And so do far too many Kossacks.
A friend of mine sent me this--I thought I'd pass it on. It concerns the bizarre idea that science is an ideological plot, and why so many Americans swallow that silly idea.
From: http://www.skepticblog.org/...
In our modern world, we have a strange phenomenon. When polls are conducted about which professions the public considers most trustworthy and useful to society, scientists nearly always come out at or near the top. This poll by the Pew Research Center of 4006 American adults placed them just below the military, doctors, and teachers in terms of trust and their contribution to society. (To no one’s surprise, lawyers were considered the least trustworthy and contributed least to society). This poll by Ipsos of 1018 adults in the UK placed scientists just below doctors and teachers. (Lawyers were not included, so bankers and politicians came out at the bottom in the UK)......
Thus, as a scientist who has published in the peer-reviewed climate science literature, I find it really upsetting and disturbing to hear the smear campaign by right-wing climate deniers that scientists are “in a big conspiracy”, that we are creating a “hoax” to make big money from government grants. Not only is this bizarrely untrue, but it angers me that people call me and my colleagues liars and frauds, yet they don’t know the first thing about how science works, or what scientists really do and what motivates them.
Yet the right-wing effort to demonize scientists has apparently been working. This 2013 poll suggests that 78% of Americans think scientists twist their results to fit their ideology.
Diarist Note: The money quote from that poll is: "A whopping 78 percent of Americans think that information reported in scientific studies is often (34 percent) or sometimes (44 percent) influenced by political ideology, compared to only 18 percent who said that happens rarely (15 percent) or never (3 percent). Similarly, 82 percent said that they think that scientific findings are often (43 percent) or sometimes (39 percent) influenced by the companies or organizations sponsoring them."
This 2014 poll says that 71% of Americans think that scientists are often dishonest. And this 2014 poll showed 31% of Americans are skeptical of climate scientists in particular, and think that they base their results heavily on the previous year’s weather. I’m sure there are some issues with how these polls were conducted, who they asked, how the questions were phrased, and how big the sample sizes were, but if they are even close to representative, this represents an alarming erosion of trust in scientists—and is completely contradicted by the polls I cited at the beginning of this article. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway fully documented in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, this mess can be laid squarely at the feet of the huge PR campaign by the climate deniers and energy companies such as Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers who have funded them. Already there are not enough scientists being trained for these oil giants to find qualified employees, so they are soon going to regret their short-sighted attack on the profession that nourishes and sustains them.
As astrophysicist Adam Frank describes it:
"This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the technologies that drove America’s postwar prosperity. In that era of the mid-20th century, politicians were expected to support science financially but otherwise leave it alone. The disaster of Lysenkoism, in which Communist ideology distorted scientific truth and all but destroyed Russian biological science, was still a fresh memory. The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political culture was at times challenged — the nuclear power debate of the 1970s, for example — the battles were fought using scientific evidence. Manufacturing doubt remained firmly off-limits.
Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels. Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination."
This whole piece is well worth reading in its entirety.
Alas, we see the same thing here, every week, with one ideologue after another declaring that science is a capitalist plot, that corporations (Big Pharma, Big Energy, Big Ag, Big Whatever) bribe or intimidate science into distorting or hiding or falsifying data (whether it's vaccines, nuclear, GMOs, or whatever), and that scientific data and conclusions should be rejected solely because of which "side" they come from. And whether it comes from the left or the right, the CT is the same: "they" (whether it's "the gubmint" or "the corporations" or "the commie environmentalists" or "the rich capitalists") are just making it all up to fit their ideological/economic/political agenda, and are conspiring to hide and suppress "the truth".
It's idiotic tinfoil-hat crackpottery, and it's sad beyond measure to see it here in the "reality-based community". It should be a bannable offense here, per KosRule 13:
13. Conspiracy theories
Extraordinary claims require evidence. If you don't have evidence, don't make the claim. So such things as "Bush was behind (or let happen) 9-11 attacks", or "the Mossad executed the London Tube bombings", or "Diebold stole the 2004 elections" are not allowed. Linking to discredited conspiracy sites isn't "providing evidence". If you want to trade in unsubstantiated craziness, you are in luck! The internet has about a million resources for you. Daily Kos just isn't one of them.
We do not tolerate silly InfoWars CT horse shit from the right wing. We should not tolerate it from the left wing either.