The Mistrust of Science
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts in explaining their work directly to the public.
Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final copy was out of their hands.
If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic, but they should at least not be hopelessly wrong or outright dishonest.
And even more, even if journalists correctly report scientific results, the real challenge is correctly conveying the "skeptical and imaginative (but not too imaginative)" quality described in the article.
The number alone doesn't tell us how reliable the conclusions are.
This doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, though.
- vaccines cause autism: OK, we have no reason to believe that they do, but we don't know for sure that nothing in them can cause autism. But even if they did, we believe the effect must be quite small.
- people are safer owning a gun: The science can't possibly say whether a particular person is safer or not owning a gun. But it does suggest that you may be underestimating the dangers of owning a gun.
- genetically modified crops are harmful: So far they have not really been harmful, but we have only a vague idea of the likely consequences down the road.
- climate change is not happening: Well, it's obviously happening, but a lot of similar questions are not clear. There's really no way to prove for sure that it's caused by humans or predict its consequences. We should still worry about it because of the potential consequences, but at the end of the day, we are still mostly working with educated guesses.
At the end of the day, even when science is wrong, I think it tends to give answers that are much closer to the truth than e.g. random intuition. So that's why some people arguing against pseudoscience try to paint the actual science as absolute truth. They're using the ends to justify the means. But their arguments are sometimes over-reaching, and that can ultimately make them lose credibility.
I don't make this argument to justify bad science or to argue for even less well supported conclusions. We don't know the answer to some questions and logically, some of the questions which we think we know the answer to, we do not. Therefore it is wise to remain skeptical while stamping out pseudoscience.
The main argument of this piece is how "an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like" can allow you to reject claims when they are scientifically proven to be false. While he does not directly state that one should be skeptical of the scientific community he also never states that there should be unquestioning acceptance of it either. It is however made clear that skepticism is a key trait of being a scientist.
He begins by pointing out the seeming contradiction of being a scientist who is "supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much" while "gathering facts and testing your predictions" before you "either affirm or reject the ideas at hand". Even then you still must "accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge." Establishing early on that a scientist must be willing to accept that "a contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge" while still advancing our collective understanding.
"Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person [...] to convincingly master more than corners of it". You therefore must rely on the collective of scientific knowledge and those who practice it, the "scientific community". He points out the difference between this group and one of pseudoscientific thought is that the claims of the latter can be demonstrably rejected using the scientific method.
A scientist must remain skeptical, but in order to be productive you also need to rely on your community, no one person can verify all claims. Being skeptical is inherit in being a scientist, and therefore part of the scientific community. Relying on the scientific community is not akin to unquestioning acceptance. Questioning established beliefs while backing it with scientific evidence is the key difference between the scientific community and the pseudoscientific one.
Fifty years is a long time. The vast majority of high-school teachers were taught in todays watered-down system, so there is little hope at that location on the educational conveyor belt. There is some potential at the university level, because university professors are largely self-made people. But it is hard to hold to standards, when universities regard students as clients and professors as service providers, and where the path to promotion is paved by good "metrics" (bums in seats, enthusiastic course reviews, etc.) that are bought most easily by grade inflation.
The commencement speech is wonderful. But these words don't need to be heard by students at Caltech, regularly ranked the top university in the world. And replaying them in the New Yorker magazine doesn't exactly get them to the ears that need to hear them. Maybe social media will help, so thanks, HN, for this.
But there are a variety of reliable scientific results that contradict other ideologies. What would happen if they were included?
Examples:
- Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about.
- Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes.
- Demand curves for labor are downward sloping.
- In the nature vs nurture battle, nature won.
- Teacher performance can be reliably evaluated with statistics (e.g. VAM).
- There is no scientifically demonstrated benefit to organic food, and no harm from GMO.
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-prob...
http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation
Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp...
The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of this implies VAM doesn't work.
Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate!
Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this?
Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.
There is a lot in there about bias also, that's what all the stuff about standardized tests not being on an interval scale is about. Gifted vs mainstream vs special ed students show wildly different rates of progress on standardized tests that's completely divorced from how much they're actually learning, which means that the scores of teachers are largely determined by which populations they're teaching.
> None of this implies VAM doesn't work.
High variance absolutely implies that VAM doesn't work. If you are firing good teachers at random then only morons would go into teaching, especially given the barrier to entry.
> the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate!
In this context, 74% accurate means 100% useless for the above reason.
> another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.
I would say that most of the research using standardized tests to 'prove' that teachers matter is wrong, but that's not the same as proving that teachers don't matter. Any research purporting to 'prove' that teachers don't matter is going to be flawed for the same reason, because you can't reliably measure teacher quality by using tests meant to evaluate students.
So only a moron would trade stocks, speculate on real estate, or take a job as a salesman?
Of course, we just agreed that even if this is true, it doesn't matter. Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway. So what would be the harm?
It's a simple fact of statistics - the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to measure. It's simply innumeracy to claim large effects sizes and also impossibility to measure them. Why all the left wing mathematics denialism?
(Another example of left wing mathematics denialism applies to the pigeon hole principle. If you have N houses and K > N people, K - N people won't have a house.)
All of those are examples of jobs with fairly to extremely reliable performance measurements... E.g. if a salesperson sells makes 20 sales in a quarter, then there is zero chance of them getting fired because their managers think they actually made -7 sales.
> Morons are nearly as good at teaching as anyone else, and the results of good teaching fades over time anyway.
Again, not accurate. The evidence that good teachers have some magical impact on student performance as measured by standardized test scores is flawed, but that doesn't have any relevance to the question of whether or not good/bad teachers exist in reality. And in fact, if you buy into the idea that "education isn't the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire," then you'd expect the impact of good teachers to become larger over time. (But again, not as measured by VAM.)
Whoah, suddenly you are applying a much lower level of skepticism to performance measurements now that we aren't talking about education.
As you know, the mean standardized test score of students in a class (with no attempt to adjust for student quality) is just as objectively known as the number of sales. So I guess if we just did that, we'd be fine?
Of course, the relevant question is how does that compare to a baseline # of sales that this salesperson could be expected to get?
