The people who are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge are doing so off of the moral, social, and cultural capital accrued by previous generations of scientists.
The assumption that the general public will always perceive science with a reverent and trusting eye is wrong: once the capital runs out, science will be perceived as just another tentacle of the establishment. Politicizing scientific language is a surefire way of accelerating this process.
This is what has already happened with the MSM, of course.
I am just an interested layman, but I have found Historians as prime examples of academics who get this balance right. This, to me, seems to be because they have to squarely level with their own biases and preconceived ideas of what they are studying from the outset.
Once that is addressed upfront (whether it is personal preference, or cultural bias/context), the authors are able to both express themselves more freely as well as be more critical of their own perspective.
I think other social sciences researchers are more OK with this idea, and unfortunately STEM researchers seem to go out of their way to assume they have no perspectives or biases, as the assumption is that 'pure research' is unable to be tainted by such things.
To expose my own personal bias, I find this article to be very heavy handed and reactionary.
I think it's probably relevant that Historians don't actually claim to be "science" at all... I'm not being sarcastic, I think that's probably helpful for remembering your fallibility.
In my experience historians are quite interested in politics and many end up going into politics. Studying history is almost like a macro study in politics.
It seems like this has been with us since there has been science, certainly Galileo paid a certain price and many others paid a price for Lysenkoism. It's certainly sad what can be done "in the name of science" and in denial of science (or service of psuedoscience).
I agree with the author's discussion of the complexity of individuals, their beliefs, and their contributions. The desire to simplify a narrative about a person's value or intent common and even effective, but still dangerous. That can be a simplification mores over different times or cultures. One of the best cures I've seen is travel (outside your cultural sphere), but that's not likely to be universally available any time soon.
What I don't really see is that scientists themselves share a greatly disproportionate responsibility or blame for the current situation, which seems historically fraught. Media (social and otherwise), "news", and advertising on the other hand...
The peril of noting the peril of politicizing science is that that itself will be politicized.
There's going to be some number on either side of the issue that genuinely don't believe they're politicizing the issue, they're just right.
If I were to say the sun rises in the east, that would be just objectively correct. If the Penguin Party were to say that it instead rises in the west and not accepting their belief is politicizing the issue, then what are my options here?
Sure there are probably those in the Penguin Party who know the sun doesn't actually rise in the west. But toe the party line, because it antagonizes the other party. And they know that there are those out there who actually believe it. And now they join the Penguin Party because here's a major group that is validating their existence.
But there are both Democrats and Republicans who believe the other party is the Penguin Party. They believe they are right. And they believe the other party is led by people who are telling people lies just to garner support.
Which leads all of us, down here, back to where we started.
And as long as there's support to be had for pushing a fantasy, there's going to be some unscrupulous people who are going to do it. I don't think it can be avoided.
> In modern terms, Hughes was canceled […] Indeed, new words are canceled every day […]
The author seems to be unaware that the word “canceled” [sic], and especially “cancel culture” are themselves only used by one of the two sides in modern U.S. politics. This will cause the article to go unread by the other side.
Indeed, the other side seems to have no corresponding acceptable word for the concept. The closest I have seen is “consequences of a person’s own actions”, but what I have mostly seen is the existence of the concept being denied outright. Thus, the allusion by the author to Newspeak – which tries to eliminate words for concepts it wants to remove – is rather apt.
The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge. Convincing people that this is what people always believe and yet it has never been true seems impossible. It seems difficult for people to imagine that there's more left to discuss.
What I'd rather do is try to convince people that it's wrong to apply this kind of ideological control regardless of whether or not you think it's correct. But that's hard, because if it was correct, and people do earnestly believe it is, then what do they have to lose?
I also think that dishonest portrayals of even recent history are a huge problem for understanding that a lot of the moral conundrums we have today are not new. It's mostly the sensationalism and moral panics that are always changing.
Professionals have long leaned pretty liberal, but they had at least putatively neutral principles and honestly tried to put those ahead of personal politics. That seems to be eroding now as millennials have decided that the professions should be vehicles for social justice, and of course it ends up being their left-leaning vision of how to achieve that. In the process, it’s destroying the credibility of our institutions.
