Comments here are still talking about defending facts. This is a losing argument.
This is bread and circuses.
Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.
America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.
Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!
But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.
Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.
At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.
Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.
Comedians were almost completely united against Trump and a lot of good that did. (I recall John Oliver pointing out, self-deprecatingly, how effective his repeated eviscerations of Trump had been).
Before I moved here, I remember thinking that Americans must be too stupid to understand "The Simpsons" because it takes apart and laughs at all the obvious flaws in American society, but discovered instead that Americans can cheerfully laugh at Homer, understand why they're laughing at Homer, and be Homer all at once.
Bear in mind that a Christian Conservative is already managing epic levels of cognitive dissonance "the love of money is the root of all evil.... mmmmm tax cuts" so a bunch more is barely going to have an impact.
You underestimate how deep this goes with the actual public.
My father has been in the GOP base his whole life. The refrain when I challenged his views on science was: "those scientists are all liberals. Why should I believe anything they have to say?"
He encouraged me to study sciences anyway because it offered a better life than his. Now, of course, he explicitly regrets providing me that education, because he sees me as "brainwashed."
We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
I agree in that people who still appreciate truth and facts must combat lies on all fronts, and that includes on the cultural front of entertainment. If a joke can reveal that the emperor has no clothes, I suppose that's a net gain. But this is a double-edged sword because it has the danger of dimming perceptions of what's really at stake. Yes we should laugh at the naked fool in charge, but if all we do is laugh, that just makes him a powerful naked fool.
"This comedian thinks I'm a stupid cretin and mocks all of my deeply held values, but he makes a good point about facts and the science of climate change! That settles it; I'm going to vote against all my other interests from now on."
I think "data science" has really let science down. 99% win predictions for Clinton, media darling Nate Silver getting the primaries completely wrong and saving face a little bit in the election, etc.
As a scientist, I instinctively trusted other data scientists to be as rigorous as I was when I did research. It turned out they were using extremely wonky simplistic models for complex human behavior, and it left me cold and clueless.
If poll-based divination is a better descriptor than political data science, then scientists should decry their stealing of the term.
>Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
At a visceral level Americans are beginning to revolt against a system that continues to grow in its power to pick winners and losers through a systematic war on education, media, and democracy.
Obama promised change; Trump didn't have to.
The American oligarchs became complacent. A shrewd sexist, racist shark capitalized on the structures they have built to perpetuate their power.
Meh. Some people act like anybody who has ever called themselves a "Scientist" has never been wrong or that mainstream science has never been wrong. It has. Many, many times.
Unless you're taking the time to do the science yourself and verify the results - you could be getting lied to or otherwise misinformed. Do you ever actually do that or do you generally just trust people who call themselves a scientist and who are trusted by other so-called scientists?
This article is also a bullshit piece of propaganda that is going on attack because somebody in the White House wrote a 7 paragraph energy plan summary that didn't include their favorite word. The plan clearly states that "Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment." and last time I checked the "climate" is part of our environment.
Do you really think that Science as an institution is incorruptible?
> Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House
> officials have found themselves embroiled in a
> scandal over “alternative facts”.
Those weren't alternative facts, those were lies.
Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations.
I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth.
Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...
I blame the media for a lot of this, honestly. If someone tells a lie, say "why did you lie about _____?" That's about 90% of why the media exists in the elevated status it has/had.
But when a reporter on CNN says "Why did the Donald Trump tell the Press Secretary to come out and tell falsehoods?" that diminishes what actually happened. The PS lied on national television. Call him out on it. Use the word "lied" or "liar" and stop dressing it up by using terms like "telling falsehoods."
When a liar is said to be "telling falsehoods" it's only one small step for them to reply with "alternative facts."
Trump's campaign was based entirely on persuasion (populism for want of a better term). That "alternative facts" exists as a thing is just another play in the persuasion handbook to discredit the idea that there any real facts at all - only opinions seem to matter now. As a result any attempt to counteract "Trumpism" with facts and data is dead in the water already.
Trump doesn't strike me as the sort of boss who enjoys hearing contrary views from his minions. I imagine he told his press secretary to get out there and tell the media off for lying about his record-breaking inauguration numbers, and Mr. Spicer went and did it.
The man is remarkably insecure. Everything he does has to be the "best ever" or it's just not good enough. Having someone like that in charge scares me.
Technically if you were pressing an alternative theory than you would be using 'alternative facts.' Facts are tools or pieces to build something, such as a theory.
We all experience alternative realities and use our 'alternative facts' to justify our beliefs. We all literally do this every single day.
