Scientists Are Planning to Run for Office
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Great. When you're being accused of being partisan, the best way to come back is to form an organization backing potential political candidates of just one party. What a joke.
This is a squandered opportunity to try to get scientific minded people into running for the republican seats, which is how you would get real change in the discourse. Anyone who thinks there aren't fiscally conservative scientists out there who want to shape the Republican party into something better is deluding themselves.
I realize that you, like many people, simply do not see it that way, and imagine that there is some kind of equivalence or near equivalence in how corrupt and crazy both parties are, but most of us don't. What we are seeing is horrific, a party that is against reason and goodness and civility at almost every step. They picked a rapist trust fund baby autocrat as their leader. He is now our president.
So yes, we are going to be partisan. We wouldn't be allowed to run as a republican if we were 'fiscally conservative' but felt that gays should be treated as people, refugees with compassion, women with respect, the environment with car, and that religion was crazy.
Furthermore anyone with a scientific bent would look at the empirical evidence provided by other nations with good standards of living and economic freedom and NOT BE fiscally conservative in the way the republican party is. It has no evidence supporting its efficacy!
Anyone who would say this with a straight face isn't intelligent or isn't honest, so they can't speak for intelligent honest people.
>but most of us don't.
Who exactly do you think you are speaking for? Identity politics and strong liberal populations in universities has made it social suicide for anyone to admit they have any doubts about the Democratic party.
>We wouldn't be allowed to run as a republican if we were 'fiscally conservative' but felt that gays should be treated as people
Two seconds of Googling reveals your bullshit: http://ijr.com/2014/10/185584-9-prominent-republicans-who-su...
Humans have and can be elected into the Republican party and that's how you achieve change.
>freedom and NOT BE fiscally conservative in the way the republican party is. It has no evidence supporting its efficacy!
The situation in Greece and various other European countries seems to suggest you can't buy your way out of a recession with entitlements either. You'll find very little evidence supporting the efficacy of any system that translates well to the US, which has the irritating job of being the entire Western World's military.
I think this is meant in the context of most sciences. If you're a physicist, your work is sufficiently apolitical that you can see both parties as reasonable. If you're an epidemiologist, or a cancer researcher, or a developmental biologist, you see more examples where one political party has asserted themselves as better arbiters of fact than the science. And that political party is the Republican party.
In terms of politics in general, both "left" and "right" have plenty of individuals that deny fact and scienec, but only one party has put those people in charge of the party and the party platform.
Republican stances on pollution are at this point directly at odds with high school chemistry.
>but only one party has put those people in charge of the party and the party platform.
If only there were some way to get people elected into the party to change this.... nah, let's just dig in with the party that got summarily rejected by the current voting system we have.
hi, former vaccine scientist here: there was never any pushback from democrats that i ever heard of, and i can say with authority that nobody would pick republican any percentage of the time for any purpose. i'm not even exaggerating. scientists are liberals.
that's all.
>that's all.
You're wrong. You just don't hear from the conservatives because it's become acceptable to be borderline militant about political views that aren't liberal enough in universities.
The disconnect is mind boggling. I had several tenured professors on my Facebook feed ranting about how everyone who would consider not voting for Hillary was a racist, sexist, and a fascist. Is it really a big surprise that people with conservative view points don't speak up in research groups? In particular people shooting for tenure would be committing career suicide to admit conservative political leanings.
even in industry, they're all (all) liberals. maybe even moreso than in academia, really. even the high up ones. even the runts of the litter. even the foreigners; even the white males. scientists are liberals... and capable of having a polite and objective discussion with those who aren't.
I've met many people in biotech startups that are not 'liberals' when it comes to economic policy. They joined explicitly to make something that helps humanity while making them rich at the same time. They were explicitly against government intervention in health care research and believed private industry was better at finding viable solutions to problems. That's antithetical to the standard liberal viewpoint in the US.
If you don't think there are people like that, it's because the crowd you are with is hostile to people with dissenting political views. It's not because biotech is a magical statistical anomaly that operates on the principles of capitalism while being filled purely with liberals.
I guess you can find a few in biotech that are against government funding health care research, but they are few and far between. There are also a few that are against regulation, but more as its implemented rather than the idea of it.
I don't think you understand the political terrain here at all. Bernie Sanders supporters of the "I have doubts about the Democratic party" variety were very, very well represented in universities during the last election.
If you managed to avoid the rather heated arguments between those people and Hillary's supporters, well, you probably had one less stressor in your life during 2016, so congratulations on that...
>TIME MAGAZINE: There was a back and forth in which another delegate argued for LGBT inclusive language and someone else responded to her, alleging that she was suggesting everyone who didn’t agree with her was a bigot. People clapped in agreement. She said that wasn’t her intention, but it was tense. What were you thinking during that exchange?
>Rachel Hoff: The reality is that all of us who support LGBT rights got frustrated. Another member offered an amendment to stand with LGBT people around the world who are targeted by violence and terrorism, and that went down in flames. In another section, the Orlando attack was mentioned, so I offered an amendment to describe it as ‘the terrorist attack on the LGBT community in Orlando.’ And they wouldn’t even do that. We knew that the platform committee wasn’t our home turf, and I did not expect to win every amendment, but I also did not expect the rigidity with which the committee would refuse to even mention the LGBT community more broadly in a positive way.
Later in the article
>time: You mentioned that you had given some thought to being an Independent over the last couple days as these meetings went on. What frustration brought you to that point?
>RH: It wasn’t the marriage stuff. I had anticipated that my amendment would not pass. It was the amendments where the committee members refused to even stand with the basic human rights of LGBT individuals. We name so many individual groups in that document, and let’s name LGBT people. When they refused to even do that, I thought, what do we even stand for? Why am I even here? ... These last few days is the first time I ever thought about leaving the Republican Party. But I’ve decided not to.
This is the Republican Party, in July 2016. I thought the article was interesting coming from an openly gay GOP member.
