For some of you, this means I'm going to destroy science as you know it. What can I possibly be talking about, you ask? I'm talking about your faith in science. The faith that people put out a study, and there's statistics, and that means something, or that proves something. The faith that scientists have the world figured out and they know exactly what they're talking about. And if you ever catch yourself using the phrase "well, that's what the science says," I'm going to challenge that right now. Because that is a limited view of the world, just like everything else is. My job, my vision, my goal is to expand your view of the world. And I love doing that while playing God's Unchained Weekend Ranked live, and then putting this on YouTube and on my podcast.
Science Is Done by Human Beings
The very first thing you need to know about science is that science is done by human beings who have their own beliefs, their own goals, and their own agendas. And peer review is a big part of science. What do I mean by peer review? Peer review means that, in order for you in many cases to publish a paper, you will need to get it reviewed by your peers before it can be published. So when you combine peer review with scientists having their own beliefs and ideas influencing exactly what happens, this has one clear outcome. Any study, any science, anything you see that relates to what you might call science or scientific discovery, anytime there's a study published that says this or a statistic that says that, it's all based on somebody's point of view and somebody's belief. Anytime you're seeing something, it's because somebody wanted you to see it. They were using that science to basically reinforce their own belief.
As we've seen over the last few years, what science means or what is scientific can be greatly manipulated, and often is, especially in the media, in order to produce a certain narrative. This is important for you to know so that you are resilient, so that you are able to understand the world better.
An Example from My Own History Doing Science
Let me give you a concrete way this works, and an example from my own history doing science. Now, I got a master's in criminology. I was working on a PhD, and I quit that to be a full-time creator online. Some of you might not count that as real science, but we went through and learned scientific methods and scientific inquiry, and I was trained in the same kinds of things that you frequently see in other places. For example, I was trained how to do statistical analysis. I was trained on how to conduct a study. And I did my own research. I did a study.
What I was interested in, as someone working on a PhD in criminology, was this: do people who exhibit what we'd quote-unquote call "deviant behavior" in offline things also become more likely to exhibit deviant behavior when it comes to online things? In other words, is there truly anything different or separate about doing things online versus offline? Is a person who's more criminal, let's say, the same kind of person going to steal your car as the person who would commit fraud online? Is the same kind of person who drinks underage also the same kind of person who would download music illegally online? And of course, when I did my study, that's exactly what I found.
Now, this is one small example from my own personal experience, which I want you to keep in mind. I did a study, and not surprisingly, it proved exactly what I thought it would prove. My study came out and showed that people who commit crimes online and offline, often the kinds of things we were looking at were misdemeanors, are basically the same person. The person is not going to act differently online than they do offline. And my study confirmed that.
I Used Science to Get the Result I Wanted
Let's unpack that a bit. I had a theory. I created a study and used science to create something that would give me the results I was looking for. I had an idea, and I used the scientific methods to create something which would reinforce and validate the idea I already had. So is it really surprising that my study found exactly what I thought it would? Of course not. That's not surprising at all. It makes perfect sense.
And here's something that will deepen your awareness on this particular subject even more: I didn't even go through the process of peer review with my study. The process of peer review is where you submit your paper to other people who do what you do, and have them review it. Then you're allowed to publish the paper in journals based on what other people, who already think similar to you, think about your research. Now let's apply that to my particular study. I did this study. I had an idea. I thought it should come out a certain way. It came out the way I wanted it to. Therefore, I share it in a journal. I tell everybody else about it. And if the other people at a particular journal believe the same way I believe, then they're likely to approve my study and allow me to publish it in their journal. So I have a theory, and it ends up going out officially, based on exactly my own belief of how things should work and what should happen. You can see that in doing that, I've set myself up to promote my own ideas. I've set myself up to make myself right.
Now Flip the Scenario
Let's look at this from a different angle. Let's say, in this particular example, my study didn't come out how I thought it should. The exact same scenario, but my study doesn't come out the way I think it should. Am I going to submit that to a journal to publish it, when I had an idea that I thought would be one way and it didn't come out that way? Or am I just going to keep that to myself and try to do another study that actually gives me my belief and makes it correct? What I've noticed is that there's a very strong tendency, and depending on how influential self-interest is, a very strong temptation to do exactly what I just said.
So in my case, let's say in a parallel universe I had become a professor of criminology instead of a Twitch streamer, YouTuber, and podcaster. In that universe, I'm a professor and I just want to get as many papers published as possible. So even if my study doesn't come out the way I want it to, I submit it to a journal and try to publish it. Now, the journal, if they don't agree with how my study came out, they're going to reject it and not let me publish it. If they think it should have been the other way, they have a good likelihood of just rejecting my study outright and saying, "we don't agree." They can criticize it for any reason they want. It's their journal. They have a good chance of rejecting my article if it disagrees with their opinion.
So that essentially has to pass two different tests. One: am I going to put something out that disagrees with my own opinion? And two: am I going to be allowed to publish something that comes out different from the opinion of those I'm submitting it to? This makes it extremely interesting, because just passing those two tests by itself might be difficult. Now, assume we pass both of those tests. Then I might actually get a paper published that would go out there and blatantly disagree with my own opinion and belief. You can see how that would be the minority of the time, right? That probably wouldn't usually happen. Sometimes it might, but that wouldn't be normal, for me to publish a paper that disagrees with me and for the journal to agree with me publishing it. Statistically, the odds of that are going to be small, because I've got multiple chances to lose.
