Conversation
Notices
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Ignoring science isn't just a Republican problem. It's an American problem. http://flip.it/5IWoG
- Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) repeated this.
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@steve R's question science when it appears to be in opposition to corporate interest. D's question science when it appears to serve corporate interest. With public funding for science under increasing pressure, Americans do not believe science is wholly objective and unswayed by funding sources, and the notion of "scientific consensus" appears naive.
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I think you oversimplified the positions taken against scientific information. Certainly, there are notable cases of Republicans opposing an established scientific issue due to business interests, but they also oppose scientific matters when they are related to government imposition on the individual. For instance, a part of the Democratic party opposes vaccination because they believe they align with corporate interests, but you'll find Republicans that oppose them because the government imposes vaccination as a requirement on individuals. Both oppose vaccination, though it would seem to be a practice that benefits the companies that manufacture them. So it's not quite as simple as you present it.
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The other issues you raise are largely centered on logical fallacies, which many people in general are unaware are poor means of arguing.. After all, all human endeavors are made possible by some form of financial support; it's a red herring to point to science funding (which is modest compared to business profits or defense spending, which often benefits private industry). People mistake scientific consensus to mean "top down assertion of a fact," which is far from the same thing; these are falsely equivocated.
A key problem, besides values issues, has to do with the average citizen mistaking science for a collection of facts; it is not. It is a process by which reliable facts are established, but the facts are only as good as the process. There is no room for authority; only assessment, verfication, and refutation.
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@steve "Falsely equivocated..." Maybe you meant falsely equated? ;)
"It is a process by which reliable facts are established, but the facts are only as good as the process. There is no room for authority; only assessment, verfication, and refutation."
To reiterate: what I was suggesting is that "only as good as the process" is a crucial caveat. When science and politics tangle, the process doesn't always function as well as it should, and when people see the process failing, a skeptical response is appropriate and justified. Denialism and anti-intellectualism are certainly wrong, but it would also be perilously naive to read science blindly with no consideration of the political and economic context in which it is done.
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Yeah, I meant "falsely equated" (I was thinking of the logical fallacy called "equivocation" while I was typing and my brain betrayed me...!)
I think we agree then that it's the process that matters. It will forever be impossible to separate the implications of scientific assessments from politics; after all, many scientific conclusions bear on human behavior, and the process of influencing other people (e.g. their behaviors) is, by definition, "politics". What matters is that we, as thinking people, learn to separate values issues from science issues. A large body of scientific evidence can point to the link between, say, human activity and major changes in climate; but what to _do_ about it is a values issue, and science can't tell us what the subsequent "right" courses of action are - those are based largely on values.
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The centralized newsmedia does a poor job of reporting on scientific research. Hopefully this will change in the next 20 years.
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In general, all news media does a poor job of reporting on science issues. We need journalism students to spend more time in science courses, so that they are exposed to different applications of the scientific method in different disciplines. An interdisciplinary major program in colleges and universities would go a long way toward this. Even coupling a dedicated course on the scientific method, taught by actual scientists and not philosophers of science, would be good.
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@steve , except for one niggle, @sklaing is entirely correct here. I'll dispense with the niggle first: Where she says Democrats, I would say people on the left. Where she says Republicans, I would say conservatives. Both major parties are increasingly losing legitimacy, as we see with Democrats and Hillary Clinton, as we see with Republicans and Jeb Bush. Now, to what this thread is actually about. First, scientific method, i.e. positivism, has its own issues with what knowledge it considers acceptable, what forms of knowledge it considers acceptable, what methods of inquiry it accepts as legitimate, and an arrogance that it has a right to determine that legitimacy, when it relies on an unverifiable theory of truth (hint: there is no theory of truth that holds water, full stop, period). Second, even within the positivist paradigm, its practice seems severely flawed. One of the very basic principles of positivism--the reason science should be tran…
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@benfell@cybernude.org @woodathon@loadaverage.org @sklaing@quitter.is You leveled a whole bunch of criticisms there. I am curious: how does science compare to other ways of knowing? Which ways of knowing are better at establishing reliable information about the universe? Certainly, science is not a perfect process.... which is why it must be repeated to establish reliability of information; any one step in the process might be flawed. This is why establishing reliable information takes decades. So I am curious, the obvious flaws of all human endeavors aside, what do you advocate to be a better way of establishing reliable information? It is not enough to criticise; what would you do to improve science as a way of knowing?
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The truth is out there.
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In terms of how scientific research is shared with the public, I ask that folks take into account that there is a historical dimension to science and there always has been. This might not even effect how scientists do their research, but rather how they write about it and how the media writes about it.
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I don't. As a human scientist, my role is less to judge ways of knowing than it is to listen to what people take as knowledge and to understand the ways of knowing that they embrace. I don't have to agree--that's not the point--but I do need, as accurately and as fairly as possible, to represent people as they would represent themselves. That said, one of the critiques of positivism is its role in colonialism. 'Control,' it turns out does not merely refer to an experimental group in contrast to a 'treatment' group. Control was the original intent of social science research in colonized lands and this has contributed to a tension between formerly occupied peoples and western science. Other problems include the appropriation of indigenous knowledge that appears as further colonization and that the benefits of this 'research' accrue entirely to the western researcher, who publishes, who gains tenure, who is funded, and so on. Human scientists seek to …
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@woodathon@loadaverage.org Can you explain what you mean by "there is a historical dimension"? Your concern is unclear. Please be specific. All things have a historical dimension. You need to explain how that is an issue for understanding the natural world and why it needs to be addressed.
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To close this out from my side, I would say this. As a scientist, I don't claim to be certain about anything except those things for which there is overwhelming reliable evidence. I am certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow, although there is a tiny probability it won't. I am certain that the sky will be blue on a clear day as a result of Rayleigh scattering; though there is a small probability that something terrible might happen. I don't put much stock in "-isms" - all "-isms" are human inventions, the babble of a child struggling to express a difficult idea in an even more complex world. I put stock in what i observe, what explanations hold up to repeated attempted to invalidate them, and try to develop new knowledge for the betterment of our species.
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I don't believe in claims that there is a "western science" - I have too many friends and colleagues from poor towns in Columbia, big cities in India and China, small villages in Japan, and far-flung towns in Russia, to believe there is such a thing as "western this" or "eastern that" when it comes to developing reliable information about the natural world. We all interrogate the natural world in the hopes of understanding it. We all fail. We all challenge each other. Sometimes, we succeed and there is real joy. We all develop more reliable information as a result. Science is not a cold practice, dependent on strict philosophies and various "-isms" to make progress - that is a myth propagated by philosophers or, worse, scientists who study a little philosophy and think they know anything at all about it. Rather, science is a dance with the natural world, one that she leads, and all we can hope to do is try to follow and not screw up.
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Oh, there's definitely a 'western science' but it's different from what you think I mean.
The methodology you're speaking of is one of a few that is common to nearly all groups. The real question here is how this form of knowledge is balanced with other forms of knowledge. Typically, indigenous people give equal credence to the empirical, the traditional, and spiritual forms of knowledge. U.S. conservatives (and probably conservatives in other parts of the world) assign a higher priority to religious, traditional, or theoretical knowledge.
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@steve@chirp.cooleysekula.net seems almost more like a general/world/politic issue
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