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Is Science Political?

bostonreview.net

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Is Science Political?

#21
post #7

No. Stop it. Funding is, science isn't. There's an effective debate tactic where attackers DDoS the other side with innocent questions about their premises. As defenders drown under these reasonable-seeming queries, onlookers wonder if the deluge might indicate a hidden fundamental flaw in the defenders' argument.

Your comment needs a little more nuance. Funding is part of the overall practice of science, and research cannot happen in a vacuum. Facts are not political. Science involves people coming up with research plans, getting funding, conducting the research, and reporting results. Even though facts are not political, many important scientific findings can be debated. Very little of our body of knowledge is verifiable by the general population. You can verify gravitational acceleration and atmospheric drag by self experimentation, but have you ever tried to verify how many electrons are in the outer shell of a particular element? We teach the periodic table of elements to high schoolers as fact, but if a student claims that titanium has eight electrons in its outer shell most chemistry teachers are going to have a hard time proving otherwise. This lack of verifiability leaves a bunch of room for political maneuvering.

Add in the fact that scientists are still human, and are just as morally corrupt as other humans. Being a scientist doesn't come with a magic aura of justice and credibility. Falsification of data in the hopes of getting published tarnishes the reputation of scientists worldwide- who is to say that others aren't also falsifying their data to favor their funding source? If a scientist can be doubted then their findings can be debated, which politicians will certainly do when it suits them.

You have to get your results published, or else you won't get funded for future research, and a group of editors controls the access to the important journals in each field. Those editors usually have a common political bias, as did most researcher's professors, because once a bias is established in a field it tends to reinforce itself.

So I'll reword your comment to be "the practice of science is political, but facts are not." Unfortunately so little of our life falls to the realm of verifiable facts.

Re: Is Science Political?

#24
Of course science is political. What isn't?

I have a feeling that non-scientists see science as an invisible ethereal, platonic construct that's slowly being unveiled by hardy explorers, uh I mean scientists, until at last the whole of the Truth and nothing but the Truth fully shines in its enlightening splendor.

Except that's not how it works. In practice, science works by scientific consensus. What is true is what the community decides is true. The community can be convinced otherwise by contradicting evidence (or not) but the process of convincing is then subject to all the biases affecting our feeble human minds: it can be contradictory with other evidence, misinterpreted, misunderstood, deemed insufficient, coming from the wrong person, etc. It takes a lot of time for the consensus to evolve, and it's a rather a messy and political affair. There's often a running joke that a theory's acceptance depends on the old guard dying out and being replaced by the younger, more open-minded generation (relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works)

Btw, just in case you're wondering, math is absolutely not immune from this either. Cathy O'Neil wrote an excellent post detailing how mathematical proofs work in real life (and not in some platonic imaginary world invented by laymen): https://mathbabe.org/2012/08/06/what-is-a-proof/ also with a relatively recent example: https://mathbabe.org/2012/11/14/the-abc-conjecture-has-not-b...

Re: Is Science Political?

#25
Everything humans do is political. Thinking something is not political is like thinking you don't have an accent: it just means you think of the politics as normal, not that they don't exist.

The practice of science involves choices about where to allocate resources, what lines of research are considered prestigious, what fields of study are encouraged or discouraged, debates over the ethics of technologies that arise from research, who gets to do the science... All of these considerations and more are political.

Re: Is Science Political?

#26
post #20
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some science is clearly political and other science is clearly not. It is important to keep as much original evidence in the open as possible (without abstracting it away behind rules and principles) so it can be challenged. That all being said, I'm not sure this really goes to the article; which seems to be more about how the capitalists were more effective at managing a complicated relationship with truth and reali…

> Some science is clearly political and other science is clearly not So the politicalness of something is based on the intention? I’d like to challenge that idea. Imagine you are a nuclear scientist in the brink of cold war. Your interests are purely scientific and you don’t care about all that political talk. You got a nice life. If you decide to work on nuclear fission you aid the government and are thus political…

I would say that an interest may be "purely scientific", but if you don't consider the impact of your work then that in itself is a political stance. Your position is that your scientific curiosity is more important than the impact of your discoveries on others.

It's not a great look.

Doing the work implies that a researcher has considered the impact of what they're looking at to the extent they feel it is important, and concluded that it is in line with their values to move forward.

What those values are is the politics. Certainly they can make mistakes, if their intent was good but they were naive about the usage because they simply didn't grasp it, it's hard to think they're bad people. If they don't bother to consider impacts, that's a position as well... but it's not neutral.

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