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The Encroachment of Fact-Free Science
G3ckoG33k writes "Fact-free science is not a joke; it is very much on the move, and it is quite possibly the most dangerous movement in centuries, for the entirety of mankind. One can say it began as counter-movement to Karl Popper's ground-breaking proposals in the early 20th century, which insisted that statements purporting to describe the reality should be made falsifiable. A few decades later, some critics of Popper said that statements need peer acceptance, which then makes also natural science a social phenomenon. Even later, in 1996, professor Alan Sokal submitted a famous article ridiculing the entire anti-science movement. Now New York Times has an article describing the latest chilling acts of the socially relativistic, postmodern loons. It is a chilling read, and they may be swinging both the political left and right. Have they been successful in transforming the world yet? How would we know?"
Let's agree not to call this a "Republican" or "Democratic" position. The problem is that there are adherents to scientific claims who don't know the truth on both sides. I don't claim to know much about climate science, evolution, natural history or reproductive biology. So me claiming a "scientific" position on global warming, creationism, evolution or abortion is to some extent who I want to have faith in. Generally I choose respected scientists, but its still faith on my part because I haven't done the research myself.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
When I think about about fact free science...
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
Really, how does this story rate posting here?
This is not even a thinly disguised attack piece. Yet another "if you don't subscribe to the current global warming facts you are an idiot" . As in, there is no room for debate, it has been decided, any contrary view is automatically wrong. Any discussion which does not state full agreement is wrong. Any facts not in the approved list are wrong.
So the entire basis to attack the other side simply is over the one issue Global Warming which is not even completely decided science. We get new information daily, we get contrary information daily, we get supportive information daily, yet the one thing we can guarantee is that the NYT will voice the opinions of the Democratic party as indisputable fact at all times.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Peer review seemed like a good idea at the time, but these days it increasingly seems to be a way for the most powerful clique to ensure their papers get published and no-one else does.
Ultimately consensus is worthless in science because it's so often been wrong.
Oh, well, even if we cause an ecological holocaust, wiping out all animals on earth larger than a mouse, the biosphere will adapt in the long run. I, for one, welcome our new cockroach overlords!
Have you read my blog lately?
I love how the article is equally fact-free, but makes sure to include several opinion polls.
For what it's worth, string theory is firmly in "hypothesis" range, and even string theorists acknowledge that. The question, if it is a complete mental masturbation or not, is kind of undecided, but judging by the number of people involved and effect on anything practical, it's not important at this point.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
A) There are lots of climate change deniers out there
B) Postmodernism has caused lots of people to think that science is all relative, and the folks in A) have adopted that banner.
I'll really argue the link here- I doubt that *anyone* in A has really, seriously read the literature from B. A is comprised primarily of folks who are either highly religious and refuse to adopt a scientific worldview at all (and would be totally horrified by the philosophy of B if they actually read it) or people who have massive financial incentives to believe that climate change isn't true. The fact that A people argue against science has far more to do with those two factors than anything a bunch of academic nutcases wrote about.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Call it what it is: religion. And no, that does not exclude the "Left".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why the hell does this article quote a literature professor on the topic of the quality of scientific research? How the fuck would he know?
Professor David Nutt uses science in a paper against prohibition of drugs, and is fired the next day. Article from 2009
Popular opinion and straw men are the new trusted sources of facts, guys! Science and statistical analysis are for fringe nutjobs and quacks!
Tentatively taking up the position of the scientific consensus is the most reasonable thing to do as a non-expert. No body of a similar standing to the IPCC has contradicted AGW as far as I'm aware. Maybe you know better. I don't.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I've seen this from both the religious and the ardently atheist. I used to work for a guy who was positive the world was 4000 years old. I explained to him several times how things like superposition work but he just never listened. I also have known several people over the years who were ardently atheist, and would gladly tell religious people how stupid they were, but at the same time believed just pharmaceutical companies are trying to trick them into giving their kids autism through poison vaccines.
It seems to me that the problem is humans are inclined to accept some form of religion, so when most people make the leap to agnostic or atheist they have to find something new, and its usually something moronic like joining PETA.
I don't deny that climate change exists; the climate on Earth has been changing since the Earth began and continues to do so. What wasn't been definitively established is to what extent this change is due to the activities of man versus to what extent it is due to the Earth's natural cycles and was going to happen anyway. Although it stands to reason that reducing the albedo of the Earth and dumping all that crap into the atmosphere should have some effect on global temperature, there is no proof that ceasing this activity would reverse the warming trend. We are experiencing basically the same climate now that existed 5000 years ago... what do you blame the climate change of 5000 years ago on?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If you show people two scientific models/theories of the same thing, (that they aren't familiar with already obviously) one older than the other, people generally can tell which is older and which is newer. This is all you have to do to invalidate postmodernism. It has been thoroughly discredited. Science works, and gets better/more accurate over time. A glance at the last hundred years can tell anyone that.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Excellent point. Its funny how anyone who goes against Global Warming is instantly labeled as a perpetrator of "Bad Science", yet a lot of the initial politically funded and motivated research has turned out to be complete garbage.
