he idea that gave birth to science was philosophical: if the world
is real, then truth can be found by testing our ideas against it. Things
that can be measured are most amenable to this approach. Things that can't,
while still possibly important, are not. It is impossible to build a
foundation of knowledge on somebody's opinion, no matter how smart that
person may be.
This was why subjective opinion, speculation, and reasoning from first principles were all cast out of science. Doing so produced a brilliant era in which the mysteries of electricity were unraveled, followed by the mysteries of the quantum, DNA, and the immune system.
Last week somebody at Google made the preposterous claim that their “artificial intelligence” is actually sentient. Leaders in public health are now obsessed with “health equity” and make bizarre claims that racism is our top health problem. Nature magazine routinely features editorials about how science must “overcome its racist legacy” and publishes articles with titles like “The sustainability movement is 50. Why are world leaders ignoring it?” They natter on about “equity in global collaborations” and complain about how mathematics prizes have a “gender problem.”
I suppose the low point was when this UK-based magazine tried to tell Americans who we must vote for in the last political election. Some readers probably agreed with their choice, but some of us wondered how Brits would react if we Americans opined on Brexit or Boris.
It doesn't matter which side you're on or how strongly you may feel. You have to choose: you can be political or can have credibility. That's why many people now read newspapers not to learn what's happening, but to be entertained about the latest propaganda that our elites have decided to bombard us with. Credibility even at our top newspapers is in the tank, with one commentator dismissing the New York Times's unsophisticated coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war as evidence they've gone to the “woke funny farm.”
If science publications take political stands, this will happen to them. They will create a perception that the journals will only publish results that conform to their political views or even blacklist and attack scientists who express opposing views. Indeed, this behavior is one reason Scientific American is not considered a legitimate scientific journal.
These days, calm and honest rationality is needed more than ever. There are people out there who are are so confused by ideology they can no longer distinguish a man from a woman. Others refuse to have children because they believe—apparently sincerely—that global warming will make the earth uninhabitable and cause widespread disasters. These people are living in a whirlwind of confusion. They need sober science more than ever.
Those of us out here in Internet-land are the ones who have to deal with people claiming that no one ever did any clinical trials on HCQ or ivermectin because we're all political, or that we're all materialists who deny the existence of non-material things, or that we all think there are 57 sexes and you can bunny-hop from one to the other at will. If I cited Nature to argue against these ideas, I'd just get laughed at.
It's not that politics and science policy aren't important. It's just that Nature magazine is not very good at it. Political shibboleths like ‘equity’, ‘diversity’, and ‘racism’ are designed with a specific function in mind: to kill intelligent discussion and enforce conformity. But killing discussion and enforcing conformity do not benefit science.
Science is almost the only remaining voice of dispassionate truth-seeking left in our society. That's a valuable thing. It's important to take care not to lose it. Once you're at the woke funny farm, you're there forever.
jun 12 2022, 5:11 am
