It is completely inexcusable that people in STEM fields are so reactionary, considering how capitalism utterly destroys science.
If universities were actually "left wing indoctrination factories" like the right thinks they are, every STEM grad would be taught, for example, what Kropotkin had to say about innovation.
idk man like theres a lot of people on the left that are anti-science and dont read scientific papers. there are leftists that are anti-nuclear, anti-vax, anti-gmo, anti-cultured meat, etc.
people will legitimately call you evil for advancing human knowledge and these nutjobs are one of the first things you come across when coming to the left. its a turnoff. i also do think it depends on the field. the majority however i think are socdems and see a lot of lefties as anti-science loons.
source: i do the sciences
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GMO good, Monsanto bad
nuclear is going to transition to fusion rather than fission over the next century. funding for it is of critical importance. the fuel is salt water for fusion and will produce so much energy we will have no clue what to do with it all. its important to fund fission as a stopgap till we get fusion in order to build expertise on nuclear energy.
Looking back at human history, odds are good that we will use it to kill each other.
i'm talking billions of years of renewability here lol. the whole point of fusion is we're basically creating a tiny sun that we can just feed energy in and get double out of it.
Lol yeah I know. Fusion is going to be great when it happens.
It really depends on the field. Conservation Biology or any other environmental aligned field can be pretty radical.
yeah, forgot to mention that. a lot of the bio/chem people that arent oil ghouls are pretty lit.
A shame, really.
yep. its a thing that frustrates me to no end. i try to educate them, show them papers and statistics, but they're in a damn cult.
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Dogmatist do this, I guess. Become anti-science, that is, because they're worried that it'll taint their sacred knowledge from the one guy or book. J. Moufawad-Paul talks about it with Breht of Rev Left Radio in their episode on Moufawad-Paul's book.
I'm not saying the people you are referring to are these types but the behavior seems similar. That or it's similar to the anti-intellectual behavior on the right. Fear of the unknown maybe?
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they're in this thread so idk how true that is.
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yeah idk if its just my geographic location or what but all the physics people i know are chill
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The Sunrise Movement is officially agnostic on nuclear and de facto hostile. That's actually an extremely worrying stance.
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Biden's plan also leans heavily into nuclear, thankfully
Being against cultured meat isn't anti-science, it's anti-pointless-effort. We have all the necessary technology to not consume meat (and thereby not consume all the resources breeding animals just to kill them requires).
Cultured meat isn't factory farming. Its growing meat using cells, a process that involves no animals being harmed at all.
Yeah, I know what it is. We already have the ability to not eat meat, so why should we waste all this scientific effort on creating it without an animal involved (oops, except the animal you need to yank the stem cells out of)?
the only one of those things thats "nutjob" territory is being antivaccine, and i have literally never met an antivax leftist.
nuclear, gmo, and meat cultures are all things the world could do just fine without, so having discourse about their value makes sense.
so why are you being a wonk about it? because you dont like that other people dislike:
promoting eating meat when theyve been trying to stop people from doing that for ages, and they feel that taking stem cells is also a violation of an animals rights or whatever (i dont find this a compelling argument so forgive me if its presented poorly)
the idea of having a superfund site in their backyard and consequently think other energy solutions are better, because contrary to what you believe, nuclear waste will never all be contained to a single site the size of a football field (hi, this me. barring massive advances in fusion tech, nuclear will always have issues that i refuse to agree with)
the idea of monsanto brand seed cultures that destroy crop diversity getting a pass because youre busy patting yourself on the back about modifying gene structures to increase grain output (i can see the point here, but it comes down to capitalism doing it wrong tbh, so is there anyone that actually feels this way?)
?
tldr; there are valid criticisms of those things, other people also do sciences and disagree with you on some topics. learn to discuss that without calling other leftists nutjobs or :cope:
you can argue that we could do just fine without them, but you could argue that we could do just fine without medicine, vaccines, advanced agriculture, and so on.
and no, they are definitely nutjobs. those things will make life better for humans everywhere, unequivocally.
do fine without medicine or agriculture? lololol okay. but no. no "we," as in a modern society, could not.
apparently im a nutjob for not wanting to live in another town with nuclear waste seeping into its water table. because it would just be so much better if i did. 🙄
:O great argument bro do you have any papers on how widespread this is vs. the disruption of other energy methods.
great argument bro, hows that fukushima daiichi treating you?
omg i list one failure and apparently that reports a systemic issue with all nuclear plants i am a very smart nutjob that doesnt understand science. christ, this is exactly the issue im talking about. i'm tired of dealing with you people.
whaa whaa. i dont like that my nuclear do a whoopsie you cant bring that up you nutjob!
fuck off. did you miss the part where i lived in a town with nuclear waste seeping into the water table you absolute twit?
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yeah and people in my family have died mining rare earth materials, what is your fucking point??? energy creation is bound to have death. nuclear minimizes it.
You do realise that producing solar panels and wind turbines creates orders of magnitude more toxic waste than a nuclear power plant, right? Before involving any batteries.
lets also talk about that the official quote for fukushima is 0 dead and 40-50 injured. good luck getting those stats in lithium and rare earth mining.
0? check again. some two thousand died in the evacuation
ok so lets assume the worst, then. the biggest, worst, estimate is 60k deaths from anything related to nuclear, including low level poisoning and stress, which means you lived pretty long but it was cut short by the sickness. we have had nuclear technology for around 80 years. if you include the stats from old-gen nuclear reactors like chernobyl, it is slightly worse than wind, but not as bad as solar. if you consider only the newest gen reactors and technology, it beats out every other energy source. in fact, latest gen nuclear reactors have roughly half the death rate of wind. here's a simple, noncomprehensive diagram from forbes: https://i.imgur.com/4LXeCFD.png.
of course, you could argue that 'oh, since these are new they havent had a long enough time to fail'. actually, there have been dozens of failures of new gen reactors and there are lots of them. however, we have gotten really smart about how reactors fail and when they do they don't hurt people.
do go on about how drinking nuclear waste is super great for my health. by comparison or whatever. maybe with batteries even. such a compelling argument.
im sure those wind turbine blades are just awful. so many tonnes of fiberglass. oh no.
Ideed. Five tonnes of fiberglass that contains water-soluble epoxy that cannot be recycled per blade. All to produce 0.3 MW of power and be thrown away after 20 years.
Compare to a depleted uranium fuel bundle, that weights ~100 tons, produces over 3000 MW of power and lasts around 7 years before it needs to be reprocessed. Because yes, unlike turbine blades, it's recyclable.
neat. wind turbine blade technology can certainly be improved and made less wasteful. nuclear, baring significant advancements in fusion tech, will always pose a serious danger because its waste products will kill you.
but no really do go on acting like im unaware, or that i even advocated for wind tech in the first place.
I'm sorry? It was you who brought up the wind turbines.
Your 'technology will fix it' argument is ridiculous, you're pitting toxic plastic recycling technology that doesn't exist against toxic uranium reprocessing technology that has existed for decades (though unprofitable) and needs a scale *500 times smaller..
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with the exception of nuclear waste always being bad, because tainted water tables suck yall, i didnt say that at all.
and even then, i absolutely look forward to fusion tech finally being figured out, assuming we all make it another decade or two, given recent promising things along that front.
im a big fan of both lab grown meat and gmo technology, in premise. so no. inherently bad? not at all.
i dislike these assholes trying to "muh science" the discourse about problematic aspects of things away, and pretending any dissenters are "nutjobs" who hate science