8 ms·

The issue isn’t that Scientific American leans “pro-Democrat” and it is political. It always has, and that’s understandable. The real problem is that the moder

by tlogan 2y ago

The issue isn’t that Scientific American leans “pro-Democrat” and it is political. It always has, and that’s understandable. The real problem is that the modern Democratic Party increasingly aligns with postmodernism, which is inherently anti-science (Postmodernism challenges the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge, framing it as a social construct shaped by culture, power, and historical context, rather than an evidence-based pursuit of truth).

wolfram74 2y ago
We have such low standards for republicans, it's amazing. We complain that democrats are increasingly acknowleding that science is done by humans and humans will tend to ask questions based on what phenomena they've encountered and what explanations they've been given in their lives up til then, but totally give the republicans a pass on catering to groups that deny global warming, evolution or even that the world is more than 6000 years old.
- decremental 2y ago
  [dead]
- Philorandroid 2y ago
  Tu quoque; Republicans harboring fringe beliefs in some cases isn't a response to Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    This is not "some cases." This is core policy of the party. You can see major leaders within state and federal legislative and executive bodies actively denying climate change research on a daily basis.
    - Philorandroid 2y ago
      So biological denialism is a morally superior position to hold, then? Democratic leaders can't ever seem to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes, certainly not with regards to competitive advantages. As for it being "core policy", I'd need to a see a citation, otherwise it's conjecture. The 2024 GOP platform [1] doesn't mention climate change, global warming, IPCC, et al. once, whereas the DNC's platform [2] discusses it at length. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 [2] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        > biological denialism What is this? I would have thought that the idea that some people who are outwardly one sex have brain wiring for the other sex is quite plausible. Development is very messy.
        exoverito 2y ago
        The significant increase in non-binary gender identity and rapid onset gender dysphoria suggests there's a cultural factor at work. A 2021 systematic review found mixed results for transgender brain structures mirroring their self-identified sex, with most neuroanatomical measures mapping to their birth sex. Though I agree with you that development is messy. We should be much more concerned about exposing children to endocrine disruptors, micro-plastics, and bizarre social dogmas.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        > a cultural factor at work For example, recognition of the existence of the syndrome and reduction in social stigma. Kind of like how the rate of homosexuality increases when you stop subjecting them to vivisection.
        2y ago
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    I think it is fair to say that through the nomination process, whoever is voted to run as the Republican nominee for president is considered to be the best representative for the party. Looking at the president-elect and all of the leaders of the party, saying they have "fringe beliefs in some cases" is severely downplaying it.
    - Philorandroid 2y ago
      That's a naive way to see it. People vote _against_ the other candidate, against what they fear is worse. And, if the theory that the frontrunner is the best representation of the party holds true, it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no? And, again, tu quoque; even if the GOP was exhaustively comprised of reality-evading lunatics, voters and all, it wouldn't excuse stooping to their level -- the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.
      - BadHumans 2y ago
        > it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no? Yes it does. I agree fully. > the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold. I don't think benevolent racism means what you think it means and no one is denying biology. Trans people aren't even denying biology. I would suggest you actually speak to a few trans people in real life.
        bongoman42 2y ago
        umm.. Scientific American said that differences in athletic ability of men and women are not based in Biology.
        BadHumans 2y ago
        I am definitely not the person to write a dissertation in support of trans people but the logic being used as I understand it is that male and female are not the same as man and woman. Whether I or anyone else agree with that is up in the air.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality No such belief exists. Recognizing the existence of bias in a science (with biased input data having detrimental effects on the reliability of the results) or observing the existence of methodological shortcomings is not the same as repudiating the method.
- know-how 2y ago
  [dead]
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Nobody was talking about Republicans in this thread until you brought them up. Criticizing Democrats doesn't necessarily mean one likes Republicans. The two poles of the idiosyncratic US political system aren't the only ideologies or worldviews that exist.
smaudet 2y ago
