The Unscientific Method: When Scientists Refuse to Science

Why do we assume that scientists are smarter than we are? They can be just as ignorant about some things as the rest of us. I believe the reason we trust scientists to comprehend things better than your average Joe is that we have a misguided notion that scientists are, you know, scientific – that they formulate conclusions only after giving matters serious thought.

In other words, we tend to think that a scientist will apply the scientific method – hypothesis, experimentation, observation, conclusion – as a rule to all areas of life. They don’t. Often they’re so hyper-focused on their expertise that they’re inordinately clueless about many facets of their world, perhaps even more so than ordinary folks. Like the neurosurgeon who’s never considered Yellow #5 and can’t figure out how to change the headlight on his Mercedes, many scientists just don’t care about peripheral issues. They move from one project they care about to the next and simply follow the crowd on issues they hold no interest in.

The automotively-disinclined neurosurgeon isn’t a problem for you and me. But the scientifically disinterested scientist is.

A while back I started a weekly series with my boys called Science Goes Boom. It’s a free, weekly science curriculum designed for kids and adults who hate textbooks. I comb through YouTube in order to find age-appropriate, interesting videos that teach all areas of science and curate them onto a single Substack post. Yet there’s a lot of garbage on YouTube, and junk science as well.

You wouldn’t believe the number of videos that have 99% family-friendly content only to let a single F-bomb fly two thirds of the way in. They often spout theories as facts as well, so you have to be careful. The more I’ve studied science over the years, the more I’ve come to understand that many of these experts – from aeronautical engineers to veterinarians and every field in between – have rather foolish ideas about a lot of things, and their worldviews can be as divorced from scientific truth as it gets.

Not long ago, Hollywood’s favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson (who never misses an opportunity to be in the spotlight) was asked by Patrick Bet-David about the continued push for more vaccines in light of vaccine injuries.

In a painful display of ignorant arrogance, Tyson went on to explain how dummies like you and I are “socially contracted” to bow to the experts and lose our jobs if we come to unapproved conclusions about vaccine data. Watch the interview if you want to but every minute listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson may proportionally subtract from your I.Q. If you do watch it, see if you can keep up with the number of things that time and science have proven him wrong about. You’ll need one of those hand-held tally clickers…because some scientists don’t “science” very well. Similarly, you might have been surprised when nostalgic science guys started shilling nonsense on talking head TV shows in 2020. And while Tyson may know a lot about astrophysics, he’s dumber than my chickens when it comes to what you should and shouldn’t put in your body. And so are a lot of other people.

This failure to apply intellectual muscle to certain areas is a phenomenon deeply entrenched in academia. Men like Tyson, or Bill Nye, or any number of other scientists often sidestep the scientific method requisite to understanding our world. They proclaim conclusions offered to them by others without ever questioning the methodology and data that birthed it. The desired conclusions – that masks are effective, that CO2 is destroying the planet, that DNA just randomly happened – fits with the academic intelligencia’s (often financial) motives, and is therefore settled as far as the records are concerned. The fact that we still have anyone pointing to Darwinian evolution as anything other than science fantasy is proof positive that many fields of science care nothing about logic, thermodynamics, chemistry, sequencing, molecular biology, code, math, engineering, probabilities, energy, the fossil record, or even observable data.

If you reject Intelligent Design for the Darwinian delusion, I can recommend a few books to you, but perhaps this interview with Stephen Meyer is more digestible in the short term:

If you want to watch the entire Joe Rogan/Stephen Meyer interview (unlike with watching Neil deGrasse Tyson), you’ll be glad you did.

But we can discuss the unscientific arguments for dinosaurs and human consciousness another time. Right now I want to focus on those YouTube scientists, and ask why they continually refuse to science when it matters.

Many of the people teaching our kids about science online are engaging and creative, and way less dorky than the ones you and I grew up with. Instead of mixing blue dye in beakers while wearing tucked-in dress shirts and khaki pants, today’s visual science elite are making glitter bombs, rocket powered fidget spinners, and are burying themselves waist deep into concrete spheres.

With 29 million subscribers, one of the most popular ones out there is Mark Rober, a former N.A.S.A. engineer credited with putting one of those little erector sets on Mars a few years back. He’s a fan-favorite for a reason, and my kids love his content – especially his squirrel maze – and so do I for that matter…when it’s all about the science. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s not.

At the height of the worldwide Covid hysteria, Rober was flying to the Bahamas to conduct some field experiments on whether sharks can smell different kinds of blood better than others. As he traveled, he was Covid swabbed and later flagged as corona-virus positive (or maybe it means he drank a can of Red Bull). That altered his travel plans with a two-week quarantine. Later on he was cleared to continue, and it ended up being a cool experiment and fun video.

What struck me while watching that video, however, was the absurdity of seeing Rober – a highly intelligent scientist – playing cards with his kids from behind a glass door, isolating himself with absurd six-foot distancing measures that some idiot at the CDC cooked up without a single science fiber in his body calling foul. All the more so when you consider Rober himself made an entire video at the height of Covid detailing how easily and proficiently viruses spread in spite of similar restrictions.

What an opportunity it would have been for a prominent scientist like Mark Rober to question the efficacy of the unscientific measures permeating worldwide institutions at that time. But no, getting kicked off YouTube for questioning the mandates with science apparently wasn’t an option. Rober, like so many others, put on the dunce mask and went about his work, disinterested in what such blind capitulation might mean to scientific proclivities of generations to come. And I got to explain to my kids why someone who seems really smart was suddenly doing something incredibly stupid just because a moron told him to.

