Scientists must rise above politics and restate their value to society
nature.com
nature.com
Science is about discovering information. It could answer the question, "Is climate change happening?" It can't answer the question "What should we do about it?" It can inform people about the consequences of one response or another but at root the answer to that question is - "Who do I want to see hurt and who do I want to see helped?"
Clearly there's a lot of overlap there - it's not hard to see how and why that's the case - but I still think when Science starts to lay claim to political decisions people become resentful and no one is fooled.
The analogy I'd make is politicians invoking religion as a trump card in making policy. No one is fooled by it - and it makes everyone suspicious of religion.
We who are not trolling do not deny the data. The data are clear, there is a general warming trend so far. And it's most likely primarily caused by human action. But there's a problem.
You see, when we noticed Uranus had perturbations in its orbit, we looked at the theoretical model, did the math the theory demanded, predicted that a planet should be in a location, looked there, and saw Neptune. In that order. That's how rigorous scientific theory works.
Climate theory is very far from that rigor. Each University has a different model. Most of them have many models. They're software, written by programmers that embed their assumptions into their code. They all disagree. And we never know which model is correct except in hindsight. Even more problematic, the model that best predicted climate change in 2015 is not the model that best predicted climate change in 2019. Of the thousand models, we see every year in the news "this one was right!". But we didnt know it was right before we looked in hindsight, and we don't know in the least which one will be right tomorrow. Climate theory is still in flux.
Moreover, the supposed solutions do not address the fact that the biggest problem is not the West, which has been declining in emissions simce the 70s [0]. It's the exponentially growing developing world. None of the solutions I've heard except "global nuclear fission or war, now" have a chance at stopping climate change as generally predicted by the entertainment media like CNN et al. Solar and wind is a mere fairy tale unless we're talking about comoletely carpetting AZ, NV, and half of TX in solar paneling. And then braindead things like the Green New Deal pop up, that even my Democrat friends make fun of. I'm left with a sense that the evangelists of climate change either don't take what they believe seriously, or they're ignorant of the gravity of their predictions.
So yeah. I'm withholding judgement because for the foreseeable future, the absolute worst case is my grandparents can outwallk climate change coastal changes and we get more net arable land in Canada and Siberia.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
For someone who starts their argument with "climate science is imperfect and we don't know which model will predict the future correctly," you seem to have a lot of confidence on your "absolute worst case" which looks like, honestly, pulled out of thin air.
E.g. When sea levels change, reefs on shallow shelves get less light. They die and regrow at the more favorable optimal depth, which takes decades/centuries. Even a few inches of rise.
All sea life essentially exists in the top few meters of water, and depends upon coastal ecosystems. They collapse - the vast majority of sea life is affected.
Vast numbers of human beings depend utterly upon fishing. Usually poorer people in less developed nations. They will starve.
Starving people numbered in the hundreds of millions/billions will have a political effect. The refugee issues we've see upsetting nations (thousands of refugees! We can't cope!) turns to millions then hundreds of millions.
Yes you might survive the weather change in your midtown apartment far from the sea. But will we all survive the 'ring of fire' resulting from global catastrophic refugee migration? Resulting brush wars that turn into regional conflicts that turn into worse?
That's one simple scenario resulting from ecological collapse due to one variable. Multiply by all the effects from ecosystems everywhere.
Conclusion: we must weight the danger of a false negative (doing nothing until its too late) which in this case is immense, when figuring our response to the climate issue.
You put your comment as long, well thought out description of what is happening, but it’s frankly embarrassing. Climate scientists don’t disagree fundamentally at all, and we can all be grateful if their models get better and better.
So please, if you dismiss policy proposals as braindead when they’re trying to accomodate for our collective failures and the learnings we had during the last 30+ years, be better than that.
But more interestingly, where did we fail exactly? And how is giving totalitarian control of the economy to a 20-something, easily manipulated bartender with a 400s credit score going to make anything better?
Absolutely not.
Where did we fail? Listening to scientists 50 years ago that had the data already. Changing our infrastructure while we had the time. Signing treaties for 30 years instead of incentivizing sustainable business.
I'm not going to comment on your ad hominem. Like yeah, people from all walks of life being able to participate in politics is called DEMOCRACY, I think you heard of it. It's also entirely offtopic for you to keep going on that.
Well, it's good to see that you're responding to actual policy suggestions and not just pulling shit your of your ass.
