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>If "progressive causes" == science backed causes, then go right ahead. No, "progressive causes" will be whatever is in vogue in the party. So anti-GMO with la

by hueving 10y ago

>If "progressive causes" == science backed causes, then go right ahead. No, "progressive causes" will be whatever is in vogue in the party. So anti-GMO with labeling campaigns and leverage the scientists to cast doubt on their safety would be very possible. Perhaps it will be to convince people that science has shown that people with more money are evil and should be jailed based on the UC Berkley study with the BMWs.

croon 10y ago
I of course can't know, but I estimate that about 0.1% of Bernie support were because of GMO labelling. The real question is WHY something is in vogue. Sure, money doesn't mean evil, but I have no trouble believing that money is the root of a ton of obviously bad policies and legislation. The healthcare, tax code, FCC points above, and many more.
redler 10y ago
Anti-vax lunacy trickles through both parties, and gets little mainstream traction (although that may change with Trump injecting oxygen into the movement). But if you're running as a pro-science Democrat who is not an anti-GMO bandwagoneer, you will generally not find yourself blackballed by the party or opposed on your flank by billionaire string-pullers obsessed with purity tests on this issue. The Democratic party does not have the same ideology enforcement infrastructure that so tightly binds the Republicans; that's a strength if you think monocultures are pathological, but a weakness if you're looking for lockstep execution of some received ideology. Accordingly, if a Democrat is in power and the findings of a science-based agency contradict some policy desire, they would sigh and fret and perhaps try to initiate other studies to see if there's any other way to align their policy goals with reality. But you would not see scientists and entire agencies of thousands of workers gagged, studies removed, data destroyed, conclusions banned. You would not see them scrambling to align reality with their goals and literally banning facts. It's little exaggeration to say the Trump administration is now engaged in book-burning. Whatever the flaws of the Democratic party, what's "in vogue" with the party is an epiphenomenon, not the driver. If you want to run as a pro-science non-religious Republican, you are desperately needed for the health of the US political system -- but you will almost certainly be structurally unable to do so.
- nonbel 10y ago
  >"Accordingly, if a Democrat is in power and the findings of a science-based agency contradict some policy desire, they would sigh and fret and perhaps try to initiate other studies to see if there's any other way to align their policy goals with reality. But you would not see scientists and entire agencies of thousands of workers gagged, studies removed, data destroyed, conclusions banned. You would not see them scrambling to align reality with their goals and literally banning facts. It's little exaggeration to say the Trump administration is now engaged in book-burning." So if one political party is in power they will ensure BS results are generated to support whatever they wanted to do anyway, if the other is in power they get rid of any results they don't like? Both strategies act to lower the signal/noise ratio, just by different means. One adds to the noise, the other removes the signal. Sounds like a great place to do research, the people funding it are actively creating obstacles for the scientist at every turn.
  - redler 10y ago
    No. Who said anything about BS results? One party is now actively erasing information they don't like -- information that is accepted by virtually every scientific body in the world. The Democrats as a whole will accept the results of science. Like anyone with a belief system, those results may disappoint them. They may not like them, and they may see if the conclusions are controvertible with respect to other studies. But they won't pretend they simply do not exist, and try to make them not exist for anyone else as well. They may grumble, as you might if you see the value of your stocks decline. But if your stocks decline, you don't declare them not to have declined, then outlaw historical stock charts, call downward movement of stock prices to be a conspiracy theory, and move to destroy stock markets around the world. The EPA, for example, is not some partisan claque of Democrats looking to vengefully squeeze cash flows and lower the value of Republicans' businesses. These are career staffers in their subject areas, scientists, policy makers and implementers -- people doing their jobs and coming to conclusions based on supporting data. But to the current GOP, the existence of an EPA itself is a partisan threat. It's worse than just removing studies they don't like. They want to remove the ability to do the science at all. And of course it's more than just the EPA in the crosshairs. They are presenting themselves as unwilling to accept scientific conclusions that do not align with their ideology. That's starting to look like a lot of banned science. With the current GOP, there is no "lessons learned" phase where policy is adjusted to meet scientific reality.
cderwin 10y ago
For what it's worth, when I wrote "progressive causes" in my original comment, I wasn't refer to things as black and white as the science on GMOs. I was referring to scientists using their scientific authority to make progressive claims on issues like abortion, or taxation, or anything else that ignores either (a) actual scientific evidence to the contrary or (b) the lack of scientific consensus on the issue at all. For example, there is significant disagreement within economics on, say, minimum wage. It would be an abuse of authority for an economist (for example, Paul Krugman) to claim we ought to raise the minimum wage because there is an economic consensus that we should do so, when in fact there is not and the said economist wants to raise minimum wage because it's a progressive cause. A good example of this in practice is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Rationalia" tweet[0] in response to the Brexit vote. He claims that a constitution should have just one line: "All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". He is implicitly appealing to authority by invoking the scientific method, and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU. The problem here isn't that scientists can be wrong: everyone knows that. The issue is that claims like these are becoming more and more common, and their gross effect is that the very institution of science has become tainted with progressive bias. [0] https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736?ref_...
- croon 10y ago
  > For example, there is significant disagreement within economics on, say, minimum wage. It would be an abuse of authority for an economist (for example, Paul Krugman) to claim we ought to raise the minimum wage because there is an economic consensus that we should do so, when in fact there is not and the said economist wants to raise minimum wage because it's a progressive cause. There is disagreement, but everything I've read has been more along the line of disagreements as to how severe the side effects were, but that they're almost exclusively weighted in favor of the upsides. Feel free to link me if you've read otherwise. And disagreement within science is good until you can have irrefutable proof (although apparently this can still be ignored). But having policy based on science even when disputed isn't bad. You can always change it according to new results/studies. > ...and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU. You say that, but can you though? I'm honestly considering the possibility that fact based politics has somehow been smeared as "progressive". Especially on public funding of science. That is something I can't even imagine a possible counter argument against. Sponsored science is at best extremely tricky, and most often simply tainted. I'm not a fan of deGrasse, but in this I can't help but agree with him. You're under the impression that him being "progressive" colors his views on science. I'm of the impression that it's the complete reversal.

