I would certainly say that our scientific knowledge had helped a lot. The reason why we can live to age eighty and people of years past only lived a few decades is because of our expanded knowledge of viruses, sanitation, and food safety.
1 Like
Antibiotics, volcano monitoring, disease-resistant crops, sonograms, smallpox eradication, ability to post on web fora.
2 Likes
Humans invent things, they observe things, sometimes beneficial, sometimes horrific. I don’t lump it all into a category called “science”. It’s just Human behaviour. These days it feels like science has become scientism. It’s a religion you’re either a member of, or not. The tech Billionaire-types. The deGrasse-Tysons. The Bill Gates’s. The whole COVID nightmare and all the official mis-information they spewed out. They’ve all ruined it for me. Left a very bad taste in my mouth for “science”.
All modern science does now is post about all the latest incompatible ideas and covering all the attempts of scientists at throwing understanding on it’s head for grants and attention.
Breaking news! Dogs aren’t Dogs! Space isn’t what you think! More Quantum nonsense! T. rex was actually this! Everything you thought you knew is WRONG! We’re gonna live forever! Reality is a SiMuLaTiOn! Trust the ScIeNcE!!
And my favourite? ICE ISN’T COLD!
There is even debate as to what a female is now. Actual scientists will tell you things that you KNOW cannot be true. It has become absurd!
There is even a Simpson’s episode idea being put forth to block out the Sun to save the world! You gotta be kidding me… Doesn’t take a scientist to see ideas like this can easily become mass-life-threatening DISASTERS!
Oh, but that’s okay, apparently science also says there’s too many of us anyway.
Time to touch grass. I dislike modern science. And the faith people have in it to solve all their problems… Boggles the mind. Just like a religion. Only tech Billionaires are gonna give them eternal life instead of a god. Then they’ll be raptured to Mars to live in a bubble.
I see the problem.
You don’t know what science is. You think it’s some weird combination of politics, clickbait, sensationalist journalism, grifting and youtube videos.
3 Likes
It’s not? Where is your brand of science done? Must be quite the rare creature, a REAL scientist then. It ought to frustrate you to no end that my view is what most people believe science to be nowadays.
Universities, research institutes, journals.
Bastions of free-thinking and knowledge… Maybe once upon a time. Now they’re fascist boot camps. Not allowed in unless you deny biology.
Ah yes, the places harbouring horrific, extinction-level viruses and making them even stronger through gain of function… Wonderful!
Did they reject your application, or did you not bother applying? You’ve clearly never been to one.[1]
Not even Bob Jones, Prager or Patriot. ↩︎
2 Likes
I’d love to know where you’ve been since 2015… I actually walked out of uni as I found being taught about how to “properly” address female fire fighters wasn’t something that could help me get a job. You’re also being pretty petty. I’m attacking ideas and institutions. You’re attacking me.
I think you may be confusing the news with scientific reporting. I’ve previously faced this problem and, yes it is annoying. However, this happens with just about every single news item online nowadays. Most of those articles are written by people trying to get you to read. The information they are based on, however, was likely formulated from a very boring and “as far from clickbait as possible” scientific paper.
2 Likes
Okay - let’s all just back away from this modern scramble for “top victimhood status”, and microsensitivities. If you want to know what real science is and you’re willing to listen, then you’re in the right place! There are a lot of people here who can help you with that. Very few here subscribe to anything like “Scientism” - and in fact a lot of us have a long history on this website of taking up arms against it. And yet now, we find ourselves actually needing to become more and more cheerleaders for science -real science, that is. Because you are right that way too many people think exactly as you’ve expressed above. Science gets a lot of blame for what everybody else has done with it. And I’m not saying science doesn’t have problems, challenges, and failures. It does - and they don’t include any of those things you’ve brought up. Roy is correct that you’re talking about a lot of other stuff, and one of the biggest reasons a lot of that other stuff is wrong and often spectacularly so, is because it has ignored science, not heeded it.
My own quick and dirty description of real science here would be something like this: it is the practice of using observations, hypotheses, experiments, further tests and research of data to craft, modify, or sometimes even disprove theories that help explain our universe. And those explanations are better when they have predictive power; successful predictions of past, present, or (most sexy of all) future data - all of that being what we call evidence. And it gets published in peer-reviewed journals where people can continue to take shots at it, or use it. Lots of problems and messy and dishonest humanity will dog all of those steps too - and often get called out for it since that’s what science does. But one thing that whole big machine doesn’t do is most of the stuff you accuse it of: chase after clicks, popularity, money, sensationalism, etc. That stuff is not science. University politics are not science either. And speaking of science as if it embraces and pushes all that stuff is like firing your accountant because you heard in the news that another, totally unrelated accounting firm was being investigated for fraud. What a travesty that you think poorly of the one thing that could be helping you, and continue to imbibe all the trash that you rightly see has been so misleading!
Edited to add: [well … okay … scientific research is obliged to chase after money, so there is that, and it’s one of the messier realities that will intrude. But if that quest for money works its way into the results and conclusions, there will be trouble brewing. That’s called dishonest science, not good science. And yes, it happens - the tobacco industry being one of the poster children. Find me a textbook now that continues to promote smoking as a way of dealing with stress, and you’ll quickly see my point. That dishonest science did not prevail, even though it hung on for a while. Science is self-correcting, even if that can be and too often is a frustratingly long cycle.]
3 Likes
Hardly original with the Simpsons.
Definitely a better way to spend a trillion dollars than giving it to the richest four hundred people, though.
1 Like
I vaguely remember a bit from the novel 1984 where some Party scientists proposed giant space lenses to shoot giant laser into enemies like ants with a magnifying glass.
Seemed silly to me when I read that.
There are various serious proposals to block a portion of incoming sunlight to reduce global warming, everything from launching dust into the atmosphere to kilometer-wide mirrors to reflect sunlight; there’s even one that would cool just the poles!
1 Like
Definitely earth for me. I’d prefer we were quarantined here until we’ve demonstrated we can live in harmony with each other and with the biome of which we are part.
1 Like
Probably a wise idea. I often see that, if we do perfect Earth-to-space transport systems, we will likely have another major age of conquest as the travel time between bodies lessens (much like what happened for traveling between continents) and empires try and to as much resources for themselves.