Posted on 11/30/2023 3:58:04 PM PST by Rummyfan
A recent Pew Research Center poll indicates that public trust in science (and in scientists) is declining across the political spectrum in the United States. Among the specific findings of the poll was that fewer Americans now say that science has had a mostly positive effect on society. This decline in confidence in over way less than a decade has been precipitous. Similarly, trust in scientists is down.
These declines are more notable among people on the right, who are already predisposed to distrust anything that smacks of government, but they are present and growing on the left as well.
This is no surprise to me. This decline in public trust was, in my view, not only completely predictable but also well-earned from decades of scientific malpractice. From where I sit, some entire scientific fields are currently purveyors of mostly nonsense. The salient question is: How did we get to where we now find ourselves?
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As a grade school student during the 1960’s, I was a direct beneficiary of this largess. A rigorous course of science and math education was a very high priority during my school years. My fifth-grade science project was to type everyone’s blood in my class. My oldest son’s fifth-grade science project, four decades later, was the equivalent of number-painting a comic book.
There are, in my view, three principal factors that have led to the downturn in science in this century: a decline in general academic rigor (and a concomitant increase in the number of scientific degrees granted by universities that prioritize numbers over quality), the decline of epistemology in favor of postmodernism, and the nearly unrestrained politicization of science across the board.
(Excerpt) Read more at martinhackworth.substack.com ...
I will never lose my trust in science. I will always be skeptical of someone who declares them self to be a scientist while promoting an agenda.
There is a publication, Retraction Watch, which I highly recommend for your edification. RW tracks the number of papers retracted from scientific journals. There may be many reasons for retractions, and some are the result of innocent mistakes. But a very high number of retractions are due to sloppiness, at best, and data manipulation and other fraud, at worst. The number of retractions, all occurring in just the past few years, in their database is astounding - and growing rapidly.
In addition to the “publish or perish” paradigm that has been an academic problem for decades (and is getting worse with the number of advanced degrees in science floating around), we now have a number of scientists who operate more as advocates than investigators, and to them, the ends justify the means.
It’s “$cience” now. You get the science you pay for.
Especially if they’re on a government payroll where political entities determine grants.
In other words: never let the truth get in the way of the agenda.
Science isn’t the problem. It’s pseudo-science or politicized science.
bttt
"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
Almost no one knows this line follows a few paragraphs later in the same speech
"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."
Because every ruling class institution is corrupted by ruling class ideology, including organized science. And people are wising up to the ruling class being their enemy.
Science is, in one sense, rather untrustworthy, because REAL science is never settled, it is but a series of hypotheses which are continually revised as more aspects of the subject are investigated and contrary or unexpected facts emerge, which are not supported by the current working hypothesis.
Some explanations are quite esoteric, in that common applications of logic do not seem to resolve the differences being discovered. Impossible results keep showing up, even after repeated experimentation. These inconsistencies are often resolved by a flash of intuitive insight, and a whole new hypothesis is revealed, which seems to work, at least for a while.
Trust the process, not the science itself.
Always wondered why my elementary school library in the 1980s mostly had a bunch of science books from the 1960s.
Covid wasn’t science.
Glowbull Warming isn’t science.
Please tell us how we are to know the difference.
Oh, I think there's an epistemology; it's just that it isn't what we would call rational-empiricism.
The epistemology of modern university science runs more toward that of what began to be called positivism AND then ran toward existentialism's fantasy world as if on rails and jet-propelled.
That is a question for Sir Francis Bacon.
The problem isn’t ‘science’ but disingenuous ‘scientists.’
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