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Do Scientists Understand the Public?
Mab_Mass writes "The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has an interesting article on the relationship between scientists and the public. [Here's the paper itself, as a PDF.] Rather than point the finger at an 'ignorant' public, this article chastises the scientists for a poor understanding of how to communicate with non-technical people. With a look at the issues of climate change, nuclear waste disposal, genetics, and the future of the Internet, the article provides examples of how the experts in these fields are failing to present their message in a way that encourages public discussion and support."
The public also understands that scientist will say or do anything to exploit the truth for "$$funding$$".
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Maybe scientists would be more respected across the board if they stopped "hiding the decline" and accepting corporate handouts in exchange for favorable studies.
In the old days a scientist would be laughed out of his profession for the sort of activities that are now accept practice, to keep those grant dollars rolling in.
I can barely comprehend the audacity of the climatologists who chair the IPCC, and it looks like the whole world had a peek inside their world of lies and massaged data.
Separate politics and science, stop taking money for favorable studies, and stop pretending that this artificial, commercialized version of science is anything but an aberration, and then we can talk about trust.
Well, it pretty much depends on where these republicans graduated is it not? If they graduated from any religious institutions like, say Bob Jones University, then I would consider them no different than somebody who did not even finish high-school.
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
Teaching happens when people are willing to be taught. More or less, school children and college kids are willing to be taught. Adults in the US are not willing to be taught, and any attempt to do so is met with cries of "condescension", "elitism", and other smarty-pants types of accusations.
Scientists and engineers assuming people who don't understand their work are idiots isn't a mistake. You make the mistake of thinking that the lack of public understanding of science is what causes us to think that people are idiots. In reality, it's largely because people are such idiots that they have so little chance of understanding science. In a country where 85% of people believe in a god, I'm afraid there's very little hope for any rational paradigm taking hold.
If you think the majority of non-scientists and engineers in the US are not idiots, then you've got an overly rosy outlook on society.
Where do I start? 1) The earth has been warmer than this before with less CO2, allegedly. 2) You make no mention of the levels of incoming radiation changing. 3a) You make no mention of how you measure the CO2 levels from a hundred thousand years ago, which relies on some really grand assumptions. 3b) You make no mention of how you measured the temperatures from ten thousand years ago, or why we should believe that the current status is the "normal" status. 4) Remember a couple of years ago when scientists were going to prove how bad global warming was because there would be a bumper crop of hurricanes, and there weren't many at all? 5) You provide ZERO proof of causation and zero proof that any human action can stop the process, which means any costs of trying to stop the problem could be better spent dealing with the effects.
I can imagine scientists back in the olden days spreading fear and panic over how our "one continent" (Pangea, didn't they call it?) was splitting up and how we had to take drastic steps to keep it all together. Today we know about plate tectonics. We know it's normal. Xerxes had his foot soldiers whipping the waves to keep back the normally occurring tide. Will our far far descendants look back at us and laugh, because they've figured out that the normal climate for earth is truly 10 degrees higher than what we have now and they'll wonder why we didn't all freeze to death in our ice age?
What is so difficult is that they then say, "You know all those government regulations we have been telling you that you needed for your own good all those years but you opposed? Well this means that we were right and you need those regulations to keep from drowning next year when the ice caps melt. Well, no, we didn't know about Global Warming when we told you that you needed these regulations, but we knew you needed them and now that we have discovered the greenhouse effect from CO2 we know why you needed those regulations."
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Here's an idea. Go study some fucking climatology for yourself and figure out what's going on instead of sitting in an armchair bitching about "hiding the decline" and making slimy ad hominem attacks about grant dollars.
Call me when the climatologists actually get schooled in the field that they are actually practicing in, which is STATISTICS. Until then, STFU because you apparently dont know dick about the real situation in the climatology circle.. which is that NONE of them know what they are doing.
"His name was James Damore."
Considering that I am paying the salaries of many of these slimy fucks, I have every right to bitch and moan.
Creating fake science so you can fool the public into allowing apparatchiks to engage their grand dream is the sort of thing that by all rights should carry the death penalty.
It is good to see that you were too scared to respond other than anonymously. This reinforces my thought that dishonest nut bags like you are actually ashamed.
Some people will never understand scientific reasons. For those people, you've got religious explanations.
God hates the smell of car exhaust, and he lives in space. Every time we drive, he gets a waft of the stink and pushes us a little closer to the sun.
This also explains why cow farts are 23 times more offensive to God than CO2.