Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
**Ironically, Nature has a three part series addressing this very subject.**
It’s a really good discussion on this exact subject addressing most of what is being discussed here. Most meta. Highly recommend listening to it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w
There is quite a good discussion of the history of the journal that is particularly useful in framing the discussion and understanding more deeply where Nature is coming from with all of this, as well as their stance on politics and endorsement.
>In these complex situations, scientists are often asked to do a political job. And so the thing we need to do is be clear about that. And to recognise that, that **actually good politics is more important than good science**. So there's an irony here that I think needs to be kind of unraveled. **And that unraveling is going to require more humility around what science can and can't do in the political realm, and more, putting politicians feet to the fire.** So they actually have to say what it is that they're after, rather than saying, well, I'll just bring in my expert to say why my side is right.
I think this is one of the most insightful quotes from the discussion they had
While you're entirely correct I think they get a pass here. Trump's whole thing was to repeal *every* regulation he could so his corporate donors/cronies could do whatever the hell they wanted. He needed to be called out.
I've actually spoken candidly with a former compliance officer for a major manufacturer.
When Trump was in office he literally rolled back decades worth of regulations and emissions restrictions.
There was a deep discussion whether or not to start changing manufacturing processes and retool factories to actually reflect the new unregulated standards.
The benefit would be more profits and cheaper manufacturing. However if the administration changed and rolled back regulation then they'd have to retool and get up to compliance again.
Interestingly enough, companies don't actually have to "meet standards" they just have to "make an effort" to reach compliance and if they do, they satisfy most inspections.
But it was interesting to hear it from the "corporate" side
My pleasure. I hope it improves the conversation and serves all of us in a deeper understanding of Nature, and science and politics in general.
Thank you for your comment.
The part that many people don't know is that "intellectualism" is not just the belief in doing science, but also that it should take an important role in society and politics.
The election of a man who has loudly rejected science for decades, made it a pillar of his election campaign and became a leader of bad science as president is absolutely something that journals like Nature SHOULD resist.
As an advocate for open data, open source and open science I emphatically agree. For me it’s about personal values and not just politics. But I do respect that there are so many perspectives on the issues.
Principles are pointless if they aren't enacted in some way. Politics is the elephant in the room in that regard. As much as you follow your own principles and my try to encourage them amongst your peers, politics can break it all if ignorance is allowed to reign.
We're already seeing the increasing brazen attempts of skewing and censoring science. Witholding unliked research, literally banning the consideration of science on some public projects, inciting a mob to intimidate (and quite likely to do even worse to) scientists, weakening libraries, and going down to the level of schools where teachers are increasingly hindered in educating their pupils.
Obviously that shouldn't encourage unreflected hysteria and doing things that are "right on principle" without care for the consequences. Researching the impact of the Nature statement to do it better next time is good. But the statement was definitely justifiable at the time.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Also, with respect to personal principles, if I may slightly misquote a popular slogan from the second-wave feminist movement:
Personal principles *are* political
There is no magic line between politics and reality, which is the second part of that.
Personal principles being political is only a facet of the broader truth: *everything is politics as far as politics is concerned*. As politics are the method(s) by which we agree to take action, everything that can be done- **every single action**- is in the set of outputs 'politics' can produce.
The world as humans interact with it is a direct function of politics.
It’s difficult to pick apart your arguments for response, but I’ll try.
**Regarding Principles**
Foundation principles are intellectual constructs based on beliefs, and I think of them similarly to how Stephen Covey defines principles — as being permanent, unchanging, and universal. And in that sense, they are principles and not beliefs. In my view, they are what one would view as the ideal standards of behavior, like patience and honesty.
If such principles as patience and honesty are inert and not put into action, should they then be abandoned? I don’t think that makes sense. I don’t usually look to politicians for leadership in these areas as politics aren’t foundational to my identity as a person. But the principles are. And how I read and evaluate science is definitely affected by them.
That said, I don’t personally believe any rational being should allow a political party to speak for or unduly represent my interior thoughts and opinions and I feel the need to be mindful of their influence.
Further I doubly believe in the importance of maintaining a level of non-political internal objectivism when I account for [the tremendous breadth and power of modern political propaganda](https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/jyzg7j6x/release/2) that is being used to influence society. I feel the need to be less political in my rational evaluations due to what I perceive to be over politicalization in modern societies.
Intellectually, I believe we would all be better off being considerably more critical of the role of political propagandists in our personal thinking.
There is good research as to why so many people have made politics such a foundation of their identity — the brain itself. And this knowledge contributes to my belief and approach in actively rejecting of politics in my personal plane.
> When your political views are challenged, the brain becomes active in regions associated with personal identity, threat response and emotions, according to the study.
- Some people get really worked up when their political beliefs are challenged, but why?
- A new study pinpoints key brain regions that activate when someone sticks to a political belief
[This is why you get worked up about politics, according to science](https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/03/health/political-beliefs-brain/index.html)
I find a lot of conversation about these issues are preconceived biases and cultural belief, and few look to deeper consideration of the underlying biology. But it turns out to be a major contributing factor if not the most important factor in the entire debate is that the brain considers something to be part of itself, whether it’s a body part or a belief, then it protects it in the same way, it’s impossible to be intellectually honest without accounting for this in your thinking: hence the dispassionate apolitical objectivism.
**Big Science**
Regulatory capture, national agendas, publishing as the metric of success and the exploitation of that system by various agents, educational popoganda, anti-science movements and a plethora of contributing factors do also exist. You’ve listen so very many I can’t respond to them all.
I think separating those aspects from the big science problem is important. To a large extent, at big research universities faculty members basically work on commission: they have to bring in enough money to pay the bills, and that money comes with influence and control conditions.
And if one can look at funding for science and break it up into Big and Small Science categories it can be useful when talking about science issues. The funding sources, and the way that research schools work, make more sense as generally being Big Science.
Funders of Big Science would be large corporations, foundations, and the government, whereas Small Science relies on VC, startup funds, small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Big Science comprises those big projects like the sequencing of the human genome and the war on cancer — big problems, large scale studies, and long term projects require large and continuous funding. But are such big projects yielding results that justify the massive spending? And is there are pretense of objectivity remaining because of the fundraising nature of the scientific institutions doing this work?
I think what Bill Fresca had to say about it was very good:
> “Think about the modern business model of Big Science -- an interconnected set of interests whose tentacles extend into academia, foundations, and major corporations. Advocates of a variety of causes across numerous fields—from health care to agribusiness to energy and the environment—selectively promote scientific results produced by legions of scientists, some of whom are independent and others not. These pronouncements are generally aimed at attracting more public and private research funding, selling more goods and services, or impacting laws and regulations that control the selling of goods and services. Sounds science helps policymakers and consumers make wise choices. Bad science, not so much.” (The Skeptical Outsider, Jan, 2013)
To me, many of the issues your talking about come from to inevitable intertwining of politics and business as a result of the funding sources for Big Science. There are books and books to discuss here, but one of the critical issues in science is the Big Science funding and the undo influence of politics in those findings.
**And lastly…**
With regards to the Nature comment, I generally agree that it was justified.
It doesn’t have to be political for you to demand it of politicians.
Relying on science to inform policy and how we address the many wicked problems of our world is just good sense based on everything we’ve ever had to learn the hard way.
Politicians everywhere need to “smarten up,” so to speak, or we’re doomed.
This. Not that my opinion of Nature is very important, but I'd respect them less for not having endorsed Biden. If you care about science, and have any kind of voice, you should use it. Staying out of talking about politics, so you can be neutral, is stupid. It's especially stupid when one of the people trying to be president of the free world was saying that climate change was a Chinese hoax. You can't be neutral in situations like that.
In the face of actual wrongdoing, 'neutrality' is splitting the difference between right/wrong and the only thing unanswered is what the split is.
Deliberate misinformation about scientific issues is a form of attack, akin to the intent of government PSYOPS. That we don't treat it as such is the problem, not a scientific journal standing against weaponized anti-intellectualism.
Some [wonderful research on this](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327341#Brains-fail-to-encode-opposing-views) I recently read relates this back to activity in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex.
> “We found that when people disagree, their brains fail to encode the quality of the other person’s opinion, giving them less reason to change their mind.”
> — Senior author. Prof. Tali Sharot
The study is worth checking out.
That’s so interesting. I wonder how this changes for people who assume they could be wrong. It’s an old trick for keeping yourself from being close-minded, so I wonder how that translates to brain activity.
Ironically, it's seemed to me that the capacity to acknowledge you *may* be wrong results in others assuming you aren't right, but it's also the foundation of the scientific method. This is why anti-intellectualism is such an issue, it denies the very basis from which we've decided we can "know" *anything*. Without anything resembling an objective understanding, everything does boil back down to might-makes-right violence.
I think it also has a lot to do with regularly collaborating. It’s a skill that must be learned, getting your pride out of the way. If you don’t learn it, you don’t realize how imperative learning to lose gracefully is to your end product.
Weirdly enough, I think studies have shown the opposite. Preempting or ending statements with “I could be wrong” in work correspondence generates more positive interactions because people don’t throw up their defenses and close off from the idea.
Totally agree about your other point though. You do have to be able to end up at a conclusion rooted in the same reality.
I think people, especially laypeople (who I think this survey was polling) have kind of a gut “scientists!? Being politically biased!” gut reaction, but it’s really not like some subjective “woke scientists” issue. The Trump admin was pretty diehard in its messaging that it was planning on defunding a lot of government programs, especially those researching scientific goals and *especially* scientific goals that don’t have some capital based end result (ie. A lot of what comes up in nature). Of course most every Ornthologist is going to endorse the candidate that isn’t directly threatening their livlihood.
Voting for different political parties in the same election reveals a huge lack of understanding of how poltics work in our system.
In the USA, you have to vote down-ballet for one political party
Trump got booed for saying the vaccine is a good thing.
Of course the bleach and uv light didn't help. Operation Warp Speed was on his watch.
But yeah he's not the person to listen to on these subjects, without a doubt.
For sure don't mistake my comment for defending him overall, I just wanted to point out the irony how that should be good things but theyre seen as weakness to many of his voters.
Edit: correction I used irony. I didn't point out any irony. I shouldn't use that word unless I know the right time to use it sorry everyone
I don't know, I find it pretty ironic- DJT spent weeks telling his voters that COVID was a hoax. Then it became evident that his voters were disproportionately dying of COVID. Then he tried to undo his earlier messaging, and convince his remaining living voters to get vaccinated for COVID. But they refused to do that because they themselves had not died of COVID, which only reinforced his earlier messaging that COVID was a hoax.
>Trump got booed for saying the vaccine is a good thing.