Link - http://time.com/4405261/gay-republicans-convention-rachel-ho...
All of these people announced support for same-sex marriage after being elected, or after leaving public service. It seems unlikely that the republican party would run a new candidate that included support of gay marriage as part of their platform. Maybe I'm wrong though.
The cognitive dissonance is strong in this thread.
Trump is a special case in so many ways. Few of the republicans in power wanted him and he pretty much stole the the republican candidacy.
The views that I indicated about Republicans exist today and now, not a hundred or more years ago. If you do a poll or research polls already done, the overwhelming majority of American who oppose gay marriage are republicans (and it seems a majority of republicans care). When gay marriage is brought up as an issue in discourse, it is almost always a republican saying something morally reprehensible.
If not for republicans people's gender would largely not be issue in modern politic, but they seem to care about your genitals when you: sign up to be a soldier, want to do family planning, try to get married to another consenting adult.
I forgot, what was the bill number of the law Obama pushed through Congress when the Democrats controlled it that made the selective service apply to women as well? Oh, right, it doesn't exist because Democrats don't give a shit about equality, they just use identity politics to enrage people.
>want to do family planning
You're being intellectually dishonest if you have the brainpower to comment on this site and are pretending this has to do with anything other than the argument about when a human life begins.
Huge chunks of pro lifers give no shits about people using birth control. Yet they consider a human life to begin much sooner than the pro choice crowd. So from their perspective, allowing a woman to extinguish a life is unacceptable. From the pro choice crowd, they think the pro lifers are just sexists interfering with a procedure on the same level as a colonoscopy.
Personally having a position is different from putting it in your political agenda.
You're talking about a handful across a political party of thousands of virulent anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-science elective officials.
Who's going to vote for Progressive Republicans? No Republican.
Funny but already we have Republicans ready to spend billions on a stupid wall. Data shows over and over that it's Democratic Presidents that provide the most stable and fiscally responsible administrations.
Your arguments are full of holes
You used a capitalized P so I assume by "Progressive", you just mean Democrats, in which case you are probably right. However, if you get your mind out of the two party system long enough for critical thought, you might find that you can have socially progressive and fiscally conservative people. Or socially progressive and states rights people. Or socially progressive and small government people.
>Data shows over and over that it's Democratic Presidents that provide the most stable and fiscally responsible administrations.
How much did the debt grow under the Obama administration?
>Your arguments are full of holes
That's not an argument.
>You're talking about a handful across a political party of thousands of virulent anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-science elective officials.
That was the result of a two second search to show refute a false claim. Don't shift the goal posts.
Obviously their personal power was worth more than whatever platform they ran on originally. The entire party has no integrity.
> Anyone who would say this with a straight face isn't intelligent or isn't honest, so they can't speak for intelligent honest people.
Oh yeah? How many people were at the inauguration? Trump/Sean/Kelly's words are direct and obvious lies that contradict video of the event from multiple sources.
How's that a party for intelligent honest people?
> Identity politics and strong liberal populations in universities has made it social suicide for anyone to admit they have any doubts about the Democratic party.
Says the non-liberal who isn't at university and read it from a Facebook-linked news article. Alternate facts from an alternate universe.
I know you didn't pay any attention to the Democratic primaries but nobody holds the democratic party to be sacred. Nobody calls it the Grand Old Party or in any other way reveres the institution. That hero worship of the past is a Republican thing.
You cannot paint all members of either party with a broad brush as you're doing. Believe it or not we are a diverse country & so are our politicians that are forced to join one party or the other. Many flip flop.
It appears that many Republicans are learning to work with Trump instead of fight against him. That (compromise) is a skill that makes a good politician by the way. It's something everyone should start trying to do. Trump is a person who has changed his views & party often. You can persuade Trump.
Extremism helped create Trump & win him the election. That is what this type of thinking is furthering. It is much more dangerous & long term than Trump.
- Obligatory I didn't vote for Trump and am not a member of either party -
I believe his point is that getting scientists into Republican seats might re-shape the party from being anti-science, to being a pro-science, fiscally conservative alternative to the Democrats.
One of the major parties being unacceptable is highly problematic.
This is the real sticking point here. If you're not a highly religious person (or at least willing to claim to be one), and not willing to publicly advocate religion in your campaign, then you're not going to get anywhere in the Republican Party.
Republican voters simply will NOT vote for someone who isn't religious. And non-religious voters will not vote for a Republican.
The majority probably won't.
"And non-religious voters will not vote for a Republican"
This isn't true. I know atheists who voted Republican this election purely for economic reasons. Spending nearly $1000 a month on Affordable Healthcare will do that to people.
But my main point stands: if you're a scientist, and not spouting a bunch of religious stuff, you're simply not going to get elected on the GOP ticket. The majority of GOP voters simply will not be interested, and you need a majority to get elected; the only way around this is if you're running for some office where there's no challengers so you just pick up the (R) votes from GOP voters who blindly vote (R) no matter what. But you're not going to get very far doing that, just local office.
Instead of digging your heels in the ground why not stop for a minute and listen to those you disagree with and attempt to find an acceptable middle ground?
The future of this country is not a zero sum game.
> I realize that you, like many people, simply do not see it that way,
Are you saying that hueving is not an intelligent, honest person?
We really, really need this.
Having one party be the designated party of batshit insanity, and the other party be the party of... well, not much, aside from non-batshit-insanity... is very bad for society. It does nothing to promote good civic dialog, and holds the second party to an incredibly low standard. Don't get me wrong: on average I want is for Democrats to win, but I'd say that America really needs is more sanity amongst Republicans.
What happens if we get rid of the Republican party? Those same groups will coalesce as factions within the Democratic party and politics will just be more obscured. The single-party South didn't do anyone favors.
I think people are of the mindset that the Democratic party doesn't share a lot of the same issues. The Clinton coalition worked because it was full of conservative Democrats. As an example, how's this for mixing religion and politics?
