7 ms·

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down f

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.
- blululu 3y ago
  Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers. It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much. For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that. The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020? OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views. (Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)
wongarsu 3y ago
Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.
- dmbche 3y ago
  You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.
  - EnigmaFlare 3y ago
    You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones. There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data. I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority. This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      What's the conclusion everyone is missing? I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.
      - 3y ago
devjab 3y ago
There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny. Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  > I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology. However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.
cedilla 3y ago
Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.
- Civitello 3y ago
  heck there are probably humans who can sight read ROT13
- bergen 3y ago
  Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name
  - bitwize 3y ago
    "Kohga, the stupendous chief of the Yiga Clan, is gonna kill you all... to death!"
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    "Killed to Death" is an album by Murdered [0] And there are 7 bands that had a song like that [1] [0]: https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Death/726489 https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Dea... [1]: https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to+Death&type=song_title https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to...
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
    And then there was that classic movie, "Murder By Death."
kergonath 3y ago
> a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated. Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being mindless followers of prominent Jewish people, very subtle that one) for saying that vaccines save lives. Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with people getting actually killed or deported for their work, even though some loud mouths have a persecution complex.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate) climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied. The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. We find them where they intersect with actual reality, because it's all just nonsense. Electrons and photons are not real. You won't ever get your quantum computer (at least not in that way), because the physics isn't real.

actionfromafar 3y ago

Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.

blululu 3y ago
Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers. It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much. For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.
- eastbound 3y ago
  I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that. The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.
PeterStuer 3y ago
I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020? OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views. (Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)

wongarsu 3y ago

Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it. But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.

dmbche 3y ago
You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.
- EnigmaFlare 3y ago
  You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones. There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data. I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority. This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    What's the conclusion everyone is missing? I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.
    - 3y ago

devjab 3y ago

There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore. I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny. Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology. However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.

cedilla 3y ago

Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death. Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.

Civitello 3y ago
heck there are probably humans who can sight read ROT13
bergen 3y ago
Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name
- bitwize 3y ago
  "Kohga, the stupendous chief of the Yiga Clan, is gonna kill you all... to death!"
- Semaphor 3y ago
  "Killed to Death" is an album by Murdered [0] And there are 7 bands that had a song like that [1] [0]: https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Death/726489 https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Dea... [1]: https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to+Death&type=song_title https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to...
- xhkkffbf 3y ago
  And then there was that classic movie, "Murder By Death."

kergonath 3y ago

> a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated. Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being mindless followers of prominent Jewish people, very subtle that one) for saying that vaccines save lives. Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with people getting actually killed or deported for their work, even though some loud mouths have a persecution complex.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate) climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied. The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect. We find them where they intersect with actual reality, because it's all just nonsense. Electrons and photons are not real. You won't ever get your quantum computer (at least not in that way), because the physics isn't real.