by Greg Mayer
[Addendum— I’ve only just realized (1005 h) that Jerry posted on this same piece by Carl Zimmer back in 2017. Great minds think alike! But the relevance to today is, I think, even more striking.]
A few days ago I happened to run across an old blog post by the eminent science writer Carl Zimmer, in which he recounts the Lysenko affair and the lessons to be learned from it. Posted in 2017, the lessons he identifies are eerily prescient in light of the U.S. government’s (i.e., Trump’s) response to the coronavirus pandemic:
— A government decided that an important area of research, one that the worldwide scientific community had been working on for decades, was wrong. Instead, they embraced weak evidence to the contrary.
— It ignored its own best scientists and its scientific academies.
— It glamorized someone who opposed that mainstream research based on weak research, turning his meager track record into a virtue.
— It forced scientists to either be political allies or opponents.
— It personally condemned scientists who supported the worldwide consensus and spoke out against the government’s agenda, casting them as bad people hell-bent on harming the nation.
— The damage to the scientific community rippled far, and lasted for years. It showed hostility to scientists from other countries, isolating them from international partnerships. It also created an atmosphere of fear that led to self-censorship.
— And by turning away from the best science, the Trump administration did harm to its country.
It all seems very relevant, and his third item practically screams, “Scott Atlas!” He wrote the piece in 2017 in the context of climate change policy, but the relevance to today must have been evident to Carl, too; the reason I came across the 4-year old post is because he had moved it to near the top of his blog, where I came across it while looking for other things on his website.
The blog post is based on a talk Zimmer gave at a conference on “Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling With A New Reality” at Rockefeller University on how science journalism can deal with the “confusing swirl of reality, misinformation, and so-called fake news” that is “[t]he current media landscape”. Carl’s talk can be seen on YouTube (below).
Sub
Thanks for this Greg.
Ditto – and Jerry, too for the earlier post. A timely reminder.
Ways in which they are not similar: Opponents were not forced out of their jobs in universities and schools, contradictory research was not prohibited, contradictory findings were not censored, opponents were not jailed or forced to do hard labor, no opponents were executed. The biggest difference: free institutions vs. one-party control. (So far; unity can be a plea for understanding or submission.)
Trump had only 4 years. Lucky, huh?
Bullseye. We dodged a bullet. Voldemort, “Tiny Hands”, the dictator.
We did dodge one (but we really need to watch out for ricochets).
Still, I’ve got to ask; which is the worse state to be in; having a dictator that we missed or having the Woke who are currently feeding on us? I’m not so sure.
To paraphrase Dr Brydon, the ones who today are “forc(ing opponents) out of their jobs in universities and schools, contradictory research (is) prohibited, contradictory findings (are) censored”, seem to me to be the bigger problem for the plain reason that the world has been down totalitarian paths before. The people who drove us down those paths are back and they’re everywhere in our schools, corporations and now government. It’s a Brave New World and having lived through the last half of the bloodiest century of human history, it’s beginning to terrify me.
I dislike the woke, but I dislike Trump and the Republicans more. For one thing, it’s not an alternative choice: the woke will be with us forever, and even if they get a bit more power under Trump, which is my belief, it’s still better than having the woke AND having a Republican administration. We have NEVER before been down the authoritarian path that Trump took us down, and had it persisted another four years, it would have been devastating.
Give them sleeping pills!
“having a dictator that we missed or having the Woke who are currently feeding on us? I’m not so sure.”
— I guess I prefer dealing with hungry lice than with a hungry tiger.
Don’t denigrate tigers, please. I would prefer hyena or jackal, but they are maligned and misunderstood organisms with their own dignity. Maybe he should be compared to ichneumonidae? Even Darwin couldn’t see much sweet about them. 😉
“Every wolf suffers fleas – ‘tis easy enough to scratch”
Nice
We unloaded a government that denied the science on climate change, and the pandemic, and we gained a government that denies the science on the existence of biological sex. So… yay?
Even if entirely true, a right wing climate change denying government is far worse than a SJW-led government that at least accepts the science of climate change and tries to do something about it.
Both are problems, mind you, but one is disastrous.
I agree. I guess my point is that in government, science will always be subordinate to ideology.
It would have been worth you mentioning that Stalin brought on many deaths re Lysenko, Trump has probably brought on something like ¼ million extra deaths with Covid, and the Republican climate change policies may very well in the end cause an order of magnitude more years of life lost than those combined.
But pronouns, maybe not so many I think.
Bout of whataboutism?