The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous. My dad has done public health for 30 years in the developing world. You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US: berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones. That’s a profound failure to understand the profession’s role relative to the rest of society.
The most astounding thing is that the people who are so confident that their current understanding of morals is absolutely correct and there is no possible reason to debate it or challenge it were, not very long ago at all, just as confident and vehement about things that they now consider morally abominable. This is very obvious in rapidly-changing areas like trans rights, where you can see people insist that only evil bigots would be uncomfortable with trans activists beating up elderly lesbians just for holding views that, only a handful of years earlier, the same people insisted it was bigoted to even criticise in any way.
The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking.
Always was true always will be.
I think it's cause:
1. Arrogance
2. Dead people take blame very well, and can't really argue back.
The logical conclusion of this train of thought is ... not to make policy based on science. Just make the science available, and let people do what they like.
If the plan is to create policies based on "the science", then people will lie about what the science is in order to get their policies into play.
It is hard to convince people with that opener, but the evidence is that it works quite well. One of the interesting tricks about Western democracies is that it channels the fleeting madness of crowds in the most productive direction without trying too hard to suppress it.
I think part of it is that different conditions that different societies exist in affect what's morally right and wrong. For example, in a secure stable country, the need to fight wars may seem unimportant and you might even think war is morally wrong. But in a country that's constantly under threat of being destroyed by enemies, war is essential to survival, and a conscientious objector would reasonably be seen as morally wrong.
> "The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge."
If they claim to be on the left, point out to them that that type of worldview is actually a form of conservatism. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Traditionalist conservatism places a strong emphasis on the notions of custom, convention, and tradition." and note that "customs
[and] convention" is the same as the "social norms" argument trotted out by the modern left to defend their activities.
Both past societies and current ones contain contradictory points of view. There was always conflict between people of opposing opinions. They were always people who broke contemporary moral codes, either for money, power or profit or idealism.
There were always sociopaths or people who were cruel for fun.
I wondered about that. ... science is political, always was and always will be. As we humans are biased and driven by politics and beliefs so is the science we do. In most debates I see here on hacker news both sides believe the science is in their camp (masks, nuclear power etc.) We should acknowledge that. Science is a process and never right. .. all models are wrong, yet some are useful.
Science is a method of confirming/ dis-confirming / finding truth.
You are conflating the problematic statements of people who believe truth is on their side (using scientific finding to confirm their biases) and the process itself. I suspect you are correct except in your overloading of the word “science”
The models themselves aren't political. They're not right, left, green, fascist or anything. They're just explanations and successful predictions of some part of nature. Politics comes into play with funding and what to do with technology. But that isn't the science itself.
> "In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and was himself canceled (see Figure 1)."
Yeah, I had a laugh there as well. The author's equivocation between cancel culture and Stalinist censorship does seem like a bit of a stretch. I think a better analogy would be the explicit promotion of 'patriotic education' as a matter of official state policy [1].
Eugenics is technically sound science. Selective breeding for traits is something we do with plants and animals. It works. You want pug nosed humans that yield 20% more crops, you can breed for that . There is nothing about selective breeding that technically wouldn't work for humans.
Now. Despite all of that, we should not do it. It is a moral wrong. It would require us to violate the autonomy of people. Don't want short people, you can't let short people reproduce. And so on. That's what makes it icky.
That's why we don't do it. And why we shouldn't. Not because it wouldn't work, it would. But because it would require us to violate another's autonomy.
The author is pointing out parallels between the way our society is trending in terms of ideological control, and similar things that happened in the USSR. Your argument amounts to "the US government hasn't rounded up political/ideological dissidents and murdered them yet so this article is flawed" which seems a bit dismissive. Two triangles can be similar even if one is an order of magnitude bigger than the other.
Some of the Western audience mentioned here that the comparison of Cancel culture with Trotsky's "cancellation" in USSR is a huge stretch.
I'm more familiar with the Soviet cancel culture and can assure you it's exactly the same. The author just did not show more examples, and it seems a different thing.
