-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 01/27/2017 10:17 AM, Razer wrote:
On 01/26/2017 10:13 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
The links you give show scientists intimidating dissenters and silencing opposition, rather the discovering and publishing evidence.
You're entitled to your wrong interpolation.
I do see a major problem with public perception of science, driven by social trends in academia and the self-promotion interests of media personalities presented to the public as the "voice of Science." I call it the Scientician faith: Just change out a Bishop's crook and mitre for a PhD and lab coat and viola, a High Priest. In academia, a naive but paradoxically condescending brand of atheism is the de facto State Religion. At best, certain religions where "liberal" political views hold sway may be tolerated as beneficial exercises in applied social psychology (i.e. Unitarian, Quaker). The rest are lumped together as infantile, socially destructive delusions, and disposed of with a handy set of strawman attacks against their participants: Sneering atheists always know /much/ more about the motives and behavior of "religious" people than those people know themselves, and never hesitate to fill them in. In many instances it is painfully obvious that atheism is a neurotic expression of a repressed fear that God - the nasty one from fundamentalist fairy tales - might exist. The modern and correct replacement for naive religious belief is Scientism, a faith whose adherents believe that science provides final answers to all meaningful questions about life, the Universe "and everything." These believers would not know a falsifiable hypothesis if it bit them in the ass, and can not distinguish a consensus model from Holy Writ. In their minds and lives, science is the final Voice of Authority, completely and exactly filling the role the Church held in the Dark and Middle Ages as final arbiter of Truth. As a general rule, only working scientists know that this is ridiculous - and I do not include the "social sciences" in this grouping. The Scientician faith has spread beyond academia, establishing itself as a popular cult through media personalities presented as High Priests of Scientism. In the process, personalities who serve as the public Voices of Science have become useful tools for propagandists tasked to promote "scientific" industrial products and public policy. Astrophysicists are especially well suited to this role, as their job is to explain "everything." Carl Sagan, a brilliant entertainer but 3rd rate scientist whose only notable contribution to the literature (signing off on a geophysical model of nuclear winter) lasted for just a few months before being discarded by community consensus, set the pattern. Neil Tyson now fills his shoes, reaching an audience of tens of millions with The Truth about various controversial issues in geophysics, the life sciences and public health policy on behalf of corporate sponsors. In the public mind, an astrophysicist is an expert on everything that exists. This brings us to a real problem of much more than "academic" concern: The role of corporate sponsorship as a regulating factor in research, publication and the evolution of consensus models in the sciences. The propaganda activities of petrochemicals lobbies, for instance, offer literal bounties for anyone with a PhD in any field related to geophysics who will go on record with the opinion that global warming is not real, and/or that human activity has nothing to do with it. These same information warriors fund a cottage industry that creates spurious "proofs" that the Earth is actually cooling, for use in media campaigns. This has so far been a losing battle, in that an overwhelming consensus supports global warming - but creating "doubt and dissent" is sufficient to defend de facto genocidal public policy. On the immunology, toxicology and epidemiology fronts, however, we have a very different outcome: Any findings harmful to the commercial interests of the multi-billion dollar PharmaChem research and development industry are in the "publish and perish" category for workers in these fields. As an example, any layman who examines public health statistics looking for the miracle working impact of "life saving vaccines" over the last century will notice that there was no such impact; but people who are paid to do so must pretend otherwise. A two year study falsifying the results of the most frequently cited papers indicating that flu vaccines has a significant impact on mortality was greeted by the Journal of the American Medical Association with, “To accept these results would be to say that the Earth is flat!” True story... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/does-the-vaccine-ma tter/307723/ When genetic engineering first became possible in the early 1970s, geneticists and microbiologists did not debate the safety of the technology, so much as which containment technologies should be mandated by law, to positively prevent the escape of its products from the laboratory setting. But when the first commercial products of genetic engineering were developed, no less a can-do guy than Donald Rumsfeld successfully lobbied the Bush I Administration to have transgenics based factory farming declared to be in the National Interest of the United States. Today, studies indicating that key components of this technology are endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and have acutely detrimental ecological side-effects are pointedly ignored by academia. Astrophysicists can assure us that transgenics based factory farming is a "life saving" technology, but geneticists who talk about the potential hazards of commercialized genetic engineering are not welcome on the talk show circuit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd9VwvLiFtc "Faith in science" is at best a grossly unreliable compass for those who do not understand the methods and history of science, and the impact of un- and anti-scientific influences on the practice of science in the real world. Those who do understand science know better than to have "faith" in its methods and products, but do have well justified confidence that the oldest and best established consensus models in physics will "very very likely" continue to hold up over time, in the physical contexts where they were originally developed and tested. :o) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJYi34DAAoJEECU6c5XzmuqTYgH/jrxRg9m4wmTMnQ9Qin9bgrE m4eJzSEfLKlHuEZ2kfQz/2jRB+gFpQ2CNs+x/4P3fXQM2MbmcMuRY37fvS46YVJv 5tXXSNzCZG3OfZ5LEFJ+j9GxUcNodADhlOsspsGhFXTRgztaVHDJl0XD7XW4MY4U VdT3C6pq/80KQoIQXgOcZFrNv6bTCBgC8v+Z1JPKxH7qJK8maAxejjVnDwvQ/Qno q6rVbEQ62AwOC3a7KerJgtpwaLZaF0yqXuojkm321hv2IEq+m0H94+AXyoQr3qWw qviPP9T+EiLXhIi9uKk5La7lK0whJm2FqPntGhBppr16ZcRrjZKNXqIwWYqnyhU= =uBa1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----