> New York City has not had a daily high temperature above 100 degrees since 2012, and it has had only five such days since 2002. However, in a previous 18-year span from 1984 through 2001, New York City had nine days at 100 degrees or higher. When the power went out in New York City earlier this month, the temperature didn't even get to 100 degrees - it was 95, which is not extreme. For comparison, there were 12 days at 95 degrees or higher in 1999 alone.
> Kansas City, Missouri, for example, experienced an average of 18.7 days a year at 100 degrees or higher during the 1930s, compared to just 5.5 a year over the last 10 years. And over the last 30 years, Kansas City has averaged only 4.8 days a year at 100 degrees or higher, which is only one-quarter of the frequency of days at 100 degrees or higher in the 1930s.
> Here is a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned: 26 of the 50 states set their all-time high temperature records during the 1930s that still stand (some have since been tied). And an additional 11 state all-time high temperature records were set before 1930 and only two states have all-time record high temperatures that were set in the 21st century (South Dakota and South Carolina).
> So 37 of the 50 states have an all-time high temperature record not exceeded for more than 75 years. Given these numbers and the decreased frequency of days of 100 degrees or higher, it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heat waves is more common today.
Source: https://m.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/realimpactofweath...
Like seriously, what are we predicting again?
For one, that's false: there're plenty of people denying the data, and there're plenty of people denying that humans are the primary contributors to it. These aren't nutballs shrieking on street corners, but nutballs who currently run our government (Trump). So acting like the public debate is between well meaning people who disagree about model validation is not reflective of reality.
For two, if you believe the issue is with needing to do more research, shouldn't we be, you know, funding more research? Why is Trump cancelling NASA's Carbon Monitoring System [0]? Why are Republicans in North Carolina banning the use of models of sea level rise that try to take into account climate change[1]? Why is the administration issuing gag orders preventing scientists from communicating about peer reviewed research[2]? Why does the budget cut climate change research generally [3]?
There are countless examples of this, and it's very difficult to take the people who say "we need more research!" seriously when they support and vote for a party that's hellbent on preventing any new research from taking place.
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-qu...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-c...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/24/14372940/trump-gag-order-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-ene...
[1] is exactly my contention
[2] not really relevant. That order was highly specific and targeted to policy statements that could be confused with administration policy. I may not agree with it, but it's really really edge case.
[3] cut is a really fun word. 31% reduction to 6 billion. Not the disaster you're looking for. Also WaPo, not exactly non partisan. And the left has everything to gain from lying or dishonestly framing to get back in power.
>the left has everything to gain from lying or dishonestly framing to get back in power
Looney tunes.
No, the contention of [1] is that they wanted to influence the real estate market based on an unvalidated fringe model that predicted more extreme sea level rises than the majority of the other models.
[3] is interesting because I'm not sure how much money should be pumped into climate research, and neither is anyone else. There's a point between 0% and 100% where it becomes a net drain on the world. Who knows where that is. But single digit billions of government funds plus all the University endowments feels reasonable. I could probably be convinced it should be double digit billions. But nobody knows the right answer. And research isn't stopping by any stretch.
WRT Looney Tunes, i said the same thing about Republicans in 2009. shrug that's politics. You win by changing opinions, not saying true things.
It can be used to model if doing X or Y is more efficient or effective.
The issue is so many policy choices are good for society and bad for someone specific. Which means a huge number of people want to use some other means for deciding what to do.
For example, farmers really don’t want people to eat less even if that would be good for society.
If you have a government undermining the institutions that make that practice possible, it's certainly appropriate for scientists to speak out about it. If the US government cuts off funding of climate change research and bans scientists from releasing their findings, scientists can certainly speak, as scientists, and call out the administration doing so as anti-science.
I remember getting into a debate with a (facebook) acquaintance of mine, ultimately it boiled down to me asking them for an example of what they'd consider a good sociology paper. The paper was trying to test whether sexual harassment training actually worked. After reading through it, it was almost laughable how bad it was. Their system for measuring if the training worked was waiting two weeks and testing if people retained the knowledge. It was also done using a small group of college students.
Of course that's just one paper, but the event stuck in my mind. He was a relatively well-respected grad student in my peer group, and that was what he considered to be good science?
There are a lot of examples of really dubious stuff coming out of the academic community. Things like the sokal affair, or the infamous "feminist glaciology" incident. Like it or not those are getting lumped in with legitimate scientists in the public conscious, and if academia want to get taken more seriously it needs to get these ridiculous excesses under control or at least de-emphasize/disavow them as much as possible.
