https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/177rsze/a_mural_in_the_science_faculty_of_my_countrys/
https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra
https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/177rsze/a_mural_in_the_science_faculty_of_my_countrys/
https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra
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It really shouldn't. We saw through the COVID vaccine hysteria just how harmful shitty science can be. A lot of people died completely preventable deaths because we live under the illusion that reason prevails under the free marketplace of ideas or some nonsense like that.
Strong disagree, given the vaccine hysteria was on the part of the deniers. The science supported and continues to support the vaccines effectiveness and safety. It's primarily people who aren't scientists and don't know how to interpret medical studies that are claiming that they are dangerous or ineffective.
Nice to meet you, I'm a medical scientist that specializes in Alzheimer's research. Absolutely none of my colleagues think vaccines are dangerous.
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Good. There isn't a single scientific organization, given the whole point of science is democratizing information research.
General populace are supposed to rely on the top researchers in their field to disseminate information. These top researchers are usually the least controversial which is why they are trusted by the (again) democratized scientific community. I'll say this because a lot of people don't realize it: if you have any controversy in your past regarding misinformation or "fixing" results, and it ever gets out, you are immediately shunned and your work will never be looked at seriously again. You will lose your job and all credibility immediately. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it is heavily discouraged.
If we want to combat misinformation we should be encouraging people to trust scientists and not get information from organizations with ulterior motives.
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I'm not saying trust any random person who calls themself a scientist. Myself included.
I'm saying people should trust reputable scientists at the top of their field. Ideally, journalists should do the leg work to identify these people and give them a voice, and describe why they should be trusted.
That doesn't happen with nearly all right-leaning journalistic publications, unfortunately, resulting in a huge population not knowing who to trust or just mistrusting scientists in general.
Edit: I realize I didn't answer your point on freedom of access. I do firmly believe all science should be accessible, because no single study should ever be taken as fact. Science works through repetition, and if you have a study that disagrees with nearly everything else then it's either a brand new way of looking at things (and will be supported in the future) or is junk (and will be ignored). But just because something is junk doesn't mean we should prevent people from accessing it.
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You're very good at putting words into people's mouths (I didn't even mention antivax theories), and that point is where I end the conversation. Good day
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Ah, yes. Good catch, I did mention that there is no scientific evidence to support any widespread negative effects of the vaccines, and there continues to not be. You're more than able to put yourself in the running for the Nobel prize for saving millions of lives by finding and publishing this evidence, though, since it seems that you're so confident in it.
I did not state that "no one credible would believe them", and your links about slavery are irrelevant because the discussion was about vaccines, not racism.
And I didn't lie. Literally none of my colleagues thinks there is any merit to antivax scaremongering.
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K
Basically it boils down to making up any bullshit excuses possible to justify
and also eugenics
That's just
but for "whites"
Race science is the science that emerged to rationalize and justify the structure of racism. It is the science that emerged to justify political race structures. Race science is what allowed black and indigenous children to be ripped away from their parents while other parents watched and participated and said "This is good".
That race science was funded by the elite or society. They extracted wealth through settler colonialism and racialized capitalism and then donated it to the universities as "philanthropy" and used their influence to direct more research into race science and other endeavors to maximize their profits.
Making research freely available is not removing all barriers to science. It is removing but one barrier to science. There are many other barriers that exist, have existed, or could exist.
In this way, saying that all barriers to science must be removed ignores the historical facts that the origins of academic science in the US are rooted almost entirely in race science. Even medical schools were locations of mass racialized atrocities where black and brown bodies were bought, imported, experimented on, killed, and desecrated in order to meet the demands of donors and chasing more endowment money. That science was used to further establish the schools' reputation and revenue streams.
Fixing this will be seen as a barrier to science, as fixing it required dismantling major portions of the socio-politico-economic structures that maintain academies of science. Reparations alone would make many scientific institutions disappear overnight.
I understand the historical context but many of us scientists strive to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Nearly every grant I apply to has a secondary version that prioritizes racially and ethnically diverse applicants. Half of articles I see published are now acknowledging the racial divide in science and striving to recruit more minority populations.
I'm applying to a federal grant now (K01) and I am required to state my strategy for ensuring representation of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in my recruitment population. I have a section of my grant discussing how the presentation of Alzheimers differs in black communities.
We definitely have more work to do, but it's not like we're pretending the racial divide doesn't exist.
That's diversity at best and tokenism at worst and has no impact on what science has inherited. Black people working on chemical warfare doesn't make it less structurally racist.
Doesn't reduce the billions of dollars current institutions have extracted by consuming black and brown bodies.
It's not a racial divide. It's a racist structure. We ARE pretending like racism doesn't exist in the way that it does but instead exists as not enough representation. Racism isn't a lack of representation. It's much much much bigger than that, and fixing it doesn't require more representation to happen first.
Intentional racism is no longer an issue due to nearly every (reputable) publication's requirement of a institutional review board. This is to prevent exactly what you describe.
Unintentional racism, yes I agree that's a problem.
But come on. We've made huge strides in this over the past few decades.
This is LAUGHABLE
You really gotta study what's been written about racism. It's not what you think it is, apparently.
Nah, we really haven't. Representation is better. White supremacy is still killing millions.
So your response is "no, u?"
