Science Turns Authoritarian

The American ^ | Tuesday July 27, 2010 | Kenneth P. Green and Hiwa Alaghebandian

[jpl]

Great piece about the dangers of politicized science, that Michael Crichton famously warned about before passing away.

[Da Coyote]

Liberals touched science.

The results are identical whatever they touch.

Faulty logic, inadequate thinking, shoddy research, and just plain corruption.

That’s why they’re libs, folks. They CANNOT do anything properly.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[moodyskeptic]

I fixed the following 3 sentences, and now it explains clearly the elite liberal approach to educating the dumb masses. How arrogant (and cynical) can they get?

Assemble two groups of spokespeople, one made up of our “experts” and the other of celebrity ambassadors. Then deploy them to reach the public wherever they are, from online social networks to “The Today Show.” Researchers need to tell personal stories, tug at the heartstrings of people who don’t have PhD’s. And the celebrities can go on “Oprah” to describe how [favorite liberal issue here] is affecting them—and by extension, Oprah’s legions of viewers.

[neverdem]

BTTT!

[ClearCase_guy]

Very much related to this, IMO, is the activism by pro-Evolutionists. There is controversy about evolution. There are areas of disagreement. There are doubts about the Theory. The activists like to pretend that the science for evolution is every bit as settled as the science for anthropomorphic global warming, but that's the problem.

If people want their school system to "teach the controversy" then that should not be seen as an unreasonable request -- you can learn a lot about "how science is done" by showing areas of disagrement and inquiry.

But the pro-science people have a nasty tendency to shout down their opposition and I think this hurts science very much.

[mvpel]

The Perversion of Science and Medicine (Part II): Soviet Science and Gun Control

The Russian scientists who did not believe in the new collectivist Soviet science, particularly, Marxist genetics, or who opposed domination by the totalitarian regime, or opposed the teachings of the "new science" were purged, either expelled from their teaching posts and research positions, consigned to the depths of the gulags or unceremoniously killed in labor camps, exterminated as "enemies of the people" and the Soviet Motherland.

[Teotwawki]

They lost me when “consensus” became an accepted means of proving a hypothesis.

[dila813]

He nailed it....

[Thickman]

Touche!

[bereanway]

Bush says researchers need a campaign that inundates the public with the message of science: Assemble two groups of spokespeople, one made up of scientists and the other of celebrity ambassadors. Then deploy them to reach the public wherever they are, from online social networks to “The Today Show.” Researchers need to tell personal stories, tug at the heartstrings of people who don’t have PhD’s.”

Sounds like the same means employed to legitimize eugenics early in the 20th century.

[FiddlePig]

This is NOTHING new... ask any in the ivory towers of “learning” (these last 50+ years or so) who has dared challenge the sacred Darwin!

[Matchett-PI]

"Great piece about the dangers of politicized science, that Michael Crichton famously warned about before passing away."

As did Polanyi before him.:

"....[These] problems with the left hijacking science were recognized by ... Michael Polanyi, as early as the mid-1940s. ...." HERE

[Matchett-PI]

"..Being a scientist, Polanyi noticed a connection between the ideals of logical positivism and the nihilism of the left. Even today, despite the fact that positivism has been thoroughly discredited, it remains a kind of tacit metaphysic for both scientists and for much of the educated public. In other words, there is a widespread assumption that "only scienctific theories [are] capable of verification (i.e., proof), and that moral or ethical or political or religious ideals and principles [are] essentially unprovable, mere matters of emotional preference." But Polanyi saw that there was a deep relationship between the very possibility of science and certain metaphysical ideals and principles "that not only could not be proved, but could not even be made wholly explicit." And just because the ideals which underlie science could not be proved, it hardly meant that they were unworthy of belief.

This tacit acceptance of positivism ramifies in interesting ways. On the one hand, there is the scientific worker bee who supposedly only believes what his experimental data tell him. But this is indeed a cold, dead, airless, and ultimately infrahuman spiritual environment into which the passion for nihilism rushes to fill the void. In this regard, it seems that human nature abhors a vacuum, and therefore filled it with a void -- the nihilistic void of the secular left.

Now it is surely noteworthy that the only organized opposition to liberty comes from intellectuals, who supposedly hold their own liberty -- i.e., "academic freedom" -- to be sacred. How could someone who would instinctively rebel at the idea of centralized "planned culture," embrace the idea of a centralized, planned economy? ..."

HERE

[upcountryhorseman]

Science has become political: the rigors of scientific
research are no longer practiced. Scientists begin research
with a predetermined agenda and select elements of findings
that suit their agenda.

[Matchett-PI]

Polanyi argued that positivism encourages the belief that science ought to be directed by the State. He pointed to what happened to genetics in the Soviet Union, once the doctrines of Trofim Lysenko were deemed politically correct. Polanyi, like his friend Friedrich Hayek, supplied reasons why a free society is preferable. bttt

HERE

[<1/1,000,000th%]

The author isn’t talking about science.

The author is talking about politicians pretending that scientists agree with them.

For example, real scientists agreed back in the 1990’s that global warming was an unproven hypothesis and 18,000 of them signed a statement saying so.

algore’s consensus has always been a lie.

[Matchett-PI]

The Difference between ‘True Science’ and ‘Cargo-Cult Science’

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” is how the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman defined science.
July 27, 2010 - by Frank J. Tipler - bttt
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-difference-between-true-science-and-cargo-cult-science/

[Matchett-PI]

"...one of the reasons Hayek doesn't appeal to the left wing ignorantsia is that he renders them not just superfluous, but demonstrates how dangerous they are.." bttt

HERE

[Matchett-PI]

"....For a while, America escaped this destruction because it had a very different intellectual genealogy, having been much more influenced by the skeptical enlightenment of Britain and Scotland than the radical enlightenment of France."

HERE