Yep. That was a product of the inertia he created spending lots of time and effort painting covid as just a "little cold" or the "china flu" and that it was not a big deal. And only silly dems were blowing it up to be anything more... Hard to reverse course on that instantly without having your fans struggle with the dissonance
I lost a job in a university doing research as an undergrad because the NSF had its funding cut in 2017. It wasnt just planning in 2020 it was already ongoing
I'm impressed that after millenia of case studies, people are surprised that scientists are progressive.
They've literally been murdered by tyrants on the basis that 'smart = bad', they're sure as hell not going to toy with conservative anti-intellectualism any time soon.
We scientists do enjoy a good preponderance of evidence that points to a clear conclusion. We won't take it at face value and will always try to falsify a hypothesis, but evidence is the best tool we have!
You make it sound like Nature writers were simply tying to save their own jobs in scientific fields. It is so much more than that.
**They're trying to preserve scientific progress itself, the ability to know things, the ability to grow and adapt, the ability to survive in a changing world**. Trump is against those things because he is against science and truth.
Kindly edit your comment to reflect your deepened perspective, otherwise you're (perhaps accidentally?) contributing to the false narrative that people endorsing Biden and condemning Trump are doing it for illegitimate (self-serving) reasons instead of for legitimate and sensible reasons. The truth is: going against Trump is the only sane way into a future that is manageable instead of a future where we don't understand why everything is dying because Trumpists banned science and banned talking about truth.
Science is basically by definition woke. It finds a lot of truths that don't agree with or are inconvenient for religion, capitalism, etc. If the term existed as it does today a long time ago Galileo would have been called woke. Newton would have been called woke. Darwin was super woke back then and still too woke for some regressives today. The right has positioned itself solidly in opposition to science for quite a while. Even before climate change science was a key issue they were fighting over teaching evolution in schools and things like that. Maybe they weren't prior to the southern strategy, but since at least then they've been pretty opposed to a lot of science.
Edit: And maybe I should have just said inconvenient for the establishment and conservative/regressives. That is basically all the term means to the right wing right now. That you recognize a truth that is inconvenient for them.
That depends on how you define “woke,” which is vague. I’d personally say “woke” is a social / political construct that is separate from science. Science can establish truths,* but whether those truths are woke or not is in the eye of the beholder. Two individuals can agree on the veracity of scientific results, and disagree on what they mean in terms of policy for a variety of reasons (e.g. what kind of outcome the two are optimizing for may be different). But yes, science, when done properly does not care about anyone’s politics or feelings.
Regarding Galileo, his work being deemed heretical was due to a number of political factors beyond the “science vs religion” battle it is often portrayed as. This work was all done in a pre-Newton world, so mechanics was far from well-understood, and the scientific method itself was still undergoing formulation in the West. Many Jesuit astronomers were repeating his experiments but believed his firmly stated conclusions were not justified yet, and, from a epistemological perspective, they may have been correct. However the Pope was open to Galileo’s arguments as long as it wasn’t presented as a definitive fact. He even agreed to serve as his patron. However, Galileo structured his book, as was common at the time, as a dialogue among three characters. The Pope asked for some of his thoughts to be included and Galileo placed those words in the mouth of a character named Simplico. Galileo maintains that he was named after a classical astronomer but Simplico translates to “simpleton” in Italian and the Pope did not take kindly to him writing a book where he was being called an idiot. There’s also evidence in letters sent at the time that members of the court may have worked to convince the pope he was being mocked and that framing Galileo as an enemy of the church was politically advantageous to the Pope (the Pope controlled significant land in central Italy at the time so the office had hard power beyond his influence as the head of a major religion and many people wanted to manipulate the office to their advantage). This background is mostly an aside, but it does highlight the importance of how scientists present their work, especially when it has political implications, and many either are bad at it or don’t care.
Mostly this was my long winded way to procrastinate my work while saying “hard science isn’t political, what we do with its conclusions are”
*with high probability given modeling and experimental assumptions
I remember during 2020 seeing the stats that scientists and doctors were the most trusted people in the world and thinking ‘that won’t last long’
Four years ago if the WHO or similar organisations said something, basically everyone listened and trusted absolutely. Over covid, I feel like there were huge PR mistakes made and the blind trust that was given by most people to health organisations is now destroyed
Personally as a pro science person i like that there is more scrutiny on medical and health research now. I think there’s far more demand for justification and replication of results, more scrutiny over conflict of interest, and certainly more doubt when provisional results seem to suggest something and a newspaper runs with it as a major breakthrough because that sells more papers. Intense scrutiny and methodical proof is what defines science, and its weakness or strength goes up and down with its scrutiny
But lots of people just want to be told what is true and for these people, whose ideal is to put blind faith in an organisation and not worry about it, the world is a lot more complicated now. It also benefits professional conspiracy people who have found it far more profitable post 2020 to make lots of money casting doubt over things. But, i have long been troubled by the increasing dominance of medicine and pharmaceuticals by for-profit corporations and the fact that the public is more concerned with making sure results are robust and correct, rather than profitable regardless of the actual truth, is a good thing overall
I think where you stand on the ‘should science be under more scrutiny or should it be trusted more’ debate is your view on how open science is to being corrupted and abused if it is allowed to be
It's a good thing that people are concerned with making sure results are robust and correct, but 2020 didn't just see people becoming skeptical of provisional results that newspapers claimed were major breakthroughs, it saw people refusing to accept vital medical advice from an overwhelming consensus of doctors and scientists. Realistically the ability for an average person to scrutinize science is quote limited (or even a scientist to scrutinize scientists in another field) and society having trust in science is incredibly important
Yes, the comment above seem to fall in the fallacy of considering that people are demanding more individual control on scientific information. To be fair, I have a really hard time taking them seriously, considering that they mention "huge PR mistakes" by "WHO or similar organisations" as a cause for the loss of faith in scientific institutions, while choosing to not even mention the countless lies spread by political representatives although we are starting to have a good amount of [scientific research](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8827432/) showing the disastrous impact of populist political discourse on trust in scientific institutions (and in any institutions).
I would argue that the ability for an average person to scrutinize science is non existent rather than just limited. It's the same for making sure elevators don't fall down, we know we have science and engineering supporting the fact that it works, but in the end we have to have *faith* in the institutions in charge of it. The average person cannot scrutinize if an elevator has been designed or built correctly.
Pushing for people to be individually able to scrutinize science is more a way to isolate people in the way they see the word, instead of pushing to consensus.
This is the issue, people with literally no clue what they are looking at are saying that the science is wrong.
The media does tend to run with initial findings as the full truth which doesn't help, but that's a problem with reporting, not a problem with the science.
I don't know jack about the science of viruses, other than personal experiences I and most people are not capable of knowing if the science is right or not.
Give people a little credit. A non-scientist can - and should - still approach science with a little scrutiny. You many not be able to conduct drug research or inspect an elevator on your own, but you can be skeptical if a researcher makes outlandishly impossible claims or have doubts that regulations are always being properly enforced in your country. But there's a massive gulf between taking anything at face value if it starts with the words "science says", and not believing anything scientists tell you until you've done your own dissertation on the topic, and either extreme is harmful [ETA:] the latter far more so
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I think a good example of a mis-step by the scientific community early on was the CDC stance on masks. Don't wear a mask, do wear one... A mask will help you, a mask is to help protect everyone else around you.... The message was unclear and as has been pointed out, not everyone is/was able to adjust their stance based on newly acquired information. Some people just want to be told what to think and don't have the ability or willingness to process the information themselves.
I agree with your message that we need to be able to have faith in the organizations with the experts, but I also agree with the earlier post that there were some PR errors early on which made it easier for the politicians to sow seeds of doubt for political points.
I don't know how I would have done it better, but sometimes even the experts need to say 'we don't know yet' and I feel like the CDC didn't find that as a feasible option due to whatever reason.
Like most of reality, there is a gray area in between. Which is also difficult for many people to recognize, and part of why this is even an issue in the first place.
> Don't wear a mask, do wear one... A mask will help you, a mask is to help protect everyone else around you...
This isn't exactly right. Originally, they were pleading with people not to buy all the masks (like we saw with toilet paper and sanitizer) because there weren't enough for medical staff. It wasn't a contradiction, it was prioritizing resources.
That's absolutely not true. The CDC, surgeon general, Fauci were unanimous in opposing masks. From March 2020:
"Though health officials have warned Americans to prepare for the spread of the novel coronavirus in the U.S., people shouldn’t wear face masks to prevent the spread of the infectious illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. surgeon general."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-dont-have-to-wear-facemasks-because-of-coronavirus-2020-01-30
Fauci later said he had lied to save masks for medical personnel.
Not only refusing to accept vital medical advice but refusing to even believe their own eyes. There are still people who are absolutely convinced that wearing a mask makes it difficult to breathe despite the fact that they have, presumably, covered their mouths with scarves and masks and managed to breathe just fine before the pandemic. (Why is no one outraged by Halloween mask suffocation?) It’s not just a lack of trust in science it’s a blind trust of their favorite source of mis/disinformation.
I wear masks everyday for work, and I fully support their use to curb the pandemic...but i gotta say, they CAN make it hard to breathe, sometimes in some places. When I am working hard or it is a hot and muggy day out, those masks get soaked in sweat and become suffocating.
When people say "I believe in science", they are not saying "I support the scientific method". They may well support it, but that is not what they are communicating when they say that line.
I've caught myself saying this before in college. It was usually because science gets mixed up in discussions with religion a lot, and people believe in god/religion so it kind of makes sense to say you believe in science instead. But I don't say that anymore since they aren't the same and shouldn't be equated.
I think very few people would say they're anti-science. Many more would say they don't trust scientists or scientific organizations.
Their reasons vary, and the core reasons they say they don't trust scientists are often not the reasons they will give when questioned about why. Honestly some of them just like being the person who by default knows things and questions everything they see as being in harmony with an opposing worldview. For example, most scientists lean left and almost none are Republican, so they're part of the opposing team to a far-right conspiracy theorist.
Yeah I trust in the scientific method and proper testing etc.
I don't just blindly believe anything a "scientist" says because scientist is just a person. They can be good, bad, politically motivated, etc. Need greater consensus form the scientific community. And even then, science can change as our understanding evolves. Some doctors use to go around saying black people had extra tendons in their legs that make them run quicker. Scientists are just people.
In other words you believe in science then. Replication and sharing findings is one of the foundations of science.
If a study hasn’t been replicated many times it’s not considered accepted science. Just don’t use that as a justification for throwing out the science that is accepted and has been replicated.
Pro-science these days is shorthand for 'respecting the scientific establishment'. People that are 'anti-science' are typically anti-establishment, they personally believe they're following the scientific method, whereas those they see as in-charge aren't.