No, there are some things that should not be claimed by any one party, because they are foundational to civilization. Science and rationality, for example. There are other things that should be staked out as party territory, so that the parties are based on differentiated principles rather than personalities.
Personally, I'd love an America where rationality was considered foundational and in-your-face religiosity was a differentiating factor, rather than the other way around. Because honestly, that video made my skin crawl.
agreed entirely... but sanity might not be enough to win those sane republicans any seats.
The only answer that seems feasible to me is that they're not really interested in getting scientists elected, instead they're more interested in scientists who are willing to abuse their authority to promote progressive causes.
* Life starts at inception
* Man-made climate change
* Evolution (taught in school)
* Not a single payer healthcare system when comparing to any industrialized country on earth
* Anti-consumer ethics in FCC, compared to any other industrialized country on earth
* Tax policies clearly aimed at keeping money flowing upwards, only very slightly veiled, yet again compared to any other industrialized country on earth
all being partisan issues, can you rise in ranks and still be a republican while opposing those views?
While anti-vaccination movements and GMO fears are more prevalent in liberals, they ARE spread across the spectrum, as well as not being party issues. I have read no attempt to legislate against vaccinations.
If "progressive causes" == science backed causes, then go right ahead.
FYI...I say this as someone who is intentionally ambivalent on the issue of abortion. Had abortion been safe, legal and reliable in 1940, I would not be alive to write this since my mother would have never been born. And yet my grandmother would have never been forced to marry her rapist, which basically ruined the majority of her life. In confronting the issue of abortion, I'm forced to weigh my grandmother's life against that of my mother and I. I haven't figured out a way of doing that yet. But it really bothers me when people like you who've likely never had any personal connection to the issue imply that only one side of the debate is rational.
Personal nit...life does start at inception, since that's a tautology. The beginning is the beginning. It's life starting at conception that's usually debated.
Your grandmother would have had a less assuredly bad life (no idea if it would have been better, but we can only hope...) and someone else would be having this anthropic discussion.
> But it really bothers me when people like you who've likely never had any personal connection to the issue
Cough.
> imply that only one side of the debate is rational.
Well, look around at those who believe what you do. Most of them do so because of religion, which by definition is irrational.
As an opinion, you're welcome to yours. As policy, it comes with all the rest of the baggage of the religious.
> But, like drugs, that doesn't mean that it's a fundamentally good thing.
But, like TV, that doesn't mean we should ban it. Control, control, control. Why the need to control?
I've yet to meet another person who is intentionally ambivalent on the issue, so I can't exactly do that. I'm neither pro-choice nor pro-life. I've chosen to remain neutral on the issue and allow others to make the decision since both sides of the debate seem wrong to me and I can deal with either outcome.
But I can see both sides of this argument and both sides feel irrefutable to me. That's not to say that the religious origins of many pro-life viewpoints aren't irrational or that it isn't hypocritical to oppose abortion and support war, the death penalty or any of the other anti-life policies often advocated by pro-life supporters. But just because someone arrived at a correct conclusion by specious reasoning or impure motives doesn't make that conclusion wrong.
I recognize that many people aren't as conflicted as I am on this issue. I'm happy for them. But to suggest that this issue is one where science and logic makes one position definitively correct and the other incorrect is wrong. It is an issue of morality and philosophical beliefs and, as such, science cannot decide it any more so than religion can.
I can see why circumstances make you feel that there's a special something about a fertilized egg, but we're really all in the same situation - but for a tiny difference someone else would have been born.
If your grandmother had a weapon she might have been able to prevent being raped, which would have been a positive spin on the same result as an abortion - you not being born.
> I'm neither pro-choice nor pro-life. I've chosen to remain neutral on the issue
Neutral is pro-choice. No law.
To justify a law, present a reason and a rationale. Otherwise why pass it, right?
> But to suggest that this issue is one where science and logic makes one position definitively correct and the other incorrect is wrong. It is an issue of morality and philosophical beliefs and, as such, science cannot decide it any more so than religion can.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. There's no reason you can't apply science to religion.
If there were gods, and they had an impact on us, it'd be scientists who noticed it and performed experiments to quantify it. We'd even be doing cohort studies to see if the gods disapproved of being monitored, etc.
> I can see why circumstances make you feel that there's a special something about a fertilized egg
This is being intentionally dismissive. The fact is a fertilized egg inside a woman has, for centuries, resulted in a baby being born without the woman being able to do anything about it. Being able to safely terminate a pregnancy is a relatively new development. The fact that my grandmother had an abortion and, because of the law at the time and the circumstances surrounding it, the procedure didn't succeed in terminating the pregnancy is very different from playing the what-if game.
> Neutral is pro-choice. No law.
No, neutral is letting others determine the law without interjecting my opinion.
> That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. There's no reason you can't apply science to religion.
I never said you couldn't. I only said that both science and religion can both be the basis for political positions. It was you who made the connection of science being rational and religion being irrational. I was merely pointing out that neither rational nor irrational bases can inform this issue. A position on this issue is strictly based on morality and philosophy. This contrasts starkly with other issues like climate change or tax policy where math and science can inform a more correct position.
Okay...I'm done feeding the troll :-)
Not at all.
> The fact that ... is very different from playing the what-if game.
I was trying to speak broadly so as not to speak for you. How would you put it?
> No, neutral is letting others determine the law without interjecting my opinion.
For a pure observer, maybe. For a taxpayer, not so much.
> It was you who made the connection of science being rational and religion being irrational.
Yup.
> I was merely pointing out that neither rational nor irrational bases can inform this issue. A position on this issue is strictly based on morality and philosophy.
Assuming you feel that a human should not be killed (without reason anyways) you can formally extend that reasoning to a baby, a fetus, and so forth. At some point, the initial reasoning may stop applying. Congrats, you've now derived an opinion on abortion.
You may feel that morality has a religious core, but that's a god of the cracks type thing. You can squish that bit away and analyze the rules systematically using the tools of logic.
