The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands | Hacker News Reader

The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

scientificamerican.com

56 pointspseudolus121 comments

This conflates "official positions of authorities" with "science".

It's like a modern religion, with three tenets: (1) science made everything around us (iPhones and airplanes!) (2) we speak for science (3) therefore you must believe our conclusions.

But in fact, that's the opposite of a proper scientific attitude, which always admits doubt, and believes experiment over authority.

As for why authorities are increasingly losing trust, I think it's because they've been rather unreliable recently.

To use just one glaring example, the official advice on masks went overnight from, "they're useless!" to "you're killing people if you don't use them!".

Both positions were condescendingly presented as "the science". A lot of people will start to lose trust when you so glaringly contradict yourself in such a rapid amount of time.

In general, the approach seems to be when crafting public advice to not worry about presenting an accurate picture of our current knowledge, but just pick a position, pretend we are certain it is true, and hand it down as the infallible words of Science. (See also: our ever changing dietary recommendations.)

The mask thing was a Noble Lie to prevent PPE shortages:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-experts-will-lie-to-yo...

I agree that that erodes trust, but it was for "a reason".

I’ve found it very hard to find the original news sources saying not to wear masks, despite remembering how prevalent that messaging was.

Here’s reasonably old document repeating the N95 & exposure concerns. It definitely happened but I think there’s some selective memory feeding a lot of the criticism.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/dont-panic-the-compr...

Then look at astral codex for the matter, he called it out as a noble lie and had the documentation.

The larger issue is how the “science” changed on the whim of the politically expedience of it all.

Look at hydroflouriquine, the drug is perfectly safe, a politico said it was good and wham, just like that opposing political parties say that the doctors cannot use it. The trained medical professionals whose judgment in time of crises are now told by politicians at state levels to not prescribe something. We have lost our minds and the singularity cannot come fast enough.

> Noble Lie

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Lying is lying. Instead of lying they could have simply said, "Here's how to turn a tshirt into a mask. If anyone can mass produce masks, start now!"

No lie needed. In fact the lying made things worse. Saying masks arent needed means people didnt work to produce masks early on.

At the time, it was pretty clear to me from the guidance given that:

1. The efficacy of masks for protecting against SARS-CoV-2 was unknown; 2. People in high risk professions will need to wear them as a precaution even if they might not be as effective as we would like, so the advise to the public was to not buy them for this reason

Same as the "now you should wear 2 masks" bullshit, right? Tell them to wear 2 because that means they'll at least wear 1, right?

These "white lies" are why I'm done with it.

An intentionally false statement from an authority on a current event of extreme importance, no matter how noble, is extremely counterproductive, even if we leave aside moral aspects. Indeed, it will cause further statements from the authority be perceived by the public as another potential lie. Since this seems very obvious to me, I can not believe it was a "white lie".

If it's real science, you would expect advice to change as more data comes in, so perhaps you should find a better example.

Can you share an example of real science where advice changed as more data come in?

The answers to this are so numerous and the logic so obvious that we as citizens may be to close to even see them.

Pretty much every bit of advice in the health sciences has been changing over multiple generations (lead and xrays are two easy examples from over 50 years ago)

But if you have witnessed that, wouldn't it be prudent to remain doubtful about any new advice coming from the field? After all, the probability of it being thrown out in the future seems to be almost 100%?

This is the fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is a process, not a library of knowledge. You do the best you can with the info you have right now. Every time science changes, it means it’s getting better.

Anything else is religion — wanting to have a single unchanging answer forever. That’s the appeal of religion, and in the short term it might make you feel better, but in the long term it cannot adapt and eventually is out of sync with reality.

Science always wins because it can change.

But you mentioned things that were flat out wrong or harmful. I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that scientism is science.

The problem is science almost always (except maybe in physics??) pretends it has arrived at the ultimate truth this time. It’s easy to detect too: just watch for the phrase “but now we know...”

It would help tremendously if new information was presented with some humility.

100% agreed. So much so that I was compelled to expand on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26634484

Read some Feynman and I think it'll open your eyes. You could certainly engage with the fatalist nature of some of his writing, but it basically means we're always on an iterative journey of refining our position. The way I read it is that "science" is not a thing to believe in, it's merely a practice or process. You either believe the scrupulousness with the data we have today or you can guess about what will be next, but that doesn't really invalidate today's stance until it does.

Thoroughly confused? Welcome to science.

With physics perhaps it is refinement, but the example of the OP was diet, wasn't it? Changing from "fat is bad" to "fat is healthy" or whatever is not refining or iterating.

