A Rational Critique of Academic Research

Before proceeding, we have to clarify that labeling anything as “fake” is a truth judgment that depends on a person’s belief network. What one person considers to be “fake” is not what someone else will consider to be “fake”. There is no fine line between “true and false” or “fact vs opinion”. Compiling a list of examples of “fake research” is thus subjective. Nevertheless, we have created a list of fake ideas with links and reasons as to why we deemed the listed ideas to be “fake”.

Most academic research produced in the 1800s and early 1900s probably wasn’t “fake”. Fake research is more of a recent problem in academia, so when we’re labeling most or a lot of academic research as “fake”, we’re usually (but not exclusively) referring to more recently published research. Say, from 1980 to the present.

To say that “most” academic research is “fake” also implies that we can quantify how much of it is fake or not. I can’t precisely estimate, quantify, and judge every academic paper that gets published out there, so I don’t claim to know exactly how much of the current research being published is reliable. It probably also varies by fields, and it’s possible for papers to include a mixture of true and fake data, reasoning, and conclusions. However, we can generally say that most recent research in humanities (or human-centric sciences) is fake, redundant, or useless; most research in earth-centric sciences is true, fake, or questionable; and most research in STEM fields is true, fake, outdated, or redundant.

For STEM fields, we should note that erroneous research often arises simply because the more theoretical and undiscovered areas of fields are so intellectually difficult to understand and investigate correctly, especially when there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right. It’s often necessary to make mistakes and learn from them before arriving at the right conclusion(s), so this is a reason why fake research is sometimes created (unintentionally). However, that doesn’t excuse intentional fake research from being created. For example, a scientist might knowingly conduct some fake research for a disprovable hypothesis in a field that’s currently at a dead end or writer’s block for further investigation. The motivation would be that there’s a lot of pressure on them to do research for the sake of doing research, even if it’s false or probably false.

Although we may not necessarily know how or why exactly, a lot of physical theories are probably wrong to some extent, since physicists currently don’t have a reasonable explanation(s) for making the different branches of physics cohere together. In the future, we may find out why in more specific detail. Notably, Sabine Hossenfelder has a YouTube channel where she’s given some of her thoughts on why many physical theories are wrong. For example, she’s explained her reasoning for why most particle theories of physics lead to nowhere.

The replication crisis is real in many fields of science. For a study’s conclusions to qualify as knowledge, it must have predictive and explanatory power. If an experiment’s results cannot be replicated, then the conclusions don’t have predictive power. That means that the conclusions don’t count as knowledge, which suggests that the research ought to be considered fake. The replication crisis is thus further evidence of the prevalence of fake research.

As an aside, the replication crisis is arguably less of an issue in computing science (minus the theoretical part), because computing scientists must always submit their code with the paper. So you can run the code and get the same results as the author. Hence, it’s probably easier to replicate results in computing science than other fields.

It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of curricula taught in schools can be fake too, even though it’s not considered academic research (e.g. IB’s TOK class, which I took in high school). The amount of fake curricula definitely varies by school. I could publish a webpage of all the fake ideas that I was personally taught in school, but some of it is nit-picky, and I doubt that most people would find it to be interesting, so I won’t publish it.

The best rule is not to assume that because an academic paper says X, that X is true. You can find academic papers that say all sorts of things. Pretty much anyone can find a paper that concludes what they want to believe, if they look for it. Instead, you should try to think about the type of evidence necessary to support a conclusion, and see if that evidence is presented. If it doesn’t, then the paper is probably “fake”.

Blithering Genius’s essay did a good job of identifying the main causes of fake academic research:

• Ideological Bias
• Perverse Incentives
• Social Circularity
• Naive/Fake Empiricism
• Statistical Manipulation (e.g. p-Hacking)

An idea doesn’t need to have an air-tight proof or solid reliable data to be the “scientific consensus” of the current era. It only needs to be the most vogue opinion, the winner of a popularity contest essentially. Since academia is so insulated and self-contained, the most popular ideas are often chosen for ideological reasons, especially in the humanities. Being supported by the academic consensus doesn’t confer being truthful.

The methods used to create fake news are often used to create fake research as well. The establishment media rarely tell outright lies, but they often lie by selecting facts, images, interpretations, etc. to fit a preconceived narrative. The narrative comes first, and everything else is cherry-picked to fit the narrative. The process for writing academic papers often works similarly. If an academic already has a conclusion that they want to present, they may ignore everything else that should also be considered and/or rig the methodology to achieve the desired results.