As a libertarian or a marxist one has 'alternative facts' about the nature of humans, society and the environment, from there they build up their world.
"Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations"
I wrote about this recently:
"When we are interested in a topic and have time, we read about it and contrast different points of views. But when we don’t have time or are not interested in something, we believe what our culture, friends and influencers say. And we are so bombarded with information nowadays that we can’t get informed about everything all the time" [1]
Do you think that a site tracking expert's opinions on important topics might help?
That's what we are doing on AgreeList.com / Wikiopinion.org We haven't decided yet if it should be a for-profit startup or a nonprofit organisation.
The administration itself named their blatant lies "alternative facts", though I guess the media could be blamed for not reminding us strongly enough that we are discussing obvious lies.
This isn't about facts. Science is rarely about facts. Empirical science is and cannot be about proofs. Proofs and facts are for the abstract, the ideal, left to philosophers, logicians, and occasionally mathematicians and computer scientists. No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations. All empirical science can do is look at things, do experiments and come up with logically consistent and plausible theories or hypotheses that explain them. The value is rarely in the data: the value is in the reasoning around it. Observing, for example, that beaks in birds change depending on the environment is rarely interesting. The interesting bit is reasoning that traits get passed down to offspring in a survival of the fittest scheme. Similarly, observing that combustion engines release CO2, and there is more of it than before we had them … not particularly interesting. The interesting bit is that it acts as insulation to sunlight and that a lot of ecological and climate systems act as non-linear under the influence of temperature and CO2.
Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).
Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.
Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others.
I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.
I think a tangential issue is the assumption that science can decide one particular course of action to be the correct one, often expressed in a form such as that the science of climate change tells us that we must build solar farms and wind turbines. Science doesn't, in fact, tell us that, directly at least -- but it can tell us that if we want to combat the root cause of climate change, we need to decrease CO2 emissions, and major component of CO2 emissions is electricity generation, and solar and wind are reasonably practical, comparably low CO2 options, compared to most other option. But they are also expensive, and science can't tell us if it's 'worth it' (specifically if its more 'worth it' than other competing expenses), for an example.
Scientists understand this, headline writing journalists less so, and agenda-pushing activists and politicians definitely don't.
It would all be so much more convincing if scientists fought for the facts from the start. Having been there, I have seen lots of scientists fight for publications, status, grant money, etc (and the 'winners' coming from that ilk - and not the honest type). It felt like facts at best were a second class citizen in the career of a scientist. I suppose that's just human, but then we shouldn't be making scientific results to such an apotheosis.
That theory doesn't really align with the number of climate change denialists that appear on media channels and say that scientists are a) wrong, b) biased, c) not in consensus, d) unsure in their predictions, e) paid shills.
The mistake is to believe that people should care about an issue just because of proven risk. That is actually the domain of politics, ethics, and philosophy. Turning it into a scientific debate does not actually pursuade people of a particular world view.
I think you're on the right track - and the discourse from both sides is clearly wrong - but it goes deeper than that.
1. Facts may exist in the abstract, but in the real world, most facts aren't knowable as such. Every experiment makes decisions about how to set up its apparatus, what to do about measurement error. As such, everything that we choose to use the convenience of calling "observed facts" is really filtered through those factors of human judgment. And thus, all of our knowledge is tentative, depending on the quality of our experimental judgments. We really don't know with certainty as much as we tell ourselves that we do. In general, it's not an unpardonable sin for someone to claim your observations are not valid. (although in doing so, one, would expect more of an argument about why the method of observation was faulty, rather than just a "he said, she said" argument.)
2. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science even at its best can only tell us raw information. This does not lead inexorably to decisions about policy. This process necessarily passes through our values, at an individual and at a societal level. In a universe of finite resources and finite opportunities, we must always make the value judgments of which course of action is best, by analyzing expected benefits versus opportunity costs (not just monetary, but also in our moral and aesthetic senses), to see which course gives the greatest net benefit.
(sorry for not giving concrete examples to explain. I'm afraid that if I were to do so, it would distract by causing debate about the examples themselves rather than my actual point)
Facts are weird beasts. We are terrible at recognising facts, for a number of reasons. For a start people tend to confuse them with truth.
A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.
Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.
I don't think it is as easy to identify "facts" as this article implies. For example, which of the following statements are factual:
1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation:
pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4
where R is the radius of the earth, A the albedo of the earth, S_0 the flux of solar radiation, and sigma the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.
2) Rearranged, this equation gives:
T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25
3) For A - 0.3 and So = 1367 watts per square meter, this yields T_e ~ 255 K.