I think there's a lot to be done to gain back that trust, but most of it has to do with cutting out the garbage. Publish or perish seems like one of the bigger problems that need addressing, but the lack of open-access journals certainly doesn't help. The academic writing style probably needs an overhaul as well.
I don't know, it's sad but for me at least there needs to be some big changes before I start regaining respect of academia as a institution.
On the whole this means I need to use heuristics in order to try and understand research on the whole, and while I believe those heuristics are better than just taking the research as gospel, they're definitely worse than a properly functioning scientific community that does good research in the first place.
Sociology does seem like a pretty big problem, and I do think these issues are bringing down the reputation of science as a whole.
But I haven't found nearly as many issues in STEM fields, although I'm seeing some very worrying trends in AI research and reproducibility.
I am not a fan of Sunday afternoon paper readers. They are not the people who contribute to Science.
If people want to study a subject deeply and contribute to progress, it's going to take decades of work. Those type of people go look for answers. They don't wait for someone else to inspire them or to prove things to them.
If that's too complex for people to get, it doesn't matter really. Shrinking the gap in knowledge between those who do the work and those who don't does not matter. It's like worrying about what people understood about Light or Electricity before Maxwell and Faraday. Even after them, it took about 40 years to start seeing applications.
Science takes its own sweet time to make progress and most people have no sense of how long things take. The world took 1800 years between Archimedes and Newton to realize the value of Calculus? They both basically were doing the same thing. Thousands of people had as good an education as Newton did, access to "papers", books, and the same problems, whether in Europe, China or Persia or India but it still took 1800 years.
Other issues in science include people turning it in a competition for prestige. Its often the case that top programs prioritize the prestige of an undergraduate school instead of research ability. The same is true of academic journals and getting tenure. In some fields, more than half of the tenured professors at the top 100 schools in the USA completed their PhD from a top 5 PhD program in their field.
In a lot of Humanities fields, it's worse. Though I can't seem to find The Atlantic article right now, I can remember one from a few years ago that stated that in fields like French Literature, there has never been a tenured professor in the US that came form anything other than one of ten schools, going back many decades. That said, these professors still taught at a place other than those ten schools and had PhD students themselves. These students stood exactly zero chance at tenure achievement. These new PhDs could, of course, go on to live lives outside of the ivory tower. However, in the Humanities, it does smell strongly of disingeniousness on the part of the tenured faculty to take on students, charge them, and train them in fields that they know they cannot possibly be employed in to any 'real' effect.
I cannot imagine the metal gymnastics that must go on in the Ethics fields these days.
Go and ask someone who a famous living physicist is nowadays.
I'm afraid the way modern media works is the opposite of what we need for scientists to have authority.
Perhaps in the 50s there was more respect for authority figures than there is nowadays. I strongly doubt there was more than that though.
Politicians start with their conclusions, find alternative theories and then seek to discredit them.
We need to vote for politicians that think more like scientists and less like politicians.
Seems like politicians start with the conclusions and find ways to pay off ethically reprehensible scientists to manipulate data to credit a politically acceptable theory (or discredit a politically competitive theory).
So many "foundations" that are either reputation-launderers for moneyed interests, or so tied to a foredrawn conclusion that every result must be carefully post-filtered to avoid career suicide.
With their livelihoods (and independence) assured, this task was typically handled by the upper classes in old Europe. Once the dust settles, the same pattern will probably be revealed for the present day.
I think the older generations, the poor uneducated families, and the bitter religious folks have more disbeliefs in science than 'the right' in general.
If the Right wants to drop its anti-science reputation, it needs to start there.
> Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue.
That is an admission by the Republican Party, in its public policy, that climate change is not a myth. It just means they've decided not to care about it in regards to national security.
I also found this:
> Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data.
Again, that is an admission that the climate is changing and that scientific research and data can give us information about it.
So as said elsewhere in this thread, we're back to politics determining decisions about what to do about climate change; the Republican Party's official platform doesn't seem to deny that the climate is changing.
"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
"The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life."
"Obama's talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a money-making industry, okay? It's a hoax, a lot of it."
I can do this with any given Republican who's been in a leadership position.
I won't, though, because you're clearly dissembling and not engaging in good faith.
