I still don't understand the discussion around "trust" in various institutions over the past 10 years. I mean, I understand it in the sense that the words are words I know, but the position people always seem to take is something like "People trust X less, and that is bad. How do we get them to trust X more?" I ask them "Well, are we sure they should trust X? Maybe X shouldn't be trusted and not trusting X is proper? Maybe we were trusting X too much before?" Then I get kind of a strange look, as though from someone who was watching a tv show that went to commercial but they hadn't noticed till just now. "Well, sure, that's possible. But what can we do to make people trust X again?" At which point I say something like "I don't know. Maybe if X can show how trustworthy they are?" and the conversation trails off, and a few days later I run into them in the hall and the conversation happens in exactly the same way. In what other context does one hear "I don't trust that guy" and think "Wow, they must have serious trust issues" and not "Huh... maybe I should keep an eye out, too."
More on point, I have noticed conservatives tend to trust science that does things more than science that promises things. Tell a conservative that you are going to laser the top off his eye ball and reshape some bits so he can see really well again, and those eyes are gonna squint at you. Have him talk to five or six people that have gotten it done and are pretty happy and he'll line up to get in the chair. I presume this is related to the openness to new things that leftists are so big on personality wise but conservatives tend to eschew. Lefties get really excited about possibilities and what might be, seemingly not attentive enough to what is actually feasible and happening. So science that is a lot of claims strikes them as more legitimate than it does conservatives.
Combine that with e.g. modern medicine's focus on preventative care which is really difficult to demonstrate or prove does anything, and you should find that conservatives are more skeptical towards medical science than leftists. Most modern science strikes most conservatives as new excuses for meddling, I expect, not actual advances in what we can achieve.
Case in point, my 103 year old grandmother ate her cereal with half and half on it every morning, and still does so far as I know. She doesn't take kindly to the notion that she should switch to skim milk because it would somehow be better for her. Hard to argue with "When you outlive me, you can give me health advice."
Science that works is called engineering. Conservatives tend to trust engineering - but then, everyone does.
Notably, whenever anyone wants to make fun of 'anti science science deniers', they always point to examples drawn from engineering: "You say you don't trust the science but I see you use a computer and fly in airplanes!"
I've been similarly baffled by the absolute lack of self reflection amongst scientists regarding declining public trust. They seem to generally assume it's due to an intellectual or even moral deficiency. Very rarely do they pause to think, maybe there's a good reason for this? Maybe that long string of scandals (climate-gate, anyone?) has had something to do with it? Maybe all those reversals (butter's bad, eat margarine! No wait, the opposite!) have had an effect? And of course, maybe it's not science per se, but scientists, that aren't trusted. But to quote Principal Skinner, no, it's the kids that are the problem.
May 11, 2022·edited May 11, 2022Liked by John Carter
I don't agree with the science that works bit. We don't call setting a broken bone or small pox vaccines "medical engineering." Maybe we should, but I don't think that "working" is the key. I think maybe the better distinction is that engineers start from what works and design or tinker from there to make things that work, as opposed to figuring out exactly why something that exists works like scientists. I am not terribly attached to that, however.
Likewise, I think many scientists claim that their solutions to problems work, whether the problems are theoretical or "I can steer the economy!" Maybe scientists that use their scientific knowledge to do things that work should be called engineers?
I think there are better responses to the "You use a plane!" argument than making a distinction between engineering and science. Maybe point out that if the science between how planes work was like climate science predicting temperature based on CO2, planes would run out of fuel plus or minus 1000 miles from their destination? Or point out phlogiston? I dunno.
The aerospace dynamic is really quite instructive. Ridiculous sums of money were poured into university labs to try and make fixed wing aircraft work. In the end the trick was figured out by a couple of backyard engineers working with a tiny budget and gleefully paying no attention to what the textbooks said about what should work or why.
Generally, I'd say that once something starts getting real world results, it starts to move out of the realm of science and into the realm of theory. Take nuclear plants for example. Sure, we still talk about nuclear physicists, but really they're engineers at this point.
Of course, it also frequently happens that the engineers are ahead of the scientists. Steam engines predated thermodynamics, for example.
