9 ms·

I stand corrected then. I wonder why for a cohort that doesn't believe in science.

by sg47 6y ago

jvreagan 6y ago
Perhaps your assumption is flawed.
JamesBarney 6y ago
That's a gross over simplification of the Republican view point. Both sides have blind spots. Republicans on climate change, Democrats on other things like nuclear for instance.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Getting back to you on IPCC energy modalities risks, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24150323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24150323 Found a mention in an earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241142 Source seems to be: Methodology, starting at p. 993: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Annex_II.pdf http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Annex_II.pdf And p. 845 (I think, "745" is clearly a typo): http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch10.pdf http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch10.pdf
svrb 6y ago
Unfortunately you don't seem to stand corrected, as you're still declaring the same assumptions you had in the first place!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brandonmenc 6y ago
Plenty of Republicans "believe in science." You're probably confusing science with policy. You may be surprised that: - Republicans are only like "20% more religious" than Democrats - Over half of Republicans believe the scientific method produces accurate conclusions - Nearly a third of Democrats don't believe the scientific method produces accurate conclusions https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-affiliation/ https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-aff... https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/09/democrats-and-republicans-role-scientists-policy-debates/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/09/democrats-a...
- notJim 6y ago
  To elaborate on the policy part, in the second poll linked, majorities of Republicans are opposed to scientists being involved in making policy.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    "scientists’ judgments are just as subject to bias as anyone else’s judgments" I'm not sure I disagree. (And the Republican and Democratic polling numbers are only about 10 points apart.)
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    To be fair, this is following a period of time which saw Democrats funding a lot of "scientific research" structured to study things like "would reducing the number of guns reduce gun violence" etc. Which is a foregone conclusion in the same way that reducing the number of red cars would reduce the number of collisions involving red cars. It's a government-funded study structured in such a way as to produce a "scientific result" convenient to the politics of the party funding the study, rather than e.g. a cost/benefit analysis of all the possible solutions to reduce violent crime. It's not overly surprising that the response from Republicans was to become skeptical and demand for that to stop happening.
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      Which is unfortunate, since such social policy matters relatively little to the future of our nation and world when compared to, say, policy informed by climate science.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        It's the same disease that leads to "if a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric." The purpose of science is to give you answers to questions you didn't already have. But it's hard enough to avoid things like selection bias even when you're acting in good faith. If you start using it to work backwards from a political platform to determine which questions you want to ask to lead to the policies you decided on ahead of time, the thing you're doing is the reverse of making policy based on science. It's manufacturing "science" based on politics. Which isn't actually science. If you knew the conclusion of a study before it was conducted, its conclusion provides no new support for your position. This kind of implies that if we want actual science, we can't have politicians deciding what to study, and we can't have scientists getting fired for their conclusions no matter how politically inconvenient they are.
erikerikson 6y ago
You may need to get to know more Republicans. Yes, they host a fair bit of anti-climate science sentiment. Democrats host a fair bit of homeopathic sentiment. Both persuasions include competent scientists. Republicans are no more unidimensional than Democrats. In my observation, the conversations between them are far more tribal fueding than epistemological clarification: epistemology is just a prop. It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance.
- cure 6y ago
  > It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance. That's a reasonable point I agree with. But you're just practicing bothsideism here. It is quite obvious that the ones throwing everyone under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance are the Republicans. Pretty much every Republican policy is a form of "screw the poor, screw the planet, it's all fine as long as I become richer". Sometimes it's a bit disguised but it's often quite blatant. For example, all the gutting of regulations at the EPA so that the coal industry can keep polluting to their hearts content.
  - RhysU 6y ago
    It's quite clearly not limited to one party. Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term.
    - cure 6y ago
      > Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term. Let me fix that for you: ... that pro-climate folks believe will help EVERYONE short to medium-term. As in, stopping the burning of coal will slow the rate of climate change, which will keep our planet more habitable. For example, avoid having the bulk of Florida underwater in a few decades. Avoid ever more powerful storms, forest fires, droughts, floods. Calling this 'throwing the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus to help themselves' is disingenuous. Again, this is just bothsideism. Because those pro-climate people also tend to be Democrats, who are the ones who actually care about providing enough unemployment assistance to allow people to live while they are looking for work. Who fund programs that allow people to learn new skills so they can start new careers. Republicans are the ones cutting benefits, from SCHIP to regular unemployment benefits, and are going out of their way to make getting benefits as incompatible as possible with the daily life of someone struggling to get by. Have you looked at the hoops that some of the red states make the poor and unemployed jump through? And finally, Democrats want to provide high quality, affordable health care for everyone, not just those people rich enough to afford it, which is the Republican platform. Coal mining is an unhealthy job. Are the coal companies going to pay for all the health care retired miners need?
rangoon626 6y ago
It was always elitist leftist “environmentalists” who were anti-nuke. They were the ones who bought into Malthusian systems that believed that the world would be over populated if nuclear energy ever reached widespread deployment. They pushed this narrative to gullible hippy “environmentalists”, who swayed public opinion and, whoops, accidentally caused us to burn another 50 years worth of coal. Yeah, “fight the man” sure felt good at the time. YEAH! 50 years of improvements to nuclear power has been lost to this nonsense. Everyone today should be absolutely livid over what happened.
- cure 6y ago
  > Everyone today should be absolutely livid over what happened. Why? Perhaps additional serious nuclear accidents (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...) were avoided because nuclear plants were never built.
  - sigotirandolas 6y ago
    Almost certainly nuclear accidents & other externalities were avoided. But would those have been more costly than the costs of fossil fuels (e.g. international conflicts, tens or hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2, many other contaminants, oil spills, etc.)?
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      We will never know. Stop acting like you know the wrong decision was made because the sports team you bet against made it.
      - sigotirandolas 6y ago
        ...I am not even American.
schoen 6y ago
"Doesn't believe in science" is pretty reductionist here. Most Democrats and Republicans, like everyone else, is operating with heuristics about which risks are especially salient and concerning. Those heuristics are influenced by social biases. Democrats are more likely to be enthusiastic about the practice of science than Republicans, but that doesn't mean that Democrats always carefully and dispassionately weigh risks as estimated by scientists, or that Republicans always learn about scientists' suggestions and then do the exact opposite. One thing that you're seeing here is that Republicans have a social bias toward seeing industry and products of industry as not that risky, while Democrats have a reverse bias. In some cases (like nuclear energy and genetic engineering) the Republicans' bias may help them, while in others (like fossil fuels) the Democrats' bias may help them.
- RhysU 6y ago
  Have sources on claims in the last two paragraphs?
  - schoen 6y ago
    I don't think so -- which parts are you wondering about?
    - RhysU 6y ago
      The enthusiasm and social bias claims.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
You may have unfortunately fell for a CNN meme, American political parties both ignore science when it goes against their gut feelings.
StreamBright 6y ago
Well here is another example for you: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-la-schools-vaccination-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-l... I think your assumption which cohort does not believe in science is not accurate entirely.
nautilus12 6y ago
Cohort that doesn't believe in science?? I think you need to examine your assumptions (generalizations)
dang 6y ago
Would you please stop posting political flamebait to HN? You've unfortunately been doing this a lot lately, which is not good. We don't want political flamewars here, or any flamewars—they're repetitive, tedious, and nasty. Even if the rest of the world descends into hell, this site has a different mandate, and people here need to use it as intended. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I stand corrected then. I wonder why for a cohort that doesn't believe in science.

