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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25645 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic.

This stance would be far more defensible if the last five years hadn't happened. When it comes to "science" and "scientists", the institutions, their leaders, and their rank and file members have displayed what could be charitably described as a certain flexibility on topics where they should be trustworthy.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534

“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”

Remember this one? Am I genuinely supposed to believe that was fair, impartial, disinterested Science talking?

From where I'm standing, it looks like the people that spent the last five years throwing their credibility on a big credibility bonfire and setting it on fire are upset that the fuel is gone.

There was also when Nature or some other large, prestigious journal (might had been Science itself) yes_chad.jpg'd it in reaffirming that, indeed, protecting and/or advancing the interests of Vulnerable Groups takes precedence over impartial truth-seeking. It's not political nor bias-inducing, of course; it's called being a decent scientist. Whether it be on Reddit or on here we discussed this one when it happened, but I couldn't find the discussion upon a brief searching.

This one?

Yep, agreed. It's so fucking dumb and idiotic because it's sacrificing the ability to actually take a scientific approach towards solving problems in the future. Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.

Also see what I wrote above:

At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world.

Yep, agreed. It's so fucking dumb and idiotic because it's sacrificing the ability to actually take a scientific approach towards solving problems in the future. Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.

The problem is that science itself does not have a metaphysical system. Scientism, the sort of religion that has grown up around science, has a particular moral outlook. Science as a praxis, a way of discovering empirical truths, does not and cannot have much to say on moral questions, as morality and metaphysics are definitionally outside of the domain of science.

Yup. It's internecine war on the left. The foundational group desire is atheism. This part is the sacred, in Robin Hanson's terminology. There is a long history of trying to wield science as a sword for atheism, but in doing so, one runs headlong into pesky intellectual challenges. The core of this conflict is how to deal with them.

One common attempt is to just deny that there's any problem to be solved. The charitable view is to observe that such folks have mistaken methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. But you sort of can't keep it from bubbling up, so you have to keep denying, keep refusing to talk about it. For example, since mathematics is so useful to the scientific method, it is natural to desire to include some grounding there. But, like, how does that work? What is the philosophy of mathematics, and how does it fit into the scientismist view? Let's not talk about it.

On the morality front, it has left most of the left just grasping for a naive form of meta-ethical relativism. When poked, there are often half-hearted appeals to game theory. I think that both sides of the internecine war do feel like this is their best grounding, but it's sort of interesting that one side just doesn't actually understand even the most basic components of what game theory is about. That's why they're surprised by the most basic concept in game theory - unilateral defection. The other side, the wokies, grok unilateral defection. They grok that once it has been accepted that it is declared not possible to reach the truth of a matter via rational argumentation, when the only thing left is game theory, one can simply move to brainwashing, shaming, canceling, deplatforming, intimidating, and maybe even having struggle sessions or genocides.

The thin line of hope for scientism on these issues was, "Since we have no clue what else to do, but we're trying to prop up science as the answer to all the things, I guess what we'll do is just ask the scientists to answer everything for us." That ran hard into unilateral defection. When the scientists are the new priesthood, it's pretty straightforward (and unsurprising to religious folks) to see that a simple strategy is to just corrupt the priesthood. The biggest difference between the corruption of the academic priesthood and the ratheism/atheism+ schism was that the former took time and was done with most people somewhat unaware, while the latter was quite sudden and visible. Neither is surprising; it's just unilateral defection, fighting the sectarian war by the only means remaining once one abandons intellectual rigor in favor of scientism.

Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.

I think in most cases it’s much worse than that: they are burning political capital for no gain at all (well, except in their own personal/social lives, perhaps). Was anyone, any single solitary person, actually convinced by the argument that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus”? I highly doubt it. On the other hand, did people who read things like that lose their faith in the fields of science and medicine? Quite plainly yes, by the hundreds of thousands.

I’m not sure that was the turning point- in practice lots of people just decided to hell with it around Easter.

Not sure I'm following you correctly -- do you mean the turning point of average people's trust in the lockdown regime? If so, that's relevant, but not really what I was trying to get at.

I don't think there was any one singular turning point as relates to the public's trust in science & medicine writ large, more of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario. There were countless examples of public-facing scientists, and crucially actual public health officials either blatantly making things up as they went along while pretending they had a plan, or outright lying for naked partisan gamesmanship. I suspect I don't really need to remind you of these times. And every time an official said something obviously false it killed the institutional trust of another chunk of average everyday people. Add this up over many, many examples of lying and flagrant idiocy and you get the crisis of trust we have today.

A lot of scientists and doctors at the time (and seemingly a fair number still today) seemed to believe that because they were trusted by the public, they could make pronouncements on social issues and be taken seriously, basically lending their gravitas to the cause of the day. This started relatively rationally with the pandemic measures and then rapidly metastasized into the "racial justice" situation. The problem was they had the flow of authority exactly backwards. People trusted scientists and doctors because they were apolitical. The trustworthiness of scientists comes from their being fixated on their particular field of interest -- "those eggheads might be weirdos, but they sure know their stuff when it comes to biochemistry/astrophysics/[insert niche interest]" is the longstanding popular image of science.

The whole point is that they're dealing with something way over the head of Joe Sixpack, but it's clear that they've devoted their lives to it, so they can be trusted when they talk about that particular thing. This trust does not -- and in fact cannot -- generalize outside of their one particular domain. If anything it anti-generalizes. In other words if a bunch of chemists start talking about structures of intersectional oppression instead of chemistry, people start to question how much they really cared about chemistry in the first place.

At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process

You know, this reminds me of some of the studies done on flat hierarchy companies. By not using explicit organization and hierarchy, you get implicit organization and hierarchy, which is almost always dominated by people who are really good at deniably using soft power while pretending they aren't.

I wonder if something similar is happening in the sciences. By ignoring explicit politics, you accidentally optimize for people who are really good at politicking with plausible deniability.

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