In any case, a lot of it just comes down to certainty. Some science has very high certainty; others (climatology) does not. The science-worshipper mindset seems to default to a binary heuristic in which everything carrying the imprimatur of science is certain. Hence, you can have decades of failed predictions, but we're still all totally going to die of the carbonpocalypse in five years if we don't adopt a vegan diet and buy electric cars.
Certainty is indeed the crux of the matter. Excess certainty across the board is exactly the problem, and like most fanatics the more evidence provided that the certainty is unwarranted the more they cling to that certainty.
I think that is why some science is so verboten, because if it hints that some unwelcome truth might be the case, that would mean it was certainly the case and so therefore the science (and scientist) must be abolished. Once science becomes a matter of faith and certainty, the party priesthood cannot allow for things that hint at off message, counter to doctrine possibilities.
Of course if you are not part of the movement, such madness drives you farther from it, but that is of little concern to those within. They like having an outgroup to vilify more than they want converts.
The problem for this strategy is that it ultimately weakens itself. While the true believers will cling to their faith with renewed fanaticism in the face of disconformity evidence (see: Seventh Day Adventists, certain UFO cults), as you say those on the outside simply move further away.
I think that will prove even more true for scientism. The entire essence of the faith is that 'science gets results because science opens everything to being tested'. As it fills with unchallengeable dogmas that yield observably disastrous results, it undermines its own justification. We're already seeing that, as demonstrated by the wealth of memes mocking the IFLScience bugman crowd. You didn't have those even a few years ago.
Yes, so long as it doesn't develop into a fully functional mass movement it is going to be self defeating over time, as it energizes opposition as much as it energizes the believers. If it does metastasize into an active movement, that could get pretty ugly. I am a bit worried that it already has as part of the woke/progressive movement, and it is just a bit more subtle than some early 20th century versions.
More importantly, the whole idea of trust is antithetical to science. The motto of the original Royal Society for Science was literally "Nullius Im Verba" roughly translated as: Take nobody's word for it. The whole point of science is that you only accept a theory if it consistently predicts some aspect of reality to some desirable degree of accuracy. After all you can't do engineering without some degree of consistent predictability.
That prediction part is highly underrated these days. That is the bar I had in mind for "it works", and it almost never obtains.
I can understand people saying "Well, we should trust science, in so far as we trust scientists to say "Hey, our understanding lets us predict how what will happen in this condition blah blah." In a sense you are trusting that they have tested this a bunch of times, and are pretty sure how that all turns out. Or even that they are giving reasonable bounds on likelihood, like "We've tested this drug and side effects are super rare so it is safe enough." Not trust in the sense that they know everything and are communicating pure truth.
The trouble is that lately scientists haven't been doing very well making it over that lower bar, stumbling at "Well, we would like this to be true, and we mucked around with some stats and data we massaged and got the answer. No one else needs to replicate it or anything, it is now true!" The scientists, and the institutions of science they created, are falling down on the job.
Yep. Just see the replication crisis, and Ioniddis's work demonstrating that the bulk of the scientific literature is false.
There was an interesting agent based model published some years ago that showed that extreme publication pressure almost inevitably leads to sloppy work proliferating to the point that the entire scientific literature becomes unreliable. Nothing but shoddy studies built on a foundation of shoddy studies.
And even then, the theory remains a theory - it is held only conditionally true, but can and in all likelihood will be proven incorrect in some fashion in the future. General relativity is widely accepted as our best theory of gravity, for instance, but the tension between GR and quantum mechanics means that it will be superseded at some point in the future.
May 11, 2022·edited May 11, 2022Liked by John Carter
The experimental method also requires a null hypothesis. The hypothesis is a question that can be answered "true" or "false."
Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics said, "if your experiment needed statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."
Global warming is not experimental physics, it's modeling, ie, statistics. There is no null hypnosis; no matter the result, "it's worse than we imagined.". It's so bad, you might as well call it by its right name, prophecy. It ain't meteorology.
COVID was obviously "medical science" at its absolute worst. Why would anyone trust the medical establishment when they imprisoned and isolated, enmasse, the elderly. They were protecting them from a respritory virus and they forbid them from opening windows. These are essentially the only people Covid killed.