I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues). I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece. That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing). I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing. I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  >but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece. Reason is right-libertarian and has to occasionally shoot at least a few bullets in the direction of the opposing front on the culture war lest the conservative barrier troops[0] shoot them. Likewise there's a lot of right-wing authoritarians who try fishing for new suckers in the right-libertarian pool. This weird interplay between libertarians and authoritarians on the right side of the political compass has been a thing since at least when capital-L libertarian figures were talking about "paleoconservatives" and Ron Paul was paying ghostwriters to write all those hilariously racist newsletters back in the 90s. [0] Barrier troops are soldiers in an army whose job it is to shoot at their own deserters.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    As a libertarian whose thinking has gone through the whole spectrum of left-right and back again, the fundamental problem is that [pure] right libertarianism is inherently contradictory, despite its simplicity making it extremely attractive. A core principle of rightist thinking is an assumption that there is some bedrock of moral axioms, and as long as we follow them then the resulting situations must also be morally right by construction. This directly clashes with Gödel's famous results in logic, which show that complexity itself creates new logical contradictions. Rightest libertarians (eg the bulk of the Libertarian party, Constitutional fundamentalists, etc) are still running off the failed ideas from the 1910's that produced efforts like the Principia Mathematica. The way I've come to see it, left and right essentially correspond to two modes of reasoning, inductive versus deductive - they are both required to get anywhere worthwhile. The current highly divisive political environment is essentially making everybody think with only half their brains. This is both lucrative (it feels good to have lazy answers validated rather than criticized), as well as disempowering (it keeps individuals from agreeing on substantive political opposition to ever-growing corporate authoritarianism).
felixgallo 2y ago
[flagged]
- smaudet 2y ago
  Filter bubbles are real. If you spend your time watching (low quality) videos with a bent (anti-feminist/transgender, e.g.) you begin to believe that is the majority discourse. Its similar to homophobia - a small (tiny) portion of the population expresses "nominal" preference towards homosexuality, however, there is an outsized fear among those who feel threatened by the concept...
  - 331c8c71 2y ago
    Well your argument holds all the same should you replace "anti-" with "pro-" etc.
    - smaudet 2y ago
      As it should. Those were examples, point was repeated exposure to something doesn't make it more true, just makes you more brainwashed.
- Philorandroid 2y ago
  Unequivocally. Remember that the parties aren't diametric opposites, and are capable of evading reality simultaneously.
- tlogan 2y ago
  Yes, a portion of Democratic Party leadership has appeared to move away from science and reason in some cases. One example that frustrated me as a taxpayer and parent with kids in school: here in California, it was Democratic policymakers who removed Algebra from high school curricula, arguing that it would help address disparities among minority students.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    This is a pedagogy and social policy decision, not a scientific one. You can disagree with it, but it isn't like we have scientific research that incontrovertibly provides education policy recommendations to address social disparities. Changing math curricula isn't denying math and reason itself.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tasty_freeze 2y ago
Like climate change? Like support of masking up when COVID was killing more than a 1000 people a day? Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like voter fraud is minimal (pop question: after the 2016 election Trump claimed there were more than 3 million illegal votes cast. As president he had all the resources in the world to investigate it, had a personal reason to identify it, had the duty as president to root it out. He formed a commission ... and nothing. Was was because he was negligent in his duties, tried but was incompetent, or was simply lying?)
- NeutralCrane 2y ago
  > Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like believing puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite historical evidence being extremely weak, ignoring or condemning more modern, rigorous studies [0], and refusing to publish your own studies when they don't confirm your preconceived position [1]. You don't need to convince anyone that Republicans don't care about science. But many of us also see the ways in which the "trust the science" crowd throw actual science out the second it contradicts their position. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transgender-youth-puberty-blockers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-olson-kennedy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...
  - unethical_ban 2y ago
    Were you to read the comments of that article about the unpublished research, You could see that many people who I am sure identify as liberals agree that the scientists took the wrong action. Though I admit that I understand why a researcher would hesitate, knowing that bigoted politicians and Evangelicals would use it as a cudgel against trans rights and trans people themselves.
  - thefaux 2y ago
beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
