The Swiss Apprenticeship Model for Mastery

swiss flag

My observations while there and what I’ve concluded from studying it.

Mission:

Prepare general population for skills and experience necessary to take care of themselves and add to the community.

Structure:

The apprenticeship system is a giant collection of connected small businesses and learning institutions that prepare young women and men to be self reliant and reliable to others.  It makes them valuable citizens, not costly.

Observations from Switzerland:

  • Almost all small businesses participate in the Apprenticeship System for Mastery.
  • Employees/Students are generally divided up into Novice, Apprentice, Expert, and Master levels that reflect responsibility and pay.
  • Novices and apprentices have a much higher turn over rate than experts and masters.  This requires a training program to quickly get new talent up to speed.  Outsourcing some training out is more efficient/effective than doing inhouse.
  • Novices and apprentices take their responsibilities ‘serious’ as the competition for apprenticeship positions is high.  Every novice or apprentice level position usually comes from a recommendation.
  • 70% of the Swiss youth go into Apprenticeships to gain mastery over their careers and lives.
  • The Swiss have a very low Adult Dependency upon welfare.
  • Pay gap between business owner and experts is far less than Fortune 500 CEO’s and Management.
  • Upward mobility is steady and mostly up.  Many take a step back and move up another pathway to mastery.

 

Conclusions:

  • Communities that provide pathways for the next generation to master their careers and lives, end up with a vast majority of citizens who can take care of not only their lives, but their family’s lives and the community in general.  They are more learned and make less rash decisions.
  • The Apprenticeship described above provides a long tested and successful methodology for attaining self reliance and the experience to reliable to others.
  • All communities should consider the Apprenticeship pathway to Mastery.

State of the Union

President Trump’s next State of the Union speech is next month.  I won’t try to imagine what he will say, but I thought I would share what I’d say if I were in his shoes.

“Ladies and gentlemen, representatives of the American people, this address is historically meant for you, but I am extending this message out to all Americans.  Every single American stateside and abroad.

The State of the Union is not good.  It seems we are as divided as we have ever been in history, and it seems that division is getting wider and more chaotic as we enter each new year.  This cannot be sustained and not risk a even more uncertain and chaotic future.

I believe this division has it roots in the Federal Government focusing far too much on the How rather than the Why? and the What?.  How to do we get thousands and thousands of different procedures, laws, regulations, taxes, and the like that change every year to work?  It’s too hard to keep up with.  We should look back to Why we, the Federal Government, exist and what are we supposed to be doing.  We should look back to our original Mission.

Our Mission is as follows;

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”

Our job is to form a more Perfect Union, not to sew division amongst Americans forced to live with each other.

Our job is to establish and maintain Justice, not to make law so confusing it is hard and expensive to follow.

Our job is to insure Domestic Tranquility, not to divide us up in 100 ways and insure Chaos.

Our job is to provide for the common defense, not endless foreign wars that rob us of our families and our wealth.

Our job is to Promote Prosperity and Self Reliance, it was called general Welfare in 1787.  We should not be promoting Dependence upon others, but rather Independence and help for those don’t have it yet.

And lastly our job is to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, not trading liberty for safety and transferring our debt and fewer liberties onto our posterity.

Our job is Our Mission.

How do we get back to our Mission?  This afternoon I sent an Executive Order to all US Federal Agencies that requires them to set up a department that compares all of their future projects, programs, grants, and the like to Our Mission, The Preamble of the United States of America Constitution.

Any and all projects etc that do not explicitly help reach our Our Mission and Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution are to be flagged and reviewed by the appropriate Cabinet secretary.  Those that help keep us from our Mission are to be Canceled and the employees given a Severance Payout of 1 years’ salary.

I am asking you all here before me in this historical chamber to Freeze all budgets and scope for the next 2 years.  To set up an Emergency Fund only to be used for areas critical to our Mission that are not currently in our budgets.  I will ask you to do this again next year, and during the next 2 years we will work on a plan to return most of the Power back to the States and People.  We need at least 2 years of stability to measure what needs to be changed and transfered.

Those that occupied this chamber before us were not bad people, but they like many others with near unlimited power and money got too focused on the Methods of getting things done and overlooked it was not their job/Mission to do most of those things.  We have to get back to our Mission, and just our Mission.  We have to transfer Power back to the States and People.

It is going to be somewhat painful to transition the Power back to the States and People, but we have decades of Organizational Change experience, thank you Big Business for developing this for us, to minimize and indeed mitigate most of that pain up front.

