"Studies" Are Likely B.S.

Breeze through a random walk of Lefty blog-, news-, or Twitter- sites, and you'll find that a lot of what's published in them is simply not true.  The GonePostal of recent vintage is a spectacular example--where a pile of a couple hundred collection boxes found in Hartford, WI. led to "news" stories telling us that Trump was dismantling the Post Office, instead of observing that those boxes were outside a refinishing company contracted to refinish collection boxes.

But that mania is nothing compared to the relatively sophisticated "studies" undertaken by academics.  (We could mention Fauci's volte-face on masks, for example--but there's no study which actually validates his Mask Madness.)

Here's the very brief summary:

...In 2015, the journal Science tried to replicate the findings of 100 articles published in three prominent psychological journals during 2008 and got significant results for only 36, compared with the significance claimed by 97 of the originals. A similar study one year later in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series of the Federal Reserve could not reproduce the outcomes of a majority of prominent economics articles.

Ioannidis [Stanford] believes that up to half the discoveries published in peer-reviewed social science and medical journals are probably wrong, an opinion he shares with The Lancet’s medical journal’s respected editor-in-chief, Richard Charles Horton. National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood has argued that many of the regulations, laws, and social programs routinely passed by the U.S. Congress on the presumption that they reflect rigorous research have no real scientific basis....

But that's just the guts.  Here's the frosting:

...critics of secular progressivism have been skeptical of the many billions Congress and state legislatures annually spend on university research, especially in the social sciences. What leftists like to tout as a valuable investment in better understanding and improving the human condition is increasingly seen by others as a cleverly camouflaged marketing effort to justify bigger and more intrusive bureaucracy.

It has been especially hard to ignore that almost every academic study includes two implications. The first is that government officials are even wiser and more worthy of the public’s trust as a result of the study. The second is that the results of the study require “further investigation.” Thus, studies generally suggest a mutually self-serving relationship that trades generous research subsidies for the apparent scientific endorsement of statist policies....

Who'da Thunk? 

What "experts in the field" are telling you is that "experts in the field" like that Big, Juicy, Gummint Tit.  And they also tell you that Politicians and Other Bureaucratic Twits are really, really, really, smart--for sending "experts" a bunch of your money.

Shazam!