It's reasonable to criticize people that take the ideas and concepts from postmodernism too far into nonsensical corners. But postmodernism, as a philosophical and larger historical/analytical approach, is not some evil boogieman. Lots of things have been done based on purported science knowledge that was, with historical context and with a proper critical eye, complete nonsense at best, and evil at worst. It was quite easy to make phrenology look like science. Postmodernism studies how it is possible to make something look like science. It's a complicated topic with consequences for the framing and development of scientific knowledge. There's no reason to discredit scientific endeavor in totality because of that though, and, to be honest, those people are far more fringe in academia, for instance, than people realize. And just as well, properly framed, there is no reason to wholesale discredit the critiques made by postmodernism of the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge by scientific institutions, governments, individuals, and the ways that arose out of culture and historical context.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Postmodernism isn't anti-science, it's anti-modernism. Postmodernism doesn't care about science aside from the fact that it happens to make claims to objectivity, which postmodernism disdains. This is sort of like arguing that relativity is anti-science because it denies the existence of a privileged "objective" or "universal" reference frame. To put it another way: if modernism was actually true and science was an inherently objective process that produced universal truths, then why do we have persistent and ongoing replication crisises in multiple scientific disciplines? Our answer has to come from postmodernism: the current scientific establishment values the production of papers as a way to fill magazines, and people with agendas to push (e.g. the American sugar lobby) will fund the production of scientific papers that produce the answer they want. If that makes sense to you, then you're a postmodernist.
- Aunche 2y ago
  Science has been rewarding politics (e.g. securing funding) over achieving objective truths. Objectivity is a modernist value, and proposing ways how to systemically change society to advance modernist values is something we've been doing for hundreds of years. On the other hand, postmodernism tends to criticize the pursuit of objectivity while embracing subjectivity.
pinecamp 2y ago
Can you give an example of an evidence-based pursuit of truth that was not in any way shaped by culture, power, or historical context?
- malwrar 2y ago
  The discovery of the atom? Huge cross-continental diverse group of humans of varying levels of power and privilege running successive experiments that led to our current atomic model.
  - pinecamp 2y ago
    It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery. You also mention power, privilege, and collaboration across continents. All of these factors shape the process of doing science. I think it's an amazing (and beautiful!) thing that we can collaborate on such a scale. Science is done by people, and I think it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture.
    - malwrar 2y ago
      > It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery […] it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture. Certainly in terms of who was able to participate in the discovery, but I doubt the actual discovered structure was shaped much by the discoverers. Put another way, I would be absolutely fascinated to see other accurate greenfield formulations of an atomic model that do not resemble our current one which could have been invented by another set of possible discoverers enabled by fortune to pursue them. I think that the ideas defining the model comprise the “shape” of the discovery more than the discoverers themselves, who merely stumbled upon them and investigated.
drawkward 2y ago
Now talk about the crowd size at Trump's first inauguration, and the birth of the term "alternative facts".
thrance 2y ago
Let's be real here, if there's one side that has an anti-science stance it's the republicans. They are pandering to (when they are not themselves) climate change deniers, evolution deniers, flat earthers, qanons... Those people don't vote democrat. As for postmodernism, it is far from mainstream in academia, and you seem to have a very narrow idea of what it is. I can only recommend the following video (by an actual scientist!): https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk
miltonlost 2y ago
??? Postmodernism does not deny the Germ Theory of Disease or Newtonian physics. You have some very flawed, Jordan Peterson-tainted ideas of what Postmodern theory is, especially in regard to physical sciences. Sure, social sciences like anthropology and economics in which human actors are in play will have their "objectivity" challenged.
65 2y ago
I wouldn't describe it as "pro-Democrat" - that would imply it embraces the Democrat governing agenda. For example, embracing more federal power compared to the Republican ideology of more state power. Which has nothing to do with science. It's more so caught up in the liberal cultural agenda. Which Democrats align with. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square. I think _both_ conservatives and liberals have turned to postmodernist questioning of science. Just as conservatives question climate change science, liberals question biological sex science. Both are detriments to society and show how we're not exactly moving forward culturally. But it seems the liberals, who tend to embrace a panpolitical ideology (where everything is political) are actively hurting established science. Thus Scientific American would be a much more useful and enduring resource - especially in the social media age - if it kept to science and didn't cross into politics.
kenjackson 2y ago
The modern Democratic party doesn't believe that. Sure, there are movements in the party that probably believe that, but it's very much a minority view. Lets avoid trying to frame minority or fringe views as the mainline belief of either party.

