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The Peril of Politicizing Science [pdf]

186 pointsby vikrumover 3 years ago

16 comments

fatcat500over 3 years ago
The people who are currently successfully utilizing science to legitimize knowledge are doing so off of the moral, social, and cultural capital accrued by previous generations of scientists.<p>The assumption that the general public will always perceive science with a reverent and trusting eye is wrong: once the capital runs out, science will be perceived as just another tentacle of the establishment. Politicizing scientific language is a surefire way of accelerating this process.<p>This is what has already happened with the MSM, of course.
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i_love_limesover 3 years ago
I am just an interested layman, but I have found Historians as prime examples of academics who get this balance right. This, to me, seems to be because they have to squarely level with their own biases and preconceived ideas of what they are studying from the outset.<p>Once that is addressed upfront (whether it is personal preference, or cultural bias&#x2F;context), the authors are able to both express themselves more freely as well as be more critical of their own perspective.<p>I think other social sciences researchers are more OK with this idea, and unfortunately STEM researchers seem to go out of their way to assume they have no perspectives or biases, as the assumption is that &#x27;pure research&#x27; is unable to be tainted by such things.<p>To expose my own personal bias, I find this article to be very heavy handed and reactionary.
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kurthrover 3 years ago
It seems like this has been with us since there has been science, certainly Galileo paid a certain price and many others paid a price for Lysenkoism. It&#x27;s certainly sad what can be done &quot;in the name of science&quot; and in denial of science (or service of psuedoscience).<p>I agree with the author&#x27;s discussion of the complexity of individuals, their beliefs, and their contributions. The desire to simplify a narrative about a person&#x27;s value or intent common and even effective, but still dangerous. That can be a simplification mores over different times or cultures. One of the best cures I&#x27;ve seen is travel (outside your cultural sphere), but that&#x27;s not likely to be universally available any time soon.<p>What I don&#x27;t really see is that scientists themselves share a greatly disproportionate responsibility or blame for the current situation, which seems historically fraught. Media (social and otherwise), &quot;news&quot;, and advertising on the other hand...
benaover 3 years ago
The peril of noting the peril of politicizing science is that that itself will be politicized.<p>There&#x27;s going to be some number on either side of the issue that genuinely don&#x27;t believe they&#x27;re politicizing the issue, they&#x27;re just right.<p>If I were to say the sun rises in the east, that would be just objectively correct. If the Penguin Party were to say that it instead rises in the west and not accepting their belief is politicizing the issue, then what are my options here?<p>Sure there are probably those in the Penguin Party who know the sun doesn&#x27;t actually rise in the west. But toe the party line, because it antagonizes the other party. And they know that there are those out there who actually believe it. And now they join the Penguin Party because here&#x27;s a major group that is validating their existence.<p>But there are both Democrats and Republicans who believe the other party is the Penguin Party. They believe they are right. And they believe the other party is led by people who are telling people lies just to garner support.<p>Which leads all of us, down here, back to where we started.<p>And as long as there&#x27;s support to be had for pushing a fantasy, there&#x27;s going to be some unscrupulous people who are going to do it. I don&#x27;t think it can be avoided.
teddyhover 3 years ago
&gt; <i>In modern terms, Hughes was canceled</i> […] <i>Indeed, new words are canceled every day</i> […]<p>The author seems to be unaware that the word “canceled” [sic], and especially “cancel culture” are themselves only used by one of the two sides in modern U.S. politics. This will cause the article to go unread by the other side.<p>Indeed, the other side <i>seems to have no corresponding acceptable word for the concept</i>. The closest I have seen is “consequences of a person’s own actions”, but what I have mostly seen is the existence of the concept being denied outright. Thus, the allusion by the author to Newspeak – which tries to eliminate words for concepts it wants to remove – is rather apt.
