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In our recently submitted grants we had to change “traumatic brain injury” to “concussive brain injury” and “male and female mice” to “male and non-male mice” because traumatic and female are now verboten words that can get our grants killed. It’s insanity.
Conservatives are fucking morons lmao
Yeah that’s what happens when “science” is based on capitalism, fascism, etc. It’s just more explicit now.
Where is all the outrage for word switching here?
The master/main folks are sure silent.
Or the male/female folks vs plug and socket?
I don’t think anybody was against master/slave over primary/secondary.
wake up babe, new politically correct has dropped
literally PC culture gone mad
Wait I thought it was Woke that was supposed to be policing what language we used?
Something, something, every accusation, a confession
God, that’s so right-woke.
Me trying to get grants for my rat trebuchet
Is it operated by rats or throwing rats?
Trebuchet of the rats, by the rats, for the rats.
I have two pet rats, and I’m pretty confident that they’d love a trebuchet. I could see one of them operating while the other is the ammunition.
Or, both operating with more conventional projectiles. Rats crave destruction and chaos. And also cuddles.
Brilliant i say Brilliant
Lowers binoculars and looks at my fellow Imperial gunners
See them? The rats are up to something.
If they can drive cars, they can work a trebuchet
Yes
I watched an interesting video recently on “Lysenkoism”.
In short, it’s a horrible example of what happens when party politics are more important than correct science. And it should all feel very familiar to what’s happening in the US right now.
F me, the parallels are unreal.
This is why politics and science shouldn’t mix. The truth is the truth, no matter how inconvenient it is to your bottom line.
Science has a huge shortcoming with desperate scientists wanting funding and making up just enough to keep it. The peer review process works when it’s something that actually gets properly peer reviewed, but there’s not much money in peer reviewing a claim that x molecule lowers your heart rate by 10%.
Science will be great if society ever got to the point of no longer needing money or barter. Which would happen due to science.
Politics and Science will literally always mix. Science always exists in a political context. It’s not some platonic ideal.
The research that gets funded, published, advertised. The people that have the privilege to get degrees and academia jobs. Is all inherently political. It’s maybe more obvious now with Trump’s meddling, but it literally always has been this way.
I think it’s dangerous to look at science (especially social sciences, political sciences, economics, sociology, psychology etc.) without considering the political context.
I knee jerk upvoted the parent that this was responding to. Then I read your comment and I did a complete 180. This is obvious in retrospect and very insightful. Thanks
You can upvote good discussion and points that are wrong or you disagree with. I downvote assholes and people who add nothing to the discussion.
I understand that, my point was in an ideal world expert panels and not politicians would get the final say in policy-setting and funding decisions. My main example is the clusterfuck the NIH and health department has become under the lunatic in charge.
I understand that this stuff is inherently political, I had to pivot on the narrative of my own master’s thesis because of the “interesting” results we generated
But
- Who decides who is the experts?
- Who gets the opportunity to become an expert?
- What are the experts taught at school?
- Who picks the experts?
All this is political.
What you’re describing is technocracy. And it has major limitations.
thats fair. I guess there is no such thing as a perfect system, there will always be conflict of interest and bias. I get your point too, just because someone is an expert in their field doesn’t mean their knowledge translates to leadership and good judgement on funding decisions ect.
I was thinking along your lines too, but have to concede the rebuttal as well. But I think we can still aim for the ideal of science proceeding as neutrally as possible once the funding is granted. Getting funding is the political interface. The question of “What should we do?” must be political, but “How should we do it?” can be left to science.
Ya its healthy to have this discussion. I still think the policy-makers should have a background in what they are governing but that is what advisory boards and councils are for. I definitely commented with too broad of a generalization with “no politics in science”, I should have said I dislike when politics oversteps in medicine/healthcare/research… I do see the value however as this comment chain grows.
Who decides who is the experts?
The people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research
Who gets the opportunity to become an expert?
The people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research
What are the experts taught at school?
The research that other experts have published
Who picks the experts?
You just rephrased your first one here, so the answer is still “the people that learn enough about a subject to publish their own research” ie peer review.
If you were actually trying to ask, who gets to become a PAID expert, the answer to that question is the people with money.
The entire enterprise is political. You have to claim you’re an authority first by creating an argument and then defending that claim. That is politics.
