When Al Gore said in 1998 that California would be under water by 2005, he was exaggerating for politics. A lot of climate change data was cherry picked and exaggerated to scare people into taking action.
Climate change is used as a bat to hit poor people in the head politically. The politics come from the left.
His prediction was that Manhattan would be under water, before the year 2026.
> When co-anchor Katie Couric asked Al Gore on the May 24, 2006 Today show “What do you see happening in 15 to 20 years if nothing changes?…Even Manhattan would be in deep water”, he replied: “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.”
> Weekend flooding left cars submerged in New York ... ( 19 July 2022 )
> New York City is highly vulnerable to flooding from coastal storms due to its intensively used waterfront and its extensive coastal geography. Floods have the potential to destroy homes and businesses, impair infrastructure, and threaten human safety. With climate change and sea level rise, these risks are expected to increase in the future, but will most adversely affect low-lying neighborhoods.
He was relaying his understanding of the general predictions he'd been told and took things a little too literally on an accelerated time scale.
Increasingly underwater increasingly frequently as storm surges increase and mean water levels increase leading to greater extremes is a complicated sound bite.
"New York will be underwater" is simpler and turned out to be true in a literal sense.
I literally have zero knowledge of what he has said, I'm not in the US, I didn't watch his film, and I wouldn't watch a US political figure for an explaination of anything technical when there are better and more primary sources.
You appear to arguing against a post that supports your position?
Al Gore's prediction is likely wrong (we'll know in 2026), but it did have an important qualifier: "if nothing changes". That to me implies BAU and emissions continuing to steadily rise over that intervening 15-20 year period. In fact they did start to level off not long after that prediction was made though it's a stretch to claim for certain that's the reason the WTC memorial is not, in fact, now underwater. If he had made the prediction for, say, the year 2076 it may have had more scientific merit (but arguably little ability to convince anyone of the urgency of the situation).
If his prediction does come true and someone says “but you said BAU but we actually cut emissions”, everyone will wave hands around saying “that doesn’t really matter the prediction was accurate”.
If his prediction does come true despite reducing emissions then we better start looking a whole heap harder for explanations - if it turns out the current scientific consensus has been massively underestimating the likely effect of historic emissions or completely missed some other factor leading to sudden sea level increases then we're truly in strife.
Even if he had, Al Gore isn't a scientist. X person said Y is a distraction because people can say anything. There are countless people and organizations that twist statistics or misrepresent science to suit their political ends, but it doesn't necessarily make the science flawed. Sometimes it's just misinterpreted, or cherry picked, or outright invented to support a political opinion, but that's not a problem with science as much as it is a problem with politics.
It's a lot more worrisome when you have scientists taking money to falsify data or faking results to push their own political agenda. We expect politicians to lie to us, but when science does it that risks setting back our collective understanding of the world we live in and can keep us from the truth for a very long time.
> Climate change is used as a bat to hit poor people in the head politically
I am sure the poor people who are suffering through the droughts in Europe, floods in Pakistan, increased erosion in Senegal and the hottest ever temperatures in Death Valley would disagree.
Climate change is happening and the science has been ignored for far too long.
Electricity is a fungible resource and most of it is generated from fossil fuels. The price of natural gas is way up, so electricity prices generally are up. Not to mention, hydroelectric production is down in some places (Hoover dam for instance), some nuclear plants are running below capacity because rivers are too low and/or too warm (France) and there's a major land war in Europe right now.
It's also possible that some investments in renewables will take time to pay off, like any investment in new infrastructure. I'd expect the same thing if some area built a brand new coal plant. (Ideally these costs are buffered out by some kind of financial instrument so rate-payers don't get hit by it all at once.)
Solar power is actually quite cheap. Storage can be cheap or expensive depending on whether it's done with pumped hydro (where geography allows) or chemical batteries.
> "Some people are saying the world will end and humanity will be wiped away."
I personally believe there may be more truth to that statement than many wish to believe, but not as a direct result of climate change itself. Rather, it's much more likely that the growing stupidity and political polarization surrounding climate change (and many other "hot-button" topics) will drive humanity to the ultimate stupidity of another World War, which these days can absolutely be a life-ending (on a planetary scale) path to go down, considering the types of "mass destruction" weapons the mad-men in power these days have access to.
And that's why science doesn't usually happen in HN comments. That doesn't change anything about the overwhelming body of evidence that we have collected in the last fifty years or so and the predictions we're able to make from it.
This is a cheap attempt to co-opt an argument "Climate Change" that is factual and not political, into political direction "Person X said Z" and "Fact X was stated by political side S".
Climate change has nothing to do with right or left, or any other way people use to paint things black and white.
Reading the Wikipedia article is not very confidence inspiring considering the criticisms of “lack of transparency”, “lack of sharing code and raw data”, “heavy reliance on statistics but no inclusion of trained statistician”.
The only encouraging finding was “no outright scientific fraud”.
I thought "Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.[17] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.[18]" to be encouraging.
I haven't read all the reports yet, but it was good to see all of them ended up at that same conclusion. I'm sure there are people who would complain about the amount of time, money, and effort that went into investigating, but I'm glad there was so much scrutiny from so many different eyes.
Why do you think that academics investigating themselves carries any weight? Of course they'll conclude there was no problem. If you want a writeup that takes a rather different view on what happened you need it to be written by outsiders. Try this one:
I'd have hoped that those outsiders would still involve climatologists, but it appears in this case the paper you linked was written by a economist affiliated with a conservative think tank and a man who spent his entire career working for mining and fossil fuel industries. These are clear conflicts of interest, which doesn't bode well for the paper. It'll still be interesting to see how what they say compares with the reports by actual experts working at places like the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the National Science Foundation, and the EPA, but I'm not expecting much to be honest.
1. How could a climatologist be an outsider? Climatologists are by definition not outsiders when criticizing climatology.
2. Why is working for a conservative think tank a conflict of interest? There are no such conflicts. If you think there are then, well, academia is well known to be dominated by people on the left, is that also a conflict of interest? If so then you have to write off most of climatology.
3. The whole problem climategate exposed is that "actual experts" are manipulating the scientific process to ensure that anyone who disagrees with their claims can't get published, and therefore gets labelled as "not an expert" and kicked out of the institutions. That's why the only people who can properly actually openly criticize that edifice are those entirely outside the sphere of government run science - but that fact is then used to write off anything they have to say. Do you therefore recognize that the argument you're making here is a circular one?
4. Given that, do you agree that climatologists are by definition conflicted - if they were to admit they had been manipulating the scientific process as was shown by the climategate emails, they would lose status, power, influence and quite possibly open themselves up to prosecution. They will obviously never do that.
Seriously, people are still claiming Climategate demonstrated anything significant other than "scientists are human" and "deniers will go to extreme lengths to hang on their world view" after 10 frigging years? I can just envisage you crying out "but climategate!" as your house is finally claimed by the rising seas and you desperately try to scavenge the last remaining cans and packages of food that are no longer economical to produce due to disrupted rainfall patterns and annual heatwaves, all while doing your best to help burn up the fossil fuels that could never have possibly been the reason for any of this happening because only nutjob communists could possibly make up such extraordinary lies.
What a bizarre, ugly and incredibly unscientific fantasy. Are you aware that absolutely nothing in any IPCC report (which presumably you trust?) depicts anything even close to that scenario? The worst they can come up with is a few percent lopped off GDP by 2100.
Also, "scientists are human"? What the emails showed is that scientists were willing to totally distort the scientific process to ensure their claims won the day even in the face of contradictory evidence. If you blow off terribly unscientific behavior with "they're only human" then you can't be upset when people decide they aren't really scientists and can safely be ignored.
From ch. 13:
"It is virtually certain that global mean sea level rise will continue beyond 2100...For a radiative forcing
that corresponds to above 700 ppm CO2-eq but below 1500 ppm, as
in the scenario RCP8.5, the projected rise is 1 m to more than 3 m."
That doesn't even include the possibility of storm surges that far exceed that, which are expected to become more frequent/extreme.
"A study simulating analogous conditions to the Dust Bowl drought in today’s agriculture suggests that Dust Bowl-type droughts today would have unprecedented consequences, with yield losses about 50% larger than the severe drought of 2012 (Glotter and Elliott 2016). Damages at these extremes are highly sensitive to temperature, worsening by about 25% with each degree centigrade of warming. By mid-century, over 80% of summers are projected to have average temperatures that are likely to exceed the hottest summer in the Dust Bowl years (1936)"
I can continue if you like.
I read many of the climate-gate emails. At worst you could claim there were a few cases where scientists were applying techniques to paint their research results in a more favourable light than it might otherwise appear.
3. RCP8.5 is a ridiculous scenario that assumes, amongst other things, that all renewable power is demolished and coal usage increases 500%. Even the BBC has debunked this one, reporting that researchers no long consider this scenario plausible:
The fact that you're citing it indicates you aren't really that well informed about this stuff.
4. Even if that did happen, a 1m or even 3m rise that happens over the course of more than 100 years isn't going to cause anyone to suddenly have to evacuate their home whilst grabbing tin cans. That's pure Hollywood. People would simply build sea defenses.
5. The whole point of climategate was that it showed scientists were exaggerating their predictions, so quoting those same predictions as an argument against the emails is nonsensical and circular.
"At worst you could claim there were a few cases where scientists were applying techniques to paint their research results in a more favourable light than it might otherwise appear."
That's distinctly underplaying the seriousness of what was going on (and probably still is).
Obviously I was engaging in a small amount of artistic license/hyperbole in order to get my point across, nor was it supposed to be a description of your own personal circumstances.
There are reports that many scientists involved in the IPCC report have been deliberately understating the case for more extreme outcomes too. No doubt both behaviours occur - again, we're all human, and the scientific method is the best (imperfect) way we have of ensuring such claims don't unduly influence our best scientific understanding.
Do you really honestly believe we'd be better off simply ignoring the IPCC report and not worry about fossil fuel emissions at all just because there may have been a few exaggerated data points published?
Maybe? The efforts being proposed to drive down emissions will have terribly harmful consequences on the poorest, and if the IPCC is wrong or even "just" exaggerating then the harms can easily outweigh the benefits.
I'd like to see us reduce dependency on fossil fuels simply because they're finite, but I also think the best way to do that is let the private sector get on with it in response to supply/demand signals. Trying to go beyond that involves massive state intervention and, historically, this has often gone terribly wrong. Especially so when motivated by science that turns out to be unreliable. Trofim Lysenko is the classic example but lobotomy is another.
Point is, that there's quite a lot of evidence that the narratives around climate change aren't just exaggerated but wildly exaggerated, and that all kinds of bad behaviors are being deployed to hide this fact. Climategate made that unambiguous because we can actually read emails where they're conspiring behind the scenes to cheat the scientific process, but there's lots of other examples of this happening that aren't from those emails. If they do it a few times and get away with it even when all their emails are leaked, why wouldn't they keep doing it? And why would we assume it was just one offs? Seems more likely to be a pattern of behavior and, again, we do see a heck of a lot of smoke when outsiders examine the (claimed to be) science.
"The efforts being proposed to drive down emissions will have terribly harmful consequences on the poorest"
What on earth makes you think that? Renewable energy sources and our ability to manufacture them cheaply and at scale are arguably of the most benefit to poorer countries.
Honestly the only people I can see "suffering" from a genuine attempt to reduce our emissions are those of us currently accustomed to a lifestyle that's largely dependent on high levels of such emissions. I certainly don't want to have to give up regular overseas travel...but it's a luxury and there are other ways to get the most out of life while maintaining a less extravagant personal footprint.
uh, I did, and I think you might wanna take another look at "climategate", cause it sounds like a bunch of nutjobs flailing about snippets of text taken wildly out of context.
I wish it would have worked and people had been scared into taking action. Now we're looking at serious ecological devastation and hundreds of millions of climate refugees (look at the recent heat wave in India and flooding in Pakistan).
Plenty of people were scared into taking action, but sadly the people with the power to make meaningful change were taking bribes from industry to continue ignoring the issue. The rest of us spent our energy taking shorter showers, separating our trash, buying things advertised as "green", and all the other largely pointless rituals they gave us to keep us calm and make us feel better while they continued to make money hand over fist destroying the future for our children.
And then there were those of us who weren't even scared, and just took all those actions simply because it was the right thing to do. Now of course, we're just as screwed as everyone, all because more money for a few that already have too much of it is far more important than "doing the right thing" or "human life" (or any life, apparently). More money for the already filthy rich is by far the most important thing in the entire Universe.
