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America's Turn From Science, a Danger For Democracy
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Here's a good article about how playing politics with science puts our country at risk — a review of Shawn Otto's book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. Today's policy-makers, Otto shows, are increasingly unwilling to pursue many of the remedies science presents. They take one of two routes: deny the science, or pretend the problems don't exist."
The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion. It's everywhere in the U.S. culture. That fact alone tells that U.S. has never been about, or seek to know, science. Science tends to look at the world in terms of numbers, technology and confirmed facts. Religion tends to tell the world has been made by some imaginary person in the sky, tells you to pray towards said imaginary person and completely disregards science in favor of what someone wrote on paper 1500-2000 years ago. They are not compatible.
Now here's a crazy question to those of you believe in god. The whole world is full of lunatics, alcoholics, drug users and pathological liars, and has always been. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a "bad" thing. Many people have great amount of imagination. What makes you think those stories weren't made up by either drunk persons, someone who wanted to tell a story or someone who just wanted to play with people?
On that matter, stories always change when they are passed from people to people. This is like 1-2th grade stuff. I still remember when my first grade teacher demonstrated this by whispering something to a student, who then whispered it to next person and so on. After all of us in the class had passed it forward, the meaning was completely different with added "fun stuff" and things that didn't even make sense.
Why do you think the bible is a good representation of how things actually went? Why do you think it's even true at all? It could just as well be based on some old stories that have changed when going from people to people, or better yet, some drunk or drug using guy just wrote it 2000 years ago. Just think about it.
Hmmm.....
- about 30% voter turnout ....
- Election looser becomes president (2000)
- You need a billion US$ campaign funds to have a chance
- Heriditary tendencies for seats in congress/senate
-
So not much left to endanger IMHO. Sorry!
The problem with this oft-repeated trope is that the pro-AGW forces are inevitably playing politics with the very "science" they claim to rest their arguments on. Over and over, we read of hidden, manipulated, and cherry-picked data, refusals to abide with having outsiders vet their work, and allowing naked advocacy into the IPCC reports on climate change as if they were peer-reviewed science. "Truthout" -- one of the most preposterous names imaginable -- here advances the same political agenda. It is environmentalism wrapped in a lab coat.
The Canadians walked away from Kyoto; shall we ask if they, too, are anti-science? Or does that only cover the US?
Dog is my co-pilot.
"They take one of two routes: deny the science, or pretend the problems don't exist."
First, the analysis presented by the author is fraudulent, nonsensical, and just a creation of the liberal elite. Second, there's simply no issue with how politicians deal with scientific facts, I don't know why anyone would say something like that.
This book is clearly proof of a huge conspiracy by high school science teachers. By pretending science should be important, they hope to keep their jobs and to be able to garner higher wages. Fortunately, we can count on the heroism of our politicians and bankers to protect us from such lies and reestablish the truth.
Here: Fact 1) The climate has changed and always will. Fact 2) We can't keep it in a solid sate (unchanging). Fact 3) Mankind directly affects the climate, and we KNOW this - we can see the Ozone hole above the poles. It was directly created by aerospray cans we created. Fact 4) Besides a static, unchanging thing, there is stomething called DYNAMIC STABILITY. Fact 5) Dynamic Stability can be achieved by careful monitoring and correcting of issues. Like say if we start pumping more C02 into the air, we can stop it.
Not saying that is what we have to do. Just saying that your logic is incredibally bad - you proved absolutely nothing but your own ignorance.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What's it like to be part of the anti-science crackpot brigade?
Not much. I am more concerned with doing something about the climate change that IS IN OUR CONTROL
It was sputnik that that put science and math back in vogue in the US, and even then it has been touch and go. I don't imagine that many who read this can imagine how hard it is to actually set up an advance math of physics class is school that are controlled by ex cheerleaders and english majors. They cannot understand the importance or the complexity. They think that the computers just magically appeared one day. They don't know the physics and engineering that was required.
Some of this comes from the religious fanatics, and some of these believe that the US is a christian state. While it is somewhat true, the beliefs of our founding fathers were not necessarily the beliefs of the christian fundamentalists and terrorists that want to divert tax a money from the public good to funding their mansions and sports complexes and terrorists cells. One example of this difference is the Jefferson bible. This bible is used by many christians as it focuses on the teaching of Jesus for those who follows his ways and habits, rather than the mysticism which is often used to tell poor people that they are poor simply because they have no faith.
