Jul 31, 2024
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The Order of the Pug
In 1738, Roman Catholics founded a society called The Order of the Pug.
The pug was a symbol of devotion and reliability. However, the society wasn’t without its questionable traditions.
New members were expected to wear a dog collar. They also had to scratch at the door before entering. But the dog-like rituals didn’t end there.
During the initiation of new Pugs, the blindfolded novices had to circle a carpet while their fellow Pugs barked obnoxiously from the sidelines.
They were also expected to kiss the posterior of a porcelain pug statue — a symbol of their loyalty to the order.
After this, they were presented with their very own silver medallion (yes, in the shape of a pug).
But why did this bizarre order exist at all? At the time, Pope Clement XII had banned all Freemason groups.
Unhappy with this new rule, the aristocrat Clemens August of Bavaria founded The Order of The Pug as a way to escape the ban.
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The Order of the Pug (German: Mops-Orden) was a para-Masonic society founded by Roman Catholics.
It is believed that it was founded in 1738 by Klemens August of Bavaria to bypass the crown's In eminenti apostolatus of 1738.
The constitution of the Order of the Pug allowed women to become members as long as they were Catholic.
The pug was chosen as a symbol of loyalty, trustworthiness and steadiness.
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In eminenti apostolatus specula is a papal bull issued by Pope Clement XII on 28 April 1738, banning Catholics from becoming Freemasons. It arose from Jacobite-Hanoverian rivalry on the continent.
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Clemens August of Bavaria (17 August 1700 – 6 February 1761) was an 18th-century member of the Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria and Archbishop-Elector of Cologne.
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Pope Clement XII (7 April 1652 – 6 February 1740), born Lorenzo Corsini, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 July 1730 to his death in February 1740.
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Understanding RELATIONSHIPS – If I have something to share, however, I didn’t share it with you because you didn’t ask me. It means I DON’T TRUST YOU. Even if you didn’t ask me, I still shared it with you, giving my trust to you. However, you shared it with the entire world. It means YOU ARE UNTRUSTWORTHY. I know what you know, however, when I asked you, you lied to me. It means YOU ARE DISHONEST.LOVE and AFFECTION are two essential elements of HUMAN RELATIONSHIP. However, whether you deserve my LOVE and AFFECTION or not is based on your TRUSTWORTHINESS and HONESTY.
Sanjeev Himachali
No two relationships look alike. That's perfectly fine. However, there are some basic traits that should be present if the relationship is to be healthy and productive for both of you.
TDLR: Don't distrust science; Be skeptical of areas with no research and studies without any follow-ups
Since my angry post about how science journals tend to work (with a few nice exceptions as I've found out via some lovely Tumblr users) has gotten widespread, I want to clarify something related to mistrust of science:
Almost all individual scientists are trustworthy. I've worked with a bunch of them, including a guy known as "One of the Four Horseman of Chemistry" at my old university (for being a pain to work with), and I've gotten along with them excellently. They have never asked me to p-hack, they have never asked me to manipulate data. Bad scientists who are constantly majorly manipulating their data are a rarity. The two I can think of right off hand are that guy at Standford who got exposed by a student journalist this year and some dude in the fly science area who keeps publishing (and vehemently defending) a bunch of stuff that no one can replicate. Also the good news here is that they do tend to get caught, if not by a student journalist, by their peers, and this is usually because bad scientists who are motivated solely by ego and puffing up the importance of their careers tend to eventually publish something that seems so ground-breaking that other scientists get incredulous, and that experiment bypasses the replication crisis [the phenomenon where experiments aren't repeated by different groups of scientists because they've already been published and won't get republished or contribute to anyone's career]. My science professor friend told me about this happening with a Korean lab that swears they can make superconducting happen at room temperature. That's a big claim. Other scientists were immediately like "Hold up," tried to repeat their methods, and no one can make it work, so that lab has lost a lot of credit in the science community.
Individual scientists, the scientific process, scientific methods, and peer review are generally very trustworthy. Science as a whole is generally very trustworthy.
What you have the right to be suspicious of is 1) Lack of published research on a given thing, 2) Studies with important results that you cannot find any follow-up studies on, especially if they've been widely spread around as "proof" of something.
And THOSE are the problems that come from the fact that very few journals and pretty much no highly prestigious journals publish negative or null results (i.e. "We found nothing interesting") or repeated trials of experiments that have already been published. This disincentivizes reseachers repeating the work of other research groups (the replication crisis). This is not a moral failing on the part of the scientists; they just know that even if they do do repeats of other people's work, it will likely never see the light of day, so there is literally no point in spending years doing that when funding and resources are limited (and that's pretty much always the case in research). Some labs have taken on the responsibility of repeating other people's experiments, but most of that gets shared internally among science groups. This helps improve science from the inside, but because journals won't publish these studies, the public is denied these same confirmations. Scientists aren't hiding things from you; the journal publishing industry is forcing information underground. Then not replicating experiments can result in a single study finding something "interesting" by chance rather than because there's actually a causatory relationship and then becoming accepted science when it's just a fluke: Like the study showing differences in men's vs. women's brains. Not true, just got a statistical difference by chance that one time, which then took a very long time to realize. This situation is once again, not a result of malice or manipulation by the scientists - it's just something that happened by accident.