Al Gore was directionally correct, which is better than the climate change deniers on the right that point in the opposite direction to reality. Moreover, Al Gore was a political actor, not a climatologist.
Let's face it, both the left and the right politicize science. The left sometimes does it when it comes to biological sex (conflating gender and sex), intelligence testing (saying they're next to useless), genetic determinism (saying all outcomes are environmental), GMOs, nuclear energy safety, sociology (denying impact of culture on outcomes). The right can do it when it comes to gender identity, GMOs, climate change, stem cells, intelligence testing (race realism), sociology (thinking it's all culture and not racism), creationism, anti-vax and public health.
Nobody has a monopoly on politicization of science. The problem is that the right's politicization is, in the current moment, more dangerous. Covid denial and social acceptance of vaccine hesitancy has killed hundreds of thousands. Climate change denial threatens the entire world.
It seems to me that science has been political since it first came into existence, even before we had a well-defined scientific method.
Science is political because the organizations and institutions that fund/support science decide which scientific studies get funded/supported, and the outcome of the scientific process often affects the legitimacy of those organizations' and instutitions'.
I see this response a lot. It's a cop out and deflection. Sure, it's always been political. But there are times when the politics of science has hued much more closely to the pursuit of truth than it currently does. It's not hard to see why when modern, powerful political movements say that "objectivity is a tool of white supremacy" or of the "patriarchy." Such positions would have been laughed out of the room in 1980 but now they are widely held within the academy.
Methinks you need to read more papers from the 1980s. I keep Susan Bordo's The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought in my back pocket when people try this argument. It was published in 1986. Try again.
Yeah, the work stuff really took off during that decade. Probably a function of the 60s and 70s student terrorists/protestors becoming a significant portion of tenured professors finally.
So it both wouldn't fly in the 1980s and then also really took off in the 1980s? I guess we're just sorta freewheeling with whatever we want to say then? Cool.
I said in 1980 not the 1980s. And this stuff started as a minority viewpoint inside a small corner of the academy. It took many years to blossom into what it is now. People have always been writing stupid things.
> modern, powerful political movements say that "objectivity is a tool of white supremacy" or of the "patriarchy."
The statement "objectivity is a tool of white supremacy" is generally used to refer to asserting confidently objective truth exists, which is more of a philosophical statement than a refutation of the scientific method like it's often framed.
The use of perceived objectivity to enforce linear thinking and silence people who react emotionally is why this comes up in the literature you're referring to. You wouldn't tell someone crying at the death of a loved one that crying isn't an objective response to the situation at hand, but this happens in many ways ("why are you so upset about X behavior from a colleague? -> you are behaving irrationally" rather than trying to understand why someone was upset, and knowing everyone reacts to things differently)
> to enforce linear thinking and silence people who react emotionally is why this comes up in the literature you're referring to. You wouldn't tell someone crying at the death of a loved one that crying isn't an objective response to the situation at hand, but this happens in many ways ("why are you so upset about X behavior from a colleague? -> you are behaving irrationally" rather than trying to understand why someone was upset, and knowing everyone reacts to things differently)
This is a topic on science and the example about someone crying over someone's death is a strange example.
It's clear that if it wants to be called "science" then it has to have what you call linear (vs circular?) thinking. And yes there is an objective truth as far as what experience can measure.
Saying "everyone reacts to things differently" is a truism. Then what? As everyone reacts differently, the logical result is to IGNORE the emotional/irrational part of people when we deal about science/technology. As simple as that.
> the logical result is to IGNORE the emotional/irrational part of people when we deal about science/technology. As simple as that.
I don't read it quite this like. “science” concepts still have emotional impacts on people, especially when many things outside "hard" science get framed as science — think about all the management advice that gets passed around as objective fact (that also changes every few years, oops!).
it's not arguing about the truth of how many electrons are in a carbon atom, it's your boss arguing that they have a "scientifically proven" management philosophy that is objective. would you believe someone if they said that? even if they showed you a study?
Movements and institutions need to jealously guard their own interests, and not spend their political capital on unrelated movements. When they don’t do that, they undermine their own supposed priorities. When public health officials made an exception to their Covid position to support protests in 2020, they revealed that they’re willing to put their personal political views ahead of “the science.” And when you do that, that shreds your credibility. It’s a really dangerous thing for scientific institutions to signal to people that they have an agenda beyond their specific field.
This puts into very simple words my opposition to orgs like Mozilla making outreach for women, minorities and whatever else the flavour of the month is in California a part of their goals. Doubly so since they have been loosing market share every quarter for 10 years.
Stick to doing the one thing you're meant to be doing. We don't need a dozen organizations to be chasing whatever is popular right now - poorly - we need organizations that follow the course regardless of what happens.
> This puts into very simple words my opposition to orgs like Mozilla making outreach for women, minorities and whatever else the flavour of the month is
I don't think this is really a problem as long as they aren't being hypocritical. If a web browser company wants to make "outreach for women" (whatever that means) something they strive for that's perfectly fine unless it undermines their other goals.
Telling people in the middle of a pandemic to gather in large groups for chanting and screaming is a bad look for an origination whose purpose is to promote people's health. If Mozilla went around looking for ways to encourage women to take an interest in open source browser development that could easily support their interests.
>I don't think this is really a problem as long as they aren't being hypocritical.
There isn't a problem if the violence to women orgs start spending half their budget on building a good open source browser. Otherwise there is very much a problem.
Except that 2020 protests didn't cause short term upticks in case numbers the same way some (not all) political and entertainment events did, most likely because they were mostly young people and they were outside.
The biggest risk factor for transmission is bad ventilation and the biggest comorbidity is age.
So they weren't really wrong, and people at the time encouraged other political and entertainment events to be held outside to reduce risk.
> most likely because they were mostly young people and they were outside.
Except that public health experts, at least on CNN, didn’t run with “outside activists involving young people are pretty safe.” They could have done that, but instead they framed the carve-out expressly in terms of “we think protests are really important.” This was early in the pandemic, when we were still ragging on Florida for not shutting down beaches and shutting down school sports.
Most epidemiologists that I remember were discouraging all gatherings. Some CNN talking heads, said that protesting for your right not to be discriminated against by police, is more important than not gathering, which is more important than entertainment events. Given they were liberal, that is not in any way surprising.
CNN/mainstream media have so many people on that say different things and get re-reported by other stations. Plenty of people on TV at the time were discouraging protests. I think you just remember what made you feel angry.
See also: https://www.upworthy.com/public-health-experts-defend-antira... (“More than 1200 public health experts, infectious disease professionals, and community stakeholders have signed onto an open letter explaining why they support anti-racism protests happening across the country despite the potential risk of coronavirus spread.”)
So a group of liberal scientists feel that social justice is more important than social distancing. You believe this is both unexpected and shreds their credibility? I don't see any institutions signing on here, just individuals with individual political views.
I want to charitably understand your opinion here. Do you feel they should have kept quiet about their political views because as public health experts or epidemiologists they must remain neutral or else sully the fields as biased as a whole?
Literally nothing public health officials recommended had any measurable impact on the numbers (other than vaccination, which did measurably reduce deaths among the elderly, though contrary to public health officials’ statements, did nothing to stop the spread). Whether their about face had any impact is really beyond the point.
Rather, the argument here is that the reason they turned on a dime with the position, which was, to remind you, explicitly about the topic of the protest, and not them being outside, shows quite clearly that they will gladly put political consideration above scientific ones. This means that you cannot trust in their integrity in other contexts either, especially ones where their recommendations just so happen to match their political proclivities.
As a result, the credibility and trust their predecessors have earned over last century, are gone with the wind.
It was heavily encouraged at the time to refrain from any kind of gatherings.
I actively supported the 2020 protests and still think that it was the right choice for people to make. But the way press coverage skirted the issue of COVID was despicable to watch, especially after they (rightly) devastated similar pro-Trump gatherings.
I don't want my news to not tell me that it's unsafe to go because they have a political agenda. I want them to tell me that it's unsafe, and then I will decide based on my politics.
Public health people were very clear that outside protest marches are OK if they're about BLM but utterly reprehensible and banned if they were protests against lockdowns or other public health initiatives.
Clearly, such people aren't scientists and never were. What was more interesting/depressing was the total lack of outrage coming from academia. Ritchie observes that biologists in particular seem to have serious problems with communist ideology to the extent that they advertise it on Twitter, and in the UK (where he's from) somehow the official SAGE advisory group ended up with someone on it who is a literal member of the Communist Party of Great Britain! We can infer that academia was silent about this massive perversion of science because they agree with it or at least don't disagree enough to speak out, meaning that public health research in general is nonsensical.
99% of science being published today has no political motivations.
The public perception of science, though, is not dictated by scholarly journals. It's what's discussed on the nightly news or seen in the Facebook news feed, and that often comes with a helping of politics.
We're also seeing a recent uptick in criticism (and also suspicion) of "elites", and academics are generally lumped into that bucket.
And then COVID happened, making everybody an armchair epidemilogist overnight. You could see this play out on Twitter, where accounts with large followings with no previous professed statistical experience started sharing non-peer-reviewed study after study, often drawing inaccurate conclusions.
Scientists continue on, but there's absolutely no putting the genie back in the bottle. Science is political, and we need (a hopefully small number of) scientists to get some decent media training and start explaining their work to the general public.
Try psychology, sociology, medicine, climatology and the things in this direction. I probably agree with the broad thrust if the politics in those fields and that isn't the point!
Geology is more of a hard science so harder to make political.
Softer science like social science or psychology seems easy to politicize though. "Studies show that people need <my favorite policy> to truly be mentally healthy"
"human learnability of abstract network representations"
Which humans? Did they test it works equally well for all races and genders and body shapes, or is their model of human learning biased to work best for buff white men and is inferior for everyone else?
What's in the abstract network representations, are they truly neutral, or are we just helping humans to learn from biased data that will make them subconsciously more racist/sexist/heightist?
The problem with the person you're responding to, is that they are a layman. They think what they read in magazines or see on Facebook is science.
Spending time in academia and reading articles in a field you know something about makes it clear they are quite far from science.
So when you said "publish science" you meant what shows up in academic journals, while when the other person said "publish science" they were thinking of an article written primarily for the purpose of engagement. The same idea probably wasn't being referenced.
Sadly, it falls on academia's shoulders to understand this problem (that before a layman sees anything "sciency" it's filtered through people who need to get an emotional reaction to drive engagement, and that defines the public perception of science) and put the work into ameliorating it. Sadly, it's a conflict of interest that probably helps procuring funds.
re: hard sciences, the scientific community's refusal to accept the covid lab leak hypothesis stands out IMHO. School shutdowns/mask mandates for pre-k and public schools is another politicalized issue.
I recall being am amateur epidemiologists suspicious of "elites" and I bet on masks being efficacious while health authorities were pooh-poohing them and came out ahead. I felt the "Elites" were being bias by the ongoing shortage of medical masks into downplaying the efficacy of masks for the general public, which in hindsight, actually seems pretty spot on.
I saw lots of people sharing studies, including before peer review, I mostly didn't see anybody come to a substantively different conclusion from the authors after like the first few months of pandemic confusion had cleared up. I found scepticism and DIY science very helpful this pandemic especially when things were more chaotic.
I'm not sure who to blame for that; but agree it was a mistake.
Stress a lack of evidence (at that time)? Sure.
Stress that N-95 and KN-95 masks must be reserved for hospital workers, and possibly even pre-press banning their sale under emergency commandeering measures? I think we can all guess why that didn't fly politically (it would require admitting there was a serious pandemic).
The public should never be 'lied to' nor 'ticked' (which the people I've spoken with mostly assume was happening with that initial mask stance) and should be treated as adults, possibly ones without a full set of information from expert matters on a subject.
There were many people posting links about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin and discussing efficacy in the presence of scant information. Also lots of discussions around R0 etc.
The story of hydroxychloroquine is much misunderstood. People remember it as “Trump’s horse dewormer” but it was one of the first potential treatments to emerge in the Chinese standard of care in the early stages of the pandemic. That fact, combined with the “fog of war” and that we know hcq is well tolerated in humans makes it a fairly reasonable bet.
The bet being wrong is a separate matter to whether or not it was reasonable. Conversely, I would argue the early anti-mask messaging was unreasonable based on similar logic (well bounded and low costs, potentially high benefits).
The conclusion that I know some people took away from it is that critical thinking is not an evolutionarily favored trait in certain administrative roles.
It’s weird. Masks have always been known to reduce transmission from a sick person. Keyword being reduce. But the anti mask people, especially on Twitter or Facebook are like “see this study! Masks don’t work” and it’s like yes it wasn’t about preventing you from getting sick, it’s reducing a sick person from spreading. People can be sick and not realise it and spread it so it’s easier to get everyone to wear masks.
