SA, have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974?
I think that this problem cannot be solved down here among the details, because Paul and others like him do not trust the process of scientific scrutiny among the scientific community in the scientific literature. That very process is distrusted, and that’s largely because it is almost completely omitted by the corporate media, making it easy to believe that there is nothing there but the rule of authority, as in almost every other organisation of people.
Suppression will merely entrench the problem. In this new era of peer-to-peer communication, in which everyone is a publisher and the corporate gatekeepers can be bypassed, we need to develop a new model by which claims can be checked. Making the matter worse, we have to develop our new bonds of trust in the midst of an information battlefield, upon which even certain words and phrases have become booby-trapped.
Like Persig, I propose an expedition away from this battlefield to the clearer air of the high country of the mind. It is the productive, fertile lowlands and foothills that are being fought over, and destroyed in the process. But the solutions lie not in science, but in philosophy. We need to climb, to a consideration of epistemology and language.
It will be cold and the air will be thin, but the view will be good, and we would all be stronger for it by the time we descend. Will you join me?