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Nature should stop writing this crap and go back to covering science instead of politics
by rdtwo 4y ago
Nature should stop writing this crap and go back to covering science instead of politics
- nerdponx 4y agoScience lives in universities. It's a relevant issue.
- yucky 4y agoScience lives online. Universities are mostly parasitic at this point, seeking only to maximize their endowments while burdening the youth with debt.
- kennywinker 4y agoUnfortunately science and politics are not actually separable things. People, including the courts and politicians, use biological arguments to justify their policies and opinions. Scientists have to be aware of the political ramifications of their work, and how their work is being used and mis-used.
- mancerayder 4y agoThat sounds like a suspect take. If someone's studying how some plant cells work, or discovering new stars, they're discovering information for the long-term of humanity's collective knowledge. Everything is political, you can't sit still on a moving train, etc. The fascists said that this or that art or science was Jewish art or Jewish science. The Marxists said that this or that art or scientific take was bourgeois art or bourgeois science. What you said about everything being politics reminds of Foucault's arguments, comrade.
- kennywinker 4y agoThe goal of science is to seek the closest possible approximation of the truth. But if I publish a paper about some detail of how brains work, and someone starts using my work to justify oppression of some group - i have a responsibility to the truth that I am seeking to at VERY least publicly say “my paper doesn’t say any of that you prejudiced dingbats”
- mancerayder 4y agoI mean I support that view that a misrepresentation may need to be called out. I'm not convinced that this is evidence in favor of 'all science is political', the stance of postmodernists. It's all ideology, it's all political, there are institutional trappings in society that are unavoidable, etc is the crux, and it's far-reaching, as no one can escape a political position. It's a suffocating viewpoint we're seeing played out painfully in the culture wars: you're either with us or against us, state your position, etc.
- kennywinker 4y agoI guess how I understand the “everything is political” thing is that every idea has a political angle. Maybe that is a helpful distinction. Like… the discovery of penicillin isn’t political - it’s the result of someone exploring the biological world looking for medically useful things - but the fact that we paid someone money to do that was the result of a bunch of political choices like money for hospitals and schools, a system of government and taxation to supply that money. And the consequences of it’s creation had geopolitical consequences like a change in the cost in lives of waging war, or changing some sexually transmitted infections from deadly to treatable which in turn changed our social values around sex. The truth isn’t political. But what we choose to study, and what we do with the things we learn is political. Politics is just a second-order phenomenon. There is what is happening, and politics is how we feel about what’s happening and what we’d like the collective humanity to do about that.
- gopher_space 4y agoFor example, a social scientist might submit a range of articles to HN in order to record, quantify, and study the personalities drawn to different topics. A board owner might use this information to attract the conversational tone they'd like to see.
- yucky 4y agoUnfortunately science and politics are not actually separable things. Let's test that theory. What was political about the Milky Way forming?
- vkou 4y agoThe political part is whether or not a teacher is allowed to teach it. That's how politicians get their hands into science. Also, in a world where 5G causes cancer, the MMR vaccine causes autism, Lysenkoism exists, and where fossils were buried by the devil to trick the faithful, any scientific question that has any bearing at all on world is also a political question.
- yucky 4y agoSo to clarify, the formation of the Milky Way wasn't political, correct? I think it's important that we quickly dispel the "Everything is political" disinformation. Bumper sticker philosophy is hot garbage.
- kennywinker 4y agoThe formation of the milky way isn’t science. Science is how to study and learn about and interpret the formation of the milky way - not the event itself. And yeah, it’s political. If astronomy wasn’t political nobody would have been ex-communicated over claiming basic facts about it. “The milky way formed over x billion years in this way” is a statement that has consequences for the place of religion in our society, the value of studying our place in the world beyond what impacts us on a day to day basis, and an assertion about the word being causal and not subject to manifesting whatever type of world you want.
- yucky 4y agoScience can't be politics, by definition - or it doesn't work. In politics, there are things you can't say or do because you will hurt feelings. If you make science political you have ruined science. You are left with just politics. Which explains why certain people think science is political. In reality, what is left of science or what is acceptable in science after they have had their way, is political. But that is not science. Science shouldn't care about your feelings.
- vkou 4y agoIt'll do so as soon as politics gets its fingers out of science and universities.
- bequanna 4y agoI’m cool with that. We could start by defunding public universities who refuse to fire professors pushing their political views on young, vulnerable students.
- vkou 4y agoSure, we can get started on that right after we're done with defunding and firing politicians who push their scientific views on young, old, and uneducated people. Or is that not what you mean when you say that you want science to be disentangled from politics..? It's weird the same politicians that get their boxers in a twist over scientists doing politics have no qualms about professing all sorts of ignorant and insane opinions on medicine, climate modeling, toxicology, engineering, neurology...
- bequanna 4y agoCool with that too. Let’s start with the politicians who use the excuse “we’re just following the science” to seize power and hold it as long as possible.
- vkou 4y agoI will point out, for the record, that over the past two years, the overwhelming majority of emergency orders surrounding COVID have all expired or been rescinded, or have been watered down into nothingburgers (If they weren't to begin with). Yet, we still have, had, and will continue to have half of congress full of, say, climate change deniers. Do you have a planned plan and timeline for when, and how they can be defunded and fired? Since we've largely solved the problem you've brought up, it's fair to ask when we are going to get to the other half of the equation. These guys have been running the show for decades, by now, with no signs of change. You do want us to get to the other half of the equation, right? If not, you could have just said up front that you want your political enemies destroyed, and we could have cut the conversation off five posts ago.