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The Peril of Politicizing Science [pdf]

186 points by vikrum 5y ago

bobbytit 5y ago
Globalists have destroyed confidence in science with their climate scam. It is religion, not science.
ardit33 5y ago
This is a sign of being of too many people studying social sciences and other useless/pseudoscientific majors, that have nothing else to do but create moral panics and problems that are non-existent. If you are not useful, the only way to feel some sense of importance by creating noise. Taxpayers should not be funding these idiocies
- dang 5y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines by calling names (lots of them) and adding flamebait (lots of it). Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Agree or disagree, the OP is substantive and thoughtful and deserves much better than what you posted here. Not only that, but threads are sensitive to initial conditions. Rushing into a new thread with a denunciatory quickie risks destroying the entire thread and is therefore particularly bad.
- xmprt 5y ago
  People working in these areas are why we have things like 5 day work weeks (instead of having to work 6 or 7 days) and human rights. Why do you find them useless?
jchw 5y ago
The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge. Convincing people that this is what people always believe and yet it has never been true seems impossible. It seems difficult for people to imagine that there's more left to discuss. What I'd rather do is try to convince people that it's wrong to apply this kind of ideological control regardless of whether or not you think it's correct. But that's hard, because if it was correct, and people do earnestly believe it is, then what do they have to lose? I also think that dishonest portrayals of even recent history are a huge problem for understanding that a lot of the moral conundrums we have today are not new. It's mostly the sensationalism and moral panics that are always changing.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking. Always was true always will be. I think it's cause: 1. Arrogance 2. Dead people take blame very well, and can't really argue back.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    Yes and 3. There's an element of group belonging in a collective righteousness. And that's definitely not unique to the present.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    > The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking. That's also the reasoning the communists and the National Socialists used in their reasoning; turns out they were faced with the same problems their predecessors had to deal with but they didn't really have better solutions. In the end the people paid because it was more important to save face than to admit being wrong.
  - api 5y ago
    Or maybe it’s always true, at least on average over long time spans. I’ve always thought that if your children think they are wiser than you it means you have been an excellent parent. If they look back with awe at your superior wisdom, it means things got worse and you perhaps failed to leave a legacy.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  > "The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge." If they claim to be on the left, point out to them that that type of worldview is actually a form of conservatism. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Traditionalist conservatism places a strong emphasis on the notions of custom, convention, and tradition." and note that "customs [and] convention" is the same as the "social norms" argument trotted out by the modern left to defend their activities.
kurthr 5y ago
It seems like this has been with us since there has been science, certainly Galileo paid a certain price and many others paid a price for Lysenkoism. It's certainly sad what can be done "in the name of science" and in denial of science (or service of psuedoscience). I agree with the author's discussion of the complexity of individuals, their beliefs, and their contributions. The desire to simplify a narrative about a person's value or intent common and even effective, but still dangerous. That can be a simplification mores over different times or cultures. One of the best cures I've seen is travel (outside your cultural sphere), but that's not likely to be universally available any time soon. What I don't really see is that scientists themselves share a greatly disproportionate responsibility or blame for the current situation, which seems historically fraught. Media (social and otherwise), "news", and advertising on the other hand...
umvi 5y ago
For some reason I thought just the living conditions in the Soviet Union were bad; I didn't realize 1984 (the book) is literally modeled after Stalinist Russia. I always assumed thought policing was just a theoretical construct of a technological dystopian future, I didn't know the Soviet government actually did it for decades - and to their best and brightest scientists and thinkers! Interesting article, and interesting parallels to our day. Luckily most of the parallels in modern society are reflected in social media mobs and not the government itself (or we would be in very deep trouble), but it's still a bit disturbing how much power said social media mobs seem to wield over corporations and politicians.
- ardit33 5y ago
  Orwell was initially a socialist sympathizer (went to spain during the spanish civil war), but after the Soviet Union went through major purges in the 30s, and the USSR (bad) treatment of other countries and major ethnic forced relocations inside USSR, he might have had a change of heart later on. He opposed totalitarianism in general, and after the defeat of nazism, he started seeing communism as evil/bad. He worked for communications in the BBC during WW2, and had first hand experience with the language censoring of the time, especially of communication towards British colonies at the time.
  - nickff 5y ago
    My understanding is that the NKVD’s purges of Republicans in Spain was what first alarmed Orwell. I believe that he had to escape ‘warrants’ out for his assassination on his way out of Spain.
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      Right. Read "Homage to Catalonia" for Orwell's own story.
  - spats1990 5y ago
    >had a change of heart later on. He certainly did. Toward the end of his life he produced a list of notable people in the UK and US whom he believed to be Stalinist sympathizers, foreign agents, communists, etc, and passed it to a British Foreign Office employee. Charlie Chaplain was on it, among others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list
wffurr 5y ago
Who exactly are the totalitarian rulers sending people to the gulag or executing them for continuing to say "strawman argument"? What an incredibly strained analogy this all is.
- umvi 5y ago
  The author is pointing out parallels between the way our society is trending in terms of ideological control, and similar things that happened in the USSR. Your argument amounts to "the US government hasn't rounded up political/ideological dissidents and murdered them yet so this article is flawed" which seems a bit dismissive. Two triangles can be similar even if one is an order of magnitude bigger than the other.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    The author is essentially saying that being asked to use respectful language makes her university administrator Joseph Stalin. Cherry-picking a few examples, stating "I am not personally offended by these so obviously no one could be", and using that to claim "Social Justice (note the capitals) has gone TOO FAR", does not a good argument make. It's a bit beyond "similar triangles". First they ask us to stop saying "master/slave architecture". Next it's FORCED FARM LABOR. It's a non-sequitur.
