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"Left wing kookiness" (was: Self-Sufficiency Acreage...?)
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 -- "Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher. "Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature. -from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers" See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/ |
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