In reality, not only Trotsky, but many other early Soviet leaders were removed from books -- by removing mentions of them and photo editing. In fact, most of the early Soviet government of 1918 fell victims of that (the reason was that they lost to Stalin in the fight for power).
A famous example was Interior Comissar (Minister) Yezhov, who initiated the greatest political purge of 1937-38. He was himself arrested and executed based on falsified accusations in 1939. Mentions of him were removed (in fact in my schoolbooks in 1990 I did not see his name), him edited out of photographs. Here's a good collection of such photo editing:
But these examples continued into science and other areas.
Scientists, teachers, book authors and actors, who'd fall in disfavor with management, were "cancelled" the same way, except not sentenced to death.
Various sources mentioned they read books from 1930s-50s in libraries, and saw many pages missing or pieces cut out.
In my favourite child cartoon, "Last Years Snow Was Falling", the voice actor Stanislav Sadalksy's name was not mentioned. Why? He got detained being drunk. The studio immediately "cancelled" him. His name was added to the cartoon ending titles in a separate frame years later.
In 2006-07 I read an interview with Yulia Dobrovolskaya, author of a good Italian manual, who mentioned that librarians were ordered to go and either cut out pieces of books, or paint with black ink their names and citations. The reasons were mere conflicts with management of Education Ministry or even with the University management. She fell victim of that in her unversity (can't recall which one, probably Institute of Foreign Relations) and had to teach in another one (fortunately, there was some competition between them). She (IIRC) also mentioned "photopalming": putting palm trees instead of "cancelled" people in interior group photos.
Importantly, this happened not because of ideological herecies, but of mere turf wars.
For some reason I thought just the living conditions in the Soviet Union were bad; I didn't realize 1984 (the book) is literally modeled after Stalinist Russia. I always assumed thought policing was just a theoretical construct of a technological dystopian future, I didn't know the Soviet government actually did it for decades - and to their best and brightest scientists and thinkers! Interesting article, and interesting parallels to our day. Luckily most of the parallels in modern society are reflected in social media mobs and not the government itself (or we would be in very deep trouble), but it's still a bit disturbing how much power said social media mobs seem to wield over corporations and politicians.
I’m curious how the thought policing parallel escaped you. Are you younger or just didn’t really get taught/research what happened? Not intended as a critique- just genuinely curious.
As for today’s problems, why are you so sure the social media mobs aren’t in some instances government controlled? Certainly we have clear evidence of this happening at least partially in the 2016 US election. Lots of investigative journalism has done good work uncovering how the industry around this kind of stuff is financed. In fact, the KGB 100% exploited social divisions in the past for political gains (eg supporting both white nationalists and the black power movements to encourage more political violence and destabilize US politics). Why would you think that a ruthless politician like Putin who came from t be KGB would be so opposed to leveraging those same tools again? In fact, it seems like they’ve learned their lesson about how to engage in such warfare more effectively.
Orwell was initially a socialist sympathizer (went to spain during the spanish civil war), but after the Soviet Union went through major purges in the 30s, and the USSR (bad) treatment of other countries and major ethnic forced relocations inside USSR, he might have had a change of heart later on. He opposed totalitarianism in general, and after the defeat of nazism, he started seeing communism as evil/bad.
He worked for communications in the BBC during WW2, and had first hand experience with the language censoring of the time, especially of communication towards British colonies at the time.
This comment breaks the site guidelines by calling names (lots of them) and adding flamebait (lots of it). Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Agree or disagree, the OP is substantive and thoughtful and deserves much better than what you posted here. Not only that, but threads are sensitive to initial conditions. Rushing into a new thread with a denunciatory quickie risks destroying the entire thread and is therefore particularly bad.
People working in these areas are why we have things like 5 day work weeks (instead of having to work 6 or 7 days) and human rights. Why do you find them useless?
This article begins with the clearly implied belief that "Science" is not political, and degenerates from this false assumption into a paroxysm of wounded cries over the renaming of buildings and other, may I say, even less weighty matters – comparing them to the gulag and mass murder.