    - etangent 5y ago
      The next step isn't "forced farm labor," that would indeed be a non-sequitur. A most likely next step is putting someone in jail over a tweet (already happening in the United Kingdom). It takes three or four more steps to get to forced farm labor.
      - KittenInABox 5y ago
        Seriously asking: How can putting someone in jail over a tweet be closer to forced farm labor when the united states already has forced farm labor (see below for link)? How can we simultaneously be approaching something and also already there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm
i_love_limes 5y ago
I am just an interested layman, but I have found Historians as prime examples of academics who get this balance right. This, to me, seems to be because they have to squarely level with their own biases and preconceived ideas of what they are studying from the outset. Once that is addressed upfront (whether it is personal preference, or cultural bias/context), the authors are able to both express themselves more freely as well as be more critical of their own perspective. I think other social sciences researchers are more OK with this idea, and unfortunately STEM researchers seem to go out of their way to assume they have no perspectives or biases, as the assumption is that 'pure research' is unable to be tainted by such things. To expose my own personal bias, I find this article to be very heavy handed and reactionary.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I think it's probably relevant that Historians don't actually claim to be "science" at all... I'm not being sarcastic, I think that's probably helpful for remembering your fallibility.
- xunn0026 5y ago
  In my experience historians are quite interested in politics and many end up going into politics. Studying history is almost like a macro study in politics.
cgrealy 5y ago
There are undoubtedly massive dangers to politicising science. But personally, I am far more concerned with lobbied interests persuading politicians that climate change is a hoax, or with idiots deciding that masks and vaccinations are something you can make your own mind up about. These are real problems with substantial negative outcomes. Whether we stop naming things after Nazis or pedophiles is lower on my list of priorities.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  One follows from the other. If you politicize science, then I have no reason to listen when you claim that science supports your position.
  - dluan 5y ago
    Do you actually think science isn't political?
    - cgrealy 5y ago
      Given that a lot of science gets funded by the government, of course it's political. Was just listening to a podcast yesterday about the attempts to develop an AIDS vaccine. It was definitely not prioritized in the early days because it was viewed as a "lifestyle disease". https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvhkd5k/presenting-not-past-it-the-vax-that-got https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvhkd5k/presenting-... Obviously the decision as to what gets researched is going to be at least partially political.. there's a finite amount of money to split between NASA and the CDC for example. But it would be really nice if results weren't politicised.
    - Levitz 5y ago
      Everything is political to a degree, that doesn't mean we have to accept the degree at which it is political, the author shows quite a few examples of how that can become a problem.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    Presumably the reverse is also true: if I claim science supports my position then you'll say I'm politicizing science?
fatcat500 5y ago
The people who are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge are doing so off of the moral, social, and cultural capital accrued by previous generations of scientists. The assumption that the general public will always perceive science with a reverent and trusting eye is wrong: once the capital runs out, science will be perceived as just another tentacle of the establishment. Politicizing scientific language is a surefire way of accelerating this process. This is what has already happened with the MSM, of course.
- KSteffensen 5y ago
  > are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge I don't understand the problem here. Isn't science - as in Poppers falsifiability - the only way to legitimize knowledge?
  - zefool 5y ago
    I expect GP to have thought along the lines of "established journals, academic titles, and prestigious universities", aka "the institutions of organized academia". And other signals that one belongs to these groups, like the aforementioned "scientific language". Which is what most people use as the actual heuristics of competence, including journalists and politicians. GP seems to believe that this heuristic will cease to be accepted if things continue, just like "being a religious authority" ceased to be an accepted heuristic for moral authority in many communities. I agree that this is a problem, since going back to the substrate of hypothesis and experiment is just not very efficient. We need institutions like those.
bena 5y ago
The peril of noting the peril of politicizing science is that that itself will be politicized. There's going to be some number on either side of the issue that genuinely don't believe they're politicizing the issue, they're just right. If I were to say the sun rises in the east, that would be just objectively correct. If the Penguin Party were to say that it instead rises in the west and not accepting their belief is politicizing the issue, then what are my options here? Sure there are probably those in the Penguin Party who know the sun doesn't actually rise in the west. But toe the party line, because it antagonizes the other party. And they know that there are those out there who actually believe it. And now they join the Penguin Party because here's a major group that is validating their existence. But there are both Democrats and Republicans who believe the other party is the Penguin Party. They believe they are right. And they believe the other party is led by people who are telling people lies just to garner support. Which leads all of us, down here, back to where we started. And as long as there's support to be had for pushing a fantasy, there's going to be some unscrupulous people who are going to do it. I don't think it can be avoided.
dluan 5y ago
> "In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and was himself canceled (see Figure 1)." lol
- ls-lah_33 5y ago
  Yeah, I had a laugh there as well. The author's equivocation between cancel culture and Stalinist censorship does seem like a bit of a stretch. I think a better analogy would be the explicit promotion of 'patriotic education' as a matter of official state policy [1]. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/what-1836-project-texas-promote-patriotic-education-1598616 https://www.newsweek.com/what-1836-project-texas-promote-pat...
  - deleted 5y ago
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dluan 5y ago
