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From the I've-heard-enough-and-won't-take-it-anymore department, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39024648
The BBC reports that former Congressman Rush Holt, now part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is the spokesman for a movement "standing up for science".
His remarks reflect growing concern among researchers that science is disregarded by President Trump.
Scientists across the US plan to march in DC on 22 April.
[...] "To see young scientists, older scientists, the general public speaking up for the idea of science. We are going to work with our members and affiliated organisations to see that this march for science is a success."
Mr Holt made his comments at the AAAS annual meting in Boston as President Trump appointed a fierce critic of the Environmental Protection Agency as its head. Scott Pruitt has spent years fighting the role and reach of the EPA.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:43PM
That was a pretty well written response. I enjoy good natured debate with you. No sarc.
The first topic from a sophistry standpoint was a major strategic error, in that I know "probably the leading mind in quantum computer science at this time" is probably not a public consumption blog but I figured I wasn't the only reader on SN. So assuming "you guys" read all his papers and blog posts like I do was a sophistry error on my part. Rephrased there is a common game play where a scientist takes something in their field, slaps a typically rather juvenile political conclusion on the end, and hides behind any criticism of the political conclusion using science as the shield. So CFD simulation of atmosphere this, radiocarbon dating that, therefore workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains, and anyone disagreeing with the usually idiotic political conclusion is a denier who hates all of science and doesn't believe in calculus and pretty much anything except defending the political conclusion itself. It is unprofessional conduct, like a PE stamping a civil engineering bridge project with his seal and a rant about white privilege, or a boiler engineer stamping a boiler design with "workers of the world unite" and answering any criticism of the Political sloganeering as a Hookes Law denier of metallurgical Science. Its weak and tiresome and unprofessional conduct.
The second topic is seeing politically active scientists and academia as one. Academia in 2010s is ... obsolete and needs replacement, and a lack of spring cleaning of the system results in ridiculous inefficiencies and obsolete groupthink behaviors. Its kind of like how businesses see occasional recessions as a good thing, wipe out the bad ideas. Or how all political organizations eventually fail and thats good because the only thing worse than replacing an org is being stuck with a stifling out of date org. Academia (connected to politically active science) is misbehaving and not wise to defer to authority to, because its obsolescent and out of date today. They may not be self aware of it, but a bunch of liberal academics marching against trump is support for trump among the other 99.9% of the population. This kind of thing happened a lot during the election, every time a SJW screamed or cried on camera about Trump, his poll numbers went up, which makes one wonder who's really supporting who. I'm just saying someone politically "woke" trying to get rid of Trump would tell these people to hide from the cameras not plan a march. Yet, "failing academia" being failing and counterproductive, is it really surprising that internal forces are pushing them to do something that helps their enemy? Not really.
We get rid of academic scientists.
LOL Naw. I mean academia isn't healthy in late 2010s. And some of the participants are questionable. But there's nothing inherently wrong with a ... monastic existence of poverty and research.
We get rid of scientists who ever do an analysis that might have policy implications we don't like.
Naw they're fine. Actually they're more than fine, they're important for good governance.
And we get rid of any scientist who might speak up on a political issue that directly impacts them but might not tow the "party line"
This is getting close to the downsizing line. I mean ... Chomsky. OK. You hire him to do political science commentary on international relations and related political topics, OK you're totally getting your moneys worth, I think thats just great. You hire Chomsky on the theory that hes mostly continuing his PHD linguistics work, well, thats skirting financial mismanagement. Just transfer him from Linguistics budget to Poli Sci and I see no problem. Or related to the article, you hire an EE prof to do EE stuff and instead all he talks about is political organizing, well, thats not really on his job description and having state funding of one political parties employees is legally questionable and theres EE out there who want that slot to do actual EE work not political party organizing. Some of that is pretty borderline...
The only "scientists" left by this definition are ...
The ones that have temper tantrums where any disagreement with the political component of their work (which is somewhat inappropriate to begin with) is exclusively responded to by attacks based on the science side of the work. Their only response to a political conclusion of "therefore we must replace capitalism with global plantation style socialism with all wealth concentrated at the top to prevent environment consequences of consumption" is "he's a trigonometric identity denier" "That heretic doesn't believe in Rolle's theorem of Calculus" "He denies the atomic theory of matter"
They are your example of "loyal, sycophantic "yes men."" but to weird left wing groupthink, not your examples of corporate thought or political thought to the right of Marx.
I admit that probably 99% of climate deniers are hard core trolling. "OK bro your science has all these ridiculous left wing conclusions, and we know left wing stuff is wrong, out of date, and obsolete, so logically that means your science must also be all wrong" and they laugh when the scientist guys head explodes. It is pretty funny trolling people who refuse to separate science from politics.
By a live example of "AFAIK nobody in the Trump administration ... is in any way in opposition to 'science' as long as it is conducted outside the three paragraphs." we've been discussing political activists who kind of moonlight as scientists for awhile. Lets look at actual science, not political activism masquerading as science and see what Trump opposes:
https://arxiv.org/list/cs/new [arxiv.org]
OK an interesting paper on modeling multi-order graphs. Thats kinda cool. Bet it could be applied to an internet routing protocol or mesh networking. Interesting. I like this paper. However it seems to be missing its quota of Marxism.
OK a rather mysterious image analysis paper on algos to analyze cervical cell cytoplasm WRT automated cancer screening. I like a good applied engineering challenge. Really lacking in Gloria Steinem quotes.
OK FaaS Function as a Service trying to more or less automatically transform java code into AWS Lambda code. Essentially a really cool crosscompiler. Huh. Thats a creative paper! I like creative papers! I don't see using this, ever, but for sheer creativity I think its interesting. But its missing "Workers of the world unite" as a tagline.
