Antivaxers and alternative medicine folks also rightly catch a lot of shit 'round here, and I’m pretty sure 90% of them are crunchy Granola types (the other 10% would of course be the “only The Jesus heals” crowd).
Questing scientific assumptions is the basis of great scientific discoveries and great men are almost by definition incredible arrogant. What’s so bad about creationists anyway? They’re a rather foolish bunch, but on the whole I should say quite harmless.
I wish.
Are those 10% right-wing, then?
It can be hard to politically classify kookery.
9/11 Truthers, likewise, tend to come from the left of the political spectrum, but there are few groups that are treated more disdainfully around here. And their objections are often founded on (among other things) absolutely dismal understandings of some pretty basic physics concepts.
Crystal healers, gemstone healers, aura healers, numerologist, astrologist, homeopathy, healers, Feng Shui, and all the other foolish kooks also tend to be leftwing. Generally harmless though - except for the odd bar-brawl of course.
What the OP is missing: The scientists who study something for a living are seen as untrustworthy* because they study it for a living.*
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The more time you spend on a particular subject/in a particular arena, the larger it looms in your mind, and the more important it seems to you, even when you’re trying to be objective.
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If someone is paying you for your results, that implies that your livelihood depends on producing results.
In the case of global warming, the economic motivation is clear: Say* something* is happening with climate, because if you came out and admitted that God holds the whole world in his hands and climate never really changes much, you might lose your stupid redundant made-up job. So say it’s warming, say it’s cooling, but above all, say we need to keep paying you for your expertise.
That’s why right-thinking people oppose the global warming scam. Why should the rest of us change our way of life just to humor some government-paid fraudster who makes up results to keep his job? Let him get a real job!
These arguments are ignorant, & use false knowledge, but they are not illogical.
(I actually believe in AGW, by the way.)
Four whole ID proponents harmed by pissy evolution proponents? Yeah, not making a case against ID there.
I’ve always observed that the more ignorant someone is about things, the more arrogant and supremely assured that they’re right they are.
In other words, they not only think they’re absolutely right (when they’re not), they also have no idea that they could be wrong.
Combine that with a fairly flawed knowledge of scientific procedure and terminology, and you have a recipe for some pretty crazy stands on issues. Probably the most obvious one that I’ve seen in action is the misunderstanding between hypothesis, theory and law.
The ignorant and arrogant will have heard in 3rd grade or so about how the scientific method works. They understand the ideas of hypothesis and experimentation, and they understand that a theory is basically an explanation of what is being observed in the real world and hopefully in the experiment. They also hear about scientific laws in passing as well, and the idea that scientific theories have been revised over time and some have been proven wrong.
In their head, they then make the logical connection that only scientific laws are actually proven, because in their heads, if someone can come along and disprove a theory in light of better measurement, experimentation or observation, then it somehow follows that all theories are therefore suspect and somehow in some sort of lesser state of truth than a scientific law.
This thinking glosses over or outright omits the facts that there are VERY few scientific laws, and most of those are ones that can be mathematically proven- Newton’s laws of motion, ideal gas law, etc…
In fields like biology, climatology, paleontology, etc… where large scale direct experimentation isn’t always feasible, the not-quite-understanders get really twisted up, because at that level of observation, there is a lot of hypothesis, and not a lot of the kind of proof that they’re looking for; because you’re looking at the historical record, scientists have to sort of back-apply (not sure of the term I’m looking for) the scientific method, to try and explain what happened, without experimentation, and this seems like making shit up to the not-quite-understanders.
That, IMO, is why AGW is so contentious with that crowd. They look at a hockey-stick graph, and say “Well, how do you KNOW it’s manmade? Can you prove it?” or they say “That could be sunspots.” and since the scientists can’t say much other than some variant on “It’s pretty fucking obvious” as a retort, they tend to discount what they say.
Wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in a failed case to get ID in schools? That was not just 4 once you remember the cases on Louisiana and Texas. And no, those are not the only examples and I think you did not read the cite properly, the ID proponents are not the harmed ones.
Actually they are illogical, there is more money to be made on being an apologist for the industries that would be affected by the change.
Yes and no. It’s true that just going to Mr. Enron and telling him “I’ll say whatever you want for a suitcase full of cash and a free latte” probably nets strictly more cash than a research job at the University of Wherever Climate Workshop, it requires a different sort of dishonesty from simply generating bogus activity to keep your job. To borrow from Elwood Blues, one is agreeing to get paid to lie while the other is just taking the liberty to bullshit a little.
