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The anti-science movement.

steddyeddy

In the last few decades we have made extraordinary advances in science. We can treat diseases more effectively, we know more about our evolutionary past and we know more about the world and universe around us.

Despite this there seems to be an increase in what I call anti-science (I'm open to debate on my labelling), Creationism in some countries is flourishing, measles in America is on the rise, NASA and meteorological agencies around the world have to argue the case for man made climate change and we still have the situation where scientists have to argue that science in itself has value and needs to be funded.

Why is there a growing mistrust of science in developed countries? It would be easy to say religion but I don't think religion plays a part in the climate change or vaccination argument.

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Maximus Alexander

Tarzana2 wrote: »

I think science can seem quite esoteric to laypeople, even if they are intelligent.

I have a science degree, I did well at it but it wasn't easy. It took a lot of work, of training my mind to understand many different theories. And I'm someone who studied it.

It'd no wonder the general public can find it so bamboozling. A little recognition of this would be helpful, I think.

The thing is though, you only really need to understand the scientific method (which is straight forward) in order to be able to read through source material and see if the conclusions make sense. I don't really buy the idea that science is too complicated.

Sure, doing science is hard, but understanding how somebody arrived at a conclusion isn't really.

magma69

Permabear wrote: »

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Depressing.

Wibbs

Permabear wrote: »

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Damned hippies.

Additionally, so indoctrinated are they by anti-capitalist sermonizing that they can't see past the profit motives of pharmaceutical companies, Monsanto, etc. Combine these things and you get people prone to regarding drugs, vaccines, and GMO foods as ploys by pillaging capitalists to line their pockets by polluting our bodies with "unnatural" substances.

Aye but for me these can be slightly different topics and arguments. Sure your hippie will tend to be anti progress and follow the above credo, but on the other hand you have those who blindly see all science as progress, especially when big money is behind it. I'd also reckon that this is more an American way of thinking. Very black and white. Monsanto baaaad/Monsanto goooood[delete as personally applicable]. It's easier for those who want easy answers, but reality is played out in shades of grey. EG I'm no hippie, but would have serious issues with some of Monsanto's practices and some of the pharmaceutical companies have had dodgy "science" masquerading as fact for years and have even hidden/bent the numbers on drug trial results. This does not mean I think all drugs or companies are bad, nor all GMO is bad. It's not so wise to blindly accept just one side or t'other.

Permabear wrote: »

Yes, here's the Gallup poll.

58% of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 39% of independents and 41% of Democrats also hold this position.

Jesus. No pun. *shakes head* That's scary reading. Funny enough for the first time in our evolutionary history as hominids our brains are shrinking and have done since about 20,000 years ago. Those folks who painted caves in France 30 odd 1000 years ago were modern humans like us but with bigger brains. They well have been more clever overall and if you brought up a kid from that time in today's society they may have been extremely bright compared to the average today.

ancapailldorcha

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Unbelievable.

Saipanne

Wibbs wrote: »

Damned hippies. Aye but for me these can be slightly different topics and arguments. Sure your hippie will tend to be anti progress and follow the above credo, but on the other hand you have those who blindly see all science as progress, especially when big money is behind it. I'd also reckon that this is more an American way of thinking. Very black and white. Monsanto baaaad/Monsanto goooood[delete as personally applicable]. It's easier for those who want easy answers, but reality is played out in shades of grey. EG I'm no hippie, but would have serious issues with some of Monsanto's practices and some of the pharmaceutical companies have had dodgy "science" masquerading as fact for years and have even hidden/bent the numbers on drug trial results. This does not mean I think all drugs or companies are bad, nor all GMO is bad. It's not so wise to blindly accept just one side or t'other.

Jesus. No pun. *shakes head* That's scary reading. Funny enough for the first time in our evolutionary history as hominids our brains are shrinking and have done since about 20,000 years ago. Those folks who painted caves in France 30 odd 1000 years ago were modern humans like us but with bigger brains. They well have been more clever overall and if you brought up a kid from that time in today's society they may have been extremely bright compared to the average today.

Really? The brain one, I mean.

expectationlost

SpaceSasqwatch wrote: »

where you going with leftwing?If anything they are capitalists.
Most of the muppets that are against flouride and vacinations have an agenda..ie peddling bollox as an alternative for $$$$$.