For those of you who we miss in our planning, we are setting up Help Centers that will be equipped to respond to and address most problems this transfer of power will create.  We are not perfect, as you all know, so we are asking our Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Charity Organizations to fill the gap where we fail.  We are asking all Americans to fill in where you can.

As for the division.  We have to unite towards this cause, all of us in this chamber and all Americans stateside and abroad.  We cannot fulfill Our Mission and continue to fulfill all the missions outside of our mandate.  We just end up Not doing a good job at any of them as the current State of our Union shows.

All Americans, stateside and abroad, please consider not looking at each others’ differences long enough to help us get back to Our Mission.  Help us help you.  Once we are back on track, we might find our immutable differences don’t matter as much as a shared vision of the future.  That shared vision is Our Mission.

God Bless you all and God Bless America.”

We need to get this started ASAP

Discovery, Blueprint, Kickoff, Build, Test, Train, Launch, Monitor, Maintenance, Audit, Optimize.

That is the ASAP Methodology (version I use) I and many other people used to help thousands of employees work together to produce valuable services and goods to their customers.

  • Discovery – Defining/Reiterating the Mission for the Organization and taking an inventory of all your assets and liabilities.  Record any problems that need to be resolved.
  • Blueprint – Laying out the structure and seeing how things fit together and where there are gaps.  Talk to employees and find out what makes their responsibilities easy or hard to fulfill.  Find and Train Early Adopters (Champions) who can help the Early Majority (all other employees) switch to and make use of the new procedures.  Document and lay out the Communication and Project Plan.
  • Kickoff – Bring all staff together to announce the Plan, who can answer questions, and who to talk to if you have concerns.
  • Build – Create new infrastructure and build onto existing.  Fill communication or process gaps found during the Blueprint.
  • Test – Carefully follow all the processes and communication streams, find and fix breakdowns.
  • Train – Use Test Scenarios to create training for your users to practice on.  Allow them to get familiar with the new or altered processes before they can make any lasting mistakes in the Live System.
  • Launch – Countdown to official full switch to New Process and Communication systems.  Make sure everyone is ready for the switch and perform Cut-Over.
  • Monitor – Careful monitoring of all of the new systems/processes and how they are being used.  Careful attention to breakdowns of every sort.
  • Maintenance – Extended period of no new processes or updates not critical to normal business functions.  Let everything settle and see how people use or not use the system to get their responsibilities fulfilled.
  • Audit – Compare resolution of ‘problems to be resolved’ recorded in Discovery to the current state of the company.  Answer “Did we meet our goals?”
  • Optimize – Blueprint solution to the problems still faced and brainstorm new features or structure that could be blended in the next iteration.
  • Discovery – Keep the cycle going . . .

The above is a system ‘any’ company can use to bring harmony to your company’s processes.  It allows everyone to know where each other is at in a process and quickly identifies bottlenecks and breakdowns.  It allows everyone to use the same language and not get confusing messages or queues.  It allows everyone to work in unison and adjust flow themselves depending upon different situations.  It takes babysitting our of the picture and allows employers to assign or reassign responsibility easily.

This methodology can and should be implemented in every small business moving forward.  I predict that small businesses in the future will be blending the above with Apprenticeship Programs or going out of business.  This kind of blending makes it possible for small businesses to compete for the talent and market share the giant businesses currently attract.  It’s available to all small businesses.

If you are in the Woodstock Georgia area, I want to talk to you about setting this up for your small business or I’m happy to help anyone get a Guild set up to provide these services for their own local small businesses.  It works in Switzerland and I think it is worth trying out here.  I’d love to see a guild in every community in the US, I’ll help you get one started in yours.

Let’s connect.

Funding for Skeptics

I’ve got a couple projects I’d like to see completed, but I only have the time and resources to work on one.  Both will take a couple years of attention to get running on their own and the tide right now is right for both.

The projects are;

The ‘Funding for Skeptics’ project is finding and getting funding, both public and private, to help AGW skeptics test the alarmists’ claims, especially those of catastrophe.  I think it would be a cruel act, indeed joke, for those of us capable of exposing the nonsense to not put an end of it before it really damages our posterity.

The CO2 debate is what organizational change experts call ‘A Wicked Mess’.  There is deep rooted belief that catastrophe will strike if action is not taken, and the solutions being pushed result in economic and cultural collapse.  We have the damned if we do side, and another side of damned if we don’t.  The actions or inaction being promoted by each side are being actively resisted by the opposing.  We will never get anywhere this way.

