The fact that epistemology, formal logic , and philosophy of science aren't part of curricula is staggering to me.
An educated populace goes against the wishes of our masters. Nothing surprises me when being left out of schools anymore.
With so many people believing the most ridiculous propaganda discrediting the scientific system; the thought of trying to explain to average people the many real problems of the scientific system gives me anxiety.
And I'm not talking about Joe Mike Billy Bob don't wanting to wear a mask, I'm talking about middle class people screeching maniatically the moment you mention, for example, "yo, this deforestation thing, is bad you know; maybe we should rethink what and why we produce, that's what the smart people say".
But yeah, of course, inside leftist spaces we should do it.
you're right, when coming to people they'll immediately think you're a liberal trying to wokescold them into "believing in the FACTS ™️ ", i'd imagine it's pretty hard to get an in there
also maniatically lol
leftists that diss nuclear really grind my gears. nuclear has the best outlook in terms of resource consumption. its mostly concrete. shit like solar, wind, etc. require a fuckton of rare earth materials, battery storage, and land use (and thusly: habitat destruction). they also produce a lot of carbon emissions to create, and require more labor. look at france and sweden. they are the most carbon friendly, fully industrialized nations and they use nuclear extensively. china has been very wise to invest heavily in nuclear too. look at their roadmaps. theyre hoping to quadruple their already solid nuclear production.
lets also talk about imperialism. rare earth materials are commonly found in the global south. bolivia had a regime change over lithium. choosing nuclear is very important to the global south's independent development.
It's been years since I've learned this, so I don't know how valid it is in the proper context, but from what I remember mining uranium is incredibly destructive and poisonous for the immediate environment, and for those working those mines.
If someone who knows more about the actual mining can shed more light on this, I'd appreciate it, since this is basically the only holdout I have for not embracing nuclear fully. I do know that the energy density is off the charts, but is it enough to make the mining impact less than, say, solar?
Also someone please finally confirm whether or not thorium is viable or just a meme.
Uranium mining, like all mining is harmful and destructive. That said most uranium comes from relatively first world nations and is regulated to the teeth ( because of the potential for weapons- grade material to be made). Advanced in ventilation, and the switch to mining ore robotically has rendered extraction relatively safe. Importantly, uranium ore is not smelted ( I'll come back to this later). Old uranium mines, like a lot of old mines, are environmental disaster areas that need to be cleaned up.
By contrast, precious metals, especially cobalt, come from third world countries (mostly africa) that don't have functioning governments. Mines are run by thugs among populations so desperately poor that families send their kids to work in mines. This is just the form of modern slavery . The materials to make your phone or device came from these mines. These are the same materials whose production needs to be increased to increase production of wind, solar, electric cars, etc.
Precious metals, copper, lead/zinc and many other metals, in existing mining districts are smelted. (Hydrometallurgy is an improvement and is being practiced extensively in some mining areas). Smelting is responsible for most of the world's most polluted places, and it's responsible (at least it used to be) the largest share of greenhouse emissions. These places are sometimes in regions among some of the world's poorest populations.
As far as I can find, what a mine is mining has very little to do with its environmental/safety impact. The literature focuses on style of mine (pit, shaft, whatever) and almost never mentions the actual product. I guess intuitively, any random chunk of rock is going to have a whole bunch of different stuff in it, some of it poisonous, and what you intend to keep doesn't affect what's down there.
Thorium is conceptually viable and should be researched, but is not even close to being ready for the kind of mass deployment needed to be relevant for dealing with climate change. Basically anyone who's trying to pitch a reactor idea that isn't "copy a recent safe reactor ad nauseum" has accidentally fell for someone or another's marketing pitch.
thorium is viable and far more common its just not a ton of research on it because the field is focusing more on fusion for its new research
Except building nuclear plants is extremely expensive and far too long term for the US to stick through for several administrations.
i literally date a nuclear physicist. you are wrong. only wind beats out nuclear, and that isnt a global, reliable solution. solar also produces 50% more carbon. you must also consider the cost of transferring energy from region to region: there is a reason why solar isn't powering everything right now and the optimal spots are rare to find. the lack of nuclear power is mostly due to social pressure.
Okay. Maybe your nuclear physicist boyfriend is slightly biased in the nuclear vs renewables argument.
Because it's widely agreed upon and demonstrated throughout the past few decades how prohibitively expensive building and maintaining nuclear plants is. That's why we don't do it.
continue with your capitalist arguments of 'cost'. the human cost of replacing an entire infrastructure worth of solar panels will be more than nuclear.
