https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/177rsze/a_mural_in_the_science_faculty_of_my_countrys/
https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra
Uhhhh, the dominant historical source of academy science is race science. We require many barriers to science because science has historically been completely entrenched in oppression and it hasn't really ever stopped
i believe this is addressed somewhere on the scihub website. racial hatred and bigotry is a barrier to science. the founder of scihub is a communist
I agree with the sentiment in the context of it being a file sharing site for academic texts but it's not worded so well barriers in the way of science could also include ethical concerns to certain kinds of experiment
Racial hatred and bigotry are individualistic barriers to science.
Racialized capitalism is the foundation of the modern university. Harvard resisted getting rid of its slaves and when they did they bought and sold people in the Caribbean outside of the reach of US law. Disgustingly high numbers of medical schools were built on the basis of dissecting and experimenting on black and indigenous people.
Most ivy league schools still have the remains of scores of black and indigenous people in their museums, their libraries, and even their classrooms. Entire skeletons of enslaved people were prepared for classroom demonstrations and used in contemporary memory!
The money for these universities came from the slave trade and from slave labor. The schools themselves were often built with slave labor. The patrons of the university funded race science to justify the structures of racism.
It has nothing to do with racial hatred and bigotry.
The structural racism funded the creation and expansion of universities. MIT would not exist if it weren't for the need for textile producers to build machines to make more money so the money that got poured into MIT was the money that was extracted from slave labor picking cotton.
Undoing this harm and bringing about justice through reparations is going to really undermine university endowments. It's going to require removing names of buildings, dishonoring scientific "heroes", and preventing it from happening again is going to be seen as barriers to science.
Either way, even shitty science should be freely accessible so your point doesn't make any sense.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Can you explain what you mean about historical race science? I've never heard of it.
Basically it boils down to making up any bullshit excuses possible to justify
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.
Nearly every grant I apply to has a secondary version that prioritizes racially and ethnically diverse applicants
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.
Half of articles I see published are now acknowledging the racial divide in science and striving to recruit more minority populations.
Doesn't reduce the billions of dollars current institutions have extracted by consuming black and brown bodies.
We definitely have more work to do, but it’s not like we’re pretending the racial divide doesn’t exist.
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.
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.
This is LAUGHABLE
Unintentional racism, yes I agree that’s a problem.
You really gotta study what's been written about racism. It's not what you think it is, apparently.
But come on. We’ve made huge strides in this over the past few decades.
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?
I’ve described numerous ways we currently combat racism in science.
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.
Every single time someone does a report on crime and breaks down data by race you’re seeing racist social science in action
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.
Forced hysterectomies
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.
But I think it’s disingenuous to say “science” is at fault for these
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.
Shitty people doing shitty things for their own shitty reasons seems to be at play.
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.
we just have different descriptions of who we think the bad guy is
Yup.
My view is that humans have the capacity for great evil
I don't believe in good and evil at all. Morality is a socially constructed technology for influencing humans. It's not real.
science itself isn’t the root cause of this evil
No one said it was.
is instead a catalyst enabling people to become famous as a result of it
The desecration of Mauna Kea has not made anyone famous. I dare you to name anyone involved in it without looking it up.
It’s the fame, in my opinion, that drives people to do these terrible things
What an incredibly unscientific perspective.
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.
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.
Of course, I am biased. I have a career in science, after all
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.
you are literally responding to a scihub post. the founder of scihub is a communist. the founders of lemmy are communist. you are a star trek fan. it was made by A COMMUNIST.
what is going on in your brain?
I'm very aware of the history of race science. Tell me what that has to do with physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and exactly why we should "require many barriers to science" today because the already thoroughly refuted race science existed? Because that is what the other commenter stated.
Race science is just an example of how academic science hasn't always acted responsibly. research should and is subject to ethical considerations and responsible inovation meaning that science should be done in the public interest
it would be science to create a new hyper infectious strain of smallpox and there should be barriers to stop someone doing that
There are ethical barriers to stop those kind of things. Militaries are going to ignore those ethical considerations, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. There was tremendous outcry when irresponsible researchers in China genetically modified fetuses in hopes of making them immune to HIV, without any consideration for the ethics of the situation.
Is academic ethics perfect? Of course not. But it exists and I don't see any proposals for a better system.
It's not different from the abortion debate. Abortion is already regulated quite well by medical ethics. Will that prevent 100% of morally reprehensible situations from occurring? Of course not. But that does not mean we need additional legal regulation (which wouldn't prevent, but only punish anyway.)
There is already effort to improve the racist, sexist barriers to performing academic science and to call out questionable science (particularly medical science, which is probably the worst offender for perpetuating racist and sexist science right now). Those efforts are precisely why we're seeing such a backlash from the white supremacists these days. Just look at what they're targeting - critical race theory and intersectional feminism. Those are academic corrections to academic problems.
I know there are barriers to unethical research I am in favour of those barriers.
"requires many barriers to science"
That's a literal word for word quote from the comment I was originally replying to. I didn't exaggerate anything.
Is someone still publishing caliper head measurements in 2023 that you're aware of? No. Just like no one is publishing flat earth "studies" even though some idiot members of the public think that's fun right now. And no one is publishing about the aether. Who is the arbiter of what compromises junk science, if not the scientific community? The founder of SciHub is a communist. Release all the science.
No more than you're suggesting that there are racist astronomy studies being published, even though I could choose to disingenuously represent your position with that statement.
