Scientist's Firing After 36 Years Fuels 'PC' Debate at UCLA | Hacker News Reader

Scientist's Firing After 36 Years Fuels 'PC' Debate at UCLA

foxnews.com

15 pointscwan12 comments

Fox news has an agenda with stories like this. Can we get a better source?

How about the magazine "Nature"? http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/09/enstrom_...

You need to realize that "better" sources might not report the story because it doesn't fit with their agenda.

You have a funny idea of "better."

It's hard to find a widely accepted news source with as much of an agenda as Fox has. Fox News is an overtly partisan observer. It's reasonable to ask for further corroboration.

Don't you stop being an observer when you're a partisan?

Science is not politically correct, as we've seen in the whole Global Warming fiasco. Ever since the government took over the universities, we've seen this increasing more and more.

I say this as scientist who used to work for a major university in a major national lab. Certain outcomes are not acceptable, even if they are scientifically correct.

Science is not politically correct, as we've seen in the whole Global Warming fiasco.

Neither are politics, much of the time, and the problem with linking to an article from Fox is the network's slant. I'm not the only person to notice this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1658518 .

Until someone else picks this up and/or tries to see if it's actually true, it doesn't mean jack.

Since when did "the government" take over "the universities"? What department of "the government" gives orders to university professors? DARPA? NOAA?

I guess this is a transnational agreement, because faculty move back and forth across the oceans, and their opinions don't change much. "The government" must be a lot more well-organized than I'd suspected.

Admittedly I've never verified this but one of my history professors said that the department of education (under the Bush administration) requested that the instructors present a more pro-American narrative (or rather complained of a very anti-American bias in recent scholarship).

(Obviously you should take this hearsay anecdote with the proverbial minimal quantity of sodium chloride but I'll try to verify it with some other professors in the department.)

In 2003 he wrote a study, published in the British Medical Journal, in which he found no causal relationship between secondhand smoke and tobacco-related death – a conclusion that drew fire both because it was contrary to popular scientific belief and because it was funded by Philip Morris.

Oops! I wouldn't call it a study. I'd call it PR work.

Who cares who paid for the study as long as it is carried out correctly? It may warrant extra scrutiny, but the more there is the better.

That's the beauty of science -- it doesn't matter who's involved as long as it's correct.

I see you agree with me. It does warrant extra scrutiny.

Frankly, it doesn't matter if the study is carried out correctly or not. All that matters is that a study in some journal says that second-hand smoke is not bad for you.

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