Science made astonishing progress and was hijacked by those with an axe to grind | Hacker News Reader

Science made astonishing progress and was hijacked by those with an axe to grind

theguardian.com

31 pointspseudolus17 comments

> But this was also the decade in which science was commandeered by all kinds of people with political, social and economic axes to grind.

And here follows a list of people with political, social and economic axes to grind. Wow, apparently, all of the examples I have just happened to be from the political right and/or aligned to the evils of ‘Big Business’!

Come on, if you’re going to accuse people of having an axe to grind, don’t do it in the service of having a political axe to grind.

... and they wonder why "trust in experts" is declining.

Saying that the author has an axe to grind is another way of saying that their idea is without merit. But you haven't actually done any work to analyze or convince anyone of that.

Nationalism bad!

I'm not quite sure how these are right-leaning political statements. She criticizes: * Nazis chugging milk and Hindu nationalism * Gene editing babies, especially in ways that they can be passed along. * AI/ML as a powerful tool we're worried about. * People denying medical consensus by avoiding vaccines and causing resurgence of preventable disease. I guess there is a solid part of the political left that gets too earthy for vaccines, but there's also a solid part of the right that seeks religious exemption. Both are unfortunate and (to the eye of an atheist) avoidable. * A minority of voices being amplified by social media to confuse the majority.

Yeah, I was also wondering which article they were commenting on. Seemed like a fairly broad base of examples to me.

> and baseless claims made by some Hindu nationalists that the speakers of the original Indo-European language hailed from the Indian subcontinent

As someone deeply familiar with the debate around IE languages and entire Aryan Migration to India vs Out of India theories I would like to point out that author is way out of his/her depths on this matter. There is a lot of serious work and theories around both sides of the debate and neither side has conclusive evidence. Calling one side baseless by somehow attributing it to political motives is plain stupid, especially when plenty of non-Hindu scholars like Dr. Elst have contributed to the either sides of the debate. One of the foremost and original proponents Aryan Invasion Theory was Mr. Tilaak who was a Hindu nationalist.

While I am not qualified to comment on rest of the article; I think it is clear to me that the author has her own political biases and might not be analyzing things in dispassionate way. The thing with science is that the people who push the boundaries of science often seem outliers and mad folks. When Galileo was being harassed he appeared mad to everyone else, now in hindsight we might think of the Church as a mad organization but that was not the case then. Similarly, the university system, peer reviewed journals, main stream media etc. could be a modern day church.

True science will always win because it is on the side of the truth.

This reminds me of a 'news' organization that promoted the pseudo-scientific book "The gendered brain" (which could be described as Peak Blank Slate Fantasy), including a fawning soft-ball interview with its author where she said that research into her claims would be unethical, because nothing says good science like "just comply with what I said". That same media then went on to put that book on their 'recommended reading of the year'.

That 'news' organization was, of course, The Guardian.

i don't like when "science" is being packaged in one single word. this kind of articles serve to piggyback questionable science or even plain opinion on certain very specific successes of very talented people. science is about skepticism, and skepticism is not an "attack"; unconditional praise is what erodes people's trust in it. people don't have a beef with scientists when they re being honest

It takes a willing audience for an idea to be effectively hijacked.

I think if 2016 and the events since have taught us anything, it's that there are a lot of willing audiences we didn't realize existed (or had blissfully lied to ourselves that they no longer existed)

And most don’t even realize they’ve been hijacked.

Almost inevitably, these type of comments (about some recent date) are never specific.

On the upside, everyone agrees; but it's pointless.

Actually this is the kind of article that makes people suspicious of science, when journalists make dubious accusations in support or against the status quo or whatever.

Take vaccines example. Some researchers at the CDC withheld information about the fact that young African American males who received some vaccines developed autism at a higher rate. Did she mention that as one of the reasons why some people are suspicious of vaccinations?

And then she links to on article about Andrew Wakefield which raises raises questions about the soundness about the case against him, yet uses the article as stick to beat him with.

Guardian hacks creating articles about nothing in particular.

cdc citation pls

I am not OP but I think s/he is talking about https://www.ptcommunity.com/wire/re-analysis-cdc-data-sugges...

They are probably referring to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2015/08/06/a-co...

Note it’s disproven in the forbes article.

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