One of the first and best YouTube scientists out there is Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day, and he’s also my favorite. A couple of weeks ago he made a heartfelt video about a recent visit with his friend, popular YouTube scientist Dianna Cowern, the Physics Girl. Shortly after her marriage in 2022 she became debilitated with mysterious symptoms that medical circles have come to call Long Covid.

Long Covid, the latest talking-point-posing-as-science, is a nebulous designation that’s become a catch-all diagnosis to explain away inconvenient ailments affecting millions across the globe. Symptoms of what they call Long Covid have included chronic fatigue, erectile disfunction, blood clots, brain fog (not kidding), flu, bronchial disorders, circulatory problems, miscarriage, and 50 more. The reason for this is simple: the hospitals are still raking in insane profits for coding this diagnosis. The surge of Long Covid (or Long Haul Covid, or Chronic Covid) has recently led many in the mainstream media to pen a series of articles claiming that Long Covid is more likely to be a mental condition affecting overweight, lonely people who don’t want to work.

But it’s not. Dianna Cowern’s illness isn’t in her head, it’s throughout her body.

The question that her fans and honest scientists should be asking – demanding – is what caused her illness and how do you prevent it in others? Specifically, the millions of children who’ve tuned in for years to learn about dark matter and thermodynamics? How can we teach our young people to embrace the science of their world when the scientific community is largely unwilling to examine the science of things being perpetrated against their own bodies?

What the medical establishment has labeled Long Covid is real; people are suffering debilitating effects from Covid-related issues. It just has little or nothing to do with their fake pandemic or their largely inconsequential virus, and everything to do with the unscientific, deadly measures the paper pushers forced everyone to submit to – most notably, prolonged mask wearing and untested vaccines.

Vaccines have always been dangerous and the Covid vaccines are more dangerous than most. This has been documented by scientists, doctors, in papers, in studies, and internal documents from within the pharmaceutical industry. The science into these atrocities continues even as the medical establishment continues to censor every study that exposes it.

But aside from the millions of vaccine side-effects killing or injuring those from all walks of life, the science has always shown that prolonged mask wearing was also deadly in and of itself. OSHA’s Hospital Respiratory Protection Program Toolkit has warned as much – along with also detailing how masks are intended for bacterial spread, not viruses – as any non-governmental industrial hygienist could tell you. They’re the ones who tell doctors, nurses, hazmat firefighters, welders, and pretty much everyone else who works in potentially toxic environments how, and when, and how long it’s acceptable to cover your face. And they were screaming from the rooftops back in 2020 that prolonged mask wearing was detrimental to your body and your brain while simpletons in local health offices were convincing everyone to mask up.

The most likely cause for Cowern’s and others’ current afflictions are a) vaccine injury, and/or b) prolonged mask wearing.


“We see a statistically significant decline in oxygen intake, increase in carbon dioxide, increased heart rate, increase in shortness in breadth [sic], and an array of discomforting symptoms. Mask-wearing was associated with a 62% increase in headaches and many skin ailments. It is not OK for people do be doing this every day for years on end. It imposes what the authors called Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES).”

Daniel Horowitz, Long Covid Could be Mask Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES)

Is that what’s happening to the Physics Girl? I don’t know, but it (and worse) has undoubtedly happened to her and other prominent scientists’ followers, and it’s a scientific question that honest scientists in those fields need to get on. I say “in those fields” because I think it might be just as inappropriate for Smarter Every Day, or Stuff Made Here, or The Backyard Scientist to teach lessons on vaccine efficiency as it was for Mark Rober to tout nonsense about masks, and for this reason: It’s not their area of expertise.

All of these influencers are brilliant in their pools of knowledge and they need to focus on those areas God has gifted them in. Most do, but some (like Tyson, Nye, and sadly, Cowern) don’t, and that’s a problem. That doesn’t mean these engineers and chemists should sit in the back of the room and keep their mouths shut, however. They’re scientists; it’s incumbent on them (on all of us) to hold the other scientists’ feet to the fire and call out junk conclusions when they recognize them. I’m no mechanic, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if a mechanic tells me the banging noise emanating from my daughter’s engine is normal, I’m gonna call him out on it.

A generation of kids have already ended up on their backs because the adults in the room refuse to look into the science and call out the madness. How much easier it might have been for those parents to ask questions if some of the world’s most influential YouTube scientists had been willing to do so when it mattered? Newsflash, it still matters. How many more of their own need to suffer before they’re willing to get their science on and start rattling some cages, demanding scientifically-derived conclusions for all of these sudden deaths and life-altering illnesses?

At the beginning of 2024, a collection of veteran and active-duty military members penned a declaration demanding accountability of the Department of Defense over forcing them to submit to deadly and unscientifically initiated Covid protocols:

“While implementing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, military leaders broke the law, trampled constitutional rights, denied informed consent, permitted unwilling medical experimentation, and suppressed the free exercise of religion. Service members and families were significantly harmed by these actions. Their suffering continues to be felt financially, emotionally, and physically. Some service members became part of our ever-growing veteran homeless population, some developed debilitating vaccine injuries, and some even lost their lives. In an apparent attempt to avoid accountability, military leaders are continuing to ignore our communications regarding these injuries and the laws that were broken.”

An Open Letter to the American People from Signatories of this Declaration of Military Accountability, 1 January 2024

The goal of all scientists is supposed to be to discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining the evidence, and seeing if all the available information can be combined into a logical answer. They’ve failed to do so.

Conversely, these military veterans are putting their reputations and careers on the line in order to get to the truth of what they were subjected to, and to ensure it never happens again. That’s not surprising since it’s the military men and women who typically storm the castle when everyone else is afraid to.

It leaves one to wonder, though: How long will it take the thousands of scientists across our nation to summon up enough courage and intellectual curiosity to follow their example?