"Despots want science that has practical results. They’re afraid that basic knowledge will expose their false claims.

Said Paul R. Josephson, an emeritus professor of history at Colby College and author of a book on totalitarian science, quoted in "Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump’s Attacks on Science/Authoritarians have long feared and suppressed science as a rival for social influence. Experts see President Trump as borrowing some of their tactics" (NYT)(free-access link).

Analysts say authoritarians and their students fear science in part because its feats — unlocking the universe, ending plagues, saving millions of lives — can form bonds of public trust that rival or exceed their own.

“Science is a source of social power,” said Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It always poses a potential threat.”

ADDED: Note that we've got historians purporting to see something in present-day politics. Their topic is science and politics, but are they being scientific? What is the science of historians seeing patterns that yield useful fuel to political arguments? Perhaps it's true that "Despots want science that has practical results." But don't they also want history that has practical results?

Scroll down one post to see a photo of a crane on whose head you can see the head of a goose. One can "see" a lot of things. There are patterns everywhere. But the pattern I've seen the most in all my studies, scientific and imaginative, is that people see what they want to see.

"We have each had the honor and privilege of serving as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.... Collectively, we spent more than 100 years working at the C.D.C...."

"We served under multiple Republican and Democratic administrations.... What Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced. Secretary Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven 'treatments' while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe.... This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American.... The C.D.C. is not perfect. What institution is?"

From "We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health" (NYT). The piece is signed by William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen — all former directors or acting directors of the CDC.

Things we will know by September.

"We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures."

Said RFK Jr., at a Cabinet meeting last Thursday, quoted in "Experts Doubt Kennedy’s Timetable for Finding the Cause of Autism/The nation’s health secretary announced that he planned to invite scientists to provide answers by September, but specialists consider that target date unrealistic" (NYT).

Why did he phrase it like that? I do not get the "by September." I could believe that scientists could be chosen to report their best ideas by a particular deadline and that a fact-finder could declare an answer, the way a court, after hearing evidence, could resolve an issue for the purpose of ending a dispute. But that's not the same as knowing. 

I note that he did not say we will know what causes autism. He said we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. Perhaps we will know — or have a pretty good answer to the question — whether the increased numbers are caused by more people seeking the diagnosis, or a changing standard in giving the diagnosis, or some substance (or combination of substances) in the environment, or (to quote Kennedy)  "different ways of parenting." To seek a cause for the epidemic is to ask what has changed. But a lot of things have changed over the years.

Plenty of people were already worried that RFK Jr. was not firmly rooted in science. His "by September" statement stokes that worry — and makes me think he likes to tweak the worriers. 

"Literally mutilating animals. Mutilating animals in demented studies that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show...."

"Some really some psychotic stuff that happens. So yeah, I mean the, I guess the, the, the, the real threat here is to the bureaucracy. So like, you probably saw like, you know, let's say, like, Trump as a threat to our democracy, which is ironic since he was elected with the majority of the, you know, popular vote. They, they started saying I was a threat to democracy. But if you, if you just replace threat to democracy with threat to bureaucracy, it makes total sense. Right. So, I mean, the reality is that our elected officials have very, very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE. So DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It's the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they're not, that the revolution might actually succeed. That we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy."

Said Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan podcast last week.

I was re-listening to that because the part about "mutilating animals" and "the worst thing you can possibly imagine from a horror show" got quoted in this new article at Yahoo News, "Trump said the US spent $8m on transgender mice – he was right."

In his big speech last Tuesday, Trump spoke of "$8 million for making mice transgender," and anti-Trump media called him out, but a fact-check of the fact-check seems to have established that Trump got it right.

"During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community—entire branches of physics went dark..."

"... and didn’t proceed. If we decide we need to, we’re going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI."

Said Marc Andreessen, on the podcast "Honestly with Bari Weiss."

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) says he attended “absolutely horrifying” meetings where Biden’s government vowed to take “complete control” over AI technology:

“They basically said AI is going to be a game of 2 or 3 big companies working closely with the government… We’re going to… pic.twitter.com/REjkfgJkyV

— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) December 10, 2024

Here's a transcript of the entire podcast. Excerpt, giving context to the quote above:

"Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as 'pseudoscience'..."

"... while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 [the Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender children]....  I expect the court to uphold the Tennessee law.... [I]t won’t stop with trans care. Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions. In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly. Quackery will continue its ascent; expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized...."

Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Just Showed Us What Contempt for Expertise Looks Like" (NYT).

Why did Gessen write "genuine expertise" if not to admit that experts can go wrong? Obviously, autocrats have their "experts" too, and respecting them has done great harm. I think first of Josef Mengele, who earned a cum laude doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt for a thesis dealing with genetics and who conducted genetic research at Auschwitz. That doesn't make genetics a "pseudoscience," but it does show that we'd be fools to think there's a binary choice between deference to experts and marginalizing them.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the Soviets' banning of genetics. I can see that those who did the banning regarded themselves as experts:

"There’ll always be people who say, 'Why can’t the Museum of American History tell everybody’s story?'"

"But the truth of the matter is, America’s history is too big for one building. I really think that what we did with the African American museum—which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world—is the right model. This is a two-sided coin. One side is about a community, about identity. But the other side is 'How does that identity shape all of us?'"

Said Lonnie G. Bunch III, quoted in "How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the 'Nation’s Attic'/The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall" (The New Yorker).

"Mr. Kennedy is the one person who has the qualities that can bring about the unity that most Americans are hungering for. He speaks a language of conciliation and compassion."

Said Dennis Kucinich, RFK Jr.'s campaign manager, quoted in "Why Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 Bid Is a Headache for Biden/The unexpected polling strength of an anti-vaccine activist with a celebrated Democratic lineage points to the president’s weaknesses, which his team is aiming to shore up" (NYT).

Notice the descriptor: "anti-vaccine activist." A lot depends on the strength of that label. If people accept it as a warning — steer clear of this nut — then Biden easily prevails. But if that insult is questioned — what is it they don't want us to look into? — then Biden is caught flatfooted.

On Joe Rogan's podcast, Kennedy expressed his skepticism about the relationship between vaccine manufacturers and the federal government. It isn't the idea that vaccines don't work, but questioning why so many vaccines, why they are mandated, especially for babies, and how the side effects are balanced against the benefits. Right now, we're seeing an avoidance of debating with Kennedy, but will that strategy work? People who lived through the rigors of the coronavirus pandemic may demand that the experts prove they were worthy of the trust and obedience they demanded. 

Are you following the pretty formidable coalition with neofascist leanings?

To those misunderstanding what he’s saying, he’s NOT agreeing to debate @RobertKennedyJr. He’s just offering to come on my show by himself.

— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) June 18, 2023

The man is refusing to debate because he stands so firmly on SCIENCE. Isn't it funny that he bandies about a slur like "coalition with neofascist leanings"? Don't you have to at least act as though you're devoted to truth and reason if you want to win on the ground that you're the scientist?

If you haven't been  following this, here's a NY Post article that might help: "Joe Rogan challenges Dr. Peter Hotez to debate anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. on his podcast."

"Profoundly embarrassed" is putting it outrageously lightly.

Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023

ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject: "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says, as Spy Agencies Remain Split/The conclusion, which was made with 'low confidence,' was based on new intelligence. The information didn’t lead other agencies to change their assessments on the origins of the coronavirus."

"This feverish techno-utopianism distracts funders from pressing problems that already exist here on Earth..."

"... said Luke Kemp...  an 'EA-adjacent' critic of effective altruism... 'The things they push tend to be things that Silicon Valley likes,' Kemp said. They’re the kinds of speculative, futurist ideas that tech billionaires find intellectually exciting. 'And they almost always focus on technological fixes' to human problems 'rather than political or social ones.'  There are other objections. For one thing, lavishly expensive, experimental bioengineering would be accessible, especially initially, to 'only a tiny sliver of humanity,' Kemp said; it could bring about a future caste system in which inequality is not only economic, but biological.... Kemp argued that effective altruism and longtermism often seem to be working toward a kind of regulatory capture. 'The long-term strategy is getting EAs and EA ideas into places like the Pentagon, the White House, the British government and the UN' to influence public policy, he said...."

From "Power-hungry robots, space colonization, cyborgs: inside the bizarre world of ‘longtermism’" (The Guardian)(which begins "Sam Bankman-Fried said his billions would save the world – but his philanthropic ideas ranged from the worthy to the severely outlandish").

"Readers of Michael Pollan or Amanda Little understand that it’s morally indefensible to purchase Chilean blueberries or, God forbid, New Zealand lamb."