Masks and Vaccines are 2 massively misunderstood things during the pandemic.
When I was at school (New Zealand) we learned that vaccines help give the immune system the information to fight a virus. But people in America and Europe have this idea that vaccine is like a shield that prevents you from getting sick entirely and then claims vaccines don’t work…
> It’s weird. Masks have always been known to reduce transmission from a sick person. Keyword being reduce. But the anti mask people, especially on Twitter or Facebook are like “see this study! Masks don’t work”
I never understood the "masks are useless" claims. I've seen it in lots of forms, sometimes covering all types of masks or sometimes just cloth ones.
We've spent so long teaching people to cover their mouths when they cough specifically because it's been proven to help! We teach little kids to "Vampire Cough/Sneeze" for that very reason. Literally anything you put in front of your virus spewing face hole is going to do some good, but since N95 masks aren't 100% effective every single time it's not worth doing anything to protect the people around you? It really just seems like people looking for any excuse or justification to not be inconvenienced in any way for the benefit of the people around them. Like a very aggressive kind of selfishness I can't wrap my head around. Like people will hurt themselves to avoid doing anything that might help somebody else.
"It’s weird. Masks have always been known to reduce transmission from a sick person."
No they have not. That's why you think it's weird - if you look at the state of mask science pre 2020, you will find a whole lot of nothing. There's no evidence masks have ever been able to stop respiratory disease.
After 2020 the space was flooded with nonsensical studies claiming efficacy but they all have rather large and obvious problems e.g. CIs that include zero or even worse problems, but the reason scientists pretty universally pooh-poohd at masks at the start had nothing to do with shortages. That was a lie retconned into their claims later and wow, was it ever successful at confusing people. No, they said that because there was no actual scientific evidence to point to. There still isn't.
"it’s like yes it wasn’t about preventing you from getting sick, it’s reducing a sick person from spreading"
The idea of a magical one way mask is also completely unsupported by any scientific evidence and in fact by now strongly refuted by it, because there is lots of evidence masks have no effect on COVID. It was invented out of nothing to justify forcing everyone to wear masks even if the risk to them was minimal to none.
"But people in America and Europe have this idea that vaccine is like a shield that prevents you from getting sick entirely and then claims vaccines don’t work"
Yes I wonder why they think that, after all, they were only told the vaccine was a shield against getting sick and spreading it by the guy who runs Pfizer, the president of the USA, public health officials in every country, etc. People are so totally unreasonable, aren't they? But I see from a sibling comment you weren't aware of that, so why are you so confident about all the other things you think you know?
China wasn't "buying up" all the masks because most masks are made in China to begin with. I don't know why they think masks are so great. It isn't to do with science because otherwise people could point to the compelling and clear research evidence that masks work, and there wouldn't be so many counter-examples where masks had no effect.
Circa 2020, the evidence masks worked for medical professionals was pretty unambiguous, but the issue with masks is think about taking them on and off. You practcially touch your hand to your face every time. Because of this, it has always been less clear that John Q Public pulling their mask aside to talk on the phone or sips a cup of coffee with their reusable mask is doing themselves or anybody else any favours.
I think though that it’s extremely obvious that it’s very likely the general public could take certain actions to make the efficacy of their mask use similar to that of medical professionals, but the interpretation of the data early on was simply “the general public shouldn’t use masks”. This was obviously nonsense, and I interpreted the data as meaning I should carefully use masks.
in france at the first they were very much against masks (since just a few months because the start of covid they got rid of the huge reseve they had) until they could restock them back and then suddenly the narrative shifted from "they wouldn't be of usefe to you and you wouldn't know how to use them anyway" to "they are absoloutly mandatory and very simple to use"
The wisdom of locking down toddlers and children for years on end was also a spot where the uppity rubes were correct and all the science wizards were disastrously incorrect.
I don’t disagree that most science is pretty non political. But it’s also true that the contact surface that a large swath of America has with “science” is through publications like Scientific American, scientists who go on TV, social “scientists,” etc.
The article you linked is not what the discussion is about, though. Yours is referring to the impacts of discrimination on the people within the scientific community. The original article is about the effect of bias on the results of the research.
People rely on crude indications of trustworthiness. When you run an article titled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past”—in reference to a field that’s chock full of brown people and Asians—it’s a signal.
(Isn’t it funny how you never see article headlines talking about how post-modern philosophy was invented by white people?)
Are we really about to pretend there’s no basis in reality, though? I literally have older relatives who were told — very explicitly! — that they should stay out of what we would now call STEM fields because it “wasn’t for Jews.” So what’s not sitting right with articles like this?
We can talk about it without adopting the rhetoric of critical theory (“math confronts it’s white, patriarchal past”) as the Scientific American article does. Critical theory is designed to meld analysis and political advocacy and it’s distinctive terminology is part of that advocacy.
I’m not making a gratuitous reference to critical theory by the way. Your example illustrates the problem. According to critical theory, “Jews are white.” So where does your example fit in? Also, math as a field is full of Indian and Chinese people. How does it make sense to label it “white?” Under critical theory, it’s “white” because Black people are underrepresented. Critical theory compels a mode of analysis that groups people a certain way, focuses on certain kinds of discrimination or power relationships to the exclusion of others, and all for distinctly political reasons.
You appear to be the first person in this particular thread to bring up "critical theory". How is anybody supposed to discuss anything with you if you're just going to find the weirdest thing anybody has ever said and then demand that they reconcile their own words against it? You win: you found something stupid that somebody said, once.
This is a tendentious characterization of what's being called out here, which is an article in a prominent periodical discussing viewpoints that are increasingly supported by the heads of elite institutions at the behest of significant percentages of the political left. It's not just, "something stupid that somebody said, once."
I mean, you're just illustrating the same thing I criticized Rayiner for doing. He wasn't talking to someone who was supporting or expounding critical race theory. The person he was talking to mentioned that he had relatives excluded from the sciences because they were Jewish, and Rayiner hit him over the head with "critical theory". He wrote a bad comment. So did you. It doesn't have to be a bigger thing than that.
You remind me of this EU project officer who wanted us to tweet more for our project. And set up a Linkedin account. And maybe an instagram account too (we could also crosspost in our lab's facebook). We had to fight her to stop using google analytics to track the website visitors.
Unfortunately we can't train 100% of people to understand all the science that gets published. That's why scientists need to learn to trust each other and communicate to the public as a single body, not as individual scientists. How they are going to do that, that's internal to the body of scientists. Politics has broken scientific unity, fix it.
> communicate to the public as a single body, not as individual scientists
That's a laudable goal. You will never, never get any body of scientists, or any other class of people, to agree on their overall goals for society, so if science IS indeed political, you've lost already.
On the other hand, if they only have to agree on what the data and logic tell us, that's still hard, but it's much closer to being achievable. It requires everyone to take a deep breath and say "I might be wrong but this is what I think, and here's why." And then listen.
I found that missive (regarding politics and it's influence on the scientific community as a whole) conspicuously.. missing.. from this article. It's not so much about how politics affects the outcomes of science, imo, but how politics shapes what science is capable of in the first place.
I'm immediately reminded of how deeply skewed towards treatment (rather than curing) pharmaceutical research is, because of our economic structure.
This is a fiction pushed by quacks. There are no cures being suppressed by "big pharma" because treatment makes more money.
It's a convenient "just so" story people who don't work in bioscience love, told with all the certainty of "did you know you swallow 8 spiders a year on average".
I'm not claiming suppression, just noting that economic incentives are misaligned, and noting that we, as a society, have in our toolbelt a whole host of treatments, and only a handful of cures.
> 99% of science being published today has no political motivations.
That's probably not true. Based on the charts here [1], it is safe to say that at least 20-30% of successful NSF grant applications have political/ideological terms used in the abstract.
Maybe more importantly, it's really hard to know how much research isn't being done or published because of the current political climate.
> And then COVID happened, making everybody an armchair epidemilogist overnight.
Well, I don't see that as a bad thing. Blind trust in authority isn't an admirable quality in my books. Also, the other option really was to become an armchair epistemologist. You had to somehow make decisions.
> Science is political
But it shouldn't be. At least not this much. We have choice to encourage or discourage that.
As a scientist, I think this piece completely misses the point. "Science is political" because most scientists aspire to answer questions that will have value for society. If you read the cited articles, the point is to remind scientists to consider how their poorly posed questions (limited as always by fundamental limits in how confounding factors can be controlled and/or resource limits on things like group sizes) will be interpreted by non-scientists in formulating policy (or attempting to, in the cases of crazies).
Said another way, while it is possible for science to be less political, it explicitly requires that the questions being posed are as far removed from policy decisions as possible (i.e., useless). I would challenge the author to articulate an alternative in which [(a) scientists desire to have a positive impact on society (beyond simply increasing knowledge) and (b) they recognize the limitations of their capabilities] but do not need to think carefully about how the results of a resource or technical limitation of their work might lead it to be misapplied to bad policy. Saying "remember science is political" is no different than saying "remember that if you decide to always check PSA levels you'll mess up more people's urinogenital loves with unnecessary tests than you'll save from cancer.
Note: many scientists (like me!) gravitate to "basic" science so they won't have to worry. But I don't think that makes us better.
> scientists desire to have a positive impact on society (beyond simply increasing knowledge)
That's where you're off into Error Land. Increasing knowledge is the only legitimate goal of science. If you wanted to benefit society, you should have gone into a different line of work.
> Increasing knowledge is the only legitimate goal of science. If you wanted to benefit society, you should have gone into a different line of work.
And who are you, so wise in the ways of science, to decide what the only legitimate goal of science can be?
Science, technology, none of these exists in a vacuum. People, even academics, have a life outside of their work. What affects that life affects what they work on as well. It's only natural.
> Increasing knowledge is the only legitimate goal of science.
According to some, not according to others. There is no consensus on what science is. Prominent philosophers like Foucault say science is a power-confirming tool first, and therefore definitely political.
Foucault would say yes, but I'm not so sure. I follow more Graeber's point of view that scientists are essentially shamans, and that you probably want to be a good or useful shaman.
Whether that means political or apolitical is hard to assess. I would say that the aspiration either way might be good for your own work, but shouldn't be used to judge the scientific work of others.
> Foucault say science is a power-confirming tool first
Can you summarize why Foucault thought the application of the scientific method to empirical questions is “power-confirming first?” If that’s not what he meant by science then what was he specifically referring to?
A large portion of philosophers are “actual communists”, since they actually read Marx
EDIT replying to sub comment (I am once again rate limited)
Indeed he literally wrote an essay called “On the ruthless criticism of everything existing” which argued against the French socialists who came up with prescriptions rather than solid critiques. Marxism isn’t about communism, it’s about criticising capitalism. That’s why he spent so little time talking about communism. That would be like a slave or a serf wondering what might come next. A strong scientific (in the German sense) critique was his project
Foucault lived when the actual Nazis were in power and saw the rise of eugenics, so I'd bet that has more to do with his relating power and the course of science than "scientists are respectable ergo oppressive". Iirc he was also fairly clear about how his analyses were rooted in observation of actual occurrence, and not an attempt to divine the essence of the idea of science and power.
So by observation of actual occurrence Foucault means ignoring the entire history of science radically improving living conditions and extending lifespans for the previous centuries and instead conflating it with Nazis? That explains a lot.
Orwell was a generation ahead of Foucault, but he lived through many of the same events. Unlike Foucault, he drew the correct conclusions about them. His work will still be read when Foucault is just a footnote.
You can find someone to disagree on anything. There are people who think we never landed on the moon. There were undoubtedly those who thought Copernicus was full of it. They were wrong.
And Foucault is only "prominent" for people who can't do science, or really anything else useful.
Exactly, anyone that would bring him up in this discussion, and expect it to actually contribute to the topic at hand, can go Foucault themselves with a rusty hammer and sickle.
That is how I feel about economics. It is just there to justify what is already happening, this actually has the counterproductive side effect that people think being wealthy is a reward for good and moral behaviour which is of course ridiculous. There are many ways to become rich and there is nothing about it that requires it to be morally good or fair.
It's like that Debt book from David Graeber where in the beginning he talks about how it is odd that paying debts is supposed to be good moral behaviour as if taking on business risk and failing is a decision that people make voluntarily. It is especially strange because lenders slap on a risk premium on top of their loans because they are fully aware that some are going to default.
Why is applying knowledge not a legitimate goal of science? When you learn that action X results in more suffering than the alternative action Y, should you not put that knowledge to use for political policy?
