So what do you propose as a solution? A closed, xenophobic culture will likely not accept any outside help.

Universities teach liberalism

No, they don't. They teach critical thinking. We had that discussion on HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829194

Or rather, they shouldn't. I understand that identity politics on US campuses is a real thing, but I'd be hard-pressed to call anything about that liberal: it's about as dogmatic as the Christian church during the inquisition.

There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly beneficial to the human race for some time now.

Sure. That computer you're reading HN on probably wasn't possible with the knowledge of 30 years ago. But "major scientific discoveries" is a perfect True-Scotsman phrase, so I don't expect you to agree with me on that.

the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives

You mean how we can never predict who is most likely to develop which cancer [1], or which cancers are curable [2], or who is most at risk from developing Alzheimer's [3]?

That their wages haven't gone up in decades

Ah, so that's the problem. Have they considered that their tribal enemy's wages haven't gone up either?

[1] https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/risk-assessment-screening/...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/genetic-test-change...

[3] https://www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/publication/alzheimers-di...

These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).

> Then there was the space race, putting men on the Moon, sending probes to other planets, and it looked like the wildest science fiction might be in reach. Then... stagnation.

Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.

> For the most part, today we have the same things we had thirty or forty years ago, just incrementally better or more efficient

Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.

> These are mostly not scientific, but engineering breakthroughs (a lot of the science necessary for it was developed long before).

That's reasonable. But the public sees the whole stack re: technology/engineering/science as the same thing. If something stalls in one part, it affects the other two.

Come to think of it: any undiagnosed failure in the education system could easily lead to a broad stagnation, so it is certainly hard to tease these things apart and allocate blame.

> Which shows that science works/worked pretty well, just the society/economy to back it was too weak. For me a really strong pro-science argument.

Supposing that you are right. Why then does society/economy remain too weak to fully back the science? What is the grit in the gears?

> Bullshit: Try to use a computer or cell phone that was built 30 or 40 years ago.

I think we are, certainly I am, excluding progress in computer science. That's the one general area of brightness.

Whether that's enough to counteract weakness in cheap energy production/storage, biotechnology and medicine, spaceflight (until very recently), effective transport etc, is another thing.

Hoarding of capital is probably a part of it. Downward pressure on wages is incompatible with creativity in the workplace.

Of course computation is the exception here. There's a small number of fields that have had good progress, but the major areas have stagnated. Is the invention of the Net enough to overcome this?

It is fine to say that maybe there were quite reasonable constraints, that say, are preventing the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation from being turned over, and pauses in specific technological change are normal, but none of that addresses the question of why has a broad based stagnation set in for so long.

You just can't turn to the current generation and say:

"That's IT! There's no More. Didn't you see how amazing things were from 1700 to 1950? Where is your appreciation! Now Fuck off"

They will at least want to know why?!

That's how it feels to me reading the Wall Street Journal these days. Everything in the past was amazing and this generation are just entitled lazy slobs who got everything gifted to them on a platter.

I think you need a critical mass of people to accept that stagnation has occurred before we can get broad based growth again. Awkward questions that haven't been asked before need to be asked. Right now my generation is sitting on its laurels because it believes, as Thiel describes it: we can just sit back and wait for the Movie of the future to unfold forever.

That won't happen as long as people like this:

thisisjasonsilva.com

are being taken seriously.

> So what do you propose as a solution? A closed, xenophobic culture will likely not accept any outside help.

Yes of course.

As jcranmer said in this subthread:

>> The reason that the anti-science right-wing comes to the forefront is most likely that intellectual faculty at universities are heavily left-wing. Most social sciences display a distressingly high degree of correlation between research findings and prior political belief, but this is masked by many of them being overwhelmingly left wing: anthropology and sociology have a 30:1 and 28:1 left:right ratio, respectively. (cf. https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0053.html ).

That shift didn't occur overnight. So it is reasonable to suppose that a shift in the other direction wouldn't be rapid either. I suppose you could try opening new universities but my sense is that a cultural shift back is already underway on university campuses, it's just in a nascent form at the moment.