"Science" is not a singular object, nor a single method, nor even a set of ideas; what we must concern ourselves with is Science as it is practiced in our society.
Can one do Science without funding? Certainly! Any child with a simple telescope can observe celestial bodies in motion, reason about observations, make conjectures, and test them against more data. But this is a toy example, and this young scientist's influence may extend to a handful of child peers, and perhaps an interested parent.
The "Science" that concerns us almost always includes published, peer-reviewed research. And thus, it is inherently and obviously political. First, and most obviously: how does one become recognized as a peer whose work is eligible for publication? It necessarily requires many years of study, apprenticeship, and supervised practice. Admission to these ranks requires scholastic and social preparation, and is literally subject to the vote of a committee. That we pretend this process operates entirely on "merit" is but one of the many delusions and useful fictions we tell ourselves when we speak of a "Science" that is somehow "not political."
Second, consider not the training of new scientists, but the actual conduct of research. All research must be "sponsored" by someone, in rare cases, by the wealthy scientist themself – the exception that proves the rule. The sponsoring entity always has a material interest in the science it is funding, whether it is to extend the shelf life of canned goods, to more cheaply deposit thin strips of metal onto a substrate, or to meaningfully improve the accuracy of a weapon system guidance module. It is left as an exercise to the reader to discern the various ways that this process is clearly and nakedly "political."
I feared the worst upon viewing this article's title, yet held to a slender hope that the author might address the real threats of using science to achieve political ends, such as that posed by eugenics, or by nuclear weapons research. Reader, my hope was in vain.
We appear to have here another member of our society's establishment who has become too accustomed to unquestioning deference, yelping like a hit dog because, for instance, a presumptuous collection of students and faculty has dared suggest that perhaps UC Berkeley's $70,000 annual grants from the Genealogical Eugenics Institute Fund might be not only better named but more prudently distributed.*
One wonders if there is a corollary to Godwin's Law that stipulates that the first person to draw a comparison to Stalin has already ceded the argument?
*(this happened in October of 2020, you can look up the fund by name).
> This article begins with the clearly implied belief that "Science" is not political, and degenerates from this false assumption into a paroxysm of wounded cries over the renaming of buildings and other, may I say, even less weighty matters – comparing them to the gulag and mass murder.
Science is not partisan. Saying "Something is political" is not precise enough for different listeners to really understand what you want to convey when you say it. If you meant "political" in any other way then please explain what you meant. Saying "Everything is political" is a perfect example of sophism in my book.
There are undoubtedly massive dangers to politicising science.
But personally, I am far more concerned with lobbied interests persuading politicians that climate change is a hoax, or with idiots deciding that masks and vaccinations are something you can make your own mind up about.
These are real problems with substantial negative outcomes.
Whether we stop naming things after Nazis or pedophiles is lower on my list of priorities.
It's amazing that someone could write an essay titled "The Peril of Politicizing Science" and not once mention the actual civilizational peril we are in due to the political polarization over climate change and the coronavirus.
Sure, what would a former Soviet scientist have to inform us about about the dangers of politics interfering in the scientific process. Not like they have a history of jailing scientists who don't tow the party line, of bright scientists defecting to enemies to escape oppression, of politics dictating what academic conclusions are and are not permitted.
> Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her.
Or maybe that bias yields some useful historical lessons worth learning from, rather than simply dismissing it as "bias".
Nothing could be further from the truth. Nowhere in the scientific method does it say that you need to be smart, or have a fancy degree from an esteemed university, or that your results must be published and affirmed by The Correct People in appropriate scientific journals.
If you prove or disprove hypotheses by collecting data from experiments you design in a reproducible way, you’re doing science. The result of that is objective truth. What the political machinery decided to do with that objective truth is entirely independent of the process of science.
Science is a process of measuring cause and effect. What you decide to study using the scientific method might be political, but to call science political seems like a lazy use of language.
[+] [-] fatcat500|4 years ago|reply
The assumption that the general public will always perceive science with a reverent and trusting eye is wrong: once the capital runs out, science will be perceived as just another tentacle of the establishment. Politicizing scientific language is a surefire way of accelerating this process.