And since very few people publish null results, scientists probably frequently spend a lot of time accidentally replicating experiments that turned out "boring" and were never published thinking it has simply never been done (which is a waste of time because they won't be published, no one will ever know it's been repeated a billion times, and if it HAS been repeated a billion times, we really can just move on and direct resources to other projects). The professor I know says that scientists generally assume that if the experiment would be easy to set up and has nothing published on it means that it's been tried and found to be uninteresting... which adds the additional problem of experiments never being done because people assume they're too easy.
Once again, notice that at every stage of the game here, the issue is the publishing conventions, not the morals or intentions of the scientists.
Now when you combine these conventions with limited funding that is often allocated based on how prestigious the lab and its work are, which is frequently determined by how many publications and citations it has, WHICH IS IN TURN affected by whether or not you can get your work into high impact-factor journals, there starts to be an incentive to overstate mildly significant results or even mess with the statistics in pursuit of trying to keep finding interesting things to publish, so that you will keep getting funding, so that you can continue your research.
And here I would also like to lay way more blame on the publishing conventions than the scientists (a lot of people quit academia rather than exaggerate results). If the literal survival of a lab was not directly tied to how much and where they publish, there would be no incentive to exaggerate. Scientists that give in to that are also not necessarily horrible and immoral either - they may be banking on their line of research being really important, so they feel the need to overstate initial results so that people will keep giving them money to keep on going. These people also have livelihoods, and "publish publish publish or lose your job" is a really tough spot to put people in then expect them to behave perfectly. Scientists are human, and humans put under immense pressure will break down and make decisions in their own self-interest or in the interest of what their fallible human judgments think is the greater good. That's not malice, that's not bad people trying to fool you, that's not people using science to push an agenda. That is a direct result of the strangle-hold the publishing industry has on science.
Oh and also: There are predatory journals that will publish anything if you pay them a huge amount of money, so now people also have to look up THE JOURNAL to see if it's legit - that's a big thing scientists are doing a good job of warning young scientists about. The legit journals, which sit behind a paywall, also do not pay anything to the scientists they publish. That paywall goes 100% to the publisher and not the authors or their lab.
The whole system keeps science labs underfunded and desperate and promotes major gaps in our collective knowledge and fact-checking machine. In short, don't distrust science. Major manipulators are found out, The Journals of Negative and Null results have been established because people recognize the issues above, some labs have taken on the responsibility of repeating other people's experiments even if these results are never published, and peer review does ferret out a lot of potential manipulation before it is ever published. It is the publishing conventions created by the journals that are preventing us from attaining the highest possible quality of science that would absolutely occur if scientists were relieved of all these pressures.
Farabî (Alpharabius) (872–950) “Akıl, kalbin ışığıdır.”
• Kalbe: “Mutluluk, sadece hazda değil; hikmette gizlidir.” Farabî, insanın iç huzurunu bilgiyle bulacağını savundu. Onun kalbi, erdemle ve dengeyle doluydu.
• Gönülle: “Gerçek medeniyet, ahlakla yükselir.” Erdemli toplum fikrini geliştirdi. Gönül gözüyle bakıldığında, onun felsefesi bir ahlak çağrısıdır.
• Akla: “Felsefe, insanı kemale ulaştırır.” Aristo’nun eserlerini yorumladı, mantık sistemini geliştirdi, müzik teorisi yazdı. Bilim, metafizik, siyaset, psikoloji ve etik alanlarında derinleşti.
• Bilime: el-Medînetü’l-Fâzıla (Erdemli Şehir) adlı eserinde ideal toplumun yapısını anlattı. Müzik teorisi üzerine yazdığı Kitâbü’l-Mûsîkî el-Kebîr, Batı’da yüzyıllarca okutuldu. Bilgi teorisi, akıl-vahiy ilişkisi ve siyaset felsefesiyle İslam düşüncesine yön verdi.
• Bilgiye: Farabî’nin mirası bize şunu öğretir: Gerçek bilgi, insanı hem düşünmeye hem erdemli yaşamaya çağırır. Onun kalemi, sadece yazmadı; insanlığın zihnini ve vicdanını şekillendirdi.
Scripture Reading
In God's Time
For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry. — Habakkuk 2:3 | King James Version (KJV) The King James Version Bible is in the public domain. Cross References: Psalm 27:14; Isaiah 8:17; Ezekiel 12:25; Daniel 8:17;Daniel 8:19; Hebrews 10:37; 2 Peter 3:9