Posted on 03/05/2021 5:12:08 PM PST by Fzob
Yet every day it seems we hear that neither politicians nor the public are paying sufficient heed to expertise. The claim has become a staple of scholarly assertion, media coverage, and political argument. Commentators raise alarm at our present “post-truth” condition,[2]made possible by rampant science illiteracy among the public, the rise of populist politics in many nations, and the proliferation of unverifiable information via the Internet and social media, exacerbated by mischievous actors such as Russia and the alt-right. This condition is said to result in a Balkanization of allegedly authoritative sources of information that in turn underlies distrust of mainstream experts and reinforces growing political division.
If it can be said that there is a crisis of science and expertise and that we have entered a post-truth era, it is with regard to these sorts of problems, and to the claims science and scientific experts would make upon how we live and how we are governed.
Writing about the limits of science for resolving political disagreements about issues such as the risks of nuclear energy, the physicist Alvin Weinberg argued in an influential 1972 article that the inherent uncertainties surrounding such complex and socially divisive problems lead to questions being asked of science that science simply cannot answer.[5]
He coined the term “trans-science” to describe scientific efforts to answer questions that actually transcend science.
Two decades later, the philosophers Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz more fully elucidated the political difficulties raised by trans-science as those of “post-normal” science, in which decisions are urgent, uncertainties and stakes are high, and values are in dispute. Their term defined a “new type of science” aimed at addressing the “challenges of policy issues of risk and the environment.”[6](Funtowicz and Ravetz used the term “post-normal” to contrast with the day-to-day puzzle-solving business of mature sciences that Thomas Kuhn dubbed “normal science” in his famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[7])
What Funtowicz and Ravetz stressed was the need to recognize that science carried out under such conditions could not — in theory or practice — be insulated from other social activities, especially politics.
Demands on science to resolve social disputes accelerated as the political landscape in the 1960s and 70s began to shift from a primary focus on the opposition between capital and labor toward one that pitted industrial society against the need to protect human health and the environment, a shift that intensified with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Public concerns about air and water pollution, nuclear energy, low levels of chemical contamination and pesticide residues, food additives, and genetically modified foods, translated into public debates among experts about the magnitude of the problems and the type of policy responses, if any, that were needed. It is thus no coincidence that the 1980s and 90s saw “risk” emerge as the explicit field of competing claims of rationality.[8]
I believe Russia has characterized the US as “Not-agreement-capable”. In part, simply because the two parties in the US are very divided, but also because the Democrats in particular have absolutely no consistent core. No one knows what Democrats will say or do except disagree with Trump.
And “science” devolved to a reliance on modeling which allowed all sorts of shenanigans to take place mostly in the quest for grant money. It will not regain its reputation as a respectable academic structure until it regroups around the discipline of Scientific Method which seems to have lost its way in current day academia.
What is now called science in the so called mainstream culture is really scientism. The use of scientific jargon in order to advance an agenda whose main focus is control.
Lysenkoism on steroids.
I think about Lysenkoism a lot. It really is what we’re dealing with. Who the hell cares about real science?? Let’s just “do” political control and call it science! Maybe no one will notice!
"The state system which exists in our country is terrible not because it is undemocratic, authoritarian, based only on physical constraint - a man can live in such conditions without harm to his spiritual essence."
"Our present system is unique in world history, because above and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. "
"To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar's, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God's - that is a sacrifice we dare not make!"
"The most important part of our freedom, inner freedom, is always subject to our will. If we surrender it to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human."
-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, from the essay "As Breathing and Consciousness Return" published in From Under the Rubble - October, 1973
Modeling touted as hard science is one of my pet peeves. I tell people that will listen that models are virtually always wrong and its just a question of how wrong. And most people put far too much faith that model accuracy is high without understanding the modeling process.
Lysenkoism is the way it goes. From global warming to Fauci's mask of red death, we are living in idiotic and post truth times.
Your post gives me the idea that in our neo stalinist age, we are also in the age of neo lysenkoism with all the junk science that such a doctrine attends.
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