• AutoTL;DRB
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    English
    11 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The teaching of natural sciences has lost its former rigour in favour of social science claims that are blatant nonsense, such as the argument that scientific knowledge is not based on observation, hypothesis generation and rigorous testing by the world scientific community, but is “constructed” within the framework of the political and social convictions of scientists.

    Those societies that have lagged behind are those that tried to subordinate science to social convictions, including religions and such political dogmas as Marxism, nazism, fascism and similar movements that forbid free, critical thinking.

    The need to show mistakes, a core part of the scientific method, has become more and more at odds with the publishing process, where scientists are required to tell perfect stories that will satisfy journal editors and peer reviewers.

    During the pandemic, this early sharing of research became a matter of life and death, and led to thousands of findings being made available as soon as they were ready.

    Servers such as bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) and medRxiv grew rapidly to accommodate this new movement, and it has been encouraging to see the trend continuing into other areas of biomedical research.

    But the basic conclusion that he settles on – “In a nutshell, scientists are thought to be part of the elite and, therefore, not trustworthy” – fails to recognise that a well-organised, well-financed, and ruthlessly aggressive campaign against science (regarding not only the efficacy and safety of vaccines but the critical planetary threat of climate change) by rightwing politicians, their donors and their media promoters, intended only to advance their political goals, is largely to account for this decrease.


    The original article contains 626 words, the summary contains 269 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • sj_zero
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    fedilink
    -21 year ago

    It certainly seems to me that postmodernism and science are mutually exclusive philosophies. Science says that there is a truth, and that through experimentation and building models you can find that truth. By contrast, postmodernism often rejects the concept of objective truth altogether.

    People say that the right wing is opposed to science, and I just don’t see it. What I do see is that the right wing is opposed to the postmodern corruption of science.

    We got to see this in 2020, where “the science” became synonymous with something that in no way represented science, it represented something that claims that it could not be proven wrong because it was infallible, something that was based around perfect individuals preaching truth rather than a humble process that tries to find what’s true, and understanding that you might have to throw out ideas that you really liked because they just turned out to be wrong.

    Once you break science, once you take away the humility that’s built into the scientific process, you no longer have the tool that built the world we live in. What you have instead is a new religion that only expresses things that are popular in the moment.

    I routinely use science in my job, the first lesson is that it can’t make something that isn’t true real. As a first principle you have to accept that you might be wrong about something, maybe something that you really thought was true or really wanted to be true. But if the data doesn’t support the hypothesis, it’s time to move on.

    This is entirely at odds with modern politics, where people just get deeply entrenched into certain viewpoints and obviously can’t move because this is the hill they chose to die on. There is Media written, there are organizations formed, there’s money donated, and it doesn’t matter that something was proven to be wrong, you can’t let that go, because there’s too much sunken costs.