Our founding fathers understood that religion was used to oppress them, which is why the fought against the aristocracy of England. It was understood that the aristocracy was no more chosen by god than a CEO is chosen by god. It was understood that the work of a person, not the lineage, should determine if a person was successful. Just because one was born into a place or a family should not determine if one was blesse by god. The blessed were the ones who would have faith and work. So the US was built on faith, but not the idea that we in the US were more blessed than other simply because we were born in the US. We had to work for the blessing.
This then is problem with math and science. If we are simply blessed because we are born in the US, then we can simply stay on our sofas and watch TV. But if god demands that we act, that we honor the creation, the Math and physics takes on a much greater importance, and one is not blessed simply because one watches Joel Olsteen on a 42" tv in a mansion. It is then required that we take an active role in exploring and expanding the good that the creation can do, which means that we have to get our lazy asses off the sofa and produce something useful, the antithesis to what is taught in too many churches.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion. -- Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11. Signed by John Adams.
Even if we accept the science of climate change, the problem is too hard to fix.
No politician is going to tell its people to stop driving cars. It is much easier to deny the problem than to deal with the reality. Even the pro science politicians are only proposing ideas that are mostly for show.
If someone comes up with a solution to fix climate change without requiring major sacrifices from its citizens, then all the politicians will be conveniently pro science again.
The Canadian conservative government pulled out of Kyoto not because they hate science but because they don't care. They see money from Alberta tar sands and that is all they can see. If the climate warms, they won't have to go as far south in winter! That is how they view it and they won't change until it's too late. New Orleans will disappear under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico this century and no conservative government, American or Canadian, will take climate change seriously until it does. Even then they will probably try to blame the victims saying New Orleans brought it on itself.
This quote sums up all you need to know about religion:
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." – Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger).
Back then, the religions he spoke of were different to today's, the cultures of the people were different to today's, and the nature of education was different to today's, but nothing has changed. Not even the hypocrisy of the rulers/politicians.
BTW, regarding your extraordinarily generous assessment of statesmen:
"Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen." – Bob Edwards.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Or simply affecting that change. The climate is always changing, but human activities might be making it change faster, or to a greater extent, than plants or animals (including humans) can adapt without severe stress or hardship.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Given that the article is somewhat focused on the ScienceDebate questions and with the notable exception of the one about climate change. The third option I'd see is that those questions are pretty unfocused and in one case - education a little deceptive.
For example are they referring to the OECD exam results? I downloaded and wrote that math exam and I found it to be weird. In some cases I'm not sure the questions were even about math and very often not the kind of math you use in science (there were huge numbers of graph reading questions). Not to mention that the purveyors of the exam themselves only recognized three statistically significant groups (those working at, beneath and above the median). Not to mention when people start throwing ordinal values around it often makes me wonder how much they actually know about science or math. Ordinals provide zero information about the distance between ranks which is far more important than being 1st or 17th.
Check your budget numbers first, fool. The US government gives huge amounts of cash to oil, coal and nuclear power - far more than we give to solar powers.
As for 'uncompetitive' solar power plants are only uncompetitive if we let people dump garbage into the air for free. Wind power is now the cheapest power - assuming we enforce existing pollution laws. Water and coal are the cheapest if we don't track pollution. If we charge every company HALF the price to clean up air pollution then Wind, Solar and Nuclear are the only competivie plants.
The question is not 'which is cheapest', but "how much are we going to charge them for the right to poison our air".
To make it even more complicated idiots in the midwest like to pollute the air and don't care that their pollution gets blown east by the wind into the East.
If you want to claim "I can live with the pollution" that's one thing. But to stand and insist "its the cheapest" is just plain STUPID.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
At the core of the religious and science differences is a very humanistic (and fallible) trait of 'we' vs. 'them'. It's what drives the whole diatribe of debate on both sides of the fence and what makes the problem irrational and unsolvable.
