A Strange Double Standard of Mainstream Academia

The object called 'Oumuamua is an unusual object that entered the solar system in 2017. Two Harvard scientists (Abraham Loeb and Shmuel Bialy) have written a paper speculating that the object might have been a probe designed by extraterrestrials. This paper has triggered much coverage in the popular press. 

One unusual thing cited about 'Oumuamua is its shape. We have been repeatedly told that the object was cigar-shaped, and press coverage has repeatedly shown a visual of a cigar-shaped object. But that visual is not an actual photo. It is a speculative “artist's visualization” thing. No actual photographs have been taken of 'Oumuamua. In a recent Scientific American article, Loeb says this:

"We do not have a photo of ‘Oumuamua, but its brightness owing to reflected sunlight varied by a factor of 10 as it rotated periodically every eight hours. This implies that ‘Oumuamua has an extreme elongated shape with its length at least five to 10 times larger than its projected width."

So 'Oumuamua may be only five times longer than its width, which would make it merely pickle-shaped rather than cigar-shaped. A pickle-shaped object is not particularly strange, and many asteroids and comets have such a shape. 

There are some reasons for doubting that 'Oumuamua was sent by extraterrestrials. The first is that  'Oumuamua has a tumbling motion, traveling in an end-over-end manner like a potato tumbling down some stairs.  It seems that no one would design a spacecraft with such a motion, since it would prevent the spacecraft from traveling in a particular direction using a rocket thrust.  The second reason is that 'Oumuamua came nowhere close to Earth.  The third is that the object did not transmit radio signals. Scientists searched for radio signals from 'Oumuamua, and detected none. Some University of Maryland scientists recently concluded that 'Oumuamua was not an interstellar spacecraft. 

So there has been this back and forth between scientists about whether an object resembling an asteroid was a product of deliberate design, and such activity was regarded by all as being very scientific. 

Another place in which scientists look for design is in deep-space radio waves.  Radio waves are naturally produced by quite a few astronomical bodies or large masses of gas floating about in space. But there is a group of scientists called SETI scientists who scan radio waves from space, looking for one that is the product of design.  The idea is to look for a radio signal that was deliberately sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. 

Recently these SETI scientists reported a discouraging result. The "Breakthough Listen" project reported that it had spent years searching 1327 nearby stars looking for extraterrestrial radio signals, but had not found any that can be classified as designed radio signals deliberately sent by intelligent beings.  These and all other efforts to find deliberately designed extraterrestrial radio signals have failed.  But nonetheless the search for design in radio waves from deep space is regarded by all as being very scientific, and the results were written up in a regular science journal. 

Such deep-space efforts have been futile. But there's another place where we can look for evidence of design, a place not far away. We can look for evidence of design in the very proteins and cells that make up our body.  This at first seems like a very promising line of inquiry. Our bodies are made up of more than 20,000 types of protein molecules. Our biologists have yet to give us a credible explanation for the origin of any of these protein molecules, each of which is as complex as a 60-line computer subroutine.  

A scientific paper entitled "Gene duplication and the origin of novel proteins" (written by an orthodox biologist) almost confesses this shortfall, for it states  (talking about the origin of proteins) "cases where  we can reconstruct with any confidence the evolutionary steps involved in the functional diversification are relatively few," and tells us that "positive Darwinian selection" (the core of evolutionary explanations) "is thought to be relatively rare at the molecular level." In the same vein, this long recent review of the topic of protein evolution states this near its end (referring to protein folds that are crucial to the functional performance of protein molecules):

"It is not clear how natural selection can operate in the origin of folds or active site architecture. It is equally unclear how either micromutations or macromutations could repeatedly and reliably lead to large evolutionary transitions. What remains is a deep, tantalizing, perhaps immovable mystery."

Similarly, many of the cells in our bodies are of fantastic complexity, being so complex that they have been compared to factories or small cities.  Explanations for the origins of such things will not be found in the works of Darwin, who had no inkling of the complexity of protein molecules and cells, and who incorrectly regarded cells as being almost featureless little blobs.  Showing rare candor about the explanatory shortcomings of modern biology, a biology professor confesses the following:  "The processes underlying evolutionary innovation are, however, remarkably poorly understood, which leaves us at a surprising conundrum: while biologists have made great progress over the past century and a half in understanding how existing traits diversify, we have made relatively little progress in understanding how novel traits come into being in the first place." Stomping upon the cherished legend that such novel traits are explained by natural selection, the same professor tells us, "It is difficult to see how selection could have played a role in the origin of novel traits and functions." 