I missed where the example was diet, but even there:

Old science said “we observe that people who eat excess fat die younger, therefore we conclude that fat is bad”

Later, science said “Now that we understand more about the body, we now know that we need a certain amount of fat to live because among other things our brains are made of fat and we efficiently use fat as fuel. We have also found that there are different types of fat and that some people process each type differently. In addition, the previous conclusion was too broad. Those people who died younger also had inactive lifestyles and ate mainly processed food that’s full of sugar so we threw out most of that old data and started over with a better method. We have now observed that people who consume only healthy fats live longer than people who don’t. Therefore we conclude that a certain amount of healthy fat is good for you.”

Smoking tobacco would be the simplest example.

Anything related with astronomy, for example.

Pasteur, Galileo, Einstein, Wegener...

Ulcer provides a pretty startling example.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

And the WHO just doubled down on the zoogenesis hypothesis of covid. Yarvin put it best: Covid is science's Chernobyl https://graymirror.substack.com/p/covid-is-sciences-chernoby...

I call it "Science with a capital S." It seeks to find and destroy an outgroup, always, like a bad cult. It portrays non-believers as harmful. There's no exceptions. Outsiders are always portrayed as dangerous with many lives at stake.

It's never about the science but about rooting out the people who disagree. It's purely a political movement and has almost nothing to do with science.

As a religion, it's the worst religion ever. Science is a tool for attaining the truth, not a top-down ideology for defining it. People who adopt the ideology ultimately lose science as a tool.

Science as a religion is known as "scientism".

(A greentext user was posting this valid point and seems to have been zapped)

Yeah but I don't like it. If only someone hadn't taken "scientology"...

Eh, the political left is just as guilty of abusing "science" for its own agenda. If you look at what peer reviewed articles in medical journals say about COVID, and then you look at the "pro-science" left-leaning-media coverage - you'll see two entirely different things. The political left picks and chooses the findings it likes to fit the narrative, and exaggerates them for effect.

In the United States, if you live in a democrat controlled area the only way your kids were going to school in-person during COVID was private education. We had a wealth of data by September of last year showing that it was possible, and worth the risk, to open schools for younger children. And yet it was politics that kept our children out of school, under the guise of "science".

The same is true of masks. The outcomes in places with and without mask mandates are roughly similar in terms of spread and mortality. But god forbid you suggest that wearing a mask while working out is counterproductive at best.

The whole talking point bugs me. There's no such thing as "science says". On most topics you'll find a wealth of "science" that is contradictory. It's through assimilation and reconciliation of various conflicts through further experimentation that we arrive at "the truth."

Calling an entire group "Anti-science" is just another way to shut down conversation and dialog. Just like calling an entire group lazy, racist, criminals, etc.

> possible, and worth the risk, to open schools for younger children

Could you elaborate on this? It seems to be clear that while children themselves are relatively unscathed, they spread the virus among themselves and to their family members quite effectively.

I mean, Google will tell you everything you need to know:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

> Based on the data available, in-person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission. Although national COVID-19 case incidence rates among children and adolescents have risen over time, this trend parallels trends observed among adults.17 Increases in case incidence among school-aged children and school reopenings do not appear to pre-date increases in community transmission

We knew all of this back in September because Europe had taken the lead on keeping schools open in many places. Only now in the United States is it politically palatable to talk about.

well, look at current numbers and see where that took us. Apparently, open schools, depending on factors of air filtering etc., can contribute quite a bit to the spread of covid - as recent studies suggest.

Google will tell you all sorts of things. But it does generally seem to confirm this view with a few caveats - risk is higher in older children, and transmission to and among staff still possible.

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/children-and...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

GMO foods is one area where the much of the left has a solid anti-science bias.

> There's no such thing as "science says"

This. Whoever knows and respects science knows it's a process, it's slow, it's full of contradictory results, hesitations, contrarians and cliques. It's the best we have for getting closer to useful truths about the world, but if you think you can take the last published paper and use that as the final support for your worldview, then you didn't understand how it works.

If I'm not mistaken, the studies indicated that in-person schooling could be done relatively safely with proper precautions, but in the US, most schools didn't/don't have the means to implement many of the precautions outlined. It's not really as simple as arguing that in-person schooling is safe, but democrat-controlled areas are closing down the schools anyway.

I'm also not sure what outcomes you're talking about with/without mask mandates. There are a lot of studies that show the effectiveness of mask mandates in slowing the spread of the disease. Do you have a study that shows outcomes are roughly similar in terms of spread and mortality between places with and without mandates? So far, I've only been able to find commentary that distorts the findings of the studies they purport to be citing.

> The same is true of masks. The outcomes in places with and without mask mandates are roughly similar in terms of spread and mortality. But god forbid you suggest that wearing a mask while working out is counterproductive at best.

Mask "mandates" in the US were largely unenforced, and therefore ignored by enough people to cause uncontrolled spread. Expecting a mask mandate to work without enforcing adoption is like expecting a "no smoking" section on an airplane to work.