"But even a humble loaf of sourdough requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel, and a supermarket tomato, which Smil describes as no more than 'an appealingly shaped container of water'... is the product of about six tablespoons of diesel. 'How many vegans enjoying the salad,' he writes, 'are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?'... One must further account for the more than three billion people in the developing world who will need to double or triple their food production to approach a dignified standard of living. Then add the additional two billion who will soon join us. 'For the foreseeable future,' writes Smil, 'we cannot feed the world without relying on fossil fuels.' He performs similar calculations for the world’s production of energy, cement, ammonia, steel and plastic, always reaching the same result: 'A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current state is impossible.' Smil’s impartial scientist persona slips with each sneer at the 'proponents of a new green world' or 'those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point.'... He finds a worthy target in the inane rhetorical battle, waged by climate activists (and echoed by climate journalists), between blithe optimism and apocalyptic pessimism.... Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility...."

From "Everything You Thought You Knew, and Why You’re Wrong" by Nathaniel Rich (NYT), reviewing "How the World Really Works/The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going" by Vaclav Smil.

The highest rated comment over there quotes something Smil said in an interview last month:

"Tom Nelson, a longtime union advocate, is running for the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin’s Senate seat as a genuine populist, not the phony kind with a Harvard degree who affects an accent."

Writes Jennifer Rubin in "Wisconsin’s Tom Nelson reminds Democrats how populists should sound" (WaPo). 

Who's she talking about — "the phony kind with a Harvard degree who affects an accent"? Russ Feingold??! (He went to Harvard, but he's really from Wisconsin, not faking an accent.)

I've been living in Wisconsin since 1984, and I don't know which politicians have affected the accent. But maybe Rubin isn't talking about Wisconsin. She's acting like she's talking about Wisconsin though, so — speaking of phony — I'm expecting her to talk about Wisconsin.

Who, exactly, is being impugned? Someone is terribly fake, apparently, but who? We're not told who this fake-accent Harvard person might be, but we are told the name of someone Nelson views as a role model: William Proxmire, who "popularized the Golden Fleece award to highlight wasteful government spending."

From the comments over there:

Stelter's plaint would mean more if he'd face up to how badly CNN's Sanjay Gupta fared when he sat down with Joe Rogan.

CNN’s @brianstelter: People trusting Joe Rogan over “newsrooms like CNN” are “a problem that’s much bigger than Spotify” pic.twitter.com/3RnifScIzk

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 1, 2022

 

Background: "CNN praises Dr. Sanjay Gupta for interview with Joe Rogan, buries viral moments/Gupta admitted his CNN colleagues should not have referred to Rogan's COVID treatment as 'horse dewormer'" (NY Post, October 15, 2021). That's something I blogged at the time, here: "In trying to present Sanjay Gupta as a science-is-real hero for talking to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, CNN laid the groundwork for fact-checkers to draw attention to all the most damaging omissions." 

ADDED: Writing this post and searching my own archive for Sanjay Gupta, I turned up a post from January 7, 2009, when President-Elect Obama was considering Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. There was debate at the time about the way Gupta had treated the filmmaker Michael Moore about his movie "Sicko."

"The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality..."

"... which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. [Ernest Becker, the author of this Pulitzer Prize-winning 1973 book] argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally-based self esteem, which Becker calls 'heroism': a 'defiant creation of meaning' expressing 'the myth of the significance of human life' as compared to other animals.... Humanity's traditional 'hero-systems,' such as religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason. Becker argues that the loss of religion leaves humanity with impoverished resources for necessary illusions. Science attempts to serve as an immortality project, something that Becker believes it can never do because it is unable to provide agreeable, absolute meanings to human life. The book states that we need new convincing 'illusions' that enable us to feel heroic in ways that are agreeable...."

From the Wikipedia article, "The Denial of Death," a book title that sprang to mind when I saw the news that the U.S. government is going to stop requiring daily reports of the number of Covid deaths.

This is the book Alvy Singer wanted Annie Hall to read:

Remember when Biden cured cancer?

Relive the good times — replete with Bruce Springsteen soundtrack:

 

To be fair, we really have conquered cancer in the sense that when you think about what disease is really bothering you, you don't go straight for "Cancer!" anymore.

Joe Rogan calls vaccine passports "crazy."

