181–190 of 1001 posts
I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
What I mean is more centralized oversight over research priorities, metric-driven rewards, and preference for political favorites?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, sure. In Australia we established a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, looked at all the schools and institutions regardless of creed (and, it turned out, the Christian Brothers were the clear worst of the worst - although few came away unscathed) and then put a senior Vatican Cardinal on trial. TBH it's been a lot harder to get the worst carbon offenders under close scrut…
Check out the timing. The sex abuse scandal broke in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s and the fight went on here for many years before it spread to the rest of the church. The church in Rome was blowing it off as an American problem for many years. That Australian commission was established in 2012. The battle had already been going on for well over a decade in the US. If you want to see how things were going early…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only a religious topic to climate change denialists.
By your rethoric, do you consider yourself as climate alarmist? Maybe try to be honest to yourslef first and then you'll understand, why it is really just about opinions that vary. No need to labeling opposition.
I have also not used any rhetoric that wasn't first introduced by the parent, so you also have no evidence of my rhetoric.
Do you see how that is a dogmatic (some might call it religious) response?
To the point: the evidence is overwhelming, and there is nothing alarmist about reacting rationally to it. Anyone denying human-caused climate change is also doing so in the face of this overwhelming evidence, so the label is rather accurate. I would happily label climate deniers with any negatively charged label you can think of: simpletons, propagandists, accelerationists, fundamentalists, reactionaries, fascists, useful idiots. Depends a little on what their role is which label sits best, but they all apply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> work which burns through money repeating things we already know (racism is bad! poor people are sicker!) and accomplishing exactly nothing Why do we need to study the sun? We already know it goes around the Earth. Flippant, but the point should be clear. Some of the most taken for granted things can also be the ones least studied... And least understood. Wouldn't you like to know why being poor leads to worse outco…
Yes, we should fund grants to make sure that the heliocentric model is still wrong.
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> any reference to them will have the political left call you a nazi, racist, sexist and pedo to boot I think this boils down to the fact it's typically just a thin veil for motivated reasoning.
What's the veiled motivation of a white person who says that Asians are intellectually superior to whites? Leftists see racism and sexism everywhere - their ideology focusses on that and they pick up on any excuse they can to label people as that. It's actually a horrible way to treat their fellow humans.
Saying "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" is a thinly veiled way to say "and whites are superior to all other non-Asian/white races."
And the claim that "Asians" are intellectually superior to "whites" isn't even correct "because of race." I'm not aware of any real study that attributed racial identity to measure intelligence. Cultural differences? Socioeconomic differences? Country of origin? Sure. Race? Used as a proxy for the former.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Because if you give an inch to that line of thinking, it leads to broader dehumanization and mass tragedy.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
(Eugene T. Gendlin)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your original post, > repeating things we already know Not a terribly scientific stance. > while legitimate researchers have to scrimp and wheedle to do anything novel There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Some fields have an easier time setting up and controlling experiments, but no research can predict how useful it'll turn out to be. You're conflating control convenien…
> There isn't a normative standard for good research beyond doing good research. Ah yes, the post-modernist rebuttal. There is no objective reality, so let's not have any standards at all. This isn't new, and isn't responsive. We've never had a normative standard, yet we pick and choose projects all the time. One can still tell the difference between someone asking a repetitive question and a novel question. I can al…
That's a laughable argument based on a claim of authority. Unfortunately, advanced training is not unique to you, and so, you don't get a singular say on what's good or bad.
> so let's not have any standards at all.
Do not misrepresent my point. My point was: if people care, even marginal reduction of uncertainty is worthwhile.
> Go get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or a left-wing think tank or something.
And there's your actual point. You hate that science is so affected by the politics of those who control the funding.
But that's always been the case. Wars have done more for physics than curiosity.
This article informs a good understanding and confirms the issues I've witnessed in academia. However, I found that it didn't cover the censorship of any criticism of Israel in science and academics. This was explicitly codified into law with respect to government funding and is a major topic of scientific funding in colleges and universities. Scientific grants and researchers often require a Zionist bias to get fund…
[flagged]
You can hate the genocidal Israelis and how far the AIPAC/Israel lobby has crawled up the ass of nearly the entire US political apparatus without being a neo-nazi that wants to stomp out the Jewish faith.