But as soon as it is suggested that we should search for or ponder evidence of design in our own cells and proteins,  a loud howl of protest comes from many of our scientists, who say that we can't do that because it's not scientific. 

You will notice the absurd hypocrisy and double standard that is involved here. How can it be very scientific to look for evidence of design in deep-space radio waves and deep-space objects resembling asteroids, but unscientific to be looking for evidence of design in our own biology?

Someone might argue that it is scientific to look for design in deep-space objects or deep-space radio waves, but not scientific to look for design in cells and proteins in our bodies, on the grounds that design in something like deep-space radio waves would only be coming from a natural source (extraterrestrial civilizations) but design found in cells or proteins would only be coming from a supernatural source.  This argument is not valid, for three reasons:

(1) First, it is just as possible that a designed radio message might come from a supernatural source as from a natural source.  Before the SETI search for extraterrestrial radio signals, it was proposed that a deity might communicate to humans through radio messages, and the idea was the plot of a Hollywood movie.  Believers in what is called EVP actually maintain that we can pick up radio messages from the deceased on the Other Side. So searching for mysterious unexplained radio signals is not necessarily a "natural causes only" type of activity.  
(2) Second, it is just as possible that design discovered in cells or proteins might have a natural source as a supernatural source.  Designed cells or designed proteins might have come from extraterrestrial visitors that arrived here long ago.  Or designed cells or designed proteins might have come from some currently unfathomable top-down information principle or organizational principle that could ultimately be classified as natural, centuries from now when it was understood. 
(3) We must reject the whole idea of judging whether a research inquiry is scientific based on the cause of an effect.  The cause of an effect has nothing to do with whether it is or is not scientific to research the effect. 

It is clear that there is no consistent intellectual principle that can bless as scientific a search for design in deep-space radio waves or deep-space asteroids, but condemn as unscientific a search for design in the cells and proteins of our bodies. If you bless as scientific a search for design in deep-space radio waves or deep-space objects, but condemn as unscientific a search for design in the cells and proteins of our bodies, you are simply guilty of double-standards hypocrisy, like someone who says that it's okay if billionaires have three-week vacations, but it's not okay if factory workers take such vacations. 

Below is a video of Jeannie C. Riley singing "Harper Valley PTA" which is the best song I know of on the topic of double standards and hypocrisy:

How Not To Do a Meta-Analysis

I have no idea whether the esoteric practice known as homeopathy has any medical effectiveness, and this will certainly not be a post intended to persuade you to use such a practice. I will be examining instead the unfairness, methodological blunders and sanctimonious hypocrisy of an official committee summoned to convince you that homeopathy is unworthy of any attention. Committees such as this are part of the reality filter of materialists, the various things they use to try to cancel out, disparage, or divert attention from the large number of human observations inconsistent with their worldview. 

 

 

Issuing a 2015 meta-analysis report on homeopathy, the committee called itself the Homeopathy Working Committee, and was sponsored by or part of the the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), an Australian body. The committee consisted of 6 professors and one person who was identified merely as a consumer.

On page 14 of the committee's report, the committee makes this confession: “NHMRC did not consider observational studies, individual experiences and testimonials, case series and reports, or research that was not done using standard methods.” What kind of unfairness is that? Using such a rule, if a committee investigating a medical technique were to receive a million letters saying the technique produced instantaneous and permanent cures of dire maladies, the committee would just discard all such letters and not let them influence its conclusion.

The committee limited itself to scientific studies, but it did not at all simply consider all of the scientific studies on homeopathy. Instead, the committee chose to disregard the vast majority of scientific studies on homeopathy, and consider only a small subset of those studies. This is made clear by a Smithsonian article on the committee's report, which says, “After assessing more than 1,800 studies on homeopathy, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council was only able to find 225 that were rigorous enough to analyze.” But what was going on was actually this: the committee cherry-picked 225 studies out of more than 1800, claiming that only these should be allowed to influence its conclusions. So it based its findings on only about 12 percent of the total number of scientific studies on the topic it was examining, excluding 88% of the studies. I have never heard of any meta-analysis that excluded anything close to such a high percentage of the studies it was supposed to be analyzing.

The committee claimed to have used quality standards, standards that relatively few of the studies met. What were these standards? Below is a quote from the committee's report.

The overview considered only studies with these features: the health outcomes to be measured were defined in advance; the way to measure the effects of treatment on these outcomes was planned in advance; and the results were then measured at specified times (prospectively designed studies); and the study compared a group of people who were given homeopathic treatment with a similar group of people who were not given homeopathic treatment (controlled studies).

