Scientist & Professor. Plants, agriculture & more. Exasperated with ideologies. Philosophy matters. Personal perspective from UK, Brazil & USA.
Joined March 2016
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David Bertioli retweeted
It's a disaster for our public epistemology that fields like Gender Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Education produce and promulgate little but politicized dogma, and that fields like Sociology, which should be providing empirically grounded correctives, are on the whole captured by the same ideology, and as a result merely contribute to the spread of what my co-authors and I call "virtuous nonsense." The book is out now!
David Bertioli retweeted
The first review I've seen of my new book "Virtuous Nonsense: Progressive America's Epistemic Crisis," written and edited with Lawrence Eppard of @ConnorsInst and @PsychRabble. Review by Michael Dudley at @fairforall_org.
open.substack.com/pub/fairfo…
David Bertioli retweeted
Here is my account of what happened to Scientific American before the latest meltdown, when the wokeness first began to rot this once great institution.
michaelshermer.substack.com/…
David Bertioli retweeted
The Fall of Scientific American
Emmet Fraizer picks up the story where I left off a few years ago, as this once great national institution of publishing went full woke, and as always happens, wokness poisons everything.
thenation.com/article/societ…
David Bertioli retweeted
Did you know there’s such a thing as “queer anthropology”?
Anthropologist @eweissunburied says her field has traded logic, falsifiability, and consistency for ideology. The goal is no longer to discover the past. It’s to mold it.
In collaboration with @HeterodoxCentre
David Bertioli retweeted
I joined the APA as a postdoc, and resigned a few years ago. This article explains why: The Inmates Run the Asylum at the Psychological Association by @SwipeWright and @Hartz_PhD wsj.com/opinion/the-inmates-… via @WSJopinion
David Bertioli retweeted
Scientists & science journalists decry the public's rejection of science, but are oblivious to the major cause: the perception, sometimes correct, that scientists are just another political faction. Among the guiltiest perpetrators are the recent editors of Scientific American, who turned this once-beloved treasure into a left-wing propaganda rag. This absolutely does not justify the Trump administration's unconstitutional meddling, but the new owners are right to restore it to its mission of explaining science to Americans. The Nation reports on The Fall of “Scientific American” thenation.com/article/societ…
David Bertioli retweeted
🚨 NEW: For the @WSJ, @Hartz_PhD and I expose the ideological takeover of the American Psychological Association.
The APA is facing the possible loss of its federal accreditation authority following allegations of widespread antisemitism.
But while the APA's antisemitism problem is serious, it's only a symptom of a much deeper ideological rot.
The organization has become so captured by radical left-wing political activism that its commitment to scientific objectivity competence is now in serious doubt.
We examined the program for this year's major APA Division 39 conference, which drew nearly 800 attendees and held 90 panels over four days.
By our count, roughly 70 of the 90 panels were overtly political, and always left-wing. Topics included abolishing the family, queer anarchist psychoanalysis, dismantling gender assessment guidelines, and white supremacy. One session even concluded with a drag show.
There was at least some hope that the threat of losing federal accreditation might prompt some institutional soul-searching. It didn't.
Instead, APA members just elected Candice Hargons as their next president. Her campaign identifies "systemic intersectional oppression" as the profession's "common enemy" and calls for rejecting the traditional scientific notions of objectivity.
Psychologists wield enormous influence over vulnerable patients, and the people seeking treatment deserve the peace of mind knowing that the care they're receiving care is evidence based and not tainted radical politics.
We believe most would agree that federal accreditation should actually mean something. If the APA cannot distinguish its scientific mission from its political activism, the Education Department should reconsider whether it deserves the government's endorsement as an authority over psychological training.
Read our full essay in the Wall Street Journal below:
🔗wsj.com/opinion/the-inmates-…
David Bertioli retweeted
Reality and satire are indistinguishable: the president-elect of the American Psychological Association has a paper on “#hotgirlscience”. Read the abstract; it’s real.
With this at center stage, imagine the biases, rotten assumptions and errors where no one’s looking
David Bertioli retweeted
How many more such studies as this do we need before transitioning adolescents ends as one of the worst cases of medical malpractice in history?
Abstract:
Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%).
Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral.
Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment.
After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.
Conclusion
Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals. Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
David Bertioli retweeted
The degeneration of Nature, Science, NEJM, and Scientific American into woke propaganda dispensers (and their refusal to publish normie, centrist, common-sense responses) is a scientific scandal.
David Bertioli retweeted
I strongly disagree with the proposals in this thread. Rejecting papers because the author "lacks a publication record or credentials in the research area" is the worst form of gatekeeping. It violates the first Mertonian norm: universalism. And requiring "oral examinations" for arXiv authors is absurd.
David Bertioli retweeted
"I like to quote the founder and proprietor of Our World in Data, who said that the papers could have had the headline: “187,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day for the last 30 years.” But you never saw that headline, and as a result, a billion people escaped from extreme poverty. One of the most significant events in human history, and no one knows about it."
David Bertioli retweeted
I've always thought that the campaign against "ultra-processed" foods was mindless. What the heck does that even mean: the more things you do to food, the less healthy it is? New RCTs and analyses confirm that the stigma is meaningless (it's calories, fiber, & other causes, not "ultraprocessing") and even harmful: it encourages RFKj's MAHA quackery. I suspect that food researchers are subject to class bias: food that poor people like and can afford must be unhealthy. vox.com/future-perfect/49404…
David Bertioli retweeted
A remarkable moment in mathematics publishing: almost the entire editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory has resigned simultaneously, declaring that “the journal, as we knew it, has ceased to exist.”
David Bertioli retweeted
That time a 9-year-old skeptic named Emily Rosa debunked energy healing (a pseudoscientific alternative medicine treatment) and published in a top medical journal.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
David Bertioli retweeted
The growing inaccessibility of science that you can understand by paying €27.99
ALT A subscription notice for Nature, highlighting access fees and options for renting articles, emphasizing science's rising inaccessibility.
David Bertioli retweeted
Tom Brown, a retired engineer, dedicated 25 years to preserving approximately 1,200 apple varieties from extinction.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
While this story is true, this photo has been ever so slightly edited with AI which might make me people question its authenticity. Here you can see the apple varieties written cleanly, with no AI interference.
x.com/rainmaker1973/…
David Bertioli retweeted
🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.
ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.
My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.
I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.
Hedgie🤗
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
David Bertioli retweeted
After today's excellent decision by the IOC.,if the Rio 2016 women's 800m. was held today, the 3 medallists in my photo. Wambui, Niyonsaba & Semenya would be barred and the medals would go to Canada's Melissa Bishop, Poland's Joanna Jozwik & GB's Lynsey Sharp @AthleticsWeekly
