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It's what liars do.
The Internet and Web multiplied the capacity for communication. Letters no longer take weeks to cross the Atlantic on a sailing ship. We no longer pay 15 cents a word to read a telegram, or wait while an operator connects two telephones.
Review has always been a step in the scientific method. That is why scientists publish. But through the decades of discovery, more emphasis was on publishing new materials, not revisiting previous works. That has changed. It appears to have been a paradigm shift in the practice of science.
The reductio would be a culture of science that contemplates its navel, always reviewing the existing works, and never creating new ones. Historically, some cultures fell into that broadly. China and Europe both knew times when studying old scholars was the essence of scholarship. We still have remnants of this. You can find journals for Aristotleans and Platonists... and the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies... But we have no journals for Ptolemaic Studies or Applied Phlogiston. So, maybe science is safe for now.
I wonder if this has been a slow change, maybe starting around the time of William Harvey, who starts of On Circulation of the Blood saying it may be shocking to readers that there's something left to discover beyond Galen's work over 1000 years earlier.
Maybe the printing press started, the telegraph, continuing through low-cost high-throughput data. What hath God wrought?
"So, maybe science is safe for now."
I perceive that many people not working around science do not understand science. This article talks about sensational headlines. Science writers make a study interesting by pointing out how it's vaguely similar to sci-fi technology like FTL travel or teleporters. Then a different person writes a sensational headline that often has nothing to do with the real research.
I don't know if it's because of the sensationalism, but many non-scientists seem to start with the premise that all science is actually politics. It seems like they say we can't actually know anything through science, so we might as well pick comforting answers and find evidence to support them.
Michael Pollan does this in In Defense of Food. The book makes good points, but at times he seems to go to that argument that because scientific opinion changes over time, it's unreliable. He says at one point scientist told us all nutrition came from macronutrients, completely missing micronutrients. He talks about how research is funded industry, so we study the benefits of food processed before it gets to the consumer more than the benefits of food that's provided raw for the consumer to cook and process. I think he has a good point. But the answer is not to throw our hands up and say we can't know anything.
My livelihood has been directly impacted by deliberately fraudulent "science" used by federal land management agencies in their implementation of land use policies with the sage grouse FEIS. I will elaborate someday.
Are you saying since there are such huge financial interests in fracking and such a strong cultural Luddite movement that we cannot study it scientifically? If so, do we find the fudge factor by weighing the interests of this huge industry and all the people in the world who want to see the global economy grow against the tiny minority that actually wants to see the world produce less? Following that, we'd think it's all a conspiracy to hide the environmental costs of fracking. I don't agree with this political fudge-factor method. We have to study reality with our imperfect human abilities.
I am on the side of the rest of humankind that likes a lifestyle that consumes energy. I can't speak for neo-Luddites. I read parts of one of Wendell Berry's and Naomi Klein's book, and I don't get it.
What I see here among some is a merger of two themes identified by Richard Hofstadter: the paranoid style in American politics; and the anti-intellectual tradition.
Some people have read that view into Atlas Shrugged, but that was not Rand's viewpoint.
I actually agree with them on not trusting anyone. I don't pretend science is separated from the culture of its practitioners. This is why craniometry showed scientific evidence that some races were smarter than others. They wanted it to be true. Today we want it not to be true. So I am skeptical that there is no correlation between intelligence or some other desirable attribute and physical features associated with race.
When it comes to fracking, it's used to extract oil, which runs the global economy. We don't want it to have a hidden environmental cost. So when I hear some findings that it's not as dangerous as we thought, I am aware that there is every incentive to check and double check findings of costs to fracking and less incentive to double-check favorable findings. But I cannot leap from there to a guess that it's actually x times more costly to the environment than studies show when you factor in a fudge factor for politics. I have to go with the imperfect, human-gathered data we have.
That's a good way to look at it.
It reminds me talking to creationists. They say I believe in a religions narrative, and you believe in Darwin. I say, I accept evolution, not believe it's metaphysical truth. And it's not about following Darwin or some sacred figure. Darwin thought evolution was gradual and had a Lamarkian component. They say, that just proves how bankrupt science is: We can't even pick one story and stick to it.
But some people in that establishment do want to clean it up, and it's nice to see that starting to happen. It's only a start, though.
Don't blame the government. They are culpable. But not for everything. People can be stupid on their own.
mostly government money ie yours and mine, some contribution from guilt ridden cronies and the sheep.
http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-bi...
But, the point is that he admitted that he was in error. And, he was exceptional.
Repeated retractions of a theory make said theory less and less likely to be accurate. Not all theories are correct because man is neither omniscient nor infallible. That said, if I loan a scientist money for research, I expect a return. Did Einstein deliver? Yes, he did.
Does fracking cause effects on the environment? Of course it does! That is the point of fracking! The difference between this paper and Einstein's work is that the truth of Einstein's work was not altered in order to meet a political dictum. Yet when scientific work is not only altered for political or bureaucratic work, as is possible per the article you share, but also that the key point of the work is in reference to "limits" defined by an organization that provides its funding through fines (the EPA), then it should become more obvious to you that retraction of this work should be scrutinized.
Are you staying regarding questions that involve politics, i.e. questions whose answers affect a major industry key to the global economy, we cannot know anything? If for some reason a while industry were immediately affected by the existence of gravitational waves, would Einstein first asserting they couldn't exist and then finding he made an error be all about politics?
I read all your examples, and I still don't get it. Perhaps there's not enough space in this forum. It sounds like you're saying once scientific inquiry has an immediate outcome that would affect a large industry, it becomes political and then we cannot know anything about it.
Is that what you're saying in the example of carcinogens? So many people would hate to see a promising energy source causing cancer, and a few extremists actually want less energy. You're saying because of that we cannot know whether these chemicals cause cancer and how many more cancers occur due to their presence.
Or are you actually saying it's political if it's gov't funded/subsidized?
Here's my example. If scientist A did research that enabled the building of an atomic bomb and scientist B did further research in order to enable the building of an atomic bomb for the express purpose of providing that technology to a state, then scientist B is doing political work too. See also, Albert Einstein. See also, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I assume the scientists performing the research are smart enough to know if their own work is political in nature or is not. In the case of the scientists retracting the environmental study, it is not necessarily true that the retraction was political, but clearly it has political consequences. Am I wrong to be skeptical?
Einstein's theory was a theory. To be tested and proven. Carcinogenicity of a fracking chemical is a theory too. But I'm not volunteering to have the test performed on me! Are you? In the case of Einstein's theory, "there are never enough samples", in the case of carcinogenicity, there are never too few.
Comparing Einstein's theory of relativity to the theory of human toxicology is as simplistic as concluding from E=mc2 that "it's all relative".
Ayn Rand didn't use the term "fracking", but there is no doubt that it was fracking.
I will save this link to use for the next time I get into it with some of my Liberal acquaintances.
As someone else suggested, it is all about the money, and control of the people. If American citizens are finicially stable they Government has no way to use fear to control us. Hell this entire BLM and Dallas thing is the same thing with a different face on it.