Cancel the Enlightenment – Science is to Become a “Feminist Institution”
Forget old dead white men and their cobwebby equations and quaint experiments. Science is about to get the full feminist, social justice, post-colonialist makeover.
If you care about science, and our ability to answer questions, steward public policy and improve public safety, then you must care about the people who make up the scientific community. Women, pregnant women, people of color, immigrants and refugees, disabled or LGBTQ, scientists are a diverse, intersectional galaxy of identities, histories and expertise. To advocate for science requires us to address and dismantle institutional misogyny and racism. Anything less is morally disingenuous.
Science should be a feminist institution, but we aren’t there yet. We have been silenced by a culture that tells us to divest ourselves from ourselves, for the sake of apolitical objectivity. Everywhere in our society, but doubly so in science, we are told to remain calm, play nice and keep our head down. As if our silence and complicity, indeed our docility, will be rewarded.
This is a lie. There is no reward in acquiescence, only subjugation. We deserve better, and we’ll get it.
The feminist reckoning is here, and it is coming for science.
I care about science. Do you know what though? I don’t give a flying f*** about those people who choose to go into science, whatever race, colour, creed, gender identity they happen to be – I only care about Science, its integrity, its honesty, its adherence to searching for the best approximation to the truth that it can. That quest should, naturally, attract people who share that ideal, but angry, axe-to-grind neo-Marxist feministas like Sarah Myhre and her bosom buddies don’t want that – they want to attract “minorities”, that being anybody who doesn’t fit the description male and pale – and the further the divergence from that despised identity, the better. You don’t need to be hungry for truth, you just need to be hungry for the confected post colonial, post modern approximation to the truth which neo-Marxist social justice warriors are busily concocting in their labs. This is the politics of hatred playing out in the field of the rational sciences and it can only lead to immense pain and the rapid devolution of scientific progress as we know it, which progress has been largely responsible for the development of civilised western society.
Sarah Myhre has no doubt experienced awfulness in her life.
He then left the field after just 10 days instead of the planned two months due to a mixture of, from what I could tell, my rejection of his advances and his own whims. I and two other women were left to complete our research projects in a village fueled by cocaine trafficking.
Working alone in coral reefs, my days passed underwater. But the nights were different. I became a target of sport for young men in the village. I was stalked, assaulted many times in public, physically hurt and most graphically of all—but not actually the most traumatic of the memories—raped silently in a strange bed, in a room that smelled like urine.
The problem with Sarah Myhre is that she externalises her personal grief and projects it onto the world stage, thinking that publicising her personal anger will somehow be cathartic in exorcising her personal and professional demons and at the same time effect the change which she believes is necessary for others equally hard done by in her professional sphere, which she then extends to encompass the entire field of scientific endeavour. Indoctrinated from an early age in the politics of supposed social injustice, she invokes a whole host of other put upon minorities/identities in her quest to mold Science in her own image – LGBTQ, refugees, immigrants, people of colour and the disabled. What arrogance, what stupidity, what reckless unconscionable self-indulgence. Would that she were the only one. Alas not. There is a war going on out there, for the very heart and soul of science.
Climate Scepticism 
Good gods this is hilarious! I apologize for laughing: I know you are very frightened and confused, and that is something that happened to you and was not your choice.
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“Science shoukd be a feminist institution” is non-rational claptrap on so many levels.
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I followed her case a month or two ago. Her entire Twitter is heart emojis at Womxn’s (not a typo) stuff and ‘smash patriarchy’ newspeak.
Bad experience [ she needs help] but nothing about her ideas are her own. Its all ideology. She, or her colleagues who love her, embrace it w/o knowing it. They don’t understand it. She is dangerous and not in the way she celebrates.
The irony of the story of the man she criticized in the essay for saying she wasn’t a real scientist is that she has been bullying him like mad.
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As one of the precepts of the feminist institutions is to be non-judgemental, climate science should fit right in there. Under those rules, we can’t tell Lew and Mann that their papers are crap,
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The replies are even worse. Here is climate “scientist” Eric Steig:
So climate scientists are accusing Jaime of ‘hate’ and then comparing her to a terrorist bomber.
Both these two have blocked me on twitter, and probably Jaime too, so I have to use an “incognito window” to see them, and can’t reply to them directly, but we can reply to the hangers on. Two of the idiots responding to her tweet have referred to Jaime as “he”. Who are the sexists here?
