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According to our dear friends over at Wired, we are losing the war on science. This interview with Shawn Otto, author of The War on Science [no-script hostile] ranges from the American presidential election to Albert Einstein:
His new book The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.
"The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence," Otto says. "Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being."
Fair enough. But things have gotten worse?
He fears that the war on science will only intensify once Donald Trump takes office in January. "I'm very concerned, as is the rest of the global scientific community," Otto says.
As a personal aside, I find it unlikely that the public, those who executed Socrates, burned the Library of Alexandria, and imprisoned Antoinio Gramsci, could fall for such a diaphanous fraud as the Republican attack on science! People back then were truly and profoundly stupid. But people today have the internet, and facebook, and a total misunderstanding of science, politics, ethics, and math. So, this will not end well? Help me, Soylentils, give me hope.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @11:48PM
Until people start fighting back against NHST being passed off as science, your arguments will fall on deaf ears. Government shouldn't be funding that any more than it funds astrology:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347431/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @12:23AM
Interesting had not heard that before.
Another thing is 'science' as presented to people has to be sensationalist. People like 'the silver bullet' as it were for fixing things. You get studies where 'cancer is cured'. Then you dig into it and they cured 3 mice out of 1000. So when people come looking for their cure they find out it does not exist. Then rightfully yell 'but "science" said I was going to live'.
I use quotes as science has very little in relation to they way people see it. Science is just as political as most things. For example studying against climate change should not only be encouraged it should be looked into to make sure it is wrong too. You can learn many things from being wrong. Yet to do so right now in the current political climate (hehe see what I did) is carer suicide. That is a self reinforcing idea that is probably right but needs to be studied better.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 09 2016, @08:25PM
Until people start fighting back against NHST being passed off as science, your arguments will fall on deaf ears.
Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is part of science. I've had discussions about this before (here [soylentnews.org] and here [soylentnews.org]). You have to understand the drawbacks of the approach (which I agree is easy to game). A lot of researchers don't or don't care.
But to merely assert it is not scientific merely because it is relatively easy to abuse is not scientific.