I knew a salesgirl doing enterprise software. In a given month she might make 0 sales, or 1, in a very good month 2. Is she a bad salesgirl because she had a month with 0 sales? That's variance, which according to you 100% invalidates a performance metric.
You are making isolated demands for rigour in education that you don't seem to apply elsewhere. See this article for a description of this fallacy: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...
Now ask yourself, why are you doing this?
Since you seem to believe good teachers exist, what evidence do you have of this? The lighting of fires in the belly of invisible dragons?
There are two issues here: 1) How accurate are the metrics 2) how stable are the metrics over time.
Here are the differences between sales and teaching:
- With VAM, not only do you have stability to worry about, but you also have the question of whether or not VAM is an accurate measure of teacher contribution to student performance in the first place. With sales you might argue that the number of sales or total contribution metrics don't accurately predict CLV or something, but the ambiguity there is trivial compared with VAM.
- With respect to stability, with teaching you only get test scores once a year, which means that it takes about five years until the VAM scores of teachers become relatively stable. Whereas with sales people, you get new metrics every quarter.
- Since what matters the most in business is having enough cashflow to stay in business, the short term view matters more than the longterm view. Whereas with students, what they achieve five and ten years out is much more important than how they perform at the end of each year.
- With sales, there is zero barrier to entry, and if you get fired then you can just get another job two weeks later. With teaching you need to spend 2+ years and tens of thousands of dollars to get into the profession, and if you get fired then the best case scenario is that it takes an entire year to get another job. But often you're basically just banned from the profession.
- With sales you're also making several times more money than you would as a teacher.
And more importantly, why don't your newfound rationalizations apply equally well to salespeople or traders?
(Incidentally, traders also are measured against a statistical model - risk adjustments + benchmark rate.)
VAM is an accurate measure of teacher contribution to student performance in the first place.
And with sales, you need to determine whether your attribution/commission model is an accurate measure of salesperson compensation to company profits. It's the exact same problem, it uses similar statistical methods, and it has variance.
* Whereas with sales people, you get new metrics every quarter.*
So test every quarter and evaluate on that basis. Done. Further, many salespeople have less information per month than teachers - for example, the enterprise salesgirl I mentioned earlier who has 0, 1 or 2 sales/month.
You seem to be desperately reaching for rationalizations that explain why teaching is fundamentally different than every other profession. Why is that?
The payoff of a good teacher shows up years down the road, not once per quarter. Teaching is extremely politicized; parents and random joes like to manipulate the system and are likewise manipulable by less scrupulous members of the public with a hidden agenda -- this is the "think of the children" phenomenon writ large. Teacher class assignments are politically motivated, not random, so student quality is not random. There are substantial movements by parents to eliminate standardized tests because they don't want their children labeled or profiled, and yet you want to increase testing to every quarter. The fears of those parents are somewhat justified because testing software keeps all kinds of behavioral metrics on students that are never revealed to parents. You have an insanely powerful union to deal with that doesn't necessarily represent the true interests of teachers.
Good sales people create value by bringing in money, and sales are measured in money. Good teachers create value by teaching well, and mean test scores don't measure teaching well. That might be slightly simplistic, but that's the big picture idea.
> And with sales, you need to determine whether your attribution/commission model is an accurate measure of salesperson compensation to company profits
I'm not arguing that sales people are always fairly compensated, only that there is less complexity in doing so and the epistemological issues are more straightforward.
> So test every quarter and evaluate on that basis.
In sales, measuring is free, whereas testing is more like growing carrots... If you keep pulling up your carrots to check how big they are, then at the end of the summer you're not going to have any carrots.
> explain why teaching is fundamentally different than every other profession
I never said or implied this.
Would the world be any different if the dragon didn't exist?
Similarly, if "teaching well" didn't exist, how would the world be different? What testable predictions (if any) does your set of ideas make?
In sales, measuring is free, whereas testing is more like growing carrots... If you keep pulling up your carrots to check how big they are, then at the end of the summer you're not going to have any carrots.
Giving quarterly exams will somehow destroy all learning?
This goes against pretty much all the principles of spaced repetition. I take a Hindi test every day and it sure seems to help me.
A more straightforward 'proof' would just be looking at all students who take a class on something random like mycology and then seeing what percentage have had some level of engagement with that subject five or ten years later.
Student quality (and administrative or support staff manipulation of student-to-teacher assignments) varies a lot from teacher to teacher and year to year, probably much more than teacher quality. You talk about using quantitative measurements, but then treat variance like a qualitative thing that is equally ignorable regardless of scope.
Most teachers are teachers because of belief in helping children and personal dedication. Flipping a coin and saying "you're fired if I get two heads in a row" every year means that is gone.
It is not innumeracy to suggest there are so many confounding variables that are nearly impossible to separate from the treatment that it isn't a realistic or effective method for making real decisions about performance that negatively impact the careers and lives of dedicated public servants. It is innumeracy to suggest that "the bigger the effect size, the easier it is to measure" -- it is not incorrect technically, but it is very misleading. No matter how large the effect size, it can be very difficult to separate the effect of different variables with limited data (which is always the case -- we are testing one teacher against another)
Granted, I haven't read those particular sources and I'm not sure if this is the approach they take.
Of course phrases like "left wing mathematics denialism" are purposefully incendiary, contentless, and laughably absurd -- they belong somewhere like Breitbart, not here. Most Mathematicians are left-wing, for the record. I've never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that context (or any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical device.
If you don't get good returns your first couple of years, you'll likely be out permanently. A couple of bad years on a 20 year trading record, you might be fine. Then again, Alex's sources all note that VAM stabilizes after a number of years (between 3 and 5). So long term teachers should be fine too.
Similarly for salespeople. Like it or not, getting a professional evaluation based on a noisy objective measurement is nothing special. It happens in many professions - why should teachers be protected?
Also, I didn't realize 38.5 hours/week, 9 months/year was "unconscionable".
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
Also, teaching is not "thankless". Teachers are given a high degree of respect - #2 below nurses, in terms of ethics/honesty.
http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/166364/Honesty_and_Ethics_of...