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Thanks Paul. Myhre blocked me a year or two back. Eric Steig – who he? – seems to have blocked me also, but by the miracle of incognito Opera window, I can see the ‘conversation’, which is not worth seeing, but wryly amusing. Of course, we don’t do censorship here at Cliscep so if Sarah or any of her pals were inclined to defend themselves against my ‘hit piece’ they would be most welcome, but that’s rarely how these people roll, so I won’t hold my breath.
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hmmm.. bet they are saying this is ‘hate speech” see emails ref Lewandowsky and parliament
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Sarah’s rationalization for her hatred of men seems to be similar in quality to that of a KKK member who claims a black person once assaulted them, therefore all black people are subhuman.
Her reliance on the climate bigot’s favorite cowardly name for skeptic, “denier”, (the intellectual equivalent of “ni$$er”) only underscores the bigotry and hatred driving her.
And assuming Jaime is a man only makes the ignorant spew more ironic.
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I’ve made 2 comments at Newsweek – lets see if Newsweek subscribes to Lewandowsky’s views on moderation.
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Bringing personal demons into science…? taking it out on those that criticise her?
Sarah Myhre:
“I sat with Death. Death and I rode the bus together. Death was with me in my morning coffee and cream. I rode waves of dysmorphia and couldn’t recognize myself. I lost my appetite and dropped 25 lbs. I stopped sleeping; if I did sleep I would wake soaked with cold-sweats. I was cold for months and I couldn’t feel it. I was mostly self-aware of the mania, the recklessness. My toes were edged up to some vast, black ocean of death and loss.
Sitting next to that dark sea of pain, I recognized the feelings as familiar. The ambiguity, the lack of clarity, the taste of death even when death was not there. Divorce is death without a corpse — the death of a marriage, a family, a dream, a future.”
View at Medium.com
Climate change seems to be cathartic.
Sarah continues:
“Grief and climate
I am an ocean and climate scientist. It’s my day job to think about our planet in a future of abrupt climate warming. The scale of loss that is coming — it’s beyond anything I was ever prepared for. Catastrophic coral bleaching, sea level rise, the loss of Arctic sea ice, the acidification of the global ocean, deadly heat waves — shit. They don’t tell you you’re in for an existential crisis when you sign up for graduate school.
So, I’ve been practicing the letting-go for a while now.
Yet, we are all holding on to, and identifying with, the pain of knowing our planet is forever changing by the onslaught climate warming. It’s the kind of pain you can’t talk about at cocktail parties. Sure, make a witty joke about your ex-husband, that’s acceptable. But whatever you do, don’t talk about how you suffer on empty car rides. Don’t talk about the loss you feel when the rains don’t come, when the cherry trees bloom in January. When you cannot dig the clams or fish the crab or afford the salmon in the store.
I am here to tell you — goddammit — that we need to stop identifying with that pain and start learning from it. We need to take a minute, put down the cell phone, go outside, and come to terms with the planetary scale of environmental death and human suffering that is coming with climate change.
The true acceptance of loss requires a brave integration across that deep, black ocean of pain. To get to the other shore, you have to let Death sweep in and burn down what must go. You are stripped outright of things you can never get back. That’s what Death does. Put beautifully by Bréne Brown, “Grief requires us to reorient ourselves to every part of our physical, emotional, and social world.” Yep. There isn’t a short-cut for that scale of change. However, grief is an open door. It’s a space that you can commit yourself towards walking through.
It hurts, and it is scary, and I feel it, too. But I am here standing with you, too. We share this loss, you and I.
Crossing to the other side
One Sunday in January, after months of pain and physical exhaustion, I had a realization come upon me: I am starving myself of everything that nourishes me. I texted a friend of mine: ‘I think I’ve hit rock bottom’. She replied, ‘that’s great you stopped digging’. Cue in the self-care: dental work, casual sex, massages, counseling, skiing, running, New Orleans, dancing, tattooing, whiskey, kale smoothies. Whatever it took to claw myself out of the grave.
In crossing to the other side after my divorce, I have come to understand what I cannot lose. Similarly, we who are mourning the balance of life on this blue, beautiful planet must remember, too, that there are things we cannot lose. In the future, regardless of the trajectory of emissions and ensuing climate chaos, the world will still be beautiful. We will still make art and sing songs. We will still love one other. We will still be family. Those are the things that death cannot touch.
