Re:Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific m...
by matthewdgreen on Sunday January 30, 2022 @11:11PM
(#30144382)
I don’t know what is going on in this thread. Did science sneak into your house(s) and kill your pet cat?
I don’t know what Universe you all live in, but I’m in my 40s and scientific research has made incredible strides just in my lifetime. This includes academic research, industrial research, both together or looked at separately. We have made amazing progress in understanding the human genome, the internals of living cells, devising incredibly powerful semiconductor devices, probing the mysteries of the Universe, developing useable machine learning technology and other areas. We have a goddamn space telescope at L2. Even the “controversial” areas are incredibly successful. In the aggregate, climate change papers from the 1980s and the 1990s broadly predict the warming we can measure today, and COVID research (despite being about two years old) has gifted us vaccines that provide enormous measurable benefits and were delivered on a timescale that previous generations would be amazed by.
Yes, at the micro level there are some individual bad results as there have always been and a few fields have had difficulty with replicating small-effect-size experiments, but even there we only know about these issues because scientists pointed them out and began improving their techniques. In the vast majority of sciences, if you pick a point 20 or 40 years ago and look at the tangible progress we’ve made, it’s enormous and more impressive than anything we have accomplished in any other area of human endeavor. I’m not sure if people here are angry at the world, or if they’ve just raised their expectations to unattainable heights, but it’s awfully depressing watching people ignore this progress.
I don’t know what Universe you all live in, but I’m in my 40s and scientific research has made incredible strides just in my lifetime. This includes academic research, industrial research, both together or looked at separately. We have made amazing progress in understanding the human genome, the internals of living cells, devising incredibly powerful semiconductor devices, probing the mysteries of the Universe, developing useable machine learning technology and other areas. We have a goddamn space telescope at L2. Even the “controversial” areas are incredibly successful. In the aggregate, climate change papers from the 1980s and the 1990s broadly predict the warming we can measure today, and COVID research (despite being about two years old) has gifted us vaccines that provide enormous measurable benefits and were delivered on a timescale that previous generations would be amazed by.
Yes, at the micro level there are some individual bad results as there have always been and a few fields have had difficulty with replicating small-effect-size experiments, but even there we only know about these issues because scientists pointed them out and began improving their techniques. In the vast majority of sciences, if you pick a point 20 or 40 years ago and look at the tangible progress we’ve made, it’s enormous and more impressive than anything we have accomplished in any other area of human endeavor. I’m not sure if people here are angry at the world, or if they’ve just raised their expectations to unattainable heights, but it’s awfully depressing watching people ignore this progress.