Posted on 04/11/2018 8:32:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
We've been told conservatives don't believe in science and that there's a "Republican war on science."
But John Tierney, who's written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, told me in my latest online video, "The real war on science is the one from the left."
Really? Conservatives are more likely to be creationists -- denying evolution.
"Right," says Tierney. "But creationism doesn't affect the way science is done."
What about President George W. Bush banning government funding of stem cell research?
"He didn't stop stem cell research," Tierney reminds me. "The government wouldn't fund it. It turned out that it really didn't matter much." Private funding continued and, so far, has not discovered much.
"People talk about this Republican war on science, but if you look around, my question is, where are the casualties? What scientists lost their jobs?" asks Tierney. "I can't find examples where the right wing stopped the progress of science, whereas you can look on the left and you see so many areas that are taboo to research."
Some research on genetically modified foods became taboo because of protests from the left. That may have prevented a second Green Revolution to feed Africa.
Scientists can't even talk about whether genes affect intelligence without being threatened by the left. Political scientists who continued to investigate the topic are screamed at on college campuses, the way Charles Murray, author of "The Bell Curve," has been.
Tierney adds, "The federal government stopped funding IQ research decades ago."
Likewise, researching gender differences is dangerous to your career.
"You can't talk about sexual differences between men and women, (although) it's OK if they favor women," laughs Tierney. "You can say men are more likely to commit crimes, but you can't suggest that there might be some sexual difference that might predispose men to be more interested in a topic."
Google fired engineer James Damore merely for suggesting that sex differences might explain why more men choose to work in tech.
"Damore just pointed out very basic scientific research about differences between the sexes," argues Tierney. "The experts in this, as soon as he published that memo, said, yes, he basically got the science right."
It's not as if women aren't doing well in life, says Tierney.
In universities, "women dominate virtually every extracurricular activity, but all the focus has been: 'Why aren't there more women physicists and mathematicians, and of course in the sports area, too?'" says Tierney. "There's this idea that they're being discriminated against, (but) there have been enormous studies of who gets grants, who gets tenure, who gets interviews for jobs, and women get preference."
However, one group does get discriminated against in colleges: conservatives.
"In the social sciences, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least eight to one. In fields like sociology it's 44 to one. Students are more likely to be taught in sociology by a Marxist than by a Republican," says Tierney. "It's gotten worse and worse."
Why does this happen at colleges that claim they "treasure diversity"? Because people on the left believe diversity just means race and gender, not thought. And even schools that want some diverse thought reach a sort of political tipping point.
"Once an academic department gets a majority of people who are on the left, they start hiring people like themselves, and soon the whole department is that way," says Tierney. "They start to think that their opinions and that their interests are not only the norm, but the truth."
That's how we get "scientific" studies that "prove" conservatives are stupid.
One such study asked people if they agree with the statement "Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them." The researcher called a "yes" answer an "irrational denial of science." But anyone who's studied economics knows the statement has repeatedly been proven true.
Finally, millions of people die of malaria today partly because many countries believed leftist junk science and needlessly banned DDT. Many were influenced by Rachel Carson's scientifically challenged book "Silent Spring."
There is a war on science. But most of it doesn't come from the right.
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Yes sir, fella.
Science determinations these days are almost the same as the highly paid high school football star who is coveted by the universities before "the star" produces at the college level.
Little is certain ....... it's just highly paid for.
Physics and math were fairly handy in the development of atomic and nuclear weapons...which actually work. So we must be onto something.
As for the “Electric Universe”, there are three more fundamental forces which all work together, in a probably deeper dimensional framework than we’ve yet been able to discern. But they’re there, separate from each other, except in a grand unified sense.
The scientific method works...at least within our limitations.
‘Science has and is prostituting itself.’
reminds me of Richard Kleindinst, AG for Nixon, saying ‘we will be doing a study that will prove the harmful effects of marijuana’...when asked in what sense it was a study if the results were known already, he smiled...
‘Time is not the same to God that it is to us, primarily because He exists outside of time and space.’
how do you know this...?
Nobody knows anything for sure regarding God. To me it is a logical supposition regarding His attributes, as described. If He were subject to time or space, many things would not make sense.
Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the Universe operates on Gravity. Those are the weak forces within microcosmic distances inside atoms. . . and don't work at infinite distances like gravity and electromagnetism.
At this point we don't even have a clue what mass is or what causes gravity. There are some hints both are a function of charge. But how, and why and what kind of charge and at what level is it applied? How is momentum stored as energy? No one knows. It is energy that can be added, transferred, and it is obviously contained in mass, but how does one objectively measure it absent some outside frame?
The scientific method works...at least within our limitations.
I agree the scientific method works. . . but only when it is allowed to work. Look at the politicalization of science though. That is where the problem lies.
I don't mean the Left/Right politics of what's going on in Global Warming but the politics of any hidebound establishment where those at the top, who have written the texts don't want their pet theories they've built their reputations on challenged. . . and physics and cosmology has gotten hidebound when contrary hypotheses are routinely denied publication because they don't agree with the orthodoxy, and the orthodox physics is continually building a house of cards of ad hoc solutions to prop up the old theory, adding more and more complexity to keep it going. While at the same time, the alternative hypotheses, one they refuse to even consider, or allow to be published in their sacrosanct journals, is already providing the answers to what they cannot answer, AND making predictions of what they will find before they look.
They ARE starting to grudgingly allowing some of the findings in from the Electric Universe, but changing the time-honored names to ones they find more palatable, to describe already described phenomena so they can say they are discovering them. . . but they won't make the connections. (pun intended). It's really very funny, in a way.
In others, they desperately cling to their made up theories, despite every piece of physical evidence falsifying their theory, such as the "Dirty Snowball" theory of comets. They desperately cling to that outmoded model despite our having visited/flownby more than 10 comets and even impacted/landed on two and found not an iota of water ice, instead finding them indistinguishable from any other asteroid like body. While, on the other hand, the Electric Universe Cosmologists have made specific predictions of what would happen in these flybys and encounters and every single one has been found to have occurred.
The problem in Cosmology is the gravity theorists cannot take their theories into the lab and test them. Everything is done with models in computers. Chemistry and most of the other hard sciences is nowhere nearly so hidebound, because it's so easy to falsify something in the laboratory. The cosmologists are nose picking and adding ad hoc math, which, while it may solve their model's problem, DOES NOT really comport to reality! To return to your atomic weapons analogy, if it doesn't go BOOM, then the math in the model has to be wrong.
The Electric Universe physicists CAN test their hypotheses in the laboratory because they are SCALABLE, from the microcosm to the macrocosm. . . and the can DUPLICATE what is being seen in the telescope in the Plasma laboratory. i.e., the Bomb goes BOOM! ;^)
“Everything is done with models in computers. “
Models are computer programs, simply put. All programs have bugs (unintended functions). The more complicated the program, the more likely to be filled with complicated bugs.
As an aerospace engineering manager once told me while I was trying to sell him our latest new flight control system, “We don’t intend to de-bug your software at 30,000 feet.”
A program that simulates Creation will definitely have bugs.
Well done, John Stossel!
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