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No. Stop it. Funding is, science isn't. There's an effective debate tactic where attackers DDoS the other side with innocent questions about their premises. As

• nikofeyn 7y ago
  how exact do you separate the two? without funding, science doesn’t happen? and this article is covering a specific viewpoint, but how people do science can certainly be political (and is).
  • scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
    People can still do science on their own. Grant giving institutions as a driver of science is a relatively recent phenomenon. There's nothing wrong with a garage laboratory to test your ideas so long as you document your methodology so it can be repeated by others and scrutinized for following the scientific method.
  • atoav 7y ago
    I think discussing a tangential discussion is enlighting: Is there such a thing as unpolitical art? You will find the intuition to consider art with political statements as political and art without as unpolitical. But art operates in an status quo, so can it even be unpolitical? Are the shiny baloon-like sculptures produced by questionably paid interns of Jeff Koons unpolitical? Is a painter who depicts the most idyllic sceneries in a starving country apolitical? You quickly realize, that trying not to taking part in political things is itself political in a way. But what about science? Is it political to speak the truth? Yeah, quite much. People have been killed for telling the truth. It takes a very nasty social climate for the truth to become political, but it can become political and when it does, speaking truth becomes as political as denying it. We have this reflex to say: “but if it is political it is less legitimate”, but forget that any action that shapes society in a meaningful way is political — be it intentional or not. You can do the most neutral climate science in the world and base everything on proof and facts and your words will still be political in a world where some fractions deny it. Your goal just isn’t power then, but to speak truth.
• roenxi 7y ago
  Some science is clearly political and other science is clearly not. It is important to keep as much original evidence in the open as possible (without abstracting it away behind rules and principles) so it can be challenged. That all being said, I'm not sure this really goes to the article; which seems to be more about how the capitalists were more effective at managing a complicated relationship with truth and reality than the communists, and that was an advantage for them.
  • atoav 7y ago
    > Some science is clearly political and other science is clearly not So the politicalness of something is based on the intention? I’d like to challenge that idea. Imagine you are a nuclear scientist in the brink of cold war. Your interests are purely scientific and you don’t care about all that political talk. You got a nice life. If you decide to work on nuclear fission you aid the government and are thus political if you don’t want to aid the government you are political as well. In that situation every choice is political because your actions have a huge impact on society. Other example: you work on image recognition algorithms used in CCTV cameras, which are used in different ways around the world and nudge societies they are used in into certain directions. Even if you don’t know where these societies are nudged into and your single goal is truth — is what you do apolitical? The person I write about here would say “Yes” without hessitation, but is that really so? As long as you science/art/etc impacts society in a meaningful way, you will have that question. Confirming the status quo is just as political as questioning it.
    • neltnerb 7y ago
      I would say that an interest may be "purely scientific", but if you don't consider the impact of your work then that in itself is a political stance. Your position is that your scientific curiosity is more important than the impact of your discoveries on others. It's not a great look. Doing the work implies that a researcher has considered the impact of what they're looking at to the extent they feel it is important, and concluded that it is in line with their values to move forward. What those values are is the politics. Certainly they can make mistakes, if their intent was good but they were naive about the usage because they simply didn't grasp it, it's hard to think they're bad people. If they don't bother to consider impacts, that's a position as well... but it's not neutral.
• goto11 7y ago
  Maybe in a very strict sense that the data points observed from a properly setup scientific experiment are not political per se. But even what experiments scientists decide to perform and what to observe can be political, and this is definitely also a part of "science".
• parsimo2010 7y ago
  Your comment needs a little more nuance. Funding is part of the overall practice of science, and research cannot happen in a vacuum. Facts are not political. Science involves people coming up with research plans, getting funding, conducting the research, and reporting results. Even though facts are not political, many important scientific findings can be debated. Very little of our body of knowledge is verifiable by the general population. You can verify gravitational acceleration and atmospheric drag by self experimentation, but have you ever tried to verify how many electrons are in the outer shell of a particular element? We teach the periodic table of elements to high schoolers as fact, but if a student claims that titanium has eight electrons in its outer shell most chemistry teachers are going to have a hard time proving otherwise. This lack of verifiability leaves a bunch of room for political maneuvering. Add in the fact that scientists are still human, and are just as morally corrupt as other humans. Being a scientist doesn't come with a magic aura of justice and credibility. Falsification of data in the hopes of getting published tarnishes the reputation of scientists worldwide- who is to say that others aren't also falsifying their data to favor their funding source? If a scientist can be doubted then their findings can be debated, which politicians will certainly do when it suits them. You have to get your results published, or else you won't get funded for future research, and a group of editors controls the access to the important journals in each field. Those editors usually have a common political bias, as did most researcher's professors, because once a bias is established in a field it tends to reinforce itself. So I'll reword your comment to be "the practice of science is political, but facts are not." Unfortunately so little of our life falls to the realm of verifiable facts.