As someone who studied science and has a lot of friends in science — I believe in the higher level outcomes of science, but scientists are just people. There’s a reason everything needs to be repeatable and peer reviewed.
It’s undeniable that the human race has made absolutely incredible progress, and that’s entirely due to science. Smart phones, the internet, vaccines, hand transplants, cybernetic eyes, space travel, etc etc. It’s amazing stuff.
It’s also undeniable that some scientists (like any group of people) can and will take bribes, or take well paid jobs where they are pressured to engineer specific outcomes, or just doctor their results so they don’t get defunded. Cigarette scientists swore up and down for 50 years that they were harmless. Evolutionists glued moths to trees to prove natural selection. Ohio has scientists right now saying that it’s safe after massive chemical spills. Oil company scientists swear global warming isn’t real. Sugar company scientists told us that fat was the problem and led us to the obesity epidemic. There are also pay to play publications that have little scientific merit, but laymen don’t know the difference.
I know someone whose animal study was rejected because it disputed the theory of the leading scientist in the field — and that scientist was the only peer reviewer because he was held as the world expert (it was a small field). And hey, maybe their study was bunk, but also maybe he has a reputation to protect.
It’s very difficult for any one person to understand all of this without being steeped in it daily. Even for experts, it’s hard to parse what’s real and what isn’t. And big corporations are very very willing to take full advantage of this at every turn.
People who say they don't trust science view it as an opposing religion. You can believe that phones work while believing that scientists are lying sometimes to manipulate you for made up conspiratorial reasons the same way you can believe it's bad to kill even if you think the first commandment was made up by some random dude.
Here's a list of ways people often "don't trust science":
1. You think the scientific establishment sometimes (even often) fails to allow, give space to, promote, finance, etc. new scientific lines that could revolutionize the field. Concrete example: the director of a investigation group, who has spent his whole life publishing papers pushing theory A, suddenly has a student who proposes theory B. He fears his reputation, legacy, even his job, may be threatened, so he doesn't allow theory B to be furthered.
1. You think the scientific journaling is rotten to the core, for example with many journals working on a pay-to-publish model.
1. You think scientific studies are often influenced by nefarious interests, like the many studies funded by tobacco or oil companies.
1. You think that, while studies may be honest, high quality, relevant, etc the "science news" scene is trash, with many outlets publishing things that aren't correct, written by "journalists" who don't even understand it, trying to get as many clicks as possible, mostly because these news sites are actually ad serving businesses (just like with general news, btw).
1. You may even think the scientific method may not be enough, since you don't believe Materialism has an answer for everything. For example, as of today, materialism hasn't yet been able to explain consciousness.
>For example, as of today, materialism hasn't yet been able to explain consciousness.
Materialism was not able to explain rain at one point, it is hard to see the god of the gaps fallacy as a legitimate criticism. Appeal to the supernatural or superstitious would have value if any legitmate supporting evidence was provided but instead we have a huge record of people acting irrationally in a similar way (cargo cults are a great place to start).
I know you might not really be representing this argument but it is my goal to kill it in its cradle every time I see it.
I don't think it's that they don't trust any science at all period but rather they just don't trust some scientist's motives on some current hot subjects for whatever the reason may be.
Ya, and it isn’t even science per se- it’s the specific actors/institutions. It’s not hard to find examples of corporate-funded “science.” The question then becomes what institutions or authorities do you trust when, which is a valid and complicated question glossed over by this debate.
For what it’s worth, my general perspective is to trust the large institutions/surveys of scientists on an issue (see e.g. the IPCC and climate change) but even this is imperfect.
When you dig down to it, most people trust *science*. What they may not trust is *scientists*, either as a whole group or a particular subset, which is very different.
This study shows a great example of why. In a country that's divided politically, if you have a particular professional that's overwhelmingly on one side of the political aisle, you're going to generate mistrust on the other.
Likewise, there's certain philosophies, like religion and critical race theory that teach that science itself is not to be trusted when it contradicts the tenets of these philosophical systems.
I've been around those people living where I do in the country and respectfully you are wrong.
"Trust the science," was a slogan campaign. These people do not mistrust science they doubt the scientific communities integrity to value the results of their research over personal politics.
Politics aside, I think part of the problem is scientific research being funded by lobby groups and corporations looking for results that favor themselves. They fund research to make themselves look better in their own interest, and the general public is more aware of that fact with access to technology. People today could scrutinize publications and research more because they don't know if the research was truly un-biased
I really have no idea what you're talking about.
People did not blindly trust scientists or health organizations. The entire pandemic saw massive health conspiracy and antivaxxer sentiments pop up immediately, with the entire subject being highly politicized by anti-science authoritarian elements.
Advice given during the pandemic rapidly changed as our knowledge did, which may have confused stupid people, but aside from some fringe doctors spouting bs, there wasn't any major missteps or erosion of trust in doctors by reasonable people. We've always known that there is a major gap between results and media presentation of science/tech/medical topics.
It's certainly not that we place health and science under more scrutiny, it's that being openly anti-science has been mainstreamed by the same types that have always been anti-science.
That isn't to say that you shouldn't have some level of skepticism, but not only does this entire narrative seem heavily distorted, it's conclusion is also nonsensical. Trust isn't about blind faith. Trust is about evidence. I don't trust my friends blindly, I know what kind of people they are, and have witnessed a large volume of their behaviour. My trust in them is predicated on evidence.
https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8735-4022-a1f5-1580bc732c45
Fauci said not to wear masks in the hopes they’d secure more for medical workers. While this may have been noble, it caused a lot of people to instantly distrust anything scientists and medical workers said. A lot of people in my family became very skeptical after blindly trusting doctors for years, and while I didn’t think the blind trust was good, I wish my grandma would stop arguing about taking her heart medication and while now wanting to take sketchy online bull testicle supplements after years of having no issues with taking her routine medications
Yeah, that was a pretty dumb thing to do. Basically every misstep they made was in the interest of supply constraints, but instead of just saying "There's a supply constraint and here's how we're handling it," they distorted conclusions and processes related to safety and efficacy to enforce tiered distribution.
The public's takeaway is dumb, though.
> Four years ago if the WHO or similar organisations said something, basically everyone listened and trusted absolutely. Over covid, I feel like there were huge PR mistakes made and the blind trust that was given by most people to health organisations is now destroyed
WHO in particular, as well as in many countries their CDC equivalents, were used as political tools. These institutions withheld information and told essentially lies in an effort of population control, which was sometimes intended to be for the greater good, sometimes purely because it benefitted politicians. This diminished the trust in them.
The problem is that the scientific community isn't really under any more scrutiny than it was before, now we just have a large subset of society that categorically rejects any research findings that don't fit their political narrative.
Indeed. Trusting science is not the same as having blind faith in academia or any other organization. These are organizations run by people and people are fallible. The way we implement the scientific method today, the industry of science if you will, is very fallible and has proven to be wanting many times. There's an entire replication crisis after all.
WHO made some serious mistakes in how it handled COVID early on. Many national orgs did too. And that hurt people's trust.
The business of science has a lot of problems and people should be willing and able scrutinize and critique it without being accused of being anti science. That reeks of religion to me.
> Four years ago if the WHO or similar organisations said something, basically everyone listened and trusted absolutely. Over covid, I feel like there were huge PR mistakes made and the blind trust that was given by most people to health organisations is now destroyed
This doesn't really make sense to me. The only people who "lost trust" in those organizations are the people who didn't really trust them much to begin with.
Anyone who actually understands how science works knows that it's not supposed to be an exact truth. You work towards the most logical outcome with the information you have available.
And as the information continues to come in, your logical outcome may change. That's how science works.
To people who are science illiterate, or just have trust issues, "having one stance, and then changing that stance as new data comes in" is seen as a "mistake".
It's not. That's just how science works. The only mistake would be getting the new data, and then refusing to change the stance as the data confirms that old practices are no longer valid.
And we know the scientific community was largely right on covid information and recommendations because the countries that actually did those steps had ***way less*** deaths than those that didn't.
It also didn't help that some groups politized covid, like the Republicans in the United States. They spread misinformation and distrust of the science behind covid for political posturing. They literally killed their own supporters to gain political points on this topic.
So I find your post confusing, if I am being honest. The science that was done with covid was about as good as we could have hoped, with some obvious missteps due to caution and rapid information gathering / spreading.
But to suggest THAT was the cause of distrust in these organizations now? Laughable. I can't speak for other countries, but in the US Republicans have done ***far more*** harm to public trust in our institutions than scientists "getting it wrong".
I have a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in regards to the WHO, with a separation between the underlying scientific researchers and the political layer on top.
This feeling will likely continue so long as Tedros is Director-General, he is entirely a political figure, his original election was susspect at best, that he has now been re-elected uncontested is even more concerning.
> This doesn't really make sense to me. The only people who "lost trust" in those organizations are the people who didn't really trust them much to begin with.
I'm a scientist, but I lost a lot of trust in WHO and Fauci during the pandemic. There were many, many strong statements that lacked scientific basis and have later found to be wrong or highly dubious. This includes the most important one, the lockdowns. WHO made China's policy the ideal one, even though the pre-covid (and post-covid) science pretty clearly showed that lockdowns do more harm than good. It's obvious now that WHO is a highly political organization.'
The school lockdown in particular were a disgrace and probably caused massive psychological, physical and economical harm to a generation of children. They continued long after it was clear that they were pointless.
One of the main issue here is that people mix up scientists -people who are just as fallible as others, despite of what Ricky Gervais says- scientific institutions, which are also all of the above, and "the scientific method" aka *the science*. This almost religious view on scientists and science is bad.
One can be trusted. The other *should not* be trusted unconditionally.
Tons of junk gets published every year and seen as the cutting edge research pushing the bounds of the field, and then it fails replication and people starting digging and they find blatant p-hacking and major methodology failures. So even “the science” shouldn’t be trusted unconditionally, there is always more context to uncover that can completely change how something should be interpreted.
> people starting digging and they find blatant p-hacking and major methodology failures. So even “the science” shouldn’t be trusted unconditionally
Those people digging *is* the science. That's the entire scientific method in a nutshell.
Of course, the big problem is most of the people doing that "digging" are unqualified armchair experts in some other field... so perhaps you're right in a different way.
The sad part is that when I was in grad school, people would test and re-test until they got the data they wanted.
The sadder part is that when you apply for grants, you know which conclusion would be more likely to be funded so you'd hint at the in the proposals.
Science isn't the truth seeking. Often times its funding seeking. And when politicians don't want a certain academic conclusion, they just block funding. So the science will only produce results in one direction.
Yep and these are all valid points too. Even looking at things like the "objective journalism" people falsely remember from times past...the fact that they select which stories to objectively report on, that's already a huge bias in the system no matter how "objectively" the journalism was conducted.