You should, and I don’t think the author would disagree. But it’s important to maintain a distinction between science your potentially science-informed political advocacy. If you don’t, how can anyone who disagrees with you on the merits of action Y trust what you have to say?
Can they trust that you've explained your reasoning honestly and showed all your data? In the political arena proper, it's very common to see politicians fail to mention inconvenient data or present unsound arguments which don't actually describe how they came to their conclusions.
There is no complete trust in life, no matter what. I can't trust myself that the data I collected myself and the conclusions I drew myself are correct. That's why we have scientific discourse, where other scientists read your papers, think that it's hot garbage and do their own investigation.
> Increasing knowledge is the only legitimate goal of science.
Should we build a super collider in Texas or a space telescope at the sun-earth L2 point?
There are many factors when considering what science to fund, but if society is footing the bill then the expected benefit to society should be a big part of the decision.
As a non-professional who attempts to adhere to scientific forms of knowledge, I think this is a far better (and shorter) analysis than the article. The word "politics" has a very ugly connotation right now, and probably for much of history, but at its root, it's the process by which we make decisions as groups of people. Without "politics" we can't maintain social structures bigger than dyads, so we should never neglect politics. If someone is publishing research on a topic that is hotly contested in our society, being ignorant or indifferent to the impact that their publication might have is not a virtue.
That isn't to say scientists should only publish findings that perfectly accord with their political beliefs, but perhaps they could spend more effort trying to present their findings in such a way as to limit the inevitable attempts to draw totally wild conclusions or take them completely out of context. And, for the love of all, don't write abstracts that make it sound like you've made some sort of revolutionary breakthrough or stumbled on hidden fundamental truths! Non-specialists (absolutely including myself) will often read abstracts at best, more likely articles written from other articles written by someone who skimmed the abstract while grinding their proverbial axe. People educated in science are aware of the limitations, non-scientists on the other hand...
> ... If someone is publishing research on a topic that is hotly contested in our society, being ignorant or indifferent to the impact that their publication might have is not a virtue.
If a topic is hotly contested in our society, publishing plenty of high-quality, reliable scholarship about it is one of the best available ways of gradually turning it into a less-hotly contested topic. This applies even to things like climate science, where people sometimes like to remark that "the science is settled". So yes, we should always be mindful of impact but undervaluing the benefits of that impact would be just as wrong.
I think a better title would have been 'science funding is political, and that's a bad thing'.
Perhaps it should be political, to some extent, assuming a well-educated public that understands why studying infectious disease outbreaks, earthquake seismology and patterns, historical drought/flood patterns, etc. is important.
However, if control of funding of scientific research is taken over by specific sectors - fossil fuel interests, established depression treatment interests, mortgage security interests, etc. - then one can expect low-quality science resulting in an academic system where the willingness to fudge data to please one's corporate owners on their next-quarter stock profile becomes more important than scientific rigor, in terms of career advancement.
That's how Soviet biological academics worked under the control of Lysenko for about three decades... just replace Lysenko with Wall Street and you have the current American research program.
Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher are three of the statisticians who established the fundamental basis and techniques of modern statistics, and they were all eugenicists. There is a modern discourse on the racist history of statistics and data collection methodology, and a number of books published:
Thicker than blood: how racial statistics lie (sociology)
Weapons of math destruction (mathematics)
White logic, white methods: racism and methodology (sociology)
'Discriminating Data' by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is a really interesting read about the impact and influence of the eugenic origins of statistics to new fields like network and data science too. Highly recommended.
> "Science is political" because most scientists aspire to answer questions that will have value for society.
Let me rephrase the last part of this slightly to help illustrate the problem:
Most scientists aspire to answer questions that will have value for people.
Scientists have discovered all kinds of fascinating stuff that has vastly improved people's lives. For example, all the discoveries that made possible the medium in which we are having this conversation. But there's no reason any of that has to be political. Scientific discoveries have greatly empowered people in all kinds of ways that don't require any politics to work.
The reason science is political is that some people want to use it as a tool, not to empower all people, but to empower themselves at the expense of other people. They want science to give them an excuse to tell other people what to do or what not to do. That is the difference between "value for people" and "value for society". If it's "value for people", then each person can judge that for themselves, and use the tools of science as they choose to improve their lives. But if it's "value for society", then who gets to judge that for "society"? That is where the problem lies. To the extent that there is a valid point lurking in this article, I think that's it.
I mean, does it have value for society that scientists recovered old administrative documents about the French revolution? Not really.
But as a society, we can now decide to continue to be wrong about most beliefs we held about that time period or to correct those beliefs. Did those researcher knew what they would find? Yes, probably. Were those finding aligned to their political views? Probably yes, i doubt there is a lot of Furetien left, and they probably wouldn't have searched those documents. (i wanted to use the verb seek and not search, but couldn't remember if it was irregular)
Does it really have value for people? Not really. I will now get internet points everytime someone talk about the French terror for the foreseeable future. That's it.
But maybe, if our civilization last long enough, our history myths will match our real history and everyone will be less wrong.
> Does it really have value for people? Not really.
You must be joking. The very fact that you are posting here indicates that you are making use of countless products of science. They're just not products of science that are tied to any political controversy or help anyone to gain political power, so everyone takes them for granted and doesn't stop to think about them when they think about "science". But they should.
Also: In what political landscape will science being political be a bad thing? If you have harmony in your political landscape with the biggest differences between your political parties being about topics like taxes, whether privatization is good and how much to spend on social issues — given such an environment wouldn't it be the case that nobody cared if science was political?
So if science does what it always does (trying to find truth in hard questions that matter) and suddenly someone starts complaining about it being "political", one should also consider that it might not be science that changed, but the relationship political actors have with the truth.
Example: If you are the head of the flat-earth party any science reporting the earth as sphere-like would seem political (or even criminal) to you. But this would have nothing to do with science — and all to do with the mismatch between your believes and the reality out there.
> it explicitly requires that the questions being posed are as far removed from policy decisions as possible (i.e., useless).
This is far from accurate. Sure you can pick a strawman example, but in reality questions can be posed and useful irregardless of what the politics are at the time.
I stopped after reading the use of a nebulous “they” scare quote which lets the reader fill in whoever “they” are, and which is basically a right wing dogwhistle. Consider for example a recent analysis of a certain right wing talk show.
I think substack should be banned completely from HN.
But that’s because the right has become synonymous with, or at least tacitly supports, insane racists, fascists, bigots and more unpleasant adjectives. You can be pedantic about our wording and try and slide the issue but the data is there.
There are plenty of issues where you can have multiple sides or perspectives and want to allow debate. But that is not what is happening.
> Hmm. I’m not much of a speech-writer, and that felt a little bit embarrassing.
Wow. You're really not. Let me give it a go.
Bias can never be eliminated, but it can be overcome by a greater commitment: the commitment to truth. We commit to pursue the evidence wherever it leads, because we believe that the truth is of such great and ultimate benefit and significance that this overwhelms any personal or political inconvenience. We will be the first ones to say what no one in our generation wants to hear, but what the next generation will be glad we uncovered, as has been the role of so many of our forefathers, heroes in the past. Though my peers abandon me and seek to bury the inconvenient out of fear of the consequences or desire to manipulate, I will tell the truth because I trust my fellow man to always make the best decisions with the benefit of full and accurate knowledge. We will not blink, and we will not lie, and we will not allow professional ambition, personal benefit, or cherished beliefs to overpower our sacred trust as humanity's best line of defense against ignorance and lies.
Everything is political. There's no getting away from it. You can be safely working in woman's health, and suddenly - it becomes political. No change in what you're doing, others have decided that it's a political issue, and so it is.
What the hell? The literal process of science is conflict. It’s not a bad thing. It’s the sorting out of which ideas are most accurate and most useful for answering questions. Edit: gob help me I’ll just say “dialectic”. I’ll take whatever is incoming for saying it.
A lot of you may not be aware of the deep, seething hatred a large number of Americans have for the educated elite. Not only are they perceived as having money and power now, they are blamed for the developments that take away people's jobs in the future. This hatred is so widespread that it was no trouble to convince people, used to flu shots and polio vaccines, that the COVID vaccines were dangerous or a hoax. You usually don't run into these attitudes in Silicon Valley, in college towns, in academia, and in the "better sections" of large cities, so many successful technologists are unaware of how deep-seated and widespread this attitude is. So politicizing climate change, COVID, etc. was very easy, there was a built-in audience.
This is an interesting take. A fairly elitist take at that. You do realize that generally the people who live in the non-“better sections” (as you put it) of large cities generally vote in line with how the super highly educated elite people that live in Silicon Valley vote.
You are right. I was focused on the bubble that persons with good tech careers live in— they almost never come across the resentful 33% in their lives.
By the way, those “resentful 33%,” in their own way, are not wrong. I saw a YouTube of what a young woman did when home from college. She sat in a cramped enclosed office, 20 feet off the ground with a narrow 18” (450mm) shelf with three crappy looking PC’s. She was plowing about 100 acres of farmland, riding in this combine. If farming can be automated to this degree, of course manufacturing can.
I'd say it's more because of the anti-white anti-male anti-Christian virtue signalling competition that the social elite do, which seeps into all cultural products including entertainment and media. It makes low status traditional white men feel alienated from all of society except for Fox News and Donald Trump. The feeling of societal alienation leads to fascist sentiments as Hannah Arendt figured out.
That's the explanation for the phenomenon, but it doesn't mean I have sympathy for these people. They are perpetuating white supremacy and domination without realizing it. I simply wish our culture didn't create such a hostile climate for white men for purely pragmatic downstream reasons (i.e. I don't want fascism), as well as for egalitarian realism (i.e. race essentialism is wrong, even when directed at white people).
Regarding trade: such people aren't entitled to my trade or business. If I want to buy something from a Chinese person, that is my right, and they have no right to interfere with that.
You are not wrong. I do not know how widespread it is, but I do agree that it does seem widespread enough to let people latch onto ideas they would otherwise not even consider. I don't know if I agree with the characterization of "better sections" of large cities, but it is hard for me to say anything categorically one way or the other on that issue ( I have conflicting anecdata ).
If there is any hope for those hoping anti-intellectualism won't come for them, remember that current resentment appears to be primarily reserved for the rich ( I have a very unscientific way of determining the current sentiment ).
One thing that's interesting is that the author doesn't really disagree about the political nature of science but rather looks for degrees of objectivity within what he acknowledges to be an already political field. This sets up a pretty big strawman because everyone agrees that, to pick his example, Lysenkoism is hogwash but that does little to address the contentious and serious political issues we grapple with, or the larger question of the proper nature of science.
I'd rather take up the second point, namely that the author almost takes it as a given that politicized science is bad. He puts forward this idea that science ought to be bureaucratic, ideally all scientists ought to be disinterested, universalist, apolitical monks who try to improve reproducibility, and so on.
To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process may help everyone to agree on results, but it impedes the evolution of the scientific process (or better, processes) itself. There's nothing wrong with methods that in different places drift into different directions, because overall this makes for a more competitive field of methodologies. in fact something even as stupid as Lysenkoism serves a purpose, it's in itself part of the scientific map of ideas that need to be discovered before they could be disregarded.
So if you want to do insular corporate science, and someone wants to do militaristic science, and someone else wants to do cooperative 'objective science', all of this is valid and in fact useful, not despite, but because it creates conflict. To do ideological science is simply to run an experiment on the scientific method itself, it's what Feyerabend called 'epistemic anarchism' which he identified as the only thing that avoids limiting the potential of science.
> To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process ...
Sorry, there, but "objectivity" is not up for debate. Unless you subscribe to the woo-woo "different ways of knowing" crap.
The scientific method is not up for debate.
> To do ideological science is simply to run an experiment on the scientific method itself, it's what Feyerabend called 'epistemic anarchism' which he identified as the only thing that avoids limiting the potential of science.
"the potential of science": Berkeley nonsense. It's too bad he didn't just stick with Popper, who'll be around long after he's forgotten.
> Sorry, there, but "objectivity" is not up for debate.
It really obviously is up for debate, all the way from the fundamental question of whether objective knowledge is accessible at all, to things like the measurement problem in quantum mechanics
"obviously" to you, I guess. Not to anyone else who realizes that life expectancy beyond 30 and absence of periodic famines with mass starvation is the result of objectivity.
> whether objective knowledge is accessible at all
How to make steel, plumb our houses, cure our bacterial infections, and bring A/C power to them is not knowledge that's "accessible to all." Most of us are happy that someone somewhere knows how to do those things. That's called "division of labor."