Many researchers may also use the Sapir-Whorf Effect and provocative wordings to influence how people perceive their papers. Pretty much everybody does this whenever they present what they believe, but the first step to detecting this is to understand how language influences thought. Usually, people can detect some misleading phrases, while unwittingly letting others slip under their radar. Everybody could become much better at it if they consciously understood the philosophy behind it.

On my economics webpage, I identified multiple different types of planned obsolescence. One of them is Academic Planned Obsolescence¹, which is when academics dismiss better simpler solutions to the world’s problems and questions, in favor of fabricating fake, less efficient, and/or more complex ideas. The intention is to create an ever-lasting flow of academic research for them to publish, to satisfy the artificially high demand for research papers. For example, some academics might dismiss Georgism, so they can create hundreds or thousands of papers that endlessly speculate on the best taxation policy(ies) that society should use.² As another example, some academics might dismiss race realism, so that they can postulate about an endless number of hazily conceivable environmental and societal factors for why racial disparities exist. In both cases and many others, the best answers to the questions at hand are actually straight-forward. But if the academics were to ever expose the correct answers, then there would be no more research papers to write, and that could be the end of many their research careers. This is similar to the conspiracy in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where Gag Halfrunt and a group of psychiatrists try to prevent everyone from discovering the Ultimate Question to the Life, Universe, and Everything, since it would be the end of their profession. Truth-seekers tend to seek simplicity, whereas complexity is better for promoting ideologies and publishing papers (because it gives people more pseudo-intellectual crap to write about). Academia thus tends to reject simplicity in favor of complexity.

Making topics seem complex may also be done in order to rationalize an academic’s biases and beliefs. But if we’re interested in the truth, then we can’t appeal to complexity to justify what we want to believe. Occam’s Razor concludes that the phenocentric theory is the best theory of evolution, because it’s the simplest explanation, and it has the most predictive and explanatory power.

As Blithering Genius mentioned, one reason why a lot of academic research is “fake” is because it builds off of false pre-existing ideas, even if the author is unaware that their starting assumptions are false.

Framing Assumptions

Mathwashing: Scientists are incentivized to make their work as inscrutable as possible. Scientists often use overly complex mathematical or statistical methods to obscure problems from reviewers. This works because most reviewers will not admit to not understanding details of work they are reviewing. The harder it is to spot an error, the less foolish you are for having failed to spot it. Unreadable academic prose can also serve a similar obfuscatory purpose, though this seems to be a bigger problem in the humanities.

It’s not true that researchers are always trying to confirm research. If you get to challenge a paper, then this can prove to be one of the best things for your career, period.

That still doesn’t mean that challenging existing papers is likely to produce more factual research. If anything, challenging solid and widely accepted papers just for the sake of doing so or for career advancement is likely to generate even more academic nonsense.

Some research probably only exists to be speculative and hypothetical, or to raise awareness of a potential cause or theory, even if it’s unlikely to be accurate. The essay that the Pragmatopian and I wrote for Pathogen Hypothesis For Male Homosexuality is an example of this.

Regression to the Mean; What Regression to the Mean is, and how many statistical studies don’t account for it, thus contributing to the abundance of fake academic research.

Research Less Likely to Be True is Cited More

The Problem With Science Communication - Veritasium

Also see: Why Most Academic Research is Fake, Explained with Graphs and Data by Sean Last

Some people will read all of this and claim regardless that I’m wrong or that I’m biased against Academia. Such people may not take my word for it, but they may be willing to listen to Sabine Hossenfelder, who is a former academic with a PhD in physics:

For the record, some of Academia’s best research has indeed come from peer review. The idealistic view and role of peer review should be for highly qualified academics to rationally debate, review, and exchange constructive criticism because academics. Unfortunately, compromised and perverse social, ideological, and financial incentives often prevent peer review from functioning as it should.

The modern problems of conformity are related to why pure review fails to live up to its ideal.

This twitter thread: https://twitter.com/LifeAfterMyPhD/status/1768334215031197828

https://threadreaderapp.com/ I’m @ThreadReaderApp a Twitter bot here to help you read threads more easily. To trigger me, you just have to reply to (or quote) any tweet of the thread you want to unroll and mention me with the “unroll” keyword and I’ll send you a link back on Twitter 😀

A lot of this is run out of universities and I suspect the boring paper writing tasks are being given to the newbies who use ChatGPT. It boggles the mind that such a simple mistake isn’t picked up. Who is proofreading and peer reviewing these papers?

what could have happened? There are multiple reviewers, the editor, and then the proofing stage…..

This is only going to get worse. Publishing is still a prestige game on both supply and reviewer side, but supply is growing and is going to grow massively faster than growth of reviewers. The point had been that gatekeepers couldn’t be hacked. No more.

