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croon

I'm all for changing parties from within, but with:

* 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.

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Don't lump abortion in with those other issues that involve denial of either rational thought or scientific evidence. It's an issue where rational people can disagree. The only way that it verges on that is in the fact that people will try to do it anyways, in ways that are historically very dangerous. In that way, it becomes like prohibition of drugs and legalization becomes a harm-reduction strategy. But, like drugs, that doesn't mean that it's a fundamentally good thing.

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.

The "but then I wouldn't have been born" argument misses that you have billions of potential first-cousins who never were born.

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?

> Well, look around at those who believe what you do

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've yet to meet another person who is intentionally ambivalent on the issue

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 know you're trolling, but...

> 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 :-)

> This is being intentionally dismissive.

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.

> Life starts at conception

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.

>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.

I of course can't know, but I estimate that about 0.1% of Bernie support were because of GMO labelling.

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.

Anti-vax lunacy trickles through both parties, and gets little mainstream traction (although that may change with Trump injecting oxygen into the movement). But if you're running as a pro-science Democrat who is not an anti-GMO bandwagoneer, you will generally not find yourself blackballed by the party or opposed on your flank by billionaire string-pullers obsessed with purity tests on this issue. The Democratic party does not have the same ideology enforcement infrastructure that so tightly binds the Republicans; that's a strength if you think monocultures are pathological, but a weakness if you're looking for lockstep execution of some received ideology.

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.

>"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."

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.

No. Who said anything about BS results? One party is now actively erasing information they don't like -- information that is accepted by virtually every scientific body in the world. The Democrats as a whole will accept the results of science. Like anyone with a belief system, those results may disappoint them. They may not like them, and they may see if the conclusions are controvertible with respect to other studies. But they won't pretend they simply do not exist, and try to make them not exist for anyone else as well. They may grumble, as you might if you see the value of your stocks decline. But if your stocks decline, you don't declare them not to have declined, then outlaw historical stock charts, call downward movement of stock prices to be a conspiracy theory, and move to destroy stock markets around the world.

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.

>"perhaps try to initiate other studies to see if there's any other way to align their policy goals with 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.

Let's say you think stress causes ulcers. The NIH runs some studies that seem to correlate the two. So you put out a new health policy advising people to take steps to lower stress to combat ulcers. Doctors begin following the policy. Maybe they even prescribe anti-anxiety meds for ulcers.

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.

Adding to the noise is vastly better than destroying the signal.

For what it's worth, when I wrote "progressive causes" in my original comment, I wasn't refer to things as black and white as the science on GMOs. I was referring to scientists using their scientific authority to make progressive claims on issues like abortion, or taxation, or anything else that ignores either (a) actual scientific evidence to the contrary or (b) the lack of scientific consensus on the issue at all.

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_...

> 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.

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.

>I'm all for changing parties from within, but with:

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.

You're right.

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.

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