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Comment by scoopdewoop | Hacker News Reader

This isn't an anti-science critique. It's a philosophical argument about how science actually operates. I'm not coming at this from a populist authoritarian angle! (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)

The tobacco-funded studies that failed to prove cigarettes harmful? Those were scientists doing "objective methodology." Pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable trials? Scientists. The replication crisis? Scientists following the same process.

These aren't exceptions. They show that science is a human practice embedded in institutional and economic contexts.

Acknowledging that science involves human interests doesn't undermine it. It's how you maintain critical perspective when bad actors claim scientific authority. Or should I trust the current experts that Tylenol causes Autism?

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I agree. People stop changing their mind at some point. Social progress is only possible when old generations die. To think scientists are some sort of truth seeking machines, unbiased, isolated from society, is naive.

Also I really dislike the categorisation into scientists and non-scientists, this really makes science sound like a dogma. I prefer inventors, pioneers, or simply curious people.

Or do people stop changing their minds because they're worn down, their brains no longer as capable of making space and joy for new ideas?

Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix

Possible, but many concepts and principles are frozen by the age of 30 already.

I have never seen someone which is left on the political spectrum at 30 become a Keynesian by 50.

I know such people exist, but they are the exception.

Personality psychology shows personality does not change much after 30.

And there is even some theories such as the “impressionable years” (15-25) which are even more extreme in that respect, stating that basically very little changes after 25.

Overall this makes me doubt stem cells can change any of this.

But I am myself way past my impressionable years, my mental flexibility is lessened, I may be wrong and not open to new ideas.

It would feel sad though, having civilisation lead by the same people over hundreds of years if not more, somewhat stratified, predictable, dull.

> (Literally my views were influenced by Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)

Sigh this is the most annoying thing on the internet. It's like every online debate a leftist post-structuralist has to say "nuh uh actually everything is relative because it's all about structure and there's no objective truth man." It's a lazy critique. You can aim post-structuralist critique at literally anything. You're right, science is an artifact of the society it's in, and actually society is based on the Wim Hof breathing technique so really science is in service of Wim Hof Breathing. You can't argue with me because everything is relative and based on structures and Wim Hof breathing is the root of all social structure.

If you're going to trot out a post-structuralist critique, build an alternate theory, don't just pick an argument apart. I'm hardly the first person to note this continental Leftist weakness. Zizek has written about this extensively. I don't need to believe in Soviet conspiracy theories to think your argument is weak.

Zero disagreement. I will only add that I am patiently waiting for transmetropolitcan prediction of postneoredereconstructionism to become true.

> These aren't exceptions.

It's furious cherry picking. The scientific consensus is that cigarettes are harmful, the globe is warming, Tylenol DOES NOT cause autism, etc.

> Feyerabend, an academic and leftist anarchist)

Yes that was obvious in your first post.

Feyerabend was writing during the cold war and was influenced by Marx (an authoritarian) and Marxist critiques of science promoted by the Soviets at the time. You get the same threads running through people like Kuhn and Popper.

The backdrop of these ideas is that the authoritarian Soviet state wanted to undermine faith in science within the US for the same reason it wanted to undermine democracy. They also wanted to promote the idea of alternative views of science at home because Soviet science was constrained by needing to be consistent with Marx. These ideas percolated for a few decades as propaganda before people like Feyerabend gussied them up and tried to publish them as academic works.

This is ahistorical conspiracy theory.

First, state communists kill anarchists. That's history.

Second, the Soviets were incredibly dogmatic about science because they used it to justify their materialist ideology. They promoted Lysenkoism (fake genetics) to conform to Marxist doctrine. That's literally the opposite of epistemological questioning.

Third, claiming Kuhn and Popper were Soviet mouthpieces is unhinged. Popper wrote "The Open Society and Its Enemies" as an anti-communist text. Kuhn taught at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. They were Western academics, not agents.

You've gone from defending naive scientism to claiming anyone who critiques it is a communist propagandist. That's McCarthyism, not an argument.

No, it's not. Like I said this isn't worth responding to, but people who actually look into the history will understand what I'm saying.

The problem you're facing is you don't believe in any sort of objective reality so you're acting as if ideas are about which team you're on instead of how they relate to the truth.

Whoever you are imagining has nothing to do with me. Enjoy debating your spooky stalinist strawmen.

The difference between you and me is I've focused on what you've written and you've called me every name in the book despite not knowing what you're talking about.

We see your other posts where you're asking why murdering your enemies isn't okay and promoting conspiracy theories. I don't have to imagine who you are, you've told us.

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