2013-09-25

Scientists Turn Authoritarian and Retreat From Science: Popular Science Edition

There is a dual effect on science due to social mood. The first is that people don't want to hear opposing ideas. In science, this is destructive because it means that science is being replaced by politics. However, this feeds into the second effect on science in this period of declining social mood, which is that the corrupt politicization of science is being attacked by the public. In response, the "political scientists" are shutting the door to debate.

Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments
Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.

It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.
Trolls and spambots are a problem, but they are a bigger problem for small bloggers and website owners who can't afford filtering software. So is the issue really about trolls and spambots, or does the magazine fear something else?

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Down goes science. If you told me 10 or 20 years ago that science would be a casualty of negative social mood, I would think science would suffer. Today, it is clear that science has become political itself, corrupted by government and corporate funding, and turning out junk science at a rate of about 80% in cancer research, as one example. (see: Scientists' Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results)

Negative social mood will be positive for science itself, but it will be very negative for those who have corrupted science and turned it into a political tool.

In the larger scale, this is the result of peak social mood. The Enlightenment began at the start of the Grand Supercycle and while it dubbed itself the Age of Reason, at the peak of this trend, the most popular idea was that there is no truth. Thus, to see science reduced to politics is not surprising. As social mood declines, science will seemingly decline as religion rises. But this is not the case. What is happening is a return to truth and a rejection of the ideas that marked the modern era. The corrective phase in philosophy, science, politics, culture and economy is underway.

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