Someone replied to "The public position of the Republican Party is that climate change is a myth" with a link to their web platform stating something different.
I think it's not really fair to counter that by quoting Trump and closing with the assumption of bad faith.
On the other hand, all of the Republican leadership cast doubt on it. And as a result the large majority of Republican voters reject the idea of anthropogenic climate change.
I am guessing from their admission that they acknowledge climate is changing, but refusing to list it as a priory is that where the difference in opinion between Democrats/Republicans lie.
When it comes to the root cause of the climate change, how much humans are accelerating/impacting the change and how we can reduce the impact are all topics where the different political party's opinions differ.
I'm quite sure 40% of the US population that voted for the GOP does not fit the description you have provided.
> They should be fired, we can't have science legitimize fascists movements.
Ok, if you want to get rid of a strong scientific community continue on with this fantasy. Propagandists making things up should be exiled.
The climate change assertions should be challenged. That's apart of the scientific method. You don't publish directly to a respected journal. Also, correlation does not imply causation.
Their unbiased* findings should assist in the creation of solutions which involve policymakers. It's not a scientists' job to make a decision that affects everyone.
Unbiased means: As unbiased as you can get. Get it peer-reviewed. Work with others to test out effective change strategies to avoid unintended consequences, present options, accept failure. (Yes, that last one is the biggest thing)
Nobody is arguing with basic research. But when a peer reviewed gender studies journal publishes a rewriting of Mein Kampf, I think it's fair to suspect that a lot of non-science masquerading as real science is indeed pouring out of Universities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa...
See: basic research on climate change. Republicans don't so much argue with it as dismiss it outright.
The political left calls GMO crops dangerous and fear mongers without a shred of scientific evidence. Or they spread fear about the pharmaceutical industry -- and how those evil drug researchers are trying to get people addicted to their drugs for profit.
Then when regular people decide not to trust any drugs at all -- including vaccines -- people wonder how that could have possibly happened, after demonizing the entire field of research for decades.
And on the political right we of course have wilful disinformation about climate change.
Not to mention that it’s not even that good an example to prove anything about academia - it’s a minuscule subfield with little funding in comparison to any other academic discipline. None of the major public universities I attended even had a gender studies department - at best it was a specialty within sociology/anthropology with a dozen grad students or so. The only thing in which gender studies has a disproportionate representation is as the favorite example in the rhetoric of anti-academics.
Please show how physics/biology/math/geology/climate science/etc is “monothically leftist and activist in nature”.
And professors of all majors are almost monolithically left-leaning, compared to the population.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...
Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.
Academic institutions have leaned left since at least the 60s, back when leftism was an actual counterculture movement. This has nothing to do with climate science.
>Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.
Gender studies is fully related to the discussion, because it is an exclusively leftist pursuit, intrinsically linked to modern "liberal" policymaking, and respected institutions tacitly enforce their pseudoscientific, sexist, racist, and classist drivel by allowing them space and funding, while making no such allowances to anything related to right wing politics. Right leaning ideas are effectively forbidden at the majority of so called elite universities in the U.S.
How can you expect scientific departments to be unbiased when their administration and sources of funding are openly and strongly politically leaning and active?
Further, and most importantly, do you really believe that climate science is immune to dogma and the statistical abuses that are responsible for the replication crisis evident in other empirical disciplines? Even asking such a question is career suicide - which unfortunately justifies some degree of right wing scepticism of modern academia due to politicization.
The conspiracy you imagine of academic administrators shutting down research that undermines climate change because of gender studies is inane.
You've misrepresented my point. The point is that the existence and condoning of politically slanted departments like those of gender studies is further evidence of a strong liberal bias in academic administration, which will inevitability bleed into management of climate science because of how politicized it has become.
I am not advocating for dismissal, I am merely suggesting that social and political pressure for certain results from the hiring and financial appropriation practices of a politically biased administration can introduce aggregate bias in published results. And on the subject:
>The majority of academic scientists identified as Republicans, up through the 80s
You've failed to establish how even a republican leaning scientific establishment is immune from the whims of administration resulting in, say, only publishing results that support the politically correct positions. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority University administration's lean strongly left - and when science is politicized, there's a strong chance that, again, such administrative bias will affect results in seemingly innocuous ways. Not to mention that most environmental scientists have personal left leaning biases and experience social and professional pressures which also may be reflected in results.
