Falsifications die
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The design of organisations and products
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Those in positions of authority in a power structure have great influence over the discourse. It presents in surprising ways.
The elementary case is the research academic, who will gladly publish experiments that confirm her hypothesis, but will be less disposed to publicise those that fail. Nor will the institutions of the paradigm — the journals, peer reviewers and competing academics be any more inclined to publish these failures. Who wants to read about an experiment that dusn’t work?
But, curiously falsifications are the onward progress of a discipline: it is only by ruling things out that we can improve the prospects of those we want to rule in.
It is hard to tell apart a correlation from a causation. Hume would say, impossible — a causal regularity would have to do.
But perhaps a negative correlation does furnish knowledge, of what is not so. If when I push this button, no pattern of consequences, I have learned something not much, but something.
It sounds, well, inconsequential but the shocking case of the Christchurch civic crèche, superbly old in a recent Radio New Zealand podcast Convicted suggests otherwise.
In the tail end of the Satanic Panic of the 1990s, the parents of children attending a daycare centre in Christchurch, New Zealand became fixated to the idea that the crèche staff were operating a network of ritualistic abuse. The intervention of police and social workers interviewing the children over a sustained period of months, generated an incredible catalogue of graphic allegations of violence and hideous abuse. Ultimately something like forty children made thousands of allegations of incredible depravity.
Literally, incredible. In many cases impossible, including deaths that did not happen severed organs that were not severed, car trips in a car that did not exist driven by a man who could not drive.
Other allegations were more landish, but fundamental problems remained: there was not a single adult witness to any abuse, not a single injury recorded (despite allegations involving sticks, knives, scissors and needles) and not one of the children had volunteered any information.
Still, 5 crèche workers were indicted, at first, on dozens of separate counts of physical and sexual assault, kidnapping and other heinous crimes.
The evidence for these counts was exclusively taken from videotaped interviews with the children, all preschoolers at the time of the alleged offending, some months or years after the alleged events.
Many of the children’s stories were physically impossible and otherwise plainly absurd.
See also
((Br|The Hidden Half}}