Yeah this is a meme that surfaces every few years spontaneously irregardless of the field or discipline. "Oh no we are being oppressed for not following the [current mainstream boogeyman idea], only we the true freethinkers are aware of the danger and must warn blah blah". Usually too it is some former soviet person. > Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). It's just astonishing that it's so reliable even in 2021, so far removed from the cold war, that the journal editors still feel the need to stir the pot this way. Younger scientists don't care about this, lmao. Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Science is a process of measuring cause and effect. What you decide to study using the scientific method might be political, but to call science political seems like a lazy use of language.
  - dluan 5y ago
    Yes, hmm, let's use this consensus algorithm called "just producing data". Look up the information deficit model please.
    - dang 5y ago
      Would you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? If you know more than other people, it's great to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. Snarky dismissals, on the other hand, are not ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- naasking 5y ago
  > Usually too it is some former soviet person. Sure, what would a former Soviet scientist have to inform us about about the dangers of politics interfering in the scientific process. Not like they have a history of jailing scientists who don't tow the party line, of bright scientists defecting to enemies to escape oppression, of politics dictating what academic conclusions are and are not permitted. > Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her. Or maybe that bias yields some useful historical lessons worth learning from, rather than simply dismissing it as "bias".
just_steve_h 5y ago
This article begins with the clearly implied belief that "Science" is not political, and degenerates from this false assumption into a paroxysm of wounded cries over the renaming of buildings and other, may I say, even less weighty matters – comparing them to the gulag and mass murder. "Science" is not a singular object, nor a single method, nor even a set of ideas; what we must concern ourselves with is Science as it is practiced in our society. Can one do Science without funding? Certainly! Any child with a simple telescope can observe celestial bodies in motion, reason about observations, make conjectures, and test them against more data. But this is a toy example, and this young scientist's influence may extend to a handful of child peers, and perhaps an interested parent. The "Science" that concerns us almost always includes published, peer-reviewed research. And thus, it is inherently and obviously political. First, and most obviously: how does one become recognized as a peer whose work is eligible for publication? It necessarily requires many years of study, apprenticeship, and supervised practice. Admission to these ranks requires scholastic and social preparation, and is literally subject to the vote of a committee. That we pretend this process operates entirely on "merit" is but one of the many delusions and useful fictions we tell ourselves when we speak of a "Science" that is somehow "not political." Second, consider not the training of new scientists, but the actual conduct of research. All research must be "sponsored" by someone, in rare cases, by the wealthy scientist themself – the exception that proves the rule. The sponsoring entity always has a material interest in the science it is funding, whether it is to extend the shelf life of canned goods, to more cheaply deposit thin strips of metal onto a substrate, or to meaningfully improve the accuracy of a weapon system guidance module. It is left as an exercise to the reader to discern the various ways that this process is clearly and nakedly "political." I feared the worst upon viewing this article's title, yet held to a slender hope that the author might address the real threats of using science to achieve political ends, such as that posed by eugenics, or by nuclear weapons research. Reader, my hope was in vain. We appear to have here another member of our society's establishment who has become too accustomed to unquestioning deference, yelping like a hit dog because, for instance, a presumptuous collection of students and faculty has dared suggest that perhaps UC Berkeley's $70,000 annual grants from the Genealogical Eugenics Institute Fund might be not only better named but more prudently distributed.* One wonders if there is a corollary to Godwin's Law that stipulates that the first person to draw a comparison to Stalin has already ceded the argument? *(this happened in October of 2020, you can look up the fund by name).
teddyh 5y ago
> In modern terms, Hughes was canceled […] Indeed, new words are canceled every day […] The author seems to be unaware that the word “canceled” [sic], and especially “cancel culture” are themselves only used by one of the two sides in modern U.S. politics. This will cause the article to go unread by the other side. Indeed, the other side seems to have no corresponding acceptable word for the concept. The closest I have seen is “consequences of a person’s own actions”, but what I have mostly seen is the existence of the concept being denied outright. Thus, the allusion by the author to Newspeak – which tries to eliminate words for concepts it wants to remove – is rather apt.
- kortilla 5y ago
  What? People on the left use “cancelled” all of the time. It’s just “cancel culture” that many don’t think exists.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    > People on the left use “cancelled” all of the time. I believe you, but I have not seen it. On the contrary, I have seen people berated for using the word.
all2well 5y ago
There's also plenty of examples of political ideas being dressed up as morally neutral science, the classic example being eugenics.
- bena 5y ago
  Hoo boy. Here we go. Eugenics is technically sound science. Selective breeding for traits is something we do with plants and animals. It works. You want pug nosed humans that yield 20% more crops, you can breed for that . There is nothing about selective breeding that technically wouldn't work for humans. Now. Despite all of that, we should not do it. It is a moral wrong. It would require us to violate the autonomy of people. Don't want short people, you can't let short people reproduce. And so on. That's what makes it icky. That's why we don't do it. And why we shouldn't. Not because it wouldn't work, it would. But because it would require us to violate another's autonomy.
  - DuskStar 5y ago
    "all of the things that are evil also don't work" is very a convenient belief. It's also wrong.
  - all2well 5y ago
    Eugenics isn't just selective breeding, it's the extension of genetics to traits such as "intelligence" or "criminality." These sorts of things are broadly non-hereditary.
    - summm 5y ago
      That is exactly what the parent meant: Intelligence has in fact been shown to be hereditary to about 2/3rds. This is difficult to integrate into a humanistic world-view, so the easy way out is to outright deny that fact.
kgarten 5y ago
I wondered about that. ... science is political, always was and always will be. As we humans are biased and driven by politics and beliefs so is the science we do. In most debates I see here on hacker news both sides believe the science is in their camp (masks, nuclear power etc.) We should acknowledge that. Science is a process and never right. .. all models are wrong, yet some are useful. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w