Peer review system were just not built for large amounts of review because the rate at which research is now produced is much higher than rate at which people who can referee/review is growing. Prestige of being one > impact of work (with increasing crowding). The peer review system was more efficient in much smaller teams. Conducting research has gotten easier in that now research group have up to 30 people, all of whom produce research but 75% can’t be referees. This will only get worse.

Of course, most papers in academic journals are never read at all. So this may be a good tactic to get attention.

Every paper on a given topic has the same worthless intro for “context”. Not surprising it gets skipped/skimmed by everyone. This may show that they are being lax with their peer reviewers, and need to do a full audit on the area in charge of picking the people who would do it.

Do people even read whatever they ask ChatGPT to generate? If not, then how do they expect anyone else to read their papers?

Should probably check the validity of the references too, considering ChatGPT makes them up too.

The fact some of the references are inside the paywalled article is a fun wrinkle too.

It’s not the only paper. A quick Google search brought up another one with the same phrase: https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1569843224000979 “Certainly, here is the pseudo code for the…”

You can find them like this in Google: “Certainly, here is” site:http://sciencedirect.com

And a bit further down in this one, just before the conclusions: https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324001298?via%3Dihub

“I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model. I can provide general information…”

See Pub Peer for more examples? (many of which wouldn’t be as bad as what gets posted on Twitter)

Even if the publishers had intentionally included that ChatGPT blooper in their paper to get the paper more attention, it’s unlikely that they would do so. But if they really did do it on purpose, then that still indicates a problem with academia. It indicates that a lot of people are attention seekers and status seekers, and not necessarily interested in pursuing the truth.

Some academics may want to deny it, but all Science is based in Philosophy. Rude, arrogant, and pretentious scientists™ on the ScienceHub Discord server have lamented me for making this argument, but I’m doubling down anyway because they don’t understand science as well as they think that they do. PhD stands for Philosophy Doctorate for a reason.

The question “What counts as fake research?” is a philosophical question since it pertains to truth and knowledge.

Do your own research. But do it right. - Sabbine Hossenfelder

i

Humans have likely passed Peak Idea Production. This is yet another reason why the growth of factual Academic Research has slowed down significantly over the last half century. Since the supply of good ideas to discover is finite, ever-lasting academic progress is impossible.

One last criticism that I have about Academia is that lots of Academics don’t know how to write their papers in a manner that’s easily read by others. As a result, academic writing doesn’t tend to be comprehension friendly or easy-to-follow. One of the reasons why Blithering Genius’s content is so amazing is precisely because it’s written as clearly and as articulately as humanly possible, with little to no rhetorical or metaphorical language. This is something that seemingly most people are unable to do to some degree.

The Negative Effects Academia has had on Society; WhatIfAltHist describes how blind obedience to corrupt, partisan academics has held society back.

Many academics insist that people who don’t have graduate or undergraduate degrees aren’t qualified to speak about intellectual topics that they’re interested in. That belief is pretentious bullshit. Plenty of important and groundbreaking theories and discoveries were created as passion projects, often by people who were self-taught. E.g. Newton’s theories (calculus, gravitation, motion), Einstein’s special relativity, Michael Faraday’s Theory of Electro-Magnetism, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Hutton’s theory of geology. Many of these intellectual pioneers also made their discoveries without formal education. I’m not saying that random people’s passion projects should be funded, but rather that a lot of scientific progress came from such projects, not from “legitimate research”. “Legitimate Research” is just whatever the academic bureaucracy decides is legitimate, including happiness studies and other nonsense.

A lot of academic research in STEM fields tends to accelerate technological progress, which worsens humanity’s current evolutionary mismatch. So even if some academic research may be seen as “productive” for advancing humanity’s technology, it may not necessarily be what’s “best” for humanity.

To quote from Industrial Society and Its Future:

88. The “benefit of humanity” explanation doesn’t work any better. Some scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the human race, most of archaeology or comparative linguistics for example. Some other areas of science present obviously dangerous possibilities. Yet scientists in these areas are just as enthusiastic about their work as those who develop vaccines or study air pollution. Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional involvement in promoting nuclear power plants. Did this involvement stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn’t Dr. Teller get emotional about other “humanitarian” causes? If he was such a humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? As with many other scientific achievements, it is very much open to question whether nuclear power plants actually do benefit humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the accumulating waste and the risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side of the question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear power arose not from a desire to “benefit humanity” but from a personal fulfillment he got from his work and from seeing it put to practical use.

The greatest problems of our times are social problems, not technological ones.

