Tag: science and society
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Who’s to blame for the American right’s distrust of science?
This study unambiguously suggests that scientific journals do the institution of science no favor when they insert themselves so directly in the political debate, especially at a time when trust in the scientific community continues to decline on the right wing. This is the surprisingly misguided interpretation, in an article published by Politico, of a…
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Assorted comments: MOM, IIT Mandi, scientists’ wishes
These are some remarks that have been fermenting in my mind and for which I don’t have the time or the inclination to supply a beginning-middle-end structure to publish as individual posts. I’m just packing them into this one post so I can say what I’d like to say, clear some headspace and move on.…
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Reimagining science, redux
This article on Founding Fuel has some great suggestions I thought, but it merits sharing with a couple caveats. First, in narratives about making science “easier to do”, commentators give science-industry linkages more play than science-society ones. This has been true in the past and continues to be. We remember and periodically celebrate the work of Shanti Swarup…
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The chrysalis that isn’t there
I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. 🙂 I should really start keeping a log of different stories in the news all of which point to the little-acknowledged but only-evident fact that science – like…
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Scientism is not ‘nonsense’
The @realscientists rocur account on Twitter took a surprising turn earlier today when its current curator, Teresa Ambrosio, a chemist, tweeted the following: If I had to give her the benefit of doubt, I’d say she was pointing this tweet at the hordes of people – especially Americans – whose conspiratorial attitude towards vaccines and…
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Unseating Feynman, and Fermi
Do physicists whitewash the legacy of Enrico Fermi the same way they do Richard Feynman? Feynman disguised his sexism as pranks and jokes, and writers have spent thousands of pages offering his virtues as a great physicist and teacher as a counterweight against his misogyny. Even his autobiography doesn’t make any attempts to disguise his…