- thephyber 5y ago
  People are political. Science is a method of confirming/ dis-confirming / finding truth. You are conflating the problematic statements of people who believe truth is on their side (using scientific finding to confirm their biases) and the process itself. I suspect you are correct except in your overloading of the word “science”
  - kgarten 5y ago
    Truth is a tricky word. Science is not about finding the truth. Science can help you find evidence for a hypothesis you formulated. Yet, you still formulated the hypothesis. The scientific methods help you to be more evidence based. Yet,they don't take away any bias that came in over the research question or hypothesis you formulated.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      You are making an argument about a single scientist and a single experiment. I am making an argument about the aggregation of knowledge created by all scientific experiments since at least The Enlightenment. Admittedly truth is difficult to pin down, but science has been the best engine for helping humankind overcome myths and superstitions and give tools for people to use evidence to come to a common understanding of a common objective truth.
      - kgarten 5y ago
        My point is more that "being human" limits any type of knowledge acquisition, as we are tribal/political beings. Check the nature podcasts I linked to, they go into quite some detail and give good examples. I don't think, we as humans can understand an objective truth. A concept of knowledge makes only sense if we as species can comprehend it. This means knowledge and intelligence need to be embodied. Yet, if they are, they must be limited by the embodiment. Foucault makes some interesting arguments around that.
mint2 5y ago
Edit: it’s amusing and telling that a post critiquing specific points of an article that decries the “cancel culture” gets downvoted, I.e canceled. I’ll admit , I only made it halfway through the article but I just couldn’t take it seriously. An article about politicization of science published in 2021 and it used the right wing talking point term of “cancel culture” and does not never mention the politicization of health policy as if that does not even exist? No mention of politicization of climate change? Nope, to this author the problem politicization is changing names of things, even when in many cases the new names are more clear. The elephant in the room politicizations of science that literally has killed thousands and literally has set human civilization up for an existential crisis are not even mentioned up to the halfway point. Instead he’s griping that dead people’s names may be replaced with more relatable terminology. The thing they seem to be griping about is removing people names from concepts and gasp giving them intuitive names!! The horror! The three fundamental laws of physics makes a hell of a lot more intuitive sense than “Newton’s laws” and aids in remembering. I get no one likes change and if they learned it that way then so should the next generation, but honestly naming concepts and formulas after the people who invented them rather is an impediment to learning, and helps keep knowledge isolated. Do you name you programs, functions, and variables after yourself at work ? Edit: people downvoting me, do you care to elaborate on why? Why do you think I’m out of line in not taking an article on politicization of science seriously due to it leaving out the most consequential and prescient examples, ones that one side of the political spectrum has had a history of sweeping under the rug, while also using that side of the spectrums vernacular. The article is itself very political.
- deleted 5y ago
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  - mint2 5y ago
    Overall most of the names are of long dead men that are now words that convey nothing about the concepts. Do you object to those renamings? And please elaborate on why an article about politicization on science can be taken seriously when it doesn’t talk about global warming or the politicization of the pandemic? And for an article griping about cancel culture, it’s funny people posting critiques get cancelled.
mint2 5y ago
An article titled politization of science that doesn’t mention global warming or the pandemic is hard to take seriously, especially because the same political side that has gone against the scientific consensus on both of those things is the same one protesting about what they term “cancel culture”, which this article is objecting to. It really makes the article come off as a one sided political piece. Are these not valid criticisms of the article? I don’t buy in to the “cancel culture” thing that this article is about, but to use that terminology I made an earlier comment critiquing this piece along the same lines I state here and it was cancelled, first downvoted and then flagged. So should any critique of the theory of “cancel culture” be itself cancelled?
amai 5y ago
See also earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951484
culebron21 5y ago
Some of the Western audience mentioned here that the comparison of Cancel culture with Trotsky's "cancellation" in USSR is a huge stretch. I'm more familiar with the Soviet cancel culture and can assure you it's exactly the same. The author just did not show more examples, and it seems a different thing. In reality, not only Trotsky, but many other early Soviet leaders were removed from books -- by removing mentions of them and photo editing. In fact, most of the early Soviet government of 1918 fell victims of that (the reason was that they lost to Stalin in the fight for power). A famous example was Interior Comissar (Minister) Yezhov, who initiated the greatest political purge of 1937-38. He was himself arrested and executed based on falsified accusations in 1939. Mentions of him were removed (in fact in my schoolbooks in 1990 I did not see his name), him edited out of photographs. Here's a good collection of such photo editing: https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalinskuyu-epokhu-izbavlyalis-ot-lyudej-i-perepisyvali-istoriyu https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalin... But these examples continued into science and other areas. Scientists, teachers, book authors and actors, who'd fall in disfavor with management, were "cancelled" the same way, except not sentenced to death. Various sources mentioned they read books from 1930s-50s in libraries, and saw many pages missing or pieces cut out. In my favourite child cartoon, "Last Years Snow Was Falling", the voice actor Stanislav Sadalksy's name was not mentioned. Why? He got detained being drunk. The studio immediately "cancelled" him. His name was added to the cartoon ending titles in a separate frame years later. In 2006-07 I read an interview with Yulia Dobrovolskaya, author of a good Italian manual, who mentioned that librarians were ordered to go and either cut out pieces of books, or paint with black ink their names and citations. The reasons were mere conflicts with management of Education Ministry or even with the University management. She fell victim of that in her unversity (can't recall which one, probably Institute of Foreign Relations) and had to teach in another one (fortunately, there was some competition between them). She (IIRC) also mentioned "photopalming": putting palm trees instead of "cancelled" people in interior group photos. Importantly, this happened not because of ideological herecies, but of mere turf wars.