Significance testing, publication of only positive results, and model design are three methods by a which slant may be unintentionally introduced and, again, we know that these problems have lead to the replication crisis explicitly identified in other empirical sciences - why do you think no one is willing to ask the same, legitimate question about climate science, particularly when climatology by nature is not a reproducible discipline?
Oh, for Christ's sake. If anything, climate scientists talk about this more than most other specialties:
"Perspectives on Reproducibility and Replication of Results in Climate Science"
https://www.nap.edu/resource/25303/Reproducibility%20and%20R... (No, the National Academies of Sciences aren't comprised of crypto-socialist ideologues.)
It took literally 10 seconds of Googling to find that. Writing this comment is taking several times as long.
Perhaps the fever swamp that's constantly wondering if climate scientists understand basic science should perform basic due diligence on their own mental models of how the world works.
Why do you refuse to admit the possibility that political and social pressures in such a strongly politicized field can bias climate science? All of the ingredients are there, and the only reason such an assertion is contentious is because of these very same political norms. It begins to resemble dogma, when any criticism is treated with such disdain.
This is patently false. Maybe you aren't arguing with basic research, but people absolutely are.
I think there's evidence of a fairly significant amount of bias being introduced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis offers the best evidence I can offer for bad science being done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac...
Goes over the issues related to politics, conservatives aren't as under-represented when you include STEM fields, but pay special attention to the disciplinary variance.
>Focusing specifically on social psychology academics, a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1.
Also note what fields are facing the most obvious replication crisis.
I expect you'll want to do your own research, but that should get you started.
Another interpretation could be: the GOP platform is highly anti-science and most scientists wouldn’t want to be associated to such a horrendous organization which doubts scientific consensus regarding an issue that’s threatening the whole of civilization.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-...
How would you go about finding that evidence? What would be sufficient evidence that they're correlated for you?
My naive first skim seems to demonstrate that political slant does have an effect on reproducibility, although it doesn't matter if that ideological slant is conservative or liberal.
It's not much, but it was tricky to find and it is what you're looking for. More research is needed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
> and that it’s systematically introducing bias into research
Publishing a rigorous scientific paper saying "well look, here's the problem" is going to be difficult, given the issues such a paper would address. It could be career suicide if handled indelicately.
Given that we have weak evidence that there is a problem, the burden of proof is now on you to provide stronger evidence that there isn't a problem, unless we have a strong prior for there not being a problem or something.
Applying higher standards to things you disagree with is a great way to end up biased. If you require a well reviewed research paper showing that there is a problem, you should also require a similar paper showing you there isn't a problem.
At the very least trying to provide a counter viewpoint to the evidence you've already being presented with would be polite.
I'm not even on the right, but I certainly take issue with a lot of the ideas coming out of gender studies (and similar) departments and how easily they are accepted as truth and how quickly they spread. Many of those ideas, if taken seriously, seem to have the possibility to rearrange society in a pretty awful way. In fact, anecdotally, they already seem to be having a pretty negative effect on our world and their influence seems to be on the rise. Now, I'm not quite as concerned about this as climate change, but it's still a real issue. Do you not see this as a real issue?
The validity of the social sciences as "real science" has long been in question, long before the concerns of modern day politics. This problem is inherent to these fields, because instead of studying the objective physical world they study literature, history, politics, art, etc. Many social sciences are more accurately called liberal arts in my opinion, and they co-opted the word "science" to lend themselves credibility.
Then on the other hand you have climate science, which does study the objective physical world. The science around this involves collecting data and building models to describe the physical world instead of speculating about the nature of mankind. It is an apples to oranges comparison.
Just to illustrate, forget about climate science and gender studies because they are politically charged. If the above poster had criticized something like the study of French medieval literature and used that to argue that particle physics is a systemically flawed and biased field, I would also call that comparison absurd.
The argument is not: Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy.
The argument is: Social scientists pushed to be put on the same level as natural scientists, but then they pushed a bunch of politicized bullshit and tarnished the reputation of all scientists in the public's eye.
It doesn't matter what is true or not, people in general are stupid. The masses on the left trust scientists, since they feel that these bullshit pushers are pushing bullshit in the right direction (Not related to climate change). The masses on the right doesn't trust scientists for the same reason. The solution is not to teach people to properly evaluate the validity of different scientific claims, that is impossible, the solution is to build up the trust of scientists in everyone's eyes as much as possible by kicking out all the bullshit. Good arguments actually works, but if you try to feed them 50% bullshit they will refuse to swallow even the good parts since they stopped trusting you.