This is what has already happened with the MSM, of course.
[+] [-] KSteffensen|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand the problem here. Isn't science - as in Poppers falsifiability - the only way to legitimize knowledge?
[+] [-] i_love_limes|4 years ago|reply
Once that is addressed upfront (whether it is personal preference, or cultural bias/context), the authors are able to both express themselves more freely as well as be more critical of their own perspective.
I think other social sciences researchers are more OK with this idea, and unfortunately STEM researchers seem to go out of their way to assume they have no perspectives or biases, as the assumption is that 'pure research' is unable to be tainted by such things.
To expose my own personal bias, I find this article to be very heavy handed and reactionary.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xunn0026|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kurthr|4 years ago|reply
I agree with the author's discussion of the complexity of individuals, their beliefs, and their contributions. The desire to simplify a narrative about a person's value or intent common and even effective, but still dangerous. That can be a simplification mores over different times or cultures. One of the best cures I've seen is travel (outside your cultural sphere), but that's not likely to be universally available any time soon.
What I don't really see is that scientists themselves share a greatly disproportionate responsibility or blame for the current situation, which seems historically fraught. Media (social and otherwise), "news", and advertising on the other hand...
[+] [-] bena|4 years ago|reply
There's going to be some number on either side of the issue that genuinely don't believe they're politicizing the issue, they're just right.
If I were to say the sun rises in the east, that would be just objectively correct. If the Penguin Party were to say that it instead rises in the west and not accepting their belief is politicizing the issue, then what are my options here?
Sure there are probably those in the Penguin Party who know the sun doesn't actually rise in the west. But toe the party line, because it antagonizes the other party. And they know that there are those out there who actually believe it. And now they join the Penguin Party because here's a major group that is validating their existence.
But there are both Democrats and Republicans who believe the other party is the Penguin Party. They believe they are right. And they believe the other party is led by people who are telling people lies just to garner support.
Which leads all of us, down here, back to where we started.
And as long as there's support to be had for pushing a fantasy, there's going to be some unscrupulous people who are going to do it. I don't think it can be avoided.
[+] [-] teddyh|4 years ago|reply
The author seems to be unaware that the word “canceled” [sic], and especially “cancel culture” are themselves only used by one of the two sides in modern U.S. politics. This will cause the article to go unread by the other side.
Indeed, the other side seems to have no corresponding acceptable word for the concept. The closest I have seen is “consequences of a person’s own actions”, but what I have mostly seen is the existence of the concept being denied outright. Thus, the allusion by the author to Newspeak – which tries to eliminate words for concepts it wants to remove – is rather apt.
[+] [-] kortilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchw|4 years ago|reply
What I'd rather do is try to convince people that it's wrong to apply this kind of ideological control regardless of whether or not you think it's correct. But that's hard, because if it was correct, and people do earnestly believe it is, then what do they have to lose?
I also think that dishonest portrayals of even recent history are a huge problem for understanding that a lot of the moral conundrums we have today are not new. It's mostly the sensationalism and moral panics that are always changing.
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous. My dad has done public health for 30 years in the developing world. You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US: berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones. That’s a profound failure to understand the profession’s role relative to the rest of society.
[+] [-] makomk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmingod666|4 years ago|reply
Always was true always will be.
I think it's cause: 1. Arrogance 2. Dead people take blame very well, and can't really argue back.
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
If the plan is to create policies based on "the science", then people will lie about what the science is in order to get their policies into play.
It is hard to convince people with that opener, but the evidence is that it works quite well. One of the interesting tricks about Western democracies is that it channels the fleeting madness of crowds in the most productive direction without trying too hard to suppress it.
[+] [-] exporectomy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|4 years ago|reply
If they claim to be on the left, point out to them that that type of worldview is actually a form of conservatism. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Traditionalist conservatism places a strong emphasis on the notions of custom, convention, and tradition." and note that "customs [and] convention" is the same as the "social norms" argument trotted out by the modern left to defend their activities.
