longer.blue

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/markrubin.bsky.social/post/3lvg3qh2yec22 I'm much more pessimistic and aggressive than Nosek. Scientists gotta produce their work like there's a pack of lawyering weirdos who'll want to defend whatever they hate the most on standby, ready to rip their work apart and sadistically use it for the worst things they can think of. That doesn't just mean getting the relevant evidence to test every hypothesis as much as the stubborn facets of circumstances allow, but also communicating it well, without using horribly misused concepts. "when the US Administration issued the May 2025 Executive Order titled ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’, it suggested that the failure of individual studies to achieve a list of transparency and rigor-related practices is a justification for disqualification of the evidence, and could even potentially be considered misconduct" Why the super-high standards? Trump's government is trying to flush old evidence because its foremost politically-ambitious nerds know that it's one way to further kill off the old paradigms and old academia. Not by coincidence, those paradigms are the more seemingly "left"-friendly ones: the "Standard Social Science Model". In its place, "centrist"-friendly sociobiological science has spread, with the "right" making the most radical uses of it. Long history behind that: 1. Destruction of academia, after the opening-up of universities once required for Cold War politics and the extension of technology to micromanage the lowest classes. 2. Self- and external-sabotage of the once fearsome "left", and their strongholds in universities. Overall a great way to bait the masses then and now arriving in universities into either accepting failing "left" politics or leading the charge in its destruction. All sides trample on anything good for the vast majority of people, including the minorities so fashionably talked about. However, in many cases, scientists can get around this by attempting to replicate prior work. But again, someone's got to provide funding and resources for that, and if they don't get that, they're now even more screwed in policymaking and legal cases. "And when invitations to engage genuinely are not accepted, or fail verification, scholarly discourse is ill-equipped to resolve the conflict." I agree! We NEED to defend science VICIOUSLY AND POLITICALLY, even if it means annihilating old institutions ill-equipped to produce it, and/or strongly rebuking newcomers and "outsiders" looking to reinforce their sadistic politics. Science has ALWAYS been a political weapon. If like me you want it to serve the masses, then just like with economies that would serve the masses, they have to be independent from the efforts of elites, would-be elites, and their "useful idiot" underlings. For example, we need as few bottlenecks in the supply networks of data as we can get. "The tools of science—reason, evidence, and debate—are poorly suited to confront raw political power asserting state-controlled belief systems." Dirty secret time: state-controlled belief systems, and more generally, belief systems built by and on behalf of elite groups to serve them have long and thoroughly poisoned science, mainly in areas of high political sensitivity. Foundations, militaries, rich donors and alliances of politcially-ambitious intellectuals are the main funders and organizers of science. Scientists are allowed to produce and use truth not immediately because of elites' impotence and incompetence in stopping good science, but because it's bait for accepting fashionable lies, like so many of the conceptual problems in biology. I regularly point to Bennett & Hacker's "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" as evidence relevant to some of this. "Science can try to exist separately from politics, but scientists cannot." Science will fail to exist separately from "politics" by most definitions, and we probably shouldn't wish that it could. Like I said, it's a weapon. Always has been. We have to ensure that evil sadists don't get to use it.