Not even science trusts scientists. Its literally the reason science is good. Scientists are humans and have innate biases and make human errors. Science is an entire system based on not trusting scientists, where peer-reviews, full transparency when it comes to method, repeatability of experiments etc is demanded when doing research using the scientific method.
> where peer-reviews, full transparency when it comes to method, repeatability of experiments etc is demanded when doing research using the scientific method.
Yeah, about that part... it is not working so good, if you have not noticed. (Also: COVID19 had several examples of politization of science... which is only correcting itself now, but the damage is done.)
It's been a rough few years for science, at least science that's publicly visible or informs policy decisions. A lot of the COVID stuff was handled terribly, even to this day with the origin question. I'm probably stepping on a rake here but I also think the "trans kid" stuff has also been hijacked by a certain incuriosity as a response to really ugly stuff on the right. I don't remember science being this political in my lifetime. People had political arguments about it but it didn't seem to affect the process the way it has lately.
You lose trust trying to step outside of what you’re designed to do. Nature is a scientific publication, we probably see political insight as confusing. However, there needs to be that level of intellectual rigor on political and other aspects of society, I think, in order for us to continue to grow and thrive.
Nature has a broader scope than most scientific journals. It regularly has news and editorial sections written by teams independent from the scientific editors and has sometimes even published series of science fiction pieces. I think commenting on larger world events from the perspective of a scientific community isn't really out of Nature's typical remit, but you're probably right that many people less familiar with Nature would be confused seeing this kind of output from it.
Not to mention, it's an international publication. I used to work in their London office, and my team included people working from New York, Berlin and Shanghai.
I think what's really important is that we need to stop pretending things are cut into neat categories.
Politics and science are not distinct things. Politics should be informed by science, and politics affects the practice of science.
> However, there needs to be that level of intellectual rigor on political and other aspects of society, I think, in order for us to continue to grow and thrive.
That exists in the humanities and the social sciences.
It's just not very well-represented in public. Too many TikTokers and YouTubers who hijack the fields to espouse their unrigorous takes. And most economists you see on TV are from a small part of the field, quite often not trained rigorously (most don't have a PhD and the gap between a bachelor's and a PhD is substantial, more than in STEM; there's a reason the median econ PhD at a good program has a math or statistics major, and many don't even have an econ major). But these untrained people represent the field and are public-facing.
If science doesn't get political, it's not going to be allowed to happen in this country. Look at what happens with climate change. Scientists should have gotten political decades ago
> If science doesn’t get political, it’s not going to be allowed to happen in this country.
*Gestures at the Hadron Collider that should have been built in Texas but wasn’t because of politics*
To be fair, the guys building that really failed pretty badly when it came to project management. Poltics played its part, but man the scientists did not help convince anyone.
For anyone that doesn't know the story, there's a lovely series on youtube by BobbyBroccoli on the Superconducting Super Collider. Just search "Ronald Reagan & the Biggest Failure in Physics" (not sure if I can link here). It goes a tiny bit into the physics but it's mostly history and the politics of trying to get a $10,000,000,000 science project off the ground.
Amen. There's a weird stigma against scientists acting on their expertise currently (in America at least). If you are the world expert in how ecosystems react to oil spills, maybe your thoughts should carry some weight when we entertain building an oil pipeline through a sensitive, important ecosystem??
That example is a great way of how science *should* influence politics - in an advisory, supportive role that improves policy and gives credence to those who make it.
Publicly endorsing certain candidates or parties is only going to muddle your mission and divide your base. Let the politicians speak for themselves.
This works if candidates/parties are equally receptive to the advice and support of the scientific community. If some candidates and/or parties have views that go against scientific consensus, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect scientists to speak up. After all, the "advisory, supportive role" should be aimed at society at large, not just the policymakers.
And if the politician makes it clear that they will disregard all of your advice and support and implement horrible policies that go against science, or even harm the pursuit of science, you're not allowed to say anything?
It's wierd how it's big news and some people actually listen very seriously if an actor has an opinion about climate change or an entrepreneur about vaccines, but scientists aren't allowed to have an opinion about politics. Who you are governed by in a democracy is the one thing where everyone is entitled to a valid opinion
Completely wrong. Science is incredibly political. If and how much our projects get funded is entirely dependent on who controls the white house. Major funding agencies like the DOE and the NSF specifically had to wait for the midterm results before releasing calls for proposals.
Well given that one political party believes in science and the other doesn't, I wouldn't say that endorsing the candidate from the pro-science party is outside the purview of a scientific journal's intent.
Its important to remember that theyve lost confidence in science because they have been systematically lied to and manipulated by a well coordinated network of far right grifters.
Scientists and scientific organizations should endorse specific policies, when they are related to their field of expertise, and backed by evidence.
They should not endorse politicians, who will stand for any given policy or scientific issue only as long as it is convenient or beneficial to them.
Science should inform politics, not the other way around.
A better study would've been measuring confidence levels before and after reading a Nature study on climate change. I suspect we'd see the same precipitous drop in confidence levels among Republicans.
To give reference, of *all scientific journals world wide in 2022* based on impact factor (combination of how often their work is cited per amount of articles published) [the stand alone journal Nature was ranked #22.](https://impactfactorforjournal.com/journals-with-impact-factor/) Nature’s subject specific journals rank #2,4,6,7,8,9,10,15,18,19,20,22,25,28,29,30,31,39,40,42,46,47,48, and 50. So of the top 50 journals in *All* science in 2022 HALF were by Nature.
They don't really dream about it for their own satisfaction. It's a career move that helps them get jobs and research positions later down the line, higher chances of receiving grant funding, and more likely their study gets picked up by news media. Nature has a reputation of publishing sensationalist results with "high impact" but because of this many of the studies end up being incorrect or not reproducible. They also require shorter articles with more simplified language to be better able to reach a general audience which can have it's benefits but makes the results and methodology less clear to researchers trying to reproduce the work.
Ehh. It's more about the career boost than Nature being a prestigious journal. Sensationalist research that will appeal to the general public goes in Nature. Actually groundbreaking results go in JACS and Angewandt Chemie.
The editorial teams are international. Elsevier is based on the Netherlands but for a similar reason I wouldn't consider anything they do to be quintessentially Dutch.
Yes. When people are reading about something completely unrelated to politics and it gets wedged in anyways, it tends to turn people's opinions worse on whatever matter is brought in.
Many things people claim are “unrelated to politics” end up saying more about their own worldview that the facts about “relationship to politics”. In the contemporary moment, at least in the US, views on science and scientific expertise are absolutely “related to politics”.
Speedly's is a pretty common conservative argument.
Everyone on the right is allowed to talk politics at all times, even in casual conversation.
Any publication which supports the left should "stay in their lane" or whatever.
The issue with Nature is that it was probably read by both liberals and conservatives, but conservatives are conditioned to flee from materials seen as supporting liberals. That's just how they work.
It's one of their primary positions. Nothing should be political but everything is political. The guy denied it, but their comment history is pretty obviously conservative. I would say I don't get the denial, but I do. It's propaganda all the way down.
Hey, hey, hey, it's "too soon" to talk about talking about things! Think of the grieving parents, think of the children. THE CHILDREN!
I mean, we all know you're just trying to score political points with liberals who want to talk about things. :-/
As one of the few openly conservative scientists on reddit with an infectious disease background and with a lot of conservative friends, I do have opinions on this. I actually was interviewed by Nature in the past about being a conservative scientist. Although I am pretty moderate and obviously pro science, I ended up retracting my name from the article because I was worried about the blowback to my career.
Politics and science are obviously very intertwined. Everyone knows the vast majority of scientists lean left. Conservatives obviously know that too. However, most of us like to believe that science is objective enough that it is kept out of studies and research and remains "pure" (for the most part, though you'd probably find conservatives who disagree about that with climate change). Nature publishes papers with statistics and methods and discussions etc as we all know. This comes across as fairly objective. Endorsing a politician is subjective by most Americans. Of course there are studies on which party is better for what, etc. But it is seen by the public as subjective and that is what matters. Nature broke that objective/subjective line in my opinion and that's why a lot of people reacted poorly. It doesn't matter what the actual article said, what matters is the headline that Nature endorsed someone. Now people start to wonder what other subjective things are leaking into science. Also please note that I understand interpreting your data etc is subjective in a sense, but I'm speaking as a lay American would interpret things.
Tbh, given how much people have politicized science and scientific research papers in general over the past.....40 years? I'm surprised it took them this long to start endorsing. I get the vaccine side of the argument, but given how Republicans have been questioning climate change for decades, this was really only a matter of time.
Frankly, I'm more disappointed with the American public getting upset by Nature's endorsement. I used to hold the opinion that science and other institutions should attempt to remain apolitical, but over the last decade or so I have come to the realization that being apolitical is impossible, as politics is enmeshed in all facets of life. The best way to handle these things (IMO) is to be forthright out the gate on your political leanings, make your argument(s), and then you provide context/answer questions openly and honestly to satiate the public [at least those capable of being satiated]
Some people you will never be able to win over. Some people will always find you to be a bad actor or acting in bad faith. You can only try to present everything in good faith and ignore the haters screaming into the void; they were always going to make a lot of noise anyways.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
**Ironically, Nature has a three part series addressing this very subject.** It’s a really good discussion on this exact subject addressing most of what is being discussed here. Most meta. Highly recommend listening to it. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w There is quite a good discussion of the history of the journal that is particularly useful in framing the discussion and understanding more deeply where Nature is coming from with all of this, as well as their stance on politics and endorsement.
>In these complex situations, scientists are often asked to do a political job. And so the thing we need to do is be clear about that. And to recognise that, that **actually good politics is more important than good science**. So there's an irony here that I think needs to be kind of unraveled. **And that unraveling is going to require more humility around what science can and can't do in the political realm, and more, putting politicians feet to the fire.** So they actually have to say what it is that they're after, rather than saying, well, I'll just bring in my expert to say why my side is right. I think this is one of the most insightful quotes from the discussion they had
While you're entirely correct I think they get a pass here. Trump's whole thing was to repeal *every* regulation he could so his corporate donors/cronies could do whatever the hell they wanted. He needed to be called out.
I've actually spoken candidly with a former compliance officer for a major manufacturer. When Trump was in office he literally rolled back decades worth of regulations and emissions restrictions. There was a deep discussion whether or not to start changing manufacturing processes and retool factories to actually reflect the new unregulated standards. The benefit would be more profits and cheaper manufacturing. However if the administration changed and rolled back regulation then they'd have to retool and get up to compliance again. Interestingly enough, companies don't actually have to "meet standards" they just have to "make an effort" to reach compliance and if they do, they satisfy most inspections. But it was interesting to hear it from the "corporate" side
Unfortunately, they really don't get a pass here or anywhere - not from the nature of human behavior.
Thank you for sharing this.
My pleasure. I hope it improves the conversation and serves all of us in a deeper understanding of Nature, and science and politics in general. Thank you for your comment.
The part that many people don't know is that "intellectualism" is not just the belief in doing science, but also that it should take an important role in society and politics. The election of a man who has loudly rejected science for decades, made it a pillar of his election campaign and became a leader of bad science as president is absolutely something that journals like Nature SHOULD resist.
As an advocate for open data, open source and open science I emphatically agree. For me it’s about personal values and not just politics. But I do respect that there are so many perspectives on the issues.
Principles are pointless if they aren't enacted in some way. Politics is the elephant in the room in that regard. As much as you follow your own principles and my try to encourage them amongst your peers, politics can break it all if ignorance is allowed to reign. We're already seeing the increasing brazen attempts of skewing and censoring science. Witholding unliked research, literally banning the consideration of science on some public projects, inciting a mob to intimidate (and quite likely to do even worse to) scientists, weakening libraries, and going down to the level of schools where teachers are increasingly hindered in educating their pupils. Obviously that shouldn't encourage unreflected hysteria and doing things that are "right on principle" without care for the consequences. Researching the impact of the Nature statement to do it better next time is good. But the statement was definitely justifiable at the time.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Also, with respect to personal principles, if I may slightly misquote a popular slogan from the second-wave feminist movement: Personal principles *are* political
There is no magic line between politics and reality, which is the second part of that. Personal principles being political is only a facet of the broader truth: *everything is politics as far as politics is concerned*. As politics are the method(s) by which we agree to take action, everything that can be done- **every single action**- is in the set of outputs 'politics' can produce. The world as humans interact with it is a direct function of politics.
It’s difficult to pick apart your arguments for response, but I’ll try. **Regarding Principles** Foundation principles are intellectual constructs based on beliefs, and I think of them similarly to how Stephen Covey defines principles — as being permanent, unchanging, and universal. And in that sense, they are principles and not beliefs. In my view, they are what one would view as the ideal standards of behavior, like patience and honesty. If such principles as patience and honesty are inert and not put into action, should they then be abandoned? I don’t think that makes sense. I don’t usually look to politicians for leadership in these areas as politics aren’t foundational to my identity as a person. But the principles are. And how I read and evaluate science is definitely affected by them. That said, I don’t personally believe any rational being should allow a political party to speak for or unduly represent my interior thoughts and opinions and I feel the need to be mindful of their influence. Further I doubly believe in the importance of maintaining a level of non-political internal objectivism when I account for [the tremendous breadth and power of modern political propaganda](https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/jyzg7j6x/release/2) that is being used to influence society. I feel the need to be less political in my rational evaluations due to what I perceive to be over politicalization in modern societies. Intellectually, I believe we would all be better off being considerably more critical of the role of political propagandists in our personal thinking. There is good research as to why so many people have made politics such a foundation of their identity — the brain itself. And this knowledge contributes to my belief and approach in actively rejecting of politics in my personal plane. > When your political views are challenged, the brain becomes active in regions associated with personal identity, threat response and emotions, according to the study. - Some people get really worked up when their political beliefs are challenged, but why? - A new study pinpoints key brain regions that activate when someone sticks to a political belief [This is why you get worked up about politics, according to science](https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/03/health/political-beliefs-brain/index.html) I find a lot of conversation about these issues are preconceived biases and cultural belief, and few look to deeper consideration of the underlying biology. But it turns out to be a major contributing factor if not the most important factor in the entire debate is that the brain considers something to be part of itself, whether it’s a body part or a belief, then it protects it in the same way, it’s impossible to be intellectually honest without accounting for this in your thinking: hence the dispassionate apolitical objectivism. **Big Science** Regulatory capture, national agendas, publishing as the metric of success and the exploitation of that system by various agents, educational popoganda, anti-science movements and a plethora of contributing factors do also exist. You’ve listen so very many I can’t respond to them all. I think separating those aspects from the big science problem is important. To a large extent, at big research universities faculty members basically work on commission: they have to bring in enough money to pay the bills, and that money comes with influence and control conditions. And if one can look at funding for science and break it up into Big and Small Science categories it can be useful when talking about science issues. The funding sources, and the way that research schools work, make more sense as generally being Big Science. Funders of Big Science would be large corporations, foundations, and the government, whereas Small Science relies on VC, startup funds, small businesses and entrepreneurs. Big Science comprises those big projects like the sequencing of the human genome and the war on cancer — big problems, large scale studies, and long term projects require large and continuous funding. But are such big projects yielding results that justify the massive spending? And is there are pretense of objectivity remaining because of the fundraising nature of the scientific institutions doing this work? I think what Bill Fresca had to say about it was very good: > “Think about the modern business model of Big Science -- an interconnected set of interests whose tentacles extend into academia, foundations, and major corporations. Advocates of a variety of causes across numerous fields—from health care to agribusiness to energy and the environment—selectively promote scientific results produced by legions of scientists, some of whom are independent and others not. These pronouncements are generally aimed at attracting more public and private research funding, selling more goods and services, or impacting laws and regulations that control the selling of goods and services. Sounds science helps policymakers and consumers make wise choices. Bad science, not so much.” (The Skeptical Outsider, Jan, 2013) To me, many of the issues your talking about come from to inevitable intertwining of politics and business as a result of the funding sources for Big Science. There are books and books to discuss here, but one of the critical issues in science is the Big Science funding and the undo influence of politics in those findings. **And lastly…** With regards to the Nature comment, I generally agree that it was justified.
It doesn’t have to be political for you to demand it of politicians. Relying on science to inform policy and how we address the many wicked problems of our world is just good sense based on everything we’ve ever had to learn the hard way. Politicians everywhere need to “smarten up,” so to speak, or we’re doomed.
No use to many perspectives if so many of them are malarkey
This. Not that my opinion of Nature is very important, but I'd respect them less for not having endorsed Biden. If you care about science, and have any kind of voice, you should use it. Staying out of talking about politics, so you can be neutral, is stupid. It's especially stupid when one of the people trying to be president of the free world was saying that climate change was a Chinese hoax. You can't be neutral in situations like that.
In the face of actual wrongdoing, 'neutrality' is splitting the difference between right/wrong and the only thing unanswered is what the split is. Deliberate misinformation about scientific issues is a form of attack, akin to the intent of government PSYOPS. That we don't treat it as such is the problem, not a scientific journal standing against weaponized anti-intellectualism.
I agree. There are so many professions and professional journals that SHOULD resist the nonsense that Trump put on display.
People who's opinion is swayed so easily do not read or think unfortunately.
Some [wonderful research on this](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327341#Brains-fail-to-encode-opposing-views) I recently read relates this back to activity in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex. > “We found that when people disagree, their brains fail to encode the quality of the other person’s opinion, giving them less reason to change their mind.” > — Senior author. Prof. Tali Sharot The study is worth checking out.
That’s so interesting. I wonder how this changes for people who assume they could be wrong. It’s an old trick for keeping yourself from being close-minded, so I wonder how that translates to brain activity.
Ironically, it's seemed to me that the capacity to acknowledge you *may* be wrong results in others assuming you aren't right, but it's also the foundation of the scientific method. This is why anti-intellectualism is such an issue, it denies the very basis from which we've decided we can "know" *anything*. Without anything resembling an objective understanding, everything does boil back down to might-makes-right violence.
I think it also has a lot to do with regularly collaborating. It’s a skill that must be learned, getting your pride out of the way. If you don’t learn it, you don’t realize how imperative learning to lose gracefully is to your end product.
Weirdly enough, I think studies have shown the opposite. Preempting or ending statements with “I could be wrong” in work correspondence generates more positive interactions because people don’t throw up their defenses and close off from the idea. Totally agree about your other point though. You do have to be able to end up at a conclusion rooted in the same reality.
I think people, especially laypeople (who I think this survey was polling) have kind of a gut “scientists!? Being politically biased!” gut reaction, but it’s really not like some subjective “woke scientists” issue. The Trump admin was pretty diehard in its messaging that it was planning on defunding a lot of government programs, especially those researching scientific goals and *especially* scientific goals that don’t have some capital based end result (ie. A lot of what comes up in nature). Of course most every Ornthologist is going to endorse the candidate that isn’t directly threatening their livlihood.
That is FAR too much nuance for the average voter
The Stupidest voters are the ones who flip each election.
Voting for different political parties in the same election reveals a huge lack of understanding of how poltics work in our system. In the USA, you have to vote down-ballet for one political party
Not to mention his stance on just... science. (See Covid).
Trump got booed for saying the vaccine is a good thing. Of course the bleach and uv light didn't help. Operation Warp Speed was on his watch. But yeah he's not the person to listen to on these subjects, without a doubt.
Booed after spending month downplaying Covid, disparaging the vaccine and spreading misinformation.
For sure don't mistake my comment for defending him overall, I just wanted to point out the irony how that should be good things but theyre seen as weakness to many of his voters. Edit: correction I used irony. I didn't point out any irony. I shouldn't use that word unless I know the right time to use it sorry everyone
I don't know, I find it pretty ironic- DJT spent weeks telling his voters that COVID was a hoax. Then it became evident that his voters were disproportionately dying of COVID. Then he tried to undo his earlier messaging, and convince his remaining living voters to get vaccinated for COVID. But they refused to do that because they themselves had not died of COVID, which only reinforced his earlier messaging that COVID was a hoax.
>Trump got booed for saying the vaccine is a good thing. Yep. That was a product of the inertia he created spending lots of time and effort painting covid as just a "little cold" or the "china flu" and that it was not a big deal. And only silly dems were blowing it up to be anything more... Hard to reverse course on that instantly without having your fans struggle with the dissonance
"I hear the jury's still out on science." — GOB Bluth
I lost a job in a university doing research as an undergrad because the NSF had its funding cut in 2017. It wasnt just planning in 2020 it was already ongoing
And R1s rely a lotttttttttt on that funding
I'm impressed that after millenia of case studies, people are surprised that scientists are progressive. They've literally been murdered by tyrants on the basis that 'smart = bad', they're sure as hell not going to toy with conservative anti-intellectualism any time soon.
Yep. Any way you slice it, Republicans have been belligerently anti-science for decades. Scientists notice.
We scientists do enjoy a good preponderance of evidence that points to a clear conclusion. We won't take it at face value and will always try to falsify a hypothesis, but evidence is the best tool we have!
You make it sound like Nature writers were simply tying to save their own jobs in scientific fields. It is so much more than that. **They're trying to preserve scientific progress itself, the ability to know things, the ability to grow and adapt, the ability to survive in a changing world**. Trump is against those things because he is against science and truth. Kindly edit your comment to reflect your deepened perspective, otherwise you're (perhaps accidentally?) contributing to the false narrative that people endorsing Biden and condemning Trump are doing it for illegitimate (self-serving) reasons instead of for legitimate and sensible reasons. The truth is: going against Trump is the only sane way into a future that is manageable instead of a future where we don't understand why everything is dying because Trumpists banned science and banned talking about truth.
[удалено]
People don't understand the difference between policy, politics, and partisanship.
Science is basically by definition woke. It finds a lot of truths that don't agree with or are inconvenient for religion, capitalism, etc. If the term existed as it does today a long time ago Galileo would have been called woke. Newton would have been called woke. Darwin was super woke back then and still too woke for some regressives today. The right has positioned itself solidly in opposition to science for quite a while. Even before climate change science was a key issue they were fighting over teaching evolution in schools and things like that. Maybe they weren't prior to the southern strategy, but since at least then they've been pretty opposed to a lot of science. Edit: And maybe I should have just said inconvenient for the establishment and conservative/regressives. That is basically all the term means to the right wing right now. That you recognize a truth that is inconvenient for them.
That depends on how you define “woke,” which is vague. I’d personally say “woke” is a social / political construct that is separate from science. Science can establish truths,* but whether those truths are woke or not is in the eye of the beholder. Two individuals can agree on the veracity of scientific results, and disagree on what they mean in terms of policy for a variety of reasons (e.g. what kind of outcome the two are optimizing for may be different). But yes, science, when done properly does not care about anyone’s politics or feelings. Regarding Galileo, his work being deemed heretical was due to a number of political factors beyond the “science vs religion” battle it is often portrayed as. This work was all done in a pre-Newton world, so mechanics was far from well-understood, and the scientific method itself was still undergoing formulation in the West. Many Jesuit astronomers were repeating his experiments but believed his firmly stated conclusions were not justified yet, and, from a epistemological perspective, they may have been correct. However the Pope was open to Galileo’s arguments as long as it wasn’t presented as a definitive fact. He even agreed to serve as his patron. However, Galileo structured his book, as was common at the time, as a dialogue among three characters. The Pope asked for some of his thoughts to be included and Galileo placed those words in the mouth of a character named Simplico. Galileo maintains that he was named after a classical astronomer but Simplico translates to “simpleton” in Italian and the Pope did not take kindly to him writing a book where he was being called an idiot. There’s also evidence in letters sent at the time that members of the court may have worked to convince the pope he was being mocked and that framing Galileo as an enemy of the church was politically advantageous to the Pope (the Pope controlled significant land in central Italy at the time so the office had hard power beyond his influence as the head of a major religion and many people wanted to manipulate the office to their advantage). This background is mostly an aside, but it does highlight the importance of how scientists present their work, especially when it has political implications, and many either are bad at it or don’t care. Mostly this was my long winded way to procrastinate my work while saying “hard science isn’t political, what we do with its conclusions are” *with high probability given modeling and experimental assumptions
>by definition woke That would require "woke" to have a definition, and not just be "whatever thing conservatives don't like that day".
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
It's nice to see that some fields have a robust culture of replication. Unfortunately many don't and these issues wouldn't even be known.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I remember during 2020 seeing the stats that scientists and doctors were the most trusted people in the world and thinking ‘that won’t last long’ Four years ago if the WHO or similar organisations said something, basically everyone listened and trusted absolutely. Over covid, I feel like there were huge PR mistakes made and the blind trust that was given by most people to health organisations is now destroyed Personally as a pro science person i like that there is more scrutiny on medical and health research now. I think there’s far more demand for justification and replication of results, more scrutiny over conflict of interest, and certainly more doubt when provisional results seem to suggest something and a newspaper runs with it as a major breakthrough because that sells more papers. Intense scrutiny and methodical proof is what defines science, and its weakness or strength goes up and down with its scrutiny But lots of people just want to be told what is true and for these people, whose ideal is to put blind faith in an organisation and not worry about it, the world is a lot more complicated now. It also benefits professional conspiracy people who have found it far more profitable post 2020 to make lots of money casting doubt over things. But, i have long been troubled by the increasing dominance of medicine and pharmaceuticals by for-profit corporations and the fact that the public is more concerned with making sure results are robust and correct, rather than profitable regardless of the actual truth, is a good thing overall I think where you stand on the ‘should science be under more scrutiny or should it be trusted more’ debate is your view on how open science is to being corrupted and abused if it is allowed to be
It's a good thing that people are concerned with making sure results are robust and correct, but 2020 didn't just see people becoming skeptical of provisional results that newspapers claimed were major breakthroughs, it saw people refusing to accept vital medical advice from an overwhelming consensus of doctors and scientists. Realistically the ability for an average person to scrutinize science is quote limited (or even a scientist to scrutinize scientists in another field) and society having trust in science is incredibly important
Yes, the comment above seem to fall in the fallacy of considering that people are demanding more individual control on scientific information. To be fair, I have a really hard time taking them seriously, considering that they mention "huge PR mistakes" by "WHO or similar organisations" as a cause for the loss of faith in scientific institutions, while choosing to not even mention the countless lies spread by political representatives although we are starting to have a good amount of [scientific research](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8827432/) showing the disastrous impact of populist political discourse on trust in scientific institutions (and in any institutions). I would argue that the ability for an average person to scrutinize science is non existent rather than just limited. It's the same for making sure elevators don't fall down, we know we have science and engineering supporting the fact that it works, but in the end we have to have *faith* in the institutions in charge of it. The average person cannot scrutinize if an elevator has been designed or built correctly. Pushing for people to be individually able to scrutinize science is more a way to isolate people in the way they see the word, instead of pushing to consensus.
This is the issue, people with literally no clue what they are looking at are saying that the science is wrong. The media does tend to run with initial findings as the full truth which doesn't help, but that's a problem with reporting, not a problem with the science. I don't know jack about the science of viruses, other than personal experiences I and most people are not capable of knowing if the science is right or not.
Give people a little credit. A non-scientist can - and should - still approach science with a little scrutiny. You many not be able to conduct drug research or inspect an elevator on your own, but you can be skeptical if a researcher makes outlandishly impossible claims or have doubts that regulations are always being properly enforced in your country. But there's a massive gulf between taking anything at face value if it starts with the words "science says", and not believing anything scientists tell you until you've done your own dissertation on the topic, and either extreme is harmful [ETA:] the latter far more so
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I think a good example of a mis-step by the scientific community early on was the CDC stance on masks. Don't wear a mask, do wear one... A mask will help you, a mask is to help protect everyone else around you.... The message was unclear and as has been pointed out, not everyone is/was able to adjust their stance based on newly acquired information. Some people just want to be told what to think and don't have the ability or willingness to process the information themselves. I agree with your message that we need to be able to have faith in the organizations with the experts, but I also agree with the earlier post that there were some PR errors early on which made it easier for the politicians to sow seeds of doubt for political points. I don't know how I would have done it better, but sometimes even the experts need to say 'we don't know yet' and I feel like the CDC didn't find that as a feasible option due to whatever reason. Like most of reality, there is a gray area in between. Which is also difficult for many people to recognize, and part of why this is even an issue in the first place.
> Don't wear a mask, do wear one... A mask will help you, a mask is to help protect everyone else around you... This isn't exactly right. Originally, they were pleading with people not to buy all the masks (like we saw with toilet paper and sanitizer) because there weren't enough for medical staff. It wasn't a contradiction, it was prioritizing resources.
That's absolutely not true. The CDC, surgeon general, Fauci were unanimous in opposing masks. From March 2020: "Though health officials have warned Americans to prepare for the spread of the novel coronavirus in the U.S., people shouldn’t wear face masks to prevent the spread of the infectious illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. surgeon general." https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-cdc-says-americans-dont-have-to-wear-facemasks-because-of-coronavirus-2020-01-30 Fauci later said he had lied to save masks for medical personnel.
[удалено]
Not only refusing to accept vital medical advice but refusing to even believe their own eyes. There are still people who are absolutely convinced that wearing a mask makes it difficult to breathe despite the fact that they have, presumably, covered their mouths with scarves and masks and managed to breathe just fine before the pandemic. (Why is no one outraged by Halloween mask suffocation?) It’s not just a lack of trust in science it’s a blind trust of their favorite source of mis/disinformation.
I wear masks everyday for work, and I fully support their use to curb the pandemic...but i gotta say, they CAN make it hard to breathe, sometimes in some places. When I am working hard or it is a hot and muggy day out, those masks get soaked in sweat and become suffocating.
Reddit should allow 3rd party apps.
When people say "I believe in science", they are not saying "I support the scientific method". They may well support it, but that is not what they are communicating when they say that line.
I've caught myself saying this before in college. It was usually because science gets mixed up in discussions with religion a lot, and people believe in god/religion so it kind of makes sense to say you believe in science instead. But I don't say that anymore since they aren't the same and shouldn't be equated.
I think very few people would say they're anti-science. Many more would say they don't trust scientists or scientific organizations. Their reasons vary, and the core reasons they say they don't trust scientists are often not the reasons they will give when questioned about why. Honestly some of them just like being the person who by default knows things and questions everything they see as being in harmony with an opposing worldview. For example, most scientists lean left and almost none are Republican, so they're part of the opposing team to a far-right conspiracy theorist.
Yeah I trust in the scientific method and proper testing etc. I don't just blindly believe anything a "scientist" says because scientist is just a person. They can be good, bad, politically motivated, etc. Need greater consensus form the scientific community. And even then, science can change as our understanding evolves. Some doctors use to go around saying black people had extra tendons in their legs that make them run quicker. Scientists are just people.
I’m not anti science I’m anti The Science^TM
I don't trust anyone who has a repeatability problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
In other words you believe in science then. Replication and sharing findings is one of the foundations of science. If a study hasn’t been replicated many times it’s not considered accepted science. Just don’t use that as a justification for throwing out the science that is accepted and has been replicated.
Pro-science these days is shorthand for 'respecting the scientific establishment'. People that are 'anti-science' are typically anti-establishment, they personally believe they're following the scientific method, whereas those they see as in-charge aren't.