>> Universities teach liberalism

>No, they don't. They teach critical thinking. We had that discussion on HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829194

I'm not being literal. The dean (I hope) doesn't literally get up on a pulpit and declare the virtues of liberalism every day.

You've got to remember that a university is a hierarchy. There are signals, special words, used by people in the hierarchy to declare their colours to a particular banner i.e. status/social signaling.

This means that 'teaching liberalism' is usually more covert than overt. If you've ever walked into a Church (cue solemn organ music) and refrained from chatting to your friend about whatever Richard Dawkins said this week, then you were affected by the environment (to not seem disrespectful) without even needing a person to influence your mood. That such a thing can influence even the most vehement opposition to the ideals of the Church is a testament to the power of an environment.

Onto the controversy:

> Sure. That computer you're reading HN on probably wasn't possible with the knowledge of 30 years ago. But "major scientific discoveries" is a perfect True-Scotsman phrase, so I don't expect you to agree with me on that.

Ah but tremon! I did selectively disallow computer science!

> All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science.

Tell me about the major breakthroughs outside of computing that have affected people's everyday lives in the last, say, three/four decades. With respect to the advancements of the past of course, since it is easy to turn a mole hill into a mountain without a benchmark.

> You mean how we can never predict who is most likely to develop which cancer [1], or which cancers are curable [2], or who is most at risk from developing Alzheimer's [3]?

Let's look at a success story:

"Although polio has no cure, prevention is available through a vaccine. In the United States, it is given as an inactivated polio vaccine. Approximately 90 percent or more of polio vaccine recipients develop protective antibodies to all three poliovirus types after two doses, and at least 99 percent are immune following three doses."

Are Alzheimers or Cancer(s) treatments at this level of effectiveness?

I have to caution you here. I'm not claiming equal difficulty for each disease. Obviously there's a range from the trivial to the nearly impossible.

From the perspective now of the average person there has been a stagnation in medicine. 1 in 3 people will develop Alzheimers, so there is immense focus/money available to solve for X here. Yet it remains unsolved. The same thing is true broadly speaking of cancer. Progress has been very incremental. Yes, some cancers can now be shrugged off in a way they could not in the 70s, but fundamentally you'll get a different reaction from a patient with polio ("They have a cure for that, right?") than from a cancer patient ("How bad is it and How long do I have to live?")

It is not just the perspective of common people either. Experts in these areas are very worried about the big picture.

The fact is that the majority of medical papers in journalist are found to be not reproducible. I know what I'm saying here. It sounds like heresy but hear me out. If the majority of 'medical discoveries' are unreproducible, then maybe most of the practitioners are not actually doing science. These storm clouds don't get much press today but it is widely known within the community.

Allied to that it is hard not to notice that 'biotech' isn't doing very well in Silicon Valley.

I should also make a personal note: I asked my doctor whether he could do something with a genome sequence of myself and family. He said no. There is no point; at our level of resolution it only matters to have the past medical histories of family. That always seemed a bit suspect to me, especially given the original promises made. Sounds like failure to me.

> Ah, so that's the problem. Have they considered that their tribal enemy's wages haven't gone up either?

Unfortunately there is also decreasing belief in science on the left tribe. It is just that it is occurring in different areas of science. The disease is the same though. Its expression is just different. The reason why there's not such an outcry about that is that broadly speaking the average left oriented person believes 'Science is on their side'. This is because of what I mentioned before: there are more leftists in the academy.

I'm European, and I'm pretty sure that my definitions of left and right don't match yours (I'm pretty sure the definitions aren't even constant within my own country)... Could you elaborate on this shift, or what exactly is meant with left-wing vs right-wing research findings?

Ah but tremon! I did selectively disallow computer science!

Yes, I noticed. If I were uncharitable I'd say you were hedging your bets.

If you've ever walked into a Church (cue solemn organ music) and refrained from chatting to your friend about whatever Richard Dawkins said this week

So you're arguing that US universities, which should be prime locations for open discourse, are actually dogmatic, oppressive power structures. That's fair, I guess, and not an assertion that I can refute. I can only tell you that that characterization does not apply to the North European universities I have seen.

Are Alzheimers or Cancer(s) treatments at this level of effectiveness?