Fight me if you must, but I firmly believe that the scientific institutions are the reason that “antiscience” and “scientism” have been able to gain ground.

Faking data, using “appeal to experts” and intellectualism to pretend that what they say must be true simply by virtue of the fact they said it, stifling opposing voices, leaning in to sensationalism with misleading conclusions, laying down at the feet of funding sources, propping up the image of “scientists” even in the face of impossible-to-reproduce experiments and predatory journals with overwhelmingly clear agendas... I could go on and on.

Human ego and the need for money are challenging hurdles for experts on the unpopular fringes to be sure, but if everyone stuck to (or stood up now and reaffirmed) the basic tenets of science:

- Change a single variable and record the results in an unbiased way - The scale of knowing is from “Absolutely no clue” to “fairly sure we’re not wrong”, and there is certainly never a “we’re absolutely sure we’re right”

I think it could go a long way towards rebuilding the public trust in the data from scientific studies, or at the very least give people the space to say “Yes the previous data was flawed, but we redid the experiments from scratch and the results are even more concerning.” without getting booed off the stage.

When science is weaponized by politicians and when the media is lying about everything intentionally, and being concentrated by very few conglomerates, it isn't anti-science as much as it is anti-media. Just because the media screams "science" doesn't make them the voice of science.

It's odd that the author only traces the political aspect back to 2015, when climate change denial has been a political issue since the turn of the millennium: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_policy_of_the...

And I'd heard of the anti-vaxx movement in the mid-90's.

Certainly, though it was mostly ignored by major political parties in those days.

And WRT EamonnMR's point, while the article invokes 'antiscience' as a movement, its author is clearly only interested in medical science. Personally, I'm not convinced that there is a unitary, consolidated anti-science movement, though it might be developing.

Anti-vax took a weird twist over the past decade. It used to be a hippie-liberal notion, heavily informed by being anti-corporate anti-big-pharma. But it became more mainstream and cross-party when endorsed by celebrities, and then cross-fertilized with the anti-science anti-government Republican party.

I'm sure the crunchy-granola antivaxers are still out there, but they were a fringe group and remain a fringe group. But for the GOP it's mainstream.

COVID's a little different from general anti-vax, being driven by a hoax narrative from the President combined with the perception of rushing a vaccine through (with the intention of having it be an October surprise for the election). That makes everybody nervous, on all sides of the spectrum.

> But for the GOP it's mainstream.

No, it's really not. It's only mainstream in the GOP if you get your news from the left - if you associate with and listen to people on both sides of the aisle, you realize that it's a fringe element on both sides.

25% of the GOP members in the US House of Representatives refusing to get the vaccine doesn't sound "fringe" to me.

The vaccines were accelerated by spending money and the high prevalence of the infection, they weren't rushed.

4 months into widespread use they have been safe and have demonstrated high efficacy in real world use.

The blood clotting with the AZ vaccine is an issue, but that risk is still a good trade-off for a big segment of the population.

I've tweaked my post slightly; I was referring to the perception of it being rushed for political reasons. It's clearly safe and pursued using proper scientific methods, but there was legitimate concern that the President would apply pressure to approve something prematurely. That would be very much in character -- as we saw when he applied pressure to change votes.

And things like creationism/resisting the teaching of evolution in schools goes back well before the turn of the century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publ...

Climate change is a political issue and has basically nothing to do with science.

The unusualness of 2015 is because that's when Obama lost control. Republicans had control of senate and house. Then also paved way for making Trump presidents just a couple years later.

Let's just assume for a second climate change is the equivalent to 4-5 hiroshima bombs per second. Which is the political assertion that we are about to go extinct every 12 years. The problem with politicization of climate change is that if it's true, we cannot act in time anymore. Then again Al Gore(politician) made a ton of claims in his movie that were quite false. According to Al Gore florida is pretty much entirely under water right now.

One of true skills of 21st century is to discern Science from Scientism. As a rule of thumb, 'respect my authoritah' is not a scientific argument.

Relying on blunt tools of persuasion alienates people irrespective of scientific substance.

You mean like holding up signs trying to persuade people vaccines are bad?

From your mouth to God's ears. /grin

This religion, despite Asimov, was not successful because it worked. It was successful because - like all other religions - it made it easier for people to stop thinking for themselves, and accept what they are told is the truth.

[When it works we call it engineering.]

Any group/person/movement with any agenda other than promoting science and reason must necessarily be against science and reason at points. Any “agendaism” must be prepared to attack science and reason as well as proponents of science and reason. I’m not suggesting other agendas aren’t important. Rather that they can incur a science-debt, and don’t typically have the motivation to pay it off.

