The War On Science

A recent issue of National Geographic is titled The War on Science.

The article on the topic discusses the skepticism of scientific studies suggesting Climate Change, the safety of vaccinations and GMO's as well as evolution.


Some reasons suggested for this skepticism mentioned are confirmation bias and the filter bubble in the way in which people receive their information and media today. That is to say, that filtered internet searches, as well as biased television programs, allow people the ability to largely filter out dissenting views, information and evidence.

The article mentions that certain organizations have even resorted to 'spin' reporting, which basically interprets scientific findings in a way to support a particular agenda.

Some of the issues on this front even extend into the scientific community. A study regarding evolution mentioned in the article suggests that even those who have a scientific education are slower in response to acknowledge common descent of humans with animals like mollusks, then they are with other primates. Another issue raised is that if a significant amount of scientists get involved with speaking up, in regards to particular causes and issues, rather than just providing the data and evidence, the potential of the perceived neutral stance of science may be compromised or called into question.


A reason the article mentions the average person has some difficulties with science is that some of science is rather counter-intuitive. The example given in the article is that of our perception of the sun going across the sky and the Earth seeming to be still, as we don't feel it rotating, sympathizing with the medieval view of the cosmos. Furthermore, the article mentions current happenings we cannot see such as global warming and as an addendum, I'll mention quantum mechanics which essentially works in defiance of our intuition. I am wondering if the information regarding quantum mechanics is kind of brushing up against a ceiling until we get significantly better technology, in terms of turning people onto science. The theoretical elements (no pun intended) seem to be outpacing the observable elements in this area of science, I don't know if there is deviation from the scientific method but it makes me wonder about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific methodology.

The article makes some good arguments, however the title seems a bit hyperbole. What are some thoughts in regards to the skepticism towards science, the direction science is headed, and what, if any adjustments science may need to make in it's public image as well as methodology?

 

My thoughts are it is so so that they can keep on doing what they are doing, as the more people brainwashed....the least resistance will be made. i am very surprised in real life how many people I meet that say...no global warming...look at the winter we had, etc......and i don';t even argue anymore....

I find it appalling how many people are mediocre in intelligence and how they just eat up whatever they are spoon fed....without any research or investigating fully anything for themselves.

It is sad really.....

Seems the world gets dumber all of the time as a whole.

 

I used to watch a lot of science stuff and also read a lot of science stuff and I really got into it. It was mostly about the universe and all the "possibilities" in the big empty space.

I guess I started to lose interest when it was "theoretical". None of it was concrete evidence, but "theoretically" it made sense. That, and the ever continuing corrections science made for itself. Theories are always corrected as new evidence is found. Some theories were completely abolished, while others theories changed dramatically.

A lot of it to me just sounds like someone's imagination gone wild and its backed up my physics that lead to a possibility, but it really isn't so. And it bothered me.

I watched a documentary once and it was about time travel. The scientist in charge was spending millions and millions on researching time travel. His surging interest? He wanted to go back in time to save his father from dying from cancer. Of course in this day and age right now, time travel isn't a possibility so his hopes held onto a slight chance he could meet alien visitors that already had a time machine in order for him to go back and save his father.

I sat there watching that documentary and could think nothing less than complete selfishness. Not only was that clown throwing millions away for a task he damn well knew wasn't going to come through, but the eagerness to encourage everyone else, from a wild imagination and idea to donate money in the name of "cancer research". Lol. Lol. Lol. Millions and millions. Would have been better off in the hands of centers already trying to figure out a solution to cancer than in the hands of some bloke who wanted to build a time machine. I found it disgusting and disgraceful.

I've never really paid much attention from that day. But I do have to laugh at how "spoon fed" a lot of people are. Erryone be like "conspiracy, conspiracy! Don't trust the government" but when a government funded science agency uploads a new article those same people be like "science, science, fact! FACTS!"

And I lol.

 

Faux News...



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Thanks for starting this thread and calling attention to the article. I'll be sure to read it. This is an important and complex subject. I'll start off with some thoughts off the top of my head, which I hope to add to. Since I haven't read the article, I can only guess at what is meant by "war on science". Let me put forward some possible explanations off the top of my head, and hopefully add more after I can give the topic more thought: (1) the disillusionment with belief in human progress as a result of the nightmares of twentieth century movements associated with science and the technology of mass destruction; (2) the political uses of "science" by industrial corporations, technocrats and other interest groups; (3) the religious reawakening since the 1980s, challenging secular versions of truth; (4) the advent of post-modernism and other intellectual critiques of prevailing models of science; and (5) the empowerment of ignorant voters.