We are not arguing among each other on how to use our money. I would not argue cost with you if that was what we were discussing, obviously.
This isn't an idealistic argument though, it's one of reality and current policies.
People, as in the government and the people who support certain policies, do not justify the insane expense and long term effort of nuclear for a system that in the minds of many can fail and harm millions. Versus actual renewable energy and investing into developing renewable technology.
You can be right in theory that a full dedication to development of nuclear power over 30 years would be better, but there are many arguments like that to be made that are detached from reality. China could do that, Russia is doing that. The US cannot with our constant trade between parties in power and lack of political will to continue the projects of past administrations that combat climate disaster.
It's not cost, it's political will (essentially, overcoming fear).
It's both. There is valid fear about producing nuclear waste given human propensity to using it for war and tendency to fuck up and kill a lot of people on accident.
its mostly concrete.
Which has an enormous carbon footprint. Mining nuclear fuel is also pretty bad in terms off land use and habitat destruction. The bulk of uranium mining is done in Kazakhstan, mostly through hydraulic fracturing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_leach). I'm not necessarily against nuclear as part of an energy mixture that gets away from fossil fuels, but it's still just one shitty option among many.
Solar is 50% worse than nuclear for lifetime CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour. Nuclear and wind tie for the best.
Obviously, not all countries can use wind. You can find the academic sources by googling their images. Hydroelectric is also good but that comes with its own problems. You're severely underestimating the amount of solar panels needed and the amount of mining that will require in comparison to even just uranium. You don't need a huge supply of uranium to accomplish a decade's worth of energy production. Thorium and other reactants are better because we accidentally dig that stuff up all the time, so it requires less concerted mining.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/04/nuclear-energy-is-50-better-than-solar-for-lifetime-co2-emissions.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/WNA/Publications/Working_Group_Reports/comparison_of_lifecycle.pdf
for reference on wind: https://globalwindatlas.info/
The United States is a good candidate for wind generation but there are still industrial hurdles there. You need an average wind speed greater than 7.5 m/s in order to export energy, lets also not forget that it takes significant amounts of energy to transfer electricity from one region to another. When you take this into account, the only sensible options are Wind, Hydroelectric, and Nuclear, with Hydroelectric and Nuclear being the top choices by a long shot. However, due to the fact that hydro is very environment damaging, you are confined to Wind and Nuclear, with nuclear being the bulk. Wind typically only works in currently well developed nations, unfortunately, so many of developing nations are going to be shoehorned into relying on the west for solar panel imports or learning nuclear tech from China for green alternatives. With the first option, you might as well laugh it off. It means nuclear is the only way forward and it would be wise to focus all our efforts on it in order to make development easier for the global south.
France has soldiers in Niger to protect their uranium mines, and they invaded Mali because the rebels were a threat to that.
I dont know if nuclear is ultimately better than the rest, but it's not clear cut like people make it out to be. It uses resources you have to dig out of the ground, it has high startup costs, it produces waste, and you have to be absolutely diligent about maintenance throughout the entirety of its lifespan.
Again maybe it edges out the alternatives, but only by a bit. I still think wind, solar, and hydroelectric should be the main focus of investment
no, nuclear is significantly better. uranium isnt the best fuel for anti-imperialism obviously, its used to create bombs and is rarer. i dont have my sources on me rn but if i remember to get back to you i will lmao
I remember back in grade school the old beatup textbooks would have a chapter, then a section of questions after the chapter. One of the subsections was labeled, "critical thinking" We used to skip that one because those took to long and we had something else to do after.
I think the issue isn't scientific literacy. We have as Americans, been intentionally denied education and fundamental skills for evaluating the world. Cause we don't just misunderstand science we are kinda shit at everything. I tried fucking with the "Rationalist' movement and they had some good ideas but it is a crypto libertarian thing out of silicon valley so that doesn't really help. There is also the fact that people don't live in a logical world so developing skills related to scientific understanding doesn't help them understand it. If science says X and the government does Y the absurdity of it breaks a persons ability to rationalize you know.