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jchwover 3 years ago
The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there&#x27;s nothing left to challenge. Convincing people that this is what people <i>always</i> believe and yet it has <i>never</i> been true seems impossible. It seems difficult for people to imagine that there&#x27;s more left to discuss.<p>What I&#x27;d rather do is try to convince people that it&#x27;s wrong to apply this kind of ideological control regardless of whether or not you <i>think</i> it&#x27;s correct. But that&#x27;s hard, because if it was correct, and people do earnestly believe it is, then what do they have to lose?<p>I also think that dishonest portrayals of even recent history are a huge problem for understanding that a lot of the moral conundrums we have today <i>are not new</i>. It&#x27;s mostly the sensationalism and moral panics that are always changing.
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kgartenover 3 years ago
I wondered about that. ... science is political, always was and always will be. As we humans are biased and driven by politics and beliefs so is the science we do. In most debates I see here on hacker news both sides believe the science is in their camp (masks, nuclear power etc.) We should acknowledge that. Science is a process and never right. .. all models are wrong, yet some are useful.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-020-03067-w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-020-03067-w</a>
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dluanover 3 years ago
&gt; &quot;In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and was himself canceled (see Figure 1).&quot;<p>lol
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all2wellover 3 years ago
There&#x27;s also plenty of examples of political ideas being dressed up as morally neutral science, the classic example being eugenics.
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wffurrover 3 years ago
Who exactly are the totalitarian rulers sending people to the gulag or executing them for continuing to say &quot;strawman argument&quot;?<p>What an incredibly strained analogy this all is.
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culebron21over 3 years ago
Some of the Western audience mentioned here that the comparison of Cancel culture with Trotsky&#x27;s &quot;cancellation&quot; in USSR is a huge stretch.<p>I&#x27;m more familiar with the Soviet cancel culture and can assure you it&#x27;s exactly the same. The author just did not show more examples, and it seems a different thing.<p>In reality, not only Trotsky, but many other early Soviet leaders were removed from books -- by removing mentions of them and photo editing. In fact, most of the early Soviet government of 1918 fell victims of that (the reason was that they lost to Stalin in the fight for power).<p>A famous example was Interior Comissar (Minister) Yezhov, who initiated the greatest political purge of 1937-38. He was himself arrested and executed based on falsified accusations in 1939. Mentions of him were removed (in fact in my schoolbooks in 1990 I did not see his name), him edited out of photographs. Here&#x27;s a good collection of such photo editing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cameralabs.org&#x2F;11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalinskuyu-epokhu-izbavlyalis-ot-lyudej-i-perepisyvali-istoriyu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cameralabs.org&#x2F;11680-sovetskij-fotoshop-kak-v-stalin...</a><p>But these examples continued into science and other areas.<p>Scientists, teachers, book authors and actors, who&#x27;d fall in disfavor with management, were &quot;cancelled&quot; the same way, except not sentenced to death.<p>Various sources mentioned they read books from 1930s-50s in libraries, and saw many pages missing or pieces cut out.<p>In my favourite child cartoon, &quot;Last Years Snow Was Falling&quot;, the voice actor Stanislav Sadalksy&#x27;s name was not mentioned. Why? He got detained being drunk. The studio immediately &quot;cancelled&quot; him. His name was added to the cartoon ending titles in a separate frame years later.<p>In 2006-07 I read an interview with Yulia Dobrovolskaya, author of a good Italian manual, who mentioned that librarians were ordered to go and either cut out pieces of books, or paint with black ink their names and citations. The reasons were mere conflicts with management of Education Ministry or even with the University management. She fell victim of that in her unversity (can&#x27;t recall which one, probably Institute of Foreign Relations) and had to teach in another one (fortunately, there was some competition between them). She (IIRC) also mentioned &quot;photopalming&quot;: putting palm trees instead of &quot;cancelled&quot; people in interior group photos.<p>Importantly, this happened not because of ideological herecies, but of mere turf wars.
amaiover 3 years ago
See also earlier post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27951484" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27951484</a>
umviover 3 years ago
For some reason I thought just the living conditions in the Soviet Union were bad; I didn&#x27;t realize 1984 (the book) is <i>literally</i> modeled after Stalinist Russia. I always assumed thought policing was just a theoretical construct of a technological dystopian future, I didn&#x27;t know the Soviet government actually did it for decades - and to their best and brightest scientists and thinkers! Interesting article, and interesting parallels to our day. Luckily most of the parallels in modern society are reflected in social media mobs and not the government itself (or we would be in <i>very</i> deep trouble), but it&#x27;s still a bit disturbing how much power said social media mobs seem to wield over corporations and politicians.