4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K.
5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds
* Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort)
People communicating scientific knowledge to the general public need to become more responsible in talking about uncertainty. Scientists in certain fields need to as well. When people hear a bunch of scientific facts that later turn out to be false, they will stop believing the experts. This happens all the time with nutrition and health "facts." Today drinking red wine is good for you and next decade it's bad for you. Hear that enough and you stop trusting nutrition studies. Same with anything coming out of the fields with reproducibility crises. You stop trusting them. If we properly communicated the limits of and uncertainty around these ideas, people wouldn't say we're crying wolf. If we had different layman's language to denote a theory of bunk and the theory of evolution, people wouldn't say "but it's just a theory," and experts might regain trust. If people stop presenting "X affects Y in certain conditions for mice, maybe" as "X affects Y for all humans, definitely" then lay people might stop associating that level of trust to things like climate change. At the very least, it becomes more defensible.
The problem isn't people holding these anti-science beliefs.
It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place.
Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be.
My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.
Has anyone else noticed the disturbing parallel between Trump's "Alternative facts" and the famous Nixon-era press office claim that "Previous statements are inoperative"?
This kind of article does not belong to Nature. It talks about what the media said as evidence , undefined alternative facts, how "Rejecting mainstream science has become a theme for Trump", yet the only fact presented is that tillerson acknowledged climate change. Other than the fair criticism of pushing fossil fuels, it's a purely political fluff article. Even editorials should be based on facts in Nature.
Not true: freezing EPA funds, censoring EPA twitter, replacing web pages on climate change with fossile fuel propaganda, and disputing truth on live television
We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
That his energy plan does not mention the threat of climate change is another fact, that the energy plan does not mention nuclear power, that of two scientists he has met after the election one is well known for his active denial of the central discovery of climate science: these are more facts the article relays.
[+] [-] intended|9 years ago|reply
This is bread and circuses.
Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.
America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.
Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!
But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.
Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.
At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.
Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.
[+] [-] Tloewald|9 years ago|reply
Before I moved here, I remember thinking that Americans must be too stupid to understand "The Simpsons" because it takes apart and laughs at all the obvious flaws in American society, but discovered instead that Americans can cheerfully laugh at Homer, understand why they're laughing at Homer, and be Homer all at once.
Bear in mind that a Christian Conservative is already managing epic levels of cognitive dissonance "the love of money is the root of all evil.... mmmmm tax cuts" so a bunch more is barely going to have an impact.
[+] [-] madgar|9 years ago|reply
My father has been in the GOP base his whole life. The refrain when I challenged his views on science was: "those scientists are all liberals. Why should I believe anything they have to say?"
He encouraged me to study sciences anyway because it offered a better life than his. Now, of course, he explicitly regrets providing me that education, because he sees me as "brainwashed."
[+] [-] conjectures|9 years ago|reply
We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
[+] [-] acobster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RodericDay|9 years ago|reply
As a scientist, I instinctively trusted other data scientists to be as rigorous as I was when I did research. It turned out they were using extremely wonky simplistic models for complex human behavior, and it left me cold and clueless.
If poll-based divination is a better descriptor than political data science, then scientists should decry their stealing of the term.
[+] [-] abandonliberty|9 years ago|reply
At a visceral level Americans are beginning to revolt against a system that continues to grow in its power to pick winners and losers through a systematic war on education, media, and democracy.
Obama promised change; Trump didn't have to.
The American oligarchs became complacent. A shrewd sexist, racist shark capitalized on the structures they have built to perpetuate their power.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
Well, the fake news factories are also good at pushing people to take a hard stance on things they have no clue about.
[+] [-] mfukar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConfuciusSay02|9 years ago|reply
It is undeniable that humans and human-run institutions are subject to all the same corrupting factors that every other person or institution is.
It's alarming that most of the comments here start off with the default of "the science must be true".
Science as a process is virtually infallible, but science as practiced by humans in human-run institutions is very very far from infallible.
[+] [-] WayneBro|9 years ago|reply
Unless you're taking the time to do the science yourself and verify the results - you could be getting lied to or otherwise misinformed. Do you ever actually do that or do you generally just trust people who call themselves a scientist and who are trusted by other so-called scientists?
This article is also a bullshit piece of propaganda that is going on attack because somebody in the White House wrote a 7 paragraph energy plan summary that didn't include their favorite word. The plan clearly states that "Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment." and last time I checked the "climate" is part of our environment.
Do you really think that Science as an institution is incorruptible?