In terms of competence and warmth teachers also rank near the top on both axes.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/Supplement_4/13593.abstract?...
Or just note the typical language used to describe them, e.g. "dedicated public servants".
What makes you think teaching is "thankless"?
I've never heard of anyone denying the pigeon hole principle in that context (or any context), but straw men are a very effective rhetorical device.
Go listen to discussions of housing in SF.
Teaching is absolutely a thankless job in the actual work. Students are constantly disrupting class, calling teachers names, threatening teachers and other students. Administrators blame teachers for their students' behavior. Parents routinely shout at, insult, and threaten teachers. Other teachers are often hostile. Any perceived glory in teaching is just whitewashing the real nature of the job (kind of like military service -- lots of talk about glory and honor, but immense disrespect in day to day experiences).
"Dedicated public servants" is almost a pejorative euphemism at this point.
Some simple arithmetic: given that teachers are excluded from that study if they work less than 35 hours, we discover at most (38.5-35)/(K-35) % of teachers work K hours/week. (This is based on the extreme case of x% of teachers working K hours, 1-x% working 35 hours.) So if 50 hours/week is "good", then at most 23% of teachers are good.
As for your subjective opinions about "thankless", what evidence - if any - would cause you to change your belief?
I know several teachers. The burden of proof would be on you to demonstrate that teaching is a higher status profession with endlessly respectful and eager students.
Saying that contract hours are the actual hours a teacher works is at best disingenuous. It's absolute bullshit.
Most likely you are simply mistaken/lying about the amount of hours you worked. Don't worry - you are in good company. Most people routinely give high numbers for how much they work "usually", as compared to how much they worked last week.
Can't win an argument because the facts aren't on your side? Bring up a red herring for a random insult! Why all the talk of left wing mathematics denialism? This is a perfect example of $GROUP_I_DISAGREE_WITH's typical meaningless sophistry!!
If I or the public in general agree with a position that only 30% of the "real scientists" in a field hold, am they "mistrusting science"? 10%? 5%? 1%?
That's actually an interesting question, I think. I certainly don't have a great answer as to how to draw the line. At least one can make a confident declaration at 0%. But the easy answers beyond that don't work, because there isn't an obvious algorithm that says how to convert collections of scientific papers into truth.
I myself have had some "big bets" out on major sciences being wrong for a while now, and at least one of them has metaphorically paid off; I've had a marker on "the dominant nutritional science of the day is majorly wrong" for about 13 years now. That would be the dominant nutritional science of the 1990s, with "excessive fat is the cause of obesity" being the primary claim, along with assorted other things. That the 1990s was wrong seems to be becoming the dominant position now at just about the maximum rate it can without anyone having to ever admit they were wrong. (Note that as a negation, I'm not claiming I did or do know what is the correct theory, just that the dominant one was wrong.) Was I "mistrusting science"? There were some scientists who led me in that direction, after all. If I was "mistrusting science", was that bad? Because it apparently wasn't very trustworthy anyhow. It is all-but-100% likely that some major fields of science today are just as wrong. What are they? I've got some thoughts but I can't prove them.
The correct relationship between the public and science is a legitimately difficult problem. It is certainly tempting for establishment (of whatever the appropriate establishment is) scientists to just yell at the public for not believing this or that element of their establishment position, but we must balance this against the fact that we have a looooot of history of establishment scientists being wrong, with at times quite significant consequences. Blind trust would be misplaced. Informed trust is an awfully tall bar. It's a hard problem.
Am I doing this? FWIW though, I think it's generally a pretty big red flag when people make decisions without being familiar with the relevant research that exists.
What about a prediction market for science?
I think many insiders know some of the stuff is bunk but the public doesn't have the time or motivation to be able to make fine grained decisions about the validity of a particular line of research.
Prediction markets would make public policy decisions about investment in science more, ah, scientific perhaps.
My intuition is that 'good talkers' are getting funding over 'good walkers'. It is legitimately hard to generate informed trust and one wonders if it is even a worthwhile thing to make the attempt when advertising works so effectively. I would like to see the affects of applying a universal basic income just to scientists, because I think a reasonable chunk of the bullshiters would be filtered out.
- There is little evidence that free markets can drive serious innovation. Nearly all the high tech of the 20th century is a product of state research labs, state funding, or state enforced monopolies like Bell. This is true up to today e.g. Tesla and SpaceX are heavily state supported.
- There is a ton of evidence that IQ and temperament are heritable and that parenting styles (excluding extreme abuse) don't matter that much.
- Infinite exponential growth on a finite planet is impossible. Space migration may be possible but will not change this since e.g. Mars is too far from Earth and travel is too costly for fundamental physical reasons. Eventually supply side (ecological) or demand side (declining birth rates, diminishing marginal utility) will end the growth era. (Personally I think we are almost there as evidenced by near zero interest rates.)
- The entire war on drugs is built on very bad science, or no science, and evidence from cases like Portugal's heroin decriminalization show that harm reduction works better even for hard drugs.
- Most "alternative" medicine fares no better than placebo.
... and so on.
Evidence is not why people believe things. For the most part, Ideologies (tm) are social/tribal membership signals not attempts to actually and honestly understand the world.
Unfortunately we then proceed to reason from these shibboleths; to make decisions based on things that amount to little more than intellectual football t-shirts and special handshakes.
For a very long time I've seen this as humanity's greatest weakness.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/321/5888/494.summary https://www.jstor.org/stable/2889145?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21038941 http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
(Note: you need to read data tables, not titles/abstracts.)
Most of Alex's links support my claims about VAM - it's reliable, but not 100% perfect (some variance exists).
The remainder are easily available via google, I'd copy/paste sources but I'm not on my personal laptop at the moment.
Strangely, the original article didn't provide sources for it's claims. Why the isolated demand for rigor?
As to the first study (Hyde et al. 2008), your claim only holds for white 11th grade Minnesota students, and only in terms of standardized math scores. For Asian-Pacific Islander students, the M/F variance ratio (VR) at the 95%+ and 99%+ percentiles is 1.09 and 0.91 respectively.