Edit: I should be clear that I’m speaking about the scientific process: admit you may not have full understandings, devise experiments to test/expand understanding, execute, interpret, repeat.

I think you are spot on. I also think much of the "anti-science" right is a reaction to the "anti-science" left, which has lots of ideologies that cannot be defended by pure reason alone, and need to be defended instead by online angry mobs. Whether it's to do with social issues (crime, racial issues, gender issues, abortion, immigration, etc), pop ideas today are defended by a "how dare you" if you are not in the movement. Note also how they leave no room for moderates: Someone with balanced views on abortion, for example, is as bad as a catholic fundamentalist. Someone with mixed views on immigration is a neo nazi. Etc

I'm also reminded of the near daily episodes on reddit, which constantly has threads highlighting outrage over police brutality, criminal injustice, etc. Then, when it's someone they don't like getting crushed by the system, it's a party of joyous triumphalism.

More than a reaction. Any agendaist who opposes science also makes it easier for other agendaists to oppose science. Their methodologies are essentially open source! I get in many arguements with friends and loved ones, not because I disagree with what their agenda represents, but because their methods are problematic. It’s very hard for someone not to take it as an attack of their values.

I may misunderstand, but I read it this way: The "pro-science" team is so obviously and transparently hypocritical and self-serving in their use of logic, become extremely defensive to any kind of criticism, and basically resort to name-calling ("they're stupid") anyone out side of the bubble.

This basically sets the scene that anyone can make any logic work and no one really needs to really think anything through - it's all just window dressing for the agenda. We act like it's only Trump that does it but he's just goofiest-looking, that's all.

I thought it was really funny in the picture accompanying the article, an anti-vaxer waved a sign that said something like "Respect my bodily autonomy" - we know where that kind of logic came from. Also, since that group was clearly anti-abortion, we knew it was just really poking fun at the "window dressing" logic that of pro-choicers that it is really about "autonomy".

I believe at the end of the day we've entered the phase of words mean nothing any more, we all just have our agendas, we want what we want, and we'll all just wrap it in whatever bullshit we want.

“Scientists” and “pro-science” aren’t immune to forgetting the process. Which is why I clarified that the process is important. I agree with your conclusion. We choose our agenda and rationalize it. Something not too far off might be: pay attention to what one is naturally sensitive to, and feed one’s experience into a common data set, and feed that into a scientific process.

One can dream.

"Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains."

The problem with that definition is "mainstream" science is also full of unproven theories, often for nefarious and political gains. The only real difference between what they consider science vs antiscience is how mainstream the views are. That seems like a poor way to determine scientific credibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

We have all learned that science as a method of obtaining knowledge is superior to and fundamentally at odds with the blind acceptance of authority. This includes would-be authorities among us. When the authorities then simply claim the mantle of "science" as their own exclusive domain, who is left to oppose them?

The trouble with appeals to science is that anyone can make empirical observations. Like if you can still smell VOC's through a mask (e.g. farts), that is empirical data to cast some doubt about their efficacy against airborne droplets, and about how much economic harm or social restriction you're going to tolerate based on that. If you make these policies about science instead of authority, it's just another lie with a short half-life, and you're going to lose when it comes out.

Trusting science on the mask and lockdown policy issue means rejecting the official policy direction. On mRNA therapies it means examining FDA approval and human trial results. Trusting science on curve flattening means rejecting that Ferguson epidemiological model used to justify lockdowns. So-called science should inform policy, but it is not a sound justification for it. To say that your political policies have the authority of "science," as though they were discovered truths is as sound as saying they were divinely revealed, because it comes down to trusting the people who are telling you that.

A scientific policy is also necessarily not a democratic one, or one based in any policymaker accountability, because it is founded in the views of a few unaccountable initiates. When elected representatives forfeit their responsibility to un-elected experts and just do what they are told, they are renouncing their authority and giving it to people who don't get fired (or worse) for being wrong.

The conflict is that policymakers have basically asked "what is the exception we can use to suspend all these legal constraints on us so that we can wield power to do what we think is the right thing for humanity?" and they have settled on a medical crisis. If only pandemic policy were based on science, we would be in much better shape, but it's based on leaders avoiding responsibility and blaming "science" for their unwillingness to produce democratic policy that preserves the foundations of their societies, arguably, because their agenda is to destabilize and un-moor them.

Lysenko was scientist with stellar credibility, he was wrong, but that happens in science. Main problem was not "anti science", but turning science into religion. Unproven theories were implemented too fast, without enough tests and verifications.

His theories fit with the prevailing political ideology, therefore he was "right".

there's a fine line between appealing to "experts" and religion. I'd argue though, that there's a monetary incentive to keep people dumb and susceptible to things like advertising - so I don't see this trend reversing soon, if ever.

