An Ocean of Lies

And no, I'm not for the moment talking about Michael Cohen's testimony

About 15 months ago, I wrote a post titled, “Five Things That Are Killing America”, to wit, cowardice, dishonesty, ignorance, sloth and mush. Today, Michael Cohen’s second day on the witness stand, seems like an apt occasion to look further at one of these evils — dishonesty. But our look won’t be about the dishonesty that goes on in our courtrooms, copious though that certainly is with and without Mr. Cohen. It’s about a kind of dishonesty that’s probably more powerful and almost certainly more widespread — the dishonesty that goes on in academia.

This is important not merely because academia is where our kids get their formative impressions of what the world is and what’s going on in it. It’s important because — ready now? — we are constantly told (well, actually, yelled at) that we must follow the science. If you think something different from what academic “science” tells us, you’re worse than merely ignorant. You’re nativist, backwards and (if the other side feels like being relatively polite) a wahoo. Thus, for example, if you thought that Covid was less fearsome than The Black Death; that the dangers of its infection, particularly to children and younger people were overhyped; and that its costs in closing schools and paralyzing the economy were seriously and deliberately understated, you were not merely completely wrong, but vicious and dangerous. You were upbraided by the government and muzzled on social media. You were spreading conspiracy theories.

Only one thing. You were right, as the mavens of science eventually had to admit — admit to the point of publicly seeking amnesty for their Nazi-like bullying, see, e.g., this article from the October 31, 2022 Atlantic titled, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” with the subhead (wonderfully reminiscent of the Left’s wailing it’s time to move on after Bill Clinton had, ummmmmm, a problem with Monica’s blue dress), “Let’s focus on the future, and fix the problems we still need to solve.” As you might guess, notably absent from the problems we still need to solve is the Left’s constant and belligerent lying.

This brings me to today’s entry from the annals of Follow the Science, published in the Wall Street Journal. Its title is, “Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures.”

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. 

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

Sounds like this could be a major problem. Perhaps we should bring in the big guns to deal with it — someone like the recent President of Harvard. Oh………wait……….maybe not. Well then, the recent President of Stanford. Oh……..wait………..maybe not that either.

The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat.”

The sources of the fake science are “paper mills”—businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions…

So to be clear, what’s going on with “science” in a huge swath of academia is assembly-line lying. Made-up “research,” literally on an industrial scale.

If you thought student cheating with AI is a problem, you’re right. But you’re missing the even bigger problem with the overwhelmingly Leftist bunch that’s “teaching” them.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that “scientific” cheating has become big business:

The journal Science flagged the practice of buying authorship in 2013. The website Retraction Watch and independent researchers have since tracked paper mills through their advertisements and websites. Researchers say they have found them in multiple countries including Russia, Iran, Latvia, China and India.

That Nigerian prince who a few years ago wanted to send you ten million bucks if you’d just give him your bank account number turns out to have been merely a preview.

Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.”

I don’t think that was intended to refer to Alvin Bragg’s indictment, but at some point it’s simply impossible even for a conscientious person to find his way to the truth through the seemingly gargantuan, always-and-everywhere maze of deceit.

I don’t know whether it’s an old man’s dusty nostalgia or whether the world really has grown this much more sleazy and untrustworthy over the last 50 years. I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts. It did seem to me as a high school and college kid that, while skeptical as young people often are, I could trust my teachers and what they were saying. I could mostly trust what I read in reputable newspapers and saw on the networks. I could trust what was presented to me as science. I could trust the FBI and the Justice Department.

Is any of that true anymore? It’s not just the lying about Covid or, of late, Joe Biden’s breezy whoopers. Worse for someone who made his career in law, it was the Justice Department’s years-long hyping of Donald-Trump-as-Russian-Agent — something that turned out, for all Trump’s serious defects and failings — to be a pack of lies, a political sideshow engineered to undermine his Presidency. And now Alvin Bragg, a fellow with the honor and the power to be the District Attorney of Manhattan, calling as his star witness for his Rube Goldberg case against Trump perhaps the most dishonest man in America.

As the WSJ shows, the rot in “science,” though mostly invisible to us laymen, is shocking in its scope and woefully ominous in its implications. As so much else shows, the rot has gone way, way beyond science.