As to the fourth study (Kane and Mertz 2012), they don't report VRs for the upper tails of the distribution; they focus exclusively on grade school children; and they report that the overall VR varies widely from country to country, with a mean of 1.08. So again, your claim does not follow from their results.
I haven't read the other two studies, but given the pattern so far, I don't think I'll need to.
Here's some discussion of that issue in a completely different context:
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2015/ab_testing_segments_...
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunch_conf_2015/s...
Note that the article didn't do any statistical test on this number (with or without a degree-of-freedom correction). That's unsurprising, given the small sample size.
tl;dr; the subgroups are not large enough and the observed differences are not wide enough. Feel free to run a statistical test to prove me wrong.
I think tying this to race is a mistake. The data shows such correlations, but there are also correlations between race and socioeconomic status, and socioeconomic status and intelligence. The way you phrase this implies a premature conclusion about race when in reality it's likely not about race at all.
I would expect that enslaving a particular group would have an effect on how their genes get mixed up over time compared to a control group of non-slaves.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c... http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance...
Further, the effect size is large - far larger than anything you could hope to accomplish with a teacher.
Supposing that the cause is genetic, I'm not sure how it's different if the genetic influences were caused by slavery or something prior to it. Either way, the net result is that an identifiable group of humans will have an intelligence distribution shifted to the left.
Note that my claim had nothing to do with genetics - the genetic influences are trickier to pin down than the racial differences. Also, there is significant evidence that at least part of the black/asian gap is caused by factors other than racism and genetics - namely the overperformance (relative to black Americans) of black immigrants.
http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-de...
Since you're convinced of this position, please provide a biological definition of each "race" you think shows this effect, and we'll see if the data actually agrees with your claims.
You'd know this if you actually read the sources I cited.
So yes, you are right. The study was not based on a biological measurement. We cannot rule out the possibility tyat at every income level stupid people with pale faces are more likely to self-identify as black while smart people with dusky skin are more likely to self-identify as white.
"Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande (footnotes omitted)
The point being that framing any issue as being a "War on Science" (or a mistrust of science) is (a) sloppy, (b) misrepresenting all of the sides, and (c) unlikely to be effective.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts
[2] http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting
[3] https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.ht...
- Object to GMO crops on basis of politics and intellectual property.
- Support organic cultivation for reasons of environmental and cultural preservation.
Mostly it's an excuse to mark up vegetables 250%.
Hybrid seed that doesn't grow true if reused is kind of an issue, but that has nothing to do with GMO crops, versus regular, naturally bred hybrids.
EDIT: source, grew up as basically a poor white Yankee subsistence farmer. Could probably have qualified as an organic farmer, if we didn't sprinkle Sevin and Rotenone on things to keep them from having the invasive beetles chew the bejeesus out of them. Hint: bugs eat Sevin and Rotenone and just become larger, angrier mutant variations of themselves, like the Hulk munching on concentrated gamma radiation.
One field that has a lot of experience dealing with this is law. I wonder if the scientific community can learn anything from it.
For both (in different ways) invesitgating the truth of purported facts is important -- as is understanding the laws governing those facts. But lawyers are dealing with interested, intelligent agents, some of whom will try to game whatever environment they are faced with.
Science has less of this problem, so it pushes harder into realms of precision that lawyers ought not dare enter. But scientists who wade into policy or legal fights should remember that they are n00bs who's methods are easily perverted.
Firstly; it is true that many right wing persons and groups mistrust science for fallacious reasons.
However this is not interesting. And it does not explain the decline in trust in science. Take the theory of evolution. Many religious conservatives do not believe it. However they were certainly aware of the concept fifty years ago. They didn't believe it then either. Logically their trust level on that point can't have changed much. So; it is something else.
My opinion is that the right wing rely on their intuitions. This will sound like I'm castigating them as unscientific, but this is not true. Intuition is a genuine information discovery system, sometimes flawed, but, and this is the key point, usually right in a way that increases the odds of survival or else it could not exist.
So the question we need to ask is: why would the right wing feel queasy about science today?
Consider the following:
1. Their tribal enemy has overwhelming majorities in large scientific fields.
That by itself is enough of an explanation. The intuition that your native enemy is likely out to get you by means fair or foul is a pretty good intuition.
2. Universities teach liberalism. It is so pervasive that commonly students and professors don't realize this. They are the proverbial fish in water. If you believe conservatives have low IQs or are intrinsically biased against the scientific method, you've been drinking the kool-aid.
If universities don't teach liberalism then it is quite remarkable how synchronized the students are in their beliefs on liberal talking points. This isn't an accident and it has nothing to do with rigorous logical arguments.
If as a student you read enough old books you'll run into trouble pretty quickly because the right wing weren't the straw men identified on television shows such as the Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Quite simply there exists a strong intellectual heritage on the right and most students never encounter it because the media and faculty are usually incapable of steelmanning their opponents arguments. That does tend to happen when point (1) is true.
3. There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly beneficial to the human race for some time now.
This will be my controversial point I think. It is a simple one. Every field has a need to justify its existence, regardless of whether it's astrology or astronomy. Astronomy needs to provide useful data, new evidence of discovery, and astrology needs to make people feel entertained. If either field stops accomplishing those things they become stagnant and eventually they get forgotten.
This will be a bitter pill to swallow but consider that the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives. They aren't living longer or better because of these projects. Many promises have been made with each development, but no meaningful change has occurred.
Naturally there are many worthwhile scientific projects which don't directly affect us and especially not right away. However the intuition when hearing that 'something doesn't affect you but could in the distant future and also by the way could you please give us money today' is that you may be listening to a description of a scam.
Perhaps technology has stopped integrating scientific knowledge into useful products and services in the way it used to. What matters is that people are broadly looking over their lives, hearing how batteries/cancer will be solved soon by some whiz-bang-discovery and then later hearing nothing and thinking they've been hearing a lot of squealing but not much pork.
Common people use common sense, and that's saying to them we haven't been back to the moon in half a century. That major diseases remain unsolved problems. That their wages haven't gone up in decades. Eventually youthful optimism becomes lost for what is a completely rational intuition.