I intentionally don't mention the word "science", because "science" isn't really the issue here - moreso this idea that certain organizations or individuals somehow know the truth we and should just believe them.

The irony here is that this article is published by Scientific American, who themselves have abandoned science on topics that relate to ideological issues.

I read another article linked inside this article. It is very good: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-l...

Some science, it seems, is better than others https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-public-health-le...

Recently, Macron said that the AstraZeneca vaccine was almost ineffective for people older then 65[1].

Politicians on both the left and the right sometimes find their political interests at odds with mainstream scientific research. That doesn't mean they're on some kind of crusade against science.

I also find the obsession with anti-vaxxers strange, when the FDA and many european medical authorities refuse to allow the AstraZeneca vaccine. I guess it's easier to blame everything on internet trolls, rather then medical authorities run by people like you, in your social circles, but the latter are objectively responsible for far more death.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56252028

> I also find the obsession with anti-vaxxers strange, when the FDA and many european medical authorities refuse to allow the AstraZeneca vaccine.

AZ has not yet asked the FDA to allow the AZ vaccine. They are still in the clinical trial stage in the US.

The FDA emergency use authorization procedure includes FDA scientists plus a panel of outside scientists reviewing all of the submitted trial data and doing their own analysis rather than just relying on the submitted analysis. This is why it takes 2 to 3 weeks between the submission of an application and the approval of the authorization.

AZ had enough anomalies in their European trials that they weren't sure they would pass the FDA's more stringent review and so are conducting more trials in the US to get cleaner data.

About 3 weeks ago AZ said it expected to have results in a few weeks and would apply then.

The antivax movement is ridiculous and hopefully the necessity of covid vaccinations will destroy it as should have happened years ago.

Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors.

But the lockdown scepticism I can kind of understand as it is more of a political issue - the cost/benefit of lockdown and depending on the type of lockdown, if it will even be effective.

It seems the usual rational decisions over medical intervention based on quality-adjusted life years etc. has been abandoned in favour of emotional arguments.

China showed us lockdowns can work, but these "lockdowns" we have now just seem to be political theatre with little effect on transmission. The politicians want to give the impression of doing something because actually effective measures like closing workplaces and schools would be too expensive/difficult.

How is china shows lockdown can work ?

They may simply reacting and just try to do 'something'.

By that logic sweeden, florida, south dakota, shows lockdown doesn't make significant difference.

Because they went from the disaster in Wuhan to zero cases, with no vaccines.

> Similarly, the evidence for climate change is pretty much undeniable now and I can only assume that those pretending it doesn't exist are not honest actors.

That's exactly my position, except the opposite. Anyone who claims that "the world is ending, give us money" is anything but a scam, shamelessly copied from the Catholic Church, is not an honest actor.

So do you have a rational explanation for all the permafrost sinkholes opening in Siberia? Or the ice shelfs melting? Or half of antartica disappearing? Or Australia, and Western United States constantly on fire?

Do you know what a feedback loop is? Heat rises, permafrost melts, methane is released causing heat to rise more, more permafrost/ice is melted causing higher temps.

Do you know what happens if we lose bees and other polinators, and how close we are to losing them because of pesticides?

There's plenty of people pushing climate change and not demanding a cent. Those pushing the hardest AGAINST climate change are the ones demanding we "look the other way" because of their corporate greed - re: Oil / Plastics industries.

> Or half of antartica disappearing? Or Australia, and Western United States constantly on fire?

I rest my case.

https://www.axios.com/concern-republican-coronavirus-vaccine...

What has me most worried is that in Germany the anti-since movement is undermined, used, pushed, financed?? by more or less all problematic/extremist right wing movements (ultra conservatives, Neo-Nazis, Reichsbürger, all not the same but often with a lot of overlap).

Worse may people getting swept up in the movement due to mistrust in the government and health system often don't realize this, starting to repeat right wing propaganda while position themself as everything but right wing.

Noticeable is also that as far as I can tell there are organized people spreading this misinformation using expertise about how to best manipulate people. For example thy intentionally take easy to misunderstand since "results" related to Covid and twist them using "broken" (i.e. outright wrong) statistics which for a person not knowing anything about statistics "seem ok/valid". While there are some cases which might have been mistakes many clearly are not. Furthermore the way "fake news" pop up indicates (for me, I didn't to to deep research) that this people do understand exactly what they do. I.e. they look for the best ways to disproof they content and then pre-empty create "fake news" to discredit the sources which would be used for this arguments. Or at least this is how I perceive it.

