PocketNines
Cutter's Way
Since I can't control for the drivel in the brains of the worst bad faith operators in this community, and never could, here is an op-ed out just today that captures what I think of science and of society. Essentially I share the opinion of the recent president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research. Any doubts I may have had about future species survival have been erased by how we have collectively reacted to pandemic adversity.
We have an extraordinarily sick society. If it were just politics I would believe there is a political fix. It's beyond politics. It's human. I predict our deeply sick society will choose from among the sickest responses to the extraordinary existential species emergency that faces us.
My opinion so straightforward that it forces people to lie about it. That's what happened here.
Science is a social process, and we all live amid the social soup of personalities, parties and power. The political dysfunction that holds America hostage also holds science hostage. Dr. Virchow wrote that “mass disease means that society is out of joint.” Society’s being out of joint means that epidemiological research is out of joint, because it exists inside the same society. This is not a new problem, but the dominant “follow the science” mantra misses the fact that the same social pathology that exacerbates the pandemic also debilitates our scientific response to it.
To restore faith in science, there must be faith in social institutions more broadly, and this requires a political reckoning. Of course one can cite many specific challenges for scientists: The wheels are coming off the peer review system, university research is plagued by commercialization pressures, and so on. But all of these are the symptoms, not the underlying disease. The real problem is simply that sick societies have sick institutions. Science is not some cloistered preserve in the clouds, but is buried in the muck with everything else. This is why, just eight days after his investigation in Upper Silesia, Dr. Virchow went to the barricades in Berlin to fight for the revolution.
To restore faith in science, there must be faith in social institutions more broadly, and this requires a political reckoning. Of course one can cite many specific challenges for scientists: The wheels are coming off the peer review system, university research is plagued by commercialization pressures, and so on. But all of these are the symptoms, not the underlying disease. The real problem is simply that sick societies have sick institutions. Science is not some cloistered preserve in the clouds, but is buried in the muck with everything else. This is why, just eight days after his investigation in Upper Silesia, Dr. Virchow went to the barricades in Berlin to fight for the revolution.
We have an extraordinarily sick society. If it were just politics I would believe there is a political fix. It's beyond politics. It's human. I predict our deeply sick society will choose from among the sickest responses to the extraordinary existential species emergency that faces us.
My opinion so straightforward that it forces people to lie about it. That's what happened here.
