4 ms·

Ah yes, academia, that famous bastion of free thought where success is totally unconnected to whether your colleagues like you and nobody ever gets cancelled. O

Ah yes, academia, that famous bastion of free thought where success is totally unconnected to whether your colleagues like you and nobody ever gets cancelled. One where, as the fine article points out, 95% of biology professors vote Democrat. Academia is the last segment of society I trust on these topics.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
Well, reality is well known to have a liberal bias.
phreeza 5y ago
What about those working for competitor companies then?
- native_samples 5y ago
  For better or worse, companies generally don't directly criticize their competitors products and especially won't make claims they're unsafe. That said, it's conceivable that with reforms to tort law, this could be incentivized in a reasonable way.
  - phreeza 5y ago
    Call me a sheep, but if your distrust of other people runs so deep that you can't trust any source of scientific knowledge, from within or without academia, I feel a great sadness for you. Some scepticism is always needed but this seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      I'm a discerning sceptic. I trust science that has been proven through successful application. I feel sorry for people who have to read academic papers as part of their job in order to find science that they could apply, partly because that used to be a part of my job and after the novelty wore off it was a miserable task. Science is best paired with real world engineering - academia can do this but the least trustworthy fields e.g. those that rely entirely on modelling, never do.
      - phreeza 5y ago
        The fraction of science that can ever be applied to engineering is vanishingly small though. How will you ever get to that kind of standard for things like astrophysics, particle physics, mathematics, most of biology? Do you really think the big bang, evolution, Fermat's theorem etc are bogus because they haven't been proven by "real world engineering"? I completely agree that there is a lot of bogus stuff coming out, like the perennial "hyper efficient solar cell developed in a lab" press release that bubbles up on HN every now and then. But that is just a tiny piece of science if you ask me. Also blaming 'cancel culture' for this seems lazy , there are misaligned incentives but they are more subtle.
        native_samples 5y ago
        Particle physics has to a large extent become engineering: particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, radiotherapy for cancer. Evolution has been applied many times, most famously, to create SARS-CoV-2 right before it escaped from a lab ;) As for the rest - well, who knows? Do I trust big bang theory? No, not really. I seem to recall it's inconsistent with various other measurements, hence the need for the enigmatic dark matter. But it doesn't matter or affect my life at all so I can easily choose not to trust it and who cares. Where the problems start is when activists/politicians force me to "trust" self-proclaimed science that has never been through rigorous market-based mechanisms to weed out the crap. Epidemiology. Climatology. Virology. Standards in these fields are rock bottom low because nobody is at risk of losing their jobs if they're wrong, yet, I cannot simply evaluate this "science" and opt out.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

Well, reality is well known to have a liberal bias.

phreeza 5y ago

What about those working for competitor companies then?

native_samples 5y ago
For better or worse, companies generally don't directly criticize their competitors products and especially won't make claims they're unsafe. That said, it's conceivable that with reforms to tort law, this could be incentivized in a reasonable way.
- phreeza 5y ago
  Call me a sheep, but if your distrust of other people runs so deep that you can't trust any source of scientific knowledge, from within or without academia, I feel a great sadness for you. Some scepticism is always needed but this seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    I'm a discerning sceptic. I trust science that has been proven through successful application. I feel sorry for people who have to read academic papers as part of their job in order to find science that they could apply, partly because that used to be a part of my job and after the novelty wore off it was a miserable task. Science is best paired with real world engineering - academia can do this but the least trustworthy fields e.g. those that rely entirely on modelling, never do.
    - phreeza 5y ago
      The fraction of science that can ever be applied to engineering is vanishingly small though. How will you ever get to that kind of standard for things like astrophysics, particle physics, mathematics, most of biology? Do you really think the big bang, evolution, Fermat's theorem etc are bogus because they haven't been proven by "real world engineering"? I completely agree that there is a lot of bogus stuff coming out, like the perennial "hyper efficient solar cell developed in a lab" press release that bubbles up on HN every now and then. But that is just a tiny piece of science if you ask me. Also blaming 'cancel culture' for this seems lazy , there are misaligned incentives but they are more subtle.
      - native_samples 5y ago
        Particle physics has to a large extent become engineering: particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, radiotherapy for cancer. Evolution has been applied many times, most famously, to create SARS-CoV-2 right before it escaped from a lab ;) As for the rest - well, who knows? Do I trust big bang theory? No, not really. I seem to recall it's inconsistent with various other measurements, hence the need for the enigmatic dark matter. But it doesn't matter or affect my life at all so I can easily choose not to trust it and who cares. Where the problems start is when activists/politicians force me to "trust" self-proclaimed science that has never been through rigorous market-based mechanisms to weed out the crap. Epidemiology. Climatology. Virology. Standards in these fields are rock bottom low because nobody is at risk of losing their jobs if they're wrong, yet, I cannot simply evaluate this "science" and opt out.