"You can trust me. Because I believe in science. And karma. Now, just imagine if science... and karma... could somehow... team up... to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be. I'm not sayin' I want it to happen. But just imagine."

Said Jim Carrey as Joe Biden in the debate spoof on "Saturday Night Live" last night:



Science and karma. A good comic concept, delivered well by Carrey.

But let's actually think about it... beyond comedy. Science and karma. My first reaction is you show you don't really believe in science if you also believe in karma. But I see there has been some serious examination of the science of karma. I'll just select one thing I found googling the 2 words: "The Scientific Explanation for Karma" by David Amerland (Medium). Excerpt:

The general consensus about behaving in a Karma-aware way (let’s call it Karma-friendly) requires that we engage in actions that are not considered socially bad and have no adverse consequences for others. So, really, when we talk about Karma we talk about engaging in pro-social behavior.

Social and behavioral psychologists define pro-social behavior as behavior that involves a cost for those who engage in it and a benefit for others.... Our actions, in other words, create the primary layer of data that generates culture which then affects the secondary layer of data that is internalized in order for us to create our values, morals, identity, purpose, goals and mission in life....

The brain... is wired to preserve energy in order for us to survive long term. Energy, therefore, is primarily used when there is an accumulation of discomfort that is experienced at a physical level.... In order to engage in an action that will require a considerable amount of energy to be used up it has to change the way it activates itself and establish some efficiencies in its operation. To do this it strengthens the connections between neurons creating pathways that require significantly less energy to transmit information along their pathways....

You see where that's going. Science and karma don't need to "team up." Karma is in the perception of what has happened, and science can explain it all.

In the scramble to blame the west-coast fires on Trump, the NYT says Trump "scorns science."

The words appear on the front page, "Trump Scorns Science as Fires Rage; Biden Calls Him 'Climate Arsonist'":



You can see the idea they're using: "Climate took center stage in the election as President Trump denied global warming had any role and Joe Biden said this denial had fed the destruction." The NYT is saying that the failure to concede that global warming had some role in the fires is a rejection of science. And I guess we're expected to see Joe Biden as a science devotee for saying the fires are as bad as they are because of the denial of global warming, though "climate arsonist" isn't scientific terminology.

Clicking through to the article, I see the headline is "As Trump Again Rejects Science, Biden Calls Him a ‘Climate Arsonist’/The president visited California after weeks of silence on its wildfires and blamed the crisis only on poor forest management, not climate change. 'I don’t think science knows' what is happening, he said."

If he said "I don’t think science knows," is it fair to say he "scorns science"? I'd say it sounds as though he's interested in the process of science. Yes, he's stressing forest management, but is the NYT denying that forest management has had any role in the destructiveness of the fires? If I talked like the NYT, I'd say the NYT is scorning science for denying the role of forest management. See how that works?

Now, I can see the caginess of saying Trump "blamed the crisis only on poor forest management." Does that mean Trump has said that the fires have only one cause, poor forest management? No, though a quick reader might think it means that, it really only means that the only cause — among all the causative factors — that Trump is talking about is poor forest management. But if he said "I don’t think science knows" the role of climate change, then he is talking about potential other factors.

Ugh. It's so annoying to sift through this. The NYT should present the news in a coolly neutral fashion. But it is my chosen task to pull the propaganda apart, so I will continue. From the text of the article:

A day of dueling appearances laid out the stark differences between the two candidates, an incumbent president who has long scorned climate change as a hoax and rolled back environmental regulations and a challenger who has called for an aggressive campaign to curb the greenhouse gases blamed for increasingly extreme weather....

I don't think Trump has called climate change a hoax! Ridiculous! The "hoax" he talks about has to do with the assertions that human beings have made about climate change. If you actually care about science, journalists, you ought to be scrupulous about your words. You ought to see imprecision like that. So sloppy. So political.

The falsification of falsification.

Scientific American turns to Critical Studies of Science to conclude that we should retire the idea of falsification, upon which the negative half of scientific epistemology rests. The sciences are under serious threat.https://t.co/loEZMiFjdd

— James Lindsay, relevant white dude (@ConceptualJames) September 8, 2020

I don't know if Lindsay's trashing of the article is correct. I simply invite discussion. From the article:

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after “explaining” how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a 'physicist’s history of physics,' which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"

Well, I can see right there that the article writer is missing something. Feynman wasn't talking about a problem with doing science. He was talking about the problem with doing history!