186 points by vikrum 5y ago

Globalists have destroyed confidence in science with their climate scam. It is religion, not science.

This is a sign of being of too many people studying social sciences and other useless/pseudoscientific majors, that have nothing else to do but create moral panics and problems that are non-existent. If you are not useful, the only way to feel some sense of importance by creating noise. Taxpayers should not be funding these idiocies

dang 5y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines by calling names (lots of them) and adding flamebait (lots of it). Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Agree or disagree, the OP is substantive and thoughtful and deserves much better than what you posted here. Not only that, but threads are sensitive to initial conditions. Rushing into a new thread with a denunciatory quickie risks destroying the entire thread and is therefore particularly bad.
xmprt 5y ago
People working in these areas are why we have things like 5 day work weeks (instead of having to work 6 or 7 days) and human rights. Why do you find them useless?

jchw 5y ago

The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge. Convincing people that this is what people always believe and yet it has never been true seems impossible. It seems difficult for people to imagine that there's more left to discuss. What I'd rather do is try to convince people that it's wrong to apply this kind of ideological control regardless of whether or not you think it's correct. But that's hard, because if it was correct, and people do earnestly believe it is, then what do they have to lose? I also think that dishonest portrayals of even recent history are a huge problem for understanding that a lot of the moral conundrums we have today are not new. It's mostly the sensationalism and moral panics that are always changing.

dmingod666 5y ago
The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking. Always was true always will be. I think it's cause: 1. Arrogance 2. Dead people take blame very well, and can't really argue back.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  Yes and 3. There's an element of group belonging in a collective righteousness. And that's definitely not unique to the present.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  > The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking. That's also the reasoning the communists and the National Socialists used in their reasoning; turns out they were faced with the same problems their predecessors had to deal with but they didn't really have better solutions. In the end the people paid because it was more important to save face than to admit being wrong.
- api 5y ago
  Or maybe it’s always true, at least on average over long time spans. I’ve always thought that if your children think they are wiser than you it means you have been an excellent parent. If they look back with awe at your superior wisdom, it means things got worse and you perhaps failed to leave a legacy.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge." If they claim to be on the left, point out to them that that type of worldview is actually a form of conservatism. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Traditionalist conservatism places a strong emphasis on the notions of custom, convention, and tradition." and note that "customs [and] convention" is the same as the "social norms" argument trotted out by the modern left to defend their activities.

kurthr 5y ago

It seems like this has been with us since there has been science, certainly Galileo paid a certain price and many others paid a price for Lysenkoism. It's certainly sad what can be done "in the name of science" and in denial of science (or service of psuedoscience). I agree with the author's discussion of the complexity of individuals, their beliefs, and their contributions. The desire to simplify a narrative about a person's value or intent common and even effective, but still dangerous. That can be a simplification mores over different times or cultures. One of the best cures I've seen is travel (outside your cultural sphere), but that's not likely to be universally available any time soon. What I don't really see is that scientists themselves share a greatly disproportionate responsibility or blame for the current situation, which seems historically fraught. Media (social and otherwise), "news", and advertising on the other hand...

umvi 5y ago

For some reason I thought just the living conditions in the Soviet Union were bad; I didn't realize 1984 (the book) is literally modeled after Stalinist Russia. I always assumed thought policing was just a theoretical construct of a technological dystopian future, I didn't know the Soviet government actually did it for decades - and to their best and brightest scientists and thinkers! Interesting article, and interesting parallels to our day. Luckily most of the parallels in modern society are reflected in social media mobs and not the government itself (or we would be in very deep trouble), but it's still a bit disturbing how much power said social media mobs seem to wield over corporations and politicians.

ardit33 5y ago
Orwell was initially a socialist sympathizer (went to spain during the spanish civil war), but after the Soviet Union went through major purges in the 30s, and the USSR (bad) treatment of other countries and major ethnic forced relocations inside USSR, he might have had a change of heart later on. He opposed totalitarianism in general, and after the defeat of nazism, he started seeing communism as evil/bad. He worked for communications in the BBC during WW2, and had first hand experience with the language censoring of the time, especially of communication towards British colonies at the time.
- nickff 5y ago
  My understanding is that the NKVD’s purges of Republicans in Spain was what first alarmed Orwell. I believe that he had to escape ‘warrants’ out for his assassination on his way out of Spain.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    Right. Read "Homage to Catalonia" for Orwell's own story.
- spats1990 5y ago
  >had a change of heart later on. He certainly did. Toward the end of his life he produced a list of notable people in the UK and US whom he believed to be Stalinist sympathizers, foreign agents, communists, etc, and passed it to a British Foreign Office employee. Charlie Chaplain was on it, among others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

wffurr 5y ago

Who exactly are the totalitarian rulers sending people to the gulag or executing them for continuing to say "strawman argument"? What an incredibly strained analogy this all is.