by tlogan 2y ago

wolfram74 2y ago

We have such low standards for republicans, it's amazing. We complain that democrats are increasingly acknowleding that science is done by humans and humans will tend to ask questions based on what phenomena they've encountered and what explanations they've been given in their lives up til then, but totally give the republicans a pass on catering to groups that deny global warming, evolution or even that the world is more than 6000 years old.

decremental 2y ago
[dead]
Philorandroid 2y ago
Tu quoque; Republicans harboring fringe beliefs in some cases isn't a response to Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  This is not "some cases." This is core policy of the party. You can see major leaders within state and federal legislative and executive bodies actively denying climate change research on a daily basis.
  - Philorandroid 2y ago
    So biological denialism is a morally superior position to hold, then? Democratic leaders can't ever seem to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes, certainly not with regards to competitive advantages. As for it being "core policy", I'd need to a see a citation, otherwise it's conjecture. The 2024 GOP platform [1] doesn't mention climate change, global warming, IPCC, et al. once, whereas the DNC's platform [2] discusses it at length. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 [2] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      > biological denialism What is this? I would have thought that the idea that some people who are outwardly one sex have brain wiring for the other sex is quite plausible. Development is very messy.
      - exoverito 2y ago
        The significant increase in non-binary gender identity and rapid onset gender dysphoria suggests there's a cultural factor at work. A 2021 systematic review found mixed results for transgender brain structures mirroring their self-identified sex, with most neuroanatomical measures mapping to their birth sex. Though I agree with you that development is messy. We should be much more concerned about exposing children to endocrine disruptors, micro-plastics, and bizarre social dogmas.
        pfdietz 2y ago
        > a cultural factor at work For example, recognition of the existence of the syndrome and reduction in social stigma. Kind of like how the rate of homosexuality increases when you stop subjecting them to vivisection.
        2y ago
- BadHumans 2y ago
  I think it is fair to say that through the nomination process, whoever is voted to run as the Republican nominee for president is considered to be the best representative for the party. Looking at the president-elect and all of the leaders of the party, saying they have "fringe beliefs in some cases" is severely downplaying it.
  - Philorandroid 2y ago
    That's a naive way to see it. People vote _against_ the other candidate, against what they fear is worse. And, if the theory that the frontrunner is the best representation of the party holds true, it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no? And, again, tu quoque; even if the GOP was exhaustively comprised of reality-evading lunatics, voters and all, it wouldn't excuse stooping to their level -- the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.
    - BadHumans 2y ago
      > it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no? Yes it does. I agree fully. > the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold. I don't think benevolent racism means what you think it means and no one is denying biology. Trans people aren't even denying biology. I would suggest you actually speak to a few trans people in real life.
      - bongoman42 2y ago
        umm.. Scientific American said that differences in athletic ability of men and women are not based in Biology.
        BadHumans 2y ago
        I am definitely not the person to write a dissertation in support of trans people but the logic being used as I understand it is that male and female are not the same as man and woman. Whether I or anyone else agree with that is up in the air.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality No such belief exists. Recognizing the existence of bias in a science (with biased input data having detrimental effects on the reliability of the results) or observing the existence of methodological shortcomings is not the same as repudiating the method.
know-how 2y ago
[dead]
School-Cotton 2y ago
Nobody was talking about Republicans in this thread until you brought them up. Criticizing Democrats doesn't necessarily mean one likes Republicans. The two poles of the idiosyncratic US political system aren't the only ideologies or worldviews that exist.

smaudet 2y ago

I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues). I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece. That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing). I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing. I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?