For fields in human-centric sciences, academic research can also worsen evolutionary mismatch, but in a different way. Instead of accelerating humanity’s technology, research in human-centric sciences could create social delusions and supposed justifications for ridiculous ideas.

Many academics are bright, intelligent people. It’s unfortunate that so many of humanity’s brightest minds end up focusing their 20s and 30s on academia, instead of having talented children who could work towards further improving society. Social delusions, modern culture, and education systems have deluded many such people into wasting their youth. Many academics get so involved in their careers that they end up having no children at all.

Education was originally intended for teachers, clergy, and thinkers. (Thus the philosophy part of PhD). People that worked were merchants, craftsmen, or farmer/peasants. You learned on the job. College just morphed into another industry. Nowadays, Academia tends to works more like a rogue industry, rather than a group of noble thinkers who are trying to discover the truth.

There is a conflict between college rankings and intellectually-honest research. College rankings are complete and utter garbage (the same goes for basically all “best of” rankings in general). Citations per faculty is a terrible proxy for quality. The number of academic publications a school produces has almost nothing to do with the undergraduate experience. In fact, colleges that spend more time on research tend to place less emphasis on teaching. When folks reminisce about college, they mention things like the fun social environment and maybe one or two stand-out classes. What they don’t tend to remember is their school’s number of academic citations. Silly as this sounds, millions of students inadvertently choose schools based on this very criteria. All college rankings really do is reward those willing to play the game. And that’s of course assuming the research being cited is even good.

Plagiarized research is another serious problem in Academia. It could be considered a sub-category of redundant research. For plagiarized research, the pretense of creating original research is fake, but the content itself of the plagiarized research may not necessarily be false.

One study showed that Wikipedia has a tendency to shape the language in science papers.

In How Widespread Is Plagiarism in Academia?, one academic estimates that 7-9% of all PhD dissertations are plagiarized, although it may vary by the field of study. As mentioned in the video, it’s often difficult to discern plagiarism due to false positives, false negatives, and the strong social ramifications of accusing someone of plagiarizing. In some contexts, it can also be difficult to write original language. For instance, it’s sometimes practical to copy things, like Methods sections, which may not vary much from paper to paper if the testing methods have not changed, or were kept the same for replicability. Regardless, there’s certainly a lot of plagiarism that occurs to boost academics’ social statuses, it’s a huge problem in academia, and more plagiarized papers may be spotted in the future with the advent of new AI technology.

I won’t comment much more on plagiarized research since I don’t know what works have been plagiarized, nor do I know the fields/topics/circumstances under which plagiarism is the most prevalent.

Redundant Research isn’t necessarily fake, but it just replicates or draws on research that has already been published before.

Or consider the scientist of the Mousetopia experiments who replicated his experiment 30 times, but did not have his results replicated by any other scientist.

It is often necessary to repeat experiments in order to prove that they can be replicated, but given the extent of the replication crisis and how it is ongoing, it seems that repeating most studies these days won’t yield consistent results. Whatever the reason may be for this (rigged experiments, intellectual dishonesty, statistical manipulation, misunderstanding of philosophical problems, etc), irreplicable research ought to be categorized as fake, and it can also be considered redundant if it spawns many failed attempts to replicate it.

Out-dated research is closely related with redundant research in a sense, but still different. Outdated research is often useless, compared to newer and more innovative methods.

This is also kind of depends on what gets considered “outdated”. Like, optimality theory could be considered just a simpler method for modeling language phonology, not necessarily a completely outdated way of thinking about it, although it is definitely less sophisticated and less accurate.

To be fair however, it is inevitable that some research will become outdated/obsolete rather quickly when new ideas are shared all over the world by brilliant minds who have done a lot of thinking, especially when the rate of the flow of information around the world is the fastest it has ever been in human history.

Research is also more likely to become outdated if it isn’t of high-quality to begin with. A lot of research is done by graduate students who have limited knowledge of their respective fields, so they aren’t able to make the best research that they can, especially if they have time constraints, financial constraints, social constraints, and limited knowledge on what they can publish.

Some fake research could be re-categorized as outdated research if the mainstream academic opinion changes to largely reject the fake opinion.

Useless Research is characterized by being undiscovered or uninvestigated (hence it’s not redundant or out-dated), but it still doesn’t improve human society by and large in any conceivable way. Labeling research as “useless” is a value judgment, and value judgments can change as we acquire more knowledge about the world. One could make the argument that much of the useless research out there may have a theoretical and yet undiscovered application that could benefit humanity in the future (e.g. many fields of applied mathematics), but that’s unlikely to be true for many things.