by sg47 6y ago

I stand corrected then. I wonder why for a cohort that doesn't believe in science.

jvreagan 6y ago

Perhaps your assumption is flawed.

JamesBarney 6y ago

That's a gross over simplification of the Republican view point. Both sides have blind spots. Republicans on climate change, Democrats on other things like nuclear for instance.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Getting back to you on IPCC energy modalities risks, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24150323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24150323 Found a mention in an earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241142 Source seems to be: Methodology, starting at p. 993: http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Annex_II.pdf http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Annex_II.pdf And p. 845 (I think, "745" is clearly a typo): http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch10.pdf http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch10.pdf

svrb 6y ago

Unfortunately you don't seem to stand corrected, as you're still declaring the same assumptions you had in the first place!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brandonmenc 6y ago

Plenty of Republicans "believe in science." You're probably confusing science with policy. You may be surprised that: - Republicans are only like "20% more religious" than Democrats - Over half of Republicans believe the scientific method produces accurate conclusions - Nearly a third of Democrats don't believe the scientific method produces accurate conclusions https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-affiliation/ https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-aff... https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/09/democrats-and-republicans-role-scientists-policy-debates/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/09/democrats-a...

notJim 6y ago
To elaborate on the policy part, in the second poll linked, majorities of Republicans are opposed to scientists being involved in making policy.
- ghaff 6y ago
  "scientists’ judgments are just as subject to bias as anyone else’s judgments" I'm not sure I disagree. (And the Republican and Democratic polling numbers are only about 10 points apart.)
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  To be fair, this is following a period of time which saw Democrats funding a lot of "scientific research" structured to study things like "would reducing the number of guns reduce gun violence" etc. Which is a foregone conclusion in the same way that reducing the number of red cars would reduce the number of collisions involving red cars. It's a government-funded study structured in such a way as to produce a "scientific result" convenient to the politics of the party funding the study, rather than e.g. a cost/benefit analysis of all the possible solutions to reduce violent crime. It's not overly surprising that the response from Republicans was to become skeptical and demand for that to stop happening.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    Which is unfortunate, since such social policy matters relatively little to the future of our nation and world when compared to, say, policy informed by climate science.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      It's the same disease that leads to "if a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric." The purpose of science is to give you answers to questions you didn't already have. But it's hard enough to avoid things like selection bias even when you're acting in good faith. If you start using it to work backwards from a political platform to determine which questions you want to ask to lead to the policies you decided on ahead of time, the thing you're doing is the reverse of making policy based on science. It's manufacturing "science" based on politics. Which isn't actually science. If you knew the conclusion of a study before it was conducted, its conclusion provides no new support for your position. This kind of implies that if we want actual science, we can't have politicians deciding what to study, and we can't have scientists getting fired for their conclusions no matter how politically inconvenient they are.

