The War on Science Is a Trap

[rug]

The science march should step carefully to avoid being ensnared.



Women in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington and many other marches in several countries, in Zagreb, Croatia, on Jan. 21. Antonio Bronic/Reuters

FEB. 6 2017 10:02 PM
By Daniel Engber

An army of advocates for science will march on Washington, D.C. on April 22, according to a press release out last Thursday. The show of force aims to “draw attention to dangerous trends in the politicization of science,” the organizers say, citing “threats to the scientific community” and the need to “safeguard” researchers from a menacing regime. If Donald Trump plans to escalate his apparent assault on scientific values, then let him be on notice: Science will fight back.

We’ve been through this before. Casting opposition to a sitting president as resistance to a “war on science” likely helped progressives 10 or 15 years ago, when George W. Bush alienated voters with his apparent disrespect for climate science and embryonic stem-cell research (among other fields of study). The Bush administration’s meddling in research and disregard for expertise turned out to be a weakness, as the historian Daniel Sarewitz described in an insightful essay from 2009. Who could really argue with the free pursuit of knowledge? Democratic challengers made a weapon of their support for scientific progress: “Americans deserve a president who believes in science,” said John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. “We will end the Bush administration’s war on science, restore scientific integrity and return to evidence-based decision-making,” the Democratic Party platform stated four years later.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign continued with the battle-tested plan. “I believe in science,” she announced to rapturous applause at the Democratic National Convention last July. But if that message played well to her base, it didn’t prove to be persuasive on a broader scale. The problem was, conditions for the combat over science have lately been transformed. Old alliances are shifting, and the science partisans who intend to march on Washington would be wise to understand the implications of this change. Today’s “war on science” could be a trap.

In the Bush years, there was every reason to believe that pro-science activism would be effective. For more than four decades, Americans had viewed scientists as deserving of respect. Even now, about 40 percent of adults profess “a great deal of confidence” in leaders of the scientific community, according to the General Social Survey; our faith in science is second, in this metric, only to our allegiance to the nation’s military leaders. (The executive branch of government, on the other hand, scores in the teens, and the press in single digits.) At the same time, more than 70 percent of Americans believe that the benefits of scientific research outweigh the harms, and almost 90 percent say that scientists should have at least a “fair amount” of influence over policy. In light of all this science boosterism, which has been quite consistent over time, it must have seemed clear that if the Democrats could brand themselves the Party of Science—if they could reframe political disputes as skirmishes between science and faith, or between evidence and belief—then they would have a way to outflank the GOP and capture some of its support.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/02/the_war_on_science_is_a_trap.html

https://www.marchforscience.com/

[gordianot]

1. Republicans, Trumpians, other fascists are against so many things.

It is hard to keep up.

[rug]

2. It disguises what they're really for.

[alarimer]

3. Trump is actively attacking reality.

Objective reality is under attack and this is what these scientists are marching against. He (and Republicans generally) attack the very integrity of public employees. Beyond this, his immigration ban is also an attack on science, because many caught up in it are doctors or scientists coming to this country to work and learn.

The US has long been a center for scientific progress. And Trump threatens to eliminate that progress and send us backwards. Without government scientists, we will have dirtier air and water, sicker people, and habitats despoiled for financial gain. Eliminating the EPA, for example, also eliminates those state government jobs that depends on grants from the EPA. Multiply this by all the agencies he wants to trim or eliminate, and we have a serious problem at state level too, even for those states who oppose Trump.

All of this is demoralizing for scientists, but it will also affect future scientists. Who, after all, wants to work for a government agency that is HATED by the very people it is supposed to serve? And academia already has problems recruiting and especially retaining people of color and women, in particular, as they progress.

The word elite used to mean 1% and the rich; now it seems to refer to anyone with a college degree. This is all a concerted plan on the part of the right (along with the attack on education generally) to dumb down people, because otherwise how else will they get votes? So scientists become "elitists" because they don't fall for Trump's bullshit.

So I disagree with this article. This march is really about the attack on knowledge and what that means, not only for scientists, but also the country as a whole.

They used to burn witches, but witches were just women with a little more knowledge than most, so that was a threat to be eliminated. We have got to be wary of any attempt to demonize science and scientists.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Not much of an argument - "Trump's base is really anti-science, so the march is dangerous"

Trump's base is anti-woman too, but thankfully, the Jan 21st marchers didn't take that as a reason to not march, or 'tread carefully'.

Marches aren't about converting the opposition, so much as awakening and informing the uncommitted, and building solidarity in your own group.

[rug]

5. That's not his argument.

He's making a class argument. In a nutshell, he asserts trump's base is anti-elites. In some way, his stereotypical base could consider a march for science an attack on them, their education, their intelligence, and all they stand for. You don't have to look far to see how that's played out elsewhere.

