(November 13, 2020 at 6:44 am)Belacqua Wrote: People on this forum think of science the same way that evangelicals think of God: when it does a good thing, it gets the credit, but when it does a bad thing, something else must be to blame.
In fact science is a loose set of practices, always enacted by fallible biased human beings. These days it is funded mostly by for-profit companies and the Pentagon. Scientists are very likely to discover the things that their funders want them to find.
Putting our trust in some abstract noun called "science" is a faith-based abdication of responsibility. People in government should act with scientists as advisors, but make their decisions along ethical lines.
Yes, a corporation or political group can buy some marginal scientist to give any sort of report they want. Want to say that burning oil helps the environment? Someone will do that. Want someone to say that there is no evidence that smoking causes cancer? You can buy a person for that as well.
But they won't actually be doing science, and their career will last only as long as their funding. Science is a global endeavor. Theories and reputations rise or fall on their own merits. Bad science gets fixed or at least ignored. Most scientists don't skew their results for political aims, despite what the right-wing would have you believe.