> whether objective knowledge is accessible at all
Kind of like the missing link in the fossil record which causes creationists to say "Look! Darwin was wrong!": quantum mechanics is the difficult-to-understand problem giving an easy out to people who don't believe in science anyway. Give it a rest.
"At all" is equally fatuous, though. The philosophical problem of whether objective knowledge is attainable was settled centuries ago. "How do you really know that Einstein's Relativity is valid?" is something that was settled when its predictions were borne out. If there are still questions about it, those will be settled by more science.
except that 'epistemic anarchism' is impossible today ,because 100% of the money is controlled by political organizations. Perhaps in feyrabends time the scientists were on paychecks instead of grant-schemes.
> To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process may help everyone to agree on results, but it impedes the evolution of the scientific process (or better, processes) itself. There's nothing wrong with methods that in different places drift into different directions, because overall this makes for a more competitive field of methodologies. in fact something even as stupid as Lysenkoism serves a purpose, it's in itself part of the scientific map of ideas that need to be discovered before they could be disregarded.
Not chaining the scientific process to objectivity might improve the evolution of scientific processes, but it won’t really bring the world any good as of now. Objectivity, as nebulous as it can be sometimes, is reliable enough at aligning what we think the world is and what it actually is. Plus, having competitive methodologies would just create silos of scientists all working on their own “science is X” methods, with nothing binding them all together. And how would you get someone who believes ‘science should be X’ to listen to someone who believes ‘science should be Y’?
Maybe if we’re on a new planet, an ‘epistemic anarchy’ is worth trying, but not on Earth, where the objectivity train is full speed ahead on an Ouroboros track.
How should we govern ourselves? By understanding the world. Forming theories and testing them. Developing models that can predict the future. Peer review. Following the data where it leads us. Controlling for variables. And on and on and on.
Said another way - there are people who are actively fighting a scientific understanding of the world, in declaring how we should govern ourselves. Please, be careful to not sound like you're on their side. Because they're so painfully wrong.
Exactly. The twisting of the truth by polluting bodies of research is extremely dangerous. The consequences of falsifying scientific data, either for money or ideological reasons should be harsh. As a child I thought that no scientist would ever do that because it would ruin their reputation and they'd never work in their field again. Instead industries are happy to keep scientists in their back pockets and nobody seems to have problems with 'science by press conference' or with taking industry funding for research knowing the results will never see the light of day if they are unfavorable to that industries profits.
Science has the ability to self-correct and get to the truth, but that takes time and money and the ones with the most money are more interested in pushing whatever lies are needed to preserve their power.
Informed by science, absolutely. I think the point here though is that science is inherently amoral (meaning without judgement). For a mundane non-political example, Science may say: If we ban skiing the outcome will be fewer people dying in accidents. It takes a politician to assess the effects of making that decision in the context of societal values (freedom, privacy etc).
Science should not be prescriptive, only descriptive. It cannot weigh its descriptions against the values of a society or people.
What of political science? Sociology? Immunology? Virology? Epidemiology?
These are all performed by humans. And yes, the risk vs the reward is an inherently political discussion, but science is performed by scientists and they are welcome to say, "the model says if we do X, then Y will happen, and I think we should avoid that at all costs."
What about them? Sure a scientist is welcome to have their own opinion based on the scientific facts in a particular matter and they can vote just like everyone else because again, the science itself is only descriptive.
Maybe I should have gone for a more direct metaphor. An epidemiologist may say - if we institute martial law we can cut Covid deaths by X. Most in society would not make that trade, some would. Knowing the facts in a matter is vital but the society makes that judgement call (via representatives in a representative democracy), not science, not scientists (except inasmuch as they participate in the democracy).
How should our representatives try to form an informed understanding about the world around them, and make predictions about the consequences of various courses of action?
Should representatives pay particular attention to scientists?
If all else were equal, and one candidate said scientists cannot be trusted, and the other one said we should look to science to guide us, which candidate would you rather vote for?
I’m not sure how any of your questions are relevant to the current discussion (or they should already seem obvious) but I’ll answer them anyway. My point isn’t to diminish the role of science, only to point out that science is again inherently descriptive, not prescriptive.
> How should our representatives try to form an informed understanding about the world around them, and make predictions about the consequences of various courses of action?
Through science
> Should representatives pay particular attention to scientists?
Certainly, my first comment was that politics should absolutely be informed by science.
> If all else were equal, and one candidate said scientists cannot be trusted, and the other one said we should look to science to guide us, which candidate would you rather vote for?
> After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things - but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. Not only is the argument from inevitability mistaken. Not only is it black-and-white thinking. It’s also cheems. Even if we can’t be perfect, it’s possible to be better - and that’s the kind of progressive message that all new scientists need to hear.
A layman’s perspective: While not necessarily because of politics, the replication crisis had made some, if not many, people very skeptical of psychology research and maybe the whole scientific enterprise as whole. Whenever someone brought up anything about science, they’ll link to some news about the replication crisis or some other flaws of the science, followed by preaching about how much of a sham science can be.
It’s not that skeptics don’t think there’s value in science. They might believe in science as a theory but not in its application. Evaluating the application of science can be very difficult and time-consuming especially for a layman. If the application of science is as flawless as its theory, we can just read the abstract and be done with it. But that’s not the reality, and people are expected to have a bevy of skills to read scientific papers. When they don’t have the skills and try to share their interpretation of the papers, you can expect someone criticising them (normally with a very adversarial tone) because of their incompetence, ignorance, blindness, biasses, etc. Because of the difficulty and intellectual battleground surrounding scientific paper discussions, some people would rather take the default route of not caring about or even denigrate science; the replication crisis is the best they could’ve hoped for to justify and bolster their positions.
The progressiveness espoused by the author shouldn’t be limited to scientists. Anyone interacting with science should try to read scientific papers even if they’re not some hotshot supposedly unbiased scientists. Similar to the scientists, non-scientists should also try to improve their objectivity, and not think that they should be supremely objective before they can read anything.
This isn't a negative comment towards the man himself. I would say take a look at his other posts (https://substack.com/profile/1881468-stuart-ritchie) before you take this article as serious as you should. There is an article about "racist dog names" so I would think, take this article with some salt. It's opinion not fact guys. Again, I'm sure he's a cool dude and let's drink some beers and all but I wouldn't take this guys stance on science and politics as something that is that serious. SEO ftw?
Calling this[1] "an article about racist dog names" is a complete misrepresentation. It's a critique of a study published in Social Psychology Quarterly, which is an official journal of the American Sociological Association.
The guy is an academic scientist (well, psychologist) and has written a successful book on bias and fraud in science. He isn't just some random guy at the bar.
Maybe I didn't read the whole article as carefully as I could have (3 G&Ts will do that to you) but I think it made a valid point. The scientific method should definitely be above politics and the moment that scientists make significant changes in how they report their results based on political inclinations then we should absolutely be concerned. But I still believe that the scientific process (falsifiable hypotheses, peer review etc. etc.) is the best method we have of determining truth about reality regardless of personal political inclinations.
Science itself isn’t political, but what the science means for society is political.
And because of that, science is political. Or at least, how we talk about science is.
But science itself (in its aspirational form) isn’t political. Back when I was in the lab, one of the most accomplished things you could do is prove an existing theory wrong - that was the very definition of scientific progress.
It's unfortunate that there can be a tendency (probably in any sentient creature), even among scientists, to double-down to defend prior investment.
It got Semmelweis put into an insane asylum by his fellow academics and beat to death. And everyone remembering Pasteur instead of him. That was his reward for being correct and saving mothers and their babies -- with his unhinged conspiratorial idea of "washing yor hands is good".
People who are part of the dominant group (often rich, white, WASP, male in American history) do stuff that is biased.
People try to remove that bias.
The first group attacks that as "political" because when they do it, they don't consider it political.
"Political correctness" is what the other side does, not hounding the Dixie Chicks for speaking out against war.
"Identity politics" is something only minorities do, not the KKK etc.
Now, political science is bad when they do it, we don't do political science, please ignore the several hundred years of history behind the curtain.
This whole argument is the "red team" strategy that the Trump admin was pushing for climate change, and previously "teach the controversy" in evolution. It's just stalling from people who have lost the argument presented as balance.
- Make vague generalizations about white people, men
- Blur the distinction between non-credible fringe groups and some of the most credentialed institutions around so you can play the underdog
- Ascribe all actions taken in name of minorities as the express wishes of those minorities, even if they are ineffective or destructive
- Frame it as redress for hundred years of "history" (read: the specific grievances of North American colonialism)
- Wrap it all up in a blue=good red=bad American apple pie with a Trump bow while simultaneously deriding others for being too set in their ways
There are colleges that are demanding _diversity and inclusion loyalty pledges_ with adherence to a _specific socio-political agenda_, and you think "science is political" is just stalling from people who have lost perspective?
Can somewhat confirm. But what's even worse, many scientific works and publications are commissioned and highly biased. I mean, they sole existence can be justification of some private/corporate interests. I've seen this in communication and medical areas, but this is just everywhere, even archeology.
Science should not be political. Science is about intellectual honesty. The results can have 1000 interpretations but at least it should be consistent with your models, as transparent as possible and without trying to force conclusions from your hypothesis beforehand.
Anyything that does not try to its best to be like that would be something else to me, honestly. So no, science is not political, it would be more tied to politics philosophy itself. But it looks it could be convenient for some to promote people to believe that. This article seems to push in that direction.
Science, like all institutions of the West, has been turned against its own population and is working to destroy them and all of Western Civilization because that's what the people who are paying for science want.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadClimate change is used as a bat to hit poor people in the head politically. The politics come from the left.
> When co-anchor Katie Couric asked Al Gore on the May 24, 2006 Today show “What do you see happening in 15 to 20 years if nothing changes?…Even Manhattan would be in deep water”, he replied: “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.”
> New York City is highly vulnerable to flooding from coastal storms due to its intensively used waterfront and its extensive coastal geography. Floods have the potential to destroy homes and businesses, impair infrastructure, and threaten human safety. With climate change and sea level rise, these risks are expected to increase in the future, but will most adversely affect low-lying neighborhoods.
- https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-stud...
Looks like he was correct about the increased risks from storm surges et al as a result of climate change.
You are being dishonest.
He was relaying his understanding of the general predictions he'd been told and took things a little too literally on an accelerated time scale.
Increasingly underwater increasingly frequently as storm surges increase and mean water levels increase leading to greater extremes is a complicated sound bite.
"New York will be underwater" is simpler and turned out to be true in a literal sense.
I literally have zero knowledge of what he has said, I'm not in the US, I didn't watch his film, and I wouldn't watch a US political figure for an explaination of anything technical when there are better and more primary sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1893_New_York_hurricane
https://www.weather.gov/okx/1938HurricaneHome
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/10/archives/hurricane-donna-...
etc etc etc
If we are that generous in interpreting him everything he says then becomes non-falsifiable.
Trying to talk your way out an prediction that was clearly false just makes it look even worse.
If his prediction does come true and someone says “but you said BAU but we actually cut emissions”, everyone will wave hands around saying “that doesn’t really matter the prediction was accurate”.
Heads you win, tails you win.
He is a liar and also a sexual predator, but he some how escaped #MeToo.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/07/why-the-masseuse-s-...
https://tunza.eco-generation.org/file/kilimanjaro-melting.jp...
It's a lot more worrisome when you have scientists taking money to falsify data or faking results to push their own political agenda. We expect politicians to lie to us, but when science does it that risks setting back our collective understanding of the world we live in and can keep us from the truth for a very long time.
I am sure the poor people who are suffering through the droughts in Europe, floods in Pakistan, increased erosion in Senegal and the hottest ever temperatures in Death Valley would disagree.
Climate change is happening and the science has been ignored for far too long.
We still can, but we could have too.
But right now cost wise it's massively uncompetitive with solar/wind + storage.
Then why are energy prices rising in every grid the more renewables it uses?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-14/renewable...
It's also possible that some investments in renewables will take time to pay off, like any investment in new infrastructure. I'd expect the same thing if some area built a brand new coal plant. (Ideally these costs are buffered out by some kind of financial instrument so rate-payers don't get hit by it all at once.)
Solar power is actually quite cheap. Storage can be cheap or expensive depending on whether it's done with pumped hydro (where geography allows) or chemical batteries.
My point is, anecdotal evidence is not meaningful for something as multifaceted as world climate.
The point is that the costs to adapt to this change will be in the trillions and be disproportionally felt by the poorest in our society.
Hence it is a change we should avoid where possible.
False. Some people are saying the world will end and humanity will be wiped away.