He's not saying the march is dangerous - he's saying misunderstanding trump's base is. In short, "Trump's stupid and so is anyone who supports him" is not a winning strategy.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. This is how he ends the piece:

" In the same way that fighting the War on Journalism delegitimizes the press by making it seem partisan and petty, so might the present fight against the War on Science sap scientific credibility. By confronting it directly, science activists may end up helping to consolidate Trump’s support among his most ardent, science-skeptical constituency. If they’re not careful where and how they step, the science march could turn into an ambush."

So, yes, he is saying that the problem is that Trump's support is anti-science, and that therefore fighting it is not a good idea. He also says that we shouldn't fight a "War on Journalism" either (the first time I've seen that capitalised, but also the first time I've seen someone say we should give in to Trump about it).

Meh. He seems to just be a science columnist for Slate. If he were a political consultant with a winning record, he might be worth listening to.

[rug]

7. This is how he frames the issue,

The War on Science works for Trump because it’s always had more to do with social class than politics. A glance at data from the National Science Foundation shows how support for science tracks reliably with socioeconomic status. As of 2014, 50 percent of Americans in the highest income quartile and more than 55 percent of those with college degrees reported having great confidence in the nation’s scientific leaders. Among those in the lowest income bracket or with very little education, that support drops to 33 percent or less. Meanwhile, about five-sixths of rich or college-educated people—compared to less than half of poor people or those who never finished high school—say they believe that the benefits of science outweigh the potential harms. To put this in crude, horse-race terms, the institution of scientific research consistently polls about 30 points higher among the elites than it does among the uneducated working class.

You don't need to be a political scientist, with or without a winning record, to see it.

Who constitutes trump's base and what drives them will be the deadly serious questions to answer the next four years.

[LanternWaste]

8. understand the differences between spurious correlations rather than conflating them

"Who constitutes trump's base and what drives them will be the deadly serious questions..."

Also deadly serious is to understand the relevant differences between spurious correlations as relating to class issues rather than conflating them as the cause in and of themselves, regardless of whether one is a political scientist or not.

[rug]

9. I understand the difference between jargon and clear sentences.

I don't know what you're saying.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. It's a crap argument - if something is more popular with the better off or better educated

then you're not allowed to support it?

The NSF figures: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report/chapter-7/public-attitudes-about-s-t-in-general

For those who never finished high school, 19% think science benefits strongly outweigh harms, 25% slightly, 30% equal, 12% harm slightly outweighs benefits, and just 1% harm strongly outweighs benefits. That's still a hefty opinion in favour of science. The fact that greater education goes with liking science even more doesn't automatically make it a bad thing to support. That's anti-elitist crap from the Slate writer. Every demographic listed supports science more than opposes it.

For the 'confidence in scientists' figures, we have, for 'never finished high school', 28% 'a great deal', 49% 'only some', and 14% 'hardly any'. That's still pretty good, and the numbers get better with more education.

Again, he doesn't explain why he thinks that the association of Trump with the fairly small anti-science group should stop a march. His association with misogynists didn't stop the women's marches.

[rug]

11. That, too, is not the argument.

It's better to address the argument being made than to restate it on terms more favourable to your argument.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. No, that is the argument. That 'the elite' likes science even more, and that is his problem

His own figures show science is popular among all groups. But Trump's voters tend to be in the groups with the lower enthusiasm. And from that, he says "oohh, it's a trap".

It's anti-elitist. It's defeatist. It's a pile of dog-do.

[rug]

13. It's more than simply science.

Here's a political scientist's description:

The “dangerous class”, (lumpenproletariat) the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#053

That is the most accurate description of trump's base I've read.

Here, add to "Law, morality, religion", science.

The SA burned books. The deplorables war on science. Among a slew of things they consider the elite's.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. So Marx said something not about science

and you think that helps an argument that defending science is dangerous?

That's absurd.

Even if I accept your contention that science should be added to law, morality and religion as things Trump's base distrust, how does that show that defending science is dangerous? Are you saying that it's accepted we shouldn't defend law, morality or religion against Trump already, and we should add science?

Again, this argument is anti-elitist, and defeatist. It's saying we must give in to any prejudices of Trump's base. It's the "sit down and shut up, Trump won" argument.

[rug]

15. He said something about the reality of class and politics.

As apt now as it was 170 years ago.

The danger is not in defending science. Any more than defending civil rights is dangerous. The danger is letting trump and the latter day plutocrats frame it as climate change versus jobs, evolutionary biology versus religious beliefs, or affordable care versus FREEDOM!

It's not saying we must give in to any prejudices of Trump's base. It's saying don't be suckered by trump's inevitable propaganda. It shouldn't be hard. But then, defeating trump in the election was not supposed to be hard.