It took us more than 100 years of proactive treatment to get to that level of effectiveness in combating polio, and polio was known as a contagious disease for centuries before that. Alzheimer's didn't get classified as a separate disease until 1977. Science doesn't do miracles; using Alzheimer's as an example of "failure of science" is showing really unrealistic expectations.

fundamentally you'll get a different reaction from a patient with polio

Polio has never been 100% deadly. Alzheimer's is, and cancer can be (lung cancer still has only a 10% survival rate).

Experts in these areas are very worried about the big picture.

Can you expand on these worries?

If the majority of 'medical discoveries' are unreproducible, then maybe most of the practitioners are not actually doing science.

It's good that you included "maybe", because that does not follow. Yes, there is much shoddy science. Medicine really is not unique in that aspect. Verification studies are not valued, so they're not performed. The lack of independent verification also makes the primary researchers lax. But luckily, the best solution to shoddy science is more science. If all the people decrying the state of overall "science" would spend just as much time arguing for more replication studies, the world would be a much better place.

For the rest of your objections: yes, progress is incremental. It always has been. Before we put a man on the moon, we had people in low orbit, then high orbit. Before we sent humans in space, we sent other animals. Before we sent animals, we sent only a rocket. And since we've been to the moon, we have succesfully landed probes on asteroids. We have performed soil analysis on Mars. All of those steps were just as incremental as the lunar landing.

Finally, in my view the lack of apparent progress since the 1980's is because of state divestment around that time. Many government-sponsored research benefits were privatized around that time, which meant that the benefits of the research ended up in a few rent-seeking silo's (big pharma being one of them).

Let's funnel more money into a system that's suffering from Eroom's Law?

A different read on the situation would be to fire the majority of scientists. We'll keep 1% - 10% of them and give them an order of magnitude more funding.

Also we'll close down some branches of science entirely because they're a waste of effort. Consider that: Corporations are already doing this to entire R&D departments and the government isn't far behind them with respect to NASA and NSF funding.

Why is public funding on life support in major areas?

Here's one idea that may be wrong but I think it's worth consideration.

Maybe there is just way too many scientists. Maybe science has a scaling problem. Maybe the signal to noise ratio is mostly noise because nobody feels the pressure to replicate that comes from intense competition between researchers and maybe nobody is reading the journals they're working so hard to publish in because it's like drinking from a fire hose.

Even in computer science we're constantly reinventing 'new' ideas that were actually originally discovered in the 70s. Ceaselessly cycling through existing paradigms leads to diminishing returns.

Not being able to integrate existing knowledge is a failure mode. If you look at the early history of science you see it is littered with disciplines that don't exist in the modern era, mostly because they were fraudulent bunk. Of course that could never happen today. Preposterous,

> For the rest of your objections: yes, progress is incremental. It always has been. Before we put a man on the moon, we had people in low orbit, then high orbit. Before we sent humans in space, we sent other animals. Before we sent animals, we sent only a rocket. And since we've been to the moon, we have succesfully landed probes on asteroids. We have performed soil analysis on Mars. All of those steps were just as incremental as the lunar landing.

This is just unconvincing. You've seen 2001, so you've seen what my parents generation expected to happen by the early 21st century. The most likely positive outcome is that after 100 years since the moon landing we'll have more robots and a handful of humans on the nearest planet. If our advancements are actually impressive we don't need the journalists to prompt us into thinking so. I recall that probe that landed on that asteroid recently went dark for most of it's life because they used solar power instead of the nuclear battery that powers the Voyagers. The Saturn 5 rusting on NASA's front lawn before it got shipped into a museum. This is pathetic.

> Finally, in my view the lack of apparent progress since the 1980's is because of state divestment around that time. Many government-sponsored research benefits were privatized around that time, which meant that the benefits of the research ended up in a few rent-seeking silo's (big pharma being one of them).

