When science is a partisan issue, what else can you do?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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'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 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.
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.
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
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!