Statistics have their uses, but it's genuinely surprising how much scientific inquiry lacks a clearly stated, testable hypothesis. There's something to be said for open-ended exploration, but much of it comes down to "we're doing sciency sounding stuff because reasons."
Just don't call them experiments. Statistics lack repeatability, and without repeatability it is not an experiment. Open ended exploration is speculative. Speculation is important. Don't let them drape speculation in the language of experiments and then call it scientific. Marx called his speculations, "scientific history". Nuff said
I think a big part of it is the differences in the ways progressives and conservatives tend to analyse things. Progressives generally seem to analyse political phenomena from a more abstract perspective i.e. what kind of statement does this thing make about the world. This contrasts with the conservative tendency to analyse things in pragmatic terms i.e. what is it's actual effect on the world and my life.
A good example of this is in the debate over Brexit. The thing that really struck me was the way the two sides talked past each other. For the left, the main argument revolved around the fact the the EU ostensibly stood for all these great things: Peace, international brotherhood, shared prosperity etc. The actual realities of the EU as a living, breathing institution never really entered into the discussion. On the right it was the opposite. The discussion revolved more around the actual policies and conduct of the EU.
I think there's a similar dynamic going on here with trust in "science." Progressives tend to focus more on the abstract notion of science as a collective social good and feel that any criticism against any institution that claims to promote science is an attack on those values. The question of whether that institution is actually a faithful representative of rarely enters into the conversation as modern progressives tend to adopt their beliefs more as a social signal than as a blueprint for the kind of society they want c.f. NIMBYism.
To wit, that a great deal of the difference in how the contemporary left and right approach the world might be a result of the political left being left-hemisphere dominant to an unhealthy degree.
Interesting article. I can't help but analogise this to the distinction between mathematics and science. Normally people think of mathematics and science as being conceptual neighbours but the reality is that in terms of method they are basically opposite. Put simply, mathematics begins with a set of axioms/principles viewed as fixed and absolute and then derives theorems/observations from them whereas science begins with a set of observations/theorems and attempts to derive a coherent set of principles/axioms. It often seems like leftists tend to view things through the more mathematical lense i.e. theory precedes observable reality and conversely for rightists. An interesting parallel is in the way left and right respond to the transgender question. Notably, the way leftists have approached the question is to re-categorise man and woman to mean something different than it once meant and then assert that since transwomen are in the same new category as women, they must be the same as women and therefore one must respond to them exactly as one would a woman i.e. categorisation determines observable reality. Conversely, the rightist/scientific view observes that since transwomen have a large number of consistent distinctions from women, they must either be men or form a totally distinctive category i.e. observable reality determines categorisation.
One could draw a further analogy to machine learning vis a vis the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, you take an established schema of categories and attempt to map a set of observations to those categories. In unsupervised learning, you take a set of observations and attempt to group them together probabilistically to form contingent categories and slowly refine them with new data. In this scheme, single categories might split into multiple categories, multiple categories might merge into a single category, and the presence of a sufficient number of observations that don't match the existing ontology spurs the creation of new categories. The trade-offs are that supervised learning tends to be far more computationally efficient but tends to give nonsensical/non-informative results when faced with data that doesn't easily conform to a pre-established conceptual schema. Unsupervised learning tends to be much slower and produces output that often isn't conceptually tractable but tends to be able to account for a substantially wider range of observations. Critically, supervised learning tends to be more prone to systematic errors like say, mistaking a cat for a bus because it doesn't have a cat category. Whereas unsupervised learning tends to make more localised errors, like say putting dolphins and fish in the same category because there's not enough observations of the two to distinguish them.
It's interesting to note that one of the most famous intellectual projects of uber-leftist Fabian Society patriarch Bertrand Russel was Principia Mathematica . Principia was essentially an effort to develop a system by which all of mathematics could be derived from a minimal set of logical principles i.e. an all-encompassing system of axioms/absolute truths from which every single possible truth could be derived. He failed miserably of course but I think the attempt says something interesting about the psychology of the man and those like him.
