I did the following WOW this weekend. It was a good workout even though I was working evening shifts.
MedX Overhead Press
EZ bar biceps curl
Triceps pushdown on the SS Pulldown
Formulator Flex/Ext
Calf Exercise on the MedX Leg Press.
This week I was disappointed to learn that the presentation that Eric Daniels and I had planned for the 2012 Ancestral Health Symposium was not selected for inclusion. The title of the proposed lecture is: From Spontaneous Organization to Central Planning in Just One Year: How Policy Produced the Health Crisis and Will Cause Ancestral Health to Fail.
With a title like this it is little wonder that it was not accepted at an event run by the Harvard Food Law Society. Like Leonard Peikoff once said…”if you are openly putting your head in a buzz saw, you should expect to get bloody”. I proposed this talk after AHS11 because I saw a mounting tide of progressive sentiment that felt that things would be better if only public policy could be dictated by the “really smart people” at the meeting. I wanted to show how when great ideas emerge from spontaneous organization and market forces, that there is a tendency to want to capture those great ideas that percolated from the bottom up and make them into societal policies that are enforced from the top down. However, the enforcement of even good ideas from the top down by necessity stifles further creativity, prevents incorporation of new knowledge, and results in the good knowledge being applied improperly or out-of-context by a populace who receives its knowledge by an argument from authority.
The following article was recently published in the Journal of Exercise Physiology Online: Is Truth in Authority or Authority in Truth? Limitations to the Publication of Scientific Research
James Fisher1, James Steele1 1Southampton Solent University, Southampton, UK
ABSTRACT
Fisher J, Steele J. Is Truth in Authority or Authority in Truth? Limitations to the Publication of Scientific Research. JEPonline 2012;15(1):57-64. This paper examines the limitations and potential bias that exist within efforts to publish articles in exercise physiology. By discussing perceptions that: (a) greater truth appears to exist based on the publishing authority or journal title, (b) that some organizations appear reluctant to change or progress their philosophies and thus recommendations, (c) that there is a large potential for bias in the peer review process, (d) that many research articles may end up in “the file drawer” unpublished because of their apparently insignificant findings, as well as (e) the importance of the impact factor, and (f) open access journals, we hope to enlighten young authors and remind experienced peers that science should be nothing more than an attachment to the truth. We believe the unbiased processes considered are invaluable in the scientific publication process, but that both perceptions and evidence presented herein support that the limitations exist and need consideration.
The full article shows the bias that exists in the academic/scientific publishing world and how to be vigilant against it. There are many important scientific studies that never see that light of day because they have negative results, are clinically but not statistically significant, or they simply go against the grain of the establishment. Most importantly, the concept of “Impact Factor” (getting published in a prestigious journal) is causing many good studies to not be noticed. This occurs because authors are giving up if they cannot make it into a high Impact Factor journal that will gain them academic notoriety and also because readers of the literature think the less prestigious journals have less stringent review criteria (which is seldom true).
Accepting an argument from authority is damaging in any realm, including academics. Bravo Dr’s Fisher and Steele! The link to the full article is attached below.
http://faculty.css.edu/tboone2/asep/JEPonlineFebruary2012Fisher.pdf
P.S. I am hopeful Dr. Daniels will still want to record the presentation to be posted at this site and on YouTube.