At the same time the established media does a horrible job, instead of properly factual reporting about this problems they put the people tricked in the same pot as the people tricking them and the people taking advantage of the situation. By discrediting all the involved people as extremist right wing and similar they denounce and discredit many people which just have been tricked pushing them further into it and loosing more trust. Especially there is a large amount of "moderate" people which have/had reasonable alternative ideas about how to approaches to handling Covid (like actually reasonable, potentially better then what the government did, especially around fall last year). But this people are repeatedly tricked in some but not all of there arguments by "fake news" and now, the press they already don't trust much discredit all they say because supposedly they are Nazis. (They are not, but they let themself be manipulated by them.)

Through in every case I looked into the press was noticeable more honest then alternative sources.

But more honest sadly doesn't mean fully honest.

The fact that especially some of the state payed (but supposedly independent) press has a record of not fully honest (and sometimes outright deceptive) reporting doesn't help. Similar is true for the non state payed press but in other ways (e.g. their involvement in the copyright reform which offended many young people).

For example one of the first larger demo against the covid measurements taken in berlin consisted of the demo moving through the city followed by an announcement. The press reported the lowest estimate of people involved by the moving demo but made it look like it is the number of all of it and also didn't say they took the lower estimated. But on the demo announcement probably twice to thrice of the amount of people had been involved. So not very honest. But the people behind of the demo where worse as they overestimated the amount of people by a factor of 10 or more and used the reasoning "that the press numbers are clearly wrong" to trick people into believing it. Then they took certain events related to the police out of order and represented a moderate reasonable action of the police as something completely different, using this to further undermine the credibility of the government.

Stopped reading at "a key feature of the political right" - the political left has adopted many anti-scientific ideas, too (if you want an example, take gender ideology and critical race theory, or belief that socialism works).

People rightfully reject publications that write nonsense like that. If such a publication calls itself "science something something", or worse, has a longstanding reputation for representing science, it is no wonder if people become wary of science in general. It seems healthy, actually. Maybe it is not science that is in trouble, but fake propaganda science.

Indeed. Only if you ignore anti-vaxxers, healing crystals, “food without chemicals”, essential oils, etc can you say with a straight face anti-science is a problem driven by the right.

It’s hard to take an article seriously when it only points the finger in one direction.

The article doesn’t claim that only those who lean right deny science. It claims only the right has embraced science-denial as a major political platform. There are plenty of science-denying democrats. There aren’t many (to my knowledge) science-denying policies, platforms, or official talking points of the democratic party. The same cannot be said of the GOP.

I read it again and no, it doesn't. It claims that certain things the author happens to believe in are rejected by the GOP.

I think anybody who claims to represent "the science" or "scientists" already should be mistrusted. It's an anti-science stance. In my opinion, proper science should constantly look for ways to disprove its theories, not the other way round. So saying one should "believe science" is anti-science.

The case for Covid-vaccines simply doesn't seem to be as clear cut as for example the author claims.

Here in Germany they just halted vaccinations with Astra Zeneca, and there is a lot of debate about it. I guess the author of the SciAM article would say the German government is anti-science, too. In reality, there are aspects in favour of vaccination and aspects against it.

I think the anti-science notions people worry about are more about distrust of official proclamations.

I think you're talking about certain subjects being more prevalent in left- or right-wing communities.

That's different from making opposition to science a political priority. Yeah, there's kooks on the left who go for healing crystals–but that's not incorporated into left politics. On the other hand, elected Republicans have actively fought in the political arena against climate issues being taken seriously.

This shows up in other areas, too, such as the Dickey Amendment that discouraged CDC research re: guns as a public health matter.

> Yeah, there's kooks on the left who go for healing crystals–but that's not incorporated into left politics.

Mhh, critical race theory, the whole gender studies joke etc seems to be pretty deeply settled in left politics. It's just something that progressives "like" and therefore don't question the absurdity and consider it "science".

Do they consider it science? I haven't seen racial justice movements incorporating that. And if they do, that's evidence of an orientation toward science that the right actively opposes—i.e. an effort to dress up views with a scientific gloss.

You're talking about misusing science, or relying on junk science. Those are problems, of course, but they're not the opposition to the scientific project as a whole that this article focuses on.

> You're talking about misusing science, or relying on junk science.

I don't think critical race theory and similar stuff is science. They're not misusing it, they're pretending somebody's ramblings are scientific, funding it at universities and then presenting it as "the science is in".

> they're not the opposition to the scientific project as a whole that this article focuses on

If you only pick those parts that you like and invent the rest, that's very much in opposition to the idea of the scientific method.

No, I disagree. Misuse and opposition are fundamentally different things.

> elected Republicans have actively fought in the political arena against climate issues being taken seriously.

Climate science ended mixing up entirely with left wing ideology: de-growth movements, anti-nuclearists, anti-capitalist, etc. First they appropriate whatever they need from scientific discourse to support their agenda, then they denounce everyone who is against their agenda as "anti-science".