But that’s beside the point considering the premise is flawed: researchers don’t need to generate bullshit results just to keep their jobs. For one thing they’ve got tenure, for another “nothing is happening whatsoever, really” is, in itself, an valuable data point.
Well… No. You may attribute the fact that there’s a lot less smackdown of leftist pseudoscience positions to the fact that this board has a liberal lean, but that’s simply not the truth. The truth is, the left is generally a lot less anti-science than the right, at least in terms of where its politicians lie. The left isn’t trying to deny evolution or climate change, and there are very, very few sciences that are politically disputed beyond that in anything more than niche insane asylums of the politically extreme (see also: flat earth). Therefore the “left” doesn’t really get that kind of treatment because they do very little to earn it. But on the other hand, we have gems like Bachmann’s absolutely ridiculous defense of global warming denialism (“carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas”), the whole christian right-wing biblical literalist camp, and Perry claiming that evolution and creationism are both “theories”. Get back to me when, say, Obama runs his reelection campaign on getting Crystal Healing back into textbooks.
By science, do you mean specific theories, or the methodology itself?
If you mean specific theories, I really wouldn’t worry about it. That’s kinda the point of peer-review. When a paper gets submitted to a journal like, say, “Nature”, it’s subject to the utmost scrutiny by the other scientists working in the field. Someone claiming that they found a fossil that, although recent, completely bucks the fossil record? They are going to either have to demonstrate that they are right to a lot of irate scientists or be shuffled off the stage, but not before being forced to admit their mistake.
They’re ignorant and wrong about one of the most fundamental tenants of virtually every field of biology? They try to insert things that have not only not been proven, but have actually been proven wrong into our schools to further the education of this kind of shit? Don’t get me wrong, they’re not evil. But stupidity can achieve misdeeds that are just as great.
The problem with this involves cross-checking. When someone is studying a field, this means that the field has, you know, been established. If someone is studying human effects of climate change as a specific discipline, that means some over-ordered field (in this case climatology) has determined it a worthwhile discipline, and someone has paid for the grants. And of course, other people from within that discipline are cross-checking it, but also from outside: most people working on the effects of human intervention in climate change are, surprise, climatologists. The existence of their field relies not on human intervention in global warming, but rather figuring out how the climate of the planet works (let’s not get into why this is not subject to the same issues right now). Furthermore there’s the subject of research grants, the inherent security in peer-review, yadda yadda yadda. It’s a fair concern in most cases, but there simply are too many safeguards involved for it to be a fair one in the case of the peer-review process.
Let’s see you apparently labeled me as a “leftist”, however when an actual agricultural scientist explained the issue I realized my ignorance and learned why I was wrong.
So to sum up as “leftist” (your label of me, not mine) I had an opinion on a matter, realized it was wrong when presented with evidence, and then changed my opinion after learning from the evidence. Clearly I’m an example of why the left is unreasonable.
Then again you blathered on about politics and global warming which weren’t the the thread topic, either. You’ve got issues.
Yes, “flip-flopping” is a hallmark symptom of left-wing thought.
Right-thinking Americans instead hold staunchly to their God-given beliefs, without falling for the delusions of “scientists,” most of whom are leftists.
Thank you. That was like being wrapped in a warm blanket after a day out in the cold…rather, a lifetime out in the cold. I’ve never fully understood why dumb people don’t realize they’re dumb. This really really makes me feel so much less stressed. They just don’t have the faculties to understand they’re wrong, and the fact that they’re constantly wrong is evidence of that. “They” being certain people with whom I have to work. Not that I think this applies to everyone, that would be smug and aloof of me. But it definitely applies to a heck of a lot of people I know.
All I know is, my dad recently decided that the pyramids and the Nazca lines must be the work of aliens, because people can’t actually do that stuff. Oh, and writing. Humans did not invent writing. Aliens did.
God, I hate the History Channel.
This thread is helping me to understand why it is that too many people in here jump all over someone who dares to ask questions. I begin to wonder where the arrogance actually is…
You all do realize that there are legitimate reasons to question science, right?
Well, you are a leftist. And when I said you were also a science denier, you were right in the middle of denying the science.
Now that you’re not denying the science, my label no longer applies to you.
I agree you acted reasonably, and are thus not a good example of the type of denial under discussion here.