umvi 5y ago
The author is pointing out parallels between the way our society is trending in terms of ideological control, and similar things that happened in the USSR. Your argument amounts to "the US government hasn't rounded up political/ideological dissidents and murdered them yet so this article is flawed" which seems a bit dismissive. Two triangles can be similar even if one is an order of magnitude bigger than the other.
- wffurr 5y ago
  The author is essentially saying that being asked to use respectful language makes her university administrator Joseph Stalin. Cherry-picking a few examples, stating "I am not personally offended by these so obviously no one could be", and using that to claim "Social Justice (note the capitals) has gone TOO FAR", does not a good argument make. It's a bit beyond "similar triangles". First they ask us to stop saying "master/slave architecture". Next it's FORCED FARM LABOR. It's a non-sequitur.
  - etangent 5y ago
    The next step isn't "forced farm labor," that would indeed be a non-sequitur. A most likely next step is putting someone in jail over a tweet (already happening in the United Kingdom). It takes three or four more steps to get to forced farm labor.
    - KittenInABox 5y ago
      Seriously asking: How can putting someone in jail over a tweet be closer to forced farm labor when the united states already has forced farm labor (see below for link)? How can we simultaneously be approaching something and also already there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm

i_love_limes 5y ago

I am just an interested layman, but I have found Historians as prime examples of academics who get this balance right. This, to me, seems to be because they have to squarely level with their own biases and preconceived ideas of what they are studying from the outset. Once that is addressed upfront (whether it is personal preference, or cultural bias/context), the authors are able to both express themselves more freely as well as be more critical of their own perspective. I think other social sciences researchers are more OK with this idea, and unfortunately STEM researchers seem to go out of their way to assume they have no perspectives or biases, as the assumption is that 'pure research' is unable to be tainted by such things. To expose my own personal bias, I find this article to be very heavy handed and reactionary.

jrochkind1 5y ago
I think it's probably relevant that Historians don't actually claim to be "science" at all... I'm not being sarcastic, I think that's probably helpful for remembering your fallibility.
xunn0026 5y ago
In my experience historians are quite interested in politics and many end up going into politics. Studying history is almost like a macro study in politics.

cgrealy 5y ago

There are undoubtedly massive dangers to politicising science. But personally, I am far more concerned with lobbied interests persuading politicians that climate change is a hoax, or with idiots deciding that masks and vaccinations are something you can make your own mind up about. These are real problems with substantial negative outcomes. Whether we stop naming things after Nazis or pedophiles is lower on my list of priorities.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
One follows from the other. If you politicize science, then I have no reason to listen when you claim that science supports your position.
- dluan 5y ago
  Do you actually think science isn't political?
  - cgrealy 5y ago
    Given that a lot of science gets funded by the government, of course it's political. Was just listening to a podcast yesterday about the attempts to develop an AIDS vaccine. It was definitely not prioritized in the early days because it was viewed as a "lifestyle disease". https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvhkd5k/presenting-not-past-it-the-vax-that-got https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvhkd5k/presenting-... Obviously the decision as to what gets researched is going to be at least partially political.. there's a finite amount of money to split between NASA and the CDC for example. But it would be really nice if results weren't politicised.
  - Levitz 5y ago
    Everything is political to a degree, that doesn't mean we have to accept the degree at which it is political, the author shows quite a few examples of how that can become a problem.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  Presumably the reverse is also true: if I claim science supports my position then you'll say I'm politicizing science?

fatcat500 5y ago

The people who are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge are doing so off of the moral, social, and cultural capital accrued by previous generations of scientists. The assumption that the general public will always perceive science with a reverent and trusting eye is wrong: once the capital runs out, science will be perceived as just another tentacle of the establishment. Politicizing scientific language is a surefire way of accelerating this process. This is what has already happened with the MSM, of course.

KSteffensen 5y ago
> are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge I don't understand the problem here. Isn't science - as in Poppers falsifiability - the only way to legitimize knowledge?
- zefool 5y ago
  I expect GP to have thought along the lines of "established journals, academic titles, and prestigious universities", aka "the institutions of organized academia". And other signals that one belongs to these groups, like the aforementioned "scientific language". Which is what most people use as the actual heuristics of competence, including journalists and politicians. GP seems to believe that this heuristic will cease to be accepted if things continue, just like "being a religious authority" ceased to be an accepted heuristic for moral authority in many communities. I agree that this is a problem, since going back to the substrate of hypothesis and experiment is just not very efficient. We need institutions like those.

bena 5y ago

The peril of noting the peril of politicizing science is that that itself will be politicized. There's going to be some number on either side of the issue that genuinely don't believe they're politicizing the issue, they're just right. If I were to say the sun rises in the east, that would be just objectively correct. If the Penguin Party were to say that it instead rises in the west and not accepting their belief is politicizing the issue, then what are my options here? Sure there are probably those in the Penguin Party who know the sun doesn't actually rise in the west. But toe the party line, because it antagonizes the other party. And they know that there are those out there who actually believe it. And now they join the Penguin Party because here's a major group that is validating their existence. But there are both Democrats and Republicans who believe the other party is the Penguin Party. They believe they are right. And they believe the other party is led by people who are telling people lies just to garner support. Which leads all of us, down here, back to where we started. And as long as there's support to be had for pushing a fantasy, there's going to be some unscrupulous people who are going to do it. I don't think it can be avoided.

dluan 5y ago

> "In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and was himself canceled (see Figure 1)." lol

ls-lah_33 5y ago
Yeah, I had a laugh there as well. The author's equivocation between cancel culture and Stalinist censorship does seem like a bit of a stretch. I think a better analogy would be the explicit promotion of 'patriotic education' as a matter of official state policy [1]. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/what-1836-project-texas-promote-patriotic-education-1598616 https://www.newsweek.com/what-1836-project-texas-promote-pat...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

