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posted by on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-like-a-massacre dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 09 2016, @08:32AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 09 2016, @08:32AM (#439069) Journal

    But no matter what you decide in the end, people cannot remain humans without psychological comfort of being needed, wanted, useful.

    By whom? I doubt there's many people out there who need to be needed by me. You speak of problems that could be solved by fellow people with the problems.

  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday December 10 2016, @07:41AM

    by tftp (806) on Saturday December 10 2016, @07:41AM (#439622) Homepage

    By whom?

    On a blog - by anyone who reads the blog. This is why we communicate. There is no other reason to participate in discussions; we aren't paid per post. Actually, it's the other way around. Perhaps, true hermits exist - but by definition we wouldn't know anything about them.

    You speak of problems that could be solved by fellow people with the problems.

    Curiously, that's how street gangs get started by multiple people "with problems" seeking mutual confirmation.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 10 2016, @07:39PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 10 2016, @07:39PM (#439776) Journal

      You speak of problems that could be solved by fellow people with the problems.

      Curiously, that's how street gangs get started by multiple people "with problems" seeking mutual confirmation.

      I'll note two things. First, I don't have a problem with the idea of gangs. The problem comes in that they are ostracized and illegitimate which I believe we probably agree on. Thus, they have nothing to lose or to gain by playing nice with society.

      But I think that has to do more with the political marginalization of alternatives to official government law enforcement. A lot of people have problems with vigilantism, for example. But what happens when you live in an area that has grossly inadequate or corrupt police? Who enforces laws then? Gang formation is a logical consequence both for mutual defense and exploitation of the situation.

      Second, gangs often have to work around the very laws that supposedly help us. For example, there was a study done some point in the 80s or 90s on the economics of what I believe is a Chicago gang [uchicago.edu] (the authors are deliberately vague on any characteristics that could be used to identify the gang) over a four year period. At the beginning the pay for most of the gang members was well below minimum wage and most of the young adults (the neighborhood in question was almost exclusively African American). And obviously with the law breaking (they were dealing crack cocaine) and violent and often lethal conflicts with nearby rival gangs, they were definitely not following OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) regulations.

      The official unemployment for the census area was 35% for males (half that for females). So it appears this gang was a major employer, particularly of young black males aged 16-22 (they apparently were employing 80% of all such over the full period of time).

      My point behind this is that we had this very situation in the past, and they resolved it by outright ignoring a lot of laws including a variety of laws meant to help workers. This is the sort of thing that informed my attitudes towards labor policy. For example, if minimum wage laws (a particular peeve of mine) were so important to a working economy, then why did we have so many poor black males flock to gang activity which paid under the table less than minimum wage (for the first couple of years of the study, pay improved by the end of the study as the gang's status and earning potential improved) and involved a huge amount of risk both legal and health-wise far beyond anything a legit minimum wage job would offer?

      Perhaps many of these people would be better off working a job below current minimum wage which gave them real work skills and experience rather than prison time or death?

      So anyway, my overall thinking is would we see all this insistence on removing humans from tasks that they're well suited for, if we weren't trying so hard to make employing people costly and risky to employers in the first place? I think a telling sign is that when people organize in gangs, one of the first things they do is outright ignore regulations even as guidance for their own policies.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @08:24AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 11 2016, @08:24AM (#439936) Journal
      As another aside about gangs, despite the marginalization of these organizations, they have a huge economic impact. It gives me a reasonable hope that people won't just sit on their butts economically and let robots take over.