Another one bites the dust - government as the progenitor of false knowledge

From Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? by Paul Tough.  The subheading is With diagnoses at a record high, some experts have begun to question our assumptions about the condition — and how to treat it.

There has long been good reason to believe that ADHD was a social fad.  My kids were school age in the 1990s and it was hard not to notice that teachers with the worst classroom management skills were also most vocal in recommending that boys be seen for an ADHD diagnosis.

This reporting feels similar to the arc in Alzheimers research.  For forty some years, there was a conviction that the disease was a product of plaque in the brain.  In the past few years, researchers discovered that the original research from which the focus on plaque originated, was discovered to be flawed, raising questions about a wasted few decades of research.

Also feels similar to the Pre-K fad over the past thirty years.  Everyone thought it would make a big difference and all the results have been that it makes no difference in educational outcomes.  

Similar also to the Covid-19 response and the corresponding vaccine.  We are now beginning to come into sight of the real consequences of bad public health policy and it is both bad and consistent with the contemporary criticisms that were being leveled at the time of deployment.  And the blithe population-wide mandating of a novel and, as it turns out, completely inadequately tested vaccine. 

CO2 driven Anthropogenic Global Warming is also looking very ripe for a corresponding backpedalling.  Over its three decades of intense investment in research, the original hypothesis keeps being dialed back and it looks about ready to collapse completely.

Is there anything believed by the Establishment and the Mandarin Class that can be accepted as true?

On the other hand, as valid as the criticism is of a Mandarin Class blindly governing based on bad or ill-founded "science," this is in fact something of an endorsement of the Age of Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution.  Despite the claims of authoritarian ignorami about the infallibility of "The Science" (looking at you NPR and New York Times), as all real Classical Liberals know, science is a process of emerging discovery and refining specificity.

All knowledge is contingent.  There is no sacrosanct truth.  There is only knowledge that is more or less well tested and more or less durable when applied.

Yes, the Establishment and Mandarin Class are prone to being bedazzled by ideas which seem right (and are good at increasing power, prestige, and personal prosperity for the members of those classes). Their ideas end up being expensively and sometimes disastrously wrong.  But, eventually, the scientific process works its way through the false beliefs and redirects us towards different and better questions and research.

I am tempted to provide telling excerpts from Tough's article but the whole thing warrants reading.  Its all there - the ill-founded beliefs; the passionate conviction superseding evidence; the complex sociocultural environment; the ignoring of emerging data; the authoritarianism of government.