Getting traction after the loss was like walking through the looking glass — things are different over here. When you burn your life down, you think everything will be ashes, ashes, ashes. But, as Pablo Neruda wrote, “You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.” While this is not true in a future of abrupt warming, it is certainly true of the human heart. The return of life in the wake of death is startling. Profound.
In a similar way, I see the climate crisis clearly. Our world has become simple and I have been parsed like a carrot or a stone. I see how human lives and voices, when united and brave, transcend and heal the world. And, I see how I might use my voice for a short while, until Death inevitably welcomes me back into the warm waters of that black ocean.
Join me on the other side and let us love one another through this darkness.
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I’ve no wish to dwell upon Myhre’s personal grievances but by making them so public and by using them in part as justification for joining the feminist crusade against misogyny and racism supposedly rife in science, she opens herself up to personal criticism. I wonder why she appears to blame the senior male mentor who made advances at her, then backed off and left the country, for her subsequent ordeal at the hands of the (presumably male) local residents whose treatment of her bears all the hallmarks of real, actual, physical misogyny, culminating in actual rape. it would appear that the unprofessional and somewhat shitty behaviour of her older white male mentor counts far more in the grievance stakes than the awful physical abuse she suffered from unidentified villagers.
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Sarah Myhre is hurting herself, again it seems. Scientists tend to be culturally conservative and she comes across as a self-flagellating masochist. She casually throws into the middle of the article that she was raped! There is no context, no details, and no framework for the reader to judge such a significant crime and violation. It’s just bundled up as one of the many bad things ‘predatory men’ did to her, in science. Such a stark exploitation of personal tragedy to score political points.
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Do read this fine article in The Atlantic: Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?
A British broadcaster doggedly tried to put words into the academic’s mouth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/putting-monsterpaint-onjordan-peterson/550859/
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As with most of these sorts of protests, it’s not obvious what they’re muttering about. Sex harassment and assault need to be separated from equality.
Her experiences could be divided into two halves. The actions of her supervisor are things that should absolutely be eradicated. I find it odd that she didn’t report it at the time, it’s not like it was decades ago. The attacks she experienced in the field however were almost inevitable, even if her supervisor had remained. The trip doesn’t say good things about her university’s health and safety policies and her own common sense. There are just places in the World where you don’t go and expect to emerge unscathed, man or woman, but women are especially vulnerable. Being a scientist doesn’t furnish you with an immunity shield. They should have had armed guards from the US and if the trip couldn’t afford them, the science probably wasn’t that important. A business would be rightly pilloried for failing to adequately protect its employees. Millennials are increasingly putting themselves at risk, going off the beaten track to prove to the world that they’re tough but in reality it just proves that they’re reckless. Science and reckless don’t really go together. They used to, but then the results were often somewhat sloppy and full of unjustified guesses… actually a lot like climate science.
If the only way you can move forward in your career as a scientist is to risk your life, then the system needs to change for everyone, not just women. And yes, that might mean that less science is done. As businesses have found, health and safety costs. It hinders progress but in many cases it is justified. Ironically there are probably really dumb H&S rules in her local work place that leech the money needed for much needed security in the field. If she’s angry, at least some of it should be directed to the women and men who went before her who failed to demand sensible measures. It doesn’t seem like she’s done much in that direction herself.
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Tiny, take a look at this:
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/11/17/25572044/the-culture-of-harassing-and-demeaning-women-scientists
This is Sarah, doing the same thing as she does now: referring to her violent experience in Costa Rica to smear Cliff Mass by association. Mass’s defence is appended at the bottom and if he’s to be believed, it appears Sarah ‘offered’ a joint op-ed in the Seattle Times as an opportunity to clear Cliff’s name, after attacking him in a state assembly hearing. (~!!!)
Attacking fellow scientists at hearings is not an uncommon tactic in the alarmist camp. It can be guessed who she picked it up from.
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To quote Oscar Wilde on Little Nell, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. I wouldn’t have said that, if Sarah Myhre hadn’t accused Jaime of “denialism, misogyny and hate.” The article seems to be designed to elicit the very misogynist reactions it decries. As Shub points out above, being so casual about rape indicate a disturbed personality, and the editor should have warned her off. This is feminism deliberately appealing to the very base instincts it claims to combat.
A politer person than I would express sympathy for her suffering and leave it at that. But she wants others to suffer, not so much the rapist, as the university bully and above all the climate deniers. She can’t be allowed to get away with that. So I shall go on having a jolly good laugh imagining Sarah with her tattoos and massages, enjoying her dentistry and casual sex, sipping kale smoothies while skiing in New Orleans.