I could keep going but there is a distinct and fairly easy to detect difference between professionally done science by people having personal political beliefs and professionally done political propaganda done by people hiding behind a personal STEM degree.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 21 2017, @05:53PM
That was a pretty well written response. I enjoy good natured debate with you. No sarc.
Thanks. And I'll counter by saying that I appreciate what you wrote in response, which makes a bit more sense to me and adds context. I'd even agree with more of it (though of course certainly not all).
For example, I agree with you that there are lots of problems in academia (and admitted that in my original response). On the other hand, I think your post overestimates the political influence among STEM academics. I brought up Chomsky because I think he's a clear example of the sort of thing I assume you're talking about, but he's not a scientist. (And frankly, I'm not a big fan of his linguistics stuff either.) But if you start looking at science and engineering faculty, you'll find a lot more diversity in political views than among humanities profs (on average). Still, I'm not going to deny that there's generally a liberal slant, but if STEM folks are pushing agendas, I think it's usually about their own ideas and research -- they want to get attention for their findings, and that sometimes can blind them. But their pet theories on string theory or knot theory (in math, couldn't resist) or, I don't know... mechanical or chemical engineering designs aren't necessarily likely to be driven by Marxism or whatever liberal ideology you fear.
Lets look at actual science, not political activism masquerading as science and see what Trump opposes:
Yes, I take your point that a lot of scientific research seems to have little political connection mixed in. Which is the point I was just making in the preceding paragraph. And that's why I reacted so harshly to your initial post which seemed to lump together all of academia as if its scientific output was an example of "doublethink." Whatever the criticisms of the tenure system or other elements of academia, the vast majority of stuff coming out of it still doesn't fit your initial narrative. But you've clarified that, so let's move on.
I could keep going but there is a distinct and fairly easy to detect difference between professionally done science by people having personal political beliefs and professionally done political propaganda done by people hiding behind a personal STEM degree.
First off, I agree with this in general. My problem comes up because there are certain areas of science that appear to come into conflict with Trump's policy proposals -- and those are the ones that are going to likely be branded with whatever Trump's new moniker is going to be for the equivalent of "fake news" in science... "fake research"? Is that a phrase? Of course I doubt Trump is going to care much about multi-order graphs or cancer screening papers or other examples you gave... UNLESS they end up coming in conflict with a policy proposal. What if the cancer screening is related to abortion or to not receiving vaccines or whatever the political topic of the day is? In that case, I have little confidence in the Trump administration staying out of it, even if the researchers in question have no political agenda.
And of course the elephant in the room here is climate science. It is concerning when the new guy heading the EPA is a guy who publicly fought the EPA on numerous occasions and has received major donations from the industries he is now supposed to regulate. These are major conflicts of interest that have little to do with science. So even if you want to criticize the "climate science consensus" because you think it displays political bias or whatever, matters are likely not helped by bringing in someone else who has major conflicts of interest in this area. So no, I don't have confidence in the Trump administration in cases like this -- and it has little to do directly with their stance on science: it has to do with the potential for corruption when you put someone in charge who has major conflicts of interest. But yes, I do think that such conflicts of interest COULD impact the way researchers and scientists are pushed; it obviously does in many big businesses when DuPont puts out studies showing their chemicals are "safe" (without extensive testing) or Big Pharma puts out drug studies or whatever. Even if I believed that climate change was a giant hoax, I STILL wouldn't want Big Oil dictating U.S. environmental policy for all sorts of reasons.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:03PM
There is an interesting side issue that there is no China environment and no USA environment there's just one environment, and that muddies the waters such that if a local conflict of interest dude is none the less an arbitrary 100x stricter than China compared to the Obama dude who was 1000x stricter, it doesn't really matter in the big picture. Other than maybe we're getting a higher quality of life / better economy with the guy who's only 99% clean than the guy who was 99.9% clean, while something that isn't changing is virtually all our pollution comes from China regardless under either policy, we're just a wealthier nation with one option.
Much as it can be interesting to express global warming in terms of "miles toward the equator" or "miles per hour toward the equator" it would be interesting to specify a year. Yeah I don't think anyone is proposing a pre- '70 environmental policy. So we're talking about rolling back environmental protection from 2010s era to the filthy 90s or what? I mean, no one is proposing pollution the Mississippi river until it catches fire, or polluting the air until LA tomorrow is as bad as Beijing today. That can be an extremely hard political sell that its a crisis to roll all the way back to the 90s, perhaps, which weren't that bad really.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:31PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:56PM
See that's exactly the kind of distractor I wanted to avoid, that turning it into a debate about the Canadian You Know Who people who claimed You Know What and all kinds of opinions on that topic isn't going to help keep the main line of the conversation on track.
But yeah, yeah. He posts really good physics mixed with WTF politics. I remember a couple years back his weird WTF post about women and feminism happened like he got drunk and shitposted worst than I've ever shitpost in my entire life, and everything blew the hell up for that guy for days. Or his recent "now we're all Iranians" which means he implies I'm tossing my gay coworkers off the roof of my building to kill them while simultaneously oppressing all the women in my family while plotting the nuclear annihilation of Israel because after all that's what Iranians do. How can a guy that smart, be so stupid in another context? Like the dumbest thing I ever did in ... woodworking lets say, was never as dumb as this physicist talking politics. Ugh.
He really is an excellent physicist worth the time to read. His political commentary... not so good.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:37AM
THANK YOU. Now I finally understand what VLM was talking about all this time. I've actually visited Aaronson's blog before, but it's been a couple years... and I'd forgotten about it. (It's not my main field.)
Anyhow, I really don't know what was so hard about identifying this. It's actually more casual in tone than what I was envisioning from VLM's description, so even after looking at it, I still don't get the controversy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:29PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves