Science Memes

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submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I appreciate the sentiment but no - in the case of hard science it shouldn't be.

Yes, BS exists everywhere, yes we all have to do it, yes yes yes but this is science. Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.

Saying "so what we all have to deal with it" is not the point. If you're talking about seminary, that's maybe closer(?) to the gist than, say, marketing. Or if you're a systems analyst for the USPS it's similar maybe. But people out in the world doing non-scientific things have already agreed long ago that it doesn't really matter what they find or how they find it (so long as it leads to more money, the only source of "truth") - science does not.

All the bullshit and pointless politics and ladders and so on she's talking about in the quote are just ways to say "money" (or "power") for science which is an anathema.

And in the social sciences, we're really fucked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

One thing is how the world is, and another is how the world should be. The person you're replying to accurately depicts how the world is as of today, but isn't saying that is how it should be, which is what you're arguing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.

I don't understand how you'd prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.

Let's say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There's only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?

Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you'll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Necessary evils, such as committee meetings, vs. runaway political madness suppressing actual work.

The former is implied by organization, the latter is more prevalent than ever in the state of modern science (because money).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Are committee meetings immune to runaway political madness? Who's on the committee? How does the committee make decisions? Can those decisions be revisited?

I'm not convinced that today's state of science is any different than in eras past, tracing all the way back to kings and wealthy patrons throwing their political and economic might behind their preferred scientific endeavors.