[+] [-] isitdopamine|4 years ago|reply
Also, I would add that history is not linear, it’s not the progressive challenging of old prejudices.
Sometimes, in our efforts to strive for better morals, we make terrible mistakes. Phrenology come to mind, but there could be many other examples.
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
There were always sociopaths or people who were cruel for fun.
As in, here you are attacking strawman.
[+] [-] kgarten|4 years ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w
[+] [-] thephyber|4 years ago|reply
Science is a method of confirming/ dis-confirming / finding truth.
You are conflating the problematic statements of people who believe truth is on their side (using scientific finding to confirm their biases) and the process itself. I suspect you are correct except in your overloading of the word “science”
[+] [-] goatlover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dluan|4 years ago|reply
lol
[+] [-] ls-lah_33|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/what-1836-project-texas-promote-pat...
[+] [-] all2well|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bena|4 years ago|reply
Eugenics is technically sound science. Selective breeding for traits is something we do with plants and animals. It works. You want pug nosed humans that yield 20% more crops, you can breed for that . There is nothing about selective breeding that technically wouldn't work for humans.
Now. Despite all of that, we should not do it. It is a moral wrong. It would require us to violate the autonomy of people. Don't want short people, you can't let short people reproduce. And so on. That's what makes it icky.
That's why we don't do it. And why we shouldn't. Not because it wouldn't work, it would. But because it would require us to violate another's autonomy.
[+] [-] wffurr|4 years ago|reply
What an incredibly strained analogy this all is.
[+] [-] umvi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culebron21|4 years ago|reply
I'm more familiar with the Soviet cancel culture and can assure you it's exactly the same. The author just did not show more examples, and it seems a different thing.
In reality, not only Trotsky, but many other early Soviet leaders were removed from books -- by removing mentions of them and photo editing. In fact, most of the early Soviet government of 1918 fell victims of that (the reason was that they lost to Stalin in the fight for power).
A famous example was Interior Comissar (Minister) Yezhov, who initiated the greatest political purge of 1937-38. He was himself arrested and executed based on falsified accusations in 1939. Mentions of him were removed (in fact in my schoolbooks in 1990 I did not see his name), him edited out of photographs. Here's a good collection of such photo editing:
https://cameralabs.org/11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalin...
But these examples continued into science and other areas.
Scientists, teachers, book authors and actors, who'd fall in disfavor with management, were "cancelled" the same way, except not sentenced to death.
Various sources mentioned they read books from 1930s-50s in libraries, and saw many pages missing or pieces cut out.
In my favourite child cartoon, "Last Years Snow Was Falling", the voice actor Stanislav Sadalksy's name was not mentioned. Why? He got detained being drunk. The studio immediately "cancelled" him. His name was added to the cartoon ending titles in a separate frame years later.
In 2006-07 I read an interview with Yulia Dobrovolskaya, author of a good Italian manual, who mentioned that librarians were ordered to go and either cut out pieces of books, or paint with black ink their names and citations. The reasons were mere conflicts with management of Education Ministry or even with the University management. She fell victim of that in her unversity (can't recall which one, probably Institute of Foreign Relations) and had to teach in another one (fortunately, there was some competition between them). She (IIRC) also mentioned "photopalming": putting palm trees instead of "cancelled" people in interior group photos.
Importantly, this happened not because of ideological herecies, but of mere turf wars.
[+] [-] amai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcrh|4 years ago|reply
The distinction with 1984 might be that the media is not entirely controlled by the government of the day, but that is not for want of effort.
[+] [-] vlovich123|4 years ago|reply
As for today’s problems, why are you so sure the social media mobs aren’t in some instances government controlled? Certainly we have clear evidence of this happening at least partially in the 2016 US election. Lots of investigative journalism has done good work uncovering how the industry around this kind of stuff is financed. In fact, the KGB 100% exploited social divisions in the past for political gains (eg supporting both white nationalists and the black power movements to encourage more political violence and destabilize US politics). Why would you think that a ruthless politician like Putin who came from t be KGB would be so opposed to leveraging those same tools again? In fact, it seems like they’ve learned their lesson about how to engage in such warfare more effectively.