These are all areas science is supposed to indirectly relate to, and people aren't seeing it anymore. All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science.
So those are my 3 reasons why a right wing person would grow to distrust science and scientists.
There is a lot to be said for the need for differing opinions on, say, social mores, finance, healthcare, government, and philosophies of life in general. That is to say, I agree that the intellectual/philosophical right-wing is indeed not at all similar to the caricatures we see.
I have a hunch, though, that highly religious and closeted people (of the "Do not be educated lest you lose your humility" kind) are almost tautologically biased against evidential "scientific method" models of the world, as opposed to one where all truth flows from $HOLY_BOOK. And if you'll look closely, it is this part that is ridiculed, largely for the unquestioning nature of its beliefs and worldviews.
Aside: I have a feeling I'm stepping on the wrong side of the Slate Star Codex "outgroup" essay with this. If there are any logical fallacies in this, or anything similar, I would appreciate comments. I'm not a seasoned observer of politics or society :)
Authoritarians are going to have a problem with that. Where there's a $HOLY_BOOK or $HOLY_RELIGION, their schtick is always that truth flows through them.
To be fair, science has some of the same issues. But science has a feedback loop which tries to reality test ideas. So shouting about how right you are and verbally abusing your enemies only ever gets you so far.
Ideologies don't have that. They only have persuasion and rhetoric - which are far more effective as political tools, but far less effective if you'd like to keep your beliefs reasonably close to reality.
> I think you may be confusing the intellectual right-wing with the, e.g. evolution/climate change-denying right wing.
Not at all Mr Kgnao. Formerly I came from a Christian cult, with double emphasis on the word 'cult'.
So as a right wing person (probably an evil mutant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0/are_your_enemies_innately_evil/) I am familiar with both the Right that has thrown out rationality altogether, and the secular, more intellectual Right. I must hasten to add that there are good scientists who are Christians and belong to a scientific tradition in the second camp, but that they are a rare breed when compared to the past three centuries.
> There is a lot to be said for the need for differing opinions on, say, social mores, finance, healthcare, government, and philosophies of life in general. That is to say, I agree that the intellectual/philosophical right-wing is indeed not at all similar to the caricatures we see.
Yes, and it is most unfortunate because when I have broached right wing positions to left wing partisans in the past, they have often been quite interested in the oppositional view even if they didn't agree with it. Steelmanning arguments leads to more interesting places and new ideas. (Ctrl-F for 'steel man' http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/)
I would hate to live in a world where everything I believed to be true, was actually so, because then there would be nothing new to discover.
> I have a hunch, though, that highly religious and closeted people (of the "Do not be educated lest you lose your humility" kind) are almost tautologically biased against evidential "scientific method" models of the world, as opposed to one where all truth flows from $HOLY_BOOK. And if you'll look closely, it is this part that is ridiculed, largely for the unquestioning nature of its beliefs and worldviews.
Agreed. There's always a danger of this on the Left too, I'm sure you remember the Little Red Book. Different thing, same insanity.
> Aside: I have a feeling I'm stepping on the wrong side of the Slate Star Codex "outgroup" essay with this. If there are any logical fallacies in this, or anything similar, I would appreciate comments. I'm not a seasoned observer of politics or society :)
Not to worry, I'm from SSC too so really we're in the same in-group ;-)
Best Tribe Forever!
Also, "Mr Kgnao" is a cute spin on my username :)
I originally intended it as a reference to Ulysses, where James Joyce captures a cat's sound as being similar to "mrkgnao".
There exists a large 'grey tribe' that doesn't classify itself as a purist left wing or right wing, but has strong elements of both under it's banner. I think of somebody like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander as continuing the Enlightenment tradition which has strong right wing influences. There was always a strong link between classical liberal thinking and the Enlightenment scholars.
In HN's own backyard we have Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. Our history is of course very recent but there are still people who stand out with their ideas and are mostly on the right.
In the more public sphere we have people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who are more easily claimed by the modern right wing intelligentsia than the left.
Obviously there is some noise with the signal but you've got to anticipate it is not often that a human being is a ideological purist to the degree of say: William Buckley or Noam Chomsky.
So what do you propose as a solution? A closed, xenophobic culture will likely not accept any outside help.
Universities teach liberalism
No, they don't. They teach critical thinking. We had that discussion on HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829194
Or rather, they shouldn't. I understand that identity politics on US campuses is a real thing, but I'd be hard-pressed to call anything about that liberal: it's about as dogmatic as the Christian church during the inquisition.
There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly beneficial to the human race for some time now.
Sure. That computer you're reading HN on probably wasn't possible with the knowledge of 30 years ago. But "major scientific discoveries" is a perfect True-Scotsman phrase, so I don't expect you to agree with me on that.
the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives
You mean how we can never predict who is most likely to develop which cancer [1], or which cancers are curable [2], or who is most at risk from developing Alzheimer's [3]?
That their wages haven't gone up in decades
Ah, so that's the problem. Have they considered that their tribal enemy's wages haven't gone up either?
[1] https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/risk-assessment-screening/...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/genetic-test-change...
[3] https://www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/publication/alzheimers-di...
These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).
> Then there was the space race, putting men on the Moon, sending probes to other planets, and it looked like the wildest science fiction might be in reach. Then... stagnation.
Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.
> For the most part, today we have the same things we had thirty or forty years ago, just incrementally better or more efficient
Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.
> These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).
That's reasonable. But the public sees the whole stack re: technology/engineering/science as the same thing. If something stalls in one part, it affects the other two.
Come to think of it: any undiagnosed failure in the education system could easily lead to a broad stagnation, so it is certainly hard to tease these things apart and allocate blame.
> Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.
Supposing that you are right. Why then does society/economy remain too weak to fully back the science? What is the grit in the gears?
> Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.
I think we are, certainly I am, excluding progress in computer science. That's the one general area of brightness.
Whether that's enough to counteract weakness in cheap energy production/storage, biotechnology and medicine, spaceflight (until very recently), effective transport etc, is another thing.
Hoarding of capital is probably a part of it. Downward pressure on wages is incompatible with creativity in the workplace.