I personally believe there may be more truth to that statement than many wish to believe, but not as a direct result of climate change itself. Rather, it's much more likely that the growing stupidity and political polarization surrounding climate change (and many other "hot-button" topics) will drive humanity to the ultimate stupidity of another World War, which these days can absolutely be a life-ending (on a planetary scale) path to go down, considering the types of "mass destruction" weapons the mad-men in power these days have access to.
Climate change has nothing to do with right or left, or any other way people use to paint things black and white.
Look no further than the 2008 Hadley CRU "climategate" leak.
Edit: The leak actually happened in November 2009. The file you're looking for is "FOI2009.zip".
Further reading:
https://www.newsweek.com/factcheck-climategate-doesnt-refute...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...
https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/02/1433246/climateg...
https://www.factcheck.org/2010/04/some-climategate-conclusio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann#Controversy_ov...
https://skepticalscience.com/Kevin-Trenberth-travesty-cant-a...
The only encouraging finding was “no outright scientific fraud”.
I haven't read all the reports yet, but it was good to see all of them ended up at that same conclusion. I'm sure there are people who would complain about the amount of time, money, and effort that went into investigating, but I'm glad there was so much scrutiny from so many different eyes.
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climat...
1. How could a climatologist be an outsider? Climatologists are by definition not outsiders when criticizing climatology.
2. Why is working for a conservative think tank a conflict of interest? There are no such conflicts. If you think there are then, well, academia is well known to be dominated by people on the left, is that also a conflict of interest? If so then you have to write off most of climatology.
3. The whole problem climategate exposed is that "actual experts" are manipulating the scientific process to ensure that anyone who disagrees with their claims can't get published, and therefore gets labelled as "not an expert" and kicked out of the institutions. That's why the only people who can properly actually openly criticize that edifice are those entirely outside the sphere of government run science - but that fact is then used to write off anything they have to say. Do you therefore recognize that the argument you're making here is a circular one?
4. Given that, do you agree that climatologists are by definition conflicted - if they were to admit they had been manipulating the scientific process as was shown by the climategate emails, they would lose status, power, influence and quite possibly open themselves up to prosecution. They will obviously never do that.
Also, "scientists are human"? What the emails showed is that scientists were willing to totally distort the scientific process to ensure their claims won the day even in the face of contradictory evidence. If you blow off terribly unscientific behavior with "they're only human" then you can't be upset when people decide they aren't really scientists and can safely be ignored.
That doesn't even include the possibility of storm surges that far exceed that, which are expected to become more frequent/extreme.
"A study simulating analogous conditions to the Dust Bowl drought in today’s agriculture suggests that Dust Bowl-type droughts today would have unprecedented consequences, with yield losses about 50% larger than the severe drought of 2012 (Glotter and Elliott 2016). Damages at these extremes are highly sensitive to temperature, worsening by about 25% with each degree centigrade of warming. By mid-century, over 80% of summers are projected to have average temperatures that are likely to exceed the hottest summer in the Dust Bowl years (1936)"
I can continue if you like.
I read many of the climate-gate emails. At worst you could claim there were a few cases where scientists were applying techniques to paint their research results in a more favourable light than it might otherwise appear.
1. I don't live near the sea.
2. I won't be alive in the year 2100.
3. RCP8.5 is a ridiculous scenario that assumes, amongst other things, that all renewable power is demolished and coal usage increases 500%. Even the BBC has debunked this one, reporting that researchers no long consider this scenario plausible:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51281986
The fact that you're citing it indicates you aren't really that well informed about this stuff.
4. Even if that did happen, a 1m or even 3m rise that happens over the course of more than 100 years isn't going to cause anyone to suddenly have to evacuate their home whilst grabbing tin cans. That's pure Hollywood. People would simply build sea defenses.
5. The whole point of climategate was that it showed scientists were exaggerating their predictions, so quoting those same predictions as an argument against the emails is nonsensical and circular.
"At worst you could claim there were a few cases where scientists were applying techniques to paint their research results in a more favourable light than it might otherwise appear."
That's distinctly underplaying the seriousness of what was going on (and probably still is).
There are reports that many scientists involved in the IPCC report have been deliberately understating the case for more extreme outcomes too. No doubt both behaviours occur - again, we're all human, and the scientific method is the best (imperfect) way we have of ensuring such claims don't unduly influence our best scientific understanding.
Do you really honestly believe we'd be better off simply ignoring the IPCC report and not worry about fossil fuel emissions at all just because there may have been a few exaggerated data points published?
I'd like to see us reduce dependency on fossil fuels simply because they're finite, but I also think the best way to do that is let the private sector get on with it in response to supply/demand signals. Trying to go beyond that involves massive state intervention and, historically, this has often gone terribly wrong. Especially so when motivated by science that turns out to be unreliable. Trofim Lysenko is the classic example but lobotomy is another.
Point is, that there's quite a lot of evidence that the narratives around climate change aren't just exaggerated but wildly exaggerated, and that all kinds of bad behaviors are being deployed to hide this fact. Climategate made that unambiguous because we can actually read emails where they're conspiring behind the scenes to cheat the scientific process, but there's lots of other examples of this happening that aren't from those emails. If they do it a few times and get away with it even when all their emails are leaked, why wouldn't they keep doing it? And why would we assume it was just one offs? Seems more likely to be a pattern of behavior and, again, we do see a heck of a lot of smoke when outsiders examine the (claimed to be) science.
What on earth makes you think that? Renewable energy sources and our ability to manufacture them cheaply and at scale are arguably of the most benefit to poorer countries. Honestly the only people I can see "suffering" from a genuine attempt to reduce our emissions are those of us currently accustomed to a lifestyle that's largely dependent on high levels of such emissions. I certainly don't want to have to give up regular overseas travel...but it's a luxury and there are other ways to get the most out of life while maintaining a less extravagant personal footprint.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email...
Let's face it, both the left and the right politicize science. The left sometimes does it when it comes to biological sex (conflating gender and sex), intelligence testing (saying they're next to useless), genetic determinism (saying all outcomes are environmental), GMOs, nuclear energy safety, sociology (denying impact of culture on outcomes). The right can do it when it comes to gender identity, GMOs, climate change, stem cells, intelligence testing (race realism), sociology (thinking it's all culture and not racism), creationism, anti-vax and public health.
Nobody has a monopoly on politicization of science. The problem is that the right's politicization is, in the current moment, more dangerous. Covid denial and social acceptance of vaccine hesitancy has killed hundreds of thousands. Climate change denial threatens the entire world.
Science is political because the organizations and institutions that fund/support science decide which scientific studies get funded/supported, and the outcome of the scientific process often affects the legitimacy of those organizations' and instutitions'.
The statement "objectivity is a tool of white supremacy" is generally used to refer to asserting confidently objective truth exists, which is more of a philosophical statement than a refutation of the scientific method like it's often framed.
The use of perceived objectivity to enforce linear thinking and silence people who react emotionally is why this comes up in the literature you're referring to. You wouldn't tell someone crying at the death of a loved one that crying isn't an objective response to the situation at hand, but this happens in many ways ("why are you so upset about X behavior from a colleague? -> you are behaving irrationally" rather than trying to understand why someone was upset, and knowing everyone reacts to things differently)
This is a topic on science and the example about someone crying over someone's death is a strange example. It's clear that if it wants to be called "science" then it has to have what you call linear (vs circular?) thinking. And yes there is an objective truth as far as what experience can measure.
Saying "everyone reacts to things differently" is a truism. Then what? As everyone reacts differently, the logical result is to IGNORE the emotional/irrational part of people when we deal about science/technology. As simple as that.
I don't read it quite this like. “science” concepts still have emotional impacts on people, especially when many things outside "hard" science get framed as science — think about all the management advice that gets passed around as objective fact (that also changes every few years, oops!).
it's not arguing about the truth of how many electrons are in a carbon atom, it's your boss arguing that they have a "scientifically proven" management philosophy that is objective. would you believe someone if they said that? even if they showed you a study?
It's "hewed", not "hued"
Stick to doing the one thing you're meant to be doing. We don't need a dozen organizations to be chasing whatever is popular right now - poorly - we need organizations that follow the course regardless of what happens.
I don't think this is really a problem as long as they aren't being hypocritical. If a web browser company wants to make "outreach for women" (whatever that means) something they strive for that's perfectly fine unless it undermines their other goals.
Telling people in the middle of a pandemic to gather in large groups for chanting and screaming is a bad look for an origination whose purpose is to promote people's health. If Mozilla went around looking for ways to encourage women to take an interest in open source browser development that could easily support their interests.
There isn't a problem if the violence to women orgs start spending half their budget on building a good open source browser. Otherwise there is very much a problem.
The biggest risk factor for transmission is bad ventilation and the biggest comorbidity is age.
So they weren't really wrong, and people at the time encouraged other political and entertainment events to be held outside to reduce risk.
Except that public health experts, at least on CNN, didn’t run with “outside activists involving young people are pretty safe.” They could have done that, but instead they framed the carve-out expressly in terms of “we think protests are really important.” This was early in the pandemic, when we were still ragging on Florida for not shutting down beaches and shutting down school sports.
CNN/mainstream media have so many people on that say different things and get re-reported by other stations. Plenty of people on TV at the time were discouraging protests. I think you just remember what made you feel angry.
See also: https://www.upworthy.com/public-health-experts-defend-antira... (“More than 1200 public health experts, infectious disease professionals, and community stakeholders have signed onto an open letter explaining why they support anti-racism protests happening across the country despite the potential risk of coronavirus spread.”)
I want to charitably understand your opinion here. Do you feel they should have kept quiet about their political views because as public health experts or epidemiologists they must remain neutral or else sully the fields as biased as a whole?
Rather, the argument here is that the reason they turned on a dime with the position, which was, to remind you, explicitly about the topic of the protest, and not them being outside, shows quite clearly that they will gladly put political consideration above scientific ones. This means that you cannot trust in their integrity in other contexts either, especially ones where their recommendations just so happen to match their political proclivities.
As a result, the credibility and trust their predecessors have earned over last century, are gone with the wind.
I actively supported the 2020 protests and still think that it was the right choice for people to make. But the way press coverage skirted the issue of COVID was despicable to watch, especially after they (rightly) devastated similar pro-Trump gatherings.
I don't want my news to not tell me that it's unsafe to go because they have a political agenda. I want them to tell me that it's unsafe, and then I will decide based on my politics.
Clearly, such people aren't scientists and never were. What was more interesting/depressing was the total lack of outrage coming from academia. Ritchie observes that biologists in particular seem to have serious problems with communist ideology to the extent that they advertise it on Twitter, and in the UK (where he's from) somehow the official SAGE advisory group ended up with someone on it who is a literal member of the Communist Party of Great Britain! We can infer that academia was silent about this massive perversion of science because they agree with it or at least don't disagree enough to speak out, meaning that public health research in general is nonsensical.
The public perception of science, though, is not dictated by scholarly journals. It's what's discussed on the nightly news or seen in the Facebook news feed, and that often comes with a helping of politics.
We're also seeing a recent uptick in criticism (and also suspicion) of "elites", and academics are generally lumped into that bucket.
And then COVID happened, making everybody an armchair epidemilogist overnight. You could see this play out on Twitter, where accounts with large followings with no previous professed statistical experience started sharing non-peer-reviewed study after study, often drawing inaccurate conclusions.
Scientists continue on, but there's absolutely no putting the genie back in the bottle. Science is political, and we need (a hopefully small number of) scientists to get some decent media training and start explaining their work to the general public.
August also seems politics free, though I'm too lazy to check five issues to see if it's 99%
Try psychology, sociology, medicine, climatology and the things in this direction. I probably agree with the broad thrust if the politics in those fields and that isn't the point!
Softer science like social science or psychology seems easy to politicize though. "Studies show that people need <my favorite policy> to truly be mentally healthy"
I think the real factor here is whether or not a large cohort of people find inconvenience in what the scientists of a given field are saying
Mechanics / Electromagnetics / Thermodynamics / Kinetics / Inorganic Chemistry / Electrochemistry / Analytical Chemistry / Earth Sciences / Anatomy / Botany / Biology / Zoology / Neurobiology / Marine Biology / Embryology / Ecology / Palaeontology / Genetics / Cell Biology / Ethology / Astronomy / Meteorology / Geology / Atmospheric Sciences / Glaciology / Climatology / Structural Geology
Most psychology papers are also fairly difficult to politicise. Like, try to politicise this: https://www.pnas.org/eprint/WREBM4QSJCM8MUAMJXEH/full
Okay!