Something that all wicked messes share is they cannot be fixed from the inside.  ‘There is no shared interpretation of the breakdown or opportunity.  There are multiple stakeholders with social or political reasons to resist proposed solutions.  It is difficult to get everyone in the mess to work together because of past and present resentment and distrust.’  ~’The Innovator’s Way

No solution exists that satisfies partisans, it is chaotic and adaptive.  We can’t fix it within, but we can get around it.  Denning and Dunham summarize the way quite nicely in ‘The Innovator’s Way’.  We organize collaboration in a local setting, negotiate a structure, and then spread the new organization out to the whole.

Of course it is more complicated than that, but only in magnitude of detailed steps.  Yes, it is work and requires a shared vision & cooperation.  It is sort of a ‘If we build a new ball field, they will come and adopt it’ narrative.  It is a way around the ‘mess’ since resentment and distrust prevents a path out from within.

My vision for ‘Funding for Skeptics’ is for it to get us out of and past this wicked mess called ‘climate change, action, etc’.  I want to fund skeptical and critical people so they can rigorously test the alarmist claims and to make their own claims.  I believe public funding going towards studying ‘catastrophic effects’ of climate change should go to skeptics determining the ’cause’.

The tide is shifting and the effort to get us out of this mess must be attended to now.  Missing and indeed not adding to this tide is only going to set us back years or decades.  I hate to sound Alarmist, but if we don’t keep the momentum going, we have no idea how long it will take for it to come back.  Prudence dictates we act.

I can’t work on this and The Apprenticeship Guild at the same time, but I can help Funding for Skeptics get off the ground and to Self Sufficiency.

This is no small feat, but it is something that I can help get started and largely automated with the right people working together.

Would a lobby organization that focused on getting Funding for Skeptics be worth looking at?

Warning, the endless Climate debate will come to an end so this conversation won’t be a part of your daily life anymore.  Could we handle that?

 

 

 

 

Apprenticeship Guild Core Competencies

The Apprenticeship Guild Core Competencies are a reflection of the social and economic skills necessary to navigate a self determined life.  Skills that allows individuals to manage their own affairs and work interdependently with others on shared commitments.  They have been chosen to help the practitioner be reliable to others and self reliant.

Those 2 traits are the best indicators of how well your life is going.  It can be thought of as Yin & Yang or the Pursuit of Happiness in Smith’s definition.  The Pursuit of Happiness is the balance between Self Interest and Interest in Others.  It is the act of improving ourselves and the world around us.  It is our Right and Responsibility.  It doesn’t work out so well when you outsource it.

The Coursework will vary, but here are some of the the Authors and Works that will be examined and put into practice.

Communications

  • Jordan Peterson – 12 Rules for Life, and Personality Traits
  • Carnegie/Mellon – How to win Friends and Public Speaking
  • Denning and Dunham – The Innovator’s Way – Innovation and Leadership
  • Toastmasters – Public Speaking and Leadership

Economics and Politics

  • Adam Smith – Home Economics, Theory on Moral Sentiments, Wealth of Nations
  • Frederick Hayek – Austrian School – Wealth Creation Errors of Socialism
  • John Keynes – London School – Wealth Redistribution
  • Taleb – Skin in the Game, Localism
  • Marx,Obama – Central Planning
  • Cicero
  • Locke
  • Peterson
  • Greene

This list will grow and become more detailed.

Project 3242 – The Apprenticeship Guild

Executive Summary:

The Apprenticeship Guild is a consortium of thousands of small businesses focused on the health and longevity of local small businesses and surrounding communities.

Mission:

Project 3242 is the innovation plan to see widespread adoption of our guilds and services across all 3242 Counties, Burroughs, and Parishes, give or take a few, established in the United States of America and Territories.

Services:

  • Consulting small businesses on how to make use of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big and Small Data, Modern Tech and Communication systems.
  • Setting up and maintaining Apprenticeship programs for small businesses across multiple industries.

Apprenticeship Program Summary:

In a nutshell, it is a Talent Acquisition, Training, and Retainment system for your company.  In places where it is widely practiced, like Switzerland, it provides the pathway to Mastery for 70% of their youth.  It is a job that pays you not only in money, but also in training and the experience that comes from fulfilling one’s responsibilities.

It is a way for Small Businesses to attract talent that may not know what they want to do in life yet, but they are willing to do a good job for whomever they are working for at the time.  In Switzerland, there are small businesses that have people taking Novice (unpaid) positions just to have that company’s recommendation for another opportunity.  These jobs are not forever, but the system works by making recommendations to third parties for future employment as a form of payment.

