7 comments

  • erelong a day ago

    I think a lot of people are fine with public science existing, they just don't want to involuntarily contribute to it via taxation but would prefer nonprofits and the private sector foot the bill

  • bigbadfeline a day ago

    The problems here are much deeper and bigger than the OP is discussing, it doesn't help that nobody is really wiling to go the extra mile which happens to be the first one for this. A topic for another day.

  • metalman a day ago

    science is the ultimate tool. there must be a minimum size for a culture of state/civisation where by useing science it is possible to bootstrap into a full technological force. North Korea is a good exapmle where they went from legions of bayonet infantry troops, to a nuklear armed state with orbital rocket capability, along with a highly talented cyber brigade, from rice and rifles, just did it. As has been pointed out many times, the genie is out of the bottle, and wont go back in, and the faster and easier we graple with the inevitable leveling up, of everybody, the better. For those who fantisise about containment and the eventual reduction of certain societies "back to the stone age" , they are blind to how there "logic" only hastens a new level of societal intercourse.

  • nickpsecurity 2 days ago

    [flagged]

    • mncharity 2 days ago

      Glancing at your comment history, I see you're already familiar with the concept of groupthink bubbles being extremely popular with people, and a big business. And you mention a wish to mitigate them. I'd hoped to write something more useful here, but it's very late, and drafts are just not gelling. So merely... I suggest the above comment provides opportunities for such mitigation.

      • nickpsecurity 6 hours ago

        I appreciate you noting my prior work on that problem. In my original post, I said dissent isn't allowed. I posted a dissenting opinion on this liberal site. It got three dowvotes to censor it followed by your ad hominem. Now, multiply that by almost every person who tries to discuss this in any liberal-leaning venue. That the majority react the same way to support their positions by social dominance, not discussion, led many of us to believe that's how the supposed consensus got there, too.

        The other point was that money was driving things on the climate policy side. Al Gore and his partner set up a company to make millions on the off chance that people believe in man-made, climate change and invest in his recommendations. Then, he makes An Inconvenient Truth. Likewise, many of them are trading carbon on the market for profit. Blackrock pushed ESG on businesses everywhere while having billions of investments that will make a huge profit if people do this. Specific billionaires also fund these studies for whatever their purposes are.

        Many articles by climate activists mention that money corrupts studies and policies. Yet, they don't mention all the money behind their own, all the people who profit off it, and how they themselves often take money from the same people. The OP article follows this pattern by describing the effects of money and what the other side does but pretends like their side doesn't work that way. They'd leave readers thinking everyone is going broke or operating at a loss promoting climate policy while only oil companies and their agents make money. Which is a bold-faced lie!

        So, the general public that previously only saw information from such liberal sources now is seeing all kinds of information. Twitter and Meta are allowing conservative sources to show up in feeds way more than before. People finally saw reports showing all the financial corruption, science that was paid for, how the projects often failed, how many were money laundering, and so on. So, they stopped believing in it... rightly.

        The fixes are straight forward. Those who have been doing this need to confess their sins. If they don't, philanthropists need to put money into honest media and scientific institutions that will tell the truth no matter what. They need to find people without conflicts of interest to run these analyses. Dissent must always be allowed with no censorship.

        They should fix the one-sidedness of the situation by bringing in the most, knowledgeable critics to put their best data on the table. We will also rerun experiments by potentially-corrupt parties to ensure we get the same results. We'll do science with people from many parts of the political and religious spectrum replicating it. They can contribute the people they'd trust to do the analyses. Then, we'll have ground-up, diverse, independent replication of results with high likelihood of catching paid liars.

        That's my proposal for all contentious topics that have more political domination or financial marketing than actual science. Eventually, we might have a large number of experience scientists, too. People who do the whole process, not just "publish or perish" and "quantity over quality." And organizations paying them for their integrity.

        • mncharity 3 hours ago

          Thanks for the reply. I had hoped my response to be encouragement, rather than ad hominem, as you never know when that might make a difference for someone. Sorry that didn't work out.

          I suggest one source of the comment's downvotes, was not the views expressed, by the style of argumentation used. Though priors which read in a different subculture as not merely incorrect but silly, I agree didn't help. I'll focus on the argumentation.

          Though as an aside, one difficulty in communicating between bubbles, is recognizing that "everyone knows" can become "that's absurd" at bubble boundaries. This can be funny. When Hollywood folks were complaining (re copyright law), on the record, about congressmen not "staying bought", rather than admitting to bribery, it was perhaps more something vaguely like "Everyone I talk with about this topic knows we're right.[bubble] Obviously and completely right. He knew what's right, so we funded him. Since he knows what's right, and did something else, the only thing which makes sense, is he was bought off to do what's not right". To do a cartoonish characterization. Anyway...

          Yesterday, exploring your previous comment, I removed the link, and fed it to... either Bing/chat or ggl AIMode, prefaced with something vaguely like "The person who wrote the following wishes to escape their thought bubble. Evaluate and make suggestions to help them. "...comment..."". Thinking it might help me reply with something useful. The result was long and interesting somewhat (so probably bing). Maybe one-shot LLM chats could be a tool towards a goal of bubble busting.

          The item I recall now, was noting a "morality play" style of argument, with cartoon characters ("liberals" this, "scientists" that). Imagine in some profession context, you're looking for someone to provide reasoned technical analysis of some complex system, and you get "oh, it's straight forward - <large group> just needs to confess their sins". I won't here critique that as theology, but as analysis, what would think of that? What value would you place on it? Or in a discussion of some web phenomenon, a comment "it's simple - web devs are bozos - they just need to pay attention". There is a, lack of fruitfulness, in this flavor of abstraction. So I suggest "dissenting opinion on this liberal site" misses one likely source of the comment's downvotes.

          Thanks for the conversation.