(1) Disillusionment With Progress. The prestige of science gained ground during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the industrial revolution that followed it in the nineteenth century. The ability of the scientific method to winnow true from false hypotheses created a revolution of rising expectations about progress that we still see echoed in these forums. Science, it was thought, would lead to never-ending progress in raising loving standards, banishing disease, and eliminating superstition. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have brought disillusionment with progress after two world wars and other major conflicts made more hideous by weapons of mass destruction, as the Nazis enlisted the science of eugenics in its quest for a master race and the Marxists enlisted "scientific socialism" to promote untenable claims about history and progress.

(2) Political Uses of Science. Because of the prestige that science has enjoyed, it is often used as an "objective" standard invoked by antagonists in political encounters. For example, people protesting the opening of a hazardous waste facility or other locally unwanted land uses are often told by technocrats that their chances of being harmed are comparable to being struck by a meteor--this factoid being arrived at by the wonders of quantitative risk analysis (QRA). But QRA involves a host of controversial assumptions that can produce as much as a twenty-fold difference in estimates of risk from one federal agency to another. It's somewhat scandalous that industry scientists, government scientists and environmental groups will produce different results, each favorable to their own interests. On the subject of global warming, the consensus among climate scientists is that it's real, but industrial corporations can find a stable of scientists who think or say the opposite--sometimes the same ones the tobacco companies used to tell us passive cigarette smoke was harmless.

(3) Religious reawakening. Since the 1980s, the United States has been undergoing a rise of spiritual and religious interest roughly coinciding with the "Reagan Revolution" in politics and the unholy alliance between the Moral Majority of Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Republican Party. I'd argue that this is partly a reaction against the perceived advances of secularism in schools and government as a result of court decisions. Religious evangelicals have been more confident in challenging the secular elites that dominated institutions of higher learning and academies of science. Evolution and stem cell research are a couple of issues that have found support from Republican politicians catering to the religious right.

(4) The Advent of "Post-modernism" and other critics of scientific methodology. Postmodernism, a late twentieth century philosophical movement of extreme relativism and skepticism toward all institutions, did not exclude science from its attacks. Science, like the others, was just the self-serving narrative of an elite justifying its own needs for social prestige, research grants, and control. The point of view is on the decline, but I think it did real damage. Also, science is still reeling from the criticisms of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions which challenged idealized views of the scientific method.

(5) The Empowerment of Ignorant Voters. Science has spawned its own Frankenstein monster in technology. Thanks to the internet, cable and satellite TV, and the social media, everybody is exposed to information and encouraged to have and voice an opinion. But science is difficult and counter-intuitive. "Nerd" and "geek' are labels we give to people who are really into science. I've had more than one friend ask me why, if evolution is real, more apes haven't evolved into humans lately. Natural selection is difficult to understand, and seems to be inadequate to explain the integrated complexity which we see around us. Apologetics easily exploits this in selling Intelligent Design.

So I hope that gives us something to chew on.

 

We should also probably define the key terms of the discussion. What is 'war"? What is "science"? Obviously war, in the context of this thread, is being used as a metaphor for a deliberate sustained assault on an institution or method of gaining knowledge. The war metaphor is popular in political discourse, as in the "war on women" alleged by Democrats against their Republican opponents. The war, in the sense used in the National Geographic article, seems to describe a pattern of rejection or opposition to scientific consensus on such matters as climate change, use of vaccines, genetically modified foods, fluoridation of public water supplies, evolution, etc. Calling it a war may imply unified concerted action against "science" rather than a series of separate battles by different groups for different motives. And what is science? The National Geographic article quotes geophysicist and Science journal editor Marcia McNutt: “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.” Right. And scientific consensus on a given issue is not quite the same a science. Nor are science and scientism the same. Scientism is the ideology that science is the only sure guide to truth and that it will eventually solve all or most of the problems facing humanity. That is something that rational folks might well be skeptical about.