"human learnability of abstract network representations"
Which humans? Did they test it works equally well for all races and genders and body shapes, or is their model of human learning biased to work best for buff white men and is inferior for everyone else?
What's in the abstract network representations, are they truly neutral, or are we just helping humans to learn from biased data that will make them subconsciously more racist/sexist/heightist?
Imagine how political geology was when it was the major proof against the world being created in 4004 BC.
Go tell it to a young-earth creationist.
Spending time in academia and reading articles in a field you know something about makes it clear they are quite far from science.
So when you said "publish science" you meant what shows up in academic journals, while when the other person said "publish science" they were thinking of an article written primarily for the purpose of engagement. The same idea probably wasn't being referenced.
Sadly, it falls on academia's shoulders to understand this problem (that before a layman sees anything "sciency" it's filtered through people who need to get an emotional reaction to drive engagement, and that defines the public perception of science) and put the work into ameliorating it. Sadly, it's a conflict of interest that probably helps procuring funds.
re: hard sciences, the scientific community's refusal to accept the covid lab leak hypothesis stands out IMHO. School shutdowns/mask mandates for pre-k and public schools is another politicalized issue.
I saw lots of people sharing studies, including before peer review, I mostly didn't see anybody come to a substantively different conclusion from the authors after like the first few months of pandemic confusion had cleared up. I found scepticism and DIY science very helpful this pandemic especially when things were more chaotic.
Stress a lack of evidence (at that time)? Sure.
Stress that N-95 and KN-95 masks must be reserved for hospital workers, and possibly even pre-press banning their sale under emergency commandeering measures? I think we can all guess why that didn't fly politically (it would require admitting there was a serious pandemic).
The public should never be 'lied to' nor 'ticked' (which the people I've spoken with mostly assume was happening with that initial mask stance) and should be treated as adults, possibly ones without a full set of information from expert matters on a subject.
The bet being wrong is a separate matter to whether or not it was reasonable. Conversely, I would argue the early anti-mask messaging was unreasonable based on similar logic (well bounded and low costs, potentially high benefits).
The conclusion that I know some people took away from it is that critical thinking is not an evolutionarily favored trait in certain administrative roles.
Usa and other Western European countries were much slower to adopt.
When there are discrepancies in the global adoption, then one can look into political factors.
Also studies from SARS back in 2000 convincingly showed that masks worked.
Masks and Vaccines are 2 massively misunderstood things during the pandemic.
When I was at school (New Zealand) we learned that vaccines help give the immune system the information to fight a virus. But people in America and Europe have this idea that vaccine is like a shield that prevents you from getting sick entirely and then claims vaccines don’t work…
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-07-21/ap-...
And then you get Whitty and his infamous 4000 deaths per day graph.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8908503/Was-lockdow...
I never understood the "masks are useless" claims. I've seen it in lots of forms, sometimes covering all types of masks or sometimes just cloth ones.
We've spent so long teaching people to cover their mouths when they cough specifically because it's been proven to help! We teach little kids to "Vampire Cough/Sneeze" for that very reason. Literally anything you put in front of your virus spewing face hole is going to do some good, but since N95 masks aren't 100% effective every single time it's not worth doing anything to protect the people around you? It really just seems like people looking for any excuse or justification to not be inconvenienced in any way for the benefit of the people around them. Like a very aggressive kind of selfishness I can't wrap my head around. Like people will hurt themselves to avoid doing anything that might help somebody else.
No they have not. That's why you think it's weird - if you look at the state of mask science pre 2020, you will find a whole lot of nothing. There's no evidence masks have ever been able to stop respiratory disease.
After 2020 the space was flooded with nonsensical studies claiming efficacy but they all have rather large and obvious problems e.g. CIs that include zero or even worse problems, but the reason scientists pretty universally pooh-poohd at masks at the start had nothing to do with shortages. That was a lie retconned into their claims later and wow, was it ever successful at confusing people. No, they said that because there was no actual scientific evidence to point to. There still isn't.
"it’s like yes it wasn’t about preventing you from getting sick, it’s reducing a sick person from spreading"
The idea of a magical one way mask is also completely unsupported by any scientific evidence and in fact by now strongly refuted by it, because there is lots of evidence masks have no effect on COVID. It was invented out of nothing to justify forcing everyone to wear masks even if the risk to them was minimal to none.
"But people in America and Europe have this idea that vaccine is like a shield that prevents you from getting sick entirely and then claims vaccines don’t work"
Yes I wonder why they think that, after all, they were only told the vaccine was a shield against getting sick and spreading it by the guy who runs Pfizer, the president of the USA, public health officials in every country, etc. People are so totally unreasonable, aren't they? But I see from a sibling comment you weren't aware of that, so why are you so confident about all the other things you think you know?
There’s a reason why China was buying up all the masks and such and shipping it all back in the early days.
But seems like I’ve struck a nerve from someone who probably is anti mask anti vax.
Clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Which makes sense since you don’t even read the studies you claim “prove masks don’t work”
I think though that it’s extremely obvious that it’s very likely the general public could take certain actions to make the efficacy of their mask use similar to that of medical professionals, but the interpretation of the data early on was simply “the general public shouldn’t use masks”. This was obviously nonsense, and I interpreted the data as meaning I should carefully use masks.
The wisdom of locking down toddlers and children for years on end was also a spot where the uppity rubes were correct and all the science wizards were disastrously incorrect.
I don’t disagree that most science is pretty non political. But it’s also true that the contact surface that a large swath of America has with “science” is through publications like Scientific American, scientists who go on TV, social “scientists,” etc.
(Isn’t it funny how you never see article headlines talking about how post-modern philosophy was invented by white people?)
I’m not making a gratuitous reference to critical theory by the way. Your example illustrates the problem. According to critical theory, “Jews are white.” So where does your example fit in? Also, math as a field is full of Indian and Chinese people. How does it make sense to label it “white?” Under critical theory, it’s “white” because Black people are underrepresented. Critical theory compels a mode of analysis that groups people a certain way, focuses on certain kinds of discrimination or power relationships to the exclusion of others, and all for distinctly political reasons.
Unfortunately we can't train 100% of people to understand all the science that gets published. That's why scientists need to learn to trust each other and communicate to the public as a single body, not as individual scientists. How they are going to do that, that's internal to the body of scientists. Politics has broken scientific unity, fix it.
That's a laudable goal. You will never, never get any body of scientists, or any other class of people, to agree on their overall goals for society, so if science IS indeed political, you've lost already.
On the other hand, if they only have to agree on what the data and logic tell us, that's still hard, but it's much closer to being achievable. It requires everyone to take a deep breath and say "I might be wrong but this is what I think, and here's why." And then listen.
If you ("you" being a scientist) are explicit that your "science" is in service of your political agenda, then you've accomplished this:
Anyone who disagrees with your agenda will reject your "science"
As we saw with vaccines & lockdowns.
On the other hand, if they trust you to just report what the data says, even when you don't like it, then you have a chance of not being vilified.
So there you have it: if you want to stand above the Twitter mob and be believed, you have to earn back the public's trust.
I'm immediately reminded of how deeply skewed towards treatment (rather than curing) pharmaceutical research is, because of our economic structure.
It's a convenient "just so" story people who don't work in bioscience love, told with all the certainty of "did you know you swallow 8 spiders a year on average".
That's probably not true. Based on the charts here [1], it is safe to say that at least 20-30% of successful NSF grant applications have political/ideological terms used in the abstract.
Maybe more importantly, it's really hard to know how much research isn't being done or published because of the current political climate.
> And then COVID happened, making everybody an armchair epidemilogist overnight.
Well, I don't see that as a bad thing. Blind trust in authority isn't an admirable quality in my books. Also, the other option really was to become an armchair epistemologist. You had to somehow make decisions.
> Science is political
But it shouldn't be. At least not this much. We have choice to encourage or discourage that.
[1]: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/increasing-politicization-and-h...
Said another way, while it is possible for science to be less political, it explicitly requires that the questions being posed are as far removed from policy decisions as possible (i.e., useless). I would challenge the author to articulate an alternative in which [(a) scientists desire to have a positive impact on society (beyond simply increasing knowledge) and (b) they recognize the limitations of their capabilities] but do not need to think carefully about how the results of a resource or technical limitation of their work might lead it to be misapplied to bad policy. Saying "remember science is political" is no different than saying "remember that if you decide to always check PSA levels you'll mess up more people's urinogenital loves with unnecessary tests than you'll save from cancer.
Note: many scientists (like me!) gravitate to "basic" science so they won't have to worry. But I don't think that makes us better.
That's where you're off into Error Land. Increasing knowledge is the only legitimate goal of science. If you wanted to benefit society, you should have gone into a different line of work.
And who are you, so wise in the ways of science, to decide what the only legitimate goal of science can be?
Science, technology, none of these exists in a vacuum. People, even academics, have a life outside of their work. What affects that life affects what they work on as well. It's only natural.
According to some, not according to others. There is no consensus on what science is. Prominent philosophers like Foucault say science is a power-confirming tool first, and therefore definitely political.
Whether that means political or apolitical is hard to assess. I would say that the aspiration either way might be good for your own work, but shouldn't be used to judge the scientific work of others.
Can you summarize why Foucault thought the application of the scientific method to empirical questions is “power-confirming first?” If that’s not what he meant by science then what was he specifically referring to?
He was an actual communist who thought of everything in terms of "the struggle." Scientists (etc.) are respectable? They must be oppressing people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
EDIT replying to sub comment (I am once again rate limited)
Indeed he literally wrote an essay called “On the ruthless criticism of everything existing” which argued against the French socialists who came up with prescriptions rather than solid critiques. Marxism isn’t about communism, it’s about criticising capitalism. That’s why he spent so little time talking about communism. That would be like a slave or a serf wondering what might come next. A strong scientific (in the German sense) critique was his project
context, man. it matters.
So by observation of actual occurrence Foucault means ignoring the entire history of science radically improving living conditions and extending lifespans for the previous centuries and instead conflating it with Nazis? That explains a lot.
And Foucault is only "prominent" for people who can't do science, or really anything else useful.
Ok, thanks for your opinion i guess.
It's like that Debt book from David Graeber where in the beginning he talks about how it is odd that paying debts is supposed to be good moral behaviour as if taking on business risk and failing is a decision that people make voluntarily. It is especially strange because lenders slap on a risk premium on top of their loans because they are fully aware that some are going to default.
Should we build a super collider in Texas or a space telescope at the sun-earth L2 point?
There are many factors when considering what science to fund, but if society is footing the bill then the expected benefit to society should be a big part of the decision.
That isn't to say scientists should only publish findings that perfectly accord with their political beliefs, but perhaps they could spend more effort trying to present their findings in such a way as to limit the inevitable attempts to draw totally wild conclusions or take them completely out of context. And, for the love of all, don't write abstracts that make it sound like you've made some sort of revolutionary breakthrough or stumbled on hidden fundamental truths! Non-specialists (absolutely including myself) will often read abstracts at best, more likely articles written from other articles written by someone who skimmed the abstract while grinding their proverbial axe. People educated in science are aware of the limitations, non-scientists on the other hand...
If a topic is hotly contested in our society, publishing plenty of high-quality, reliable scholarship about it is one of the best available ways of gradually turning it into a less-hotly contested topic. This applies even to things like climate science, where people sometimes like to remark that "the science is settled". So yes, we should always be mindful of impact but undervaluing the benefits of that impact would be just as wrong.
Perhaps it should be political, to some extent, assuming a well-educated public that understands why studying infectious disease outbreaks, earthquake seismology and patterns, historical drought/flood patterns, etc. is important.
However, if control of funding of scientific research is taken over by specific sectors - fossil fuel interests, established depression treatment interests, mortgage security interests, etc. - then one can expect low-quality science resulting in an academic system where the willingness to fudge data to please one's corporate owners on their next-quarter stock profile becomes more important than scientific rigor, in terms of career advancement.
That's how Soviet biological academics worked under the control of Lysenko for about three decades... just replace Lysenko with Wall Street and you have the current American research program.
There are other ways for science to be political than that:
Source: https://libguides.umn.edu/antiracismlens
===
Learn the racist history of statistics
Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher are three of the statisticians who established the fundamental basis and techniques of modern statistics, and they were all eugenicists. There is a modern discourse on the racist history of statistics and data collection methodology, and a number of books published:
Let me rephrase the last part of this slightly to help illustrate the problem:
Most scientists aspire to answer questions that will have value for people.
Scientists have discovered all kinds of fascinating stuff that has vastly improved people's lives. For example, all the discoveries that made possible the medium in which we are having this conversation. But there's no reason any of that has to be political. Scientific discoveries have greatly empowered people in all kinds of ways that don't require any politics to work.