I tend to believe that if the early research and consensus had been left to the scientists, and politicians like Al Gore had stayed out of it, it wouldn't be a political issue at all by this point.
When politics gets involved in science it ruins both.
Its just like rock music and religion.
popper's analysis of science is weak. It's based in the idea that their are 'facts' and that these facts are truths. If we accept certain axioms such as that we are not living in 'the matrix' etc then we can all agree that yes the sun is 'above' the earth, that planes fly, that this conversation is happening on server somewhere. Anybody who understands anything about the philosophy of science will understand and accept these things. The issue with popper is that he fails to recognise that the creation of scientific truth is a human endeavour and thus subject to human flaws, a far better analysis of the production of science is produced by Bruno Latour in Science in action - see Google books http://is.gd/07KejQ Perhaps the OP should widen their circle of scholarship before making such muddle-headed comments PS Sokal may have got a paper published in social text, but various scientific journals have accepted papers from people that show they are equally as gullible to accepting papers devoid of logic or proof. The problem with peer review is that it is peer review: ideas that are only acceptable to ones peers will be published. Challenges to the current orthodoxy typically have to be publicised through journals outside the mainstream view
Yes there are bozos out there who push their illogical political. views. There always have been. And some people want to deny science and/or critical thinking, to push a political agenda.
But I do not see where this is impacting actual scientific research.
This article is a liberal democrat biased "news" source, trying to smear the republicans. I am not repub myself, and I am not trying to defend the repubs. But, to say this article is shallow, and biased, would be understatements.
This whole topic pisses me off. The non-science idiots who try to pervert science with their armchair observations polluted with religion are ruining this country.
We need science policy based on fact - not fantasy. This creationist crap is what leads to bad policies for the country as a whole too and impacts global warming and energy policy just as much as science funding.
Keep the nut jobs out of science.
it's like believing that the earth is flat, which was widely held by even scientists centuries ago.
No, it wasn't. That's a fallacy.
"There never was a period of 'flat earth darkness' among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." -- Stephen Jay Gould
Reference: http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/WS06/pmo/eng/Gould-FlatEarth.pdf
Can someone tell me how the same people who believe that pumping tons of smoke into the air and pouring millions of gallons of oil into the ocean has no effect on the environment and that the Earth is 6000 years old, are willing to buy off on at least basic atomic theory? Is it because the atomic theory gives them weapons?
Have they been successful in transforming the world?
Anti-intellectualism, anti-science, or anti-whatever-else has been prevalent in at least the United States for a very, very long time. And it starts when you're very young.
I remember being in school, in first grade. I was smarter than a lot of other kids in my class, and because of that I was ostracized. I wasn't allowed to be an intellectual; stupidity was celebrated. Acts of buffoonery were promoted and lauded.
Is it any coincidence why the most socially-outgoing people, in the history of K-12, are typically *not* the intellectuals? The "nerds" and "geeks" are always kept from ever rising above the "jocks" on the social ladder.
When you make it to college/university, it doesn't change very much. The nerds are at least not the brunt of jokes, and they're allowed to sit in the science and engineering buildings well into the night, silently doing their nerdy sciency and engineery things.
But the loud ones -- in sports, and poli-sci -- are still the non-intellectuals of the high school years. And these are the ones who grow up to be politicians.
So when articles like this act surprised that the majority of the government is filled with anti-elitist and anti-intellectuals, I have to wonder – were they paying attention any, growing up? This sort of conditioning –letting people know that being smart is NOT COOL – starts from a very young age.
But these people became successful? So they must be smart, right? Oh, if only. It's not about what you know, but rather about who you know. Nerds don't really socialize; we focus on our work, because that makes us happy. The others schmooze and network like crazy, with like-minded anti-science colleagues, who later become leaders, while we're the ones left wondering where the world is heading.
They become rich and powerful, and spread their ideas to the next generation. Of course, not all of them are successful. Many of them are not. Many of them remained dumb because they didn't realize the importance of knowledge, since it was ingrained to them from a very early age to think that knowledge and intellect are ELITIST and UNCOOL. And so they raise their kids that same way.
And we're back to square one.
I've experienced this first hand, and I am sure many have here as well.
It sucks; it's terrible. It shouldn't be like this. But it is. And I really have no idea what to do to stop it, but the article is right about one thing – it's terribly dangerous.
Well my "casual" observation shows there was another global warming period during the time of Ancient Egypt (circa 3500 BC) and again in the Roman Empire (circa 300-1300).