 

Anti-intellectualism: popular among republicans, and the khmer rouge.

 

A war on science is a war you can't possibly win, because you can't deny that science benefits us all. Nobody denies that, except maybe ISIS. Scientists just have to stop panicking and be patient with these guys who deny the evidence. Eventually they'll come around and then we can work together to stop climate change, if it's not too late.

 

I'm not optimistic. For one thing, I don't think the war is against "science" per se, but on different areas of scientific consensus. Just last week I was talking to a friend who, in the course of the conversation, voiced his skepticism about the human role in climate change while bitterly criticizing "nuts" like Robert Kennedy, Jr., for being against vaccinations. This is not an uncommon position. My friend is a libertarian with a strong pro-industry bias, and he therefore believes the industry propaganda that climate change, like environmentalism in general, is "junk science" promoted by liberals as an excuse to regulate us more. He attacks Kennedy on the vaccination issue with relish, since Kennedy is a liberal environmentalist. My friend would say he isn't anti-science, but is instead a champion of real science against "junk science".. His position on vaccinations is paradoxical for a libertarian, since mandatory vaccinations is an intrusion by the government into private choice, but the fact that Kennedy is against them makes my friend for them. That's the way people think. I am a believer in both climate change and compulsory vaccinations, as well as fluoridation of water and evolution. That's because I not only value science, but I tend to respect scientific consensus on these issues.Not everyone does, and those who don't are hard to sway because they've convinced themselves that the scientists are controlled by elites who are using science to further their own agendas. When people have a strong vested interest in a belief system that defines their identity, be it Iibertarianism, conservatism, or religious fundamentalism, it's hard for them to shake it even when challenged by wht seem to be incontrovertible facts. I recall a discussion I had in the Christian Sanctuary with a guy who believes that the earth is 6,000 years old on the basis of biblical genealogies. I pointed out that paleontologists and archeologists have found evidence of human existence and impressive artistic and technological achievements before that time. He said they were all part of a Darwinist conspiracy to lead us astray. i doubt that there's any hope of getting through to these people. BTW, he's posted on this forum recently, so maybe we'll get to here his arguments.

 

the world is not intuitive at first glance. we all are born into this world with a few basic capabilities, and some things are clear to see or experience directly using our somewhat primitive senses .. i say primitive because only a small set of possible phenomena can be observed directly this way. any technology sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from some kind of voodoo to the uninitiated. the more advanced science, and even related fields such as different types of engineering get, the higher the barrier to entry will be.

i guess i dont really get the thought process of these people that deny science. this is one reason that people with somewhat extreme fundamentalist rligious ideals kind of offend me, and to me they just seem pretty ignorant to think that just because they cant understand certain things that the people who study such things dont know what theyre talking about. these people greatly underestimate the capabilities of the human mind with their simplistic thinking. i love learning and figuring out new things. i actually kinda get a high from it, especially from finally tackling a hard problem.

 

Science is just as guilty though. Tons of stuff over the last 100 years we thought was correct, turned out to be wrong. Hawking is in a wheelchair, trapped in his body, so he has more time to think, lets follow him,science is just as prone to the cult of celebrity. Hundreds of thousands of geeks blindly following one idea until another one comes along, often from a totally different field to prove it wrong, or just out of context

Global Warming is a classic example, one is really talking about predicting the future and at the same time being able to control everythings adaption to its own environment, including fellow humans, that is controlling the evolutionary process. Quasi-relgous belief that we are even remotely smart enough to do that, or that even 'smart' is what would give us the answer

Climate change ideology just as ridiculous as Creationism

 

Science as a whole is doing just as great as ever. It is communication, education etc. that matters in this regard.

About unintelligent/stupid (in the literal sense) people: we have to accept them. They were always there. It doesn't seem like they're increasing disproportionally. About uneducated people: well, seems like an educational task. Not primarily the fault/task/responsibility of science/scientists.