To clarify, “useless research” isn’t necessarily “bad”. Sometimes, “because I want to” is a perfectly legitimate reason to do anything, even if the action or research has no known practical applications. From a societal perspective, there’s nothing wrong with people making donations for people to do useless research or teaching for fun. However, a more functional society and government should never pay nor subsidize professors and other people to do research that doesn’t or won’t conceivably benefit society. The time used to conduct useless research can also have a lost opportunity cost for society, if the useless researcher would’ve been better off doing something else. Those are the two main problems with useless research.

• The Genocentric Theory of Biological Purpose – See: Debunking the Selfish Gene Book Summary
• The Group Selection Theory of Biological Purpose – See: Debunking the Selfish Gene Book Summary
• r/K Selection Theory
• Kin Altruism, Reciprocal Altruism, etc.
• Myths About Human Genetics: Most human traits are polygenic, and are rarely determined by only one gene. Many of the typical examples used to teach genetic differences in K-12 biology classes also have no scientific basis to back them up.

• The Gay Uncle, and other theories on homosexuality
• Lewontin’s Fallacy
• Thuletide’s exhibitions of fake socially and politically motivated history
• https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2023/08/27/otzi-the-iceman-was-neither-black-nor-dark-skinned-information-on-the-early-european-farmers/
• https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2023/07/29/studies-debunking-the-myth-that-neolithic-early-european-farmers-were-matriarchal-feminist-pacifists/

If the consensus among biologists and the consensus among anthropologists can’t agree on what race is, then they can’t both be right, so one of them is wrong, which should indicate a lot of fake research.

• Most researchers have been unable to make coherent analyses regarding Social Mobility

Although mathematics is often overused in many branches of science, some philosophical fields have the opposite problem of not using enough mathematics to better understand and model philosophical problems, especially game theory, chaos theory, and various types of discrete mathematics. For a list of philosophical topics that use mathematics, see: Philosophical More Mathematics.

• The unreasonable inefficiency of economics

• Pretty much everything having to do with morality
• Even worse, many academics mistakenly believe that their moral philosophies count as knowledge. All human-centric theories that are based around moral assumptions have flaws to the extent that they fail to accurately account for their moral biases.
• Most Epistemological Theories
• The false dichotomy between visual learning, hands-on learning, etc.
• Pretty Much All Pro Covid-19 Lockdown Research Papers
• Many Psychological Theories

• The Land Bridge Hypothesis For How Native Americans First Entered The Americas: Additionally, linguistic theories and evidence had already shown that it is more likely that many of the language families across the Americas arrived by crossing the Pacific Ocean.

• The Real Causes Of Depression: Depression isn’t merely chemical balances in the brain. Depression is a natural biological reaction to having a shitty life, and is caused by:
  • Childhood trauma
  • Deadening and boring work
  • Instability in life
  • Poor social connections
  • Lack of good values
  • Low Social Status
  • Grief
• Many Sociological Theories
• Many Nutritional Theories
• Are Seed Oils Causing the Diseases of Civilization? Episode 1 - Plant Chompers
• Are Seed Oils Causing the Diseases of Civilization? Episode 2: Your Questions Answered - Plant Chompers
• The Myers-Briggs Personality Test -This is a terrible personality test with little scientific basis and great variations with every attempt, and yet its use is very widespread. Professional psychologists and scientists prefer the Big 5 Personality Traits Test. The widespread use of the Myers-Briggs Test can probably be attributed to its categorization of all personalities into 16 personality types, which is fetishized among the public and the brain’s tendency to categorize things. In reality, personalities are far too diverse to pigeonhole into just 16 types and a series of spectrums is a much better way to record them and their differences. Myers-Briggs is not a valid personality test.
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs -There are many contradictions to Maslow’s Hierarchy.
  • A Better Theory For Motivation: Drive-Reduction Theory of Pain, Pleasure, and Motivation
• Many linguistic theories regarding hypothetical super language families.
• Many linguistic theories regarding grammar and syntax are redundant, but not necessarily incorrect. Though, some are more practical than others.
• The endorsement of trans fats instead of saturated fats backfired catastrophically.