Clearly those global warming periods were not caused by cars, so there's no reason to think the present period is either. We need to find the REAL cause for these three Warming periods, which are not man-made.
Also Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, long before firearms were invented.
Clearly he was not killed by a firearm, so there's no reason to think someone could die as a result of being hit by a gunshot.
The West is already on its way out as a manufacturing and innovation base , most of which has headed east. Soon the chinese will be doing most of the science too and the west will be free to degenerate back into superstition and ignorance once more.
Oh, please. The climate summit farces in Copenhagen and Cancun show how seriously the rest of the world takes the issue. Most of the Kyoto treaty signers actually increased emissions, some by *more* than the US did. Your high horse is made of straw.
The summary is talking about the evils of postmodernism, cultural relativism, and deconstructivism.
The New York Times article linked is about head-in-the-sand data denial.
These two things have nothing to do with each other. The Republican congressmen in question don't give a damn about postmodernistm or cultural relativism. They don't believe that the truth depends on your perspective, or that morals and ethics are culturally informed. They believe that their ideal of the traditional American way of life is the only truth, and that anything that contradicts that must not be true.
TFS author is trying to shove a square peg down his favorite round hole.
That's why you say "we need to restrict [business] from doing [action]" late in the game.
Politics got involved way, way too early.
However, as a wise man once said:
"Don't call a man a fool, borrow money from him."
The thing we have to remember is that "anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-elite"-ism is != anti-science. There might be a correlation between those who are anti-science and those who are anti-intellectualism and the rest but I know a number of very good scientists who could be considered anti-intellectualism. Intellectualism generally (not always but generally) includes a disdain for less intellectual methods of knowledge. It places the intellect (rationalism, if you will) as the best (and maybe even only) way to discover knowledge. I could go on but you can be a scientist and not hold to all the other scientific elitism stuff.
The NYT article does a good job of displaying some of this elitism. For example, "Opposing the belief that global warming is human-caused has become systematic, like opposition to abortion,' [Weiss] says. 'It’s seen as another way for government to control people’s lives. It’s become a cultural issue." Sure, this quote is out of context but many of the AGW critics (deniers exist but they are a vocal minority) simply state that not all global warming (is it global warming or climate change?) is caused by humans. Isn't this a rational questioning of the science? This should drive (and has driven) scientists to demonstrate the reliability of their findings. The problem is that people who question AGW are called "deniers" without much thought taken for their arguments or lack thereof. A lot of people have very serious questions about global warming science, as they should - it's the kind of science that has huge political, social, and economic consequences. Many are simply opposed to governments imposing penalties and would rather the free(ish) market to decide. If enough people value green technologies then the markets will go that way eventually. I'm not arguing either way with my post, I'm merely pointing out that many of the oppositions to AGW are in fact opposition to political policy and not the science per se. Further, including abortion in with AGW is a cheap shot because being opposed to or in favor of abortion is about moral values, not science.
Anyway, the NYT article's author makes a number of good points (particularly that conservatives and liberals both have issues with science) but she doesn't even begin to get at the root of why so many people on all sides of the political spectrum might have issues with science: most people don't understand science. What's even ironic is that a lot of scientists do not understand science. They might understand how to do science but they do not understand science. Science is, after all, one way to discover facts. Facts are discovered (actually they are made - mauFACTured; fact comes from the Latin facio, facere, and factum {essentially the same word, just different forms}). However, facts are discovered through the biases of the methods (study epistemology and the philosophy of science for more on this) and the biases of the scientists. Facts also are != truth. Facts might be true but truth is independent from facts. People's biases strongly affect the research being conducted (by affecting what people choose to study or by affecting the funding or not funding of specific studies) as well as that being published (file drawer effect of research - in short, journals don't like publishing studies that fail to show anything seemingly meaningful but maybe the lack of a finding is what is meaningful). We were recently able to get an article published in which we had a null result only because it contradicted common beliefs in the medical field. Otherwise, our lack of results would not have been published.
I know how scientific journals work. The peer review process is sometimes a joke. People accept or don't accept work based on what they know. Sometimes what they know is wrong so articles can get rejected or accepted based on bad knowledge or assumptions of a reviewer. My research interests go against some of the conventional wisdom in my field precisely because I think most previous researchers have foc
Actually 'climate change' was created by republican political consultants in the Bush era to sound less scary, not because of some nefarious scheme by climate scientists.
“Climate change” is politically correct nonsense, but Republican pollster Frank Luntz and George W. Bush are to blame, not Al Gore. Luntz sold the phrase to Bush: “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming.” While “global warming” has catastrophic connotations attached, “climate change” suggests a more controllable challenge. Bush agreed. Republican political appointees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where I was a biologist, forced scientists to always use “climate change” instead of the accurate and alarming “global warming.”
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it.
Fixed:
It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.