5 ms·

"Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what's true." I am hoping that this was meant in jest. But if you look at some of the

by jawns 8y ago

"Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what's true." I am hoping that this was meant in jest. But if you look at some of the other comments in the article -- science should be funded through the government, industries that would otherwise contribute to scientific research should instead be taxed -- I'm not so sure how un-Big Brotherish these authors are. (Yes, obviously, the government already funds a good deal of science, but it sounds as if they're arguing that science funding should all be funneled through the government.)

tertius 8y ago
A good deal? The vast majority more like. The one variable here is that the private market does what it wants. So if government 'takes' a larger proportion of the funding 'market' it really means the private market chose. Now, making private research illegal...
- sandwall 8y ago
  That's getting deep... Industry has specific problems, scientific findings are often ancillary to other work, i.e. problem solving. Can't tell people to stop solving problems and making discoveries. Or can you???
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    If you setup payout structures such that research becomes obviously uneconomical, you can dramatically curtail private research. Examples might include: eliminating pharma patents or capping pharma prices to 2x the raw materials and manufacturing costs.
- rgbrenner 8y ago
  "A good deal? The vast majority more like." That just isn't true. The federal government funds no where near the majority of r&d, not even the majority of basic research. Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. ... Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country’s spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits. Those private sector efforts are now the dominant form of research activity in the United States, with business spending $3 on research for every $1 invested by the U.S. government. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-governm...
  - tertius 8y ago
    Some good data. I guess I was talking about funding research, not actually doing it. Research that is privately funded but published, as an example. Most of the research we're talking about from your data I assume is not published. I.e. not really research... (If I can go that far.) And I'm not trying to argue a technicality here to win an argument.
porpoisely 8y ago
They are a married couple working at UC Irvine who "been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old". They most likely are as extreme and as biased as any person could be.
- skh 8y ago
  Papers were published in the 1800s about the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on temperature. The physics behind this is straightforward. If the couple were truly worried about this at a young age wouldn’t that suggest some level of insight and a level of maturity on their part? That you think this most likely makes as extreme as a person can be says quite a bit about your own bias.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    Papers were published about global cooling a few decades ago. Papers were published about malthusian collapse. Papers were published saying tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, the physics of carbon dioxide on temperature is understood, but the physics of climate isn't so well understood. Hence why we don't have as great a model of it as we'd like. You can understand the concept of a bit without understanding how a system ( like the OS ) works. Also, the fact that you think a 5 year old kid read papers published in 1800s about carbon dioxide and started worrying about climate change shows your bias, not mine. A 5 year old kid worried about climate change or anti-vaccination or abortion debate or any of the hot-button political issues is someone who has been brainwashed by their parents or environment. I agree that climate change exists ( with or without humans ). I agree that humans contribute somewhat to it, but to what degree and to what ends, I know we have no clue. The only people with evangelical and zealous fervor ( on either side ) are pretty much anti-science agenda peddlers. I'm open to both sides and most importantly to fact and science. I have a feeling that you and these authors "converted" a long time a ago.
    - devonkim 8y ago
      While I can agree with your sentiment, the problem thus remains - what do we do in the face on uncertainty? If we aren’t really responsible terribly much we would be potentially wasting a lot of effort on the wrong problems (we’ll need to do this one anyway IMO - that climate change is happening and it’s a big deal) or do we spend capital and political effort on reducing our climate footprint? I don’t like either/or scenarios but laypersons in a lot of the US are increasingly frustrated with science (probably due to poor science education by default in the US) and are seeking more clearly communicated, stable answers from pop deacons.
oytis 8y ago
Historically philosophers were often at odds with the idea of democracy. Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. Modern philosophers are mostly pro-democratic for a number of reasons. They have to invent mental tricks to make democracy compatible with what they think is right. "Ministry of information" or separating voting (based on values) from decision making (based on facts) are examples of such tricks. IMO, if we value democracy, we'll have to agree that decisions taken democratically will sometimes be wrong. The only way to fix that without compromising the democracy, is to raise the level of an average citizen's education.
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Education isn't a cure all. Highly educated citizens can still be wrong en masse.
  - oytis 8y ago
    Well, if our education doesn't help people to be less wrong, then we need to improve it (that's what I mean by raising level of education, not just giving people diplomas). Or reconsider what we think is wrong.
  - gregknicholson 8y ago
    And it's not objective — one person's "education" is another person's "indoctrination".
- astazangasta 8y ago
  Plato was at odds with democracy. Zeno was not. Plato's Republic, shitty as it is, survived and is still widely read as a basic philosophy text. Zeno's Republic, written in response to Plato, was lost. Go figure.
- mistermann 8y ago
  > Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. It is also very frustrating when you think you discover what is true and what is false and have to deal with people who you think are not as smart as you are. The effects of this can be observed in social media discussions on both sides of the political divide, as well as in the words of the people in this article. It's funny watching how something said in jest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU) is turned into yet another meme about how conservatives are stupid, followed by a lecture about misinformation in media.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
In the 1950s and 1960s many developed nations had national science programmes that were much more than they are now. They didn't always capitalise on them to best effect (carbon fibre springs to mind here), despite having patents. Not always military either: Concorde, APT(Pendolino) and TGV, Ariane, hovercraft, nuclear etc. I'd link Wikipedia, but the entry on UK's National Research Development Corporation is comically short, and I can't find anything for the French equivalent on English wiki. Can't even remember the name of the equivalent US programme to link that. Nevertheless a lot of significant science and the products that stemmed from that, that wouldn't get done otherwise, came with government funding. It's a good part of the positive image of science in the immediate post war years. I would love to see some of those huge blue sky national science projects make a return. EDIT: Atrocious grammar.
- jawns 8y ago
  I don't think the concern is about government funding of science. I think the concern is about all science funding being funneled through the government. O'Connor says science should be funded either by "the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry" -- as if the government isn't influenced! Weatherall floats the idea of "taking the money [private organizations] would be spending and redirecting it [through taxes] to an organization that was selecting who was getting funded independently." In my mind, government funding is at least as capricious as industry funding. Government budgets related to science research get slashed all the time for reasons totally unrelated to the quality of the work being performed or its potential impact on society. So I think you can both be very strongly in favor of government funding of these national science projects (e.g. NASA) and yet very reluctant to have the government be the sole arbiter of what gets funded.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    It's not easy. Particularly for the US where NASA gives the only sizeable national science programme remaining. In the UK, and others, most of what there was got privatised. What's left is fractional contributions to ESA, CERN etc. Much less by percentage of GDP, leaving nearly all to be done by the private sector. Thing is, I suspect government in the 1960s could have set up an independent body to oversee science funding, that actually was independent, and had a level of trust by both scientists and the public. On both sides of the Atlantic, by either political party, though my knowledge of US is somewhat more limited. Today? I don't think I, or pretty much anyone, trusts either public or private. What's left? A BDFL? Well, first find the benevolent dictator I suppose, few of the current crop are benevolent. At which point I don't know how to fix it.
sandwall 8y ago
From a communication with O'Conner: "Please tell me the ministry of information was just a flippant remark -- I hope that you will never promote such an idea. It sounds great, in a world run by honest individuals. But, No - not ever - has humanity demonstrated that this would be a good idea." Her response: "Yes, of course a joke. I need to learn to be more careful on the record." -- Bad joke, but better than the alternative.
- jawns 8y ago
  Oh man. So there is some real irony here. The piece leads with the story about how Pete Hegseth declared that germs aren't real, and the interview begins with O'Conner and Weatherall joking about how people like Hegseth come to hold "wacky false beliefs." But Hegseth was asked about the remark and said of course it was a joke. So ... Hegseth makes a joke about science that O'Conner and Weatherall didn't perceive as a joke, and then O'Conner makes a joke about how a ministry of truth could help address the problem with people like Hegseth -- and that doesn't necessarily come off as a joke. I guess the key takeaway for all of us is that it can be easy to assume a joke is not a joke if doing so confirms some of our pre-existing views. So ... give people the benefit of the doubt until they erase all doubt?
  - sandwall 8y ago
    100% -- Awesome call out on confirmation bias. Definitely reserve judgement. I didn't blink at Hegseth's irrational remark, due to my own biases... excerpt from usa today: Hegseth says the joke is a call-out to germ obsessors to lighten up. "My half-hearted commentary to the point is, we live in a society where people walk around with bottles of Purell in their pockets, and they sanitize 19,000 times a day as if that’s going to save their life," he said. "I take care of myself and all that, but I don’t obsess over everything all the time."
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
A good example of how the result will look like is any US drug commercial: thirty seconds of smiling people holding a box of "Shititol" pills, then five minutes of a boring voice reading over a list of possible complications in legally precise, but humanly incomprehensible language. The truth is all here. Will it help though?
- RileyJames 8y ago
  Direct to consumer pharma advertising is a US phenomenon (and New Zealand apparently). So it seems like you’d be able to study the effects state by state against similar states in other countries to find out.
- coldtea 8y ago
  I'd forbid the fictional part of drug commercials No smiling people, no BS 3D animations "inside the body", no BS claims. Want to advertise a drug? Just post a "boring voice" style of what you drug does, what its name is, what the possible complications are, etc.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    You are right and in case of drugs that indeed may be the only way, as they did with cigarettes which can only be sold in a plain dirt-colored pack with a standardized typesetting. It may not work very well with news though: you cannot ban witness interviews, live reporting and other stuff which may get very colorful and emotional.

