The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. held a panel last Thursday on “The Perils of Politicized Science”. (You can go to the website by clicking on the screenshot below, but I’ll put the entire video at bottom (1 hour, 41 minutes). No beefing about AEI: who else but a conservative organization would even host a discussion like this? It’s the ideas, not the venues, that are important.
I haven’t watched all of it yet, but will. Of the first two I’ve watched, Jussim is particularly energetic and engaging, as he tends to be. But I haven’t seen Satel, Krylov, or Mills.
The panelists certainly have street cred.
Sally Satel, senior fellow at AEI, former psychiatrist and teacher
Wilfred Reilly of Kentucky State University, who participated via Zoom. He’s a political scientist.
Lee Jussim of Rutgers University psychologist
Anna Krylov, University of Southern California, theoretical chemistry
M. Anthony Mills, Senior Fellow, AEI.
The topic, according to Anna, was the different ways that politics interacts with science and how politics and supposedly science-based policies are damaging science. This differs a bit from the YouTube description, and because her summary was made after the panel, I take it to be more accurate.
So here you go:
Meanwhile at the “Largest Mathematics Gathering in the World”……..
“Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice”
Presenter: “Spectra Lavender Lecture – Luis Leyva, Vanderbilt-Peabody College”
https://meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2023/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/16248
Yikes, I initially assumed that you were joking. But sadly not… I sincerely hope that this madness ends soon.
Stupidly, I clicked the link and it was possibly worse than I’d thought. I just can’t believe anybody writes and publishes stuff like this. With a straight face. Is it a hoax? REALLY?
D.A.
NYC *FL
Thanks, will try and watch later.
It is astonishing that the outcome of politicized science is an issue in need of panels, after the effect of the Lysenkovshchina on Soviet biology was plain to see only a few decades ago. In the latter half of the 20th century, the USSR probably had
more individuals with academic degrees in biology than any other nation on earth. Yet the
Soviet contribution to the molecular biology revolution—which grew out of an amalgam of Genetics and Biochemistry—was barely greater than that of Paraguay, Malta, or Bhutan.
Will we next need panels on the perils of driving an automobile while playing video games on a smartphone? Oops, I guess we will.
You have to remember that to the far, Marxist left, modern Science has been a failure, in that it has only served to shore up bourgeois, white, or Western culture. They, therefore, aren’t interested in the concrete results of Science, but only in achieving a post-bourgeois society. Once that is done, they will worry about how things actually work.
Arthur Koestler recounts an anecdote about a philosophical seminar on Communist approaches to the deep questions in life. On the subject of tragedy, Andre Malraux asked: what about a child accidentally run down by a bus? No problem, one of the assembled Marxist-Leninist philosophers replied: after the Revolution, there will no longer be traffic accidents.
Chemist Anna Krylov, who we met at the Stanford workshop on academic freedom, wrote a very nice four-page plus references opinion on the perils of politics and ideology impacting science, accessible for free at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475
She writes from her cosmopolitan background of born in the soviet union, phd in israel, and now living and teaching in the us at usc.
Downloaded and read. Большое спасибо!