> This contrasts starkly with other issues like climate change or tax policy where math and science can inform a more correct position.
There shouldn't be any contrast. What's the problem with runaway climate change? The suffering and death that it will cause. But that's the same ethical framework you'd use to analyze abortion. And it leads the same place - your basic value for the lives of others, which you may call religious or not.
Isn't that scientific fact? The zygote is not viable, but it is in fact a living instance of Homo sapiens sapiens. So scientifically, life begins at conception.
Now saying that life begins at conception, does not mean that abortion should be illegal. There are legal and philosophical arguments based on privacy and bodily autonomy that say it should be legal.
However, this illustrates an important point. Because you wanted to support a political point, you embraced a scientifically incorrect idea. This is not much different than the climate change denialists.
No, "progressive causes" will be whatever is in vogue in the party. So anti-GMO with labeling campaigns and leverage the scientists to cast doubt on their safety would be very possible. Perhaps it will be to convince people that science has shown that people with more money are evil and should be jailed based on the UC Berkley study with the BMWs.
Accordingly, if a Democrat is in power and the findings of a science-based agency contradict some policy desire, they would sigh and fret and perhaps try to initiate other studies to see if there's any other way to align their policy goals with reality. But you would not see scientists and entire agencies of thousands of workers gagged, studies removed, data destroyed, conclusions banned. You would not see them scrambling to align reality with their goals and literally banning facts. It's little exaggeration to say the Trump administration is now engaged in book-burning.
Whatever the flaws of the Democratic party, what's "in vogue" with the party is an epiphenomenon, not the driver. If you want to run as a pro-science non-religious Republican, you are desperately needed for the health of the US political system -- but you will almost certainly be structurally unable to do so.
So if one political party is in power they will ensure BS results are generated to support whatever they wanted to do anyway, if the other is in power they get rid of any results they don't like?
Both strategies act to lower the signal/noise ratio, just by different means. One adds to the noise, the other removes the signal. Sounds like a great place to do research, the people funding it are actively creating obstacles for the scientist at every turn.
The EPA, for example, is not some partisan claque of Democrats looking to vengefully squeeze cash flows and lower the value of Republicans' businesses. These are career staffers in their subject areas, scientists, policy makers and implementers -- people doing their jobs and coming to conclusions based on supporting data. But to the current GOP, the existence of an EPA itself is a partisan threat. It's worse than just removing studies they don't like. They want to remove the ability to do the science at all. And of course it's more than just the EPA in the crosshairs. They are presenting themselves as unwilling to accept scientific conclusions that do not align with their ideology. That's starting to look like a lot of banned science.
With the current GOP, there is no "lessons learned" phase where policy is adjusted to meet scientific reality.
I may have misunderstood. What did you mean by the above line then?
If you keep initiating studies you will eventually get the results you want. It will generate tons of noise along the way as well.
Suddenly there's a new study result at the NIH that shows a link between ulcers and H. pylori. Maybe doctors and drug companies don't like this. Maybe there's even a Department of Ulcer Stress Management that doesn't like it. But the scientist is going on all the shows; this thing has traction.
(1) You're skeptical about these results because you're hearing griping from Big Ulcer. In this situation, the reasonable thing would be to run more studies. You're human: your bias may be that this H. pylori link is wrong; it seems crazy. You may hope new studies confirm your beliefs. But they don't. Your new reality becomes: H. pylori causes ulcers. The Department of Ulcer Stress Management will have to be dissolved or changed to be the Department of Bacterial Ulcer Management.
- or -
(2) You're skeptical about these results because you're hearing griping from Big Ulcer. You're human: your bias may be that this H. pylori link is wrong; it seems crazy. So you discredit the H. pylori study, and call it a conspiracy theory. You defund the department that ran it, preventing scientists there from further investigating the suggestive result. You ban the scientist from public speaking. You delete web pages that talk about the study, and delete the data that went into it. You place a gag order on the entire NIH, slash its budget, and install as its director the CEO of the company that makes the $10B StressAway ulcer medication.
So the "extra studies" in option one could be seen as noise, but that's not a problem if it's within the framework of science: part of science is teasing results from noise. An extraordinary claim like "bacteria cause ulcers" would need extraordinary evidence, which comes in the form of more noisy studies aimed at the null hypothesis. But the claim is ultimately validated and accepted.
It's even worse, though, because many of the GOP ideas about policy are not science-based to begin with.
For example, there is significant disagreement within economics on, say, minimum wage. It would be an abuse of authority for an economist (for example, Paul Krugman) to claim we ought to raise the minimum wage because there is an economic consensus that we should do so, when in fact there is not and the said economist wants to raise minimum wage because it's a progressive cause.
A good example of this in practice is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Rationalia" tweet[0] in response to the Brexit vote. He claims that a constitution should have just one line: "All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". He is implicitly appealing to authority by invoking the scientific method, and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU.
The problem here isn't that scientists can be wrong: everyone knows that. The issue is that claims like these are becoming more and more common, and their gross effect is that the very institution of science has become tainted with progressive bias.
[0] https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736?ref_...
There is disagreement, but everything I've read has been more along the line of disagreements as to how severe the side effects were, but that they're almost exclusively weighted in favor of the upsides. Feel free to link me if you've read otherwise.
And disagreement within science is good until you can have irrefutable proof (although apparently this can still be ignored). But having policy based on science even when disputed isn't bad. You can always change it according to new results/studies.
> ...and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU.
You say that, but can you though? I'm honestly considering the possibility that fact based politics has somehow been smeared as "progressive". Especially on public funding of science. That is something I can't even imagine a possible counter argument against. Sponsored science is at best extremely tricky, and most often simply tainted.
I'm not a fan of deGrasse, but in this I can't help but agree with him.
You're under the impression that him being "progressive" colors his views on science. I'm of the impression that it's the complete reversal.
The real question is WHY something is in vogue.
