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The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

science.org

21–29 of 29 posts

Re: The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this read more like a long twitter rant than anything I'd expect to find on science.org. With posts like these, I always wonder what the intent is? I'm an outsider, so to convince me of anything you'd have to give more context to your claims (linking to a few publications and using their titles as a priori fact isn't convincing). If you want to convince someone who has enough context to understand each claim, w…

If you were a true outsider, if you genuinely didn't know what's going on, you would be very alarmed. Why is science.org posting things that sound like Twitter rants? They say the government hates science and wants to destroy it, that's pretty scary! Achieving this alarm is the intent of the post; the author doesn't normally post about politics, but he wants outsiders who don't know about what's going on to understan…

Hear hear! Well put.

Ostriches with their heads in the sand not wanting to state at the doom. Upset at someone that made them look up, not at the doom itself.

Re: The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Muslim empires stopped supporting science and intellectual curiosity just as the European powers slipped into the renaissance. War against science never ends well.

Why do you think this is an accurate characterization of how the Islamic Caliphates of the medieval world worked? How much of what we label "science funding" was happening anywhere at all then, why was this more important to the European Renaissance than traditional explanations like "an influx of Byzantine Greeks with ancient texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453"? (And how much of what we…

I was saying intellectual curiosity. As in one morning waking up and realising everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit. That attitude became heavily discouraged in the Islamic world.

Re: The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this is an accurate characterization of how the Islamic Caliphates of the medieval world worked? How much of what we label "science funding" was happening anywhere at all then, why was this more important to the European Renaissance than traditional explanations like "an influx of Byzantine Greeks with ancient texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453"? (And how much of what we…

I was saying intellectual curiosity. As in one morning waking up and realising everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit. That attitude became heavily discouraged in the Islamic world.

Is it actually consistent with intellectual curiosity to wake up one morning and realize that everything your ancestors believed in was a bunch of bullshit? It seems wildly implausible that every single belief held by your ancestors was wrong, and probably some beliefs were correct and others were incorrect and it's not necessarily trivial to distinguish which ones were which; or even to know from many generations removed which beliefs your ancestors actually held.

Re: The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America

#29

> the US has been responsible for a huge amount of the basic research that we've been building the whole scientific enterprise on. We're now engaged in tearing all of that down, and it's a crime against this nation, against its people, and against the rest of the human race - an unforgivable one. Absolutely Right! Looking at it from outside the US, nothing makes sense except for two possibilities; 1) A vested group (…

No, it's not either of those things. The administration doesn't like the politics of most science/academic types, and views intellectualism as a tool of liberals. And as we all know, the libs must be owned.

It's really not any more complicated or thought-through than that.

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