It is not at all true that medicine or science has these criteria as standards that are followed by all or even most studies. Control groups are when you have some people studied who are not subject to what is being tested in another group. A large fraction of all scientific studies and medical studies do not use control groups, for various reasons. Controls are often not practical to implement, too expensive to implement, or not needed because it is clear what the result will be in the case of zero influence. This scientific paper says the following about control groups:

The proportion of studies that have control groups in the ten research domains considered range from 3.3% to 42.8% ..Across domains, a mere 78 out of the 710 studies (11%) had control groups in pre-test posttest designs.

It also is extremely common for medical and scientific research to report findings that the study was not designed to look for. Saying that a study must only report what it was designed to measure is a piece of sanctimonious rubbish, rather like claiming that good students must only get ancient history answers by reading the original ancient texts, rather than looking up the answers on the Internet. Under such a rule, we would for example ignore very clear findings that homeopathy was effective in reducing arthritis pain, if the study was designed to look for whether homeopathy was effective in reducing headaches. I have never heard of any meta-analysis excluding studies based on whether they reported unexpected findings the study was not designed to look for. This seems to be an aberrant, non-standard selection rule.

So what we have here is a committee using a double standard. It has declared that scientific studies will not be considered unless some particularly fussy standard is met, a standard that a large fraction of highly-regarded scientific studies do not meet. It's like the door guard of the country club saying “Ivy league graduates only” to dark-skinned people trying to get in, even though he knows he just admitted some white people who don't even have college degrees.

The statement below from the committee's report also is a sign of double standards and cherry-picking.

For 14 health conditions (Table 1), some studies reported that homeopathy was more effective than placebo, but these studies were not reliable. They were not good quality (well designed and well done), or they had too few participants, or both. To be confident that the reported health benefits were not just due to chance or the placebo effect, they would need to be confirmed by other well-designed studies with adequate numbers of participants.

On page 35 we learn that the actual participant size requirement used by the committee was a minimum of 150 participants (studies with fewer participants were ignored). So if there had been 500 studies each showing that between 110 and 149 patients were instantly cured of terminal cancer, such studies would all have been excluded and ignored. How silly is that? For comparison, a meta-analysis on stuttering treatments excluded only studies with fewer than 3 participants; a meta-analysis on diabetes excluded only studies with fewer than 25 participants; and a cardiology meta-analysis included studies with as few as 62 participants.

I very frequently read about scientific studies which used only a small number of participants (30 or less), studies getting lots of coverage in the media, after being published in scientific journals. So evoking “too few participants” as an exclusion criteria (based on a requirement of at least 150 participants) is another example of a double standard being used by the committee. And once a committee has declared the right to ignore any study that does not meet the vague, arbitrary, subjective requirement of being “good quality (well designed and well done)," it has printed itself a permission slip to ignore any evidence it doesn't want to accept.

Below is a page from a statistician's presentation on whether or not small sample sizes should be excluded when doing a meta-analysis of medical studies. The recommendation is the opposite of what the homeopathy study committee did.

Similarly, the “Handbook of Biological Statistics” site says, “You shouldn't use sample size as a criterion for including or excluding studies,” when doing a meta-analysis.

In the case of homeopathy, it's particularly dubious to be excluding small studies with less than 150 participants. Only a small fraction of the population believes in the effectiveness of homeopathy. It is entirely possible that because of some “mind over body” effect or placebo effect, homeopathy is actually effective for those who believe in it, but ineffective for those who don't believe in it. So we are very interested in whether it is effective for small groups such as a small group that believes in homeopathy. But we cannot learn that if a committee is arbitrarily excluding all studies with fewer that 150 participants.

No doubt if we were to examine the scientific papers of the professors in the committee, we would find many that had the same issues of small participant size or no control groups or reported effects that the study was not designed to show (or we would find these professors had authored meta-analysis papers that included studies that lacked one or more of these exclusion criteria). So it is hypocrisy for such a committee to be using such things as exclusion criteria.

Apparently the committee used some type of scoring system to rate studies on homeopathy. One of the subjective criteria was “risk of bias.” We can guess how that probably worked: the work of any researcher judged to be supportive of homeopathy would be assigned a crippling "risk of bias" score making it unlikely his study would be considered by the committee. But what were the scores of the excluded studies, and what were the scores of the studies that were judged to be worthy of consideration? The committee did not tell us. It's kept everything secret. The report does not give us the names of any of the excluded studies, does not give us URL's for any of them, and does not give us the scores of any of the excluded studies (nor does it gives the names, the URLs or the scores of any of the studies that met the committee's criteria). So we have no way to check on the committee's judgments. The committee has worked in secret, so that we cannot track down specific examples of how arbitrary and subjective it has been.