Take our own special fuktard aisling fitzgibbon aka The Girl Against Flouride.She repeatedly repeats debunked studies(peer reviewed I might add) to back up her fuktardness.Shes a qaulified angel healer,nutritionist(not a dietician,similar to the difference between a toothologist and a dentist) .The campaign manager for her anti-flouride campaign is her mother and she believes the pill can cause homosexuality.

The mother/daughter pair are also making money selling a cure for autism.
http://geoffsshorts.blogspot.ie/2014/03/gaps-in-thinking-irish-times-promoting.html

It would be funny if it wasnt peoples health they fukking about with.

there are lefty,hippy elements to it. Not them they seem to be catholic conservative background.

steddyeddy

One of the many reasons I dislike the terms right and left is that they're rarely accurate descriptive terms. The vast majority of people don't see things so black and white Imo.

ScumLord

Wibbs wrote: »

Jesus. No pun. *shakes head* That's scary reading. Funny enough for the first time in our evolutionary history as hominids our brains are shrinking and have done since about 20,000 years ago. Those folks who painted caves in France 30 odd 1000 years ago were modern humans like us but with bigger brains. They well have been more clever overall and if you brought up a kid from that time in today's society they may have been extremely bright compared to the average today.

Maybe our brains are just getting more efficient and better at dealing with the information. There are some very effective small brains in the natural world. If our social engineering lead to some more energy efficient ways of thinking we didn't need our brain to be as large and having a smaller brain would come with it's own advantages.

I don't know though, it seems odd that our brains would get smaller as our society became more complex.

Permabear

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steddyeddy

Permabear wrote: »

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The Obama issue is an example of confirmation bias the Sinn Fein issue is not. I'll have to reiterate my opinion that the vast majority of those I encounter who are anti vacc or GMO are on the right. In this country and Britain at least. It's probably different in America though.

Tarzana2

steddyeddy wrote: »

One of the many reasons I dislike the terms right and left is that they're rarely accurate descriptive terms.

But you were earlier quite happy to pin the current rise of scientific ignorance of right wingers until it was pointed out that that's not all that accurate. Now you don't like the terms right-wing and left-wing.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Wibbs

Saipanne wrote: »

Really? The brain one, I mean.

Yep.

ScumLord wrote: »

Maybe our brains are just getting more efficient and better at dealing with the information. There are some very effective small brains in the natural world. If our social engineering lead to some more energy efficient ways of thinking we didn't need our brain to be as large and having a smaller brain would come with it's own advantages.

Sure SL size aint everything. EG Neandertals had the largest brains of any humans ever, but weren't a patch on us in the thinking dept. Though that's also down to their size and brain to body size ratio. In that case they had slightly smaller brains comparatively. However even when accounting for brain/bodymass ratio, our brains are still shrinking.

There are all sorts of theories as to why this is happening. Though funny enough you rarely hear about in the mainstream. The mainstream idea is that our brains got ever bigger. Nutrition could be part of it. There was a drop in brain size when we first started farming. Hunter gatherers generally have better nutrition and more varied diets. Problem with this idea is populations who had never farmed also showed a reduction in brain size over time. Another theory is that we're in the process of domesticating ourselves(by removing more aggressive individuals etc) and domestic animals have smaller brains than their wild cousins(though if history is anything to go by we're just as aggressive as we were in the distant past).

I don't know though, it seems odd that our brains would get smaller as our society became more complex.

Actually that's another theory trying to explain this and it comes from a different angle than expected. Yes society has become more complex, but the human population has also grown exponentially. This means that an individual can rely on more and more people to cover areas of complexity that they personally don't understand. So most people using their PC's to read this don't know quite how they work at a lower level and couldn't build one from scratch, but others do and can. Although there would have been specialised individuals among a tribe of French CroMagnons, the individual would have needed a more complete understanding of the world around them and how to navigate that world, so this might explain the need for their larger brains. Sure Joe might be the best flint knapper in the cave, but you'd also have to be able to knap to survive and so on. The individual would need to be a jack of all trades and master of most just to survive. It might explain why and how people from this period while living through an extremely harsh climate basically invented art, culture, religion, iconography etc as we came to know it.