Neither science nor religion are based on 100% total fact. A scientific theory, (as is much religion), is based on what appears to be known about something from a given set of data. Can you explain Dark Matter with 100% certainty? No. Can you explain Intelligent Design with 100% certainty? No. You can make a lot of guesses but in the end those guesses are subjective.
Seems to me one set of weakly glued hypothesis and conjecture should not be insisted upon over another set of weakly glued hypothesis and conjecture. We are on one planet of zillions of galaxies. We have not seen all there is to see and cannot explain much of what we have.
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"I don't blame corporations because they are stuck in a system we have created and they can't solve it all themselves," he said in an interview. "I don't blame the Republican Party for going anti-science because there are a lot of factors that led to that socially, and I don't think it's a decision of Republican Party leadership to one day say, 'oh, we're not going to accept science anymore.' And it's not just because evangelicals got involved in politics. There's a lot of complex reasons."
I notice he doesn't blame the Democrat Party, progressives, labor unions, etc either for their "anti-science" positions. But in those cases, he doesn't mention them by name either. I don't know who did this, whether it was the author, Otto, or a bias of the reporter of that particular interview, but any discussion of "anti-science" shouldn't be taking sides else it falls into the trap it purports to study.
For example, perhaps the number one, serial abuse of science is in the field of economics. Everyone with enough money to hire a pet economist (the modern version of the chicken entrails-equipped soothsayer) can find a credentialed someone who can economically rationalize the wants of the client. Medicine is a close number two. Their saving grace is that they're a bit result driven. Past that, it depends on the stakes. Nobody is going to throw string theory, because nobody gains or loses (whether money, power, or some vaguer notion like firmness of conviction) no matter what happens. Climatology and ecology are different stories since someone stands to lose and gain by what conclusions are drawn.
When you get to the weird religion based anti-science arguments against the sciences having to do with Earth's and the universe's past, these tend to be high profile and low impact. For example, I know of no case where some US school board passed an anti-evolution curriculum which didn't result in the overturning of the school board.
It's not about religion vs. science per se. In the U.S. it's all about getting enough money to run a successful election campaign. Either you are independently wealthy, or you need big-time campaign contributors. These big-money donors have agendas that are often at odds with scientific opinion. I am old enough to remember when tobacco officially didn't cause cancer, despite overwhelming scientific evidence otherwise. The same thing can be said about the U.S. position on climate change, health care reform, banking system reform, military spending, etc... In all of these cases, scientific opinion requires making a change in how money is spent, taxes are levied, or on how regulatory burden or liability are allocated.
Another great example is science has shown though numerous studies that cannabis is quite safe, mildly addictive (less than alcohol, and much much less than tobacco), has anti cancer properties and has been shown to treat many illnesses and diseases. But when the president or the DEA speaks on the subject, they contradict every study and fail to acknowledge the existence of those studies. They go back to saying that the FDA has found no medical use and its highly addictive. They just ignore the facts and push what is in the interest of the lobbyists and "their" morals. Completely disregarding scientific fact.
I am bothered by one part of this article, the idea that Science Debate 2008 was only moderately successful. True, they were unable to get the candidates to debate science topics live on television, but the organization DID succeed in getting the candidates to debate science. The organization gave the candidates a list of questions and then posted their answers online side by side for comparison (I wrote up a score card on who I thought gave the best answer to each question).
This was more than the Federation of American Scientists or Union of Concerned Scientists have accomplished in their decades of activism. This was HUGE for an organization that had just come into existence. This success is why I abandoned my memberships to these other organizations and committed my donations to Science Debate.
(Side Note: Newt Gingrich is a scumbag, but if he gets the nomination I can't wait to see him and Obama throw-down on Science... I've seen Newt destroy John Kerry on how to tackle Climate Change and I believe his nomination would bring scientific issues into the spotlight since Obama is something of a science geek himself.)
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
By the time the hydrogen bomb was being created, most of the best minds had left the project. The lack of immediacy - no Hitler to defeat - and difficulties with the government management of the project convinced all but the most hardcore to return to academia.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The problem here is, Eisenhower was wrong.