There is a set of guidelines for conducting a medical meta-analysis, a set of guidelines called PRISMA that has been endorsed by 174 medical journals. One of the items of the PRISMA guidelines is #19: “Present data on risk of bias of each study and, if available, any outcome level assessment.” This standard dictates that any subjective “risk of bias” scores used to exclude studies must be made public, not kept secret. The NHMRC committee has flaunted such a guideline. The committee has also ignored item 12 on the PRISMA guidelines, which states, “Describe methods used for assessing risk of bias of individual studies.” The NHMRC committee has done nothing to describe how it assessed a risk of bias. Nowhere do the PRISMA guidelines recommend excluding studies from a meta-analysis because of small sample size or whether the reported effects match the effects the study was designed to show, two aberrant criteria used by the NHMRC committee.

It has been recommended by a professional that whenever any meta-analysis uses a scoring system to exclude scientific studies on the topic being considered, that such a meta-analysis should always give two different results, one in which the scoring system is used, and another in which all of the studies are included. That way we could do a sensitivity analysis in which we can see how much the conclusion of the meta-analysis depends on the exclusion criteria. But no such thing has been done by the committee. They have secretively kept their readers in the dark, by revealing only the results obtained given all of their dubious exclusions.

After doing all of this cherry-picking based on double standards and subjective judgments, the committee reaches the conclusion that homeopathy is not more effective than a placebo. But even if such a thing were true, would that make homeopathy worthless for everybody? Not necessarily.

Here's the story on placebos. Placebos have repeatedly been shown to be surprisingly effective for certain conditions. A hundred years ago, your doctor might have given you a placebo by just handing you a bottle of sugar pills. But nowadays you get your medicine in labeled plastic containers at the pharmacy, and people can look up on the Internet anything that is on the label. So a doctor can't just write a prescription for sugar pills without the patient being able to find out it's a placebo. But if a patient thinks some particular thing will work – homeopathy, acupuncture, holding a rabbit's foot, praying, or meditation – that might act as a placebo with powerful beneficial effects. 

We therefore cannot dismiss something as being medically ineffective by merely saying it's no better than a placebo. Imagine there's a patient who doesn't trust pills, but who tends to believe in things like homeopathy. Under some conditions and for certain types of patients, homeopathy might help, even if what's going on is purely a “mind over body” type of placebo effect, rather than anything having to do with what is inside some homeopathic treatment.

If there are “mind over body” effects by which health can be affected by whether someone believes in a treatment, such effects are extremely important both from a medical and a philosophical standpoint, since they might be an indicator that orthodox materialist assumptions about the mind are fundamentally wrong. Anyone trying to suppress evidence of such effects through slanted analysis shenanigans has committed a grave error.

Based on all the defects and problems in this committee's report, we should have no confidence in its conclusion that homeopathy is no more effective than placebos; and even if such a conclusion were true it would not show that homeopathy is medically ineffective (since placebos can have powerful medical effects). `The fact that 1800 studies have been done on homeopathy should raise our suspicions that at least some small subgroup is benefiting from the technique. It doesn't take 1800 studies to show that something is worthless – one or two will suffice.

Whether homeopathy has any medical effectiveness is an unresolved question mark, but about one thing I am certain. The committee's report is an egregious example of secretiveness, double-standards, overzealous exclusions, guidelines violations, and sanctimonious hypocrisy. Using the same type of methodological mistakes, you could probably create a meta-analysis concluding that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer; but you would mislead people if you did that. 

Postscript: Today's New York Times criticizes "the cult of randomized controlled trials" and points out the case of those who say the evidence for the effectiveness of flossing is weak, because there aren't enough randomized controlled trials showing it works. That, of course, makes no sense, as we have abundant anecdotal evidence that flossing is effective -- just as we have abundant evidence that parachutes work, despite zero randomized controlled trials showing their effectiveness. 