But let's say that does happen. Even if that paper goes out and it proves my theory wrong, somebody else is now motivated. They see my paper and think, "hmm, I'm going to go out there and put something else out that actually agrees with me." And if they're more prestigious, their paper may get a lot more circulation than mine. You can see how many issues we're having with this whole science thing right now, can't you? There's a lot of ways where this goes wrong. Very often, things that were proven wrong wouldn't even come out. They're not as interesting for a journal to publish. And if nobody else had a particular theory, it's just not that juicy or interesting to even publish in the first place. What's going to be much more common is the opposite scenario I gave you.
A More Problematic Scenario
Now let's look at a more problematic scenario. The scenario I gave you had me being a very altruistic person, someone who truly cares about having the right science out there and really wants the right science out there. That's an ideal scenario, where my career doesn't depend on my reputation or anything, where I'm a professor and I can just make myself look dumb by publishing studies that go against me. That's obviously not going to be very common. Let's look at a more common scenario: a professor has a reputation on the line. They don't want to publish anything that disagrees with themselves or goes against their own ideas.
Or let's look at a much more unfortunate and extremely common scenario. Let's take a prescription drug company, for example. A prescription drug company does a study to see if a particular drug works or if it doesn't. Now, how fair do you think they're going to be about that study coming out the way they want it to? Do you trust a prescription drug company to come out and be accurate and honest and fair when they do a study to assess how a certain drug performs? If you're a prescription drug company and you do a study, and your study comes out saying it turns out your drug sucks, it turns out your drug doesn't work...
Burying the studies that do not work
Are they going to publish that study and tell everybody about it? Or are they going to run another one? What if they do ten studies? What if they do ten different studies, and one time the drug works and the other nine times it does not? What do you think they are going to publish? What if they keep those other nine studies secret from you, and the only study they publish is the one that just by essentially dumb luck happened to work that one time? Literally, they just got lucky. One time.
So what happens when the prescription drug company tests the same drug ten or twenty different times? They get one study showing that it works, and they bury the other nineteen. The only one you see, the only one your doctor sees, is the one that says the drug works. What nobody else sees is those nine, maybe nineteen, maybe nine hundred other studies where it did not work. What happens then? Now you can see that we are getting into a serious problem here. We are getting into a situation where you cannot really trust what you are being told and what you are being shown, because you do not know what you do not know.
If you are seeing a study from some drug company saying that this reduces blood pressure by twenty percent, does it really? Or did they just run nineteen studies until one time it reduced the blood pressure that much, and then publish that one study? In my experience, this is the unfortunate reality of the science we are living inside of. There is so much interest, such a strong self-interest in being right and in having things come out a certain way, that you cannot really tell what is true and authentic versus what is not true and inauthentic. This is a problem we are facing with our science today. We cannot tell, because we do not know the ratios of things being presented to us.
When being dishonest is profitable
And when you get into areas of self-interest, take a weight loss pill as an example. You test a weight loss pill fifteen times, and it works once. Now you have got a study that says it works. You take that one study, and you take the pill to market. But the truth is that most of the time the weight loss pill does not even work. And not only that, but there are weight loss approaches that are incredibly cheap and easily affordable. You do not want to tell anybody about those, though, because why would anybody take your weight loss pill if there were free alternatives that worked just as well?
Now you see how thick this gets, how much of a difficult situation we are in collectively, where being dishonest is profitable. It is profitable to be dishonest. It is profitable to use the science to show you what is desired. And if you want to take it even deeper than this, it gets to be even more of a problem. You are like, good God, how much deeper is this going to go? It is going to go a lot deeper. So what happens when the science is intentionally inconvenient and directly in your way? What happens when what the science tells you is blatantly inaccurate or wrong, but people literally just run studies over and over again to prove their point, and then present those to the public as if they are facts? You see the problem we are having here with science. And when you combine this with peer-reviewed journals, when you combine all this self-interest across the board, you can see that science is truly a creative field.
Scientists have a track record of being wrong
Let me give you the last big issue with science. People carry this certainty around, while our scientists tell us certainty is not possible. Well, our scientists told us 120 years ago that it was not possible to fly. Our scientists have a clear track record of being blatantly wrong about what is possible. You cannot fly. You cannot break the sound barrier. You cannot go into outer space. You cannot go faster than the speed of light. There is nothing smaller than the atom. You can find so many things where scientists have been blatantly wrong, and the earth is flat is another one, where these were mainstream opinions that turned out to be blatantly wrong.
Right now, though, almost all of our scientists are trained through the same basic schooling system, which teaches almost everybody the same basic, limited, and in many areas wrong ways of thinking. So if almost all of your scientists think the same way, disbelieve the same things, and believe in the same other things, what they are capable of producing sits inside a very limited bubble.
Science is a creative field
So my call to action is to remember that science is a creative field. Never say to anyone else that that is simply what the science says, because the science can say anything you make it say. You can make the studies say whatever you want them to. Holding this in mind, in my experience, will help you navigate the world, understand the world you are in, and maybe break out of the bubble a little bit.
If this way of looking at things resonates with you, I would love for you to keep the conversation going with me and the rest of us who think about this stuff out loud. The best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we share this kind of thinking with no distractions.
Thank you so much for listening to this. If you enjoyed it and you want more of the same, you can find plenty of these conversations gathered together in my Life playlist, where I get into exactly this with nothing else in the way.