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When science mixes with politics, all we get is politics

#1
C C Offline
https://bigthink.com/13-8/science-politics/

EXCERPTS: . . . The paradox of our age is that although we live in a world that depends in essential ways on science and its technological applications, the credibility of science and of scientists is being questioned by people with no expertise whatsoever in science or how it works. [...] questioning knowledge that is painstakingly obtained by years of hard work and study ... How did we get ourselves into this mess?

After the Second World War, scientists enjoyed an all-time high in public perception. [...] The Cold War amplified this prestige, and defense support has sustained a large part of the scientific research budget. There was also an understanding that basic science is the cornerstone of technological innovation, so that even more abstract topics were worthy of funding.

As science advanced, it also became more technical, complicated, and arcane, moving farther away from general understanding. [...] Even the experts are siloed inside their research areas. ... Specialization makes it harder for scientists to be a public voice for their fields in ways that are engaging to the general public.

To complicate things, the relationship between science and society changed. Beginning roughly in the 1960s, scientists started to use their findings to caution people and governments about the dangers of certain products or of unchecked industrialization and population growth [...] These discoveries (some of them predating the 1960s by decades) were inconvenient to many. ... They had to be stopped!

Scientists sounded the alarm, denouncing how the tobacco and fossil fuel industries developed a corrosive strategy to undermine science’s credibility, attacking scientists as opportunists and manipulators. Politicians aligned with these industries jumped in, and a campaign to politicize science took over the headlines. Scientific knowledge became a matter of opinion, something that Francis Bacon fought against almost 400 years ago.

The media helped, often giving equal weight to the opinion of the vast majority of scientists and to the opinion of a small contrarian group, confusing the general public to no end. The growth of social media compounded the damage, as individuals with no or little scientific training jumped in ready to make a name for themselves as defenders of freedom and liberty, conflating lies with the American ideal of individual freedom.

The results, not surprisingly, have been catastrophic. [...] To get out of this mess will take a tremendous amount of work, especially from the scientific community, the media, and educators. [...] Let’s make sure that we do not allow the pendulum of scientific knowledge to swing back to the obscurantism of centuries past, when the few with power and means controlled the vast majority of the population by keeping them in ignorance and manipulating them with fear... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Syne Offline
This article just sounds like a journalist trying to circle the wagons of propping up leftists, completely oblivious to the corrosive effect of leftism on the reputation of science as well as the science itself. Trying to make it about the unwashed rubes rather than their own misuse of science for their own political agendas.
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