Thread on $cience which I’ll attach to an old thread of mine.

The empire has no lab coat: When “The Science” became a secular priesthood immune to questioning

The modern world has witnessed a dangerous transformation: science as a method of inquiry has been replaced by “The Science” as an infallible institution demanding blind faith.

What began as humanity’s greatest tool for understanding reality has mutated into a corrupt enterprise where $377.6 billion in pharmaceutical shareholder payouts matters more than truth, where 89% of landmark cancer studies can’t be replicated, and where dissenting voices are silenced with the same fervor once reserved for heretics.

This thread examines how institutional capture, financial corruption, and ideological dogma have created a crisis that threatens both scientific progress and public trust.

1/N The reproducibility apocalypse no one wants to discuss

The dirty secret of modern science is that most published research is wrong. When the Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies from prestigious journals, only 36% successfully reproduced

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

The situation in biomedical research is even more catastrophic: when Amgen scientists tried to replicate 53 “landmark” cancer studies that had shaped entire research programs, only 6 studies (11%) could be confirmed

nature.com/articles/48353…

Glenn Begley, who led this effort, reported desperately watching patients nearly dying from bleeding ulcers while knowing antibiotics could cure them - but the medical establishment refused to accept the evidence for over a decade

The mechanisms of this failure are well-documented but rarely discussed. Researchers engage in “p-hacking” - manipulating data analysis until they achieve the magical p<0.05 threshold that journals demand. They practice HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Known), presenting exploratory fishing expeditions as if they were confirmatory studies. Optional stopping allows them to halt data collection the moment statistical significance appears

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC51…

The American Statistical Association took the unprecedented step in 2016 of warning that “statisticians have been sounding the alarm about these matters for decades, to little avail.”

2/N

I can help you, more than any PhDx100 or Psychologist, to reduce stress and improve mental health.

Couple of things would improve most of all your mental health / stress / anxiety issues

- Go back to Nature in whatever way you can. Be it forest bathing, camping or surfing. Do an activity amidst Nature, ideally in a small group. And do it often.

- Faith and Prayer.

- Chronic stress is basically the gap between Expectations and Reality. Since Industrial Revolution, and more, since Tech Revolution, our expectations have inflated massively by seeing few entrepreneurs becoming super-wealthy and powerful. From JPMorgan to Elon. It’s increasingly (this is KEY) impossible for anyone become insanely successful starting from modest background. Ancestral wealth and ability to form nepotistic social connections are absolutely necessary. Thus, having high expectations based on Meritocracy alone, just because MSM told you so, will cause lots of stress. For a long time, most of peasants (>90% used to be peasants not so distant back) have minimal Expectations/Aspirations. They knew Elites gonna play Elite games, but they didn’t have to listen to that as there were no mass media to brainwash them.

- Meaningful small community

TL;DR

Nature + Faith + Less Expectations + Cohesive small community Building a giant thread of mental health:

https://twitter.com/de_bose/status/1802975123751989688

A thread on how AI/ML would affect jobs markets and society in general.

What would be economic value (jobs) of humans when:

- There are competent AIs smarter than any human
- They are embodied (robots)
- They work 24/7 at the cost of electricity & maintenance

A combination of existing threads and new posts

Thread 🧵 1/N When we say "us", "we", "society", we are actually building imaginary clans/tribes on our minds.

If history and technological progress till today are of any support, it has been seen that, beyond compassionate types, humans usually don't care about other humans unless certain tribes or groups or cliques (be it "Angel investors of Uber", "Macro traders of 90s", "Silk exporters associated with East India Company" etc.) can extract wealth by virtue forming associations often being closer to the money-flow/Governments/Nationalised-Debt.

Core driver has always been: "maximal fertility using wealth/tech/ML as advantage in survival struggle"

Same applies for AI/ML

For majority AI/ML would be terrible, a commodity (more on this later) and a necessary evil. But for a select few, this will reduce production cost drastically, like all other automations

Now if commoners would think, "oh, I'll capture the growth by investing AI/ML/Robotics ETFs". Sure, but every other retailers would do that, and it will not give any survival advantage, unless one gets privileged access to private deals in AI/ML/Robotics businesses/ventures early.

On commodification: AI-As-Service (AIAS)

"AI's potency and ubiquity have increased, so too has its strategic value. It’s a reasonable assumption, even an intuitive one. But it’s mistaken.

What makes a resource truly strategic – what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage – is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can’t have or do.

By now, the core functions of AI/ML – foundation models, algorithms, compute resources, service endpoints and even data (via Data Exchanges) – have become available and affordable to all.

Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none"

2/N

I’ve a Bayesian theory around why “believe in science” and “believe in technocratic progress” are so high, even if the counter-evidences are strong.

Thread 🧵

1/N The belief, held by humanity until “Industrial Revolution” (1800), emphasized that the future wouldn't necessarily improve upon the past.

Key values included - small, short-term, and high-interest loans (debt is bad and makes society eventually enslaved), focusing on contentment rather than progress, prioritizing family and community, and adhering to spiritual wisdom that warned against exceeding human limitations, as doing so would lead to disappointment and disaster.

2/N

Life can be blissful without even knowing mathematical and physical basis of reality.

The more one acquires mainstream
education, the more inflated lifestyle becomes, more status-hungry partner one ends up choosing, more demand come from life-events and more necessity it seems to earn money (fiat) in order to satisfy those requirements, more one has to depend on someone for job (referrals, promotions etc.) and play the “game” etc.

Return on education (I know lots of Asians are growing up being brainwashed by the worldview that a 120K-150K MBA and FAANG/IB/Bank job is key to a happy life. That’s far from truth) over years have been abysmal.

This will be a long thread on practical and philosophical futility of modern education !

Long thread 🧵

1/N If you are a man, T-levels (testosterone) are one of the most important health dimension for you. And guess what - college-education reduces T levels.

(Testosterone levels according to ethnicity and education in a sample of male American veterans; median age of the sample was 37 years (redrawn from Mazur 1995))

1/N

Young folks has to learn about science, capitalism, civilisation and history.

Modern western science (based on experiments/hypothesis testing/double-blind trials etc.) always has been flourished through the help of Industry/Capitalism. Science, being a slave to capitalism, has no claim to any higher moral ground !

And why would someone need such a moral ground or qualitative judgement, as opposed to blindly depending on bunch of scientific experiments or controlled trials ?

A: Science has a reproducibility problem and often has tendency to conclude a test/study under limited amount of variables or ignoring adjustments of confounding variances, to reduce the time and cost to run the test.

“Science is endangered by statistical misunderstanding, and by senior people who impose perverse incentives on scientists.”

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

Then there are questions to quality of data or an effort to fit to the narrative of the capital provider.

Objective of Nature and natural distributed, complex systems is not anchored on providing some sociopathic investors/VCs 20x ROI.

As the foundational incentive of Science (individual scientists may have other incentive such as curiosity etc.) as a whole is to provide ROI to the one who funded the test - be it Gov or Venture Capitalists, truth often remain elusive.

In my 18Y of STEM career, what I understood is that, often science arrives to a conclusion purely driven by ROI/Budget or Utility, rolls out policy or product based on that limited utilitarian view, only to discover non-linear effects longitudinally over time, for which another entrepreneur/capitalist would propose another solution. Repeat.

Even more important is the fact that foundation of money is broken (fiat system). As the foundation of value exchange is broken, all higher-level policy decisions or strategic initiatives are expected to broken too.

Most of the Science (as a whole, not individual scientists) is currently enslaved by current dysfunctional version of capitalism, which only cares about “infinite growth” in a finite planet, more consumption and more waste. GDP-maximalism w/ fiat, literally depends on this assumption. And look GDP-maximalism has done to us. Thread attached.