Sure, money doesn't mean evil, but I have no trouble believing that money is the root of a ton of obviously bad policies and legislation. The healthcare, tax code, FCC points above, and many more.
The Democrats were once pro slavery and the parties have effectively flipped positions of support for various things throughout the years. The parties change because people that try, not people that dig their heels in on their side that just got slaughtered in the election.
But if you want to make a car, would you start from a motorcycle or a boat?
There's a lot more work to be done by going through the GOP.
I actually contacted 314 offering to run as a pro-science republican against my pro-science democratic congresswoman. I won't win, as her support is solid, but I'd perform quite nicely as a pro-science republican candidate to (I hope) shame the rest of the GOP.
If they change their minds, you may see me on the ballot.
At least when it comes to GMO crops and food, there is a pretty strong anti-science movement in the Democratic Party, too [1]. When more than one third of all currently alive science and medicine Nobel laureates have signed a pro-GMO letter [2], it is pretty strongly anti-science to be anti-GMO.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/opposition-stalls-gmo...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
I put Monsanto in the same category as Big Oil, they use their massive capital and weight to push smaller players out of the market and generally don't favor the consumer very much.
I can't find it but there was an NPR story about a teach whose black students performed worse than the white students. The school's response, "Racist test!" The teacher reviewed the test, found nothing racist and looked further. The school was a bit peevish, but couldn't stop him since he was doing it on his own dime. The end result? The black students were all lead poisoned from their homes. The teacher worked with local clinics for free treatment and local rehabs to mitigate the lead in the houses. At the end of the year, the black students dramatically improved. That is science. Test a hypothesis with data.
You need to look for people in ALL parties that will listen to you. I could be such a person in the Republican party. I haven't been an official member since I ran a campaign for Coroner in South Bend at 18. I agree with them far more the Democrats. I also think that the party has left its core tenant of "Do what you want, but not on my lawn or public."
Publicly attacking half of the voting populace by explicitly excluding them from any consideration is a) impolite and b) un-fucking-scientific.
It's highly unscientific to make such a sweeping generalization. There are plenty of liberals and leftists who will accept science and data that doesn't match their political agenda, just as there are still some conservatives who will. However the GOP has official policies opposing such nefarious plots as 'critical thinking.'
Many of the Democrats are as much sheep as the Republicans. I've had fewer conversations with them about food. I eat eggs. I eat a high fat diet. They all tell me I'm going to get high cholesterol and be in worse shape. I try to explain the science of diet. They point me to old research that says eggs are bad.
Well, only if the fear was unfounded. Your analysis seems a little shallow there.
Guns, like all other power tools, should be respected. I carry daily. I respect the responsibility I bring on myself in doing so. I respect what the tool can do. Many weekend I use 1-5 power cutting tools. I respect those too. As a child I feared both. I then because an adult and put away childish things. I respect and use the tools properly.
Now, can you guarantee that every person I pass on the street respects their gun as much as you do, and they won't misuse this "power tool" they have the right to own? If you cannot guarantee that, I don't think you can say anybodies fear is unfounded.
What you just said is like saying a fear of airplanes is unfounded because all pilots respect their aircraft, what it can do, and use their tool properly.
As to fear about planes or fear in general, the foundation of fear, especially such that motivates policy, should be based on odds. I am terrified when I fly. I still fly. I know, deep down, that I have a higher chance of dying by driving. The fear is real in an abstract sense: this could kill me. It is not something that I should put much emotional/physical response in because it is so unlikely as to not be a problem. To put it another way, I should not let my fear of flying affect my personal travel policy.
Every day millions of Americans have guns and don't kill anyone. To try to ban guns because of the few bad actors is like trying to ban all Muslims. Statistically there are about 700k Muslims that lean with ISIS (at least wanting to establish a caliphate). I apply the same heuristic as above to the question, "should I fear Muslims?" My answer is that statically, no. Should I respect the possibility of one of those 700k going nuts glib? Sure. But I don't worry about Muslim co-workers or Muslims walking down the street.
That is a fair point and a rational reason. However, it's convenient to say "We've always had guns, the chance of randomly getting shot in the street is low, therefore we should keep them."
What is the chance of randomly getting shot if guns were never legal in the first place (e.g. an American in which no 2nd amendment was present)? What will the chance be of randomly getting shot if guns are made illegal tomorrow? Lower? Higher? Maybe we could look at other countries and see how they compare. If your logic is policy should be related to odds, I think you may have just argued that guns should in fact be illegal based on homicide rates in other developed countries, for example - http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/06/visualizing-gun-...
I'm not even against gun control. I'm merely against useless legislation and fear-based politics. The movement consistently fails to show interest in the results they're supposedly fighting for (less deaths) and just the means they propose (less guns).
Just curious, what's that assertion based on?
Traffic fatalities do cluster around roads, yes, but those are harder to avoid for the average person.
While the base numbers are roughly the same, for the tragic death of someone who could be you or me (ie not robbing a drug dealer, etc) traffic accidents are the more likely cause of death.
Also, a lot of the low-hanging fruit is taken care of with guns. My colleagues who keep guns have locking holsters(?) that mount under the dash, gun-safes at home, etc. To reduce the deaths by much you've got to approach the hard area of intentional shootings, and you need to realize that those are people trying to kill another - many of those deaths will be replaced with stabbings, etc.
Whereas every day I'm on the roads I see drivers setup to kill those around them while they blithely text away. (Guy in intersection waiting to turn right through the crosswalk, wheels cranked hard over pointing to the pedestrians, and on his cell-phone.) Further, if and when he kills someone, he'll get some pathetically low punishment and probably remain a driver.
Many traffic fatalities happen "near home" and to anyone, pedestrian, driver, passengers in the other car. There's a ton of actionable things we could do, such as just make driver's license renewal require a retest.
We remember the unique, so a gun death stands out. We stoically ignore the everyday, so V2 bombings and traffic fatalities quickly just become a thing that happens.
