העורך Editor

The Universal Theory of Everything: More Research Needed!

(Well, everything but the Corona vaccine…)

How does every study end?
A mealy-mouthed conclusion, good enough for media headlines and excerpts. And then: “However, there were certain constraints… Conclusion: There is an urgent need for further studies like this one.”

In other words, give us more money!

Scientists are funded by taxes. This is how “science” continues.
An excerpt:
A 2004 metareview by the Cochrane collaboration of their own systematic medical reviews found that 93% of the reviews studied made indiscriminate FRIN-like statements, reducing their ability to guide future research. The presence of FRIN had no correlation with the strength of the evidence against the medical intervention. Authors who thought a treatment was useless were just as likely to recommend researching it further.
Indeed, authors may recommend “further research” when, given the existing evidence, further research would be extremely unlikely to be approved by an ethics committee.
… Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, argues that FRIN is often used as a way in which a “[l]ack of hard evidence to support the original hypothesis gets reframed as evidence that investment efforts need to be redoubled”, and a way to avoid upsetting hopes and vested interests. She has also described FRIN as “an indicator that serious scholarly thinking on the topic has ceased”, saying that “it is almost never the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from a set of negative, ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory data.”
Not to mention the asked-for research is never the lonely thoughtfulness of a Tesla, but ten thousand blooming wasteful experiments (per Nikola Tesla’s criticism of Thomas Edison’s showy scatter-shot approach), or, even worse, catered symposiums and the like.
If anything, we need private science funding!

CORONA CONSPIRACY: Where Are Our Prayers?!

From Rabbi Sternbuch’s English parsha sheet:

In a speech Rav Sternbuch noted that this plague has killed many people around the world, and recently rabbonim have been discussing whether the vaccine for it should be taken. Rav Sternbuch said that unfortunately we are forgetting about our primary duty to pray to Hashem, and in some places they do not even say Ovinu Malkeinu.

Hashem is the one in charge of the virus, and we have forgotten that everything depends on His salvation. Although a person is obligated to use his human effort to save himself, one must remember that our efforts are not the cause of our salvation.

Rav Sternbuch recalled how at the beginning of World War Two, when people did not yet know about gas chambers, everybody crowded into shuls praying to Hashem with ceaseless tears. Also, whenever someone young died from an illness, or the like, everybody would cry out to Hashem in prayer. But nowadays, due to our many sins, we have forgotten the duty of praying properly, and attribute our salvation to natural causes. That is why the current discourse is only about whether the vaccine is beneficial based on natural considerations.

Our duty at this time is to strengthen our faith, and internalize the fact that nature is a delusion. Just like the beginning of the pandemic stemmed from Hashem, so too will its end come only from Hashem.

Hashem is surely waiting for us to repent, to realize that He is in charge of all of Creation, and understand that our salvation can only come from Him. In the merit of strengthening our faith, may we see Hashem’s salvation speedily.