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just_steve_hover 3 years ago
This article begins with the clearly implied belief that &quot;Science&quot; is not political, and degenerates from this false assumption into a paroxysm of wounded cries over the renaming of buildings and other, may I say, even less weighty matters – comparing them to the gulag and mass murder.<p>&quot;Science&quot; is not a singular object, nor a single method, nor even a set of ideas; what we must concern ourselves with is Science as it is practiced in our society.<p>Can one do Science without funding? Certainly! Any child with a simple telescope can observe celestial bodies in motion, reason about observations, make conjectures, and test them against more data. But this is a toy example, and this young scientist&#x27;s influence may extend to a handful of child peers, and perhaps an interested parent.<p>The &quot;Science&quot; that concerns us almost always includes published, peer-reviewed research. And thus, it is inherently and obviously political. First, and most obviously: how does one become recognized as a peer whose work is eligible for publication? It necessarily requires many years of study, apprenticeship, and supervised practice. Admission to these ranks requires scholastic and social preparation, and is literally subject to the vote of a committee. That we pretend this process operates entirely on &quot;merit&quot; is but one of the many delusions and useful fictions we tell ourselves when we speak of a &quot;Science&quot; that is somehow &quot;not political.&quot;<p>Second, consider not the training of new scientists, but the actual conduct of research. All research must be &quot;sponsored&quot; by someone, in rare cases, by the wealthy scientist themself – the exception that proves the rule. The sponsoring entity always has a material interest in the science it is funding, whether it is to extend the shelf life of canned goods, to more cheaply deposit thin strips of metal onto a substrate, or to meaningfully improve the accuracy of a weapon system guidance module. It is left as an exercise to the reader to discern the various ways that this process is clearly and nakedly &quot;political.&quot;<p>I feared the worst upon viewing this article&#x27;s title, yet held to a slender hope that the author might address the real threats of using science to achieve political ends, such as that posed by eugenics, or by nuclear weapons research. Reader, my hope was in vain.<p>We appear to have here another member of our society&#x27;s establishment who has become too accustomed to unquestioning deference, yelping like a hit dog because, for instance, a presumptuous collection of students and faculty has dared suggest that perhaps UC Berkeley&#x27;s $70,000 annual grants from the Genealogical Eugenics Institute Fund might be not only better named but more prudently distributed.*<p>One wonders if there is a corollary to Godwin&#x27;s Law that stipulates that the first person to draw a comparison to Stalin has already ceded the argument?<p>*(this happened in October of 2020, you can look up the fund by name).
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cgrealyover 3 years ago
There are undoubtedly massive dangers to politicising science.<p>But personally, I am far more concerned with lobbied interests persuading politicians that climate change is a hoax, or with idiots deciding that masks and vaccinations are something you can make your own mind up about.<p>These are real problems with substantial negative outcomes.<p>Whether we stop naming things after Nazis or pedophiles is lower on my list of priorities.
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dluanover 3 years ago
Yeah this is a meme that surfaces every few years spontaneously irregardless of the field or discipline. &quot;Oh no we are being oppressed for not following the [current mainstream boogeyman idea], only we the true freethinkers are aware of the danger and must warn blah blah&quot;. Usually too it is some former soviet person.<p>&gt; Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English).<p>It&#x27;s just astonishing that it&#x27;s so reliable even in 2021, so far removed from the cold war, that the journal editors still feel the need to stir the pot this way. Younger scientists don&#x27;t care about this, lmao.<p>Science is inherently a political process, and this author seems to lack the self awareness of how her own bias has influenced her.
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