Apr 22, 2015 04:14 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i...story.html
EXCERPT: Science historian Alice Dreger [...] claims that her positions are all politically incorrect and therefore suspect to the scientific mainstream, as Galileo’s were to the church. Her larger theme is that, in science, evidence has given way to ideology and that scientists bold enough to buck the status quo are all too often marginalized or even banished. She sees herself as a crusader for intellectual freedom, following the science wherever it leads, as opposed to what she describes as the standard academic practice of stifling uncomfortable truths. She writes, “Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true.” This is an excellent point, of course, but one that might have been better supported with examples other than those she happened to light upon. For, in her defense of what she calls “evidence based activism,” she sometimes appears not so much politically incorrect as simply incorrect.
[...] Certainly, scholars are driven toward a “regression to the safe,” as Dreger puts it, though that is not, as she implies, particularly new in the Internet age. Since Galileo’s time, thinkers have relied on the patronage of others to fund their work, and that patronage — be it from government, business interests or individuals — generally extracts a price. [...] In the case of science today, despite Dreger’s argument, that pressure comes less as a consequence of political correctness than of economic forces that have shifted academic and scientific institutions to a corporate model not designed to prioritize public interests. In the academy, it is money far more than ideology that rules the day — which explains how corporate funding allows Willie Soon, a rampant climate-change denier, to maintain his position at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....
EXCERPT: Science historian Alice Dreger [...] claims that her positions are all politically incorrect and therefore suspect to the scientific mainstream, as Galileo’s were to the church. Her larger theme is that, in science, evidence has given way to ideology and that scientists bold enough to buck the status quo are all too often marginalized or even banished. She sees herself as a crusader for intellectual freedom, following the science wherever it leads, as opposed to what she describes as the standard academic practice of stifling uncomfortable truths. She writes, “Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true.” This is an excellent point, of course, but one that might have been better supported with examples other than those she happened to light upon. For, in her defense of what she calls “evidence based activism,” she sometimes appears not so much politically incorrect as simply incorrect.
[...] Certainly, scholars are driven toward a “regression to the safe,” as Dreger puts it, though that is not, as she implies, particularly new in the Internet age. Since Galileo’s time, thinkers have relied on the patronage of others to fund their work, and that patronage — be it from government, business interests or individuals — generally extracts a price. [...] In the case of science today, despite Dreger’s argument, that pressure comes less as a consequence of political correctness than of economic forces that have shifted academic and scientific institutions to a corporate model not designed to prioritize public interests. In the academy, it is money far more than ideology that rules the day — which explains how corporate funding allows Willie Soon, a rampant climate-change denier, to maintain his position at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....