• Demographic Transition Theory
• The Laffer Curve – Georgism is a more effective approach to taxation, so the Laffer Curve is obsolete and irrelevant.
• Market Capitalization
• Almost much every take on free will that doesn’t utilize the subject-object dichotomy.
  • https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2020/05/free-will-determinism-and-choice.html
• Just about every take on knowledge/truth that doesn’t utilize the subject-object dichotomy. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2023/08/theories-of-knowledge.html
• Pretty much all takes on Mind-Body Problems.
• IB’s Theory of Knowledge (TOK) Course -This has absolutely no scientific basis, and is one of the main reasons why I hate the IB curriculum. It makes about as much sense as the Bible, the Koran, or any other nonsensical theological text. I can’t believe that money is being stolen from people to teach these nonsensical contradictory garbage to adolescents. IB is overrated.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Neil_Fleming's_VAK/VARK_model
  • Visual / Hands-on|Kinesthetic / Auditory / Reading Method of Learning -i
  • I can remember questioning if this theory of learning styles ever made any sense since it seemed that many of the subjects that I learned in school could only be learned by reading.
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
• Keynesian Economics -…
• Wealth Inequality: There are many economics papers that try to postulate what causes wealth inequality. What most academics have failed to figure out is that there are two main causes wealth inequality: 1. hereditarian genetics, and 2. unequal land ownership distribution.
• “Immigration is always good” -…
• Many economists don’t fully understand the effects that fertility rates and overpopulation have on economies, if at all.
• Many sociologists don’t fully understand the effects that fertility rates and overpopulation have on economies, if at all.
• Overpopulation and resource competition are the primary causes of war.
• Prescriptivism and Parts of Speech -…
• Aspects of Political Science -i
• Aspects of Gender Studies -Aside from feminism, sexuality, sexology, and some biology studies, the rest of gender studies is cultish, unscientific, and a waste of time. Biology and feminist activism are more practical things to study.

• Vegan diets -Vegan diets are unhealthy and they don’t work. Believing that you can get all the nutrients that you need to function from a plant-based diet when humans evolved to be omnivores is wishful thinking. A better and more practical solution than veganism would be entomo-vegan diets or entomo-vegetarian diets.
• College Rankings, Best City Rankings, etc.
• Green Energy Studies
• Breakfast Company Funded Studies on the supposed importance of breakfast
  • Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -There is no evidence that skipping breakfast by itself will make a person less healthy. Studies that reach this conclusion have been funded by breakfast companies, might have had their results exaggerated (like the Harvard study), or may have failed to account for correlations. Thus they have made a Correlation Implies Causation Fallacy. Although people that skip breakfast tend to be less healthy, this is because they tend to do other unhealthy stuff too like smoking, not exercising, and other bad health decisions. When people wake up, they should eat when they’re hungry, and if they’re not hungry, then they should eat later.
• Pornography is a bad thing because the chemicals released in the brain when someone watches porn are the same chemicals released in the brain when someone takes highly addictive illegal drugs, and every single time someone wants to reach the same high (euphoric feeling of pleasure), they have to watch even more extreme porn, just as a drug user has to take higher and higher doses to feel the same high -This argument is the Guilt by Association Fallacy. By the same reasoning, they would also have to conclude that falling in love is a bad thing since romantically falling in love someone also releases the same chemicals in the brain associated with highly addictive illegal drugs, which is exactly why it is so hard for some people to get over breakups, deceased loved ones, and why some people even love their former partners until the day that they die. The people making this argument would probably insist that love is a good thing (since Fight The Drug is funded by the Church of Latter Day Saints), so their argument contains a contradiction.
• The Food Pyramid / My Plate -Corporations lobbied the US government to teach this false curriculum in schools. Over half of the world’s humans are lactose intolerant, so they can’t consume dairy products. Not to mention that it is unethical to eat meat if that requires inhumanely killing life that wants to live.

• Orthodontics – Orthotropics is a superior alternative to orthodontics that doesn’t harm the body or cause facial damage. There are many reasons why conventional medicine not want to acknowledge orthotropics and its theories.
• Object-Oriented Programming – OOP may have merits for specific cases, but its utility is often exaggerated. Functional programming is often easier to code and manage than OOP.
  • SOLID Programming – See: Where Does Bad Code Come From?
• Sex Denialism – There are sizable personality and biological differences between men and women.
• Race Denialism – See: Race FAQs; And: Is there a “Scientific Consensus” on the Existence of Human Races? - Thuletide

• The Fire-Gravity Collapse of the World Trade Center: It is taboo to discuss this theory in academia.

  • ELABORATE.
  • ELABORATE.
• Et Cetera.
• [This list is a work in progress. It takes time to write stuff.]

Examples Of Motivated Pseudo-Science In Our Society:

• Academia pushed quantum theory, black holes, and Einstein’s theories in physics off some very weak and spotty evidence.
• Academia basically invented modern monetary theory with no evidence.
• Academia rejected the idea that there are lessons to history with no evidence.
• All the humanities are ideologically motivated, where everything must fit inside a Leftist prism. The humanities assume the Blank Slate, which has been disproven strongly.
• Almost every trait, including personality and intelligence is half genetic, but academia (and our society) operates off the Blank slate assumption.
• We assume human nature is rational, but most studies actually aim to rationalize our emotions.

