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Comment by jwfxpr | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you would find the original article https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-... has the weighty facts that this response-to-criticism lacks.

I strongly disagree with the rationalist fallacy that science must progress unfettered by social or political 'ideology'. The very notion that science is ideologically blanched, that it exists in some asocial vacuum, is naive at best, disingenuous at worst, and misguided always.

To paraphrase John Wheeler on spacetime: Society tells science how to move; science tells society how to curve.

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If you go this route, then you have no leg to stand on to criticize Trump if/when he defunds NASA climate science and mandates teaching Creationism in public schools. After all, he is just guiding science by his idealogy. Are you also against the "March for science?"

I honestly think that Trump is the application of postmodern concepts to politics on an unrelated precedented level and many people on the left who supported these ideas find them horrifying when they are used to bolster positions that are not theirs.

So the only possible positions are the extremes? By acknowledging that science and society have an unavoidable structural relationship you give yourself a framework for developing tools to improve that relationship. There are plenty of problems with anti-science politics and the antidote is not to insist that they should just leave science alone just because.

You want science better represented in society and politics? Get more scientists involved in society and politics. http://www.314action.org/home

Can you explain how you want science to be influenced by "social or political ideology"? Do you just mean developing weapons during wartime and medicine during epidemics, or something beyond that?

Those examples you give are good large-scale ones. But the impact of society on science is universal and pervasive, down to the observational biases of the individual humans handling instruments. It is a major project within science to eliminate subjective biases in research, right? That wouldn't be necessary if it wasn't universal and pervasive.

As far as how I 'want' it to be influenced, I think civil society should be entitled to discuss the implications and validity of research that is done (in this case, racial or ethnic factors in 'standardised', culturally based tests of 'intelligence'), as well as set large scale priorities as to where effort should best be focused, like in your examples.

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