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Comment by guscost | Hacker News Reader

Science is now thoroughly political, from top to bottom (with the exception of some applied sciences). The biggest reason people don’t respect it anymore is because it no longer deserves respect.

This is a tough pill to swallow but you’ll get it down eventually.

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You may have a substantive point here but expressing something this inflammatory as flamebait is basically trolling. That's against the site guidelines so please don't. It just leads to dumb, shallow fights, and nothing interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you this more than once before, and (coincidentally) almost in exactly the same terms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23398227. Could you please take the intended spirit of HN more to heart, and please fix this? We're looking for curious conversation here. How you raise a topic like this is by far the biggest influence on whether the conversation develops curiously.

> How you raise a topic like this is by far the biggest influence on whether the conversation develops curiously.

An influence surely, but in my experience not at all the biggest. Curiosity is a two-way street, and there are some topics that most people here simply do not want to be curious about.

But yes, I’m mostly just spending karma fighting an info-war. Success in that context is not only about the quality of discussion, it’s that more people see the controversy. If the collateral damage is not acceptable I understand.

And if I end up getting kicked out, please just take to heart that your effort to apply the rules impartially is not unappreciated. The opposition here is used to receiving wildly-inflammatory escalating nasty replies that rarely get flagged or moderated, but it’s still better than most places: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017661

You don't need to get kicked out—it's not as if the guidelines are so hard to follow. Just post when you have something thoughtful and substantive to say, and don't be gratuitously provocative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Science is the use of data and math to conduct experiments to test hypotheses about cause and effect.

If only. That was the idea before Kuhn.

You’re only able to type and communicate this message because of science. If you’re going to say something so inflammatory, you better have an argument to back it up.

It’s one factor, definitely.

But one could also say that science wouldn’t be allowed to flourish if we didn’t have peace for example (what we experience now is rare in the history of humanity), and that the institutions that support peace are involved in being able to type and communicate this.

Much of what has enabled modern computers and telecommunications has come from war (WWII and the Cold War), so that’s not true at all.

Because of applied science. And don’t give me nonsense about all science eventually being applied. Most of it won’t.

This type of language and tone is not acceptable on HN. Please refrain from further inflammatory comment regardless of the topic or stance.

It’s a fine, fine line. I’ve been on the receiving end of much more insulting personal attacks here, many times.

And note that my comment says nothing about the person I’m arguing with, it just pre-empts a common response and calls the response nonsense.

yeah, I would just respond like this to avoid any kind of misinterpretation:

> It's because of applied science. Most of the science won't be applied.

That’s a good suggestion, thanks.

I'm kind of curious how you expect science to be applied without its discovery phase being performed first.

If you think of e.g. string theory as the “discovery phase” of anything other than a ponzi scheme, we’re not going to come to agreement here.

Can we can an update to your blog post lamenting the death of science, now that science is only reason we will have a vaccine for a virus that has killed a quarter-million people in the US? Could also expound on your interpretation of the LIGO data while you're at it.

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