erikerikson 6y ago

You may need to get to know more Republicans. Yes, they host a fair bit of anti-climate science sentiment. Democrats host a fair bit of homeopathic sentiment. Both persuasions include competent scientists. Republicans are no more unidimensional than Democrats. In my observation, the conversations between them are far more tribal fueding than epistemological clarification: epistemology is just a prop. It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance.

cure 6y ago
> It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance. That's a reasonable point I agree with. But you're just practicing bothsideism here. It is quite obvious that the ones throwing everyone under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance are the Republicans. Pretty much every Republican policy is a form of "screw the poor, screw the planet, it's all fine as long as I become richer". Sometimes it's a bit disguised but it's often quite blatant. For example, all the gutting of regulations at the EPA so that the coal industry can keep polluting to their hearts content.
- RhysU 6y ago
  It's quite clearly not limited to one party. Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term.
  - cure 6y ago
    > Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term. Let me fix that for you: ... that pro-climate folks believe will help EVERYONE short to medium-term. As in, stopping the burning of coal will slow the rate of climate change, which will keep our planet more habitable. For example, avoid having the bulk of Florida underwater in a few decades. Avoid ever more powerful storms, forest fires, droughts, floods. Calling this 'throwing the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus to help themselves' is disingenuous. Again, this is just bothsideism. Because those pro-climate people also tend to be Democrats, who are the ones who actually care about providing enough unemployment assistance to allow people to live while they are looking for work. Who fund programs that allow people to learn new skills so they can start new careers. Republicans are the ones cutting benefits, from SCHIP to regular unemployment benefits, and are going out of their way to make getting benefits as incompatible as possible with the daily life of someone struggling to get by. Have you looked at the hoops that some of the red states make the poor and unemployed jump through? And finally, Democrats want to provide high quality, affordable health care for everyone, not just those people rich enough to afford it, which is the Republican platform. Coal mining is an unhealthy job. Are the coal companies going to pay for all the health care retired miners need?

rangoon626 6y ago

It was always elitist leftist “environmentalists” who were anti-nuke. They were the ones who bought into Malthusian systems that believed that the world would be over populated if nuclear energy ever reached widespread deployment. They pushed this narrative to gullible hippy “environmentalists”, who swayed public opinion and, whoops, accidentally caused us to burn another 50 years worth of coal. Yeah, “fight the man” sure felt good at the time. YEAH! 50 years of improvements to nuclear power has been lost to this nonsense. Everyone today should be absolutely livid over what happened.

cure 6y ago
> Everyone today should be absolutely livid over what happened. Why? Perhaps additional serious nuclear accidents (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...) were avoided because nuclear plants were never built.
- sigotirandolas 6y ago
  Almost certainly nuclear accidents & other externalities were avoided. But would those have been more costly than the costs of fossil fuels (e.g. international conflicts, tens or hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2, many other contaminants, oil spills, etc.)?
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    We will never know. Stop acting like you know the wrong decision was made because the sports team you bet against made it.
    - sigotirandolas 6y ago
      ...I am not even American.

schoen 6y ago

"Doesn't believe in science" is pretty reductionist here. Most Democrats and Republicans, like everyone else, is operating with heuristics about which risks are especially salient and concerning. Those heuristics are influenced by social biases. Democrats are more likely to be enthusiastic about the practice of science than Republicans, but that doesn't mean that Democrats always carefully and dispassionately weigh risks as estimated by scientists, or that Republicans always learn about scientists' suggestions and then do the exact opposite. One thing that you're seeing here is that Republicans have a social bias toward seeing industry and products of industry as not that risky, while Democrats have a reverse bias. In some cases (like nuclear energy and genetic engineering) the Republicans' bias may help them, while in others (like fossil fuels) the Democrats' bias may help them.

RhysU 6y ago
Have sources on claims in the last two paragraphs?
- schoen 6y ago
  I don't think so -- which parts are you wondering about?
  - RhysU 6y ago
    The enthusiasm and social bias claims.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

You may have unfortunately fell for a CNN meme, American political parties both ignore science when it goes against their gut feelings.

StreamBright 6y ago

Well here is another example for you: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-la-schools-vaccination-rates-are-as-low-as-south-sudans/380252/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/wealthy-l... I think your assumption which cohort does not believe in science is not accurate entirely.

nautilus12 6y ago

Cohort that doesn't believe in science?? I think you need to examine your assumptions (generalizations)

dang 6y ago

Would you please stop posting political flamebait to HN? You've unfortunately been doing this a lot lately, which is not good. We don't want political flamewars here, or any flamewars—they're repetitive, tedious, and nasty. Even if the rest of the world descends into hell, this site has a different mandate, and people here need to use it as intended. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html