Racist studies need to be refuted. It's not that hard. Restricting access to all science (which I see you now notice is what that other commenter was suggesting) isn't going to magically stop racist studies from being published.
And again, who are you suggesting should be the arbiter?
I've said exactly what I think. The scientific community is the arbiter, as it is now.
You have utterly no idea what's even present in scientific publications. Antivax and climate change denialism are not rampant in published science. They're rampant amongst ignorant members of the public. That's not even remotely the fault of science.
And here's a summary of the current state of race science:
"Race does not stand up scientifically, period."
https://www.scribd.com/article/350285350/What-Both-The-Left-And-Right-Get-Wrong-About-Race
It's not never ending. We're very critical of the racism and sexism in medical research. And the younger generations of doctors are far more aware of it.
We used to butcher women in radical mastectomy surgeries and we don't do that anymore. We used to do medical experiments on black Americans without telling them and we don't do that anymore. For everything that you can point to as a current problem, I can point to another thing that used to be a problem and now has been corrected.
And still none of that has anything to do with physics, chemistry, materials science, geology, oceanography. You can't just say "racism impacts some sciences therefore we shouldn't do science at all"
You're hilarious. Thank you for the entertainment. Have a good night
No I'm just amusing myself at this point because I can tell you're one of those people who needs to have the last word
You're ignoring the history of academic science.
https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/report
https://slaveryandjustice.brown.edu/
https://slavery.virginia.edu/
https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/nzo1tx4elaerg13akjwxuve3pv9sb03a
https://news.emory.edu/features/2021/09/emory-unpacks-history-of-slavery-and-dispossession/index.html
And on and on.
And that's just the university system. Then you have actual laboratories. Los Alamos is notorious for being a massive "consumer" of indigenous women and girls of the slave trade. Current astronomy observatories on Mauna Kea are there against the will of the colonized Hawaiians and for years have destroyed their environment, their sovereignty, their health, and have contributed massively to the sex trade in Hawaii. The indigenous are a barrier to the planned 30m telescope there. Are you arguing that this barrier should be removed? Are you saying astronomy cannot possibly intersect with the structures of racism, settler colonialism, and genocide?
We do not need to be anti-intellectual to erect barriers to settler violence that impinge on science. Those barriers are important, and we need more of them. If we are to undo the harm of centuries of European imperialism, it will be a massive project that will hinder scientific inquiry in many ways. Establishing a "no barriers to science stance" creates an ideological commitment to the already existing conflict between justice and science that has been raging for centuries upon centuries.
I am very aware of all of this and it does not have anything to do with the output of most scientific endeavors. The colonialist history of the building of those telescopes doesn't make the astronomical data collected with them somehow racist, and putting up barriers to sharing that data isn't going to fix the racism involved in the administration of those institutions.
We need to change the way we practice academic science just like we need to change the way we practice at every other institution that was built by colonialist "enlightenment." But saying somehow that SciHub is wrong and wet shouldn't promote open sharing of scientific output isn't going to change those institutions.
Also the entire history of academic science is one of evolving standards of practice based on updated ethical standards. In the beginning, experiments were performed without regard for the harm done to human, animal, or environment, and these days we have many ethical standards against those harms. In fact, I will point out that you're sharing data from academic sources who are criticizing academic history which is how it always has been done.
it does not have anything to do with the output of most scientific endeavors
Don't try to equivocate your way out of this. The practice of science does harm. Setting "remove all barriers to science" as your slogan is problematic. If you want to equivocate, advocate for a slogan change to "Remove all barriers to distributing the outputs of scientific research to any and all people free of charge".
The colonialist history of the building of those telescopes doesn’t make the astronomical data collected with them somehow racist
Don't strawman. No one claimed the data was racist. The 30M is not history, it's the future. The US occupation of Hawaii is still illegal under US and UN law. It's not historical colonialism, it's present day colonialism. The indigenous people who were disenfranchised are still there, still occupied, still dying from water pollution, land pollution, and destruction of their food sources and ways of living. And the way we conduct science is actively playing a part in that occupation.
But saying somehow that SciHub is wrong and wet shouldn’t promote open sharing of scientific output isn’t going to change those institutions.
I have been very clear that the slogan is problematic. Scihub's missing of free information flow is not.
In fact, I will point out that you’re sharing data from academic sources who are criticizing academic history which is how it always has been done.
Brown University was the first, and it happened because the president they chose was both the first black person and the first woman to ever be president at any Ivy League institution. Harvard University didn't do - its undergrads did all the work and went public with it. The process of dismantling is ongoing, it's very slow, and all the while the white supremacist structure that undergirds the academy remains and continues to dominate decision making.
In one big voice all of the university trustees have linked arms and established that any students and professors speaking and acting tor Palestinian liberation are to be condemned. The academy may do incremental reforms, but their power is not subject to incremental reforms because it is structural. As a communist, you should understand this. If you don't understand, I'm happy to help you work through it. But don't give me this incremental ethical reform bullshit. It comes nowhere near addressing the white supremacist structure that the academy participates in.
Do you understand that the primary barriers being referred to here are intellectual property? I suspect you aren't in favor of propritarian intellectualism. What do you think those racist academies opinions on intellectual property has been?
Do you understand that the primary barriers being referred to here are intellectual property?
I understand that anyone who knows what SciHub is about would infer that. It's not what the slogan says. It says remove all barriers in the way of science. The slogan is problem.
Removing the intellectual property barriers necessitates ending the racist academies.
But doesn't do anything to prevent, for example, military science to oppress or genocide.