• The inaccurate reporting of the American divorce rate -
• The college graduation rate of people with ADHD -See the Stack Exchange response
• 30 million word gap -This study has been cited over 8000 times, but it is based on extremely bad data and ridiculous extrapolations. i
• Just about everything favoring prescriptive language over descriptive language
• Body language accounts for 90% of communication -This is obviously not true for all types of communication and it is more limited in scope than most people realize. It only applies when people are communicating their likes and dislikes. It is intellectually dishonest that many people lazily spread this false claim without also saying the context that it applies to and it overemphasizes body language, even though body language is very important. A better way to emphasize body language is to not spread false claims like this around since lies/dishonest statements do not move academia forward. It is also likely that different people and different cultures would use body language more than others since everybody is different and likely has different ways of communicating, so it is also dishonest to suggest that this is a universal statement.

Unlikely/Contradictory Hypotheses That Gain Unreasonable Attraction The main reason why these hypotheses get so much attention among the populace is most likely because they: 1. spark interesting conversations, 2. are easy to explain, 3. fit well in story-telling. However, these hypotheses have several holes in them, and it is dishonest to teach them as fact for that reason.

• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis – By and large, most linguists have rejected the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. There have been very few cases where language has been proven to determine thought. And if you think about, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense if language determined thought because thought has existed at least hundreds of thousands of years before language ever did.
• Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics -This theory breaks probability, but it gets taught a lot since it is relatively easy to explain and fits well with story telling.
• Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis -The CTH has several holes inside it: …
• All attempts to defend Creationism and Intelligent Design
• All attempts to defend God
• All attempts to defend Labor Theory of Value, Marxism, and Communism

There is something to learn from everybody -At minimum, it only takes just one counterexample out of billions of people to prove this wrong. And there are probably at least millions maybe even a couple billion or more people from whom the smartest human beings or even smarter-than-average humans wouldn’t have anything to learn from. Since millions to billions of humans all have the same lifestyle, education, major life choices, and/or surrounding circumstances, lots of people’s advice would become quite similar and repetitive.

People that can brainstorm more curse words may be more intelligent -The internet articles that make this claim are intentionally hiding critical information in the misleading titles and the content. The truth is that studies show that people that can brainstorm more cursewords demonstrate an ability to be able to brainstorm all kinds of different words in general, and being able to think of different cursewords is just a small section of the vocabulary that they are able to brainstorm. God-Given Rights -The only place where God exists is in the imaginations of those who choose to believe in such a ridiculous nonsensical concept. Rights are not given by a magical man, but rather they are the well-reasoned conclusion of the Non-Aggression Principle.

FACT: In the long run, training wheels actually don’t make it easier to learn how to ride a balance bike. They make it arguably harder since training wheels don’t require counter steering to steer, whereas balance bikes do. So when the training wheels are removed and one must learn how to ride a balance bicycle, one has to unlearn turning and relearn how to turn (this time with counter-steering for balancing the bicycle).

• Neo-Classical Strategem As A Strategy Against Henry George - Mason Gaffney
• Why does conventional medicine not want to listen to Orthotropics? - Mike Mew
• Analyzing the “Scientific Consensus” on Human Races - Thuletide

The denial of the biological validity of race is an exclusively Western phenomena, biologists are less likely to deny race than anthropologists, and the global scientific consensus is overwhelmingly opposed to race-denialism. A lot of fake research occurs in the West due to the denial of biological realities.

Links Regarding Fake Academic Research

• Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis
• Wikipedia: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis
• Trouble at the Lab
• https://condor.depaul.edu/tcole/Research_Methods/correlatex.htm
• https://wakelet.com/wake/35a80e1c-0033-4db1-a5c1-28337f57d75b
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8wi0QnYN6s
• https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
• https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17433
• Data Dredging (also known as Data Snooping or p-hacking)
• https://gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800
• Crowdsourced research: Many hands make tight work
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkFuturology/comments/1tu9xp/science_corrupted_by_the_cult_of_profit/
  • Science Has Lost Its Way, At a Big Cost to Humanity
  • The Science-Is-Self-Correcting Myth
  • Scientific Fraud: ‘Nobody Had Noticed the Whole Thing Was Rotten’
  • American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
  • Scientific Fraud in Medicine: More Than a Few Bad Apples
• https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/07/lets-not-mischaracterize-replication-studies-authors/
• https://retractionwatch.com/
• https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1
• https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience

• A linguist creates a thesis paper and poster showing the application of a linguistic phenomenon, even though there’s already many papers out there like it before.
• Over-Emphasis of Literary Analysis in Education - I haven’t learned anything from analyzing literature that has particularly led to great intellectual development. It is important to know how to read, write well, and get one’s point across, but analyzing literature does not build CTS. What should be emphasized in place of literature is rational philosophy and epistemology, because they actually build CTS and give people a sense of direction for how to live their lives.