[+] [-] ardit33|4 years ago|reply
He worked for communications in the BBC during WW2, and had first hand experience with the language censoring of the time, especially of communication towards British colonies at the time.
[+] [-] ardit33|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Agree or disagree, the OP is substantive and thoughtful and deserves much better than what you posted here. Not only that, but threads are sensitive to initial conditions. Rushing into a new thread with a denunciatory quickie risks destroying the entire thread and is therefore particularly bad.
[+] [-] xmprt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbytit|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] just_steve_h|4 years ago|reply
"Science" is not a singular object, nor a single method, nor even a set of ideas; what we must concern ourselves with is Science as it is practiced in our society.
Can one do Science without funding? Certainly! Any child with a simple telescope can observe celestial bodies in motion, reason about observations, make conjectures, and test them against more data. But this is a toy example, and this young scientist's influence may extend to a handful of child peers, and perhaps an interested parent.
The "Science" that concerns us almost always includes published, peer-reviewed research. And thus, it is inherently and obviously political. First, and most obviously: how does one become recognized as a peer whose work is eligible for publication? It necessarily requires many years of study, apprenticeship, and supervised practice. Admission to these ranks requires scholastic and social preparation, and is literally subject to the vote of a committee. That we pretend this process operates entirely on "merit" is but one of the many delusions and useful fictions we tell ourselves when we speak of a "Science" that is somehow "not political."
Second, consider not the training of new scientists, but the actual conduct of research. All research must be "sponsored" by someone, in rare cases, by the wealthy scientist themself – the exception that proves the rule. The sponsoring entity always has a material interest in the science it is funding, whether it is to extend the shelf life of canned goods, to more cheaply deposit thin strips of metal onto a substrate, or to meaningfully improve the accuracy of a weapon system guidance module. It is left as an exercise to the reader to discern the various ways that this process is clearly and nakedly "political."
I feared the worst upon viewing this article's title, yet held to a slender hope that the author might address the real threats of using science to achieve political ends, such as that posed by eugenics, or by nuclear weapons research. Reader, my hope was in vain.
We appear to have here another member of our society's establishment who has become too accustomed to unquestioning deference, yelping like a hit dog because, for instance, a presumptuous collection of students and faculty has dared suggest that perhaps UC Berkeley's $70,000 annual grants from the Genealogical Eugenics Institute Fund might be not only better named but more prudently distributed.*
One wonders if there is a corollary to Godwin's Law that stipulates that the first person to draw a comparison to Stalin has already ceded the argument?
*(this happened in October of 2020, you can look up the fund by name).
[+] [-] throw_m239339|4 years ago|reply
Science is not partisan. Saying "Something is political" is not precise enough for different listeners to really understand what you want to convey when you say it. If you meant "political" in any other way then please explain what you meant. Saying "Everything is political" is a perfect example of sophism in my book.
[+] [-] cgrealy|4 years ago|reply
But personally, I am far more concerned with lobbied interests persuading politicians that climate change is a hoax, or with idiots deciding that masks and vaccinations are something you can make your own mind up about.
These are real problems with substantial negative outcomes.
Whether we stop naming things after Nazis or pedophiles is lower on my list of priorities.
[+] [-] wffurr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dluan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naasking|4 years ago|reply
Sure, what would a former Soviet scientist have to inform us about about the dangers of politics interfering in the scientific process. Not like they have a history of jailing scientists who don't tow the party line, of bright scientists defecting to enemies to escape oppression, of politics dictating what academic conclusions are and are not permitted.
> Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her.
Or maybe that bias yields some useful historical lessons worth learning from, rather than simply dismissing it as "bias".
[+] [-] teeray|4 years ago|reply
Nothing could be further from the truth. Nowhere in the scientific method does it say that you need to be smart, or have a fancy degree from an esteemed university, or that your results must be published and affirmed by The Correct People in appropriate scientific journals.
If you prove or disprove hypotheses by collecting data from experiments you design in a reproducible way, you’re doing science. The result of that is objective truth. What the political machinery decided to do with that objective truth is entirely independent of the process of science.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply