Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartman | Hacker News Reader

These cuts have been in progress for months, and it’s a sad state of the world when scientific research and its products are called unscientific and not evidence based without any substantiation.

I’m reminded of this quote from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, as we creep closer and closer to future he describes.

> We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

View on HN

It’s more nuanced, I think.

Some of those in power do understand science and technology, and have responsible stances.

Some … understand …, and have intentionally-irresponsible stances.

Some do NOT understand, and choose positions either based upon bad information or other priorities entirely.

And those of us not in power are routinely lied to by all four groups, making us question the reputation of literally everything.

I think the end state of this is sort of the dragon eating its tail—not only do those in power no longer understand science and technology (or use their understanding to manipulate others), but the disease then spreads to most everyone else.

Slight addition: some understand that science is immutable (in the platonic sense, whether or not current knowledge is accurate) and therefore willingly work to destroy public belief in science because it's a threat to their own power to declare truth.

Closer to home, here on HN (and in SV generally) there is a lot of support for this regime.

It's infuriating that people who really should know better either remain willfully ignorant or simply view the loss to humanity as an acceptable price to pay for ending up with a lower marginal tax bracket.

Souter warned of the lack of civic education as well. We are just ignorant all around these days!

“An ignorant people can never remain a free people. Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.”

“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics in American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”

Theres such a huge focus on STEM yet i rarely see the scientific method or critical thinking and logic being taught. Its like forming your own ideas is no longer a thing and so long as you have the solution you wont need anything original

I see it growing worse in my job where newer staff rarely can come up with new ideas and the older staff are having to hand hold them. They have trouble even stating the problem at times just “i dont know how to fix any of it”. Eventually the solution is either crazy convoluted (a factory for a class for a static function that returns a string of static json) or just crazy in general (let me put this json into an env variable so its now its available global)

Partly this because there was never a focus on STEM there is a focus on a limited subset of T and E that businesses find profitable.

Even then, you need history and philosophy of science classes to actually contextualize and contrast "scientific thinking" to actually get people to go engage with science as an ongoing endeavor rather than a series of concepts from a text book that must be memorized and mastered.

+1. I learned more about what parent is talking about in my philosophy / epistemology courses than STEM ones.

Or maybe they do have evidence that proves ineffectiveness/harm of a technology that was rushed to the market during a global panic.

I'm glad this is being done. Government funded research like this is just another financial engineering opportunity for these research companies/universities. I am not making this up, just check the other post about scientific fraud at scale which is currently on the front page of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796526

All we're doing is shifting your tax dollars to the military, which is another financial engineering opportunities for defense contractors.

If my money's going to go somewhere I'd rather it go to research universities/companies and get outputs that will save lives rather than destroy lives.

Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud. If anything, we trust the government with these incalculably valuable public-works projects because we cannot afford to write off the alternative. Not for COVID, not for the seasonal flu, and not for the next plague/ebola/malaria of your lifetime either.

> Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud.

Right it won't. My point however is that don't create an avenue, private or public, which has dedicated funds for such activities. It just ends up becoming an industry which tries to gain off those funds than doing any real research.

That's how all industry works. The side that invests most in innovative techniques is rewarded with larger margins and incentivized to wring out every last dollar they can.

The "if we don't look at the research then it doesn't exist" mentality is why TSMC is 5 generations ahead of Intel's fabs.

Do you know how the Internet was created?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com