Space Nazis, Ultima Thule, and "Science Is Political"
Meghan Bartels, ladies and gentlemen...
Just click through. It's just a tweet. I'm not going to summarize a tweet.
"Science is political": bullshit.
Not because there aren't any substantially true interpretations of the sentence...but because the people who say such things almost always mean something dumb by them. (They like to leave the quantifier off of such claims because they like to mean "all science is political" without having to defend that indefensible claim. When challenged on it, they can easily retreat to a more modest interpretation.)
And: stretching frantically to find some link between Nazis and an asteroid doesn't show that "science is political." It shows that you are an idiot with too much time on your hands.
Good science isn't political. So, no. Science isn't political. Though some of it is. Way, way too much, in fact. The left likes to pretend that they're the heroes of the story, bravely unmasking corrupt, reactionary presuppositions of and influences on science. But currently it's far, far more often the left that does the politicizing.
This wispy link between an asteroid and the left's new obsession--Nazis--is just a particularly bone-headed effort.
Just click through. It's just a tweet. I'm not going to summarize a tweet.
"Science is political": bullshit.
Not because there aren't any substantially true interpretations of the sentence...but because the people who say such things almost always mean something dumb by them. (They like to leave the quantifier off of such claims because they like to mean "all science is political" without having to defend that indefensible claim. When challenged on it, they can easily retreat to a more modest interpretation.)
And: stretching frantically to find some link between Nazis and an asteroid doesn't show that "science is political." It shows that you are an idiot with too much time on your hands.
Good science isn't political. So, no. Science isn't political. Though some of it is. Way, way too much, in fact. The left likes to pretend that they're the heroes of the story, bravely unmasking corrupt, reactionary presuppositions of and influences on science. But currently it's far, far more often the left that does the politicizing.
This wispy link between an asteroid and the left's new obsession--Nazis--is just a particularly bone-headed effort.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:06 PM
2 Comments:
Anyone who has read Kuhn will agree that science, as a discipline, is political--just like any other discipline. (Or talk to a few professors about department politics.) But that is science with a lower case s. In Plato's cave, where Science has an upper case S, sure it isn't political. And indeed there is the occasional paper that approaches that ideal. (Einstein famously published 5 such in one year.)
As for nutpicking a twitter thread--that one actually isn't too bad. She gets corrected within a few posts of the original, where it is pointed out that Ultima Thule is actually a pretty good name for somewhere so cold and so far away. The bad nutball threads are the ones where the commenters agree with the OP.
Nope.
Not true.
Though anyone who has read Kuhn should see that what he says isn't inconsistent with such a view.
But 'science is political' doesn't really mean anything specific. Which is part of why it's dangerous.
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