I largely agree with this, but I think the masses on the right approach it more like the first argument:
> Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy.
More accurately, it seems to me that it has become "social science is not trustworthy and I don't agree with the field's mainstream ideas, so I can consider any science I don't agree with to be not trustworthy". So when climate science suggests that climate change is a problem, and the proposed solutions do not agree with right-wing economics, the natural conclusion is for them to reject climate science. This conclusion has been reached by right wing governments across the world, so it certainly seems that those who follow the ideology tend to reach it.
I think it happens both ways with people of all political persuasions, saying "I agree with these conclusions so this science is trustworthy" or "I don't agree with these conclusions so this science is untrustworthy".
You have only to spend 5 minutes in a typical economics class to understand that that field favors neoliberal ideas. If you sit down and have a conversation with an actual leftist (particularly a marxist) professor, you'll hear something that nobody outside of the system seems to discuss. Marxism is very uncommon in most departments.
> Nobody is arguing with basic research.
Are you kidding me?
There are places in the US where powerful organizations and even state legislatures are actively trying to prevent schools from teaching evolution. Look at this development from two years ago: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316487-new-wave-of-...
At the federal level, we have congresspeople carrying snow into session so they can deny that climate change is occurring. I regularly see arguments online include discussion of how NASA and NOAA are doctoring the evidence. I wonder where they're getting THAT idea from...
So yea. People absolutely ARE arguing with basic research. Large numbers of people. Significant fractions of the population.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa...
From your link: Affilia: _"Journal of Women and Social Work is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers social work practice(s) and feminist analysis of gender inequality."_
How is this related to science (much less basic scientific research)? Even if it WERE a scientific journal, an anecdote about being fooled by a hoax doesn't invalidate the scientific research being done today.
I'd say there's a lot more diversity of opinion in the rest of the departments than there is in econ. I didn't get any sense of political agenda in the history department, and the sociology department seemed to be deliberately avoiding it.
I actually started university under the assumption that professors would be dogmatically pushing their agenda. I was wrong.
It's similar to accusing people of racism. Very very very few people who are called racists would agree with that, and the ones who would you're not going to win over anyway. People shut down when accused and get defensive. If the goal is to make progress (in the traditional sense of "liberalism", to reduce human suffering through gradual reform) rather that "to be right", then calling someone stupid or racist or saying that all of human knowledge contradicts their claims isn't really a good way to get there.
Scientists getting into politics opens them up to the attack that they are pushing an agenda out of political rather than professional beliefs or truth-seeking behaviour. See Trump's attacks on Mueller's team because many voted for democrats. His attacks are probably in bad faith but the point stands: give people something to attack other than a belief they're wrong about and they'll happily switch to that.
I totally understand that feeling I believe we all get when someone acts like a jackass and you don't mind alienating them, but every liberal democracy is built on a foundation of presuming that people can be convinced rather than having to be forced. That may not be true all the time, but it seems like we should at least act as though it is true.
If we're not going to act as though it's true, then we should call a spade a spade and say that it's ok to use authoritarian methods when they serve what we know to be right. Rule by strength of arms seems like a bad road to go down, though.
Now the fact that you immediately leap to authoritarianism is just plain stupid. No one at all is advocating for that in the linked piece or any of the comments. Passing a carbon tax for instance is not authoritarian if done through the democratic process.
The kind of language that alienates better serves the purpose of creating a group of people that is an enemy that can be fought against, which goes to my point about authoritarianism. There are lots of instances in a democracy where you put your foot down as a group and decide that certain behaviors are unacceptable. I just think it's morally important to distinguish between the times that we're using reason to drive policy and the times that we decide that we're officially so right that it's ok to use the power of the government to force people to behave in what we believe to be their own best interest.
FWIW, I absolutely believe massive change needs to happen on the climate change front. I just think that calling the other side deniers and anti-whatever is entirely counterproductive and only serves to deepen divisions. Policy can be made without creating a bogeyman, and if a policy requires a bogeyman, it's way more likely to be authoritarian, in my estimation.
This whole "you're with us or against us" thing? It's not working for me, and if it keeps happening I'm going to have to not be with you.
That being said If climate science becomes more about punching the other side into submission than about looking for truth I am going to take new research as to the effects and pace of climate change less seriously.
