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Scientists Fight Back In Canada
Trufagus writes "The current Canadian government is widely regarded as 'anti-science,' and this year they have stepped up their efforts to undermine scientists and control their contact with the media. But now the federal scientists are fighting back and have just launched their own website. Gary Corbett, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said, 'If science isn't supported then you're going to find that decisions are going to be made more at the political level,' on Monday as the union launched their website."
"The union said in a release the recent decision to end the mandatory long-form census is the latest step in a worrying trend away from evidence-based policy making."
Well, see, there's your problem. You silly scientists, insisting that demonstrable facts are used to guide public policy. Don't you know that the truth is whatever the Party says it is?
I am officially gone from
If you can prove that a business is ruining the environment and economy through sound scientific methods, OF COURSE big businesses will try to stifle research, innovation and facts in order to continue their relentless pursuit of money. Unabashed greed and facts do not mix well.
The worst-case scenario is never knowing the truth about anything because businesses have completely obscured reality in order to continue their pursuit of massive profits.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
that a conservative government is anti-science.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
> The current Canadian government is widely regarded as 'anti-science,'
Just saying ... This statement is total shit.
Do you have any evidence to back up that statement?
conservatives hate: scientists and unions. i imagine there will be some kind of counter-campaign to smear the Public Science members at some point. another CRU incident maybe?
of course what i just wrote is based on politics too. it's hard to see how rationality can trump ignorance when the ignorant have the bully pulpit to shout down the rationalists.
"To stop the terrorists."
Conservatives in Canada rise to power, and start squelching science funding. Anyone who didn't see this coming hasn't been paying attention ... anywhere. Many scientists in Canada saw this coming a while ago and have been working on diversifying their funding to insulate themselves from the inevitable cuts.
Fortunately, the conservatives in Canada are at least smart enough to know better than to screw with the health care system (at least too much).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The article backs him up. If Canadians were aware that their government was anti-science then it wouldn't be newsworthy that a science union put up a website raising awareness about the way the Canadian government is treating scientists.
I'm a Canadian and I didn't know - now I do. I knew that the Conservative government is against public services in general, but I certainly didn't know they're regulating what public scientists are allowed to say.
"The worst-case scenario is never knowing the truth about anything because businesses have completely obscured reality in order to continue their pursuit of massive profits."
No coincidence that the Religious Right in the US, who compose the vast majority of the Tea Party, are funded by oil billionaires among others.
It's the perfect storm of anti-science superstition and corporate greed.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
They made the toys with money provide by the government.
People need to remember who they work for and look for a new employer if they don't like the conditions.
I was a public servant and research scientist in Canada for several years. I moved on to other things eventually, but I understand why there is friction between scientists and the government of the day. It's normal, and at some level it isn't peculiar to the current government.
Here's why: on one hand, the government wishes to set and completely control the agenda, and the public service is supposed to be setting its goals at the direction of the political level. That's the job of a public servant: to do the job you are directed to do by the government.
But on the other hand, public servants have a broader commitment to the public-at-large, and scientists especially have an ethical responsibility to pursue the science regardless of whether the specific results of a study will support what the government wishes or not. If a measurement has inconvenient implications for political policy, well, too bad. Deal with the data or admit you don't care about reality. An ethical scientist is not going to cover it up or alter the data to fit political policy. Policy can and should dictate to some degree what should be studied in the first place (i.e. policy determines what is important enough to study -- in which field or topic to invest limited money), but it should have no influence on the actual results or the need to communicate them to other scientists and the broader public. Putting a barrier between scientists and the public is counterproductive to scientists doing their job. It's also a waste of money, because what's the point of doing science on behalf of the public and for the sake of important public concerns like health, safety, resources, etc. if you can't in the end communicate with the public, or if doing so is dependent on whether the results align with the politics of the day? Scientists have to be able to talk about the "bad news" as well as "good news".
A government that fails to recognize this balance between political loyalty and the broader loyalty of federal government scientists to the public and to science is a government that is no friend to anyone -- the scientists or the public. Like I said, the friction has always been there and always will be, but it's true that the current government has gone significantly further than previous ones to try to control communication. In my opinion, they're a bunch of control freaks more interested in determining the message than having an informed political debate. I'm glad that scientists fed up with the situation are doing something about it, because what the government is doing is wrong.
In my experience federal government scientists are some of the most highly-dedicated public servants I've ever met, and they're usually working at about two-thirds to half the pay they could get if they moved to equivalent industry jobs. Where I worked, it was the scientists who were often there until 6pm or later, doing their job because they enjoyed it. The administrators and bureaucrats would be out of there 4pm sharp.
There is a comparable web site by US scientists started during the Bush Jr. administration. http://www.ucsusa.org/
So the union doesn't think its positions aren't political? Nonsense. Policy - what we do about the facts - is supposed to be political. Many European countries are effectively bankrupt today. That's the fact. The policies that flow from that fact are political, and there's not a scientifically "right" choice to be made. Do they cut spending? Increase the retirement age? They need to choose based on their values and culture. Scientists are great at finding facts, but return to being regular citizens - no more or less important than anyone else - when it comes to deciding what to do about the facts. The website amounts to a lobby effort to increase funding and power for a bunch of civil servants, the vast majority of whom are engaged in necessary but mundane research that is nowhere near as important as they would like you to think.
Ya, that whole science thing is a waste of time. ...of some kind...
The "scientists" just make things up so that the "data" says whatever they want it to say.
And they have an agenda!
A scary agenda!
The very idea that it could be a good thing if policies at a national level were influenced by such nonsense as "evidence" or "data" or "reality" is absurd!
If the sceientists want to disrupt the orderly running of the country by publicly talking about how their "data" (made up of course) and "conclusions"(nefarious no doubt) contradict the decisons made by our good and godfearing leaders then they should be silenced!