She’s a jolly physical lass, isn’t she? When does she get the time to do any science?
[added: From Shub’s link above, she has a child, who one day will read all this. I’m sorry about that. But so much hate spread so widely can’t go unanswered.]
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“Of course, we don’t do censorship here at Cliscep so….”
Really?
[A small number of trolls and their sockpuppets are set to go into moderation. One of them is currently our 4th most prolific commenter.]
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Really Kermit.
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The more Sarah rants and spews, the more she sounds like a mixture of Capt. Queeg and one of the accusers from The Crucible.
But instead of religion or missing strawberries, she is obsessed with climate apocalypse and the hatred of men.
Tormented souls *need* an apocalypse to redeem their suffering. And reducing an entire gender into the role of devil to be defeated in Sarah’s climate apocalypse seems about right for today’s illiberal academic bigots.
So corrupting the entire edifice if science with the modern devolved version of “feminism”, which is fundamentally irrational, racist, sexist and musanthropic, seems a nice fit for Sarah.
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She’s a good example of why I dislike feminism and environmentalism for that matter. They don’t invite support, they demand it, to which many are inclined to say no, just in response to the agressive tone.
There ARE many inequalities out there but because humans use all sorts of tricks to move up the pecking order and exclude others, it’s hard to know how much can be attributed to specifically racist or sexist behaviour. So are minorities more discriminated against than others or is it just their minority that forms the subject of their received insults? Any physical abnormality (even very good looks) can be the subject of an exclusion. Men often do put women down, but they’re equally keen to put down each other and women do the same. Animal nature also enourages people to pick most on the least powerful. So if you’re already an outsider, it’s very hard to become an insider. It’s often the case that the newest insider is the most cruel excluding would be members of the group.
Warmists do the exclusion insult thing all the time. ‘Denier’ is all about saying ‘you’re not in my tribe, scumbag’. Sarah Myhre is as unpleasant as many of those she feels happy to decry. She just thinks that she’s justified in being a nasty piece of work. She will in turn get more hostility in response and will assume that it is proof she is discriminated against.
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Len, Provost, Kermit, whoever he is, is free and welcome to **** off to post on countless other sites — there are billions of them to choose from.
If he were censored, he would not be able to. And if we had the power to censor him, censorship would be the least of his worries.
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Geoff, perhaps I should take the accusation of denialism, misogyny and hate a little more seriously, but they are just empty words, tweeted without the benefit of a single rational thought; angry red paint thrown randomly at a half-glimpsed canvas with the hope of achieving some ill-conceived ‘effect’. The tragedy is that Myhre hopes to defend ‘science’ in such a manner. The greater tragedy is that her colleagues buy into her hysteria, apparently.
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Tiny – …they don’t invite support, they demand it,
They demand obedience, rather than support. Which is why their impulse is towards policing, rather than sharing, values. It’s fundamentally a distrust of people.
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Went to UEA yesterday (to renew my library card) and wondered what all the fuss is about. Saw a first year science class go into a lecture (140 people?) and noticed that males were quieter and definitely a minority. Virtually all the female lecturers in the School of Environmental Science when I left are now full professors. It won’t be long till those that are male and pale will be a minority.
‘Bout time.
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This tweet seems a lot more liked than anything from Myhre or Newsweek:
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WHAT is investigated in science should be determined not so much by the personal preoccupations and biases of those doing the investigating but by the real and urgent environmental and technological challenges we face as a society and as a species. Science for its own sake is sadly becoming very much a hobbyist pursuit. Funding and resources will increasingly be driven by perceived need and practical application. So the people you want to attract to science are going to be the brightest and most able, those most suited to pursue research in their chosen discipline. Why on earth would you want to socially engineer the intake and the promotion to seniority in research with the sole intention of conforming to some vague notion of ‘equality’ or ‘social justice’ or acceptable ‘diversity’? All you need do is ensure that all students of equal ability are given equal opportunity based on that ability. If you start dishing out scholarships and professorships based upon any characteristic other than academic ability, then you are just going to trade academic excellence for ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’, attract the wrong sort of people into science and thus science will suffer as a result. Eventually, you will end up replacing objective research with politically motivated and sociologically driven ‘touchy-feely’ pseudoscience, more informed by the humanities than by empirical data.