Of course computation is the exception here. There's a small number of fields that have had good progress, but the major areas have stagnated. Is the invention of the Net enough to overcome this?
It is fine to say that maybe there were quite reasonable constraints, that say, are preventing the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation from being turned over, and pauses in specific technological change are normal, but none of that addresses the question of why has a broad based stagnation set in for so long.
You just can't turn to the current generation and say:
"That's IT! There's no More. Didn't you see how amazing things were from 1700 to 1950? Where is your appreciation! Now Fuck off"
They will at least want to know why?!
That's how it feels to me reading the Wall Street Journal these days. Everything in the past was amazing and this generation are just entitled lazy slobs who got everything gifted to them on a platter.
I think you need a critical mass of people to accept that stagnation has occurred before we can get broad based growth again. Awkward questions that haven't been asked before need to be asked. Right now my generation is sitting on its laurels because it believes, as Thiel describes it: we can just sit back and wait for the Movie of the future to unfold forever.
That won't happen as long as people like this:
thisisjasonsilva.com
are being taken seriously.
> So what do you propose as a solution? A closed, xenophobic culture will likely not accept any outside help.
Yes of course.
As jcranmer said in this subthread:
>> The reason that the anti-science right-wing comes to the forefront is most likely that intellectual faculty at universities are heavily left-wing. Most social sciences display a distressingly high degree of correlation between research findings and prior political belief, but this is masked by many of them being overwhelmingly left wing: anthropology and sociology have a 30:1 and 28:1 left:right ratio, respectively. (cf. https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0053.html ).
That shift didn't occur overnight. So it is reasonable to suppose that a shift in the other direction wouldn't be rapid either. I suppose you could try opening new universities but my sense is that a cultural shift back is already underway on university campuses, it's just in a nascent form at the moment.
>> Universities teach liberalism
>No, they don't. They teach critical thinking. We had that discussion on HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829194
I'm not being literal. The dean (I hope) doesn't literally get up on a pulpit and declare the virtues of liberalism every day.
You've got to remember that a university is a hierarchy. There are signals, special words, used by people in the hierarchy to declare their colours to a particular banner i.e. status/social signaling.
This means that 'teaching liberalism' is usually more covert than overt. If you've ever walked into a Church (cue solemn organ music) and refrained from chatting to your friend about whatever Richard Dawkins said this week, then you were affected by the environment (to not seem disrespectful) without even needing a person to influence your mood. That such a thing can influence even the most vehement opposition to the ideals of the Church is a testament to the power of an environment.
Onto the controversy:
> Sure. That computer you're reading HN on probably wasn't possible with the knowledge of 30 years ago. But "major scientific discoveries" is a perfect True-Scotsman phrase, so I don't expect you to agree with me on that.
Ah but tremon! I did selectively disallow computer science!
> All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science.
Tell me about the major breakthroughs outside of computing that have affected people's everyday lives in the last, say, three/four decades. With respect to the advancements of the past of course, since it is easy to turn a mole hill into a mountain without a benchmark.
> You mean how we can never predict who is most likely to develop which cancer [1], or which cancers are curable [2], or who is most at risk from developing Alzheimer's [3]?
Let's look at a success story:
"Although polio has no cure, prevention is available through a vaccine. In the United States, it is given as an inactivated polio vaccine. Approximately 90 percent or more of polio vaccine recipients develop protective antibodies to all three poliovirus types after two doses, and at least 99 percent are immune following three doses."
Are Alzheimers or Cancer(s) treatments at this level of effectiveness?
I have to caution you here. I'm not claiming equal difficulty for each disease. Obviously there's a range from the trivial to the nearly impossible.
From the perspective now of the average person there has been a stagnation in medicine. 1 in 3 people will develop Alzheimers, so there is immense focus/money available to solve for X here. Yet it remains unsolved. The same thing is true broadly speaking of cancer. Progress has been very incremental. Yes, some cancers can now be shrugged off in a way they could not in the 70s, but fundamentally you'll get a different reaction from a patient with polio ("They have a cure for that, right?") than from a cancer patient ("How bad is it and How long do I have to live?")
It is not just the perspective of common people either. Experts in these areas are very worried about the big picture.
The fact is that the majority of medical papers in journalist are found to be not reproducible. I know what I'm saying here. It sounds like heresy but hear me out. If the majority of 'medical discoveries' are unreproducible, then maybe most of the practitioners are not actually doing science. These storm clouds don't get much press today but it is widely known within the community.
Allied to that it is hard not to notice that 'biotech' isn't doing very well in Silicon Valley.
I should also make a personal note: I asked my doctor whether he could do something with a genome sequence of myself and family. He said no. There is no point; at our level of resolution it only matters to have the past medical histories of family. That always seemed a bit suspect to me, especially given the original promises made. Sounds like failure to me.
> Ah, so that's the problem. Have they considered that their tribal enemy's wages haven't gone up either?
Unfortunately there is also decreasing belief in science on the left tribe. It is just that it is occurring in different areas of science. The disease is the same though. Its expression is just different. The reason why there's not such an outcry about that is that broadly speaking the average left oriented person believes 'Science is on their side'. This is because of what I mentioned before: there are more leftists in the academy.
I'm European, and I'm pretty sure that my definitions of left and right don't match yours (I'm pretty sure the definitions aren't even constant within my own country)... Could you elaborate on this shift, or what exactly is meant with left-wing vs right-wing research findings?
Ah but tremon! I did selectively disallow computer science!
Yes, I noticed. If I were uncharitable I'd say you were hedging your bets.
If you've ever walked into a Church (cue solemn organ music) and refrained from chatting to your friend about whatever Richard Dawkins said this week
So you're arguing that US universities, which should be prime locations for open discourse, are actually dogmatic, oppressive power structures. That's fair, I guess, and not an assertion that I can refute. I can only tell you that that characterization does not apply to the North European universities I have seen.
Are Alzheimers or Cancer(s) treatments at this level of effectiveness?
