Feb 18·edited Feb 23Liked by Steve Stewart-Williams
Good article, especially on the harms caused by this. I would just add that the way for scientists to address conclusions they don't like or consider anti-social is to work to refute them where they may be erroneous, or study and recommend policies that mitigate their harm if not refutable. But, for the reasons you enumerated, it is not to censor them.
An clamor for aggressive censorship in and of science, self- and otherwise, is growing and will have a devastating impact on the credibility of science in the public. Smashing the “jewel in the crown of our cultural achievements” for the sake of momentary political gain is foolish. But it is done is such earnestness, "to make the world a better place"!
The Mann verdict is turning into a rallying cry for ramping up the legal thuggery.
Hotez's new book, *The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science*, is an inadvertent self-parody of the earnest scientist laying out his plans to "uncouple" his dissenting colleagues from public discourse by "dismantling" their voices. [https://ddalthorp.substack.com/p/prof-peter-hotez-md-phd-and-the-dreadful]
Hotez and Mann are joining forces on a new book project—*Science under Siege*—to be released in 2025.
The scientific method is a huge expenditure of energy to reduce average error or surprise (entropy) in our ability to predict reality and continue to propagate... science. It works very well.
The divergence between reality and “science” (surprise) continually increases free energy in the system (unusable work) until maintaining scientific facts are thermodynamically infeasible as a system.
Humanities has achieved that state with, for instance, “gender studies” which is entirely free of connection to reality, creates no illumination of the human condition ... At least with science, it self-corrects, but it just takes increasingly more and more effort.
It's going to take a lot of courage for the silent ones to raise their voices and they will need examples like your paper to rally them. This looks like an important contribution to fixing a problem, tyoically driven by incentives that mitigate so hard against the real mission of scholarship.
Good article, especially on the harms caused by this. I would just add that the way for scientists to address conclusions they don't like or consider anti-social is to work to refute them where they may be erroneous, or study and recommend policies that mitigate their harm if not refutable. But, for the reasons you enumerated, it is not to censor them.
Yep, completely agree.
An clamor for aggressive censorship in and of science, self- and otherwise, is growing and will have a devastating impact on the credibility of science in the public. Smashing the “jewel in the crown of our cultural achievements” for the sake of momentary political gain is foolish. But it is done is such earnestness, "to make the world a better place"!
The Mann verdict is turning into a rallying cry for ramping up the legal thuggery.
Hotez's new book, *The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science*, is an inadvertent self-parody of the earnest scientist laying out his plans to "uncouple" his dissenting colleagues from public discourse by "dismantling" their voices. [https://ddalthorp.substack.com/p/prof-peter-hotez-md-phd-and-the-dreadful]
Hotez and Mann are joining forces on a new book project—*Science under Siege*—to be released in 2025.
“By blunting our ability to understand the world, we also blunt our ability to make the world a better place.”
This, right here, full stop.
The scientific method is a huge expenditure of energy to reduce average error or surprise (entropy) in our ability to predict reality and continue to propagate... science. It works very well.
https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/1485673d77ce7c702ff0e37885de968ebae63e26
Measures it nicely.
The divergence between reality and “science” (surprise) continually increases free energy in the system (unusable work) until maintaining scientific facts are thermodynamically infeasible as a system.
Humanities has achieved that state with, for instance, “gender studies” which is entirely free of connection to reality, creates no illumination of the human condition ... At least with science, it self-corrects, but it just takes increasingly more and more effort.
Sad.
The truth will come out eventually, to our detriment. Ideology poisons everything. Bowing to it is the antithesis of science.
It's going to take a lot of courage for the silent ones to raise their voices and they will need examples like your paper to rally them. This looks like an important contribution to fixing a problem, tyoically driven by incentives that mitigate so hard against the real mission of scholarship.