Again the problem with this theory is modern hunter gatherers who still live similar lives also show reduction in brain size.

IMH it's a mix of diet over time, self domestication and increasing population sizes that is doing it.

OldNotWIse

Maybe because some people are so arrogant that their pea sized intellect wont accept that when you're dead, that's it.

Akrasia

Saipanne wrote: »

Really? The brain one, I mean.

The brain is getting smaller on average but this does not mean that people living today are less intelligent than people 20,000 years ago.

A large part of our brain is dedicated to regulating bodily processes that are not related to intelligence. Bigger bodies need bigger brains. Humans are less physically strong and bulky now compared with 30k years ago

Also, the fact that we live in large groups in relative security with social safety nets means that there isn't the requirement for every individual to be clever enough to provide for all of his/her survival needs, we just need to specialise in specific tasks and use economic trade to provide for ourselves.

And to top things off, we have developed tools that mean we can use our brains much more efficiently and accomplish the same ends without the requiremnent for larger brains. By tools, I include things like language, mathematics, logic as well as information storage and processing systems from books to modern computers.

A modern human can use our thinking tools to solve problems that a human from 20000 years ago would never hope to solve, so we can do much more thinking with less wasted effort. Everything we encounter a new problem, we don't have to re-invent the wheel so to speak

Saipanne

Wibbs wrote: »

Yep.

Exactly the response I expected from you.

steddyeddy

Tarzana2 wrote: »

But you were earlier quite happy to pin the current rise of scientific ignorance of right wingers until it was pointed out that that's not all that accurate. Now you don't like the terms right-wing and left-wing.

No I don't like right and left wing as political phenotypes. I Think the words have been used as an insult too many times to have a concise meaning free from loaded meaning. I should have said conservative regarding recessive views on science (a progressive enterprise). As I said previously many of those whom the right would describe as left wing hold views contrary towards science.

steddyeddy

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

But attributing Sinn fein support to wishful thinking is opinion. Not fact. I don't have time for Sinn Fein's economic policy either but I can't say people who go against my opinion are in denial of facts. That's my opinion and nothing more. That is completely different than someone claiming the MMR vaccine doesn't work.

Yea it's my opinion. Also as a scientist I find most other scientists to have left rather than right leanings. As I said I think left and right have minimal meaning outside personal opinion anymore but those (left or right) who conflate political belief with opinion are the guilty culprits in all matters anti science.

Wibbs

Saipanne wrote: »

Exactly the response I expected from you.

Try reading the rest of it.

Akrasia wrote: »

A large part of our brain is dedicated to regulating bodily processes that are not related to intelligence. Bigger bodies need bigger brains. Humans are less physically strong and bulky now compared with 30k years ago

Even allowing for that our brains have shrunk.

Also, the fact that we live in large groups in relative security with social safety nets means that there isn't the requirement for every individual to be clever enough to provide for all of his/her survival needs, we just need to specialise in specific tasks and use economic trade to provide for ourselves.

And to top things off, we have developed tools that mean we can use our brains much more efficiently and accomplish the same ends without the requiremnent for larger brains. By tools, I include things like language, mathematics, logic as well as information storage and processing systems from books to modern computers.

Pretty much this.

steddyeddy

Saipanne wrote: »

Exactly the response I expected from you.

He gave you the science it's up to you to draw your own conclusions from it.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

conorhal

I'd highly reccomend Francis Wheen's very insightful 'How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World'.
It's a breezy funny read that takes a pot shots at such diverse topics from Horoscopes to how 'management speak' infected politics with ineficency (when Thatcher started hiring 'management consultants' to drive performance during the 80's she began a trend for highly paid outside consultants that reached it's epoch under Blair, spoiler alert, they didn't manage make things run more efficently, they just created a new tier of middle management in the public sector that didn't actually seem to do anything other then write reports about 'blue sky thinking', spoke gibberish and pocketed massive salaries)
The best chapter on the subject (bit dated as the book is quite old at this stage) is his absolutely venomous chapter on "the demolition merchants of reality" which takes a swipe at the university culture that promotes relativism. I'll cut and paste some good quotes from a review that's well worth a read:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/how-mumbo-jumbo-conquered-the-world-by-francis-wheen-570206.html
In it describes how, since Michel Foucault's writings captured the intellectual mood in the early 1980s, many students in the humanities have been taught "that the world is just a socially constructed 'text' about which you can say just about anything you want, provided you say it murkily enough." He quotes the left-wing American Barbara Ehrenreich, who explains that her daughter was marked down for using the word "reality" without quotation marks.
This led to an insane form of relativism and folly. Michel Foucault's praise for the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran (which would have happily decapitated him for being homosexual), and his apologism for it on the grounds that it does not have "the same regime of truth as ours", is a particularly grotesque example. My own favourite from this book, however, is postmodern priestess Luce Irigaray's attack on E=mc2 as a "sexed equation", since "it privileges the speed of light over other less masculine speeds."