It took us more than 100 years of proactive treatment to get to that level of effectiveness in combating polio, and polio was known as a contagious disease for centuries before that. Alzheimer's didn't get classified as a separate disease until 1977. Science doesn't do miracles; using Alzheimer's as an example of "failure of science" is showing really unrealistic expectations.
fundamentally you'll get a different reaction from a patient with polio
Polio has never been 100% deadly. Alzheimer's is, and cancer can be (lung cancer still has only a 10% survival rate).
Experts in these areas are very worried about the big picture.
Can you expand on these worries?
If the majority of 'medical discoveries' are unreproducible, then maybe most of the practitioners are not actually doing science.
It's good that you included "maybe", because that does not follow. Yes, there is much shoddy science. Medicine really is not unique in that aspect. Verification studies are not valued, so they're not performed. The lack of independent verification also makes the primary researchers lax. But luckily, the best solution to shoddy science is more science. If all the people decrying the state of overall "science" would spend just as much time arguing for more replication studies, the world would be a much better place.
For the rest of your objections: yes, progress is incremental. It always has been. Before we put a man on the moon, we had people in low orbit, then high orbit. Before we sent humans in space, we sent other animals. Before we sent animals, we sent only a rocket. And since we've been to the moon, we have succesfully landed probes on asteroids. We have performed soil analysis on Mars. All of those steps were just as incremental as the lunar landing.
Finally, in my view the lack of apparent progress since the 1980's is because of state divestment around that time. Many government-sponsored research benefits were privatized around that time, which meant that the benefits of the research ended up in a few rent-seeking silo's (big pharma being one of them).
Let's funnel more money into a system that's suffering from Eroom's Law?
A different read on the situation would be to fire the majority of scientists. We'll keep 1% - 10% of them and give them an order of magnitude more funding.
Also we'll close down some branches of science entirely because they're a waste of effort. Consider that: Corporations are already doing this to entire R&D departments and the government isn't far behind them with respect to NASA and NSF funding.
Why is public funding on life support in major areas?
Here's one idea that may be wrong but I think it's worth consideration.
Maybe there is just way too many scientists. Maybe science has a scaling problem. Maybe the signal to noise ratio is mostly noise because nobody feels the pressure to replicate that comes from intense competition between researchers and maybe nobody is reading the journals they're working so hard to publish in because it's like drinking from a fire hose.
Even in computer science we're constantly reinventing 'new' ideas that were actually originally discovered in the 70s. Ceaselessly cycling through existing paradigms leads to diminishing returns.
Not being able to integrate existing knowledge is a failure mode. If you look at the early history of science you see it is littered with disciplines that don't exist in the modern era, mostly because they were fraudulent bunk. Of course that could never happen today. Preposterous,
> For the rest of your objections: yes, progress is incremental. It always has been. Before we put a man on the moon, we had people in low orbit, then high orbit. Before we sent humans in space, we sent other animals. Before we sent animals, we sent only a rocket. And since we've been to the moon, we have succesfully landed probes on asteroids. We have performed soil analysis on Mars. All of those steps were just as incremental as the lunar landing.
This is just unconvincing. You've seen 2001, so you've seen what my parents generation expected to happen by the early 21st century. The most likely positive outcome is that after 100 years since the moon landing we'll have more robots and a handful of humans on the nearest planet. If our advancements are actually impressive we don't need the journalists to prompt us into thinking so. I recall that probe that landed on that asteroid recently went dark for most of it's life because they used solar power instead of the nuclear battery that powers the Voyagers. The Saturn 5 rusting on NASA's front lawn before it got shipped into a museum. This is pathetic.
> Finally, in my view the lack of apparent progress since the 1980's is because of state divestment around that time. Many government-sponsored research benefits were privatized around that time, which meant that the benefits of the research ended up in a few rent-seeking silo's (big pharma being one of them).
This is a world wide stagnation in science/engineering/technology ex-computation, it's much bigger than a country's funding drying up. If the stagnation continues and we have a major economic hiccup we could really go from plateauing to an undignified descent. All the scientists will be ekeing out a living just to make ends meet. Some of that has been happening already. I know of several influential scientists in biology and mathematics who were or are literally living hand to mouth. This irks me when I see poppingjays with trust funds playact at cargocult science. I'm sure this happened in the past also, but for it to occur in a time it is commonly supposed that anybody complaining about quality is a crank it is especially galling.
http://67.media.tumblr.com/96064fb9c0b3371eec2349149dc15f11/...
You had a question concerning experts and their worries? I'd point you to the life's work of John Ioannidis. There seems to be one of those guys in most fields now, Jonathan Haidt in social science, even physics has Lee Smolin. Mostly for the sake of brevity I pause here.
Also;
>> What is the grit in the gears? > >Hoarding of capital is probably a part of it. Downward pressure on wages is incompatible with creativity in the workplace.
Agreed.
I didn't say more money, I said more science. Wouldn't it be great if all patients taking a particular drug would have direct access to a scientifically-trained researcher/assistant that could interpret the effect on that patient, and publish their results as a single data point on that drug? For many conditions, there are patient support groups. I would want these groups to participate in the evaluation of drug effectiveness, but most lack scientific rigour and have little means to corroborate with other groups or manufacturers.
We'll keep 1% - 10% of them and give them an order of magnitude more funding.
I think this will not prevent agenda-driven research (AKA corruption of science). At the most, you will get higher inflation of the cost of buying specific results with money. And since you've reduced the total scientific capacity, there is even less capacity for verification of results.
Also we'll close down some branches of science entirely because they're a waste of effort.
I'm afraid the first that would be closed down are the purely theoretical sciences, such as advanced math and string theory. After all, they don't have a practical use, don't they? And wouldn't it be useful if you could classify the entire field of climate research as "waste of effort", because you happen to be in power and don't like its results?
The problem is that we don't have a universal, uncontested definition of "waste of effort". Serendipitous discoveries are a real thing, and have spawned entirely new areas of research or tools. Some of the major accidental breakthroughs: penicillin, microwave ovens, teflon, vulcanization of rubber, viagra.
We will never know what breakthrough we missed out on by not pursuing some research. I think narrowing the scope of research is a bad idea.