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Jaime. “WHAT is investigated in science should be determined … by the real and urgent environmental and technological challenges we face as a society and as a species. Science for its own sake is sadly becoming very much a hobbyist pursuit. Funding and resources will increasingly be driven by perceived need and practical application. ”
The problem comes in deciding WHO should determine what are the “real and urgent environmental and technological challenges we face as a society and as a species”. At the present time the science establishment consider AGW to be one of the main challenges.
This type of top down control should, as you point out, drive out science for its own sake. Fortunately there is some form of counterbalance. Research funds are allocated to enable the teaching of research (MSc and PhD ) students and this can be for “blue-sky” research.
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Comments at Newsweek aren’t going well for Sarah. Here are some of the less rude ones.
Eric Falkenstein · Northwestern University
Based her testimony of sexual assault–which if true was a crime–the author makes a vast, vague claim about a repressive cis male white culture, with all the clarity of the Occupy Movement. As a Paleoceanographer feminist climate scientist who has published in peer reviewed journals, we supposedly should find that sufficient to accede to her demands. Only the hard left, academics and the mainstream media find that compelling.
Jonathan Grier · Stevenston
No, it shouldn’t. Science should be science, an entirely meritocratic and unpoliticised space. Anything that taints that should be thrown out, including the world’s newest religion (Intersectional Feminism).
Barry Woods · University of Reading
looks like you visited a ‘shithole’ country… maybe a plane home would have been better. quite how, the culture of that country, and the behaviour of the locals’ has anything to do with science is beyond me.
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“Science should be science, an entirely meritocratic and unpoliticised space. Anything that taints that should be thrown out, including the world’s newest religion (Intersectional Feminism).”
A far more concise and succinct summary of my waffly comment above.
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Alan,
“At the present time the science establishment consider AGW to be one of the main challenges.”
That’s the problem Alan. AGW has not presented us with any serious challenges. It’s got a bit warmer; how much warmer is a matter of debate. Scientists tell us that their models predict that AGW will, at some point in the future, become a serious challenge to our society and an existential threat to the planet. This crystal ball gazing has so far cost trillions in research, administration and preventative measures, of dubious benefit to say the least. Meanwhile, actual challenges, e.g. how to produce real clean energy from fusion, how we might adapt to abrupt natural climate changes, etc. receive relatively little attention and research funding.
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Dear me, “it’s worse than we thought”, clearly bovine spongiform encephalitis is more widespread than I ever believed possible!
Anyone fancy a bit of Feminist Glaciology?
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368
Heh, “just and equitable science and human-ice interactions”… Strewth!
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We seem to be living in an age of hyper-emotionalism. I blame Michael Bay.
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Where’s Ken when need him? You would think that such a pile of steaming un-science would attract him like a fly to decomposing flesh
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Scientists should investigate things thst interest them.
Not what their political commisars command.
And most certainly not what some tortured soul projects out of her dark and painful past in a hateful, sexist, misanthropic fight against a foe that exists only in her mind.
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Scientists should investigate things thst interest them.
Not what their political commisars command.
And most certainly not what some tortured soul projects out of her dark and painful past in a hateful, sexist, misanthropic fight against a foe that exists only in her mind.
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Hunter, we can’t say that there is no foe, just that she tars everyone with the same brush. She smears across the boundaries of different issues and pretends that they’re the same thing. There IS sexism and other isms out there. There are bosses who wrongly think that trying to get dates from junior staff is fine. I’m not talking about mutual attraction, but serial pick ups with a little pressure thrown in. There is discrimination. There is assault. You only have to consider the Presidents Club to know that there are some ugly attitudes out there, even in the most wealthy circles.
Sarah Myhre’s attitude is bad in the other direction but she at least has a good reason for her hatred. The #metoo thing is an over reaction based on a millennia of under reaction (even by women). Feminism is a blunt tool. It’s unfocused and just bashes around indiscriminately. Like other western self loathing it often chooses to attack the best, rather than the worst. That disincentives those who are already decent.
I’ve yet to see a modern leader of the feminist movement that I don’t dislike. Largely they’ve used the issue to do what they wanted and sod other women. eg Germaine Greer is a terrible role model. Her teachings were solely to justify her own behaviour. Trouble makers always like a gang round them. She’s the priestess of the self-centred, self indulgent, litigious generation that demand that their smallest whim be fixed yesterday. So it is hugely funny that she’s now been sacrificed on the alter of political correctness. How galling to find out that a guy in a dress has more rights than the women she supposedly fought for. Feminism should have been about equality, not about trying to get advantage through minority status.