The entire Keynesian Economics is based on Govt borrowing to death and consumers consuming to death, till demographic dividend runs out.

I expect a whole lot of scientists/scientifically-minded people to disengage of industrialised/corporatised science as it exists today, only to take a apparently-regressive view of “Going back to Nature” while practising real Science.

GDP-maximalism, driven by modern Science and Economics 🧵/ @_david_ho_ This is the situation of Corporatised Science driven purely for ROI

It’s actually more dangerous to depend on “$cience” than actual Science.

https://twitter.com/de_bose/status/1672573797915049984

F*ck the meritocracy myth.

Meritocracy is the myth we are all told to

(a) motivate us to work harder for the bosses and make them richer,
(b) for the fortunate to argue that they actually deserve all their success even if they started at or near the top, and
(c) to blame people for their own misfortunes and justify not giving them any help or organising society in a fairer way.

Hard work and talent can get you ahead (but it’s a maybe rather than a given) but my experience is that you always end up giving a huge amount to get a very modest reward.

You can climb the ladder, but if you’re born on a lower rung you may go up a rung or two, but you won’t make it to the top. And you’re supposed to be happy with that.

x.com/de_bose/status… Someone from software sales:

"I’m in software sales. No large vendor will recruit people without a private school network to tap in to."

There is a reason parents are ready to pay a lot for "private schools" all the way to elite "MBA", is not for knowledge, its for membership to "closed clubs".

Private Schools
Elite MBA
Investment Banking/LBO
PE
VC

Network...and "closed clubs"

All worthwhile knowledge can be learned and explored free.

Every company is just trying to "capture value" that's already there.

Our entire society became speculative. Trying to catch the raindrops of trillions of dollars of debt as it 'trickles' down through privileged & nepotistic waterways.

@Uber raised like $25B to reinvent taxis and food delivery. They finally made a profit last quarter after 14Y. Facebook bought instagram just to copy tiktok_us which just copied vine. Then Facebook made threads which is just a copy of Twitter which was made 17y ago. A kid born the day Twitter was made will be able to vote in the next election. AirBnb was supposed to be a way to rent out an extra room or couch, but it just turned into investors buying houses specifically as bed and breakfasts (Without actual breakfasts !). Even the current iteration of #ArtificialIntelligence is just some linear algebra, optimised computing & lots of engineering thrown into the mix. Not much actual innovation.

Long gone are the days when innovation and the desire to build a better world (by actual curious & talented people, not by someone who went to a IvyMBA to get a 5M seed) drove development. The only thing on anyone's mind is how he can make as much money as quickly as possible from something.

#reflections #investment #innovation

1/N "My analysis of start-ups, however, shows that the big losses suf­fered by Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Pinterest, and Snapchat—greater than 50% of revenues annually—are just the tip of the iceberg.

More than 90% of America’s “unicorns”—start-ups valued at $1 bil­lion or more while privately held (before IPOs)—lost money in 2019 or 2020, even though more than half of them were founded over 10Y ago.

And a similar trend of losses holds for European, Indian, and Chinese start-ups.

Of similar importance, recent analyses of venture capital (VC) firms show that ROIs in VCs have barely exceeded those of public stock markets over the past 25Y, and their current losses suggest that returns will fall even further"

Good Lord. IPOs have been strange lately. Lots of unprofitable startups IPO-ing, providing exit liquidity to private investors

"..start-ups that do go public, the % that are unprofitable at the time of their IPO has increased dramatically over the last few decades, exceeding 80% in recent years, according to analysis by Jay Ritter of the University of Florida"

Ref: Rani Molla, “Why Companies Like Lyft and Uber Are Going Public without Having Profits,” Vox, March 6, 2019.



#venturecapital

2/N

This is a real-life story of how corporatisation of #science (MIS complex) has replaced the curious scientists with stronger moral backbones.