Maybe science has a scaling problem [..] maybe nobody is reading the journals [..] because it's like drinking from a fire hose
Science has an accessibility problem. When researchers have to pay thousands of dollars before they can even read other studies, that automatically sets a minimum bar for their own scientific research to break even. Since replication studies can not lead to new patent applications, they're only money sinks.
And you are correct that there are too many publications adding next to nothing to the overall knowledge. But that too, in my eyes, is a problem of accessibility. Not money-wise, but content-wise. We really need better search and classification systems. But as long as the content is locked up, the content holders have no incentive to improve our access.
Not being able to integrate existing knowledge is a failure mode
Fully agreed.
You've seen 2001, so you've seen what my parents generation expected to happen by the early 21st century.
Not sure what you mean here. If you mean "2001: A Space Odyssey", then no, I haven't seen it. I have seen "Airplane 2" though...
If our advancements are actually impressive we don't need the journalists to prompt us into thinking so.
But that was exactly my point. The lunar landing wasn't actually that impressive, yet we had thousands of journalists prompting us to think so. The space race was overhyped because it was used as propaganda on the cold war front. Yes, it was a major milestone in human engineering, but as a scientific achievement it was just incremental.
To me, it is exactly because of journalist hype that we think that the lunar landing was a greater accomplishment than the Mars exploration missions, or than the permanently-inhabited International Space Station.
that probe that landed on that asteroid recently went dark for most of it's life because they used solar power instead of the nuclear battery that powers the Voyagers.
Yes, the aversion against nuclear energy is a great tragedy for modern life, especially for space exploration. But that is a political problem brought on by the weaponization of nuclear power, it's not a scientific or engineering problem.
This is a world wide stagnation in science/engineering/technology ex-computation
I think we'll just have to disagree on that.
I think much of this really does come back to economics. If people's wage were higher thanks to innovation I imagine they certainly would pay for an assistant of the sort you're describing around the 70k - 100k mark. Or if these assistants were able to supply their service for about the cost of buying a newspaper per week. Frankly though, drug companies and I imagine the FDA are less than enthused, for good reasons and bad, with the possibility of patient groups returning feedback that might generate expensive recalls or call regulations into question. This might be the kind of problem Silicon Valley could solve for x with some quasi-computional-insurance startup.
> I think this will not prevent agenda-driven research (AKA corruption of science). At the most, you will get higher inflation of the cost of buying specific results with money. And since you've reduced the total scientific capacity, there is even less capacity for verification of results.
Very likely those are the downsides, but I believe we're in triage, not cosmetic surgery. The pressing issue for the corporation or government is the total spend and the hammer-nail issue. Having more eyeballs on less publications will probably deter fraud or shoddy work.
> I'm afraid the first that would be closed down are the purely theoretical sciences, such as advanced math and string theory. After all, they don't have a practical use, don't they?
I'd be less afraid of that. The people doing string theory are very economic to accommodate with chalk and pencils and there I don't think there are that many of them around. I say this as somebody who thinks this is all probably bunk!
> And wouldn't it be useful if you could classify the entire field of climate research as "waste of effort", because you happen to be in power and don't like its results?
Immensely useful. Much consternation in Australia I hear. In practice this happens without a recession required. The weakness of most areas of science today is their over reliance on government funding. I believe the Catholic Church had the best trained astronomers in the business at one point, will Upton Sinclair's quote ever lose relevance! The solution I believe is to change the funding model with a sovereign fund, like Harvard's endowment. Difficult but it will work.
> Not sure what you mean here. If you mean "2001: A Space Odyssey", then no, I haven't seen it.
A homework assignment, should you choose to accept it!
It's one of the movies, like the Matrix, that never quite looks dated despite half a century.
> To me, it is exactly because of journalist hype that we think that the lunar landing was a greater accomplishment than the Mars exploration missions, or than the permanently-inhabited International Space Station.
You're technically correct. The best form of correct! It's the scale of things (present in 2001) that didn't happen that is my bugbear though. Propaganda aside it is hard not to watch the Saturn 5 taking off without chills running down your spine.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=330_1299456750
> Yes, the aversion against nuclear energy is a great tragedy for modern life, especially for space exploration. But that is a political problem brought on by the weaponization of nuclear power, it's not a scientific or engineering problem.
I will argue there is an invisible but certain connection between a stagnation in science and political deadlock in many areas. Innovators typically riff off technology that ultimately had it's foundation in basic science some decades or centuries back. All growth in GDP ultimately comes from making more stuff with less resources, which is a fine definition of technology. Lack of economic resource growth leads to less niches in society and to zero sum politics or deadlock because one party must lose for another to win. Therefore the lack of a nuclear battery in the robot is not a coincidence. That genetic modification and nuclear power are defacto illegal or actually illegal in many countries is not unconnected to what we've been talking about. When the Chinese forbade 3 mask sailing ships they stopped something more than ocean travel.
Ok, I think we've reached the limits of this conservation for today. Thank you for a pleasant and interesting conversation.
The political right distrusts science on climate change, the more radical factions even evolution. The political left distrusts science on GMOs, organic farming and nuclear power, the more radical factions even vaccinations.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge, which side is more anti-science. They seem pretty equal to me.
The reason that the anti-science right-wing comes to the forefront is most likely that intellectual faculty at universities are heavily left-wing. Most social sciences display a distressingly high degree of correlation between research findings and prior political belief, but this is masked by many of them being overwhelmingly left wing: anthropology and sociology have a 30:1 and 28:1 left:right ratio, respectively. (cf. https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0053.html ).
Perhaps your 3rd point is the most accurate of the stated reasons. But, even then, your final conclusion leaves me disturbed. There is no reason to distrust verifiable facts when they are presented, and I don't think right-wingers are any more prone to ignorance than left-wingers. What is rotten in the entire matter is that the industries attached to that science, and governments that employ science for the same reason, as a tool, with which to procure economic benefits from market participants.
All that I can suggest to anyone who wants to complain about people who do not trust vaccines, is to do something to make them more trustworthy. If they are so imperative to public health and safety, then why have a profit seeking corporation directing the implementation? The very track record of behavior by the pharmaceutical and agro-chemical industries make me question the very sanity of those who would promote thier products, let alone use them on themselves or their family.