A few years back in Queensland, Australia we had a government that wanted to get ahead instead of listening to those gloomy scientists. We ended up with a lot of taxpayers money going to things like Dr Horvath's Hydrogen car scam and the Cape York spaceport where the entire massive operation was going to be run by a two person company (which mysteriously soaked up money for years while still being nothing but two people and glossy brochures). The former USSR and Lysenkoism of course has many worse examples - but my point is purely political choices in science end up in snake oil scams.
I guess people are worried that our state of the art igloo geometric designs, dogsled aerodymanics and maple syrup chemistry are in danger if poltical decisions are made without the benefit of science. Luckily there are only 78 of us in the whole country. We can probably sort it out in about a fortnight over a few Molson's beers while watching ice hockey. duane "Who won the damn gold medals at the last Olympics anyways?"
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
The site is being hosted on a server within Canada? There is a few probable sceneries about what the government might do about it, and none of them is going to be liked by the scientists.
++
Public sector scientists certainly do remember that. At least, I sure did when I was a government scientist, before I moved on to other opportunities. While I worked in that job I took my commitment to the public very seriously and treated any money I received for my research as if it was my own -- I pay taxes too, you know.
That's why public sector scientists get particularly frustrated when they are told by their government masters that they can't speak to the public who are paying the bills, and it's why the public should feel justifiably angry with any government that sets serious restrictions on scientific communication. You the public are our bosses, not merely the government-of-the-day who might not like the scientific results and decides to stifle open communication.
A government that prevents scientists from speaking to the public is denying the public the right to hear the scientific results they paid for, and for issues that everyone agrees are important to the public (e.g., things like public safety, health, resource development and preservation, etc.). Government scientists provide what is needed to have informed political discussion and decisions. It's grossly irresponsible on all sorts of levels to restrict their communication with the public, but it sure isn't the fault of the scientists trying to do their job.
It is long established that belief is more powerful than fact. Facts often interfere with our beliefs to the point that you have to get rid of one in favor of the other. The problem is simply that one's own identity is tied very closely to belief where facts are rarely, if ever, claimed as a part of one's identity. Political affiliations and sports teams are also often components of identity for some people to the point of being violently defensive of them.
It may seem nonsensical to ignore new information in order to maintain one's beliefs, but we see it all the time. We see it in diet, religion, relative mathematics, and pretty much every aspect of life. It is all part of how the brain works. We break down, simplify and symbolically represent things in our minds. It serves to help remember, categorize and index what we keep in there. To change our beliefs means to change our long-term neural pathways. This is no trivial matter. For example, I am atheist, but I was raised Christian and so various aspects of Christian thinking still runs through my brain with no sign of ever going away.
Beliefs are comforting. To challenge belief is to make someone uncomfortable.
Because religion, in the West, has never suppressed science.
Galileo is the most famous "example" of scientific persecution. The inconvenient little fact is that the man was persecuted for publicly insulting the Pope who, at the time, had the same powers as any other Italian feudal leader. In fact, he was lucky that he did it to the Pope and not one of the other Italian leaders or a major monarch because they'd have been perfectly justified by the standards of feudalism to torture and kill him. The Pope, being the head of most of the Christian religion, was expected to be more merciful than that (and he was, the punishment was house arrest). Ironically, the very reason Galileo was able to insult the Pope in the Vatican was because the Catholic hierarchy invited him as an honored lecturer to discuss the merits of these new theories.
Heliocentrism, which nearly was declared a "heresy" was nearly declared so because of philosophy, not religion. One of the reasons for the Reformation was the influx of extra-biblical philosophy into Catholicism. Luther bluntly stated that he felt that Aristotelean philosophy had badly corrupted the Catholic Church and it was men in that tradition who persecuted the Heliocentrists.
You know why they did that? Because they merged Christian scripture and Greek philosophy and said "an oval is an imperfect circle, God never makes anything that's imperfect, therefore Heliocentrism is dangerous." You won't find this view in the Bible. It was only in the minds of "learned men" who applied pagan philosophy to Christian scripture, badly.
Ironically, this is why the New Testament frequently bashes philosophers and religious individuals who "value tradition over revelation." The New Testament has several scathing attacks on Greek philosophy and Talmudic legalism.
The EPA ban on DDT only covered the United States. The EPA doesn't have the authority to make a worldwide ban. DDT is still in use in other parts of the world to combat malaria. The US gets around 1500 cases of malaria every year, but as far as I am aware there are no deaths.
Your linked article is very misleading.
You're confusing science with engineering. Scientists discover principles, engineers put them to work in the real world,
Free Martian Whores!
So you are saying that the current government did NOT try to prevent genverment scientists from public communications on their work?
The Rockefellers? Buffett? Gates? Really?!
I don't think you understand what left-wing economic policies actually are, never mind that you're forgetting what people like Rockefeller did to get their fortune in the first place. even Buffett is only coming to this realization very, very late in his career, as is Gates.
I mean, Rockefeller? Mr. Standard Oil Monopoly?
Soros is about the only one who comes even close to left-wing economic policy.
You're operating from a very American perspective: that all social liberalism and leftist economic policy are in lockstep. This is very, very wrong: you can be a rampant capitalist without being a social conservative. Heck, you can even do it while being a philathropist. What you can't do is start talking about upper-to-lower-class income redistribution and cradle-to-grave social programs.
I'll give you hint: when any of these guys are start seriously proposing a return to 1950s income taxation levels, or when they start pushing for a Scandinavian-style social safety net, I'll believe we dealing with leftists. Right now, there's thousands of people making millions of dollars who very much do not want either of those (and especially the former) to happen.
--srj/mmv