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This is also the definition of good activism.
Absolutely not. A scientist is expected to change their mind when new, counterfactual evidence is presented. Activists push for positions regardless of whether any evidence exists to support their position, and seem to maintain their position even when presented with counterfactual evidence. That is not science. We have a name for it: dogma.
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It’s basically impossible to make a career as a scientist these days without constantly promoting yourself and your work unfortunately. It’s very tiring and makes it difficult to focus on science. This is one of the reasons I changed careers.
That's bad, too, but true in many professions I think. But I think what the GP means is let's do science, let's not do hot-political-topics-as-science.
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>Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential. How do they do that?
The “I am an expert, so listen to me drone about some political topic that’s vaguely related to my expertise” has been a thing for years now. And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway. In general, it makes scientists look really naive and makes them lose credibility when they talk about actual science.
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
X is not politically neutral, Elon openly talks about recalibrating Grok whenever it says something too liberal like recent discussions about gun violence. Scientists should embrace decentralization and use Mastodon in my opinion. Bluesky will meet the same fate as Twitter and X one day
If only Bluesky could be as decentralised as the Fediverse [0] Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play. [0] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
The Fediverse will only be popular if someone releases a client that makes it as easy to use as X and Bluesky. Not sure if it's technically feasible (I don't know much about the innards of the protocol) but it doesn't seem to have happened at the moment.
X still appears above the fold in a special section on Google with custom previews. Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky. It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.
Btw if you set your browser default search to anything other than Google searching for people works much better. No customized bumping of X based links over other options when searching for people. Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much…
It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
Scientists are allowed to have opinions outside of their work and share them.
"Scientists say..." is becoming just another "studies show...". You can always find a scientist or a study or an "expert" to push whatever agenda the media outlet has.
Nothing about this is remotely scientific.
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> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo. When did this happen?
AFAIK, the CDC itself made no such official statement, but many prominent figures in public health, including a former CDC director [0], said just that. [0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...