The Unfortunate Necessity of Fear Mongering

[calamity]

If you are house suvayor and lie you are liable for your report.

I as a gas fitter am liable for any gas appliance in the house even if I did not go into the room it is in.

A mechanic is liable for his work. If the brakes fail due to poor workmanship he is liable.

A scientist should have a degree of responsibility to be honest. Science is far too powerful to allow the conartist to have free reign.

Did you seriously just compare surveying, pipe fitting and brake replacement with research science?

:lol:

 

[Tim the plumber]

Did you seriously just compare surveying, pipe fitting and brake replacement with research science?

:lol:

Yews all human activities which have responsibilities. Only one of which is the happy home for any conartist who wants to get there.

 

[calamity]

Yews all human activities which have responsibilities. Only one of which is the happy home for any conartist who wants to get there.

Uh, no. Research is not loosen bolt A and remove Item B to replace with new part C.

 

[Tim the plumber]

Uh, no.

If you were a clever con-artist who wanted a risk free easy job being in an accademic job with little oversight would be a nice place to be. Not all con-artists are thrill seakers.

If you saw that the world would give you huge amounts of prestige and power plus money, if you just made up some **** and peddled it around the place why not?

If you found that the further you went the more similar types cema along for the ride why stop? You all reinforce each other!

The if you made sure your message was handy for various vestaged interests you got lots of funding. Gravy trian rolling!

 

[TDGonDP]

If you are house suvayor and lie you are liable for your report.

I as a gas fitter am liable for any gas appliance in the house even if I did not go into the room it is in.

A mechanic is liable for his work. If the brakes fail due to poor workmanship he is liable.

A scientist should have a degree of responsibility to be honest. Science is far too powerful to allow the conartist to have free reign.

Just to take this a step further, when we take our car to the mechanic, we have a reasonable expectation that they will do a professional job most of the time. And that is because those mechanics who consistently fail to deliver are eventually and somehow held to account.

Scientists are not subject to this social force.

 

[Anarchon]

If you are house suvayor and lie you are liable for your report.

I as a gas fitter am liable for any gas appliance in the house even if I did not go into the room it is in.

A mechanic is liable for his work. If the brakes fail due to poor workmanship he is liable.

A scientist should have a degree of responsibility to be honest. Science is far too powerful to allow the conartist to have free reign.

They are liable directly to the people they report to/work for, not the government. The government funds a large amount of scientific research. The scientific community has become reliant on that money, rather than a free market. They're now biased because of it. They'll find whatever the government wants them to find, in order to keep the money coming, and themselves in a job.

Peer review and public reputation are supposed to be main things that keeps these people honest, not government review.

 

[marke]

A prominent scientist has issued a warning for governments to evacuate the west coasts of North and South America because of the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant:

David Suzuki's Fukushima Warning Is Dire And Scary (VIDEO) | HuffPost Canada

Obviously governments are not going to do this. Other not-so-well known scientists have denounced this claim. And those of us who remember C1V1=C2V2 in our high school chemistry should realize that all the radioactive waste of Fukushima cannot contaminate the Pacific Ocean to the extent of being uninhabitable for humans. Why, then, would this scientist be making this kind of claim?

Let us all agree with the scientist that radioactive material should not be entering the Pacific Ocean. Some possible results are the upsetting of certain ecosystems and contamination of the food chain for humans. Plus adding radioactivity to the current waste of oil and plastics and chemicals and debris in the Pacific Ocean could have some further consequences we can’t yet fathom.


Note the words “possible” and “could” in these statements. They are tentative. The stated consequences might happen. They “could” be worse, or they “may” not be so bad. Or even they “might” yet be ameliorated by Mother Earth somehow. Who knows for sure? However, this scientist has learned that speaking tentatively on environmental issues yields a low return on political action in proactive protection of the environment: the public—and the politicians elected by the public—won’t pay attention to such tentative talk.

If the end of effective environmental action justifies the means of overstating the outcome and framing it as a 100% possibility, then all is well. The only problem is that when the sky doesn’t actually fall, a significant sector of the public becomes skeptical of future scientific claims of this extreme (though some of them may indeed be true). With enough skepticism from the public, politicians are swayed to delay effective and much needed environmental reforms.

So here’s the first of two paradoxes: sky-is-falling, fear mongering approaches have marketing appeal to get public attention and discourse. They can generate a small army of activists willing to march in the streets, write letters to politicians, and post graphics all over the internet. But such fear mongering also indirectly induces a counter force of scientific skepticism which then hinders an otherwise appropriate political movement. It becomes a case of four steps forward and three back.

The scientist could be more realistic with his statements. He could state the outcomes are only possibilities, and they may not be that severe. He could provide a thorough societal risk analysis that weighs the pros and cons of several possibilities—and looks beyond the first order of ramifications. But such talk will never make it very far in the media. The public will tune out rather readily—and the good cause goes no further.

Hence comes the second paradox: it is better for scientific fear mongering to move public opinion slowly in the right direction rather than for more realistic science to move it nowhere. We have to admit that this scientist has been one of the most influential people in the world in the environmentalist movement—even though his science is sometimes not very good. Maybe he knows what he is doing.

What a strange world we live in when we must distort the truth to find the truth!

We are all going to die, although not many chicken little alarms will turn out to be true. We are not all going to die and earth will not cease to exist as we know it until after Jesus returns to take His people to heaven and to judge the wicked left on earth for their wickedness resulting from rejecting Jesus as Lord and Savior.

 

[Tim the plumber]

Just to take this a step further, when we take our car to the mechanic, we have a reasonable expectation that they will do a professional job most of the time. And that is because those mechanics who consistently fail to deliver are eventually and somehow held to account.

Scientists are not subject to this social force.

Yep. That I would have change.

Although since I would have it that anybody who lied and called it science was subject to the law. Same as false advertising.