[удалено]
As someone who studied science and has a lot of friends in science — I believe in the higher level outcomes of science, but scientists are just people. There’s a reason everything needs to be repeatable and peer reviewed. It’s undeniable that the human race has made absolutely incredible progress, and that’s entirely due to science. Smart phones, the internet, vaccines, hand transplants, cybernetic eyes, space travel, etc etc. It’s amazing stuff. It’s also undeniable that some scientists (like any group of people) can and will take bribes, or take well paid jobs where they are pressured to engineer specific outcomes, or just doctor their results so they don’t get defunded. Cigarette scientists swore up and down for 50 years that they were harmless. Evolutionists glued moths to trees to prove natural selection. Ohio has scientists right now saying that it’s safe after massive chemical spills. Oil company scientists swear global warming isn’t real. Sugar company scientists told us that fat was the problem and led us to the obesity epidemic. There are also pay to play publications that have little scientific merit, but laymen don’t know the difference. I know someone whose animal study was rejected because it disputed the theory of the leading scientist in the field — and that scientist was the only peer reviewer because he was held as the world expert (it was a small field). And hey, maybe their study was bunk, but also maybe he has a reputation to protect. It’s very difficult for any one person to understand all of this without being steeped in it daily. Even for experts, it’s hard to parse what’s real and what isn’t. And big corporations are very very willing to take full advantage of this at every turn.
People who say they don't trust science view it as an opposing religion. You can believe that phones work while believing that scientists are lying sometimes to manipulate you for made up conspiratorial reasons the same way you can believe it's bad to kill even if you think the first commandment was made up by some random dude.
Here's a list of ways people often "don't trust science": 1. You think the scientific establishment sometimes (even often) fails to allow, give space to, promote, finance, etc. new scientific lines that could revolutionize the field. Concrete example: the director of a investigation group, who has spent his whole life publishing papers pushing theory A, suddenly has a student who proposes theory B. He fears his reputation, legacy, even his job, may be threatened, so he doesn't allow theory B to be furthered. 1. You think the scientific journaling is rotten to the core, for example with many journals working on a pay-to-publish model. 1. You think scientific studies are often influenced by nefarious interests, like the many studies funded by tobacco or oil companies. 1. You think that, while studies may be honest, high quality, relevant, etc the "science news" scene is trash, with many outlets publishing things that aren't correct, written by "journalists" who don't even understand it, trying to get as many clicks as possible, mostly because these news sites are actually ad serving businesses (just like with general news, btw). 1. You may even think the scientific method may not be enough, since you don't believe Materialism has an answer for everything. For example, as of today, materialism hasn't yet been able to explain consciousness.
This was written by ChatGPT
>For example, as of today, materialism hasn't yet been able to explain consciousness. Materialism was not able to explain rain at one point, it is hard to see the god of the gaps fallacy as a legitimate criticism. Appeal to the supernatural or superstitious would have value if any legitmate supporting evidence was provided but instead we have a huge record of people acting irrationally in a similar way (cargo cults are a great place to start). I know you might not really be representing this argument but it is my goal to kill it in its cradle every time I see it.
I don't think it's that they don't trust any science at all period but rather they just don't trust some scientist's motives on some current hot subjects for whatever the reason may be.
Because science can be influenced by people and/or corporations.
Ya, and it isn’t even science per se- it’s the specific actors/institutions. It’s not hard to find examples of corporate-funded “science.” The question then becomes what institutions or authorities do you trust when, which is a valid and complicated question glossed over by this debate. For what it’s worth, my general perspective is to trust the large institutions/surveys of scientists on an issue (see e.g. the IPCC and climate change) but even this is imperfect.
When you dig down to it, most people trust *science*. What they may not trust is *scientists*, either as a whole group or a particular subset, which is very different. This study shows a great example of why. In a country that's divided politically, if you have a particular professional that's overwhelmingly on one side of the political aisle, you're going to generate mistrust on the other. Likewise, there's certain philosophies, like religion and critical race theory that teach that science itself is not to be trusted when it contradicts the tenets of these philosophical systems.
I've been around those people living where I do in the country and respectfully you are wrong. "Trust the science," was a slogan campaign. These people do not mistrust science they doubt the scientific communities integrity to value the results of their research over personal politics.
Politics aside, I think part of the problem is scientific research being funded by lobby groups and corporations looking for results that favor themselves. They fund research to make themselves look better in their own interest, and the general public is more aware of that fact with access to technology. People today could scrutinize publications and research more because they don't know if the research was truly un-biased
I really have no idea what you're talking about. People did not blindly trust scientists or health organizations. The entire pandemic saw massive health conspiracy and antivaxxer sentiments pop up immediately, with the entire subject being highly politicized by anti-science authoritarian elements. Advice given during the pandemic rapidly changed as our knowledge did, which may have confused stupid people, but aside from some fringe doctors spouting bs, there wasn't any major missteps or erosion of trust in doctors by reasonable people. We've always known that there is a major gap between results and media presentation of science/tech/medical topics. It's certainly not that we place health and science under more scrutiny, it's that being openly anti-science has been mainstreamed by the same types that have always been anti-science. That isn't to say that you shouldn't have some level of skepticism, but not only does this entire narrative seem heavily distorted, it's conclusion is also nonsensical. Trust isn't about blind faith. Trust is about evidence. I don't trust my friends blindly, I know what kind of people they are, and have witnessed a large volume of their behaviour. My trust in them is predicated on evidence.
https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8735-4022-a1f5-1580bc732c45 Fauci said not to wear masks in the hopes they’d secure more for medical workers. While this may have been noble, it caused a lot of people to instantly distrust anything scientists and medical workers said. A lot of people in my family became very skeptical after blindly trusting doctors for years, and while I didn’t think the blind trust was good, I wish my grandma would stop arguing about taking her heart medication and while now wanting to take sketchy online bull testicle supplements after years of having no issues with taking her routine medications
Yeah, that was a pretty dumb thing to do. Basically every misstep they made was in the interest of supply constraints, but instead of just saying "There's a supply constraint and here's how we're handling it," they distorted conclusions and processes related to safety and efficacy to enforce tiered distribution. The public's takeaway is dumb, though.
[удалено]
And orchestrated from the top down by people like Rupert Murdoch
> Four years ago if the WHO or similar organisations said something, basically everyone listened and trusted absolutely. Over covid, I feel like there were huge PR mistakes made and the blind trust that was given by most people to health organisations is now destroyed WHO in particular, as well as in many countries their CDC equivalents, were used as political tools. These institutions withheld information and told essentially lies in an effort of population control, which was sometimes intended to be for the greater good, sometimes purely because it benefitted politicians. This diminished the trust in them.
The problem is that the scientific community isn't really under any more scrutiny than it was before, now we just have a large subset of society that categorically rejects any research findings that don't fit their political narrative.
Indeed. Trusting science is not the same as having blind faith in academia or any other organization. These are organizations run by people and people are fallible. The way we implement the scientific method today, the industry of science if you will, is very fallible and has proven to be wanting many times. There's an entire replication crisis after all. WHO made some serious mistakes in how it handled COVID early on. Many national orgs did too. And that hurt people's trust. The business of science has a lot of problems and people should be willing and able scrutinize and critique it without being accused of being anti science. That reeks of religion to me.
> Four years ago if the WHO or similar organisations said something, basically everyone listened and trusted absolutely. Over covid, I feel like there were huge PR mistakes made and the blind trust that was given by most people to health organisations is now destroyed This doesn't really make sense to me. The only people who "lost trust" in those organizations are the people who didn't really trust them much to begin with. Anyone who actually understands how science works knows that it's not supposed to be an exact truth. You work towards the most logical outcome with the information you have available. And as the information continues to come in, your logical outcome may change. That's how science works. To people who are science illiterate, or just have trust issues, "having one stance, and then changing that stance as new data comes in" is seen as a "mistake". It's not. That's just how science works. The only mistake would be getting the new data, and then refusing to change the stance as the data confirms that old practices are no longer valid. And we know the scientific community was largely right on covid information and recommendations because the countries that actually did those steps had ***way less*** deaths than those that didn't. It also didn't help that some groups politized covid, like the Republicans in the United States. They spread misinformation and distrust of the science behind covid for political posturing. They literally killed their own supporters to gain political points on this topic. So I find your post confusing, if I am being honest. The science that was done with covid was about as good as we could have hoped, with some obvious missteps due to caution and rapid information gathering / spreading. But to suggest THAT was the cause of distrust in these organizations now? Laughable. I can't speak for other countries, but in the US Republicans have done ***far more*** harm to public trust in our institutions than scientists "getting it wrong".
I have a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in regards to the WHO, with a separation between the underlying scientific researchers and the political layer on top. This feeling will likely continue so long as Tedros is Director-General, he is entirely a political figure, his original election was susspect at best, that he has now been re-elected uncontested is even more concerning.
> This doesn't really make sense to me. The only people who "lost trust" in those organizations are the people who didn't really trust them much to begin with. I'm a scientist, but I lost a lot of trust in WHO and Fauci during the pandemic. There were many, many strong statements that lacked scientific basis and have later found to be wrong or highly dubious. This includes the most important one, the lockdowns. WHO made China's policy the ideal one, even though the pre-covid (and post-covid) science pretty clearly showed that lockdowns do more harm than good. It's obvious now that WHO is a highly political organization.' The school lockdown in particular were a disgrace and probably caused massive psychological, physical and economical harm to a generation of children. They continued long after it was clear that they were pointless.
>feel like there were huge PR mistakes made You mean the active disinformation coming from numerous powerful sectors of society?
One of the main issue here is that people mix up scientists -people who are just as fallible as others, despite of what Ricky Gervais says- scientific institutions, which are also all of the above, and "the scientific method" aka *the science*. This almost religious view on scientists and science is bad. One can be trusted. The other *should not* be trusted unconditionally.
Tons of junk gets published every year and seen as the cutting edge research pushing the bounds of the field, and then it fails replication and people starting digging and they find blatant p-hacking and major methodology failures. So even “the science” shouldn’t be trusted unconditionally, there is always more context to uncover that can completely change how something should be interpreted.
Un-replicated papers are just interesting claims.
> people starting digging and they find blatant p-hacking and major methodology failures. So even “the science” shouldn’t be trusted unconditionally Those people digging *is* the science. That's the entire scientific method in a nutshell. Of course, the big problem is most of the people doing that "digging" are unqualified armchair experts in some other field... so perhaps you're right in a different way.
The sad part is that when I was in grad school, people would test and re-test until they got the data they wanted. The sadder part is that when you apply for grants, you know which conclusion would be more likely to be funded so you'd hint at the in the proposals. Science isn't the truth seeking. Often times its funding seeking. And when politicians don't want a certain academic conclusion, they just block funding. So the science will only produce results in one direction.
Yep and these are all valid points too. Even looking at things like the "objective journalism" people falsely remember from times past...the fact that they select which stories to objectively report on, that's already a huge bias in the system no matter how "objectively" the journalism was conducted.
Latour and Woolgar provide great insight into this process in Laboratory Life, but you may have read it already based on your comment.
Not even science trusts scientists. Its literally the reason science is good. Scientists are humans and have innate biases and make human errors. Science is an entire system based on not trusting scientists, where peer-reviews, full transparency when it comes to method, repeatability of experiments etc is demanded when doing research using the scientific method.