This is a world wide stagnation in science/engineering/technology ex-computation, it's much bigger than a country's funding drying up. If the stagnation continues and we have a major economic hiccup we could really go from plateauing to an undignified descent. All the scientists will be ekeing out a living just to make ends meet. Some of that has been happening already. I know of several influential scientists in biology and mathematics who were or are literally living hand to mouth. This irks me when I see poppingjays with trust funds playact at cargocult science. I'm sure this happened in the past also, but for it to occur in a time it is commonly supposed that anybody complaining about quality is a crank it is especially galling.

http://67.media.tumblr.com/96064fb9c0b3371eec2349149dc15f11/...

You had a question concerning experts and their worries? I'd point you to the life's work of John Ioannidis. There seems to be one of those guys in most fields now, Jonathan Haidt in social science, even physics has Lee Smolin. Mostly for the sake of brevity I pause here.

Also;

>> What is the grit in the gears? > >Hoarding of capital is probably a part of it. Downward pressure on wages is incompatible with creativity in the workplace.

Agreed.

I didn't say more money, I said more science. Wouldn't it be great if all patients taking a particular drug would have direct access to a scientifically-trained researcher/assistant that could interpret the effect on that patient, and publish their results as a single data point on that drug? For many conditions, there are patient support groups. I would want these groups to participate in the evaluation of drug effectiveness, but most lack scientific rigour and have little means to corroborate with other groups or manufacturers.

We'll keep 1% - 10% of them and give them an order of magnitude more funding.

I think this will not prevent agenda-driven research (AKA corruption of science). At the most, you will get higher inflation of the cost of buying specific results with money. And since you've reduced the total scientific capacity, there is even less capacity for verification of results.

Also we'll close down some branches of science entirely because they're a waste of effort.

I'm afraid the first that would be closed down are the purely theoretical sciences, such as advanced math and string theory. After all, they don't have a practical use, don't they? And wouldn't it be useful if you could classify the entire field of climate research as "waste of effort", because you happen to be in power and don't like its results?

The problem is that we don't have a universal, uncontested definition of "waste of effort". Serendipitous discoveries are a real thing, and have spawned entirely new areas of research or tools. Some of the major accidental breakthroughs: penicillin, microwave ovens, teflon, vulcanization of rubber, viagra.

We will never know what breakthrough we missed out on by not pursuing some research. I think narrowing the scope of research is a bad idea.

Maybe science has a scaling problem [..] maybe nobody is reading the journals [..] because it's like drinking from a fire hose

Science has an accessibility problem. When researchers have to pay thousands of dollars before they can even read other studies, that automatically sets a minimum bar for their own scientific research to break even. Since replication studies can not lead to new patent applications, they're only money sinks.

And you are correct that there are too many publications adding next to nothing to the overall knowledge. But that too, in my eyes, is a problem of accessibility. Not money-wise, but content-wise. We really need better search and classification systems. But as long as the content is locked up, the content holders have no incentive to improve our access.

Not being able to integrate existing knowledge is a failure mode

Fully agreed.

You've seen 2001, so you've seen what my parents generation expected to happen by the early 21st century.

Not sure what you mean here. If you mean "2001: A Space Odyssey", then no, I haven't seen it. I have seen "Airplane 2" though...

If our advancements are actually impressive we don't need the journalists to prompt us into thinking so.

But that was exactly my point. The lunar landing wasn't actually that impressive, yet we had thousands of journalists prompting us to think so. The space race was overhyped because it was used as propaganda on the cold war front. Yes, it was a major milestone in human engineering, but as a scientific achievement it was just incremental.

To me, it is exactly because of journalist hype that we think that the lunar landing was a greater accomplishment than the Mars exploration missions, or than the permanently-inhabited International Space Station.

that probe that landed on that asteroid recently went dark for most of it's life because they used solar power instead of the nuclear battery that powers the Voyagers.

Yes, the aversion against nuclear energy is a great tragedy for modern life, especially for space exploration. But that is a political problem brought on by the weaponization of nuclear power, it's not a scientific or engineering problem.

This is a world wide stagnation in science/engineering/technology ex-computation

I think we'll just have to disagree on that.

I think much of this really does come back to economics. If people's wage were higher thanks to innovation I imagine they certainly would pay for an assistant of the sort you're describing around the 70k - 100k mark. Or if these assistants were able to supply their service for about the cost of buying a newspaper per week. Frankly though, drug companies and I imagine the FDA are less than enthused, for good reasons and bad, with the possibility of patient groups returning feedback that might generate expensive recalls or call regulations into question. This might be the kind of problem Silicon Valley could solve for x with some quasi-computional-insurance startup.