• The Linear Model of Linguistic Morphology -… ../language/morphological-typology
• One linguist’s PhD dissertation used stochastic optimality, but it was outdated by maximum entropy phonotactics just a few years later.
• How one person’s master’s thesis studied belief networks, but it was outdated by large language models just a couple of decades later.

• Most of Sociolinguistics
• Most of Comparative Linguistics
• Most of Archaeology
• All of Pure Mathematics, since none of it is categorized as applied mathematics by definition. Some pure mathematics could become applied mathematics someday if we find practical applications for it, but until then, it shall categorized as “useless”.

The funding and salary structure of Academia should be restructured. Money should only be given to truth-seekers, rather than paper pushers. It’s true that making unsuccessful discoveries can sometimes pave the way for more successful discoveries late on, but if it’s profitable for academics to make failed attempts to prove or discover things, then they will continue to publish fake research. Fake research may have a smaller potential profit than making the definitive proof/discovery, but academics will do it anyway since it’s easier to make fake discoveries, rather than real discoveries.

As I mentioned on my economics page, the government should replace patents with a bounty system for rewarding people who made proven new discoveries. Currently, there are many unsolved mathematical and scientific problems that don’t have any monetary rewards for solving them. But if the government offers money to solve them, then more people are going to be focused on solving them and doing real academic research. For this to work though, the government can’t just award prize money to anybody who attempts to solve a standing problem and fails. If it’s profitable for academics to make failed attempts to prove or discover things, then they will continue to do, even if it has a smaller potential profit than making the definitive proof/discovery. A person who makes a successful discovery should be awarded enough money to live off it for a while. We only want to reward people who do real research.

If most would-be academics are not smart enough to consistently make an endless stream of ground-breaking discoveries, then it would be better if they do something else as their main occupation instead. It simply doesn’t make sense to have so people who make a living off of coming up with new ideas, especially when many fields of knowledge are on the verge of running out of ideas. I thus propose that there should be a minimum age set for most people who want to do research in academia. Unless someone can demonstrate that they are exceptionally gifted during their childhood, adolescence, and early 20s, people should be bared from doing academic research until they reach 40 or 50 years old, or whenever their reproductive age has ended. Exceptions to this age requirement can be made for extremely gifted people, e.g. Terrence Tao, since they have a proven ability to make groundbreaking discoveries during their 20s and 30s. Society would benefit most from allowing them to do research as their main occupation.

Everyone else who wants to do academic research should instead focus on building up their savings (perhaps according to the FIRE movement) and having children while they are still young enough to be within their reproductive age range. If a person is truly smart, then they should be able to put their higher-than-average intelligence to work and use it to receive higher incomes than most other people. Once they’ve finished having children and are ready to retire, they can live off of their own savings to do whatever research they want to do. (And of course, if a person has done some research for a few years or so, but they want to start making money again, they can always leave academia and rejoin the workforce.)

This restriction would cause less academic papers to be published, but this would be a good thing since most academic papers are fake anyway. More importantly, it would cause the quality of academic papers to increase. And since it would cause more smarter than average people would be focusing on making money rather than writing pointless papers, it would also have a positive effect on the economy, western fertility rates, and eugenics in western societies. Currently, there is a strong positive correlation between how educated a person is and how many children they have. One reason for this is that academia usually isn’t very profitable for most academics. Since there is a positive correlation between wealth and fertility rates, less wealthy people (including academics) tend to have fewer children. Another reason may be that too many academics get so invested in their academic careers that they run out of time to have children before it’s too late. Having smarter-than-average people get jobs that pay better than academia and encouraging them to have children while they still can would thus increase their fertility rates.

Additionally, if most academics have to live off of their own savings, then they are more likely to make more honest research, since they won’t have to worry about feeding themselves or putting a roof over their heads. Instead of choosing to make provocative, unproductive, and/or counter-productive “research” for making money and a name for themselves, they will be more motivated to focus on the truth instead. This is especially true if money is only given to truth-seekers, rather than paper pushers. People will be less likely to make fake research if they aren’t getting paid to do it. If funding for a major research project has to come out of researcher’s own pocket, then they will also be more selective in conducting research that is more likely to succeed.

Like with everything else that needs to be fixed in modernity, fixing the culture will always help.

i