OK - so what? That is hardly news.

The media lies to people, but the science - properly done - is not
political.

I know enough science and engineering to winnow through most of it in
technical areas, but I have to work at medical subjects a little
harder to feel comfortable with the answers.

People who WANT the truth can generally get it, people who really
prefer slogans and tabloid science, be it painted up ever so pretty,
generally never bother to try to find out what the real science is.

For the most part, right now, the worst offenders in the tabloid
science racket are the liberals and their bullshit scenarios. When you
trace the bullshit back to its source, it tends to devolve to some
graduate student's computer projection which doesn't do anything else
right, but the part that predicts what the liberals want, is touted as
being the revealed word of God. It gets tiresome having to listen to
the media, who uncritically publish the bullshit and just can't find
the column inches to print the sober rebutttals by competent
scientists.




On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:07:58 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

In article , Greylock
wrote:

Good science is apolitical.

If one may define economics as political, the political impact on science
is terrible. At the EPA and FDA for examples, careers have come to sudden
ends because someone or another focused on findings that this or that
product had been proven to be unsafe, & anyone who doesn't want their
careers squelched soon learns to self-censor & give "good" spins to things
that may be profitable if the harm is overlooked. The data itself, bought
& paid for by the interested parties, may more often than not be accurate,
but may well have been designed consciously or subconsciously to NOT
assess the bad with the good, but to only assess the good. When receiving
funds from an "interested party" who will renew grants only if "answers"
please them, these answers tend somehow to be found.

By and large doubleblind studies are apolitical & you can detect, from
most peer reviewed & published data at least, what any bias might have
been, you can tell that though they "proved" such-&-such had a health
benefit they failed to factor in side effects, so some other study would
be required to assess the bad, for which no funding is forthcoming from
the interested parties.

One of my favorite examples was a Davis University study that proved mulch
from recycled tires killed all plantlife within one week because of the
zinc content, but by the time the vendors of rubber mulch got their hands
on the data, it was interpretted as "improves the quality of zinc
deficient soils" & "suppresses weeds." The "spin" amounted to a lie
though narrowly & literally it was true. The Davis research itself was
funded by the rubber industry & was riddled with positive asides, but the
data provided was unambiguous & conclusive: it rapidly killed all the
plants.

Even data presented in peer review publications, and which make it pretty
clear that something very bad is in the making (regarding greenhouse
effect for example), but by speaking statistically rather than in
absolutes, there's always wiggle-room for politicians to claim a finding
is the opposite of what it was. Politicians serving industrial interests
ahead of public health do this as a matter of course -- so while it is
often the case that the actual science was apolitical, by the time the
scientific finding reaches the public in "pop" & "PR" contexts, it is so
thoroughly politicized to "prove" diamatrically opposed conclusions that a
public that rarely goes to MedLine or a Health Science Library for the
original data never know quite what to believe -- & frequently end up
chosing a side on the basis of their own politics instead of the
never-seen complete data.

Occasionally a company like Monsanto generates in-house data that is
completely fabricated or so slanted as to be worthless, but looks real on
the surface. Non peer-review journals & academic vanity presses produce
intentionally fraudulant results that bewilder the public. Even "good"
science tends to be so couched in so many qualifiers or undecipherable
language that it can instantly be turned into "lies, damned lies, &
statistics" by abusers of the findings, even when not by the complete
findings themselves.

The bottomline is that science as it reaches the public is politicized. It
is less so for the extreme minority who rely on peer-reviewed journals,
but for the majority these are awfully hard to track down, & the garbled
versions in magazines or newspapers rarely bare much resemblance to the
original.

-paghat the ratgirl

Facts are gathered, a theory is advanced, and if the theory is found
to explain the facts the theory is accepted until further facts
support or contradict it.

Junk science starts with a theory and then selectively accumulates
facts to support the theory. Inconvenient facts are ignored in the
pursuit of proving the theory.

Good scientists are not necessarily apolitical, but proper adherence
to the science and the facts does not allow for the insertion of
political dogma. If you start with the theory, the dogma is built in.

Most of the junk science being promoted these days is coming from the
far left nutballs and the far right religious nutballs. Most of the
press for the junk science goes to the far left nutballs.

far . . . .

Keith