[+] [-] lhnz|9 years ago|reply
Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations.
I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth.
Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...
[+] [-] pc86|9 years ago|reply
But when a reporter on CNN says "Why did the Donald Trump tell the Press Secretary to come out and tell falsehoods?" that diminishes what actually happened. The PS lied on national television. Call him out on it. Use the word "lied" or "liar" and stop dressing it up by using terms like "telling falsehoods."
When a liar is said to be "telling falsehoods" it's only one small step for them to reply with "alternative facts."
[+] [-] smackay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
The man is remarkably insecure. Everything he does has to be the "best ever" or it's just not good enough. Having someone like that in charge scares me.
[+] [-] randomgyatwork|9 years ago|reply
We all experience alternative realities and use our 'alternative facts' to justify our beliefs. We all literally do this every single day.
As a libertarian or a marxist one has 'alternative facts' about the nature of humans, society and the environment, from there they build up their world.
[+] [-] hectorperez|9 years ago|reply
I wrote about this recently:
"When we are interested in a topic and have time, we read about it and contrast different points of views. But when we don’t have time or are not interested in something, we believe what our culture, friends and influencers say. And we are so bombarded with information nowadays that we can’t get informed about everything all the time" [1]
Do you think that a site tracking expert's opinions on important topics might help?
That's what we are doing on AgreeList.com / Wikiopinion.org We haven't decided yet if it should be a for-profit startup or a nonprofit organisation.
Do you think this would help to tackle fake news?
[1] https://medium.com/@HectorPerez/wikipedias-social-network-57...
[+] [-] trombone22|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redler|9 years ago|reply
1) The President and his staff are mistaken, but honestly believe what they say
2) The President and his staff are lying, and know they are spreading falsehoods
3) The President and his staff are delusional
What other options are there?
If (1) is the case, and the actual facts are presented and they refuse to believe them, that would also seem to imply (3).
[+] [-] anon1253|9 years ago|reply
Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).
Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.
Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
[+] [-] cderwin|9 years ago|reply
I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.
[+] [-] mseebach|9 years ago|reply
Scientists understand this, headline writing journalists less so, and agenda-pushing activists and politicians definitely don't.
[+] [-] dnautics|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7952|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|9 years ago|reply
1. Facts may exist in the abstract, but in the real world, most facts aren't knowable as such. Every experiment makes decisions about how to set up its apparatus, what to do about measurement error. As such, everything that we choose to use the convenience of calling "observed facts" is really filtered through those factors of human judgment. And thus, all of our knowledge is tentative, depending on the quality of our experimental judgments. We really don't know with certainty as much as we tell ourselves that we do. In general, it's not an unpardonable sin for someone to claim your observations are not valid. (although in doing so, one, would expect more of an argument about why the method of observation was faulty, rather than just a "he said, she said" argument.)
2. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science even at its best can only tell us raw information. This does not lead inexorably to decisions about policy. This process necessarily passes through our values, at an individual and at a societal level. In a universe of finite resources and finite opportunities, we must always make the value judgments of which course of action is best, by analyzing expected benefits versus opportunity costs (not just monetary, but also in our moral and aesthetic senses), to see which course gives the greatest net benefit.
(sorry for not giving concrete examples to explain. I'm afraid that if I were to do so, it would distract by causing debate about the examples themselves rather than my actual point)
[+] [-] grabcocque|9 years ago|reply
A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.
Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.
[+] [-] nonbel|9 years ago|reply
1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation:
where R is the radius of the earth, A the albedo of the earth, S_0 the flux of solar radiation, and sigma the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.2) Rearranged, this equation gives:
3) For A - 0.3 and So = 1367 watts per square meter, this yields T_e ~ 255 K.4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K.
5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds
[+] [-] tomkinstinch|9 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-scie...
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|9 years ago|reply
* Reproducibility crisis - http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
* P-hacking http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err...
* Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort)
* Not publishing raw data so others can analyze it http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/sc...
These issues, especially the last two make it seem that a lot of scientists are not fighting for the facts, but for their own academic position.
[+] [-] akiselev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vampires123432|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] imh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crawfordcomeaux|9 years ago|reply
It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place.
Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be.
My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.
[+] [-] juskrey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbmorgado|9 years ago|reply
A scientist job is to present the facts. It's the media, and ultimately the citizen job to fight for them.
[+] [-] Tloewald|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lstroud|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gravelc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allthatglitters|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msier79|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loafa|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] msier79|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Vampires123432|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] return0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arekkas|9 years ago|reply
We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
[+] [-] trombone22|9 years ago|reply