You get an honest effort because the Apprentice (Student) is counting on a Letter of Recommendation to get into a more desirable, for them, Apprenticeship that has come available.  Yes, there is some cost in having to maintain your Talent Acquisition, Training, and Retainment system, but it pays for itself once you get it going.  You always have a steady flow of talent going through your organization at a pace you set.  The better the workplace you provide, the better talent you will attract and keep.

It is not unlike having thousands of small universities providing the skills experience necessary to become independent adults.

Who wouldn’t want that?

 

Funding for Man-made Global Warming Skeptics

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Mission:  Falsify or fail to falsify the the alarmist effects of CO2 levels in our atmosphere.  Report findings to patrons and interested parties.

I’ve been whining about the lack of real funding for man-made global warming skeptics for some time now.  The amount of funding that has gone into the alarmist side is staggering, $100’s of billions have been spent on all the research and public relations.  What has the Return on Investment (RoI) been?

  1. Zero experiments (able to be falsified) conducted that tie Temperatures to CO2 levels.
  2. 10’s of 1000’s of articles, paid for from Tax Revenue, on Effects of man-made global warming while never comparing to the Null hypothesis that it is Natural Climate Variability like it was from 4 Billion B.C. to A.D. 1950.  They loosely assume Nature stopped doing what it has always done in 1950 and since then CO2 has taken control of climate.
  3. More calls and public relations to surrender more of our income and freedom to those who have wasted it for decades.

I’m saying “no more”.   “Panic, and surrender more of your income and freedom” is not a policy worth continuing to pay for.  We shouldn’t be paying for anything that is a repeat of that or similar messages.  We know that the Alarmists believe that CO2 levels are going to lead to catastrophe.  I don’t want my tax money going towards another study that says the same thing.  There’s already 10,000+ of them.  If you can’t convince the masses with 10,000+ articles and studies, another million won’t do it.

I want another message displayed to the masses with our tax money.  The message that says “Don’t panic, it was a mild hallucination, it didn’t feel right for a good reason.” Truthful messages like “the Greenland Ice Sheet melted the last 2 interglacials like this one. It has not yet and we don’t know why.”  It might be prudent to look at the studies already written about what would happen if sea levels rose 6 meters like it did the last two interglacials.

It happened twice before.  I’m not saying it has to happen this interglacial, but it would be smart to consider that Nature did it twice before and CO2 never got above 280ppm.  Okay?  CO2 above 280ppm is NOT REQUIRED to have higher or lower temperatures, different degrees of storm intensity, or Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, like it already did two times before.

I’d like to see some studies that try to figure out what IS REQUIRED to have higher and lower temps, different degrees of storm intensity, and the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, like it did the last two times.  I’d like to see Climate Calm’ists get paid to give us the facts, attempt to Falsify hypotheses, and promote deeper inquiry.

So, all that said, I have fundingforskpetics.com and .org.  I’m considering the best way to set it up and what it’s core mission shall be.  I like the mission stated at the beginning.  I think it would be both moral and ethical to lobby for Tax Revenue for Skeptical Scholarly Articles and Experiments.

And if Skeptics fail to falsify the AGW hypotheses, the AGW argument will get more solid.

Who would you nominate to get funding?  What do you think they could provide for the funding we acquire for them?

Self Reliance Apprenticeship System

https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/self-reliance/

Self Reliance Apprenticeship System

Mission: Prepare community youth and young adults for a dynamic and uncertain world.

For quite sometime I’ve pondered and worked on several different iterations of this crazy idea.  The idea is a self autonomous organization that recruits and trains all of its members to provide top notch goods and services for their community.  It doesn’t sound novel, but it  shares the scarcity of use as novel ideas exhibit.

The training would be two-fold.  Technical education; first hands on – then theory.  And the Arts; economics, finance, communication, philosophy, etc.  In other words, an apprenticeship program with life long self improvement built in.  The ‘community served’ would pay for all the training, salaries, and overhead via purchasing goods and services.  Consideration (pay, benefits, experience gained) would be based upon level of responsibility (novice, apprentice, expert, and master).

My first iteration of this was rooted in Information Technology.  Family illness/troubles took me away from this path, but I’ve found myself on a similar one today.  I hope to be sharing more about that project in the future, but I’m heavily focused on the newest iteration, which is a Cabinetry and Carpentry Apprenticeship.

