These cuts have been in progress for months, and it’s a sad state of the world when scientific research and its products are called unscientific and not evidence based without any substantiation.

I’m reminded of this quote from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, as we creep closer and closer to future he describes.

> We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

▲

twodave 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It’s more nuanced, I think.

Some of those in power do understand science and technology, and have responsible stances.

Some … understand …, and have intentionally-irresponsible stances.

Some do NOT understand, and choose positions either based upon bad information or other priorities entirely.

And those of us not in power are routinely lied to by all four groups, making us question the reputation of literally everything.

I think the end state of this is sort of the dragon eating its tail—not only do those in power no longer understand science and technology (or use their understanding to manipulate others), but the disease then spreads to most everyone else.

	▲	ethbr1 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Slight addition: some understand that science is immutable (in the platonic sense, whether or not current knowledge is accurate) and therefore willingly work to destroy public belief in science because it's a threat to their own power to declare truth.
	▲	JeremyNT 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Closer to home, here on HN (and in SV generally) there is a lot of support for this regime. It's infuriating that people who really should know better either remain willfully ignorant or simply view the loss to humanity as an acceptable price to pay for ending up with a lower marginal tax bracket.

▲

2OEH8eoCRo0 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Souter warned of the lack of civic education as well. We are just ignorant all around these days!

“An ignorant people can never remain a free people. Democracy cannot survive too much ignorance.”

“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics in American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”

▲

lvspiff 4 days ago | parent [-]

Theres such a huge focus on STEM yet i rarely see the scientific method or critical thinking and logic being taught. Its like forming your own ideas is no longer a thing and so long as you have the solution you wont need anything original

I see it growing worse in my job where newer staff rarely can come up with new ideas and the older staff are having to hand hold them. They have trouble even stating the problem at times just “i dont know how to fix any of it”. Eventually the solution is either crazy convoluted (a factory for a class for a static function that returns a string of static json) or just crazy in general (let me put this json into an env variable so its now its available global)

▲

Avshalom 4 days ago | parent [-]

Partly this because there was never a focus on STEM there is a focus on a limited subset of T and E that businesses find profitable.

Even then, you need history and philosophy of science classes to actually contextualize and contrast "scientific thinking" to actually get people to go engage with science as an ongoing endeavor rather than a series of concepts from a text book that must be memorized and mastered.

	▲	ethbr1 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		+1. I learned more about what parent is talking about in my philosophy / epistemology courses than STEM ones.

▲

OCASMv2 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or maybe they do have evidence that proves ineffectiveness/harm of a technology that was rushed to the market during a global panic.

▲

lawlessone 4 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

▲

tomhow 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Please don't dig up comments from old threads to weaponize in current threads.

▲

lawlessone 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am citing past comments to demonstrate the individual has a pattern of disregarding basic hygiene measures. And that it's related to their current view on vaccines

And as you can see from their reply they don't mind talking about it.

	▲	tomhow 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The phrase "disregarding basic hygiene measures" is also a rhetorical interpretation that indicates you're more interested in battle than curious conversation. And just because somebody doesn't complain about you digging up old comments, it doesn't make it OK to do. We can't know in advance how it will make someone feel, nor how they actually feel about it, even if they haven't complained about it. The central issue is still that you seem to be using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is not what it is for.

▲

krapp 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hacker News doesn't allow old threads to deprecate and doesn't allow you to delete your account. You choose to create a permanent public record of everything everyone has ever said on this forum, and I've seen mods go back months into a commenter's history to do exactly that.

What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.

▲

tomhow 4 days ago | parent [-]

Anyone can email us to have comments deleted if there are no replies, or anonymized/redacted if they no longer want the comment linked to their identity.

We cite past comments only to demonstrate a pattern when taking action against a user who has a history of guidelines breaches.

It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic, as we have no idea if the person still agrees with what they posted a long while ago, nor whether the context of the historical comment is relevant to the present topic.

Geese and ganders have nothing to do with it and I don't know why you're using my efforts to uphold fair debating between community members as grounds to attack our moderation.

▲

lawlessone 4 days ago | parent [-]

>It's a long-established norm on HN that weaponizing historical comments in a present-day argument is not considered a fair debating tactic,

I think it's fair to use past comments to highlight bad faith actors.