kmeisthax 2y ago
>but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece. Reason is right-libertarian and has to occasionally shoot at least a few bullets in the direction of the opposing front on the culture war lest the conservative barrier troops[0] shoot them. Likewise there's a lot of right-wing authoritarians who try fishing for new suckers in the right-libertarian pool. This weird interplay between libertarians and authoritarians on the right side of the political compass has been a thing since at least when capital-L libertarian figures were talking about "paleoconservatives" and Ron Paul was paying ghostwriters to write all those hilariously racist newsletters back in the 90s. [0] Barrier troops are soldiers in an army whose job it is to shoot at their own deserters.
- mindslight 2y ago
  As a libertarian whose thinking has gone through the whole spectrum of left-right and back again, the fundamental problem is that [pure] right libertarianism is inherently contradictory, despite its simplicity making it extremely attractive. A core principle of rightist thinking is an assumption that there is some bedrock of moral axioms, and as long as we follow them then the resulting situations must also be morally right by construction. This directly clashes with Gödel's famous results in logic, which show that complexity itself creates new logical contradictions. Rightest libertarians (eg the bulk of the Libertarian party, Constitutional fundamentalists, etc) are still running off the failed ideas from the 1910's that produced efforts like the Principia Mathematica. The way I've come to see it, left and right essentially correspond to two modes of reasoning, inductive versus deductive - they are both required to get anywhere worthwhile. The current highly divisive political environment is essentially making everybody think with only half their brains. This is both lucrative (it feels good to have lazy answers validated rather than criticized), as well as disempowering (it keeps individuals from agreeing on substantive political opposition to ever-growing corporate authoritarianism).

felixgallo 2y ago

[flagged]

smaudet 2y ago
Filter bubbles are real. If you spend your time watching (low quality) videos with a bent (anti-feminist/transgender, e.g.) you begin to believe that is the majority discourse. Its similar to homophobia - a small (tiny) portion of the population expresses "nominal" preference towards homosexuality, however, there is an outsized fear among those who feel threatened by the concept...
- 331c8c71 2y ago
  Well your argument holds all the same should you replace "anti-" with "pro-" etc.
  - smaudet 2y ago
    As it should. Those were examples, point was repeated exposure to something doesn't make it more true, just makes you more brainwashed.
Philorandroid 2y ago
Unequivocally. Remember that the parties aren't diametric opposites, and are capable of evading reality simultaneously.
tlogan 2y ago
Yes, a portion of Democratic Party leadership has appeared to move away from science and reason in some cases. One example that frustrated me as a taxpayer and parent with kids in school: here in California, it was Democratic policymakers who removed Algebra from high school curricula, arguing that it would help address disparities among minority students.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  This is a pedagogy and social policy decision, not a scientific one. You can disagree with it, but it isn't like we have scientific research that incontrovertibly provides education policy recommendations to address social disparities. Changing math curricula isn't denying math and reason itself.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tasty_freeze 2y ago

Like climate change? Like support of masking up when COVID was killing more than a 1000 people a day? Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like voter fraud is minimal (pop question: after the 2016 election Trump claimed there were more than 3 million illegal votes cast. As president he had all the resources in the world to investigate it, had a personal reason to identify it, had the duty as president to root it out. He formed a commission ... and nothing. Was was because he was negligent in his duties, tried but was incompetent, or was simply lying?)

NeutralCrane 2y ago
> Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like believing puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite historical evidence being extremely weak, ignoring or condemning more modern, rigorous studies [0], and refusing to publish your own studies when they don't confirm your preconceived position [1]. You don't need to convince anyone that Republicans don't care about science. But many of us also see the ways in which the "trust the science" crowd throw actual science out the second it contradicts their position. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transgender-youth-puberty-blockers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-olson-kennedy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  Were you to read the comments of that article about the unpublished research, You could see that many people who I am sure identify as liberals agree that the scientists took the wrong action. Though I admit that I understand why a researcher would hesitate, knowing that bigoted politicians and Evangelicals would use it as a cudgel against trans rights and trans people themselves.
- thefaux 2y ago

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago

It's reasonable to criticize people that take the ideas and concepts from postmodernism too far into nonsensical corners. But postmodernism, as a philosophical and larger historical/analytical approach, is not some evil boogieman. Lots of things have been done based on purported science knowledge that was, with historical context and with a proper critical eye, complete nonsense at best, and evil at worst. It was quite easy to make phrenology look like science. Postmodernism studies how it is possible to make something look like science. It's a complicated topic with consequences for the framing and development of scientific knowledge. There's no reason to discredit scientific endeavor in totality because of that though, and, to be honest, those people are far more fringe in academia, for instance, than people realize. And just as well, properly framed, there is no reason to wholesale discredit the critiques made by postmodernism of the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge by scientific institutions, governments, individuals, and the ways that arose out of culture and historical context.

