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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's the problem that I have with MAGA:  If your worldview crumbles under the weight of peer-reviewed data, whether climate change, vaccines, renewables, or economic models that show trickle-down doesn't work, and whatever else - the problem isn’t the data, the math or the science; it’s the scaffolding you built around denial.

Dismissing climate models, vaccine development, and ecological research as “elitist” doesn’t make you a rebel. It makes you a liability. The left isn’t smug for trusting experts; it’s just tired of pretending that facts are optional. You don’t get to call it “political science” just because it threatens your comfort zone. Science isn’t partisan. It’s the reason your GPS works, your weather app updates, and your medicine heals. If MAGA wants to gut research funding and call it freedom, they should be honest: it’s freedom from accountability, not freedom to thrive.[/quote]

Science is partisan.

Engineering is not.

Lots of tightly held views on the left and right fall apart in light of inconvient data. Rhetoric also works on most people.[/quote]

Clearly you don't actually understand how science actually works.[/quote]

I am an engineer. I assure you I do.

Engineering either works or doesn't. It is [u][b]highly highly highly[/b][/u] reproducable because when a design fails [u]people die[/u]. Think failing bridges in Florida or 737 MAX planes falling out of the sky. This is the application of science, in other words engineering is science that is proven to work.

Science on the other hand is suffering a reproducability crisis. Here's a journal than even the common man should recognize, "Nature" that covers the process..

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04253-w

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/01/13/the-theory-crisis-in-physics-compared-to-the-replication-crisis-in-social-science-two-different-opinion-field-inversions-that-differ-in-some-important-ways/

Scientists are having a hard time replicating each others experiments. Despite what your average person thinks, peer review doesn't mean that another scientist (usually an unpaid reviewer who has published something else in that same area) actually reproduced the same results, it just means that they looked at it and it seems plausible.  If multinational corporations can force the Lancet (another medical journal familiar to the common man) to print a retraction of peer reviewed science on their own say so alone then peer reviewed science is definitely not what it once was. Anyone familar with the topic is familiar with the concept of public or perish, and there's a ton of junk publications coming out of China.

Physics is the gold standard in science, medicine is next and social science/psychology is way down the line. If you look at the reproducability numbers you will be shocked. [b]70% of physicists say they can't reproduce one another's findings[/b], yet somehow those findings still get published.

Science being partisian is in part due to gate keeping/consensus and that some topics are taboo (and I'm not talking about social science, I'm referring to some areas of physics you literally can't get funding to explore it, say alternatives to string theory).  Your funding determines what science can be studied, and you're expecting to find something for that funding body, they're not doing it for charity. If other scientists aren't even trying to reproduce it before publishing, and they work in a similiar area with similiar findings...

Hence it is partisan.[/quote]

There are some valid concerns about reproducibility, driven by the publish-or-perish nature of academia, and driven by what funding may be available, however you oversimplify and mischaracterize, and it does not logically follow to make a blanket claim that "science is partisan."

Engineering is application-driven, with immediate feedback loops.  Science is by design exploratory, often dealing with uncertainty, abstraction and long timelines.  Engineering benefits from tight coupling between theory and outcome, while science often operates in open-ended domains.  You do indeed demonstrate you don't understand science with your expectation that science should operate the way engineering does.  And worse yet, your attitude suggests we should just abandon science rather than reform the incentives and models.

Science is a method, not a belief system. As for what's "taboo" one should also look at things like the massive disinformation, fear/uncertainty/doubt campaigns that the fossil fuel industry has poured into climate denial, easily over a billion dollars.  https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/new-joint-bicameral-staff-report-reveals-big-oils-campaign-of-climate-denial-disinformation-and-doublespeak  It's sad that they didn't instead put that money into funding research toward solving problems.  That massive disinformation campaign has resulted in delays in improving the research, delays in legislation, delays in strategic investments toward solving the problems, while undermining public trust in the research.  But again, it wasn't scientists who did that - it was industry, using PR firms, lobbyists, conservative media outlets, front groups and so on.[/quote]

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