Liked your scientific method chart! May use it in a post at some time, if that is alright with you. Good article will be linking today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Also glad to see the mention of Monsanto and GMO seeds. Just because it got bought up doesn't mean that the evil scientists at Bayer still don't have plans!!!
it's rather remarkable how the whole conversation around GMO crops just sort of petered out. Mass distrust and outrage, the power structure simply ignored it, and eventually, sure enough, the plebs got used to their Frankenfood.
All this ideological subversion of science is leading to a loss of "design margin" which will, and already has, lead to catastrophic losses in men, material, outcomes, and investment for the future.
The "settled science" of climate change with CO2 as a "pollutant" which is about as anti design margin as it gets, has already caused irreparable damage to our energy sector future in the form of not-invested trillions in that sector, and wasted trillions in the "green" fantasy. To say nothing in the lack of agricultural output and investment for future output which will be in overdrive demand as we enter the next glaciation (if we make it that long).
This "corruption" of science by ideology will reach a level where "design margin" is not even achievable in the most minimal of levels, and if you think trust is low now, just wait!
So true, and if we continue to allow the 'ideological subversion of science' it's going to kill all of us (Gates wanting to blot out the sun during a Grand Solar Minimum, or taking CO2 out of the atmosphere when we actually could do with more of it for food production, messing with our own genome when we hardly understand any of it, and on and on goes the list).
Those are concerning, but at a more abstract level the subversion of scientific institutions threatens to simply blind us, and with ultimately catastrophic results. Official science having proclaimed gravity to be white supremacy, our society then Follows The SCIENCE! right off a cliff. See for example the famine that resulted from Lysenkoism.
Yes agreed. Let's hope that the sorts of discussions we are having here are also happening a million fold among truly thoughtful scientists who are resisting such subversion - an a counter-revolution, of sorts, will happen in the scientific community.
I think that's happening. In fact as a practicing scientist who is in regular private conversation with like-minded colleagues, and is observing this conversation happening in public amongst dissident scientists (eg Weinstein, Heying, Malone, etc. etc. ... it's really quite an extensive list say this point) I can assure you that it IS happening.
That IS so encouraging. My world of the humanities seems to be totally subverted - but reading McGilchrist gives me hope for the psychology/philosophy world.
Keep up the good work John - really enjoying your writing!
"Off a cliff" is exactly what we are about to do with destroying the energy and agricultural sectors just years before they would be inadequate even if we had proceeded with maximum investment, research, and development.
Whether it be 5, 15, 50, or 500 (doubtful) years, the glaciation is coming back and there is not a damn thing we can do to stop it in the present, or the future!
Some of these idiots say in 500 years we'll all be living in space.
The available energy resources in total on this planet couldn't get a fraction of us into space, much less support us there!
I'm quite a bit more optimistic in the long run. The available resources in terms of both matter and energy are vast beyond our needs, particularly if we expand into the solar system. Wind and solar however, ain't it, chief.
I sure as heck hope you are right. But, we have to have the ability to exploit "local" resources, and it seems they are intent on destroying that ability for all but themselves.
You've heard of the Fermi paradox, right.
Well, with Communism, we never get off this rock in time to avoid the big one.
Political/ideological mechanisms have of course been proposed as a possible Great Filter, along with many other failure modes (nuclear war, ecological collapse, virtual reality addiction....) Then you've got all the hard steps in evolutionary development, e.g. multicellular life. Assuming the Great Filter to be true, it's an open question whether it lies in our past or our future. Given that, we might as well assume it lies in our past; to assume it lies ahead of us is to embrace despair.
Me, I'm not so certain that we're as alone as we think we are. The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if a great deal of evidence is excluded from scientific consideration. Certainly there's nothing really definitive yet, but there's enough high strangeness in the UFO phenomenon for reasonable minds to entertain certain possibilities.
I still don't understand the discussion around "trust" in various institutions over the past 10 years. I mean, I understand it in the sense that the words are words I know, but the position people always seem to take is something like "People trust X less, and that is bad. How do we get them to trust X more?" I ask them "Well, are we sure they should trust X? Maybe X shouldn't be trusted and not trusting X is proper? Maybe we were trusting X too much before?" Then I get kind of a strange look, as though from someone who was watching a tv show that went to commercial but they hadn't noticed till just now. "Well, sure, that's possible. But what can we do to make people trust X again?" At which point I say something like "I don't know. Maybe if X can show how trustworthy they are?" and the conversation trails off, and a few days later I run into them in the hall and the conversation happens in exactly the same way. In what other context does one hear "I don't trust that guy" and think "Wow, they must have serious trust issues" and not "Huh... maybe I should keep an eye out, too."
