SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 09 2016, @03:52AM
The world of knowledge has transformed more dramatically in the last 20 years than anytime since the advent of written language.
Even in 1990, we had "the computer" and networked indexing of knowledge, but when I did research for my Masters' thesis, I would find snippets and crumbs of things I was interested in, track them down by index information and either wait days for the desired article to arrive by inter-library loan, or travel in person up to 100 miles to other libraries in hopes that their collections contained interesting information in my topic of study. And there was some degree of diversity of information available in the various libraries, and that was a good thing since a single building could not hold all things for all people - even with microfiche collections. This was me, in the 1st world, with access to dozens of world-class University libraries, spending weeks to gather information that is literally available for a few mouse clicks today.
But it's not just the speed of access or depth of information (and disinformation) that's available today, it's the equality of access to that information... 100x as many people now have internet access as used to have access to those world-class University libraries just 25 years ago.
It hasn't solved all our problems, but the problem of not knowing who starred with Kevin Bacon in all of his pre-1990 movies has been reduced to a triviality. In my day we were lucky if we could remember title and artist of our favorite songs, my 13 year old now wants to know the release date of every song that comes on the radio, and we can find that out while it is playing, while driving, via voice dictated query and computer spoken response.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 09 2016, @06:12AM
It's amazing how much more accessible info has become. Want to read the papers of Euler, a famous 18th century mathematician? In 1990, it was hard. You'd probably need special permission-- the keepers of the documents would want to be sure you weren't a psycho out to destroy precious originals at the first opportunity, or a careless bozo who has no idea that old papers can be extremely fragile. If granted, you'd have to travel to whichever facility, probably in Germany, that was keeping them. If you got that far, there are still more barriers. Do you know Latin? Because that's the language Euler wrote his papers in.
Today, Euler's papers are indeed only a few mouse clicks away. There are high quality digital scans of every paper he published, free for downloading. Lack of Latin is no problem, and not because of Google Translate. There are also English translations of his works, done by knowledgeable scholars specializing in such work, also free to download.
(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Sunday December 11 2016, @11:03AM
Very well put. The change is hard to fathom for sure.
> it's the equality of access to that information...
Amen. This gives me hope for us humans.
>This was me, in the 1st world, with access to dozens of world-class University libraries, spending weeks to gather information that is literally available for a few mouse clicks today.
That's the truth of it right there.
>the release date of every song that comes on the radio
This (plus sending messages and watching tv) seems to be the type of thing most of the population uses this amazing resource for. Nothing wrong with that! Add hyper-monetized clicks to the mix, however, and things change. It kinda feels like the web is reshaping away from open information exchange.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:54PM
I used to worry about patronizing "pay for info" sites, afraid that if I helped them succeed that the free info sites would not get developed as quickly, or at all. The only "free info" that seems to have slipped into paid only access is the old white pages, I'm sure there are others that have slipped away with it, but most of the "good stuff" like scholarly articles, property appraiser databases, etc. has been moving (relatively quickly, considering the history) toward open and unpaid access.
🌻🌻 [google.com]