You have to draw a distinction between "unease with science" and "unease with scientists". I fully trust the scientific method as a way to examine the universe around us. But, I do not necessarily believe that "scientists" are using the scientific method without bias and in good faith.
Exactly this.
The left tells us to "listen to the science",
but when I point out bad, non-random, cherry-picked sampling methodology in their claim of a 95% consensus amongst scientists about climate change
(or the fact that the argument by consensus/mob is a logical fallacy and has no place in science, has nothing to do with the scientific method whatsoever),
or that NASA's "adjusted" temperature data completely fails to line up with history, depicting the droughts and resulting Dust Bowl that were a major contributing factor to the Great Depression as some of the lowest temperatures in the last century,
and still shows rising temperatures as news article after news article at the time was predicting a "New Ice Age" due to the major decline in global temperatures for a good 20 years or so-
If you dare bring up these things, they either come up with a new lie because they're a liar, or they clam up because they never thought about these things for more than five seconds before.
These people know nothing of science, know nothing of statistics (and how easy it is to lie with them)-
they simply defer to authority and consensus because there's so much they don't know and while appeal to authority and argument by consensus are both logical fallacies,
they tend to work as a shortcut most of the time.
...But not all of the time, and this leaves them wide open to exploitation.
I have a poor view of the field of psychology, but "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" does an excellent job of explaining this thoughtless, automated shortcuts that people engage in
and how all sorts of people exploit these mental shortcuts for personal gain on a regular basis.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Rlu2eVWkegA/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/KZIwZ7W7fl8/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/vUMQGZEpD5E/
This guy (Tony Heller) just got banned off Youtube for a week, by the way.
Can't let that pesky truth get out!
He was banned for this video in particular: https://www.bitchute.com/video/hzXPxUaGY0g/
There's some nuance to this.
First, the left is pretty selective on science. Conservatives would love science if they looked into racial science and how things like IQ and the heritability of certain behaviors, including criminality, completely refute the white privilege / racism narrative. The left is anti-science, but since they own the media, they can turn eyes away from the science they reject.
Second, science is often quoted for batshit insane ideas. For instance, I'm not a skeptic of manmade climate change, but I recognize that there's nothing scientific or pro-environment about saying that giving billions to the third world will somehow solve global warming. Conservatives hear this batshit insane shit under the guise of science and, not being confident in their scientific knowledge, reject science all together. If conservatives knew that immigration was the worst environmental thing we can do, they'd suddenly love science.
Third, science is getting less scientific by the day. The hard sciences are still safe (though they're trying to shoe in things like "feminist biology"), but conservatives hear sociologists spinning narrative instead of presenting data and they are rightfully skeptical.
Fourth, some of it's pure psyop to smear the right. I've literally never seen a real flat earther or flat earth communities, yet we're told it's this big massive right wing push.
And last but not least, this is probably just false to a large degree. Conservatives are more likely than leftists to major in STEM. For all we're told about being anti-science, we're the ones who actually study it on our own and then try to make careers out of it.
A perfect example of this is the advertisement disguised as a poll ("paid for by the NRDC Action Fund") at the bottom of the article (above the byline, which just seems to add its legitimacy). It asks, "Did you know this election may be our last chance to solve the climate crisis?" The options available are "No" and "Yes, *we need to act*" (emphasis mine).
Americans have been beaten over the head -- for decades now -- about the looming *man-made* planetary apocalypse first called "global warming" and then switched to "global climate change" when the 'warming' part was thrown into doubt. We have been told that "the debate is over" and "the science is settled", and even if you accept *some* of the arguments made by the parties citing alarm over the environment, the entire issue has been **polarized** to the point that if you don't accept the threat of human-caused environmental disaster wholesale... you're lumped in with the "deniers". And a "denier" is defined as anyone who raises their hand and asks "how are you sure?"
**This is why Americans are uneasy with science: not because they reject the scientific method or logic, but because of how it has been venerated as infallible and used as a political weapon.**
*Edit:* to further my point, I went to the [NRDC Action Fund](https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/)'s website, and was immediately confronted with a popup that said "Help us raise $65,000 by September 30 to Defeat Trump".
8 comments
13 u/Escape626 30 Sep 2020 15:00
8 u/anon255 30 Sep 2020 15:41
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7 u/WaltzRoommate 30 Sep 2020 14:51
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4 u/MattyJV 30 Sep 2020 16:26
2 u/kaliali 30 Sep 2020 16:06
1 u/None 30 Sep 2020 21:52