If a field was built on a less solid foundation, like say economics, started doing that? Well yeah, I'd absolutely start taking everything they say with an even bigger grain of salt.
The unreasonable perseverance on CO2 levels not only distracts attention from truly severe issues, like loss of amazon rainforests, but makes them worse by introducing policies like biofuel quotas.
If you're going to push forward with language like that, don't be surprised when science becomes a political issue.
Climate change isn't an extinction level threat.
1) The rich countries can almost surely make it through with, worst case, major inconvenience and deaths of lots of foreigners.
2) We've had the technology to go carbon free for a long time now (in nuclear) and generally the environmentalists say that nuclear power is at least as bad if not worse than climate change. France has been basically emissions free for quite some time now.
If you want to argue that climate change is a major threat, go ahead. But if it is an extinction level threat, the nature of that threat is being communicated truly terribly, to the point where I doubt anyone on the right has heard enough of it to reject it. I've heard a lot of horrible predictions, none of them are scarier than all the other things that could go wrong over the next 100 years. Even the last 100 years had WWII in them. 100 years is a long time.
There may be good ways to participate, but you need to be more specific than "lean in with everyone else".
(I exclude voting from this. Increasing turnout obviously requires all hands on deck. But that doesn't take much time.)
(Disclaimer: Not my book, but a friend's) You can learn more on the topic in "Impact Science: The science of getting to radical social and environmental breakthroughs" which comes with a wonderful list of real-world stories.
https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Science-environmental-breakthr...
Scientists who can talk freely (and be respected for their views) about climate change. And unborn babies. And all sorts of other topics where their honest and well-researched opinions can be useful.
As it is today, scientists are often used as a political force ('March for Science', eh?) All this does is render them mute to half the audience. It also leads to embarassing over-reaches and over-statements, which again diminish respect for their work.
We really, really need for politics to be removed from science.
Despite the headline, the article seems to be arguing that scientists reclaim their seat at the table, and get their hands dirty. A tall order in this era.
Does Science favor a progressive income tax or a VAT as a way of raising revenue?
Science can help us figure out how our decisions will affect society. What society optimizes for is up for political discourse.
That's informative about the trade offs - should we take money from X and give it to Y - but it says nothing about if we want to give it to Y. Maybe we all like X and if it's a penny for Y to have a holiday we'd still say "Screw Y." Maybe we despise X and will take the last penny of X to give to Y for no obvious benefit.
That paper can in some way help people make an informed decision but we live in a finite world and it doesn't, shouldn't and can't tell them how to make the trade offs.
^ Your comment sounds very much like my own (below), so I don't know what the disagreement is.
> Science can help us figure out how our decisions will affect society. What society optimizes for is up for political discourse.
It's useful to remember that science is a social construction, and thus that there is no definitive science, but rather a collage of emotions and opinions about scientific endeavors. Thus, we cannot actually marry science to the State; the closest we can come is to choose representatives who are scientific.
I like what the FAA does: they separate fact-finding from policy-making after an aviation accident.
The fact-finding folks make no recommendations on policy. All they do is find the cause of the incident.
Only after they are done do a completely separate group of people address how the problem could be fixed.
In your proposal, scientists would be the fact-finders, and politicians would be the policy-makers.
frequently, the prescription to improve human welfare is for other humans to take certain actions, or to refrain from certain actions. and so, by performing its fundamental mission, science makes enemies by constantly proposing alternatives to the status quo. these alternatives are frequently unwelcome by certain types of people to say the least.
speaking from experience, the anti-scientists aren't going to be convinced by anything a scientist says because science is alien, frightening, and, from their perspective, deeply tainted by corruption and abuse of authority to promote political agendas. for now, the right wing has the biggest and most deserved anti-science reputation. however, i can very easily imagine a future in which the left wing reacts in an identically ignorant way to some growing body of evidence.
so, how can scientists restate their value to a society which ignores, rejects, condemns, or doesn't understand their message? as terrible as it sounds, making a real and easily understandable major breakthrough that positively impacts human life would sure help -- but of course, science doesn't work like that, and most of the low-hanging fruit has been exploited already.
aside from that, i think one part of the answer is to keep a close oversight on science journalism such that it represents scientific progress with less hyperbole and with more context and more third-party/peer review input.
Nature itself said it:
> As if full-time research weren't time-consuming and challenging enough, nanophysicist Michael Stopa embraced a second occupation while at the bench: politics.
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v539/n7630/full/nj7630...