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For example, there's a lot of frustration over people who make politically-motivated judgments that climate change is bunk. Under the normal model of science, i

For example, there's a lot of frustration over people who make politically-motivated judgments that climate change is bunk. Under the normal model of science, it's easy to explain why this frustration is legitimate: climate scientists aren't working on some kind of higher plane, but they're smart people trying their hardest to find the truth, and if you're going to discard the entire field you need a better reason than "I just don't buy it". If science is just another sociopolitical theory, it's hard to explain why people shouldn't do this, because it's entirely legitimate in that space. There's lots of smart, honest experts working on political theories whose fundamental premises I don't agree with, and I feel entitled to ignore their conclusions without necessarily pointing to flaws in specific arguments. If someone showed me a bunch of Islamic scholars with arguments against charging interest, my response would just be that their perspective doesn't interest me because I'm not Muslim.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
I’m not saying that science is just another sociopolitical theory, I’m saying that scientific theory and the scientific method are products of the social relations we make ourselves in, and this is precisely why science is important. The collective effort to build rationality so that we can understand and control our hostile environment, is a social constructed effort that has been carefully developed throughout history, and is something that needs to be actively preserved. Rationality is not something that is just “given” by nature; it is an entirely synthetic concept made up by humans and only exist because of humans, and that is precisely why it is so precious. Read Thomas Moyinhan’s X-Risk (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk), there’s a lot of Kantian underpinnings in this argument. So returning to your climate change example: the reason why there are so many climate change deniers in the US doesn’t have to anything with science (as you’ve said), it has more to do with the retaliation from the industrial-based conservatives, as well as general distrust against the current political elites. However, that doesn’t mean that we have no responsibility in doing anything political because science is simply the “objective truth”: we need to actively make decisions in social terms so that this distrust towards climate science doesn’t end up preventing ourselves from making important future decisions for humanity. (What we actually need to do is too far out of scope for this comment, but you get the idea.)
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I agree with everything you're saying, but one of the key social decisions I think that scientists need to make in this regard is to maintain deliberate neutrality on controversial political issues which aren't directly related to their field of expertise. Distrust towards science can't be prevented or mitigated in an environment where journals endorse presidential candidates.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    The real problem is not journals endorsing presidential candidates, it’s the other way around. It’s the political class funding various think tanks and institutions to steer research the way they want to influence public opinion (which has been done for more than a century). And let’s not forget that the majority of the scientific advancements we had in the 20th century were made by military research! And if you look at historically famous scientists of the past 400 years, many of them had interest in politics and were quite politically active. That doesn’t prevent them from doing objectively good research, but it definitely guides what kind of research they are doing.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago

I’m not saying that science is just another sociopolitical theory, I’m saying that scientific theory and the scientific method are products of the social relations we make ourselves in, and this is precisely why science is important. The collective effort to build rationality so that we can understand and control our hostile environment, is a social constructed effort that has been carefully developed throughout history, and is something that needs to be actively preserved. Rationality is not something that is just “given” by nature; it is an entirely synthetic concept made up by humans and only exist because of humans, and that is precisely why it is so precious. Read Thomas Moyinhan’s X-Risk (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk), there’s a lot of Kantian underpinnings in this argument. So returning to your climate change example: the reason why there are so many climate change deniers in the US doesn’t have to anything with science (as you’ve said), it has more to do with the retaliation from the industrial-based conservatives, as well as general distrust against the current political elites. However, that doesn’t mean that we have no responsibility in doing anything political because science is simply the “objective truth”: we need to actively make decisions in social terms so that this distrust towards climate science doesn’t end up preventing ourselves from making important future decisions for humanity. (What we actually need to do is too far out of scope for this comment, but you get the idea.)

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I agree with everything you're saying, but one of the key social decisions I think that scientists need to make in this regard is to maintain deliberate neutrality on controversial political issues which aren't directly related to their field of expertise. Distrust towards science can't be prevented or mitigated in an environment where journals endorse presidential candidates.
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  The real problem is not journals endorsing presidential candidates, it’s the other way around. It’s the political class funding various think tanks and institutions to steer research the way they want to influence public opinion (which has been done for more than a century). And let’s not forget that the majority of the scientific advancements we had in the 20th century were made by military research! And if you look at historically famous scientists of the past 400 years, many of them had interest in politics and were quite politically active. That doesn’t prevent them from doing objectively good research, but it definitely guides what kind of research they are doing.