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> One uses science as a tool

This requires a base rate of literacy and critical thinking that a lot of Americans, unfortunately, lack.



Not the majority. A bit less than 20%, the remaining support coming from people who think politics is a tribal engagement like watching a sports team. Or those that listen to bags of hot wind like Yarvin, Rogan, or Thiel.


People want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge.

What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic).

At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)


That common source of trust has been eroded as certain populations cling to ideas long proven false and/or maladative, and rather than adapt they instead become exclusionary and xenophobic.

Once your tribe meets another, you either adapt or die.




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