/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8933827
I see a lot of political opinions formed around ill-studied concepts. Where the empirical facts end and policy depends on having those facts, the political ideologies begin to fill the voids in scientific knowledge.

For instance, climate change research is well-documented in terms of the rise in CO2 levels and the rise in global temperature, but no publicly available empirical study has managed to turn up any more than a correlation. As any good scientist or statistician knows, correlation is not causation. They're both rising, but there's scant a study out there giving good evidence that one is a primary cause of the other, and without that, climate change is not a good reason to pour funding into changing our CO2 output. It just so happens that the ones who would receive funding for such efforts also favor one major political party over the other, which further muddies the water. For all we know, it's just a benign conspiracy to take the power of global energy needs out of the hands of a fossil-fuel-rich Middle East that can't handle such power right now. We just don't know, because there's no unbiased comprehensive study out there to displace all the ideologies that are fighting to fill in the gaps right now.

Then, there's racism, for which, there also happens to be no empirical study on how racism happens. Despite this, either side will swear up and down that that it's because of media representation or because of genetics or because of this particular cherry-picked part of a case study. They'd rather fight over the problem than solve it. This is where the actual scientist comes in. If a scientist can test the hypotheses proposed by either side, then the opinions won't matter anymore.

So yes, the scientist has a place in politics, but such a scientist must have integrity and will have a hell of a time getting the facts known since the facts are likely to contradict both major narratives in some way.

>>8701224
Greenpill here.

In the western world today, there are a lot of ideologue idiots on both sides, and the social political situation is a mess. People generally aren't engaged in actually looking for information that they weren't already interested in finding, so the media does the job of reporting that info. The problem with that is that the bulk of the mainstream media's doubled down with its corporate leftist agendas, turning all of its campaign capital into actually cascading their reports together in order to control the narrative of the people. Just some years ago, it wasn't normal for all news stations, newspapers, and journalist Web sites to all be reporting the same opinion pieces on the same information. They're obviously trying to control the people. I'm someone who left that matrix after they dropped the ball on Brexit and Trump, and I've never met a person who's left it and ever gone back.

I mean, it does restore some balance to the high castles that are now ruled by right-wingers, but while the right has just been full of smug dicks lately, the authoritarian leftists are condoning instead of condemning actual hate movements that act in their name. I swear, the left needs another Gandhi or Martin Luther King to calm this beast down.

It is kind of fucked that Antifa is supposed to be an anarchist movement, but the baseline of its entire narrative is spoonfed to them by the corporate media. I just find that funny.