kmeisthax 2y ago

Postmodernism isn't anti-science, it's anti-modernism. Postmodernism doesn't care about science aside from the fact that it happens to make claims to objectivity, which postmodernism disdains. This is sort of like arguing that relativity is anti-science because it denies the existence of a privileged "objective" or "universal" reference frame. To put it another way: if modernism was actually true and science was an inherently objective process that produced universal truths, then why do we have persistent and ongoing replication crisises in multiple scientific disciplines? Our answer has to come from postmodernism: the current scientific establishment values the production of papers as a way to fill magazines, and people with agendas to push (e.g. the American sugar lobby) will fund the production of scientific papers that produce the answer they want. If that makes sense to you, then you're a postmodernist.

Aunche 2y ago
Science has been rewarding politics (e.g. securing funding) over achieving objective truths. Objectivity is a modernist value, and proposing ways how to systemically change society to advance modernist values is something we've been doing for hundreds of years. On the other hand, postmodernism tends to criticize the pursuit of objectivity while embracing subjectivity.

pinecamp 2y ago

Can you give an example of an evidence-based pursuit of truth that was not in any way shaped by culture, power, or historical context?

malwrar 2y ago
The discovery of the atom? Huge cross-continental diverse group of humans of varying levels of power and privilege running successive experiments that led to our current atomic model.
- pinecamp 2y ago
  It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery. You also mention power, privilege, and collaboration across continents. All of these factors shape the process of doing science. I think it's an amazing (and beautiful!) thing that we can collaborate on such a scale. Science is done by people, and I think it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture.
  - malwrar 2y ago
    > It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery […] it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture. Certainly in terms of who was able to participate in the discovery, but I doubt the actual discovered structure was shaped much by the discoverers. Put another way, I would be absolutely fascinated to see other accurate greenfield formulations of an atomic model that do not resemble our current one which could have been invented by another set of possible discoverers enabled by fortune to pursue them. I think that the ideas defining the model comprise the “shape” of the discovery more than the discoverers themselves, who merely stumbled upon them and investigated.

drawkward 2y ago

Now talk about the crowd size at Trump's first inauguration, and the birth of the term "alternative facts".

thrance 2y ago

Let's be real here, if there's one side that has an anti-science stance it's the republicans. They are pandering to (when they are not themselves) climate change deniers, evolution deniers, flat earthers, qanons... Those people don't vote democrat. As for postmodernism, it is far from mainstream in academia, and you seem to have a very narrow idea of what it is. I can only recommend the following video (by an actual scientist!): https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk

miltonlost 2y ago

??? Postmodernism does not deny the Germ Theory of Disease or Newtonian physics. You have some very flawed, Jordan Peterson-tainted ideas of what Postmodern theory is, especially in regard to physical sciences. Sure, social sciences like anthropology and economics in which human actors are in play will have their "objectivity" challenged.

65 2y ago

I wouldn't describe it as "pro-Democrat" - that would imply it embraces the Democrat governing agenda. For example, embracing more federal power compared to the Republican ideology of more state power. Which has nothing to do with science. It's more so caught up in the liberal cultural agenda. Which Democrats align with. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square. I think _both_ conservatives and liberals have turned to postmodernist questioning of science. Just as conservatives question climate change science, liberals question biological sex science. Both are detriments to society and show how we're not exactly moving forward culturally. But it seems the liberals, who tend to embrace a panpolitical ideology (where everything is political) are actively hurting established science. Thus Scientific American would be a much more useful and enduring resource - especially in the social media age - if it kept to science and didn't cross into politics.

kenjackson 2y ago

The modern Democratic party doesn't believe that. Sure, there are movements in the party that probably believe that, but it's very much a minority view. Lets avoid trying to frame minority or fringe views as the mainline belief of either party.