I'm happy to have this conversation but you really need to contribute more. I've described numerous ways we currently combat racism in science. Would you like to provide a recent example of racist science that we can discuss?
No you didn't. You described how we currently combat bigotry in the academy and somewhat in sampling for research. If you think the 1800s isn't recent enough, then you've got a real problem. Imperialism and racism weren't built in a couple of decades, they're not going to be dismantled by asking people to identify as a goddamned racialized group. Every single time someone does a report on crime and breaks down data by race you're seeing racist social science in action. The way we do clinical trials. Decisions about what to study, like the impacts of lead, or education, or pharmaceuticals, all of it lies on top of and interpermeates racist superstructure. Recent? Forced hysterectomies. Public statements from researchers that genetics are not politically correct. Mauna Kea. Environmental impact studies in Guam. I mean, it's never ending.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting but... is your solution to ignore race and pretend it doesn't exist? That we should be ignorant of how different groups are being treated and pretend everyone is the same? I think we both agree that minorities in many countries are more likely to be poor and have lower social mobility, and so it's important to study them. As an example from my field: Alzheimer's is significantly more likely if you're a minority, especially black or hispanic, due to their reduced ability to access healthy food (food deserts) and quality healthcare due to past redlining. The only way we know this is by studying it.
That's not science, that's horrible treatment of minority groups and medical malpractice. No scientist with any degree of repute supports that shit.
I'm unfamiliar with the others: genetics being politically correct (this statement makes no sense to me), Mauna Kea, or Guam.
Mauna Kea is a sacred mountain in Hawaii that is colonized by astronomers and the proposed site of the very large 30M telescope. Indigenous Hawaiians who are illegally occupied are resisting it. Scientists are saying that they're being anti-science.
In Guam, environmental impact studies are used to justify the continued destruction of habit because the study doesn't reveal sufficient impact. This is because the definition of impact is politically motivated and informed by white supremacy.
I will try to find right-wing geneticists who go out and try to justify racism with genetics. It happens all the time. Richard Dawkins was someone who attempted to use science and neo-atheism to justify bombing brown people.
Forced hysterectomies come from the academy. They aren't merely just bad behavior, they are the legacy of eugenics and white supremacist social policies informed and crafted by the academy. You can't just stay science doesn't do anything wrong - that's a "no true Scotsman".
Just because you aren't informed of the prevailing critique of science as a continuous tool of oppression doesn't mean it's not. It just means you likely have a vested interest in not believing it. If you're not making oodles of profit from science, then your vested interest is likely your self-concept.
Thanks for the information. Each of these are indeed troubling. But I think it's disingenuous to say "science" is at fault for these. Shitty people doing shitty things for their own shitty reasons seems to be at play. Some of those reasons are for scientific funding or clout, but I think I comfortably speak for a lot of scientists when I say the scientific output is not worth it.
I think we're mainly on the same page with a lot of this, we just have different descriptions of who we think the bad guy is. My view is that humans have the capacity for great evil, especially when motivated by profit or fame, but that science itself isn't the root cause of this evil but is instead a catalyst enabling people to become famous as a result of it. It's the fame, in my opinion, that drives people to do these terrible things. Science itself doesn't really benefit, and is arguably hurt, by these actions, since there are likely other less harmful ways to research these topics.
Of course, I am biased. I have a career in science, after all. But I do genuinely believe that science does not require these terrible actions to thrive.
I think it's disingenuous to say that this is what I said. Science participates in the dominant social structure and is interpermeates the processes and structures of violent oppression.
That is an incredibly farcical representation of how liberals conceive of society. It's just not true. These are systemic and structural outcomes, not simply morally reprehensible individual choices.
Yup.
I don't believe in good and evil at all. Morality is a socially constructed technology for influencing humans. It's not real.
No one said it was.
The desecration of Mauna Kea has not made anyone famous. I dare you to name anyone involved in it without looking it up.
What an incredibly unscientific perspective.
Now you're moving way into the abstract by saying that science can be hurt. What you mean is that the process of "science" exhibits suboptimal outcomes, in part, because of things like oppression and colonization. I agree. That doesn't mean science doesn't participate in it all the same. You're crafting your worldview entirely from ideals and not actually engaging with reality.
When you say you're biased, it's really important to understand what that means. I don't think you actually mean it in the literal sense. You actually mean to say that you are "prejudiced" - meaning that you have a tendency to make judgments prematurely and stick to those judgments even in the face of evidence.
Bias is a statistical concept about outcomes. When I attempt to throw a dart at a bullseye, if my darts end up to right of the bullseye more often than not, then we can say I have a bias in my throwing behavior towards the right hand side of the dart board. What bias does your behavior exhibit, statistically? Is it that your prejudice biases your cognitive behaviors towards denying the harms of science, to fallaciously attribute harm to anything except science, to abstract science to its ideals more often than actually examine how it functions in society?
This is important, because if you think of your prejudice as bias, then you can't ever examine what your actual bias is. Own that you're prejudiced. It's fine. We all have prejudices. I am prejudiced towards believing people who self-identify as communists have a better grasp of history and of dialectics. I am often wrong, but I still judge prematurely. My biases are fundamentally different than my prejudices. My network is biased towards white suburban men. My work is biased towards tech work. My friend-set is biased towards people who are often late to social events.
So, what is your prejudice, and what bias does it cause in your behavior?
Be scientific about this.
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