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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

You remind me of this EU project officer who wanted us to tweet more for our project. And set up a Linkedin account. And maybe an instagram account too (we could also crosspost in our lab's facebook). We had to fight her to stop using google analytics to track the website visitors.

Unfortunately we can't train 100% of people to understand all the science that gets published. That's why scientists need to learn to trust each other and communicate to the public as a single body, not as individual scientists. How they are going to do that, that's internal to the body of scientists. Politics has broken scientific unity, fix it.

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> communicate to the public as a single body, not as individual scientists

That's a laudable goal. You will never, never get any body of scientists, or any other class of people, to agree on their overall goals for society, so if science IS indeed political, you've lost already.

On the other hand, if they only have to agree on what the data and logic tell us, that's still hard, but it's much closer to being achievable. It requires everyone to take a deep breath and say "I might be wrong but this is what I think, and here's why." And then listen.

Since it's too late to edit that, I'll add this as a reply:

If you ("you" being a scientist) are explicit that your "science" is in service of your political agenda, then you've accomplished this:

Anyone who disagrees with your agenda will reject your "science"

As we saw with vaccines & lockdowns.

On the other hand, if they trust you to just report what the data says, even when you don't like it, then you have a chance of not being vilified.

So there you have it: if you want to stand above the Twitter mob and be believed, you have to earn back the public's trust.

I found that missive (regarding politics and it's influence on the scientific community as a whole) conspicuously.. missing.. from this article. It's not so much about how politics affects the outcomes of science, imo, but how politics shapes what science is capable of in the first place.

I'm immediately reminded of how deeply skewed towards treatment (rather than curing) pharmaceutical research is, because of our economic structure.

This is a fiction pushed by quacks. There are no cures being suppressed by "big pharma" because treatment makes more money.

It's a convenient "just so" story people who don't work in bioscience love, told with all the certainty of "did you know you swallow 8 spiders a year on average".

I'm not claiming suppression, just noting that economic incentives are misaligned, and noting that we, as a society, have in our toolbelt a whole host of treatments, and only a handful of cures.

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