The reason science is political is that some people want to use it as a tool, not to empower all people, but to empower themselves at the expense of other people. They want science to give them an excuse to tell other people what to do or what not to do. That is the difference between "value for people" and "value for society". If it's "value for people", then each person can judge that for themselves, and use the tools of science as they choose to improve their lives. But if it's "value for society", then who gets to judge that for "society"? That is where the problem lies. To the extent that there is a valid point lurking in this article, I think that's it.
I mean, does it have value for society that scientists recovered old administrative documents about the French revolution? Not really.
But as a society, we can now decide to continue to be wrong about most beliefs we held about that time period or to correct those beliefs. Did those researcher knew what they would find? Yes, probably. Were those finding aligned to their political views? Probably yes, i doubt there is a lot of Furetien left, and they probably wouldn't have searched those documents. (i wanted to use the verb seek and not search, but couldn't remember if it was irregular)
Does it really have value for people? Not really. I will now get internet points everytime someone talk about the French terror for the foreseeable future. That's it.
But maybe, if our civilization last long enough, our history myths will match our real history and everyone will be less wrong.
And that's the best science can do.
You must be joking. The very fact that you are posting here indicates that you are making use of countless products of science. They're just not products of science that are tied to any political controversy or help anyone to gain political power, so everyone takes them for granted and doesn't stop to think about them when they think about "science". But they should.
History is not a science, although it can make use of tools that science has developed.
> And that's the best science can do.
Again, you must be joking. Even leaving aside my comment above, science has done a huge amount more than discover some old historical documents.
So if science does what it always does (trying to find truth in hard questions that matter) and suddenly someone starts complaining about it being "political", one should also consider that it might not be science that changed, but the relationship political actors have with the truth.
Example: If you are the head of the flat-earth party any science reporting the earth as sphere-like would seem political (or even criminal) to you. But this would have nothing to do with science — and all to do with the mismatch between your believes and the reality out there.
This is far from accurate. Sure you can pick a strawman example, but in reality questions can be posed and useful irregardless of what the politics are at the time.
I think substack should be banned completely from HN.
But that’s because the right has become synonymous with, or at least tacitly supports, insane racists, fascists, bigots and more unpleasant adjectives. You can be pedantic about our wording and try and slide the issue but the data is there.
There are plenty of issues where you can have multiple sides or perspectives and want to allow debate. But that is not what is happening.
Wow. You're really not. Let me give it a go.
Bias can never be eliminated, but it can be overcome by a greater commitment: the commitment to truth. We commit to pursue the evidence wherever it leads, because we believe that the truth is of such great and ultimate benefit and significance that this overwhelms any personal or political inconvenience. We will be the first ones to say what no one in our generation wants to hear, but what the next generation will be glad we uncovered, as has been the role of so many of our forefathers, heroes in the past. Though my peers abandon me and seek to bury the inconvenient out of fear of the consequences or desire to manipulate, I will tell the truth because I trust my fellow man to always make the best decisions with the benefit of full and accurate knowledge. We will not blink, and we will not lie, and we will not allow professional ambition, personal benefit, or cherished beliefs to overpower our sacred trust as humanity's best line of defense against ignorance and lies.
There's no science that is safe.
What the hell? The literal process of science is conflict. It’s not a bad thing. It’s the sorting out of which ideas are most accurate and most useful for answering questions. Edit: gob help me I’ll just say “dialectic”. I’ll take whatever is incoming for saying it.
By the way, those “resentful 33%,” in their own way, are not wrong. I saw a YouTube of what a young woman did when home from college. She sat in a cramped enclosed office, 20 feet off the ground with a narrow 18” (450mm) shelf with three crappy looking PC’s. She was plowing about 100 acres of farmland, riding in this combine. If farming can be automated to this degree, of course manufacturing can.
That's the explanation for the phenomenon, but it doesn't mean I have sympathy for these people. They are perpetuating white supremacy and domination without realizing it. I simply wish our culture didn't create such a hostile climate for white men for purely pragmatic downstream reasons (i.e. I don't want fascism), as well as for egalitarian realism (i.e. race essentialism is wrong, even when directed at white people).
Regarding trade: such people aren't entitled to my trade or business. If I want to buy something from a Chinese person, that is my right, and they have no right to interfere with that.
If there is any hope for those hoping anti-intellectualism won't come for them, remember that current resentment appears to be primarily reserved for the rich ( I have a very unscientific way of determining the current sentiment ).
The educated. (Example: Making a criminal out of Dr. Fauci)
It’s the educated that resent the rich.
I'd rather take up the second point, namely that the author almost takes it as a given that politicized science is bad. He puts forward this idea that science ought to be bureaucratic, ideally all scientists ought to be disinterested, universalist, apolitical monks who try to improve reproducibility, and so on.
To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process may help everyone to agree on results, but it impedes the evolution of the scientific process (or better, processes) itself. There's nothing wrong with methods that in different places drift into different directions, because overall this makes for a more competitive field of methodologies. in fact something even as stupid as Lysenkoism serves a purpose, it's in itself part of the scientific map of ideas that need to be discovered before they could be disregarded.
So if you want to do insular corporate science, and someone wants to do militaristic science, and someone else wants to do cooperative 'objective science', all of this is valid and in fact useful, not despite, but because it creates conflict. To do ideological science is simply to run an experiment on the scientific method itself, it's what Feyerabend called 'epistemic anarchism' which he identified as the only thing that avoids limiting the potential of science.
Sorry, there, but "objectivity" is not up for debate. Unless you subscribe to the woo-woo "different ways of knowing" crap.
The scientific method is not up for debate.
> To do ideological science is simply to run an experiment on the scientific method itself, it's what Feyerabend called 'epistemic anarchism' which he identified as the only thing that avoids limiting the potential of science.
"the potential of science": Berkeley nonsense. It's too bad he didn't just stick with Popper, who'll be around long after he's forgotten.
It really obviously is up for debate, all the way from the fundamental question of whether objective knowledge is accessible at all, to things like the measurement problem in quantum mechanics
"obviously" to you, I guess. Not to anyone else who realizes that life expectancy beyond 30 and absence of periodic famines with mass starvation is the result of objectivity.
> whether objective knowledge is accessible at all
How to make steel, plumb our houses, cure our bacterial infections, and bring A/C power to them is not knowledge that's "accessible to all." Most of us are happy that someone somewhere knows how to do those things. That's called "division of labor."
> whether objective knowledge is accessible at all
Kind of like the missing link in the fossil record which causes creationists to say "Look! Darwin was wrong!": quantum mechanics is the difficult-to-understand problem giving an easy out to people who don't believe in science anyway. Give it a rest.
"At all" is equally fatuous, though. The philosophical problem of whether objective knowledge is attainable was settled centuries ago. "How do you really know that Einstein's Relativity is valid?" is something that was settled when its predictions were borne out. If there are still questions about it, those will be settled by more science.
Not chaining the scientific process to objectivity might improve the evolution of scientific processes, but it won’t really bring the world any good as of now. Objectivity, as nebulous as it can be sometimes, is reliable enough at aligning what we think the world is and what it actually is. Plus, having competitive methodologies would just create silos of scientists all working on their own “science is X” methods, with nothing binding them all together. And how would you get someone who believes ‘science should be X’ to listen to someone who believes ‘science should be Y’?
Maybe if we’re on a new planet, an ‘epistemic anarchy’ is worth trying, but not on Earth, where the objectivity train is full speed ahead on an Ouroboros track.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4045.211
How should we govern ourselves? By understanding the world. Forming theories and testing them. Developing models that can predict the future. Peer review. Following the data where it leads us. Controlling for variables. And on and on and on.
Said another way - there are people who are actively fighting a scientific understanding of the world, in declaring how we should govern ourselves. Please, be careful to not sound like you're on their side. Because they're so painfully wrong.
Science has the ability to self-correct and get to the truth, but that takes time and money and the ones with the most money are more interested in pushing whatever lies are needed to preserve their power.
Informed by science, absolutely. I think the point here though is that science is inherently amoral (meaning without judgement). For a mundane non-political example, Science may say: If we ban skiing the outcome will be fewer people dying in accidents. It takes a politician to assess the effects of making that decision in the context of societal values (freedom, privacy etc).
Science should not be prescriptive, only descriptive. It cannot weigh its descriptions against the values of a society or people.
These are all performed by humans. And yes, the risk vs the reward is an inherently political discussion, but science is performed by scientists and they are welcome to say, "the model says if we do X, then Y will happen, and I think we should avoid that at all costs."
Maybe I should have gone for a more direct metaphor. An epidemiologist may say - if we institute martial law we can cut Covid deaths by X. Most in society would not make that trade, some would. Knowing the facts in a matter is vital but the society makes that judgement call (via representatives in a representative democracy), not science, not scientists (except inasmuch as they participate in the democracy).
Should representatives pay particular attention to scientists?
If all else were equal, and one candidate said scientists cannot be trusted, and the other one said we should look to science to guide us, which candidate would you rather vote for?
> How should our representatives try to form an informed understanding about the world around them, and make predictions about the consequences of various courses of action?
Through science
> Should representatives pay particular attention to scientists?
Certainly, my first comment was that politics should absolutely be informed by science.
> If all else were equal, and one candidate said scientists cannot be trusted, and the other one said we should look to science to guide us, which candidate would you rather vote for?
The latter obviously.
A layman’s perspective: While not necessarily because of politics, the replication crisis had made some, if not many, people very skeptical of psychology research and maybe the whole scientific enterprise as whole. Whenever someone brought up anything about science, they’ll link to some news about the replication crisis or some other flaws of the science, followed by preaching about how much of a sham science can be.
It’s not that skeptics don’t think there’s value in science. They might believe in science as a theory but not in its application. Evaluating the application of science can be very difficult and time-consuming especially for a layman. If the application of science is as flawless as its theory, we can just read the abstract and be done with it. But that’s not the reality, and people are expected to have a bevy of skills to read scientific papers. When they don’t have the skills and try to share their interpretation of the papers, you can expect someone criticising them (normally with a very adversarial tone) because of their incompetence, ignorance, blindness, biasses, etc. Because of the difficulty and intellectual battleground surrounding scientific paper discussions, some people would rather take the default route of not caring about or even denigrate science; the replication crisis is the best they could’ve hoped for to justify and bolster their positions.
The progressiveness espoused by the author shouldn’t be limited to scientists. Anyone interacting with science should try to read scientific papers even if they’re not some hotshot supposedly unbiased scientists. Similar to the scientists, non-scientists should also try to improve their objectivity, and not think that they should be supremely objective before they can read anything.
[1] - https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/dog-name-racism
And because of that, science is political. Or at least, how we talk about science is.
But science itself (in its aspirational form) isn’t political. Back when I was in the lab, one of the most accomplished things you could do is prove an existing theory wrong - that was the very definition of scientific progress.
It got Semmelweis put into an insane asylum by his fellow academics and beat to death. And everyone remembering Pasteur instead of him. That was his reward for being correct and saving mothers and their babies -- with his unhinged conspiratorial idea of "washing yor hands is good".
People who are part of the dominant group (often rich, white, WASP, male in American history) do stuff that is biased.
People try to remove that bias.
The first group attacks that as "political" because when they do it, they don't consider it political.
"Political correctness" is what the other side does, not hounding the Dixie Chicks for speaking out against war.
"Identity politics" is something only minorities do, not the KKK etc.
Now, political science is bad when they do it, we don't do political science, please ignore the several hundred years of history behind the curtain.
This whole argument is the "red team" strategy that the Trump admin was pushing for climate change, and previously "teach the controversy" in evolution. It's just stalling from people who have lost the argument presented as balance.
- Blur the distinction between non-credible fringe groups and some of the most credentialed institutions around so you can play the underdog
- Ascribe all actions taken in name of minorities as the express wishes of those minorities, even if they are ineffective or destructive
- Frame it as redress for hundred years of "history" (read: the specific grievances of North American colonialism)
- Wrap it all up in a blue=good red=bad American apple pie with a Trump bow while simultaneously deriding others for being too set in their ways
There are colleges that are demanding _diversity and inclusion loyalty pledges_ with adherence to a _specific socio-political agenda_, and you think "science is political" is just stalling from people who have lost perspective?
The American left is insane and delusional.
Anyything that does not try to its best to be like that would be something else to me, honestly. So no, science is not political, it would be more tied to politics philosophy itself. But it looks it could be convenient for some to promote people to believe that. This article seems to push in that direction.