Posted on 02/11/2014 12:59:13 AM PST by neverdem
Sadly, this is but one of the fronts where we are being attacked.
Look no further than "gay rights" and the media blitz behind it to understand that the dissolution of the family is their real target.
Using science to denigrate and diminish the influence of the church is yet another front. The power of the state is being used to crush the "Little Sisters of the Poor" and the media is mum.
Abortion is the "sacrament" of all that's evil in this culture of death. Its the power of God and family that they most fear and it is these institutions they attack most ferociuosly.
Honor, integrity, valor are ridiculed and the only allowable heroes are anti-heroes; pigs and prostitutes.
Escape isn't an option.
“She was going on about how winter is “becoming extinct”. I’d just read that Quadrant piece. I politely said “gee I hope you’re wrong”.”
I am not so polite and would have said something to the effect of “Gee, how long have they been letting idiots into Yale?” Being polite to these people is counterproductive. It reinforces confidence in their opinions. Challenging them likely wont help but MAY lead them to examine their beliefs (yeah right). Indoctrination and peer pressure are powerful things. So is public ridicule.
Bump for later
“...there not just good people and good scientists who have allowed themselves to be taken in by this, but science in general.”
“Good scientists” by definition are driven to critically examine data and their own biases. They are much less likely to be taken in by a trendy theory that goes against what is clearly observable. For example, I once had a Nobel Prize winner in Physics publicly challenge some data I was presenting on an organism that could metabolize and grow on a certain pollutant. He claimed to have done the calculations and that it was impossible. All the control experiments and other clear evidence did not disuade him. We agreed to disagree. Several years later he admitted he was wrong. The point is when reality flies in the face of your calculations, a good scientist re-examines his calculations and premises.
Science is still respected and based in truth, reality and practicality.
On any given day there are millions of activities involving professional and academic science but the ones that make the news are the rare breakthroughs that are approved for release or the politicized nonsense that give a bad name to the scientific field.
I understand what you mean, and agree.
I think what I was driving at, poorly, was that not all those people are evil...many are simply flawed and were taken in by money, power and influence.
Many citizens were simply trusting and didn’t want to examine it for themselves.
We’ve always been at war with EastAsia.
Keep in mind that what you are describing is a symptom of the toolkit of Leftism. Call it Alinsky’s Rules if you like, but they’ve been used by communists going back at least to the French Revolution.
The Left started out attacking the funding of many in the basic sciences. The “science” didn’t matter, but the funding did. Corporate funding of basic scientific research, of the kind done pre-FDR, pre-progressivism in America, drove some of the most innovative products. The Left cannot have private success. It stinks of private property, thinking for one’s self, and the persistent liberty of a free mind. They loathe that.
So the funding, for the most “important” things, couldn’t come from private action. It needed public action. It needed government to remove the taint of bias.
Well, here we are.
Yep. I tell ya, as time passes, 1984 is looking less like fiction and more like a prediction.
Yes. Well put.
Well, it is what they are doing with Health Care. Destroying it so government can be the savior.
I knew what the answers were “supposed” to be, but I dutifully did the experiment as designed and was not surprised to have some data points that didn’t perfectly fit the expected curve. Other students, who knew what the outcome was supposed to be, faked their data, so that it would exactly match the acceleration curve. To my surprise, they got better grades because they had the “right” data. The teacher was apparently too stupid to understand concepts like experimental error. He rewarded students who lied to make their “data” fit.
I wonder how much of that went on in other schools across the country. I wonder how often that still happens today in schools and in real laboratories.
In the real world, we working scientists are highly suspicious when we see perfect data. The other day, one of my colleagues found data he thought too perfect, and called everyone over to look and laugh at it.
Back in grad school, when my mentor asked me to produce a figure for an important publication, I made two pictures of my experimental result. One picture was almost perfect, the other was full of background. He chose the "ugly" picture for the publication, because it was what anyone following our protocol would probably see. I didn't cheat to get the perfect picture, I just decreased the exposure time, which minimized the visibility of the background.
Bm
Coffee is good for you. Coffee is bad for you. Repeat cycle.
I think part of what drives that dynamic is that people want magic bullets. To be healthy, you must eat a balanced diet and exercise. But that is hard work, and too many people want an easy answer that bypasses the work. It would be wonderful if there were one magic vitamin which would guarantee perfect health if you eat it by the handful--but there isn't. It would be fantastic if obesity were really caused by consumption of one "bad" food, so that anyone wanting to avoid weight gain or lose weight would have but to avoid that one food and the pounds would evaporate. But the reality is that whether you eat that "bad" food or not--if you never drink a drop of soda, the current villain--you will not stay thin on a 5,000 calorie diet (unless you are an athlete).
P.S. Coffee is a gift from God. Enjoy it!
Perhaps one of the hardest skills to learn as a scientist is that of being able to let go of a bias when the data does not support it. I think that skill is in short supply--heaven knows, most of our politicians utterly lack it, as evidenced by the strong push towards socialized medicine, despite decades of experience in many countries showing it does not work.
While scientists are often criticized for using "hedge" words and never just stating something outright, that speech habit is the mark of a well-trained scientist, one who knows that future data might invalidate his or her current opinion.
Indeed. However, too many people—probably a small percentage’ but too many nonetheless—paint us all with the same broad brush.
Anyone who has ever sought medical care and been cured of something that was a big killer in ages past—like a bacterial infection—should thank scientists. Without multitudes of scientists barricading themselves in their labs for hours at a time, never seeing sunlight, working doggedly on a single problem for decades, we would not have those cures.
I could say similar things about scientists in other fields, but I am admittedly biased towards the medical sciences.
So is Salvation. Choose it!
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