The image of a solitary investor, toiling in some basement laboratory is, for the most part, a fairy tale. It has very seldom been true. A huge percentage of inventions, even through history, are funded by government. That includes many of those scientists who are iconized in pop culture as solitary inventors, like Ben Franklin and Leonardo DaVinci. These two were heavily funded by the government and would not have been able to complete their research and fund all of their laboratory equipment and assistants, etc, without such funding.
So, it's neat that you are pointing out that Eisenhower had a very shallow understanding of the history and reality of scientific funding, especially seeing how much his government funded science, but it's not proving anything other than your bias.
I thought most of the founding fathers were deists. With respect to religion, people remember that the purpose of the law was to keep one particular brand of christianity from becoming the offical national religon, but seem to forget that some various states had various versions of christianity as their offical state religion, even until the early/mid 1800's.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
It's not particularly that scientists should make all the decisions, but rather, than we need an informed population and a very informed government in order to deal with modern problems.
In congress:
And quite a few are career politicians who moved up from state legislatures/etc.
In short, we're a nation run by lawyers and politicians, and have a tiny representation by engineers and scientists - people who have a demonstrated interest and capacity in how things actually work.
This is problematic because there simply isn't enough knowledge in congress to go around. Quite a few Americans, likewise, are voting from a position of complete ignorance and, instead of selecting a candidate who is very knowledgeable on the assumption that that candidate will make better decisions, quite a few Americans vehemently "vote their ignorance"; that is, they're looking specifically for a candidate who reflects their own biases and uninformed viewpoints.
As Isaac Asimov said:
This quote sums up all you need to know about religion: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." – Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger). Back then, the religions he spoke of were different to today's, the cultures of the people were different to today's, and the nature of education was different to today's, but nothing has changed. Not even the hypocrisy of the rulers/politicians.
BTW, regarding your extraordinarily generous assessment of statesmen: "Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen." – Bob Edwards.
Religion or spiritual belief is fine when it's individual and personal. Like with so many other insanities of mankind, the problem kicks in when it becomes an organized corporate activity. Then it appeals to the need that insecure, weak people have to feel like a member of something greater than themselves because they do not have the courage to be individuals. Or you could say that courageous people satisfy the same need by being in this vast Universe; they can handle the vastness and the unanswered questions and do not need membership in a club of like-minded sycophants to give them self-worth.
Either way, that weakness and neediness is the exploitable vulnerability that rulers (cloth or crown, and lately media) have always exploited. I know some of you hate the term "sheeple" and for those I say, suck it up and learn to deal with it. Print it out and read it a few times until you desensitize yourself if that's what it takes. When you can handle a simple term, even one you wouldn't use yourself (the horror!) like a calm dispassionate adult, read the rest of this.
They are sheeple not because they join a group. They are sheeple not because they happen to do what others happen to do. They are sheeple because they need other people to define their reality for them, to give them a framework within which to interpret their own lives. That's how fundamental this is. It's about levels of consciousness arranged by framing of information. The need for this is so strong that almost any framework will do. It may be organized religion, it may be professional prestige, or nationalism, it may be hatred of a rival sports team, or it may be presented in terms like rich and poor, black and white, left and right. It doesn't matter -- they are all interchangeable flavors different prepackaged flavors appeal to different people who share this sick need.
It takes real strength to actually think for yourself, to not be deceived into falsely believing you know what that means, and to truly know the difference. It takes a certain kind of real purpose to observe all the frameworks and -isms, learn what you can from them, accept the tiny kernel of truth they often contain without hating them for the way they mislead, and move on without ever getting stuck in one.
The people with that unhealthy need get stuck as soon as they find one they like. The promise of acceptance and affirmation and fellowship lulls them into a slumber. They now have a loyalty and an interpretation to which everything else must be related no matter how much of a forced fit it requires. Almost everyone is so compromised. You could call it Satan or a thousand other names. I personally explain that it is to mind what viruses are to DNA. Either way, it's nothing less than the single principle which is wrong with the entire world.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The article (yes, I RTFA) says very little about science other than climate change - What about alternative energy (regardless of greenhouse gases), computers, space exploration, advances in transportation, standard of living, food generation, medical care, etc.
But politicians don't win primaries by taking a stance on the P = NP question.
Global warming denial is rife among Republican presidential candidates because they oppose any policy that might inhibit rich people's ability to make money at everyone else's expense. And evolution denial, because they realize that fundamentalist Christians have disproportionate influence in the primaries.