by hueving 10y ago

croon 10y ago

I of course can't know, but I estimate that about 0.1% of Bernie support were because of GMO labelling. The real question is WHY something is in vogue. Sure, money doesn't mean evil, but I have no trouble believing that money is the root of a ton of obviously bad policies and legislation. The healthcare, tax code, FCC points above, and many more.

redler 10y ago

Anti-vax lunacy trickles through both parties, and gets little mainstream traction (although that may change with Trump injecting oxygen into the movement). But if you're running as a pro-science Democrat who is not an anti-GMO bandwagoneer, you will generally not find yourself blackballed by the party or opposed on your flank by billionaire string-pullers obsessed with purity tests on this issue. The Democratic party does not have the same ideology enforcement infrastructure that so tightly binds the Republicans; that's a strength if you think monocultures are pathological, but a weakness if you're looking for lockstep execution of some received ideology. Accordingly, if a Democrat is in power and the findings of a science-based agency contradict some policy desire, they would sigh and fret and perhaps try to initiate other studies to see if there's any other way to align their policy goals with reality. But you would not see scientists and entire agencies of thousands of workers gagged, studies removed, data destroyed, conclusions banned. You would not see them scrambling to align reality with their goals and literally banning facts. It's little exaggeration to say the Trump administration is now engaged in book-burning. Whatever the flaws of the Democratic party, what's "in vogue" with the party is an epiphenomenon, not the driver. If you want to run as a pro-science non-religious Republican, you are desperately needed for the health of the US political system -- but you will almost certainly be structurally unable to do so.