	▲	tomhow 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The energy of "highlight[ing] bad faith actors" is not what we're going for here. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and there are valid reasons why someone's present-day position could (appear to) contradict a historical position. The best reason is that they have undergone some personal growth, which we would hope of most people over a year or more, and we definitely want to allow space for that on HN.

▲

fnordpiglet 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If they do have such evidence it would be worth while to justify their cuts with that evidence. Just because it was rushed out doesn’t mean it wasn’t used by billions of people tens of billions of times with an extraordinarily low incidence of side effects observed in situ. This is a situation of unparalleled prevalence, including probably everyone reading this now. If there were evidence of problem it would be globally observable and impossible to suppress. Even if the pharma industry would want to, all it would take is a single professor of medicine, statistician, epidemiologist, etc anywhere on earth looking for tenure to be able to produce a compelling and well structured survey and / or meta analysis that showed mRNA vaccines had any level of harm. But it didn’t happen. Because they are safe, and literally everyone who has had one - which is pretty much literally everyone - knows this. RFK Jr knows this too, but he is seeking something other than truth here.

▲

OCASMv2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

No, what I said about masking policy during COVID was this:

> Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.

▲

mindslight 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know why you wouldn't wear a mask to stop aerosols. Masks were a correct answer. The problem was pushing those pieces of crap made out of cut up t-shirts and other hopium, to help cope with the presidential dereliction of duty failing to address the shortage of real PPE P95/P100s.

▲

OCASMv2 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I don't know why you wouldn't wear a mask to stop aerosols.

Because the masks don't stop aerosols. They're too tiny for them. Then there's also the fact that being so light they accumulate in the air and last there for an hour or longer and can even infect people through the eyes.

▲

mindslight 4 days ago | parent [-]

That argument was always trotted out in the context of the hopium made out of t-shirts, or surgical masks with open flow paths around the filter. Everything I saw confirmed that P100's were quite effective at the relevant drop size (as you'd expect them to be, as they stop things like atomized and aerosolized paint spray). As far as the eyes, reducing viral load is worthy on its own. Or if you want the proper solution, that is a full face mask. But either way, not having a perfect solution certainly doesn't indicate going in the opposite direction and completely giving up on the idea.

▲

OCASMv2 4 days ago | parent [-]

> not having a perfect solution certainly doesn't indicate going in the opposite direction and completely giving up on the idea.

Having a so-so solution can in fact be worse than nothing since it makes people think they're safe, which leads to much greater exposure than if they thought they were in danger. Promoting ventilation and open-air interaction is a much more effective solutions but the latter was banned and even persecuted.

	▲	mindslight 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You didn't address my core point, and you're still pulling in this odd direction of pointing to the failings of the straightforward approach to justify contrarianism based around doing even less. Ventilation and open-air interaction were also both widely promoted, and widely used for things like social gatherings in parks and outside of homes. There were plenty of situations (eg grocery stores) where they were inapplicable from an individual perspective, hence the masks.

▲

rngecounty 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm glad this is being done. Government funded research like this is just another financial engineering opportunity for these research companies/universities. I am not making this up, just check the other post about scientific fraud at scale which is currently on the front page of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796526

▲

insane_dreamer 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

All we're doing is shifting your tax dollars to the military, which is another financial engineering opportunities for defense contractors.

If my money's going to go somewhere I'd rather it go to research universities/companies and get outputs that will save lives rather than destroy lives.

▲

bigyabai 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud. If anything, we trust the government with these incalculably valuable public-works projects because we cannot afford to write off the alternative. Not for COVID, not for the seasonal flu, and not for the next plague/ebola/malaria of your lifetime either.

▲

rngecounty 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Privatizing vaccine development doesn't remove the incentives for scientific fraud.

Right it won't. My point however is that don't create an avenue, private or public, which has dedicated funds for such activities. It just ends up becoming an industry which tries to gain off those funds than doing any real research.

	▲	bigyabai 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's how all industry works. The side that invests most in innovative techniques is rewarded with larger margins and incentivized to wring out every last dollar they can. The "if we don't look at the research then it doesn't exist" mentality is why TSMC is 5 generations ahead of Intel's fabs.
	▲	haganomy 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you know how the Internet was created?