I do believe that splitting the EU into constituent parts for the purposes of statistics comparing the US is disingenuous. The EU has the same issues that the US has. It has multiple countries with different policy just as the US has different states.
Each other EU country has somewhere in the range of .5 deaths per 100k people. An eyeball average would be .5 deaths per 100k people throughout Europe. Are you trying to add the bars up? Because if that's the case, your interpretation of the statistics presented is wrong.
I also can't guarantee they won't get diabetes or heart disease, or fall off a ladder, or be hit by one of the passing cars. All of which are vastly more likely to happen than being shot, which itself is an order of magnitude more likely than an innocent person being shot. (ie, not robbing a drug dealer, etc)
Dead is dead, and a car gets you there just as quickly. Focusing on one is silly. (Unless you're a crossing-guard, for instance.)
I normally see the irrational fear (crypto-racism) argument from people who want to limit refugees. You've got a higher chance of dying from someone falling off a ladder onto you than being killed by a terrorist hiding as a refugee. I'm not saying you're a crypto-racist, I'm saying this sloppy thinking is used to support other nonsense arguments because it's so empty you can use it to support anything.
I question your probability argument that concerns around guns are irrational.
Just because heart disease is the most common cause of death doesn't mean concern about anything else is irrational.
I think being afraid of something that can kill you is absolutely rational.
> All of which are vastly more likely to happen than being shot, which itself is an order of magnitude more likely than an innocent person being shot.
If fear of guns is irrational then why do licence-holders need them?
Often for non-gun related threats. And also because they're probably in riskier demographics.
Or maybe because they just enjoy shooting.
> Just because heart disease is the most common cause of death doesn't mean concern about anything else is irrational.
Worry is zero-sum. The time you spend worrying about being shot is time you aren't spending worrying about your trans-fat intake, or simply enjoying life.
> I think being afraid of something that can kill you is absolutely rational.
Afraid of, or worried about in general? If a bad guy is swinging a gun around, yes you're right to be afraid. There's a direct action that will make you safer - leaving - and you should take that if possible.
But in general to worry about a bad guy with a gun is stealing attention from real problems with actual solutions.
People carry guns because they're afraid of all the dangerous people out there not carrying guns? Uh huh
Now, for the sake of this debate I started: I was arguing that the OP couldn't just claim his friends fears of guns were unfounded. Your counter claim is that it is an irrational fear founded in "crypto-racism". If racism is the reason, it would mean the fear is irrational but founded. So I'm not sure what you're arguing.
I'm not sure how something can be irrational without also being unfounded.
Whatever validity there is to say "I hate X people" is lost when lies are used as the supposed justification. These people are already racist and are grasping at any straws (currently the fake rape-epidemic stories) as if that caused their racism, but next week it'll be back to mis-interpreted IQ tests, etc.
Calling people's fear of guns "unscientific" based on them not having been personally a victim of gun violence is nonsense.
Seriously, your argument is just the party-level version of "why would you run for office in america, a country that elected someone who denies climate change and says vaccines cause autism?" Easy - to lead them in a positive direction!
I remember the days before their descent to this insanity.
I highly doubt all Republicans in Congress don't believe in climate change. But they say what they have to say in order to get the votes they need to stay in Congress, and while they keep saying that, it doesn't make sense for a pro-science group to support them or their ilk.
This is actually a mildly subtle point, which is why people who don't 'get it' are so immediately dismissive. There's nothing wrong with providing more information to consumers. Hell every product we sell could come with small book's worth of information about its chemical contents, health risks, place of origin, worker conditions which could be considered valuable to the buyer. The question is why this specific piece of information is being fought for so hard. And that's because there's a movement that vehemently opposes GMOs and are trying to use labeling to scare people into avoiding (what their opponents say is) a completely safe product.
I'm not a scientist so I'm not qualified to evaluate the various and contradictory studies about the risks or non-risks of GMO foods. However, this battle should be taking place in labs and the FDA. Using labeling and the fact that GMO sounds scary to hurt GMO producers is the definition of anti-science FUD. It's not anti-science in the sense that the movement disagrees with a widely held scientific consensus but that they are using psychological and political tricks to subvert the actual scientific process.
> We're told if it's kosher.
This is not a government requirement, there are committees of jews that evaluate if a product is kosher or not and allow their seal to be placed on the packaging. Jewish families will even have a preference for which committees they trust.
That's just a hypothesis, but based on the way genuinely unhealthy things tend not to have disappeared from the market just because they're on a label, I think it's true.
Because, like it or not, a label that says "note, this product contains acids" would alarm many people who would immediately ask themselves "Wait, why do they need to tell me that? Better just play it safe."
> Why should we exclude stock/source information from the consumer?
It's not about hiding information, it's about the regrettable fact that mandatory labelling communicates a lot more than just the words on the label.
What I don't know, because I don't have source data, is what will spliced in gene based foods (that's what I mean by GMO, not the equivocation straw man people throw up in the Mendel sense) do to both the human GI tract and to the environment at a macro level. Until then, I'd like the option of "noping" out. Just the option. I might not even do it because as Stewie says, "They say star light gives your cancer, but what doesn't these days?" I just want the option.
Scientists have come along and said, "Stupid layman, trust us. Of course we're just like those people who said use lead in paint, then in gas, and advocated for Asbestos". That' not scientific. I want to see the data. Until then, my default is skepticism, you know the rational default [1].
And therefore I trust you to make a reasoned decision. How about your cousin who is on deepak chopra's mailing list, though? Will she make the same reasoned decision?
All the debate is about is mandatory labels on the side of the can. How about, people who know what they're doing and can make reasoned decisions, can look up information on their smart phone or whatever- but the people who are going to make a kneejerk emotional decision that winds up penalizing GMO foods and benefiting the organic alternative for emotional reasons won't see any scary labels that exert undue influence on the marketplace- would that be a reasonable compromise?