More on point, I have noticed conservatives tend to trust science that does things more than science that promises things. Tell a conservative that you are going to laser the top off his eye ball and reshape some bits so he can see really well again, and those eyes are gonna squint at you. Have him talk to five or six people that have gotten it done and are pretty happy and he'll line up to get in the chair. I presume this is related to the openness to new things that leftists are so big on personality wise but conservatives tend to eschew. Lefties get really excited about possibilities and what might be, seemingly not attentive enough to what is actually feasible and happening. So science that is a lot of claims strikes them as more legitimate than it does conservatives.
Combine that with e.g. modern medicine's focus on preventative care which is really difficult to demonstrate or prove does anything, and you should find that conservatives are more skeptical towards medical science than leftists. Most modern science strikes most conservatives as new excuses for meddling, I expect, not actual advances in what we can achieve.
Case in point, my 103 year old grandmother ate her cereal with half and half on it every morning, and still does so far as I know. She doesn't take kindly to the notion that she should switch to skim milk because it would somehow be better for her. Hard to argue with "When you outlive me, you can give me health advice."
Science that works is called engineering. Conservatives tend to trust engineering - but then, everyone does.
Notably, whenever anyone wants to make fun of 'anti science science deniers', they always point to examples drawn from engineering: "You say you don't trust the science but I see you use a computer and fly in airplanes!"
I've been similarly baffled by the absolute lack of self reflection amongst scientists regarding declining public trust. They seem to generally assume it's due to an intellectual or even moral deficiency. Very rarely do they pause to think, maybe there's a good reason for this? Maybe that long string of scandals (climate-gate, anyone?) has had something to do with it? Maybe all those reversals (butter's bad, eat margarine! No wait, the opposite!) have had an effect? And of course, maybe it's not science per se, but scientists, that aren't trusted. But to quote Principal Skinner, no, it's the kids that are the problem.
I don't agree with the science that works bit. We don't call setting a broken bone or small pox vaccines "medical engineering." Maybe we should, but I don't think that "working" is the key. I think maybe the better distinction is that engineers start from what works and design or tinker from there to make things that work, as opposed to figuring out exactly why something that exists works like scientists. I am not terribly attached to that, however.
Likewise, I think many scientists claim that their solutions to problems work, whether the problems are theoretical or "I can steer the economy!" Maybe scientists that use their scientific knowledge to do things that work should be called engineers?
I think there are better responses to the "You use a plane!" argument than making a distinction between engineering and science. Maybe point out that if the science between how planes work was like climate science predicting temperature based on CO2, planes would run out of fuel plus or minus 1000 miles from their destination? Or point out phlogiston? I dunno.
The aerospace dynamic is really quite instructive. Ridiculous sums of money were poured into university labs to try and make fixed wing aircraft work. In the end the trick was figured out by a couple of backyard engineers working with a tiny budget and gleefully paying no attention to what the textbooks said about what should work or why.
Generally, I'd say that once something starts getting real world results, it starts to move out of the realm of science and into the realm of theory. Take nuclear plants for example. Sure, we still talk about nuclear physicists, but really they're engineers at this point.
Of course, it also frequently happens that the engineers are ahead of the scientists. Steam engines predated thermodynamics, for example.
In any case, a lot of it just comes down to certainty. Some science has very high certainty; others (climatology) does not. The science-worshipper mindset seems to default to a binary heuristic in which everything carrying the imprimatur of science is certain. Hence, you can have decades of failed predictions, but we're still all totally going to die of the carbonpocalypse in five years if we don't adopt a vegan diet and buy electric cars.
Certainty is indeed the crux of the matter. Excess certainty across the board is exactly the problem, and like most fanatics the more evidence provided that the certainty is unwarranted the more they cling to that certainty.
I think that is why some science is so verboten, because if it hints that some unwelcome truth might be the case, that would mean it was certainly the case and so therefore the science (and scientist) must be abolished. Once science becomes a matter of faith and certainty, the party priesthood cannot allow for things that hint at off message, counter to doctrine possibilities.