dluan 5y ago

Yeah this is a meme that surfaces every few years spontaneously irregardless of the field or discipline. "Oh no we are being oppressed for not following the [current mainstream boogeyman idea], only we the true freethinkers are aware of the danger and must warn blah blah". Usually too it is some former soviet person. > Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). It's just astonishing that it's so reliable even in 2021, so far removed from the cold war, that the journal editors still feel the need to stir the pot this way. Younger scientists don't care about this, lmao. Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Science is a process of measuring cause and effect. What you decide to study using the scientific method might be political, but to call science political seems like a lazy use of language.
- dluan 5y ago
  Yes, hmm, let's use this consensus algorithm called "just producing data". Look up the information deficit model please.
  - dang 5y ago
    Would you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? If you know more than other people, it's great to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. Snarky dismissals, on the other hand, are not ok. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
naasking 5y ago
> Usually too it is some former soviet person. Sure, what would a former Soviet scientist have to inform us about about the dangers of politics interfering in the scientific process. Not like they have a history of jailing scientists who don't tow the party line, of bright scientists defecting to enemies to escape oppression, of politics dictating what academic conclusions are and are not permitted. > Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her. Or maybe that bias yields some useful historical lessons worth learning from, rather than simply dismissing it as "bias".

just_steve_h 5y ago

This article begins with the clearly implied belief that "Science" is not political, and degenerates from this false assumption into a paroxysm of wounded cries over the renaming of buildings and other, may I say, even less weighty matters – comparing them to the gulag and mass murder. "Science" is not a singular object, nor a single method, nor even a set of ideas; what we must concern ourselves with is Science as it is practiced in our society. Can one do Science without funding? Certainly! Any child with a simple telescope can observe celestial bodies in motion, reason about observations, make conjectures, and test them against more data. But this is a toy example, and this young scientist's influence may extend to a handful of child peers, and perhaps an interested parent. The "Science" that concerns us almost always includes published, peer-reviewed research. And thus, it is inherently and obviously political. First, and most obviously: how does one become recognized as a peer whose work is eligible for publication? It necessarily requires many years of study, apprenticeship, and supervised practice. Admission to these ranks requires scholastic and social preparation, and is literally subject to the vote of a committee. That we pretend this process operates entirely on "merit" is but one of the many delusions and useful fictions we tell ourselves when we speak of a "Science" that is somehow "not political." Second, consider not the training of new scientists, but the actual conduct of research. All research must be "sponsored" by someone, in rare cases, by the wealthy scientist themself – the exception that proves the rule. The sponsoring entity always has a material interest in the science it is funding, whether it is to extend the shelf life of canned goods, to more cheaply deposit thin strips of metal onto a substrate, or to meaningfully improve the accuracy of a weapon system guidance module. It is left as an exercise to the reader to discern the various ways that this process is clearly and nakedly "political." I feared the worst upon viewing this article's title, yet held to a slender hope that the author might address the real threats of using science to achieve political ends, such as that posed by eugenics, or by nuclear weapons research. Reader, my hope was in vain. We appear to have here another member of our society's establishment who has become too accustomed to unquestioning deference, yelping like a hit dog because, for instance, a presumptuous collection of students and faculty has dared suggest that perhaps UC Berkeley's $70,000 annual grants from the Genealogical Eugenics Institute Fund might be not only better named but more prudently distributed.* One wonders if there is a corollary to Godwin's Law that stipulates that the first person to draw a comparison to Stalin has already ceded the argument? *(this happened in October of 2020, you can look up the fund by name).

teddyh 5y ago

> In modern terms, Hughes was canceled […] Indeed, new words are canceled every day […] The author seems to be unaware that the word “canceled” [sic], and especially “cancel culture” are themselves only used by one of the two sides in modern U.S. politics. This will cause the article to go unread by the other side. Indeed, the other side seems to have no corresponding acceptable word for the concept. The closest I have seen is “consequences of a person’s own actions”, but what I have mostly seen is the existence of the concept being denied outright. Thus, the allusion by the author to Newspeak – which tries to eliminate words for concepts it wants to remove – is rather apt.

kortilla 5y ago
What? People on the left use “cancelled” all of the time. It’s just “cancel culture” that many don’t think exists.
- teddyh 5y ago
  > People on the left use “cancelled” all of the time. I believe you, but I have not seen it. On the contrary, I have seen people berated for using the word.

all2well 5y ago

There's also plenty of examples of political ideas being dressed up as morally neutral science, the classic example being eugenics.

bena 5y ago
Hoo boy. Here we go. Eugenics is technically sound science. Selective breeding for traits is something we do with plants and animals. It works. You want pug nosed humans that yield 20% more crops, you can breed for that . There is nothing about selective breeding that technically wouldn't work for humans. Now. Despite all of that, we should not do it. It is a moral wrong. It would require us to violate the autonomy of people. Don't want short people, you can't let short people reproduce. And so on. That's what makes it icky. That's why we don't do it. And why we shouldn't. Not because it wouldn't work, it would. But because it would require us to violate another's autonomy.
- DuskStar 5y ago
  "all of the things that are evil also don't work" is very a convenient belief. It's also wrong.
- all2well 5y ago
  Eugenics isn't just selective breeding, it's the extension of genetics to traits such as "intelligence" or "criminality." These sorts of things are broadly non-hereditary.
  - summm 5y ago
    That is exactly what the parent meant: Intelligence has in fact been shown to be hereditary to about 2/3rds. This is difficult to integrate into a humanistic world-view, so the easy way out is to outright deny that fact.