There’s a good living in hand and machine produced cabinetry and fixtures.  It’s not terribly difficult work and the perks of having your own tools and ability to use them is damn near priceless.  We don’t expect all apprentices to become carpenters, we expect them all to learn to be one if they want to be.  Most will move on having put in a good effort and learned/added a lot. They get solid references for how quickly they learned and how much responsibility they could handle.  Fewer will stay to become the Experts and Mentors that keep it all going.  The goal is everyone get something positive out of the relationship.

The Arts portion of the Apprenticeship program is geared towards helping members with the softer or people oriented skills.  Honing one’s skills in social, economic, and political ways so one can easily add to and benefit from their community.  Economics from Smith, Hayek, Mises, and the like.  Philosophy from Christ, Moses, Freud, Jung, Socrates, Plato, Confucius as well.  Communication and Personality Traits from Carnegie, Toastmasters, Peterson, and more.  And yes, even politics.  There is a ton to be learned from studying Cicero, The USA Founders, Machiavelli, and Greene.

Of course each business will do their own thing, but a business that offers the best Technical and Arts program is likely to attract the best apprentices.  It can’t be repeated enough; healthy and thriving small businesses equal healthy and thriving communities.  If one of the biggest companies in town closes up, there are 15 looking for additional people to help them fill the gap.  It is not time to panic as we find with big business closures.

And speaking of gaps, the gaps between those giving the orders and those carrying them out are much smaller than giant businesses.  This is about small business health and creating organic paths to success that both ensures competition and training/exercise for all.  Everyone ends up being able to compete in their chosen or temporary fields.  Once you get good at few things, it gets so much easier to get good at the next.

It sounds like a crazy pipe-dream, but I’ve seen it.  Switzerland has its own problems and challenges, but 70% of their youth gain the technical and social skills necessary to earn a descent living through Apprenticeships.  They are not learning challenged oppressed youth being forced into dead-end monotonous jobs.  They are seeking these Apprenticeships out because they offer on the job training and off the job research and practice.  They do this because it almost always leads to being able to fend for yourself and adding to their community. Another 20% via Academic and Research (university) paths.  Almost every Swiss citizen can fend for themselves, especially in areas where division of labor is used.  That is almost everywhere on the planet.

The goal is to turn our Small Businesses into Education and Experience Centers.  The Students, who can be Fired and Replaced with someone more motivated, get work and industry experience as well as some Arts training.  The Business gets, mostly, a steady stream of motivated talent, that is either looking to stay in the industry or do such a good job while apprenticing that they get a stellar recommendation and invitation to return.

Imagine that 70% of your community’s youth did something like the above instead of crowding university campuses for 4 years.  Imagine they can try out more than one or two paths without committing everything.  Imagine them all adopting the goal of being self reliant and reliable to others.  Imagine thousands of communities that were mostly comprised of confident and reliable people.  It’s possible.

This Cabinetry Apprenticeship is a prototype and template for others.  The apprentice system ends up being a Talent Acquisition, Training, and Retainment program that periodically updates itself.  Any industry can use it and modern technology is pushing into the hands of small businesses.

My goal is to make this Self Reliance Apprenticeship System common in multiple industries and communities all across the USA, perhaps the world.  Every person who wants a good life is a reason to act on this goal.  Something quite close to the above has been practiced in Switzerland for some time.  It is almost unbelievable how nice and stable their communities have become.  I am certain it can be reproduced most places it is tried.

Would you consider trying it out in your community?  Would you be interested so see how it works for others first?  Find out what your neighbors think and see if they’d try it out.

Alt-Moses came down from the Mountain

You ever hear the story of Alt-Moses and how he came down the mountain with a list of God’s, or Nature’s God as some prefer, Commandments?

No?  Well it is worth hearing and relevant to us all.

Alt-Moses lived in an alternate universe just like ours, in fact it was an exact copy.  Moses led his people out of Egypt and wandered the desert for 40 years, etc, etc.  You know the story.  Everything was the same except for that one day when he went up the mountain and came back down.

In the alternate universe, Alt-Moses came back down the mountain with an army of Lawyers, Accountants, and Bureaucrats with hundreds of thousands of stone tablets.  He explained that God had sent him back down with 10,000+ Commandments so the people could live in harmony with each other.  No one knew exactly how many there were, there were arguments over what was a Commandment and what was a Regulation.

Yes, He sent down Regulations as well.  In addition to the 10,000+ Commandments, God saw fit to also include 300,000+ Regulations that allowed the people to make sure they were following the 10,000+ Commandments in a way that would make God pleased with them.