The time it takes to learn about a subject costs a fair amount of money. The people with money, by and large, aren’t experts. They need to be convinced by the claimant that they deserve the money because they are experts and able to do something valuable with that money. This is politics.
This idealized views of science knowledge creation is a thin investigation into the social and political aspects of science. It makes no room for starts, transitions, different levels of expertise, or old experts, often revered in the field, defending their positions because of their political status in the field.
Addressing these issues at depth take time and is exhausting when dealing with the self assured idealist.
So, you keep saying money this, money that, and I 100% agree that money makes everything political.
Science is not inherently political until you bring money into it, which is why well funded, independent and public research institutions are such a benefit. And why threatening the operating capital of those researchers like we have here is such an insult. They don’t care about these squabbles.
Its political not because of money but because of people.
What if bias start to grow within academic institutions?
What if the public funding to those institutions influences which departments get more/less funding?
I actually am asking genuinely because I would be happy to know we can improve on what we’ve got.
There are well documented processes and methods for removing biases from research, it’s basically 3/4 of the work.
That’s just wrong. Everything is politics.
Politics not invading science means horrific human experiments at the extreme end.
Politics must decide where funding should go for public science projects. They must mix for that reason. Politics retaliate in the case of human designer babies in China. And that is considered good by some.
Just because a government is heinously terrible does not mean governing is bad. It just means that they do it badly.
How about instead of burning down the entire house because you saw a spider you, uh, don’t do that. Government grants for scientific research are amazing things because profit need not be a motivator and the research can be shared among everyone, not kept secret and maybe not even used.
This is not a valid form of government, it’s just outright authoritatian tyrrany. There need to be laws protecting instituations from that danger but of course the US has always been much further from the utopia it claims to be than would allow for that sort of thing.
Male and non-male
Lmao
Actually more inclusive terminology lol
I think the male is a bit hostile and problematic too. It should be non-male and non-female
Can’t use the word female in any context so it would have to be non-male and non-non-male.
I prefer “those who is” and “those who ain’t.” Binary and inclusive.
Just strip the distinction at this point.
The party that swears there are only Two Genders really seems to only believe in One.
There are two genders. Male and political.
Cede conservatives a fraction of an inch and they will take a hundred miles.
First they came for…
Oh, what a glorious quote, never thought i’d see it here. didn’t even need to check the link. You are twisted if you liked this series, and if so I like you
One of the greatest shows of all time.
Favourite scene? I’m torn between the above and Mantrid vs. Brizon.
I gotta watch em again, anything with Prince is awesome and yeah mantrid v brizon was a great one
under His eye
I went through some of my papers partially supported by US grants and all of them use a bunch of forbidden words. This is basically pure maths, and you are not allowed to use “equality” as in the relationship between one expression and another is an equality? It is so increadibly stupid. Look:
A dangerous sign of wokeness
=
@idunnololz@lemmy.world the = inside the spoiler doesn’t render for me
Fascism is completely based on lies. The denial of math should be no surprise. It’s a direct continuation of the ideology.
See also the conclusion of “1984”. There’s a good reason why it was about 2+2=?. Some things never change.
deleted by creator
That’s so fucking asinine
Me frantically going through all my Maths papers to replace the equal sign with “Is Equivalent to”
I presume you used base ten, which is dangerously non-binary.
but equivalent and equal are different right?
in comp sci “is the same thing as” (equal) and “amounts to the same thing as” (equivalent) are very different concepts
(also when talking “DEI”-type use [god i hate that i hate phrasing it like that]: equality is not wanted: we don’t want the same as in most cases; we want amounts to the same as taking in different circumstances)
Anti-Woke stuff is ridiculous.
So it now includes non-binary mice!
These idiots will learn one day that you can’t kill an idea.
But they can defund ideas and watch them fade to obscurity under a flood of fascist bullshit and violence.
But you can kill mice! Presumably with a little box and a miniature, spring-loaded boxing glove stored inside
Orwell would disagree, unfortunately.
Fortunately, he’s not a historian.
But he’s got lived experience of totalitarianism. Of rhetorical practices states use to crush ideas.
Epistemically he’s very qualified to comment on this.
And academics who you might call historians, like Foucault, would back him up here.
I’m talking about learning like Hitler did in a bunker.
You have more hope than me that nazis can change.
Oh, I never said that…
Learning implies change
I’m trying to not fedpost. I’m inferring about learning like Mussolini.