kgarten 5y ago

I wondered about that. ... science is political, always was and always will be. As we humans are biased and driven by politics and beliefs so is the science we do. In most debates I see here on hacker news both sides believe the science is in their camp (masks, nuclear power etc.) We should acknowledge that. Science is a process and never right. .. all models are wrong, yet some are useful. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w

thephyber 5y ago
People are political. Science is a method of confirming/ dis-confirming / finding truth. You are conflating the problematic statements of people who believe truth is on their side (using scientific finding to confirm their biases) and the process itself. I suspect you are correct except in your overloading of the word “science”
- kgarten 5y ago
  Truth is a tricky word. Science is not about finding the truth. Science can help you find evidence for a hypothesis you formulated. Yet, you still formulated the hypothesis. The scientific methods help you to be more evidence based. Yet,they don't take away any bias that came in over the research question or hypothesis you formulated.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    You are making an argument about a single scientist and a single experiment. I am making an argument about the aggregation of knowledge created by all scientific experiments since at least The Enlightenment. Admittedly truth is difficult to pin down, but science has been the best engine for helping humankind overcome myths and superstitions and give tools for people to use evidence to come to a common understanding of a common objective truth.
    - kgarten 5y ago
      My point is more that "being human" limits any type of knowledge acquisition, as we are tribal/political beings. Check the nature podcasts I linked to, they go into quite some detail and give good examples. I don't think, we as humans can understand an objective truth. A concept of knowledge makes only sense if we as species can comprehend it. This means knowledge and intelligence need to be embodied. Yet, if they are, they must be limited by the embodiment. Foucault makes some interesting arguments around that.

mint2 5y ago

Edit: it’s amusing and telling that a post critiquing specific points of an article that decries the “cancel culture” gets downvoted, I.e canceled. I’ll admit , I only made it halfway through the article but I just couldn’t take it seriously. An article about politicization of science published in 2021 and it used the right wing talking point term of “cancel culture” and does not never mention the politicization of health policy as if that does not even exist? No mention of politicization of climate change? Nope, to this author the problem politicization is changing names of things, even when in many cases the new names are more clear. The elephant in the room politicizations of science that literally has killed thousands and literally has set human civilization up for an existential crisis are not even mentioned up to the halfway point. Instead he’s griping that dead people’s names may be replaced with more relatable terminology. The thing they seem to be griping about is removing people names from concepts and gasp giving them intuitive names!! The horror! The three fundamental laws of physics makes a hell of a lot more intuitive sense than “Newton’s laws” and aids in remembering. I get no one likes change and if they learned it that way then so should the next generation, but honestly naming concepts and formulas after the people who invented them rather is an impediment to learning, and helps keep knowledge isolated. Do you name you programs, functions, and variables after yourself at work ? Edit: people downvoting me, do you care to elaborate on why? Why do you think I’m out of line in not taking an article on politicization of science seriously due to it leaving out the most consequential and prescient examples, ones that one side of the political spectrum has had a history of sweeping under the rug, while also using that side of the spectrums vernacular. The article is itself very political.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- mint2 5y ago
  Overall most of the names are of long dead men that are now words that convey nothing about the concepts. Do you object to those renamings? And please elaborate on why an article about politicization on science can be taken seriously when it doesn’t talk about global warming or the politicization of the pandemic? And for an article griping about cancel culture, it’s funny people posting critiques get cancelled.

mint2 5y ago

An article titled politization of science that doesn’t mention global warming or the pandemic is hard to take seriously, especially because the same political side that has gone against the scientific consensus on both of those things is the same one protesting about what they term “cancel culture”, which this article is objecting to. It really makes the article come off as a one sided political piece. Are these not valid criticisms of the article? I don’t buy in to the “cancel culture” thing that this article is about, but to use that terminology I made an earlier comment critiquing this piece along the same lines I state here and it was cancelled, first downvoted and then flagged. So should any critique of the theory of “cancel culture” be itself cancelled?

amai 5y ago

See also earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951484

culebron21 5y ago

Some of the Western audience mentioned here that the comparison of Cancel culture with Trotsky's "cancellation" in USSR is a huge stretch. I'm more familiar with the Soviet cancel culture and can assure you it's exactly the same. The author just did not show more examples, and it seems a different thing. In reality, not only Trotsky, but many other early Soviet leaders were removed from books -- by removing mentions of them and photo editing. In fact, most of the early Soviet government of 1918 fell victims of that (the reason was that they lost to Stalin in the fight for power). A famous example was Interior Comissar (Minister) Yezhov, who initiated the greatest political purge of 1937-38. He was himself arrested and executed based on falsified accusations in 1939. Mentions of him were removed (in fact in my schoolbooks in 1990 I did not see his name), him edited out of photographs. Here's a good collection of such photo editing: https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalinskuyu-epokhu-izbavlyalis-ot-lyudej-i-perepisyvali-istoriyu https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalin... But these examples continued into science and other areas. Scientists, teachers, book authors and actors, who'd fall in disfavor with management, were "cancelled" the same way, except not sentenced to death. Various sources mentioned they read books from 1930s-50s in libraries, and saw many pages missing or pieces cut out. In my favourite child cartoon, "Last Years Snow Was Falling", the voice actor Stanislav Sadalksy's name was not mentioned. Why? He got detained being drunk. The studio immediately "cancelled" him. His name was added to the cartoon ending titles in a separate frame years later. In 2006-07 I read an interview with Yulia Dobrovolskaya, author of a good Italian manual, who mentioned that librarians were ordered to go and either cut out pieces of books, or paint with black ink their names and citations. The reasons were mere conflicts with management of Education Ministry or even with the University management. She fell victim of that in her unversity (can't recall which one, probably Institute of Foreign Relations) and had to teach in another one (fortunately, there was some competition between them). She (IIRC) also mentioned "photopalming": putting palm trees instead of "cancelled" people in interior group photos. Importantly, this happened not because of ideological herecies, but of mere turf wars.