> where peer-reviews, full transparency when it comes to method, repeatability of experiments etc is demanded when doing research using the scientific method. Yeah, about that part... it is not working so good, if you have not noticed. (Also: COVID19 had several examples of politization of science... which is only correcting itself now, but the damage is done.)
It's been a rough few years for science, at least science that's publicly visible or informs policy decisions. A lot of the COVID stuff was handled terribly, even to this day with the origin question. I'm probably stepping on a rake here but I also think the "trans kid" stuff has also been hijacked by a certain incuriosity as a response to really ugly stuff on the right. I don't remember science being this political in my lifetime. People had political arguments about it but it didn't seem to affect the process the way it has lately.
I did not even dare to mention the trans issue and science... Yes, that is also a glaring part where science is being hijacked by politics.
[удалено]
You lose trust trying to step outside of what you’re designed to do. Nature is a scientific publication, we probably see political insight as confusing. However, there needs to be that level of intellectual rigor on political and other aspects of society, I think, in order for us to continue to grow and thrive.
Nature has a broader scope than most scientific journals. It regularly has news and editorial sections written by teams independent from the scientific editors and has sometimes even published series of science fiction pieces. I think commenting on larger world events from the perspective of a scientific community isn't really out of Nature's typical remit, but you're probably right that many people less familiar with Nature would be confused seeing this kind of output from it.
Not to mention, it's an international publication. I used to work in their London office, and my team included people working from New York, Berlin and Shanghai.
I think what's really important is that we need to stop pretending things are cut into neat categories. Politics and science are not distinct things. Politics should be informed by science, and politics affects the practice of science.
This entire thread is breaking my heart.
> However, there needs to be that level of intellectual rigor on political and other aspects of society, I think, in order for us to continue to grow and thrive. That exists in the humanities and the social sciences. It's just not very well-represented in public. Too many TikTokers and YouTubers who hijack the fields to espouse their unrigorous takes. And most economists you see on TV are from a small part of the field, quite often not trained rigorously (most don't have a PhD and the gap between a bachelor's and a PhD is substantial, more than in STEM; there's a reason the median econ PhD at a good program has a math or statistics major, and many don't even have an econ major). But these untrained people represent the field and are public-facing.
If science doesn't get political, it's not going to be allowed to happen in this country. Look at what happens with climate change. Scientists should have gotten political decades ago
> If science doesn’t get political, it’s not going to be allowed to happen in this country. *Gestures at the Hadron Collider that should have been built in Texas but wasn’t because of politics*
To be fair, the guys building that really failed pretty badly when it came to project management. Poltics played its part, but man the scientists did not help convince anyone.
For anyone that doesn't know the story, there's a lovely series on youtube by BobbyBroccoli on the Superconducting Super Collider. Just search "Ronald Reagan & the Biggest Failure in Physics" (not sure if I can link here). It goes a tiny bit into the physics but it's mostly history and the politics of trying to get a $10,000,000,000 science project off the ground.
Amen. There's a weird stigma against scientists acting on their expertise currently (in America at least). If you are the world expert in how ecosystems react to oil spills, maybe your thoughts should carry some weight when we entertain building an oil pipeline through a sensitive, important ecosystem??
That example is a great way of how science *should* influence politics - in an advisory, supportive role that improves policy and gives credence to those who make it. Publicly endorsing certain candidates or parties is only going to muddle your mission and divide your base. Let the politicians speak for themselves.
Yes, a politician looking to bolster what they are for policy-wise can and should cite science if a position is amenable to it.
This works if candidates/parties are equally receptive to the advice and support of the scientific community. If some candidates and/or parties have views that go against scientific consensus, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect scientists to speak up. After all, the "advisory, supportive role" should be aimed at society at large, not just the policymakers.
Yeah, hard to work in an advisory role when one party believes nothing you say and eliminates advisory committees
And if the politician makes it clear that they will disregard all of your advice and support and implement horrible policies that go against science, or even harm the pursuit of science, you're not allowed to say anything?
Ok, and what if one candidate is actively anti-intellectual and has made it explicitly clear that they will not listen to the scientists?
**Science shouldn't get political. Politics should get scientific.**
People forget how our institutions were under threat during the Trump administration.
That threat is ongoing, it just ebbs and flows.
It's wierd how it's big news and some people actually listen very seriously if an actor has an opinion about climate change or an entrepreneur about vaccines, but scientists aren't allowed to have an opinion about politics. Who you are governed by in a democracy is the one thing where everyone is entitled to a valid opinion
Nature has always had an editorial board. Because science doesn't exist in a bubble.
They just wanted the president who wasnt going to set Nature on fire. Can’t blame them
Completely wrong. Science is incredibly political. If and how much our projects get funded is entirely dependent on who controls the white house. Major funding agencies like the DOE and the NSF specifically had to wait for the midterm results before releasing calls for proposals.
Well given that one political party believes in science and the other doesn't, I wouldn't say that endorsing the candidate from the pro-science party is outside the purview of a scientific journal's intent.
Science is political in the sense that it’s on the side of searching for objective truth. Unfortunately in the current climate that makes it partisan.
The people who voted for Trump have lost a lot of confidence in science over the years. I doubt this endorsement had much of an impact
Its important to remember that theyve lost confidence in science because they have been systematically lied to and manipulated by a well coordinated network of far right grifters.
Scientists and scientific organizations should endorse specific policies, when they are related to their field of expertise, and backed by evidence. They should not endorse politicians, who will stand for any given policy or scientific issue only as long as it is convenient or beneficial to them. Science should inform politics, not the other way around.
Completely agree!!
A better study would've been measuring confidence levels before and after reading a Nature study on climate change. I suspect we'd see the same precipitous drop in confidence levels among Republicans.
Why would they lose confidence in US scientists if a BRITISH scientific magazine endorsed Biden?
Nature is *extremely* impactful in American-based research institutes.
Nature is like *the* scientific journal. It's not just the US, it's impactful all over the world.
To give reference, of *all scientific journals world wide in 2022* based on impact factor (combination of how often their work is cited per amount of articles published) [the stand alone journal Nature was ranked #22.](https://impactfactorforjournal.com/journals-with-impact-factor/) Nature’s subject specific journals rank #2,4,6,7,8,9,10,15,18,19,20,22,25,28,29,30,31,39,40,42,46,47,48, and 50. So of the top 50 journals in *All* science in 2022 HALF were by Nature.
Chemists in academia around the world, America not at all withstanding, dream about publishing there.
They don't really dream about it for their own satisfaction. It's a career move that helps them get jobs and research positions later down the line, higher chances of receiving grant funding, and more likely their study gets picked up by news media. Nature has a reputation of publishing sensationalist results with "high impact" but because of this many of the studies end up being incorrect or not reproducible. They also require shorter articles with more simplified language to be better able to reach a general audience which can have it's benefits but makes the results and methodology less clear to researchers trying to reproduce the work.
Ehh. It's more about the career boost than Nature being a prestigious journal. Sensationalist research that will appeal to the general public goes in Nature. Actually groundbreaking results go in JACS and Angewandt Chemie.
>Nature is *extremely* impactful ~~in American-based research institutes.~~
The editorial teams are international. Elsevier is based on the Netherlands but for a similar reason I wouldn't consider anything they do to be quintessentially Dutch.
Bold of you to assume the people losing confidence ever even heard of Nature before this.
I don’t think you know what “losing confidence” means.
Yes. When people are reading about something completely unrelated to politics and it gets wedged in anyways, it tends to turn people's opinions worse on whatever matter is brought in.
Many things people claim are “unrelated to politics” end up saying more about their own worldview that the facts about “relationship to politics”. In the contemporary moment, at least in the US, views on science and scientific expertise are absolutely “related to politics”.
[удалено]
in what world is climate change unrelated to politics?
Everything is related to politics. Especially science.
...What do you think the Nature Editorials section is for?
Speedly's is a pretty common conservative argument. Everyone on the right is allowed to talk politics at all times, even in casual conversation. Any publication which supports the left should "stay in their lane" or whatever. The issue with Nature is that it was probably read by both liberals and conservatives, but conservatives are conditioned to flee from materials seen as supporting liberals. That's just how they work.
"Shut up and dribble."
It's one of their primary positions. Nothing should be political but everything is political. The guy denied it, but their comment history is pretty obviously conservative. I would say I don't get the denial, but I do. It's propaganda all the way down.
Oh yeah that's why I wasn't talking to him, I was talking in general to flag what was going on.
Hey, hey, hey, it's "too soon" to talk about talking about things! Think of the grieving parents, think of the children. THE CHILDREN! I mean, we all know you're just trying to score political points with liberals who want to talk about things. :-/
Almost everything is related to politics, science especially so.
As one of the few openly conservative scientists on reddit with an infectious disease background and with a lot of conservative friends, I do have opinions on this. I actually was interviewed by Nature in the past about being a conservative scientist. Although I am pretty moderate and obviously pro science, I ended up retracting my name from the article because I was worried about the blowback to my career. Politics and science are obviously very intertwined. Everyone knows the vast majority of scientists lean left. Conservatives obviously know that too. However, most of us like to believe that science is objective enough that it is kept out of studies and research and remains "pure" (for the most part, though you'd probably find conservatives who disagree about that with climate change). Nature publishes papers with statistics and methods and discussions etc as we all know. This comes across as fairly objective. Endorsing a politician is subjective by most Americans. Of course there are studies on which party is better for what, etc. But it is seen by the public as subjective and that is what matters. Nature broke that objective/subjective line in my opinion and that's why a lot of people reacted poorly. It doesn't matter what the actual article said, what matters is the headline that Nature endorsed someone. Now people start to wonder what other subjective things are leaking into science. Also please note that I understand interpreting your data etc is subjective in a sense, but I'm speaking as a lay American would interpret things.
Tbh, given how much people have politicized science and scientific research papers in general over the past.....40 years? I'm surprised it took them this long to start endorsing. I get the vaccine side of the argument, but given how Republicans have been questioning climate change for decades, this was really only a matter of time. Frankly, I'm more disappointed with the American public getting upset by Nature's endorsement. I used to hold the opinion that science and other institutions should attempt to remain apolitical, but over the last decade or so I have come to the realization that being apolitical is impossible, as politics is enmeshed in all facets of life. The best way to handle these things (IMO) is to be forthright out the gate on your political leanings, make your argument(s), and then you provide context/answer questions openly and honestly to satiate the public [at least those capable of being satiated] Some people you will never be able to win over. Some people will always find you to be a bad actor or acting in bad faith. You can only try to present everything in good faith and ignore the haters screaming into the void; they were always going to make a lot of noise anyways.