Scientific American finds SETI racist & colonialist + Fat acceptance movement (Maher)

[C C]

Scientific American finds SETI racist & colonialist
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/08/1...lonialist/

EXCERPT (Jerry Coyne): . . . In this piece, Scientific American author Camilio Garzón[ (it’s an article, not an op-ed) interviews Rebecca Charbonneau, identified as “a historian in residence at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as well as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.”

Charbonneau’s thesis:

. . . .increasingly, SETI scientists are grappling with the disquieting notion that, much like their intellectual forebears, their search may somehow be undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields.

Yep, Scientific American is rapidly descending to the status of a risible, woke, and useless publication. I used to read it avidly when I was a kid, but back then it was full of science. Now, like Teen Vogue, it’s a disguised way to propagandize its readers.

Yes, I could hear your kishkes tighten up when you read Charbonneau’s thesis above, but there’s a lot more. Click to read for free—and that’s all it’s worth.

Charbonneau sees space exploration not just as a manifestation of scientific and intellectual curiosity, but largely as “an extension of our imperialist and colonial histories.” That manifests itself in several ways: not just in plans to colonize other planets (where there’s no life to dominate!), but mainly in the very way we go about detecting life in the Universe—through SETI.  She adds: “And SETI in particular carries a lot of intellectual, colonial baggage as well, especially in its use of abstract concepts like ‘civilization’ and ‘intelligence,’ concepts that have been used to enact real, physical harm on Earth.”

Her thesis, then, is SETI is not propping up the harms of colonialism on Earth using racist and colonialist methods involving things like “civilization” and “intelligence”.  Since “intelligence and “civilization” are colonialist ways to assess intelligence, what are we to do in our search for extraterrestrial life.

[...] I don’t think Charbonneau knows how SETI works. They are of course looking for signs of technological development, like radio signals or deliberate attempts to communicate, but is that colonialist? Further, SETI also uses astronomy, telescopes, and so on. Those don’t really depend on intelligence: they could, in principle, detect signs of life produced by organisms that don’t have “intelligence” in the human sense. The fact is that SETI scientists have spent decades thinking about how extraterrestrial civilizations might communicate, and designing their endeavors around these ways.

If there’s another way to detect extraterrestrial life beyond these, I’d like to know. Charbonneau certainly doesn’t tell us, nor does she seem to care. She cares more about chastising us for bad acts of the past and showing how virtuous she is... (MORE - missing details)

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Bill Maher is right about the fat-acceptance movement
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-12691-...l#pid52489

Comedian Bill Maher is in trouble after attacking the fat-acceptance movement on his show last week. Not only was the segment hilarious, but it highlighted an important fact many people would rather not discuss: social-justice activists are rewriting science to protect their ideological commitments. (MORE)

[Yazata]

What repels me about Rebecca Charbonneau isn't so much that Scientific American is promoting her (I've already pretty much given up on the magazine), it's that she seems so privileged: Somehow she acquired degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, then she floats into a prestigious position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She's apparently traveled the world giving invited talks at international conferences. And no doubt she will float on into a tenure-track position at a "top ten" university. Which naturally raises the question of how this young woman has managed to have such a "top" academic career.

Is it the quality of her academic work? Doesn't look that way to me. She writes papers (and has a book in the works) that are ostensibly about SETI but really aren't. They are papers about what she takes the politics of SETI to be, social criticism of the very academic world that has treated her so royally and given her so many advantages. Advantages that other "lesser" scholars who actually contribute something of value to SETI and the science of astronomy will never receive.

There's a whole genre of contemporary scholarship that's ostensibly about the subject of the scholarship, but is actually quite "meta-" in that instead it addresses what is supposedly the fatal political incorrectness of all the earlier scholars in the history of the subject.

There are all the recent books that are supposedly about Indian religions, but actually about how terrible the history of Western Indology supposedly has been (often some critique based on Edward Said's caricature of "orientalism"). Resulting in books that tell us nothing we didn't already know about the Indian religion in question, but more than we ever wanted to hear about Euro-American left-politics. In the same way, Rebecca's treatment of SETI appears as if it might simply employ SETI as if it was a mirror, through which she can trash the subject she is really interested in discussing, the supposed moral evils of Western academic culture.

Those of us who are interested in the possibility of intelligent alien life, in the question of how we might possibly detect it and how we could recognize it if we did, will have to look elsewhere I guess. To "lesser" scholars at "lesser" institutions perhaps.

The bottom line might be that the quality of Western academic life is rotting from the top down.

[Syne]

Like Hollywood, academia has become the haven of narcissists. Just like Hollywood has penchant for stores about themselves (acting, media, etc.), now academia also has a penchant for doing more "science" about academia itself.