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First thing that came to my mind was.. "Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free speech has consequences." @KonstantinKisin Good luck!
Mods have deleted this question with no reasoning- Why is the "science" solution to lockdown? This is a prioritization of a minority population at the expense of an overwhelming majority. Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over the 0.5%. My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.
The US isn't making the wrong decision about prioritizing hard choices, it's simply MAKING THE WRONG CHOICES. This was a largely solvable problem. We just failed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy I'd say maybe a well-informed electorate . Until very recently, the majority of "the public" wasn't allowed to vote and so had very limited input into "our democracy".
Can you elaborate? The two major extensions of our electorate were (former) slaves and then women. Do you believe that these groups are more easily manipulated? Or are you talking about some other group that I forgot about?
Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.
I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership. STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.
Maybe the reason we are in this mess is because we relied too much on science, and too little on actual humanities (rhetoric, logic, and so on)? I hear about hermeneutics more and more in my circle: how to communicate trumps what is communicated. I can see why Fauci and many top scientists fail to convince people like Trump and his supporters: he knows, but can't communicate what he knows so that information is conve…
I mean... this is The Problem writ small, really. What really happened with why "America Turned Away From Science" isn't anything to do with science at all. It's the the population used to have a sense that there were "experts" out there with a "consensus" on important items. And that consensus went away, as now we have whole media ecosystems whose role is to redirect this kind of consensus building.
So Fox, which started as a way to redirect the 70's/80's consensus opinions about, say, the welfare state and Keynsian economics, is now serving to tell people that "the experts" say masks are going to kill them and that the virus is a fraud.
Mods have deleted this question with no reasoning- Why is the "science" solution to lockdown? This is a prioritization of a minority population at the expense of an overwhelming majority. Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over the 0.5%. My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.
> An engaged and well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so correct as to be unquestionable.
I agree. In my lifetime I have never known the average person to be engaged, nor informed. I think they're mostly mis-informed for the past 10+ years. People just believe whatever outlandish title comes across their facebook feed. I had about 12 people ask me if I heard the news--that wayfair was selling missing children on their website, disguised as fancy cabinets. It took me about 12 seconds to find out it was a t…
Simple logic goes a long way in discovering the truth, no need to get into that complicated epistemology pseudoscience.
Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to p…
Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same scenario).
I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens first.
Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to p…
While it may look like the public is losing faith in science, it's actually the public losing faith in the platform on which science is practiced: academia. If we want the public to regain faith in scientific findings, we need to fix academia.