by jawns 8y ago

tertius 8y ago

A good deal? The vast majority more like. The one variable here is that the private market does what it wants. So if government 'takes' a larger proportion of the funding 'market' it really means the private market chose. Now, making private research illegal...

sandwall 8y ago
That's getting deep... Industry has specific problems, scientific findings are often ancillary to other work, i.e. problem solving. Can't tell people to stop solving problems and making discoveries. Or can you???
- sokoloff 8y ago
  If you setup payout structures such that research becomes obviously uneconomical, you can dramatically curtail private research. Examples might include: eliminating pharma patents or capping pharma prices to 2x the raw materials and manufacturing costs.
rgbrenner 8y ago
"A good deal? The vast majority more like." That just isn't true. The federal government funds no where near the majority of r&d, not even the majority of basic research. Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. ... Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country’s spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits. Those private sector efforts are now the dominant form of research activity in the United States, with business spending $3 on research for every $1 invested by the U.S. government. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-governm...
- tertius 8y ago
  Some good data. I guess I was talking about funding research, not actually doing it. Research that is privately funded but published, as an example. Most of the research we're talking about from your data I assume is not published. I.e. not really research... (If I can go that far.) And I'm not trying to argue a technicality here to win an argument.

porpoisely 8y ago

They are a married couple working at UC Irvine who "been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old". They most likely are as extreme and as biased as any person could be.

skh 8y ago
Papers were published in the 1800s about the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on temperature. The physics behind this is straightforward. If the couple were truly worried about this at a young age wouldn’t that suggest some level of insight and a level of maturity on their part? That you think this most likely makes as extreme as a person can be says quite a bit about your own bias.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  Papers were published about global cooling a few decades ago. Papers were published about malthusian collapse. Papers were published saying tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, the physics of carbon dioxide on temperature is understood, but the physics of climate isn't so well understood. Hence why we don't have as great a model of it as we'd like. You can understand the concept of a bit without understanding how a system ( like the OS ) works. Also, the fact that you think a 5 year old kid read papers published in 1800s about carbon dioxide and started worrying about climate change shows your bias, not mine. A 5 year old kid worried about climate change or anti-vaccination or abortion debate or any of the hot-button political issues is someone who has been brainwashed by their parents or environment. I agree that climate change exists ( with or without humans ). I agree that humans contribute somewhat to it, but to what degree and to what ends, I know we have no clue. The only people with evangelical and zealous fervor ( on either side ) are pretty much anti-science agenda peddlers. I'm open to both sides and most importantly to fact and science. I have a feeling that you and these authors "converted" a long time a ago.
  - devonkim 8y ago
    While I can agree with your sentiment, the problem thus remains - what do we do in the face on uncertainty? If we aren’t really responsible terribly much we would be potentially wasting a lot of effort on the wrong problems (we’ll need to do this one anyway IMO - that climate change is happening and it’s a big deal) or do we spend capital and political effort on reducing our climate footprint? I don’t like either/or scenarios but laypersons in a lot of the US are increasingly frustrated with science (probably due to poor science education by default in the US) and are seeking more clearly communicated, stable answers from pop deacons.

oytis 8y ago

Historically philosophers were often at odds with the idea of democracy. Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. Modern philosophers are mostly pro-democratic for a number of reasons. They have to invent mental tricks to make democracy compatible with what they think is right. "Ministry of information" or separating voting (based on values) from decision making (based on facts) are examples of such tricks. IMO, if we value democracy, we'll have to agree that decisions taken democratically will sometimes be wrong. The only way to fix that without compromising the democracy, is to raise the level of an average citizen's education.

ChrisSD 8y ago
Education isn't a cure all. Highly educated citizens can still be wrong en masse.
- oytis 8y ago
  Well, if our education doesn't help people to be less wrong, then we need to improve it (that's what I mean by raising level of education, not just giving people diplomas). Or reconsider what we think is wrong.
- gregknicholson 8y ago
  And it's not objective — one person's "education" is another person's "indoctrination".
astazangasta 8y ago
Plato was at odds with democracy. Zeno was not. Plato's Republic, shitty as it is, survived and is still widely read as a basic philosophy text. Zeno's Republic, written in response to Plato, was lost. Go figure.
mistermann 8y ago
> Once you discover what is true and what is false, it is very frustrating to have to deal with people who are not as smart as you are. It is also very frustrating when you think you discover what is true and what is false and have to deal with people who you think are not as smart as you are. The effects of this can be observed in social media discussions on both sides of the political divide, as well as in the words of the people in this article. It's funny watching how something said in jest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU) is turned into yet another meme about how conservatives are stupid, followed by a lecture about misinformation in media.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