Postscript: A meta-analysis was recently published on the effectiveness of homeopathy in livestock. The meta-analysis avoided the outrageous exclusion problems discussed above; for example, it didn't exclude studies based on sample size. The meta-analysis concluded, "In a considerable number of studies, a significant higher efficacy was recorded for homeopathic remedies than for a control group." Specifically it concluded that "Twenty-eight trials were in favour of homeopathy, with 26 trials showing a significantly higher efficacy in comparison to a control group, whereas 22 showed no medicinal effect."  What is astonishing is that this result favoring homeopathy has been reported in The Scientist magazine with the headline, "Homeopathy does not help livestock."  That's the opposite of what the meta-analysis actually found.  

LIGO Doubts Will Persist Unless Replication Occurs

Last week the billion-dollar LIGO project announced the discovery of gravitational waves. It is interesting to examine the very absurd double standard followed by mainstream science when it comes to instantly accepting announcements such as this (based on a single rather questionable observational occurrence) while rejecting evidence for phenomena that is based on decades of experiments.

First, let's look at the LIGO observational event reported last week, and some reasons why it may not be so bulletproof. The scientific paper is here. The observational event occurred on September 14, 2015 at 9:50:45. It lasted only a tenth of a second. Two LIGO observatories recorded an ultra-faint spike at this instant, one in Hanford, Washington, and another in Livingston, Lousiana. The signal was so short-lived and faint that it is best described as a momentary micro-blip.

But there are several reasons for being skeptical about the claim that both observatories observed a pair of distant black holes merging. For one thing, the signal in Louisiana apparently occurred while there was no one in the control room of the observatory. Two scientists had left an hour ago, as reported in this press account. This raises security questions about whether someone could have been messing around in the control room, unobserved.

We actually know that sometimes LIGO would have false signals “injected” into it, by something called the “blind injection group,” but we are assured that this was not such a false signal. But are we sure? The New Yorker reports that the scientists investigated whether one of their colleagues could have faked the signal:

Reitze, Weiss, González, and a handful of others considered who, if anyone, was familiar enough with both the apparatus and the algorithms to have spoofed the system and covered his or her tracks. There were only four candidates, and none of them had a plausible motive. “We grilled those guys,” Weiss said. “And no, they didn’t do it.” Ultimately, he said, “We accepted that the most economical explanation was that it really is a black-hole pair.”

That is a little less than airtight. Apparently at least four people could have faked the signal, but we are asked to dismiss such a possibility solely on the rather questionable assertion that “none of them had a plausible motive” and the fact that they were questioned.

We should also ask: could other people have faked the signal, other than these four? We would expect such a possibility if the data was stored online, in database servers that could be hacked. Since the reported observation event covered less than a second, it would seem to be an easy job to fake such a thing. If a standard SQL database was used to store the data, someone would merely need to create a short SQL script with a few lines of Update statements. Once you login to a remote server using Telnet or some other utility, you would merely need to login to the database and run the script. Repeat the process on a second server, and you've done everything you need to fake things. Some foreign hacker might have done that from his living room. How can we be confident that such a thing didn't occur? American corporations suffer from all kinds of weird hacking incidents from other countries.

According to this account, an expensive gravitational wave observatory has just been approved in India, because of the observations reported by LIGO. So conceivably foreigners may have had a motive for hacking.

There are other possibilities that don't involve fraud. One possibility is that the incredibly sensitive equipment simply didn't work quite right. That seems all too possible. At this link the equipment is described: “The interferometers consist of suspended mirrors, which reflect the laser beams which are used to sense tiny mirror motions — 1/10,000th the diameter of a proton — caused by the passage of a gravitational wave.” Why should we have much confidence in something so sensitive, measuring something so microscopic that we should doubt the ability of anyone to accurately measure it? These are perhaps the most sensitive measurements that have ever been attempted.

I may also note that the event occurred at the very beginning of a major upgrade. Every software manager knows that new releases or major upgrades are often the source of various types of bugs.

Another possibility is that an earthly signal was detected. The scientific paper claims that such a possibility was considered: “Exhaustive investigations of instrumental and environmental disturbances were performed, giving no evidence to suggest that GW150914 could be an instrumental artifact.” That doesn't sound airtight at all, and the scientific paper gives very few details of how such an investigation occurred. The paper says that they looked for an earthly source that could have produced the signal, and didn't find one. How does that rule out such a possibility? They could have overlooked some earthly source that produced the signal. Since the LIGO observatories are kilometers long, we should expect that they should be sensitive to seismographic events originating from our planet itself.

There are other explanations that could explain the data without gravitational waves being involved. A software error or hardware error could explain the data. There could be a bug somewhere in the very complicated LIGO software that produced a false alarm, due to some programming error.