 

I think the real problem is that science can't do everything, but many people look to it as though it should. Science can tell us that there is global warming, although thirty years ago that was a controversial conclusion. Not settled are the big questions: is it primarily a result of human activity, will reduction of greenhouse gasses by western industrial countries alleviate the situation, would the world be better as a result, and would it be worth it? . Most scientists now agree that global warming is human-induced, although there are still holdouts. More controversial is the idea that western industrial nations can do something about it without getting China and India on board, although there are promising signs that China might be coming around. And what would be the result? We don't know for sure, although the hope is that the melting of polar ice caps and the rising of oceans might be slowed, thus sparing coastal cities from flooding. Some regions would be warmer, some colder, some wetter, some drier than before, but we don't know for sure which. And would the effort it be worth it?That isn't a question science can answer. It's a policy question. And that's the important point, and is usually the case with most of the really important questions in our lives. But how we answer could be enormously important to our survival.

 

it is true that science cannot stop us from lying to ourselves, from refusing to respond to what it learns in a reasonable and responsble way. the innundation of a few coastal cities, isn't the big deal, its one of the few that's more easily dramatised, people seem to have this backward idea, that cities are humanity's ultimate achievement. famine and disease, on a species threatening scale, that the concern.
can we, and i'm not excluding india and china from the western/northern world in this context, correct enough of what we're doing wrong, to deflect this real threat, sufficiently, to assure that at least SOME of humanity WILL survive to rebuild an infrastructure based on saner principles? and why wait for nature to force us to, when we are already perfectly capable of doing so?

 

So you're saying that NO phenomenon could ever have a predictable outcome?
Hey maybe you should eat radioactive waste for breakfast because it would be silly to predict that doing so could kill you.

 

The reason the war on science is so successful (and it is successful) is because most of these issues are far too complex for the layman to ever really get a solid grasp on them.

It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which in simple terms means you're so clueless that you don't even know how clueless you are.

I've come across people who honestly thought they knew more about climate change than NASA climatologists, while having absolutely no science background whatsoever. I'm talking about truck drivers who barely made it through high school, pretending to have uncovered a gaping hole in the arguments of people who have studied climate change for decades. They go to some ridiculous propaganda site, find denier arguments that are simple enough to understand, and then repeat them on forums like this while gloating over their inherent superiority... as if debunking decades of work is as simple as pointing out that 'science doesn't have all the answers' or 'volcanoes emit CO2' or some such nonsense that isn't even at the high school level of comprehension. More than once, I've resorted to posting links to science sites for kids to respond to them.

The problem here is that they're so pigheaded about it that any attempt to explain the more complex facts to these people goes flying right over their head-- they either tune you out or simply move onto another denier point. When you get tired and give up, they claim victory.

I would agree with the article in terms of information sources-- the Internet and freedom of information is actually a big problem in terms of helping people to understand issues, because it places credible and non-credible sources on an even playing field... so people are mostly drawn to whoever is the loudest and most controversial.

We're at the point where we just roll our eyes at Fox News and such, but the truth is that such ideologically-driven stupidity comes from a very dark, very cynical place that is dangerous in the same way Bush was dangerous. The paranoia and libertarian anti-government BS that is trying to convince everyone it's as simple as us vs them and good vs. evil isn't helping.

 

That's actually a good example, as we all do eat radioactive waste everytime we have breakfast, just not in the amounts you are implying

Me sitting in a room drinking tea made from Fukishima water would be closer to a closed environment, so a lot easier to predict

Me in my kitchen having breakfast as normal, an extra couple of trillion variables come in to play to make it impossible to isolate the effect of radioactive particles present in the earths atmosphere will have on me.

There are certain things we will never be able to predict until someone solves the P=/NP problem, if indeed that's ever going to be possible. Doesn't matter how fast the worlds fastest supercomputer is, it cant solve a polynomial function faster than a linear one

 

Global warming is undeniably the result of human activity-- the only place that this is a controversy is on denier websites and in the right wing media.
It is as settled as gravity, and the holdouts are a small minority akin to the people who dispute that smoking causes cancer or evolution occurs.

And your China argument is like saying because you're raping 1 person every day, it's perfectly fine because your neighbor is raping 2 people every day. If the US took aggressive action then China would be politically pressured into doing the same... we're not living in isolated pockets anymore and every action taken by the biggest players has a ripple effect on the whole of global society.

Climate is complex enough so that certain predictions are probably going to be wrong, but that doesn't mean that ALL predictions are going to be wrong or that we can simply assume that everything is going to be fine. The odds that things could be WORSE than predicted are just as great as the odds that they won't be as bad.