Science Memes

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Frog's Gift (mander.xyz)

submitted 7 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.

Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about”

But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits

The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago

Take literally any scientific idea and you can easily imagine a conservative mocking it.

"They want to male a huge bomb, sit on it, and go to space!"

"They're looking at mold from their days old sandwiches and call it science!"

I tried googling whether penicillin was mocked "pencillin was mocked as stupid" just out of interest. The third result (or first after "people also ask") on Google, The Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats

Around and around and around

[–] [email protected] 55 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It's an even more fundamental conservative tactic. What they do is find a single example of something they think they can easily deride and hold it up as representative of that entire thing. Think welfare, immigration, criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender identity, and much more. Right wing media is full of single cases they beat into their viewerships' minds while ignoring all other cases

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 hours ago

I heard the explanation "conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result".

If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.

But if it's about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to "prove" that it's bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).