scienceruinseverything

If I had my act together, I would have had my final installment of “It Ain’t Heavy, It’s Science” ready for today, as we’re having the #ScienceMarch. But I don’t, so in lieu of that I will turn things over to Carl Phillips and Nicolas Bourbaki, who share their thoughts on the event.


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Ed Note: Link is to the earlier tweet stating “First, it could mean ‘the scientific method’ (whatever that is, but more on this later).


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9 Responses to Science And Its H8rs

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    Probably one of the more intelligent twitter rants I’ve ever read.

  2. greginak says:

    Agreed this is good solid twittering. Makes a lot of sense. And the Marches are good things if they generate energy to role back the nonsensical ( not to be judgmental or anything) cuts to science funding and focus on how we can use science to inform our decision making.

  3. Jaybird says:

    It is this particular notion of science (henceforth: SCIENCE!) that allows for a fairly well-trained Young Earth Creationist to dismantle an advocate of SCIENCE! in front of a crowd.

    At the end of the day, deferring to The Elders That You Trust With These Things is a tribal behavior. Whether they’re wearing black robes or white coats.

    • greginak says:

      Oh god YEC’s. Yeah they could be well trained, i used to argue with them on the old discovery channel boards. They could be trained to repeat arguments and some did it well. The deeper truth came out when their training failed them and their arguments were shredded. They didn’t really understand and were only repeating scripts. There are probably YEC’s who are better, but i’m not sure i ever talked to one.

      • Brandon Berg says:

        Yes, but that’s also true of many/most IFLS types. They believe all the proper things (i.e. the ones consistent with their ideology), and memorize a few talking points, but they don’t actually understand the underlying issues, and can’t effectively argue against someone who does at least somewhat, even if that person is wrong.

  4. I like these specific twitter arguments, but then I’m part of the choir to which they are preaching.

  5. fillyjonk says:

    I am someone who is technically a scientist (botanist and ecologist) and I find the SCIENCE!!! crowd a little embarrassing. It does feel rather like a new religion, with things that are Not Questioned and with the catechisms and everything.

    Two phrases I wish I never had to see again:

    “Science: it works, b*tches” and “Let’s do a Science!” The first, because science sometimes gets things wrong (the whole POINT of it is that newer discoveries supplant older knowledge sometimes) and also that there are things science doesn’t really address. (We might be able to clone a human, but SHOULD we?). The second, because it’s just STUPID and ungrammatical. “Doing a science” for some reason makes me think of a three year old saying “go poo-poo in the potty!” Yes, I’m being a crank about it, but I hate it when stuff I have been doing for 20+ years gets co-opted by some “cool crowd” that doesn’t totally understand it.

    So yeah, I find that tweetstream a lot more nuanced about the Science March than most of the people I know who were talking about it. (Confession: I temporarily muted most terms having to do with it for the day of the march, just to avoid my feed filling up with it)

    • George Turner says:

      Should we clone humans? Of course we should, and on a massive scale so science and genetic engineering can advance at a faster pace. At present, we’re forced to rely on studies of genetically random twins, and we don’t even allow scientists to freely dissect them or see what their physical and mental limits are.

      This refusal to do science, due to Obama’s inane assertion that we won’t allow human cloning because it is “wrong”, holds back the knowledge we need to build lab-grown genetically-modified super soldiers, which will be the greatest scientific achievement since the invention of the hydrogen bomb.

  6. Michael Cain says:

    All models are wrong. Some models are useful (for making accurate predictions about the real world). Complexity of the model is neither here nor there — does it make accurate predictions?

    Back in the 1970s, there were lots of long-term economic models. The Club of Rome’s “limits to growth” model was one of the simpler ones. Over 40 years, it has tracked reality as well as any of them. The next decade is when the model will prove its utility (or not) — this is about the time the model said things would get interesting.

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