Public Dissentiment

[Steve Kinney]

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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)





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