SpaceTime

Zamboni wrote: »

Because the majority of the human species are fcuktards.

That can be proven scientifically too!

Valmont

The OP is clearly trying to slap the label of 'anti-science' onto those who do not share his political philosophy but unfortunately every single human being on earth has an individual set of beliefs, biases, and opinions that influence to some extent how they act in relation to what others would consider 'scientific fact' - even the endeavour of science itself is based on a set of metaphysical speculations which were pointed out to the OP in another thread.

You can't talk meaningfully about an 'anti-science' movement until there is some definitive philosophical conclusion about the nature of the scientific method. And the word 'movement' is nonsense as it implies a group of people who share the goal of 'denying' what scientists tell them; in reality we have different groups of people who 'deny' what scientists tell them for religious or moral reasons. The whole thread is a bit of a straw man to be honest.

Paul Feyerabend wrote:

Everywhere science is enriched by unscientific methods and unscientific results, ... the separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them.

Akrasia

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

All economic frameworks deny basic arithmetic in the long run

The neoliberal framework is seeing massive wealth consolidation into the pockets of a wealthy elite.
What do the mainstream political parties plan to do about the fact that more and more of the worlds resources are being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals?

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/how-unequal-is-ireland-1.2105668

Akrasia

Valmont wrote: »

The OP is clearly trying to slap the label of 'anti-science' onto those who do not share his political philosophy but unfortunately every single human being on earth has an individual set of beliefs, biases, and opinions that influence to some extent how they act in relation to what others would consider 'scientific fact' - even the endeavour of science itself is based on a set of metaphysical speculations which were pointed out to the OP in another thread.

You can't talk meaningfully about an 'anti-science' movement until there is some definitive philosophical conclusion about the nature of the scientific method. And the word 'movement' is nonsense as it implies a group of people who share the goal of 'denying' what scientists tell them; in reality we have different groups of people who 'deny' what scientists tell them for religious or moral reasons. The whole thread is a bit of a straw man to be honest.

I don't think there are many people out there who would describe themselves as 'anti science'. There are however professional denialists who are paid by certain political, religious and economic interests to front campaigns of misinformation

Climate change denialism is no different to the denialism that accompanied the 'tobacco causes cancer' debate in the 70s. They use almost the same tactics and many of the individuals involved are the same.

The reason why so many people embrace climate change denialism is the same reason they were happy to go along with the tobacco denialists. The science tells us things that we don't want to hear, so we'll happily latch onto any uncertainty that allows us to continue as before

Regarding Vaccine denialism, I blame the media. Every newspaper has lifestyle sections that constantly go on about how 'natural' and 'organic' is best and that these supplements are filled to the brim with half baked advice on detox programs and superfoods and alternative medicine to help people live better lives.

These are billion dollar industries selling overpriced products that make claims verging on false advertising (often with disclaimers nullifying any claims for legal purposes). Part of the way these companies market themselves, is by breeding mistrust in mainstream foods and pharmaceuticals and lifestyles, and by convincing these people that they are in a select group of informed healthy people who are better than the average slob on the street.

ancapailldorcha

Akrasia wrote: »

Regarding Vaccine denialism, I blame the media. Every newspaper has lifestyle sections that constantly go on about how 'natural' and 'organic' is best and that these supplements are filled to the brim with half baked advice on detox programs and superfoods and alternative medicine to help people live better lives.

