A new form of bad science

Here is an article in CBC and also in TOI and my quick response:

I hope this is not another liberal mischief to legalise drugs! One has to be careful these days about lopsided arguments. Wasn't the case against drugs about drugs being more addictive than alcohol? Harmful all of them are but this - using one aspect to measure something - is even more harmful. Remember how psychoanalysts use sex to evaluate history and how postmodernists use obscuration to whip up anti-science arguments? And now scientists use just a small part they understand, to measure the whole! To say Cannabis is less 'harmful' is a new form of bad science.

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A new form of bad science is to use only one aspect of something to make a decision on 'the whole'. For example, one scientist says, "Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol". The pseudo liberals now throw their weight behind, to use it to their advantage and say, "OK, science says that, now legalise Cannabis!". The bad science part comes when a scientist turns activist and uses his findings to buttress his activism. Now, that is bad science because s/he is still a scientist and s/he is using only one aspect - harmfulness - to make a point. What about addiction or the fact that "less harmful" is only relative and not really less?

This is a common fashionable nonsense. Psychoanalysts use sex to explain everything. Someone other day claimed Rama was a sex addict! Based on Valmiki Ramayana, their misunderstanding of it and psychoanalysis! On top of that they called it history. We have post-modernists; a pejorative explanation of who they are would be: people who view this world as a museum, or anti-modernists using science or just one finding to justify their side of the story.  I will give it to you if you tell me that only bad guys deserve this definition and not the rest. We need too many Sokal type people to figure who are not bad, is another matter.

There is no dearth for this type of bad science in politics. You have human rights activists who often side with aggressors and work actively against the interest of victims. This they do by arguing that human right is the most sacred thing on earth, which is a good thing in itself I agree. But, didn't this aggressor that activists bleed to sympathise just abuse someone's right? So this activism becomes 'human rights only for aggressors not for victims' kind of thing. The point relevant to us in this is, in state-craft human right is just one of the important things. There are other things such as, security of most of rest of the peaceful people who are not yet victims but could very well become one given "human rights" of aggressors were to become a priority. When only human rights argument is used to argue against a state or its institutions, we have a recipe for a skewed argument. It is like using my stinking ass to describe beauty of my body. This applies to historians as well. Now that they claim history is a faculty of science, they might do well to know, using only one aspect such as lack of non-existent contemporary resources or lack of authenticity in available ones, using unfalsifiable arguments as proof and relying on authority as in the case of "eminent historians" is simply bad science.

Update1: This post is primarily a reaction to TOI article. The CBC article is in the same lines but TOI has more info on its background.

Update2: There was a discussion in CBC on a finding that said something like Egg yoke has more cholesterol than a fast food meat item. A nutritionist was called in to discuss where she emphasized that all such findings must be put to context and it was incorrect to use only finding to explain a more complicated subject.

Update3: On when the peer review Jazz and Rock can turn Country.