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Jaime: Eric Steig, Who he?
Steig is a member of RealClimate
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/extras/contributor-bios/
Antarctic is melting…or not.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/01/skeptic-paper-accepted-on-antarctica-rebuts-steig-et-al/
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I blame Global Warming, Trump and Brexit in equal proportions.
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After the Economic collapse of 2008, I was compelled to begin a new a job in a field about which I knew very, very little. The first several months were learning on the job, with little formal training and a manager that I thought was largely thoughtless and unprofessional. She had a friend who, I was told (in whispers) had attended Law School somewhere, but after a full three tries, was unable to pass the Bar Exam, leaving her no options in the field to which she aspired. I’m sure it hurt and caused some serious emotional trauma. She joined the company a couple months after I did and I also heard that her father was battling cancer and also (again, in whispers) that she had something of a rocky relationship with him. I don’t know if that was true and if so, why. But that’s what I’d been told by someone else who’d met her before (and did not like her, for legit reasons, or so I thought). Nevertheless, I had no problems with her; we exchanged no hard words, nor ran afoul of each other for the two or three months that I remained at the company. Then, one day she was eagerly trying to get someone to switch a work shift for the following day and I happened into the office as she was hearing “no” from the second, then third person she’d asked (about switching shifts). She immediately approached me, but I too was unable to accommodate her request and when I said as much -despite no prior acrimony of any kind between us- her countenance twisted into a look of deep and utter disgust (ostensibly with me as the cause) and she growled at me telling me what a shit I was for not doing this when her dad was dying! (NOTE: I found out that she didn’t want the time off to be with her dad – important detail). I saw a couple of people behind her physically react to what she had said and turned to look away (presumably in disgust of their own). But what really struck me was -judging from the look on her face at that time how she seemed to actually attribute to ME, the reason, or cause for own her horrible feelings at that time. There was absolutely no possible, reasonably rational reason for it. None. But it was written on her face. I left the company a month or two later and joined another (where I still am today) and sent some goodbye emails to a few people. I included her and said that I wished her and her family the best with their dad’s health, etc. I never heard back. She was simply miserable for whatever (number of) reason(s). It’s a place we all flirt with and even fall into occasionally. Perhaps she improved afterward, but if she did, she never tried reaching me to apologize, or any such. Perhaps she was too damaged or, perhaps her dad was an abusive man when she was young, but even if not, surely his sickness churned up chaotically confusing and difficult emotions as such things do. But, as with Sarah Myhre, it becomes hard to engage the “better angels of our nature” in the face of it, especially when it’s a pattern of behavior as is seems to be with Sarah. I’ve also been unimpressed with her science, so it may be as likely that feeling insecure about her own abilities, or the work she’s produced (just like failing to pass the bar) brings out the bombast and caustic vitriol. Heck, you have to at least consider the possibility that it’s untrue. Whether it is or isn’t true, it’s certainly a prop (and a weaponized one at that) for her to use as needed, just as “my dad is dying, you ass” was for my former co-worker (even though that was true…though I’m still not convinced that her distress about it was…at least at that moment). So who knows. But when I see something that serious treated with an almost glib casualness, I begin to catch a whiff of disingenuousness. Sorry for the length of this entry, but…there you go.
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My longer comment, citing this blog.. seems to have been removed from the Newsweek article
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They wouldn’t want people reading alternative viewpoints now would they Barry. I never managed to comment there, but it looks like if I had, they would have deleted it anyway.
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The problem with the internet and social media is that they have given unbalanced and ignorant personalities a loud voice that enables them to skew the opinions and foster the fears of others.
I can’t see where it ends other than in societal madness and self destruction.
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Jaime. 24 Jan 18 at 6:34 pm
“Science should be science, an entirely meritocratic and unpoliticised space. ”
I presume you are referring to state-funded, academic science. Much science (a majority?) is done within industry where it may be neither always meritocratic nor unpolitical. Decisions are more often based on economic strategies and tactics. Science within government agencies is a mix, with good science commonly not done for financial reasons.
I have worked for industry, government agency, and academia: each has its pluses and minuses. None is entirely meritocratic nor unpolitical.
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Have you noticed how many of these PhD’s pumping out alarmist crap are barely 20’s?
I had to sit for the 8 hour EIT exam and accumulate 4 years of real world experience before talking the PE exam.
PhD’s have become less about expertise and more about playing the academic political game, – who you know, who you are, what you are – continually sequestered in the academic echo chambers.
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