In the 1950s and 1960s many developed nations had national science programmes that were much more than they are now. They didn't always capitalise on them to best effect (carbon fibre springs to mind here), despite having patents. Not always military either: Concorde, APT(Pendolino) and TGV, Ariane, hovercraft, nuclear etc. I'd link Wikipedia, but the entry on UK's National Research Development Corporation is comically short, and I can't find anything for the French equivalent on English wiki. Can't even remember the name of the equivalent US programme to link that. Nevertheless a lot of significant science and the products that stemmed from that, that wouldn't get done otherwise, came with government funding. It's a good part of the positive image of science in the immediate post war years. I would love to see some of those huge blue sky national science projects make a return. EDIT: Atrocious grammar.

jawns 8y ago
I don't think the concern is about government funding of science. I think the concern is about all science funding being funneled through the government. O'Connor says science should be funded either by "the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry" -- as if the government isn't influenced! Weatherall floats the idea of "taking the money [private organizations] would be spending and redirecting it [through taxes] to an organization that was selecting who was getting funded independently." In my mind, government funding is at least as capricious as industry funding. Government budgets related to science research get slashed all the time for reasons totally unrelated to the quality of the work being performed or its potential impact on society. So I think you can both be very strongly in favor of government funding of these national science projects (e.g. NASA) and yet very reluctant to have the government be the sole arbiter of what gets funded.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  It's not easy. Particularly for the US where NASA gives the only sizeable national science programme remaining. In the UK, and others, most of what there was got privatised. What's left is fractional contributions to ESA, CERN etc. Much less by percentage of GDP, leaving nearly all to be done by the private sector. Thing is, I suspect government in the 1960s could have set up an independent body to oversee science funding, that actually was independent, and had a level of trust by both scientists and the public. On both sides of the Atlantic, by either political party, though my knowledge of US is somewhat more limited. Today? I don't think I, or pretty much anyone, trusts either public or private. What's left? A BDFL? Well, first find the benevolent dictator I suppose, few of the current crop are benevolent. At which point I don't know how to fix it.

sandwall 8y ago

From a communication with O'Conner: "Please tell me the ministry of information was just a flippant remark -- I hope that you will never promote such an idea. It sounds great, in a world run by honest individuals. But, No - not ever - has humanity demonstrated that this would be a good idea." Her response: "Yes, of course a joke. I need to learn to be more careful on the record." -- Bad joke, but better than the alternative.

jawns 8y ago
Oh man. So there is some real irony here. The piece leads with the story about how Pete Hegseth declared that germs aren't real, and the interview begins with O'Conner and Weatherall joking about how people like Hegseth come to hold "wacky false beliefs." But Hegseth was asked about the remark and said of course it was a joke. So ... Hegseth makes a joke about science that O'Conner and Weatherall didn't perceive as a joke, and then O'Conner makes a joke about how a ministry of truth could help address the problem with people like Hegseth -- and that doesn't necessarily come off as a joke. I guess the key takeaway for all of us is that it can be easy to assume a joke is not a joke if doing so confirms some of our pre-existing views. So ... give people the benefit of the doubt until they erase all doubt?
- sandwall 8y ago
  100% -- Awesome call out on confirmation bias. Definitely reserve judgement. I didn't blink at Hegseth's irrational remark, due to my own biases... excerpt from usa today: Hegseth says the joke is a call-out to germ obsessors to lighten up. "My half-hearted commentary to the point is, we live in a society where people walk around with bottles of Purell in their pockets, and they sanitize 19,000 times a day as if that’s going to save their life," he said. "I take care of myself and all that, but I don’t obsess over everything all the time."

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

A good example of how the result will look like is any US drug commercial: thirty seconds of smiling people holding a box of "Shititol" pills, then five minutes of a boring voice reading over a list of possible complications in legally precise, but humanly incomprehensible language. The truth is all here. Will it help though?

RileyJames 8y ago
Direct to consumer pharma advertising is a US phenomenon (and New Zealand apparently). So it seems like you’d be able to study the effects state by state against similar states in other countries to find out.
coldtea 8y ago
I'd forbid the fictional part of drug commercials No smiling people, no BS 3D animations "inside the body", no BS claims. Want to advertise a drug? Just post a "boring voice" style of what you drug does, what its name is, what the possible complications are, etc.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  You are right and in case of drugs that indeed may be the only way, as they did with cigarettes which can only be sold in a plain dirt-colored pack with a standardized typesetting. It may not work very well with news though: you cannot ban witness interviews, live reporting and other stuff which may get very colorful and emotional.