Americans' trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days.
I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".
Also a typical argument is made that more should be done against anti-competitive behaviour. The problem is that there is no better alternative. If you regulate competition too much then people will not spend their time and/or money on moonshot ideas anymore. Why take a massive amount of risk if you aren’t allowed to reap the rewards? This is what happened in the Soviet Union and nowadays partially in China. Innovation stalls and all you can do is copy. Russia, for example, tried to make chips by copying the American designs, but without understanding the fundamentals. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
So complete regulation for anti-competitive behaviour doesn’t work. Then governments should probably just regulate a little bit? This is precisely what the US is doing. Yes, sometimes corporations push it too far and consumers are negatively affected. However, the alternative is less innovation which will also negatively affect customers.
For the counterargument that technology doesn’t make things better. (Even this is nowadays a common argument.) Compare living today with living in the 1980s. Transportation, education, medical aid, and entertainment are in general much better. Yes, there are some negative sides, but I wouldn’t want to be born 40 years earlier. Having to write letters to your family when they are overseas. No YouTube. Internet measured in kB/s. Sending patches via email on repositories without CI/CD. No thanks.
The initial point misses a fairly significant consideration though. A huge number of advancements are publicly funded. That public funding turns into private profit. People largely unaware of that fact, recently were made aware with the massive vaccine development spending that led to record shattering profits for pharma companies. To cite just one prominent example in the last few years.
Edit: shout out to text only
Seems like that's where the public's trust and interests lie these days, whether they know it or not.
Personally, my trust in survey results summaries is pretty low.
So I'd like to tell you from my point of view, but my posts were removed for being pro science. On HN. So since this is turning into reddit.. where have all the techies gone?
At some point, people stop blindly believing in the constant click-bait headlines.
Scientists, like everyone are not without errors. But there is active anti-science push in some media. There are several reasons for that. For example topic of climate change is in contrast with profits of some companies. Another example are vaccines. Exploiting believes and fears that can not be proven is easy way to obtain support.
I had people like Galileo and Darwin in mind. So no, politics in science is not new. And no, there has never been universal agreement on...that. We'll call it a "statement" to not run afoul of the guidelines. You would have to restrict your view to a fantastically thin and non-contiguous slice of geography, history, and ideology to consider it true, and it would be absurd to take someone who does that seriously.
You are politicizing science. Mind your glass house.
>> "There are only two biological sexes, feel free to fact check."
There's the various forms of intersex if we just limit it to humans and modern concepts of sex. Branch out a little to the history leading up to that modern concept and things get wild.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-...
Notions of immutable binary sex and gender themselves are political in their construction. It papered over an inconvenient truth for people whose worldview depended on neat, simple little boves.
>> "The story to be gleaned from reading Gill-Peterson can be put this way. Money, with his colleagues, largely rolled 1950’s norms over scientific data so as to defend against what that data showed. Without enough interest, in the deepest sense, to listen to children or even inform them about their treatment, Money embraced changeability with one hand while grasping at fixity with the other."
>> "[...] There’s your circle. Society, ignorant of medical research, makes a stigma out of something our bodies do quite naturally: not conform to a sexual binary. Thus, society’s enforced binary corrects a problem of its own making. And medicine complies, against its own research. Quite unlike later feminist notions — that gender is dynamic, changing, changeable, and capable of undermining social norms and their stigmatizing ways — Money’s 'gender' argued for something much more fixed and stigmatizing, all while purporting to sidestep stigma."
Then there's ZW, XO, ZO, etc. And of course numerous animals change sex over their lives or in response to environmental conditions.
And then we have X, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXXX, and XXYY people walking around, living and breathing, some of them fertile and presenting no recognizable signs.
It's crazy to me that someone would use knowledge of genetics to argue that there are only two "biological" sexes and nothing else exists. Biology is messy and full of edge cases that defy easy and clear definitions. To take a convenient rule of thumb (XX <=> female, XY <=> male) and declare it a universal rule is either ignorance or motivated reasoning.
Erodes trust.
It's not like this is only related to Covid. You can see people "doing their own research" on climate change as well, without knowing the basics of science, physics, systems science or actual climate science, but they've watched a podcast or read a blog. Covid just made this bro science stuff so mainstream that it's hard to have a beer in a bar without hearing about it.
But I'm fairly confident that Darwin's "survival of the fittest" still applies.
Where "fittest" means those (groups of) people which are better informed than their science-denying peers. And as a result, better equipped to deal with the many challenges of life.
Here on HN, it shouldn't need explaining what effect even small differences in "fitness" can have over a # of generations.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We need something similar today or the thousands of orchestras playing different tunes will never sync or get coherent. HN front page is a great example of pure randomness. You can't produce focus and trust using such systems. Just endless distraction and confusion.
For example, climate scientists are mostly united about anthropogenic climate change. But there is a huge dissenting crowd of pseudo-scientists - "noise". They sound convincing because they use big words and fancy graphs, and people believe them. And they're very good at arguing, because they're driven by religious levels of irrationality and fear.
Somehow, it's become much easier to sound like a scientist. There are pseudo-universities, and pseudo-qualifications. A doctorate doesn't seem to carry much weight any more. These people weave politics into the scientific numbers, and twist issues away from the hard-core science. And let's not even mention the conspiracy theorists...
How does one deal with that kind of insanity?
Eg: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=143082 "Illustre Axioma, Ivstvs Avtem Fide Sva Vivet"
If Josephson-Storm's thesis be true, at least given the existence proof that humanity has at least once decided that (a) the problem with studying inconsistent things is that it is too easy to make contradictory claims*, and therefore (b) we would be better off to study consistent things, allowing claims to be built upon claims, and hence at least ephemeral progress, we should expect the same process to remain possible after any future dark ages, whether it were to be carried out once more by humans, or —given our current level of destructive technology— perhaps even by remote descendants of the cockroaches.
* were I to write a DD, my topic would be: "The Rapture occurred on schedule, in 1000 AD", and so few (they who would have been There to witness the 2nd coming in 1007) were taken and so many were Left Behind, that we the remanent have no historical record.