Posted on 03/29/2012 8:48:53 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Conservatives, particularly those with college educations, have become dramatically more skeptical of science over the past four decades, according to a study published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. Fewer than 35 percent of conservatives say they have a "great deal" of trust in the scientific community now, compared to nearly half in 1974.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I’m not half so skeptical about science as I am of lying scientists.
I always thought skepticism and science were synonymous.
If you have to “trust,” then whatever it is, it ain’t science. Science is a procedure for identifying truth by experiment. If there’s not an experiment, with clear results, that’s repeatable by any researcher, the information is “religion” or “fiction,” not science.
Where do you go from there?
AGW ping?
pseudo-science is not science
We don't trust newspapers or the MSM either. Same reasons.
Spot on! The research that private industry does is self funded and for private use. Think car companies, aircraft pharma, etc. The value they seek in science has to be right and can't be faked. They can't afford the dissasters that falsified science could bring.
Compare that with "knowledge" science (science not tied to production). Now suddenly mild alcohol use by heart attack patients can be beneficial and extend life according to one study. What?
“Spare me your moral scruples. This is superb physics.” —Tony Shalub as Enrico Fermi, “Day One”, about the building of the atomic bomb.
I trust science. I don’t trust political ‘science.’ I have two degrees. Give me the data and I’ll draw my own conclusions.
Put more accurately, “Science whose conclusions are driven by political ideology is not science.” Hence, science education has come to be viewed as an information agency of government (that is, an information agency serving the interests of government officials and bureaucrats).
Hence the need for the separation of School and State.
They’re at it again Beep.
[ “Science whose conclusions are driven by political ideology is not science.” ]
Science is sometimes science fiction.. always has been..
Science fiction MUST be logical or whats the point of it..
Reality need not be logical at all.. Nothing to prove.. No agenda.. It just “is”..
Example: Intelligent life or any life at all on other planets has not a scintilla of evidence.. Yet its cute to believe that.. That is science fiction.. Many believe that as strongly as some believe there is a God.. Which is also unproven.. People believe what they want to believe facts have nothing at all to do with it..
The operative question is: What do you know? AND how sure are you that you know it?..
Off topic here, but it has been fun to listen to the DOJ Solicitors attempt to square Tyrannical Obamacare with a Constitution premised on enumerated powers and Natural Rights. Everyone knows that Wickard/Filburn was nonsense yet feel the deception must continue. It's as if an engineer was told to start with F=MV and go from there.
Surely, we must think unreliable any government funded university study not connected to national defense. And any others at least under suspicion.
Government Science must be understood not to serve the interest of Science, but to serve the interest of Government (that is the interest of elected officials and bureaucrats).
I would say so . . . yes.
Because there's little risk of exposure that one is lying. At least not from like-minded colleagues and politicized grant-making institutions. The assumption is always that a scientist is acting in good faith.
Only rarely do we see a scientific theory blow up in public, as has happened with AGW. It was a most instructive experience: "evidence" tampered with, misrepresented, even manufactured, all to support what boils down to an ideological presupposition, that Man is the Problem....
Anyhoot, it seems to me the problem is not with science per se; it is with a certain type of scientist — the ideologically-driven type, for whom "the end justifies the means." It should be clear that genuine science cannot be done at all, by a person with that expectation....
Thanks so much, PeterPrinciple, for that great anecdote!
I have faith in science, I don’t have faith in folks who manipulate variables to get predetermined outcomes and try to call it Science.
Shades of Ayn Rand! Two main characters in her seminal novel (Dr. Floyd Ferris & Dr. Robert Stadler) are a precise summation of what you are describing on this thread. Over fifty years ago this remarkable woman laid out for us, in astonishing detail, precisely what is happening today. She did not, in any fashion, subscribe to the idea of a Creator or a Creation (the Christian philosophy of Creationism, with which our protagonists seek to slander us by misrepresentations, rather than engage in reputable debate), yet in terms of the ideas contained in The Declaration and The Constitution, the concepts of liberty, of free enterprise, of free inquiry, of all the political ideas we hold dear, no material difference can be discerned between the two of you.
This is interesting, but it’s not clear to me what this means, perhaps other than that intellectual rigor and integrity are ecumenical.
Thanks for the beep. Always interesting.
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