cut back on, and low prices show where we can pick up bargains.
This process takes time. Interfering with this process just locks in shortages and surpluses.
So-called “stimulus,” just thrown at “the economy” to increase “aggregate demand” in the abstract, cannot work, when there are supply constraints in some industries and prohibitions in others.
Government policy should be on mending holes in the social safety net, compensating those it has forced out of business and jobs, and reducing the tax and regulatory burden it places on businesses, workers and consumers as they try to adjust.
These are all microeconomic responses to relieve suffering and remove impediments.”
https://fee.org/articles/focus-on-people-during-economic-crises-not-macro-statistics/
The drug is currently approved for malaria and also for rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, which is its main use in the U.S. It’s therefore available to be prescribed off-label, and some clinicians have already said they’re using it on COVID-19 patients. But neither Hahn nor other task force members addressed whether enough hydroxychloroquine is on hand to treat large numbers of coronavirus cases. Convalescent plasma is another treatment the FDA is considering for COVID-19, said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD.
Convalescent plasma and the immune globulin that it contains is another possible treatment the agency is considering, Hahn added. “FDA’s been working for some time on this,” he said. “If you’ve been exposed to coronavirus and you’re better — you don’t have the virus in your blood — we could collect the blood, concentrate that and have the ability, once it’s pathogen-free, to give that to other patients, and the immune response could potentially provide a benefit to patients. That’s another thing we’re looking at; over the next couple of weeks, we’ll have information and we’re really pushing hard to try to accelerate that.” Such treatments have been effective in Ebola, for example.
Source: FDA to Study Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 | MedPage Today
Smoot-Hawley and the New Deal are hardly the only examples of government actions making a panic worse.
Thomas Sowell recounts several instances in which governments turned small problems into major ones by using blunt force—often price controls—to respond to public panic about rising costs of a given commodity.
One of the more famous examples of this is the gasoline crisis of the 1970s, which started when the federal government took a small problem (temporary high costs of gasoline) and turned it into a big one (a national shortage).
As Sowell explains, however, there was not an actual scarcity of gasoline. There was nearly as much gas sold in 1972 as the previous year (95 percent, to be precise).
Similar examples kind be found throughout history, from the grain shortages in Ancient Rome brought about by Diocletian’s “Edict on Maximum Prices” to the mortgage crisis in 2007.
It is no coincidence that crises—foreign wars, terrorist attacks, and economic depressions—have often resulted in vast encroachments of freedom and even given rise to tyrants (from Napoleon to Lenin and beyond). In his book Crisis and Leviathan, the historian and economist Robert Higgs explains how throughout history, crises have been used to expand the administrative state, often by allowing “temporary” measures to be left in place after a crisis has abated (think federal tax withholding during World War II).
Like an economic panic, pandemics incite mass fear, which can lead to flawed and irrational decision making.
“…the archetype of the modern university…”
“Little more than a decade after consumers binged on inexpensive mortgages that helped bring on a global financial crisis, a new debt surge — this time by major corporations — threatens to unleash fresh turmoil.
The root cause of the debt boom is the decision by the Federal Reserve and other key central banks to cut interest rates to zero in the wake of the financial crisis and to hold them at historic lows for years.“
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