Producers should be free to add any of these labels to their products, but mandating that all products are labelled in regard to GMOs when there's no evidence that GMOs have any proven impact on health or the nutrition of the food does border on scaremongering.
Does USA have mandatory kosher labeling on foods?
GMO is a tool. It is itself neither good nor bad, neither safe nor unsafe.
Those who wish to do good can use GMO to do great good. It is more powerful than non-GMO methods, and so potentially can let them do greater good than they can with traditional methods such as selective breeding.
The same holds for those who wish to do bad things. They can currently do bad things with selective breeding and other non-GMO methods. GMO gives them more power to more extreme bad things and do them faster.
The question of whether such foods should be labeled comes down to whether or not there will be those who will GMO for bad things, and if so whether or not consumers who wish to avoid those bad things should be given the information to do so. Science is completely silent on how to answer this question.
Looking at the foods that fill a typical American supermarket, I do not find myself confident that the major food companies have my long term best interests at the top of their priority list when they design a new food product.
And the appearance of partisan bias is much easier to avoid if you have at least one guy from each party.
The headline is a little misleading, but this isn't actually a "support scientists, in general, running for office," but rather "support specific scientists running for office who support the issues 314 wants to address."
More broadly I think the "changing the party from the inside" tack is a dead end, especially for the Republican party whose power actors seem to only ever double down on their positions and tactics.
there are a few oddballs who aren't financially liberal, and a few oddballs who aren't socially liberal-- but we're talking like 1/100 for each of those cases.
realistically, most of the scientists i've ever met would fall into the green party best, but hold their nose and vote democratic party because it's the closest they'll get to actually liberal policies.
>to get scientific minded people into running for the republican seats
the republican electorate is largely anti-intellectual and distrustful of scientists, so that won't work. i don't mean to be dismissive here... but it just isn't going to work because of the culture. no way, no how-- those people are not accessible by the eggheads. i guess if you got a climate denier or creation scientist or some other quack out there, it might work... but that would defeat the point.
i do agree that the only way we'll survive is by driving a wedge within the republican party so that they don't vote as a unified bloc consistently. i'm really not sure what demographic to go after in order to make that happen, though.
"We are quite in danger of sending highly trained and highly intelligent young men out into the world with tables of erroneous numbers under their arms, and with a dense fog in the place where their brains ought to be. In this century, of course, they will be working on guided missiles and advising the medical profession on the control of disease, and there is no limit to the extent to which they could impede every sort of national effort."
Fisher, R N (1958). "The Nature of Probability". Centennial Review. 2: 261–274. http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher272.pdf
Do not be blinded by a degree, there are a lot of these people out there. As a heuristic, you may have to limit "scientist" to mean physicists and engineers, as those communities have been least affected.
Can you expand on this? What is NHST?
The parent poster has ... for some inexplicable reason ... decided that this technique is invalid. This reeks of a profound misunderstanding of the technique, and a failure to discriminate between poor use and invalidity.
While there is all sorts of things wrong with NHST, the primary thing is that researchers never actually test their own hypothesis. Instead they test a "null" hypothesis that acts as a strawman, usually that some parameter equals exactly zero. Then when the strawman is "rejected", they go on to say the results support whatever theory/idea it is they favor.
Rather than come up with precise predictions deduced from their idea, they leave them vague (If I am right, A will be correlated with B). Then calculations are used to reject the very precise strawman, giving an entirely false sense of rigor to a handwavy, nonsensical ritual.
It is very common, and seems to get more and more popular every year despite all efforts by scientists and statisticians to stop it (because it lets you seem scientific about proving whatever you want). I was trained to think that way myself not too long ago, with absolutely zero mention of any controversy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347431/
http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf
http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/30/why-the-garden-of-forking...
How is "there is no difference between my groups/conditions" a strawman?
This is by far the most common H0.
For nearly all use cases many plausible models/theories/ideas will predict "not exactly zero difference", so rejection of the hypothesis "difference = zero" is useless to the scientist. Mathematicians apparently don't get this, which is what inspired the Fisher paper I linked to.
And yes, it is the most common H0. No argument there. The problem is so widespread and destructive that the mind instinctively rejects its existence as unbelievable.
>No one predicts "an absence of effect"
In my field, we most certainly do predict an absence of an effect, in the following sense:
1. if a manipulation does not have an effect on the system, then we expect no systematic deviations in the measurement distribution
2. point 1 will be revealed by H0 (no systematic change in measurement distribution across conditions) not being rejected.
It's beginning to sound like you've encountered people who misuse or misinterpret this technique -- and I agree that there are alarmingly many such people -- but this is different from the technique being invalid.
I'm suggesting that people who do NHST would encourage more funding to go towards others who do NHST, while also making policy decisions based off of it. At least when politicians are mostly clueless about science they use intuition and common sense.
But within elections, what else SHOULD we vote for other than merit?
What really bothered me when Obama was elected was people throwing the word "elitism" around, because he was smart, eloquent and well educated, like that was somehow a bad thing.
I sure as hell hope that the people elected are smarter than me, because I would have no idea what I was doing in office.
But I guess we'll now see what happens when you elect someone that's "just like us", except born with money.
The way I see it, being smart is no guarantee of success. This can be especially true when those intelligent people are misguided in what they aim to achieve. History is replete with people who were very effective in pursuing misguided goals. But that doesn't mean that less-than-intelligent people are well-suited to run government. It just means that we need to choose better from among our intelligent people.
Since we are good at hypocrisy as well as rationalization, we have left ourselves a back door for thebpeople we truly hate - he's not smart, he's lucky(or the opposite, if we are really sympathetic).
I believe you are right that "these qualities" are a "requirement", but only due to their flexible nature and our tendency to assign and strip them in order to meet our just-world view.
While I get your point, most rational people have no trouble attributing positive properties to people they dislike.
I welcome technocrats from hard-sciences and engineering.