nonbel 10y ago
>"Accordingly, if a Democrat is in power and the findings of a science-based agency contradict some policy desire, they would sigh and fret and perhaps try to initiate other studies to see if there's any other way to align their policy goals with reality. But you would not see scientists and entire agencies of thousands of workers gagged, studies removed, data destroyed, conclusions banned. You would not see them scrambling to align reality with their goals and literally banning facts. It's little exaggeration to say the Trump administration is now engaged in book-burning." So if one political party is in power they will ensure BS results are generated to support whatever they wanted to do anyway, if the other is in power they get rid of any results they don't like? Both strategies act to lower the signal/noise ratio, just by different means. One adds to the noise, the other removes the signal. Sounds like a great place to do research, the people funding it are actively creating obstacles for the scientist at every turn.
- redler 10y ago
  No. Who said anything about BS results? One party is now actively erasing information they don't like -- information that is accepted by virtually every scientific body in the world. The Democrats as a whole will accept the results of science. Like anyone with a belief system, those results may disappoint them. They may not like them, and they may see if the conclusions are controvertible with respect to other studies. But they won't pretend they simply do not exist, and try to make them not exist for anyone else as well. They may grumble, as you might if you see the value of your stocks decline. But if your stocks decline, you don't declare them not to have declined, then outlaw historical stock charts, call downward movement of stock prices to be a conspiracy theory, and move to destroy stock markets around the world. The EPA, for example, is not some partisan claque of Democrats looking to vengefully squeeze cash flows and lower the value of Republicans' businesses. These are career staffers in their subject areas, scientists, policy makers and implementers -- people doing their jobs and coming to conclusions based on supporting data. But to the current GOP, the existence of an EPA itself is a partisan threat. It's worse than just removing studies they don't like. They want to remove the ability to do the science at all. And of course it's more than just the EPA in the crosshairs. They are presenting themselves as unwilling to accept scientific conclusions that do not align with their ideology. That's starting to look like a lot of banned science. With the current GOP, there is no "lessons learned" phase where policy is adjusted to meet scientific reality.

cderwin 10y ago

For what it's worth, when I wrote "progressive causes" in my original comment, I wasn't refer to things as black and white as the science on GMOs. I was referring to scientists using their scientific authority to make progressive claims on issues like abortion, or taxation, or anything else that ignores either (a) actual scientific evidence to the contrary or (b) the lack of scientific consensus on the issue at all. For example, there is significant disagreement within economics on, say, minimum wage. It would be an abuse of authority for an economist (for example, Paul Krugman) to claim we ought to raise the minimum wage because there is an economic consensus that we should do so, when in fact there is not and the said economist wants to raise minimum wage because it's a progressive cause. A good example of this in practice is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Rationalia" tweet[0] in response to the Brexit vote. He claims that a constitution should have just one line: "All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". He is implicitly appealing to authority by invoking the scientific method, and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU. The problem here isn't that scientists can be wrong: everyone knows that. The issue is that claims like these are becoming more and more common, and their gross effect is that the very institution of science has become tainted with progressive bias. [0] https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736?ref_...

croon 10y ago
> For example, there is significant disagreement within economics on, say, minimum wage. It would be an abuse of authority for an economist (for example, Paul Krugman) to claim we ought to raise the minimum wage because there is an economic consensus that we should do so, when in fact there is not and the said economist wants to raise minimum wage because it's a progressive cause. There is disagreement, but everything I've read has been more along the line of disagreements as to how severe the side effects were, but that they're almost exclusively weighted in favor of the upsides. Feel free to link me if you've read otherwise. And disagreement within science is good until you can have irrefutable proof (although apparently this can still be ignored). But having policy based on science even when disputed isn't bad. You can always change it according to new results/studies. > ...and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU. You say that, but can you though? I'm honestly considering the possibility that fact based politics has somehow been smeared as "progressive". Especially on public funding of science. That is something I can't even imagine a possible counter argument against. Sponsored science is at best extremely tricky, and most often simply tainted. I'm not a fan of deGrasse, but in this I can't help but agree with him. You're under the impression that him being "progressive" colors his views on science. I'm of the impression that it's the complete reversal.