When someone starts telling his followers that God told him P != NP, or someone figures out that one conclusion or the other will cost someone some money, *then* it will become part of the science-denying political agenda. Meanwhile, no politician has any reason to give a shit.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Athenians democratically decided to go to war against Sparta, and lost both the war and their democracy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When a geologist says "You're town is right in the path of a future lava flow..." and a politician says "building a big ditch to redirect the flow will harm our economy!", you think the politician is the guy who should get the upper hand?
And eugenics theory was never really a scientific theory at all. It certainly ran counter to Darwinian evolutionary mechanics (where variation is absolutely key to a species' survival), so the analogy is bad. Doubtless there were some scientists advocating it, but many of those, at the time, also rejected natural selection in favor of either racial purity nonsense or the more nebulous but equally vile economic purity concepts. At any rate, Darwin and his successors made very clear that the best way for a species to survive was diversity, which eugenics by and large rejects in favor of creating a very homogeneous genetic stock.
Besides what you've written is a red herring. I don't think anybody is saying scientists should run the show, but rather that the politicization of science harms science and ultimately harms people. Scientists should be free to publish their results without tampering and then it is up to the politicians and the public to decide what to do with it. If they decide digging a big ditch to redirect a future lava flow will damage their economy, then at least they were given the warning and understood the potential ramifications of their decision, rather than having politicians muzzle the geologist and try to put across the message that there's nothing to worry about.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This happened with Cholera! Read about how cholera's transmission was discovered. The british government at the time denied the science for decades before anything was put in place to stop hundreds/thousands of people from dying.
"John Snow and the Broad Street Pump" don't have the link sorry.
Politics, inertia, is definitely an enemy (if not always intentionally) of science.
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I will have to read this book; I want to see his methods and analysis section. It's hard to believe that the entrance of evangelicals into politics and their influence is not largely responsible for the rejection of global warming. You have only to consult a political map and a map of denierland to see that where evangelicals have power is the same territory as denierland.
Furthermore, the basic message of evangelicals - that "man's knowledge" is limited and wrong but what appears in the bible written in the Bronze Age by people who had a only pre-scientific understanding of the world available to them is right, directly prepares the ground for denial on ANY scientific matter whatsoever.
There's a direct line to be drawn from the anti-evolution and the "young earth" hypothesis.. err sorry that's "young earth certainty" and the rejection of science generally including the science behind AGW, a rejection with the capacity to deconstruct the basis of civilization despite who changes their minds about what later on or what anyone living through it wants to do about it then.
Sure, libertarian psychopaths like the Koch Brothers and the sociopaths who helped Philip Morris murder hundreds of millions of people (and yet they walk free) are behind the tactics and methods of the denier movement,
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/09/chart-climate-change-spin-cycle
and yes they're funding it also, but it couldn't carry the day if it were not for the millions of evangelicals and the much smaller number of sick dominionists who believe in creationism and self serving narcissistic theories like "the prosperity gospel" (god wants you to be rich!) etc. etc.
This culture of scientific rejectionism is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America and needs to be dealt with like the clear and present danger that it is.
Under what other lethal threat to not just the US's but to civilization itself, would we just stand by and do nothing? Would we do that if al Queda where in control of US politicians and a significant swath of the voting electorate?
The consequences for some events are so bad their eventuality has the power to re-write the rules of engagement, or more precisely, cause society to invoke and apply the existing rules of engagement in a manner which, while legal most people naturally find odious. But the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and it does provide the President - and by implication the direct action of the national security apparatus to its full effect under the Presidents' command - with the power to defend the nation against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Denierism is domestic terrorism in both intent- conspiracy:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/294714-1
and in effect-
http://global-warning.org/main/intelligence/
hundreds of millions dead and starving, billions homeless and wandering across borders, international chaos and lawlessness orders of magnitude larger than we have now, civil strife tending toward national disintegration and economic collapse.
It is an imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America and I call on the President of the United States to take ALL necessary measures to counter, undermine, disable, disband and otherwise stop the collective action of this group of American domestic terrorists using whatsoever force he deems necessary.... and may god have mercy on their souls.