James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or #Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

1/N
Bernadine Patricia Healy (August 4, 1944 – August 6, 2011) was an American cardiologist and the first female director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

W. Bush tapped her in 1991 to become director of the NIH, its first woman head.

#science #MISComplex

2/N

Everywhere GDP-maximalism starts, a bunch of events eventually follow

- more #debt
- more liberal lefts
- more #cancer & chronic diseases
- more decline in mental health
- more junk foods
- more #BigPharma
- more breakdown of family system
- less traditional wisdom & Spirituality
- more societal degeneracy
- more corporations & slave MBAs
- less family leisure, bonding & warmth
- less local businesses
- more environmental destruction
- less fertility

#GDP #Keynesian


It seems GDP-maximalism also correlates (+0.71) with degree of LGBTQ+ acceptance.

#society #capitalism #fiat #economics #culture

Considering that modern humans, due to the Neanderthal assimilation (we carry their DNA), are entirely different from the misnamed extinct pre-contact Homo sapiens, it might be time to rename the latter in order to distinguish them from us, maybe as Homo socialis.

1/N Since the Neanderthal assimilation most Homo sapiens have retained their predominantly social nature & therefore tend to ostracise those of a predominantly individual nature who, beginning in the 1940s, are being pathologised with the label of #autism

2/N

The Overworked American by Juliet Schor.

There's a reason employers are terrified of #WFH. Back at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when factories were still an expensive new tech that not everyone could invest in, there was a concept called "piece work" #career

1/N
"piece work": Where workers did all their stuff at home, rested enough & then turned in finished pieces for pay. It drove business owners crazy because, without control of their workers' schedule, they couldn't squeeze out every little drop of productivity possible. #career

2/N

This is going to be a thread, IMO, capable of changing lives of some. It’s about fixing #depression endemic in the Westernised societies, w/o paying #psychologists tons of money.

#Mentalhealth #MentalHealthAwareness #MentalHealthMatters

1/N Barring few cases of medical, to fix depression you need to understand human evolution. Physical survival (and all challenges) were part of it, but working for $ wasn’t.



2/N

https://x.com/de_bose/status/1480389041635790848

@Mktweets0 Going to start a thread on #melatonin & its effects on CKD validated by scientific research. Please correct if you find any medical faults.

#kidneys @Mktweets0 1/ Melatonin was first purified and characterised from the bovine pineal gland extract by Aron Lerner and co-workers in 1958.

However it has systemic effects. #Kidney cells (proximal tubule) express a melatonin receptor of type MTNR1. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9034171/

1/ Soon in my own journey I’ve discovered that it’s just a meme perpetuated by MSM. And one of the core propositions of my next book is to help naive unprivileged entrepreneurs to avoid these traps & memes.

https://twitter.com/ArchaeoNomad/status/1487617802261331969

2/ The much-worshipped ‘American Dream’ (and all other parallel dreams of making it big elsewhere, rising from a not-so privileged background) is fading.

OpportunityInsights.org

visualcapitalist.com/the-decline-of…

1/ If you can imagine a hunter-gatherer roaming around Africa around 14K years ago, he didn’t know anything about - nation-state, fiat, central bank, corporate law, education, modern markets, industry, pharma, media, politics, modern definition of morality or consumerism 2/

Nor they had any concept of money, stock options, CEO of a large organization, boardroom politics, knowledge of vector calculus and abstract mathematics, career struggle, mortgage stress etc.

#lifestyle #simpleliving #career

1/ The Vax$ contains the RNA (encapsulated in liposome) to make one of the spikes found on the outside of the coronavirus. When injected, it is absorbed into a cell and makes one of those spikes on the outside of whatever cell it went in to.

#VaccineMandate #VaccinePassport 2/
The RNA shot was supposed to stay in the arm muscle, making those spikes on the outside of muscle fibres, but instead most of it got flushed into the blood and spread around the body.

#VaccineMandate #VaccinePassport