Would you please stop posting political flamebait to HN? You've unfortunately been doing this a lot lately, which is not good. We don't want political flamewars here, or any flamewars—they're repetitive, tedious, and nasty.
Even if the rest of the world descends into hell, this site has a different mandate, and people here need to use it as intended.
To be fair, this is following a period of time which saw Democrats funding a lot of "scientific research" structured to study things like "would reducing the number of guns reduce gun violence" etc. Which is a foregone conclusion in the same way that reducing the number of red cars would reduce the number of collisions involving red cars.
It's a government-funded study structured in such a way as to produce a "scientific result" convenient to the politics of the party funding the study, rather than e.g. a cost/benefit analysis of all the possible solutions to reduce violent crime. It's not overly surprising that the response from Republicans was to become skeptical and demand for that to stop happening.
Which is unfortunate, since such social policy matters relatively little to the future of our nation and world when compared to, say, policy informed by climate science.
It's the same disease that leads to "if a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric."
The purpose of science is to give you answers to questions you didn't already have. But it's hard enough to avoid things like selection bias even when you're acting in good faith. If you start using it to work backwards from a political platform to determine which questions you want to ask to lead to the policies you decided on ahead of time, the thing you're doing is the reverse of making policy based on science. It's manufacturing "science" based on politics. Which isn't actually science.
If you knew the conclusion of a study before it was conducted, its conclusion provides no new support for your position.
This kind of implies that if we want actual science, we can't have politicians deciding what to study, and we can't have scientists getting fired for their conclusions no matter how politically inconvenient they are.
"Doesn't believe in science" is pretty reductionist here.
Most Democrats and Republicans, like everyone else, is operating with heuristics about which risks are especially salient and concerning. Those heuristics are influenced by social biases.
Democrats are more likely to be enthusiastic about the practice of science than Republicans, but that doesn't mean that Democrats always carefully and dispassionately weigh risks as estimated by scientists, or that Republicans always learn about scientists' suggestions and then do the exact opposite.
One thing that you're seeing here is that Republicans have a social bias toward seeing industry and products of industry as not that risky, while Democrats have a reverse bias. In some cases (like nuclear energy and genetic engineering) the Republicans' bias may help them, while in others (like fossil fuels) the Democrats' bias may help them.
That's a gross over simplification of the Republican view point. Both sides have blind spots. Republicans on climate change, Democrats on other things like nuclear for instance.
Almost certainly nuclear accidents & other externalities were avoided. But would those have been more costly than the costs of fossil fuels (e.g. international conflicts, tens or hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2, many other contaminants, oil spills, etc.)?
You may need to get to know more Republicans. Yes, they host a fair bit of anti-climate science sentiment. Democrats host a fair bit of homeopathic sentiment. Both persuasions include competent scientists. Republicans are no more unidimensional than Democrats. In my observation, the conversations between them are far more tribal fueding than epistemological clarification: epistemology is just a prop. It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance.
> It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance.
That's a reasonable point I agree with. But you're just practicing bothsideism here.
It is quite obvious that the ones throwing everyone under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance are the Republicans. Pretty much every Republican policy is a form of "screw the poor, screw the planet, it's all fine as long as I become richer".
Sometimes it's a bit disguised but it's often quite blatant. For example, all the gutting of regulations at the EPA so that the coal industry can keep polluting to their hearts content.
I disagree. I was noting a more complex reality where scientists who agree with climate science might also choose to identify as Republican given the totality of the platform. In fact, I have known some. To rephrase my earlier statement:
There exists at least one proper (accepted by the scientific community as opposed to self proclaimed) scientist who identifies as Republican.
I said that in counter to a universal statement. The reason is that the existence of one counter example leads to a contradiction with the generalization. As such the universal is false. It doesn't declare a statement on the relative frequency of scientists in either party. I choose to stay out of that conversation because I find people struggle to be rational in these discussions about politics.
What you call "screw the poor" can be seen as a way to prevent moral hazard. By that I mean the term as used by the insurance industry, not something religious.
Simply put, every economic system finds a way to force people to do miserable work. Passive systems (roughly "free market") use the natural consequences of poverty. Active systems end up with brutal prison camps, because normal people just won't volunteer to do miserable jobs for the common good.
Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term.
> Taking coal as an example.. Pro-climate folks would throw the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus, too, to achieve climate policies that pro-climate folks believe will help them long-term.
Let me fix that for you: ... that pro-climate folks believe will help EVERYONEshort to medium-term. As in, stopping the burning of coal will slow the rate of climate change, which will keep our planet more habitable. For example, avoid having the bulk of Florida underwater in a few decades. Avoid ever more powerful storms, forest fires, droughts, floods.
Calling this 'throwing the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus to help themselves' is disingenuous. Again, this is just bothsideism.
Because those pro-climate people also tend to be Democrats, who are the ones who actually care about providing enough unemployment assistance to allow people to live while they are looking for work. Who fund programs that allow people to learn new skills so they can start new careers.
Republicans are the ones cutting benefits, from SCHIP to regular unemployment benefits, and are going out of their way to make getting benefits as incompatible as possible with the daily life of someone struggling to get by. Have you looked at the hoops that some of the red states make the poor and unemployed jump through?
And finally, Democrats want to provide high quality, affordable health care for everyone, not just those people rich enough to afford it, which is the Republican platform. Coal mining is an unhealthy job. Are the coal companies going to pay for all the health care retired miners need?
That pro-climate folks think it'll help everyone else too is irrelevant to the example. Certainly, climate policy aims for outcomes they want for themselves.
The example assumes nothing about the outcome of any such policy other than it surely makes it harder for a coal miner to put food on the table in the near term.
That is, pro-climate folks seek outcomes that are at least short-term detrimental to others. This is a direct contradiction to the earlier claim that one party in the US has a monopoly on such behavior.
> Calling this 'throwing the livelihood of coal mining families under the bus to help themselves' is disingenuous.
Uhh, no.
Source: Extended family that was well-paid within the mining industry until regulatory changes during the prior presidential administration caused a sharp contraction in that industry.