Of course if you are not part of the movement, such madness drives you farther from it, but that is of little concern to those within. They like having an outgroup to vilify more than they want converts.
The problem for this strategy is that it ultimately weakens itself. While the true believers will cling to their faith with renewed fanaticism in the face of disconformity evidence (see: Seventh Day Adventists, certain UFO cults), as you say those on the outside simply move further away.
I think that will prove even more true for scientism. The entire essence of the faith is that 'science gets results because science opens everything to being tested'. As it fills with unchallengeable dogmas that yield observably disastrous results, it undermines its own justification. We're already seeing that, as demonstrated by the wealth of memes mocking the IFLScience bugman crowd. You didn't have those even a few years ago.
Yes, so long as it doesn't develop into a fully functional mass movement it is going to be self defeating over time, as it energizes opposition as much as it energizes the believers. If it does metastasize into an active movement, that could get pretty ugly. I am a bit worried that it already has as part of the woke/progressive movement, and it is just a bit more subtle than some early 20th century versions.
Phlogiston is electrons, though I'd still like to know what those are. (Specifically, what charge is. An electron is spin (neutrino) with charge.)
As for smallpox vaccines, see https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-smallpox-pandemic-response-was
More importantly, the whole idea of trust is antithetical to science. The motto of the original Royal Society for Science was literally "Nullius Im Verba" roughly translated as: Take nobody's word for it. The whole point of science is that you only accept a theory if it consistently predicts some aspect of reality to some desirable degree of accuracy. After all you can't do engineering without some degree of consistent predictability.
Yea, verily. FORSOOTH.
That prediction part is highly underrated these days. That is the bar I had in mind for "it works", and it almost never obtains.
I can understand people saying "Well, we should trust science, in so far as we trust scientists to say "Hey, our understanding lets us predict how what will happen in this condition blah blah." In a sense you are trusting that they have tested this a bunch of times, and are pretty sure how that all turns out. Or even that they are giving reasonable bounds on likelihood, like "We've tested this drug and side effects are super rare so it is safe enough." Not trust in the sense that they know everything and are communicating pure truth.
The trouble is that lately scientists haven't been doing very well making it over that lower bar, stumbling at "Well, we would like this to be true, and we mucked around with some stats and data we massaged and got the answer. No one else needs to replicate it or anything, it is now true!" The scientists, and the institutions of science they created, are falling down on the job.
Yep. Just see the replication crisis, and Ioniddis's work demonstrating that the bulk of the scientific literature is false.
There was an interesting agent based model published some years ago that showed that extreme publication pressure almost inevitably leads to sloppy work proliferating to the point that the entire scientific literature becomes unreliable. Nothing but shoddy studies built on a foundation of shoddy studies.
And even then, the theory remains a theory - it is held only conditionally true, but can and in all likelihood will be proven incorrect in some fashion in the future. General relativity is widely accepted as our best theory of gravity, for instance, but the tension between GR and quantum mechanics means that it will be superseded at some point in the future.
The experimental method also requires a null hypothesis. The hypothesis is a question that can be answered "true" or "false."
Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics said, "if your experiment needed statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."
Global warming is not experimental physics, it's modeling, ie, statistics. There is no null hypnosis; no matter the result, "it's worse than we imagined.". It's so bad, you might as well call it by its right name, prophecy. It ain't meteorology.
COVID was obviously "medical science" at its absolute worst. Why would anyone trust the medical establishment when they imprisoned and isolated, enmasse, the elderly. They were protecting them from a respritory virus and they forbid them from opening windows. These are essentially the only people Covid killed.
Statistics have their uses, but it's genuinely surprising how much scientific inquiry lacks a clearly stated, testable hypothesis. There's something to be said for open-ended exploration, but much of it comes down to "we're doing sciency sounding stuff because reasons."