Anyone who's worked professionally as a programmer has seen a similar effect. Non-programmers see only the success case and, perhaps, a few obvious error cases. Programmers more naturally see the edge-cases and are able to think of their users as possible adversaries. Our laws are very much like computer programs, but written in English and executed in our judicial system instead of a computer.
We don't want non-lawyers writing our laws any more than we want non-programmers writing our code. Having a politician without a legal background seems akin to a non-technical product manager. Absent some other form of expertise that's being put to use, that's usually not a good thing.
[1] Example from the House of Representatives: https://legcounsel.house.gov/HOLC/Before_Drafting/Ghost_Writ...
I think scientists writing laws, assisted by the legal expertise you mentioned, would be a positive change. They have that other form of expertise. But I also take issue with the above implication that lawyers are somehow unfit to be politicians. They are, in my analogy, the technical product managers. Absent some other form of expertise, having a lawyer in that position is probably the next-best option.
Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?: https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/why-dont-...
Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists: https://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-to...
Scientists and engineers cannot simply give up their positions for several years and then easily return to their industries, and not just academia like the article points out. Professions such as lawyers have it easier in that regard.
I get the appeal of non-career politicians voted into office, but I'd much rather take reasonable, well-educated scientists than the opposite.
Margaret Thatcher is near the top of most historical rankings of UK PMs in most surveys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Prime_M...).
It's probably too early to tell whether Merkel is considered "good" or "bad" from a historical perspective, but her term as chancellor has been quite influential, enough for many publications to describe you as "de-facto leader of the EU" (and for Forbes to name Merkel as the 2nd most powerful person in the world in 2015).
Obviously the converse exists, but Thatcher and Merkel seem like good examples for reasonable, well-educated scientists doing "great" in politics.
It wasn't an emphatic "This is great in every single scenario", but I very much think that it has a much larger chance of being great than the alternative, which is the long form of what I wrote.
What I want to know is -- is there a market for a "constituent pro-bono consultant"? I don't want to become a career politician (not even part-time), but I would be willing to consult with legislators on technical matters without compensation. I won't buy my representatives lunch or even coffee, but I'd be willing to try and be a balance against the trade groups for the sake of the people.
Would be very intriguing to see this play out in a democratic society.
On minimum wage, there are scientists who have two schools of thoughts:
a. Minimum wage can be increased without negative impact to individuals b. Minimum wage is a horrible action that harkens back to racist unions trying to keep black people out of jobs and has unseen consequences in a labor market.
In this instance, the answer from the 314 Action group is that those scientists that agree with Democrat policies are more equal to others.
Another example of this would be in the realm of climate change modeling. Let's say we have two climate models that utilize carbon dioxide as an input. Model A uses less of a feedback loop than Model B, resulting in less global average increase in temperature. Both were put together by top scientists, there is just an existing dispute in the scientific community as to the amount of feedback that can occur. Will these scientist politicians be able to allocate resources any better than a politician? If according to the Atlantic, the next five years is the time to act, will there be time to set up a committee to review the differences and make recommendations?
Of course anyone can learn these skills, but so few do.
This isn't to say the criticism found there is unreasonable, just that it's not special. People in science and people in tech can get involved in politics, but most of the political issues out there are not scientific or technological so support for them will break down on ideological lines, not technocratic ones. The case of Peter Thiel isn't special, i.e. a conservative member of the tech community would not prefer Richard Stallman to Marco Rubio, just as a progressive member of the tech community would not prefer Peter Thiel to Jerry Brown.
If you want technocracy, I would suggest encouraging tech-minded folks to move to the public sector rather than run for office. Personally I would oppose that, as I think most tech talent would be somewhat wasted there.
Its the weirdos who gave us the Apple // and the Mac. Not the button down conservative culture Thiel represents. I'm not sure its even fair to call Thiel a tech industry person. He's very much now a financier and investor. He's not making the future, he's worrying about what stocks to short and who to invest in.
I don't think that's fair. First of all, in some sense Thiel is one of those "weirdos" you mentioned above as a gay man. But that aside, the more modern versions of those enterprises -- google, facebook, uber -- were all funded by that "button-down conservative culture". It is hard, if not impossible, to call the success of those enterprises as anything but cooperation between "the weirdos" and people like Thiel.
And it is of course ridiculous to say that Thiel isn't genuinely a member of the tech community: if partners in ycombinator aren't genuine members of the tech industry, then who is? Just the engineers?
Yes, I think this anti-engineer culture at work at HN is ridiculous. Its the people building the future and having a vision for it who matter. Not the bankers who write the loans/buy stock/buy equity. That what Thiel's role is, pretty much just what banks used to do for businesses, except the SV way is no collateral just equity.
I think we greatly overplay the importance of the money men and let them steal credit from the engineers and founders.
> "the weirdos" and people like Thiel.
He stopped being one of the weirdos a long time ago. He's the establishment the weirdos now have to fight against.
Wow, do I see a generation gap here.
Close your eyes and picture the nation in 1990. As you pointed out, tech tends to float in and around big cities. But we're in 1990. The cities are at rock bottom. Crime all over. Poverty. Horrendous disfunction.
Anyone living in the cities back then could be excused for blaming the situation on the hard-pressed staff of the executive branch at the various levels of government. And since a techie's first impulse is "let's automate this/route around this/code around this", there was in deed a lot of hardcore libertarianism.
But then the cities started to recover. And recover. And recover. And the clipboard-wielding liberal functionaries trying to hold things together, well, they started to hold things together.
But old attitudes die hard. Still a lot more libertarianism floating around than you think.
You should read less Trump tweets and more facts. The GDP, salaries, etc in big cities is very impressive. There's a reason the tech innovations and big startups don't come from nowhere Wyoming and instead come from urban centers.
OTOH, I pulled this gem from an Asimov quote website -- "[Creationists] make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."
If you're a civil engineer, chemical engineer, electrical engineer, or a software engineer, you can find far too many examples of Republican politicians offering rhetoric and policies that are directly at odds with the domain knowledge of your profession.
We can't let this continue.