So, here is my plan. Make DnD a part of high school curriculum. It is only in the relm of pure creative imagination that people have the ability to try making logical choices in this life. So, to develop that skill to use in life, they need to practice living outside reality to create a lens to view reality from. Replace government/econ in 8th grade with creative writing and improv theater.
i got a bachelors degree in the sciences but instead of pursuing research and grad school i immediately left that field after graduation for working in the arts. my reasoning was actually pretty similar to what you describe here. i went through a "skeptic"/new atheist/rationalist phase, tried to go deep into understanding the epistimological biases of my particular field of study, and eventually felt like the issues were more cultural than knowledge/fact-based. that's not to say we don't need a huge revamp of how we teach critical thinking and the scientific method in the USA- we definitely do! but after i graduated i felt I could have more impact in changing circumstances via fostering the creative imagination in the cultural sphere rather than siloed into some extremely specific research within an institution.
10ish years later, the jury is still out on whether that was a sound decision (lol). if I had stayed in that field I would probably be either a highly paid data scientist or an extremely low paid academic researcher. i've done a lot of cool things since within arts/culture but there's maybe even larger issues in promoting creative pedagogy/thinking in the USA compared to scientific literacy.
That's rad, and I am pleased I hit on a element of truth with my idea. I did the opposite. I was going for sociology until I discovered all the questions were answered people just don't want to do them. Now, I am trying to go for nursing.
I am really curious, do you feel comfortable sharing any of your work or your methodology?
By stripping economics of its scientific acumen.
The Financial Crisis resulted in a lot of scientific scepticism.
Liberal arts education and getting the academic institutions to quit hiring administrators in lieu on tenured faculty and relying on grade inflation for matriculation.
Just means that scientists learn how to actually communicate rather than dig themselves into a jargon-hole of isolation. Also means that arts/communications people are introduced to scientific inquiry and how we did things like convince ourselves the world isn't flat. It makes me sad that you've only heard it in a derogatory way.
Yes that's pretty much what it means. The idea is you're educating for the sake of education rather than for vocation.
I think more than anything we're working against the idea that humans today are inherently antagonistic and different from each other, and unfortunately racial "sciences" have hard a long lasting impact on the American and European people as a whole. Our mission is dispelling those myths, because otherwise we'll always be fighting a losing battle
What is racial "sciences"? Are you talking about sociology? Because that is not science. I'm not saying it's not a valuable line of inquiry, it's just that sociologists famously don't apply the scientific method. The resulting reproducibility problem is the outcome of that.
Moreso referring to stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
This is wholesale rejected by scientists. This is not to say that a fascist couldn't elevate some fringe dingbat. But it still doesn't make the dingbat a scientist.
Oh I totally agree. But if you poll Americans, you're going to find that "scientific" racism has had a large scale impact on the way Americans look at race. There are many myths that exist from these fascistic pseudoscience peddlers that still permeate over a century later
I've read a bunch of scientific papers, and I don't really get the issue with being concerned about potentially putting mentally-affecting chemicals in the drinking water? It feels really naive to just be fine with setting that precedent.
I mean, yes, but I think there's a difference between literally just food and actual mood stabilizers. Like, have you ever been on mood stabilizers? It's not like they're just a happy pill (which I still wouldn't be ok with) they do exactly what they say they do, they stabilize your mood, highs and lows. When you don't have bipolar disorder or something similar that just sucks because it just makes everything duller.
I'm very skeptical of that and would like to see the results replicated under controlled conditions, tbh. But I will grant that if that is the case then it's less bad, but I'm still extremely not hot on the idea of putting shit into the drinking water when we don't even understand how it functions. Like, psychiatry is still practically at a fuckin plague doctor level of understanding of how everything works, that's really not the time to start getting ambitious and putting shit in the water supply. It's arrogant, frankly.
I'm aware of that, that doesn't mean I'm actually in favor of the idea of fortifying it. Very keen difference between fluoridation, which to my understanding we actually understand the function of, and dumping mood stabilizers that we do not understand in any sense into the water supply.
I don't just mean understanding the effects, I mean understanding the mechanism. There's a pretty real difference there, I think.
Decolonise DNA Day
Does this mean "stop acting like race science is real, you stupid fucks" day?
That paragraph talks about dispelling ideas of race science, so it's at least part of the equation which is good.
You might enjoy this:
https://monthlyreview.org/2016/11/01/revolutionary-biology/
I think the biggest problem with science literacy on the left is, when there's a scientific idea that is applied by neoliberals in a western chauvinist, colonialist way, leftists tend to dismiss the science completely.
My biggest recent example of this is discussion of overpopulation. Yes ecosystems have carrying capacities. Yes we live in an ecosystem. But somehow because the way overpopulation is dealt with by neoliberal NGOs like the Gates Foundation (as in going to Africa and giving out birth control and abortions or whatever), it's a fake thing that doesn't exist.
