Bauer takes it forward.

Dear Henry Bauer,

What you write below, between the @s, is new. However, I add yet another theoretical advance, which only occurred to me this morning, 13.5.2020.

An advance warning was the silencing of alternative views on climate change. The only permissible view was that man caused climate change.

Coronamania shows us that your " By emphasising progress and not the repudiation of previous belief " is not the end of the story. In the case of corona, which is a new occurrence, there was immediate competition between competing conjectures (theories). All careerists, (or more generally MICs) wanted was that everyone herd behind a single theory, and silence alternative ideas “in order to save lives”. (One alternative theory is that corona spread rapidly throughout the world, and we nearly all have had it; that shutdown is damaging, delaying herd immunity.)

I feel that I go even further than your between @s story (below). Perhaps due to the internet, the Conventional Wisdom is now dangerously unstable, and a consensus is agreed rapidly to face up to a new event (e.g. corona), and all disagreement with the immediate consensus is viciously attacked and silenced. Note that youtube removes alternative theories over corona "to save lives". As with AIDS, it is argued that publicising alternative theories, for instance Duesberg's, will mean loss of life. (I cite that in my article "The Decline of Science" http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x59596.htm . The Master of Trinity said Duesberg should be suppressed.).

What politicians are calling “the science” is a restricted source of information controlled by a small number of vested interests. I think the vested interests are largely manipulating the “philanthropy”. Thus they wield power, and do damage.

Ivor Catt

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https://henryhbauer.homestead.com/21stCenturyScience.pdf

"Much popular and much technical discourse cites Thomas Kuhn’s description of progress in science via scientific revolutions, emphasizing the progress, the advance. But every such revolution deserves its naming because it overturns earlier beliefs. Scientific revolutions are not only milestones on the road of progress, they are also gravestones of earlier theories that, more often than not, were held dogmatically and were defended vigorously against dissenters who were ignored, dismissed, or actively persecuted. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x6611.pdf ; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x54c.pdf ; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x232.pdf

By emphasizing progress and not the repudiation of previous belief, the impression of science as certifiably reliable at any given time becomes reinforced.

The alternative viewpoint makes for a very different attitude, namely, that every contemporary belief in medicine and in science is reliable only insofar as it has not yet been overturned in a scientific revolution. History obviously cannot provide any example of a belief that will never be overturned, it can only offer instances of beliefs that have not yet been found wanting.

More instructively, the history of science and of medicine teach that in the run-ups to scientific revolutions, any researchers who foreshadow the future revolution by drawing attention to the flaws in current beliefs, the evidence against current theory, are treated shabbily, to put it in the mildest possible terms.

Here, then, is the prime insight to be drawn from the fact that the practices of contemporary psychiatry are at odds with popular ideas about the reliability and progress of science and science-based medicine: .... "

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