> I think this will not prevent agenda-driven research (AKA corruption of science). At the most, you will get higher inflation of the cost of buying specific results with money. And since you've reduced the total scientific capacity, there is even less capacity for verification of results.

Very likely those are the downsides, but I believe we're in triage, not cosmetic surgery. The pressing issue for the corporation or government is the total spend and the hammer-nail issue. Having more eyeballs on less publications will probably deter fraud or shoddy work.

> I'm afraid the first that would be closed down are the purely theoretical sciences, such as advanced math and string theory. After all, they don't have a practical use, don't they?

I'd be less afraid of that. The people doing string theory are very economic to accommodate with chalk and pencils and there I don't think there are that many of them around. I say this as somebody who thinks this is all probably bunk!

> And wouldn't it be useful if you could classify the entire field of climate research as "waste of effort", because you happen to be in power and don't like its results?

Immensely useful. Much consternation in Australia I hear. In practice this happens without a recession required. The weakness of most areas of science today is their over reliance on government funding. I believe the Catholic Church had the best trained astronomers in the business at one point, will Upton Sinclair's quote ever lose relevance! The solution I believe is to change the funding model with a sovereign fund, like Harvard's endowment. Difficult but it will work.

> Not sure what you mean here. If you mean "2001: A Space Odyssey", then no, I haven't seen it.

A homework assignment, should you choose to accept it!

It's one of the movies, like the Matrix, that never quite looks dated despite half a century.

> To me, it is exactly because of journalist hype that we think that the lunar landing was a greater accomplishment than the Mars exploration missions, or than the permanently-inhabited International Space Station.

You're technically correct. The best form of correct! It's the scale of things (present in 2001) that didn't happen that is my bugbear though. Propaganda aside it is hard not to watch the Saturn 5 taking off without chills running down your spine.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=330_1299456750

> Yes, the aversion against nuclear energy is a great tragedy for modern life, especially for space exploration. But that is a political problem brought on by the weaponization of nuclear power, it's not a scientific or engineering problem.

I will argue there is an invisible but certain connection between a stagnation in science and political deadlock in many areas. Innovators typically riff off technology that ultimately had it's foundation in basic science some decades or centuries back. All growth in GDP ultimately comes from making more stuff with less resources, which is a fine definition of technology. Lack of economic resource growth leads to less niches in society and to zero sum politics or deadlock because one party must lose for another to win. Therefore the lack of a nuclear battery in the robot is not a coincidence. That genetic modification and nuclear power are defacto illegal or actually illegal in many countries is not unconnected to what we've been talking about. When the Chinese forbade 3 mask sailing ships they stopped something more than ocean travel.

Ok, I think we've reached the limits of this conservation for today. Thank you for a pleasant and interesting conversation.

There is a lot to be said for the need for differing opinions on, say, social mores, finance, healthcare, government, and philosophies of life in general. That is to say, I agree that the intellectual/philosophical right-wing is indeed not at all similar to the caricatures we see.

I have a hunch, though, that highly religious and closeted people (of the "Do not be educated lest you lose your humility" kind) are almost tautologically biased against evidential "scientific method" models of the world, as opposed to one where all truth flows from $HOLY_BOOK. And if you'll look closely, it is this part that is ridiculed, largely for the unquestioning nature of its beliefs and worldviews.

Aside: I have a feeling I'm stepping on the wrong side of the Slate Star Codex "outgroup" essay with this. If there are any logical fallacies in this, or anything similar, I would appreciate comments. I'm not a seasoned observer of politics or society :)

Authoritarians are going to have a problem with that. Where there's a $HOLY_BOOK or $HOLY_RELIGION, their schtick is always that truth flows through them.

To be fair, science has some of the same issues. But science has a feedback loop which tries to reality test ideas. So shouting about how right you are and verbally abusing your enemies only ever gets you so far.