Just don't call them experiments. Statistics lack repeatability, and without repeatability it is not an experiment. Open ended exploration is speculative. Speculation is important. Don't let them drape speculation in the language of experiments and then call it scientific. Marx called his speculations, "scientific history". Nuff said
I think a big part of it is the differences in the ways progressives and conservatives tend to analyse things. Progressives generally seem to analyse political phenomena from a more abstract perspective i.e. what kind of statement does this thing make about the world. This contrasts with the conservative tendency to analyse things in pragmatic terms i.e. what is it's actual effect on the world and my life.
A good example of this is in the debate over Brexit. The thing that really struck me was the way the two sides talked past each other. For the left, the main argument revolved around the fact the the EU ostensibly stood for all these great things: Peace, international brotherhood, shared prosperity etc. The actual realities of the EU as a living, breathing institution never really entered into the discussion. On the right it was the opposite. The discussion revolved more around the actual policies and conduct of the EU.
I think there's a similar dynamic going on here with trust in "science." Progressives tend to focus more on the abstract notion of science as a collective social good and feel that any criticism against any institution that claims to promote science is an attack on those values. The question of whether that institution is actually a faithful representative of rarely enters into the conversation as modern progressives tend to adopt their beliefs more as a social signal than as a blueprint for the kind of society they want c.f. NIMBYism.
That matches my observations, too. In fact, that aligns closely with some neurological speculations I wrote up here:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/left-and-right-brains-and-politics
To wit, that a great deal of the difference in how the contemporary left and right approach the world might be a result of the political left being left-hemisphere dominant to an unhealthy degree.
Interesting article. I can't help but analogise this to the distinction between mathematics and science. Normally people think of mathematics and science as being conceptual neighbours but the reality is that in terms of method they are basically opposite. Put simply, mathematics begins with a set of axioms/principles viewed as fixed and absolute and then derives theorems/observations from them whereas science begins with a set of observations/theorems and attempts to derive a coherent set of principles/axioms. It often seems like leftists tend to view things through the more mathematical lense i.e. theory precedes observable reality and conversely for rightists. An interesting parallel is in the way left and right respond to the transgender question. Notably, the way leftists have approached the question is to re-categorise man and woman to mean something different than it once meant and then assert that since transwomen are in the same new category as women, they must be the same as women and therefore one must respond to them exactly as one would a woman i.e. categorisation determines observable reality. Conversely, the rightist/scientific view observes that since transwomen have a large number of consistent distinctions from women, they must either be men or form a totally distinctive category i.e. observable reality determines categorisation.
One could draw a further analogy to machine learning vis a vis the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning. In supervised learning, you take an established schema of categories and attempt to map a set of observations to those categories. In unsupervised learning, you take a set of observations and attempt to group them together probabilistically to form contingent categories and slowly refine them with new data. In this scheme, single categories might split into multiple categories, multiple categories might merge into a single category, and the presence of a sufficient number of observations that don't match the existing ontology spurs the creation of new categories. The trade-offs are that supervised learning tends to be far more computationally efficient but tends to give nonsensical/non-informative results when faced with data that doesn't easily conform to a pre-established conceptual schema. Unsupervised learning tends to be much slower and produces output that often isn't conceptually tractable but tends to be able to account for a substantially wider range of observations. Critically, supervised learning tends to be more prone to systematic errors like say, mistaking a cat for a bus because it doesn't have a cat category. Whereas unsupervised learning tends to make more localised errors, like say putting dolphins and fish in the same category because there's not enough observations of the two to distinguish them.
It's interesting to note that one of the most famous intellectual projects of uber-leftist Fabian Society patriarch Bertrand Russel was Principia Mathematica . Principia was essentially an effort to develop a system by which all of mathematics could be derived from a minimal set of logical principles i.e. an all-encompassing system of axioms/absolute truths from which every single possible truth could be derived. He failed miserably of course but I think the attempt says something interesting about the psychology of the man and those like him.
Science I trust, scientists not so much.
How much does it cost to change the meaning of a word? To change what science means?
Ask the people who redefined racism, pandemic, and vaccine.
They forgot to calculate losses stemming from revenge, because that is all that remains.
2012-2020, basically what happened with my generation at the university. Sad, really sad. The thing is they always had strings.