Yep. Wakefield has buggered off to the US and now has allies like Jenny McCarthy backing him. Now, he's able to play the "Big Pharma and corrupt government tried to silence me but I know the truth" card. It's one the media love as well hence the coverage. The original "study" involved him basically abusing half a dozen children with horrible and unnecessary tests like lumbar punctures. It was so flawed that I'm amazed the Lancet used it for anything other than toilet paper.

Akrasia wrote: »

These are billion dollar industries selling overpriced products that make claims verging on false advertising (often with disclaimers nullifying any claims for legal purposes). Part of the way these companies market themselves, is by breeding mistrust in mainstream foods and pharmaceuticals and lifestyles, and by convincing these people that they are in a select group of informed healthy people who are better than the average slob on the street.

The great thing about supplements is that you don't have to prove they work, just that they are what they say on the box, ie pills with 5mg Zinc must actually contain that amount of Zinc. In the EU, you must prove your ingredients are safe before you can sell 'em. In the US, someone needs to prove they're unsafe. It's insane.

Egginacup

steddyeddy wrote: »

In the last few decades we have made extraordinary advances in science. We can treat diseases more effectively, we know more about our evolutionary past and we know more about the world and universe around us.

Despite this there seems to be an increase in what I call anti-science (I'm open to debate on my labelling), Creationism in some countries is flourishing, measles in America is on the rise, NASA and meteorological agencies around the world have to argue the case for man made climate change and we still have the situation where scientists have to argue that science in itself has value and needs to be funded.

Why is there a growing mistrust of science in developed countries? It would be easy to say religion but I don't think religion plays a part in the climate change or vaccination argument.

It's a lot easier to control people (and make money off of them) if you can control them with fear. And the best way to keep them fearful is to keep them thick.
If science was encouraged more people would become smarter...or at least less dense and clueless and might actually be able to think for themselves and you can't have that. How would you control them, get them to agree to shit that flies in the face of their best interests? How would you get them to not bat an eyelid when you stick a coal-powered electricity plant in their area that will give them all cancer but will make you very wealthy?

No, you have to keep them thick.

KomradeBishop

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

The thing is though, you only really need to understand the scientific method (which is straight forward) in order to be able to read through source material and see if the conclusions make sense. I don't really buy the idea that science is too complicated.

Sure, doing science is hard, but understanding how somebody arrived at a conclusion isn't really.

You have actual problems with science itself too though - it seems that even many scientists are not well grounded on when something is/isn't 'science' - even one of the most well respected sciences like physics, has significant problems which put in question, whether a lot of theoretical physics, can really be considered science anymore - as I posted about in another thread: (epistemology being, roughly, peoples beliefs on what knowledge is and how to determine what knowledge is/isn't valid)

This is even a central problem in the most respected/prominent field of science, physics, because (in a field where you'd expect scientists to have a rigorous/solid epistemological belief system) there are massive epistemological problems with the study of string theory.
The central problem with string theory, is that it shows no hope of being tested anytime within the next millennium(!), and shows no hope of any theoretical breakthroughs which may bring it closer to testing - so we have some of the best scientists in the world, working on a theory that (as far as we know) may have no application to reality whatsoever.

There has been a similar problem with economics now too, for a very long time - neoclassical economics is the base of mainstream economic teaching, yet while it has been thoroughly debunked by many people, and does not apply well to the real world, it is still the dominant form of economic thought, and (as a field) it is incredibly resistant to reform, despite plenty of examples of theories which better fit empirical data (which is why economics is known as the 'dismal science').

String theorists do not seem to be aware or accepting of the very simple/basic/obvious criticisms in their field, and how the dominance of string theory is unjustified, and economists likewise, often are not even aware of the deep faults/criticisms in the foundations of neoclassical economics (many aren't even aware that that is what they were taught), and how its dominance is also unjustified.

KomradeBishop

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Or it's that people can differentiate between individual good and bad actions by a company, instead of having a black/white view (either 'all good' or 'all bad') - and don't accept that "the benefits [] outweigh the drawbacks", as an excuse for giving companies carte blanche to engage in unethical (and often illegal) actions.

We should never stop holding companies to extremely high ethical and legal standards (in the latter case: by not allowing them to be effectively above the law) - and this in no way involves impeding the beneficial effects and progress from companies (it just stops them actively harming the rest of society, on the path to progress).