These Commandments and Regulations, of course, would require hundreds of thousands of experts to help make sure they were being followed properly.  So Alt-Moses went on to explain that God had also given him 70,000+ tablets to explain the Tithing System, which would be used to pay for all the Lawyers, Accountants, and Bureaucrats necessary to make sure the 10,000+ Commandments and 300,000+ Regulations were being followed properly.

Now the Tithing System was so complicated that God insisted the people pay a Tithe Expert to make sure they were Tithing correctly.  If you didn’t fill out your Tithe Tablet just right, God demanded a fine so it was wise to pay an expert to make sure you didn’t make God angry.

As the story goes, Alt-Moses finished his explanation of what he was doing up on the mountain and what God demanded, and he was feeling pretty good about it.  Well, the people pondered for a moment, then they dug a hole in the ground, buried Alt-Moses up to his neck and stoned him to death.

Folks, who in their right mind would come up with such a complicated system of Laws, Regulations, and Taxes in order to serve The Land of the Free?

I’ll tell you, a bunch of Rent Seeking Elites who get extremely rich by convincing their fellow citizens that they need hundreds of thousands of Laws, Regulations, and Taxes in order to live in Harmony with each other.

I beg to differ.  It seems to me that being forced to adhere to hundreds of thousands of Laws, Regulations, and Taxes causes Disharmony where none would otherwise exist.

It is time to face the Brutal Fact that we have been duped.  The Land of the Free is in reality the Land of Hundreds of Thousands of Laws, Regulations, and Taxes that prevent us from truly being Free and making the most of our limited time on this planet.

Where do we go from here?

  1. Admit we have a Problem
  2. Do Not Freak Out
  3. Start discussing ways to Peacefully get back on the Path to Peace and Prosperity.

Peer vs Critical Review

Hand holding a magnifying glass with blank space for design or text

The Scientific Method is not just a way to test and validate the universe around you. For career scientists, its a great way to avoid being humiliated in front of the whole world.

We can go into the detail on the first steps in The Method another time, for this exercise we’re going to focus on Peer Review. We’re going to take a lesson from a chemistry professor of mine back in college.

I can’t remember his name at the moment, but this professor explained Peer Review something like this;

“Peer Review is the best way to make sure you are not humiliated when you publish your work. Extremely smart people usually have extremely large egos. So when you publish something, you can expect the most ‘know it all egotistical asshole’ to rip you a new one up and down if you get something wrong. Professional Scientists are some of the meanest people you will ever meet and at least one of us will make you look like a fool if given the opportunity. By showing how dumb one of their peers is, that’s you, they get to show off how smart they are. That is simply part of the profession.”

“Now how do you avoid that?”, he went on, “You thoroughly test your hypothesis. You should actually try to falsify your own work and findings before you show it to anyone else. Try to find a way to break your hypothesis and when you have exhausted all your ideas, ask the smartest person you know to try to break it. That’s Peer Review. Good theories are hard to break and you should never publish an idea or theory without rigorous testing beforehand.” He always used that term, Rigorous, or Rigorously test.

“Once your smartest colleague fails to falsify your methods and results, then it is safe to publish. If your idea has a large impact on the scientific world, then you need to have at least a few of your very smart peers review your work before publishing. The bigger the claim, the more scrutiny and ridicule you will receive.”

Folks, that is how Peer Review works. The Scientific Method does not stop at Peer Review, it is followed up by Critical Review. Critical Review by the most ardent and egotistical skeptics that care to examine your work. The Scientific Method doesn’t even stop at Critical Review, in fact it is ‘never’ closed to further review. So long as there is someone who wants to take another look, there will be skepticism. Peer Review is just a smart gateway to use in order to keep yourself from being embarrassed. It’s the difference between Proof Reading your own writing and having someone else do it. It does not and should not determine the final Grade.

Climatologists are demanding that we stop and accept Peer Review as the final step in observing Anthropocentric Climate Change.  I find it somewhat amazing that Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are up for scientific scrutiny, but the Green House Effect and Anthropocentric Global Warning is not.  Two well established theories that do a great job of prediction are up for scrutiny, but a mish-mash of partial hypotheses and theories that do a terrible job of predicting is not?

That’s what should be alarming to ‘scientists’ and the general public. Well, at least to people who take the Scientific Method and their Reputations seriously.

This should also be alarming to the Judge and Jurors in the upcoming Michael Mann Libel case.  I should hope that the Defendants’ lawyers bring this up.