What makes Republicans deserve denunciation as anti-science on climate change is not their rejection of left wing solutions. It is their rejection of right wing solutions, too.

There are conservatives working to address climate change. Here was a plan [1] from a bunch of people who were prominent members of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations, for example. It's economically and scientifically sound. Good luck getting Republicans currently in Congress to even consider that.

[1] https://www.clcouncil.org/media/2017/03/The-Conservative-Cas...

The only thing I can really say would be the "food without chemicals" part. The rest of that is pretty apolitical except the anti-vaxx movement.

What I listed is not exclusively found on the left side of the spectrum but I’ve never met a right winger who is into healing crystals or essential oil quite like the crunchy hippies of the west coast.

Again, there are plenty of examples of anti-science thinking across the political spectrum.

SciAm isn't what it used to be. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-wh...

I would add to this list a belief in "blank slate-ism" specifically around individual cognitive ability expressed mostly in ineffective education methods.

science is still great. "scientific consensus" has taken over in many places where people used to mean "scientific method"; and thats not great but still fits into "believe the science" for the people putting logos on signs.

Science doesn't care what we believe.

The so-called hard sciences are still great. It's kind of hard to deny that an apple, when released, falls to the ground. Now let's go to the so-called soft sciences which rely upon statistical modeling. Whoa! We necessarily must rely more on "scientific consensus." We should be increasing the public's education in statistics since it's become so important for public discourse of important issues. But of course we haven't.

I’m surprised that Sci Am published this. The hyper partisan language immediately caused me to doubt the veracity of the claims the author makes.

And that’s an understatement.

Sci Am used to be a quality magazine. No more.

So we can add scientific American to the pile of things that used to do journalism.

There is plenty of antiscience on the left (chemtrails, 5g, anti-vax).

But critical race theory is a deliberately extreme academic model of the world, and it actually turns out to be a useful model. To complain that it is not a falsifiable model misses the point of what literary "theory" is for.

Your post smells like a bad faith dogwhistle, rather than an attempt to discuss something.

It wasn't my intention to discuss any of those beliefs, just to list examples of anti-science beliefs among leftists.

If you believe critical race theory is science, OK - it's not the subject of this thread, I suppose.

The only relevant aspect is that we will see articles of how anti-science conservatives supposedly are, because they reject critical race theory. It's actually useful for that - identifying bullshit articles and organisations.

Fair enough. Just don't conflate "belief in things I don't believe" with "anti-science".

Articles like this one accelerate the politicization of conspiracies like anti-vax, rather than help address the underlying problem.

To attempt to make this a 'right wing extremist' problem, one has to ignore the fact that one of the historically least vaccinated counties in the US is also one of the most progressive (Marin CO in the Bay Area).

This is a 'nut jobs on Facebook' problem, not a right or left problem.

-- edited to clarify that I'm not referring specifically to the COVID vax

This is a case where "nut jobs on Facebook" are being endorsed by prominent political figures from one party, and not the other. Every party has its nut jobs, but there's a real asymmetry here, where explicit anti-science attitudes are a political platform of just one side.

Fighting "nut jobs on Facebook" is a good thing to do, though it's really hard. "Hard" becomes "impossible" when prominent political figures endorse it.

Science is modern religion.

Paid journals are a type of anti-science movement.

How about we just take away their phones. Without science there wouldn't be any anyway.

Name three scientific papers (that you have studied) that contributed to mobile phones.

What I was getting at is that the whole field of electronics would not even exist without science. No computers, no phones, maybe a tiny bit of electricity... Pretty much our whole standard of living exists due to advances in science. If people don't recognize and respect this, they should not enjoy their current living standards --- i.e. not having phones.

I suspect/hope they'd reconsider their thoughts.

I’ve been pro science all my life but heavy censorship on coronavirus made me change my mind, perhaps blame is on the censorers a bit, no?

If it is truly science, why censor the ideas of others?

Something about a lie making it half way across the world before the truth can get its boots on.

We, as a general population, have proven that completely uncensored speech gives way too much weight to ideas that have no merit.

> We, as a general population, have proven that completely uncensored speech gives way too much weight to ideas that have no merit.

That sounds like it'll get pretty scary once you start following the road.

Quite the opposite. We proved that the imposition of “acceptable” information and censorship to protect it holds back societies, and can see that those with greater freedoms do better economically and otherwise.

[citation needed] That's a pretty bold statement. I'm pro free speech, but believe it should have limits in a civilized society.

I don't know what the answer is, or where the line should be but entirely unrestricted free speech isn't the infalable utopia that the US is conditioned to believe.

Shall we begin with some egregious examples and go from there?

How is Nazi Germany doing? Or East Germany?

Soviet Russia?