As for the very brief match of the signals between the two observatories, they are not an exact match, although they look about 95% similar.  Below is the graph from the scientific paper, showing observations from the different observatories during a time of less than a second.  Even though the data from the Hanford observatory has been "shifted" and "inverted" (possibly to make it look like a close match to the data from the Livingston observatory), there is not an exact match between the lines.

 

Such a match could have been found from a “data mining” database query looking for a match. If you give me two random sources of data (such as stock prices in 2006 and bond prices in 2015), collected continuously over months, then with the right SQL query I will probably be able to find some tiny time slice where the data matches up, purely by coincidence, giving a false impression that the same thing was being observed. 

There is another reason for doubt. A scientific paper co-authored by a huge team of scientists estimated that a project such as LIGO should produce 40 detections of gravitational waves each year, from “compact binary coalescence sources.” But so far the LIGO project has announced only one detection, the event of September 14, 2015. Where are all the other such events, that are supposed to be happening almost once a week? This may cast doubt on the LIGO announcement, until such time as other observations are made.

There are two parts of the LIGO announcement. The first is the claim that gravitational waves were detected (which as we have seen is on rather shaky ground). The second is the claim that these waves were caused by a merger of distant black holes. The second claim is speculative, and is not well supported by the evidence.

The scientists had no direct evidence that the claimed signal came from a distant black hole. What they basically did is to do some calculations showing a hypothetical scenario by which a black hole merger might have produced the described signal. But that is not at all the same as showing that such a hypothetical scenario was the actual cause. Given a gravitational wave observation, there are always many possible ways of explaining it astronomically. We are reminded here of the BICEP2 affair, when scientists triumphantly claimed that the signals they detected came from the dawn of time. It was later shown that just such a signal could have been produced by dust. There was no way of even telling from which direction the LIGO signal was coming, so the scientists did nothing to show that the signal came from an exact spot in the sky where black holes are known to exist.

You would think that facts such as these would cause our scientists to be cautious. Science is supposed to require repeated observations, not one-shot wonders. But the scientific community has thrown caution to the wind in this matter. Based on a single rather questionable observational event, the scientific community has acted as if LIGO is proof of gravitational waves and proof of a black hole merger. The first claim is shaky, and the second claim is extremely shaky.

We can contrast this with the situation in regard to evidence for ESP (extrasensory perception). Gathered for over a century, the observational evidence for ESP is currently vastly greater than the one-second LIGO evidence. The Society for Psychical Research and other organizations started publishing experimental data as early as the 19^th century. At universities such as Duke University, researchers such as Joseph Rhine spent many years doing experimental research that repeatedly produced spectacular successes, such as the extremely convincing Rhine-Pearce experiments and the equally convincing Pearce-Pratt experiments discussed here, getting results with a chance likelihood of about 1 in 10 trillion. Even more compelling (as described here) was the 73% accuracy rate recorded by a professor at Hunter College, with a person located at another location, making 1850 guesses that should have produced by chance a success rate of only 20%. Also very compelling are ESP tests in recent decades using sensory deprivation studies involving a technique called the ganzfeld technique, and some recent tests with ESP and autistic children, as reported here.

But have our mainstream scientists accepted these results, decades of convincing evidence? No. They keep demanding that more airtight tests be done, no matter how airtight is the evidence. But the same mainstream scientists will instantly accept some “gravitational wave” finding based on a single questionable observational event lasting a tenth of a second. It's a ridiculous case of a double standard. When our mainstream scientists have something that they want to believe in, they seem to have an extremely lenient standard. But when they have something they don't want to believe in, they adopt an exclusionary standard a thousand times more stringent.

It's hard to imagine a more outrageous double standard: if it's something our scientists don't want to believe in, then a hundred years of compelling observations are dismissed as “no evidence”; but if it's something they do want to believe in, then a single questionable observation event lasting a tenth of a second is counted as conclusive proof.

We can imagine if a country club operated in a similar way. It might work like this. If a white person tried to enter the front door of the club, the person guarding the door would simply ask “Are you a member?” and would let in the white person if he answered “Yes.” But if a person of color tried to enter the door, the guard would demand to see a birth certificate, a driver's license, a Social Security card, a work photo ID, and a college diploma. And when all those were produced, the person of color would still not be admitted, on the grounds that there was still doubt about his identity.

Postscript: By 2020 it is being claimed that 23 times gravitational waves have been detected. But in 2019 a physicist stated the following:

"The signals that LIGO and Virgo see are well explained by gravitational wave events. But we cannot be sure that these are actually signals coming from outer space and not some unknown terrestrial effect."