Ideologies don't have that. They only have persuasion and rhetoric - which are far more effective as political tools, but far less effective if you'd like to keep your beliefs reasonably close to reality.

There exists a large 'grey tribe' that doesn't classify itself as a purist left wing or right wing, but has strong elements of both under it's banner. I think of somebody like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander as continuing the Enlightenment tradition which has strong right wing influences. There was always a strong link between classical liberal thinking and the Enlightenment scholars.

In HN's own backyard we have Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel. Our history is of course very recent but there are still people who stand out with their ideas and are mostly on the right.

In the more public sphere we have people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who are more easily claimed by the modern right wing intelligentsia than the left.

Obviously there is some noise with the signal but you've got to anticipate it is not often that a human being is a ideological purist to the degree of say: William Buckley or Noam Chomsky.

> I think you may be confusing the intellectual right-wing with the, e.g. evolution/climate change-denying right wing.

Not at all Mr Kgnao. Formerly I came from a Christian cult, with double emphasis on the word 'cult'.

So as a right wing person (probably an evil mutant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0/are_your_enemies_innately_evil/) I am familiar with both the Right that has thrown out rationality altogether, and the secular, more intellectual Right. I must hasten to add that there are good scientists who are Christians and belong to a scientific tradition in the second camp, but that they are a rare breed when compared to the past three centuries.

> There is a lot to be said for the need for differing opinions on, say, social mores, finance, healthcare, government, and philosophies of life in general. That is to say, I agree that the intellectual/philosophical right-wing is indeed not at all similar to the caricatures we see.

Yes, and it is most unfortunate because when I have broached right wing positions to left wing partisans in the past, they have often been quite interested in the oppositional view even if they didn't agree with it. Steelmanning arguments leads to more interesting places and new ideas. (Ctrl-F for 'steel man' http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/)

I would hate to live in a world where everything I believed to be true, was actually so, because then there would be nothing new to discover.

> I have a hunch, though, that highly religious and closeted people (of the "Do not be educated lest you lose your humility" kind) are almost tautologically biased against evidential "scientific method" models of the world, as opposed to one where all truth flows from $HOLY_BOOK. And if you'll look closely, it is this part that is ridiculed, largely for the unquestioning nature of its beliefs and worldviews.

Agreed. There's always a danger of this on the Left too, I'm sure you remember the Little Red Book. Different thing, same insanity.

> Aside: I have a feeling I'm stepping on the wrong side of the Slate Star Codex "outgroup" essay with this. If there are any logical fallacies in this, or anything similar, I would appreciate comments. I'm not a seasoned observer of politics or society :)

Not to worry, I'm from SSC too so really we're in the same in-group ;-)

Best Tribe Forever!

Also, "Mr Kgnao" is a cute spin on my username :)

I originally intended it as a reference to Ulysses, where James Joyce captures a cat's sound as being similar to "mrkgnao".

The reason that the anti-science right-wing comes to the forefront is most likely that intellectual faculty at universities are heavily left-wing. Most social sciences display a distressingly high degree of correlation between research findings and prior political belief, but this is masked by many of them being overwhelmingly left wing: anthropology and sociology have a 30:1 and 28:1 left:right ratio, respectively. (cf. https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0053.html ).

Perhaps your 3rd point is the most accurate of the stated reasons. But, even then, your final conclusion leaves me disturbed. There is no reason to distrust verifiable facts when they are presented, and I don't think right-wingers are any more prone to ignorance than left-wingers. What is rotten in the entire matter is that the industries attached to that science, and governments that employ science for the same reason, as a tool, with which to procure economic benefits from market participants.

All that I can suggest to anyone who wants to complain about people who do not trust vaccines, is to do something to make them more trustworthy. If they are so imperative to public health and safety, then why have a profit seeking corporation directing the implementation? The very track record of behavior by the pharmaceutical and agro-chemical industries make me question the very sanity of those who would promote thier products, let alone use them on themselves or their family.

The political right distrusts science on climate change, the more radical factions even evolution. The political left distrusts science on GMOs, organic farming and nuclear power, the more radical factions even vaccinations.

I wouldn't be so quick to judge, which side is more anti-science. They seem pretty equal to me.