Liked your scientific method chart! May use it in a post at some time, if that is alright with you. Good article will be linking today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Also glad to see the mention of Monsanto and GMO seeds. Just because it got bought up doesn't mean that the evil scientists at Bayer still don't have plans!!!
it's rather remarkable how the whole conversation around GMO crops just sort of petered out. Mass distrust and outrage, the power structure simply ignored it, and eventually, sure enough, the plebs got used to their Frankenfood.
I have been mocking the I Fucking Love Science idiots for at least 10 years. These new memes we got in the past 2 years are life.
You know the idiot with the big fat mouth and the I Fucking Love Science drinks this:
https://soylent.com/
The only good scientists are the scientists who make fun of IFLScience groupies.
Seriously they ruin it for everyone.
All this ideological subversion of science is leading to a loss of "design margin" which will, and already has, lead to catastrophic losses in men, material, outcomes, and investment for the future.
The "settled science" of climate change with CO2 as a "pollutant" which is about as anti design margin as it gets, has already caused irreparable damage to our energy sector future in the form of not-invested trillions in that sector, and wasted trillions in the "green" fantasy. To say nothing in the lack of agricultural output and investment for future output which will be in overdrive demand as we enter the next glaciation (if we make it that long).
This "corruption" of science by ideology will reach a level where "design margin" is not even achievable in the most minimal of levels, and if you think trust is low now, just wait!
So true, and if we continue to allow the 'ideological subversion of science' it's going to kill all of us (Gates wanting to blot out the sun during a Grand Solar Minimum, or taking CO2 out of the atmosphere when we actually could do with more of it for food production, messing with our own genome when we hardly understand any of it, and on and on goes the list).
Those are concerning, but at a more abstract level the subversion of scientific institutions threatens to simply blind us, and with ultimately catastrophic results. Official science having proclaimed gravity to be white supremacy, our society then Follows The SCIENCE! right off a cliff. See for example the famine that resulted from Lysenkoism.
Yes agreed. Let's hope that the sorts of discussions we are having here are also happening a million fold among truly thoughtful scientists who are resisting such subversion - an a counter-revolution, of sorts, will happen in the scientific community.
I think that's happening. In fact as a practicing scientist who is in regular private conversation with like-minded colleagues, and is observing this conversation happening in public amongst dissident scientists (eg Weinstein, Heying, Malone, etc. etc. ... it's really quite an extensive list say this point) I can assure you that it IS happening.
That IS so encouraging. My world of the humanities seems to be totally subverted - but reading McGilchrist gives me hope for the psychology/philosophy world.
Keep up the good work John - really enjoying your writing!
"Off a cliff" is exactly what we are about to do with destroying the energy and agricultural sectors just years before they would be inadequate even if we had proceeded with maximum investment, research, and development.
Whether it be 5, 15, 50, or 500 (doubtful) years, the glaciation is coming back and there is not a damn thing we can do to stop it in the present, or the future!
Some of these idiots say in 500 years we'll all be living in space.
The available energy resources in total on this planet couldn't get a fraction of us into space, much less support us there!
I'm quite a bit more optimistic in the long run. The available resources in terms of both matter and energy are vast beyond our needs, particularly if we expand into the solar system. Wind and solar however, ain't it, chief.
I sure as heck hope you are right. But, we have to have the ability to exploit "local" resources, and it seems they are intent on destroying that ability for all but themselves.
You've heard of the Fermi paradox, right.
Well, with Communism, we never get off this rock in time to avoid the big one.
Where is everybody?
They were all Communists!
If we make it, we will be "The First."
Political/ideological mechanisms have of course been proposed as a possible Great Filter, along with many other failure modes (nuclear war, ecological collapse, virtual reality addiction....) Then you've got all the hard steps in evolutionary development, e.g. multicellular life. Assuming the Great Filter to be true, it's an open question whether it lies in our past or our future. Given that, we might as well assume it lies in our past; to assume it lies ahead of us is to embrace despair.
Me, I'm not so certain that we're as alone as we think we are. The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if a great deal of evidence is excluded from scientific consideration. Certainly there's nothing really definitive yet, but there's enough high strangeness in the UFO phenomenon for reasonable minds to entertain certain possibilities.
I suspect they do; they just don't trust Vannevar Bush' meretricious "science community".
A different thesis about the occupy-woke phenomenon.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aOh_Ng0v1WE