Clearly there's an impossible hump of correlation/causation, but that doesn't mean we can't show at least part of the data set to be true - that you are far more likely to fail or be a horrible place to live.

> entirely unrestricted free speech isn't the infalable utopia that the US is conditioned to believe

It wouldn't be a utopia, it would just be better than the alternative, like most liberties. Utopianism is a vision that is associated with a lack of freedom and collectivism (large scale collectivism necessarily entails curtailed freedom), not with enhanced liberty.

> I'm pro free speech, but believe it should have limits in a civilized society

To be civilised implies two things, primarily:

- greater learning - better manners

That you can learn more where information is unrestricted should need no explanation.

As to manners, what better sign of good manners and civility can there be when you may say whatever you like without fear of punishment and yet you remain civil?

Hence, a more civilised society has less limits on what you can say and imbues its citizens with greater responsibility to practise that speech well.

I agree with pretty much everything you say. However your last sentence is where the problem lies.

> and imbues its citizens with greater responsibility to practise that speech well.

Name me a western country that does this. Until it does, and until that type of education (critical and logical reasoning) is embedded in the fabric of our societies sensible limits on free speech (such as hate speech) are probably a reasonable compromise.

> Name me a western country that does this.

The more freedom "given", the more this is done, so the answer is all of them to greater or lesser degrees.

> until that type of education (critical and logical reasoning) is embedded in the fabric of our societies

Free speech is the embedding of critical thinking - do you see more critical thinking in societies riven with censorship and the suppression of speech? Are there less lies in societies that supress speech? There could be the same amount but there's definitely not less - why bother to suppress it in the first place if there's not a lie to protect?

> sensible limits on free speech (such as hate speech) are probably a reasonable compromise.

That's as close to a classic begging the question as you can get. The "sensible limits" and "reasonable compromise" are the same thing, and you're yet to show that hate speech is:

a) harmful to society

b) able to be defined any better than any dictator in history has managed

I agree, which is why we should just go ahead and hand over all truth to technocrats and all decision making to beurocrats, as only they have our best interest in mind.

Except governments actively pushed lies about Covid too.

You can't be 'pro' objective truths; science is not a faith you can believe in or not. That's the problem here. It's the defenders of science that are also in the wrong, because why do you feel like you have to defend things like that?

Mr. CEO of big oil company, our scientists say oil is causing global warming and going to destroy the world by 2070.

Mr. CEO: Oh really? I never knew, I'll stop drilling immediately!

Mr. CEO to assistant: Fire these people and bury this study.

^ This scenario is why we need to "defend" science, because money/power doesn't align with the narrative.

Sometimes science recommends fixes that are just too costly for society to accept as "is this the only way" ... the only way to ensure less mass casualties? Yes, max profits? No. ...

Lockdowns were the same because $$ > lives.

Exactly. It pissed me off to no end when at the beginning of the pandemic the health minister of my country mindlessly parroted WHO in their initial "masks do not help" stance. How can anyone treat what we are being told seriously when instead of telling us the truth (masks help, but please don't hoard them because we need them for first responders) they choose to lie in the simplest things.

Same thing with real numbers of people that suffer issues after receiving covid vaccines. The only countries I know of that are truthful in this is UK (their yellow card scheme) and USA(VAERS database). Anyone can see that in UK there were around 500 deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination (20 mln people vaccinated) and in US around 1000 last time I checked (for 60mln vaccinated). Anyone can search those databases and compare incidence of for example vascular issues, stroke, or anaphylaxis to their "natural" incidence in the population. However, in my country where we have 5mln people vaccinated half of people are fearing "death by vaccine" because "few cases of stroke" are linked to the vaccine. Coincidently there is no open database of issues. Clearly politicians think people are too stupid to be told the truth that the likelyhood of "death by vaccine" is extremely low as compared with "death by covid" in pretty much all age groups. Instead of presenting real numbers they claim "there is no risk" in taking the vaccine.

Additionally people stopped believing the bullshit they hear after hearing multiple "experts" telling us various versions of: "uv will kill covid so it'll end by the summer"(then brasil had huge outbreak), "children do not get ill", "children do not pass the disease to adults", "you can't get infected outside or if you keep 2 meters distance" "no need for masks at work if you can maintain 2m distance". Then a year later: "we're closing nurseries and schools because despite teachers being vaccinated we see high numbers of children spreading covid to their families" and "40% of covid transmission happens at workplaces despite adherence to measures put in place". One doesn't need to be a genius to understand those were lies of convenience and wishful thinking. I seriously hope politicians in charge will be brought to justice after this pandemic ends.

Well the last paragraph is (I think) due to medicines approach if you do not have evidence you claim it is not happening (or you say 'there is no evidence...'). And sometimes this just means there was no data.

Science community did not censor anything, tech companies did, and that has nothing to do with science.

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