> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
Democrats also do not always do what the electorate wants.
How many times did they have executive and both houses since Roe v Wade without passing law to enshrine the right to abortion?
Surely they could have released the Epstein list as well.
We can argue which party is “worse than the other” for sure, but both serve themselves and neither is a bright shining star of serving the actual people IMO.
Why would they need to enshrine the right to abortion in law when the supreme Court said it was guaranteed in the Constitution? They probably thought they had more pressing matters to work on. I didn't hear any call to pass a right to abortion law. Maybe there was some grovel I missed?
And from what I can see, the Democrats didn't care much about the Epstein list because there wasn't much evidence there even was a list. The current administration ran on the idea that there was a list and the Democrats were covering it up.
Surely you got many of the DNC fundraisers that breathlessly urged donors to give to the DNC to protect the right for a woman to choose? Or remember the turn out the vote campaigns to protect abortion rights?
It appears to me that the possibility that Roe v Wade would be overturned was more valuable to the DNC as a threat than cementing the issue by law-making was.
> Republicans not always do what the electorate wants.
>
> Abortion, gun control and releasing the Epstain list are have popular support but the are against it.
No they're not, though? At least, amongst their voterbase. The Epstein files are the first truly bipartisan issue I've seen, the other two are very strictly partisan issues, and most Republicans/Conservatives I know do not want either.
I wish pollsters would ask the right question: "would you support the government fining you or jailing you (or a family member) if you seek an abortion." I bet the numbers would swing way towards legality. But what're ya gonna do.
> or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
I hope you realize the irony that this argument applies to both sides of the argument here. In other words, how do you know that your research was done in an unbiased way?
Being led on a leash, or at least being nudged, by monied interests is not unique to either side of US politics. Do you know who has funded anti-nuclear power propaganda since the 1950s? The same fossil fuel industry involved with the destruction of the EPA.
The good thing about science is that it doesn’t depend on trusting any one person or institution, it depends on a process designed to catch bias and error.
Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.
Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.
What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
> The good thing about science is that it doesn’t depend on trusting any one person or institution, it depends on a process designed to catch bias and error.
In the long term, yes. In the short term it is extremely hard to know what is good science, and what is noise produced by the system that incentivizes publishing and not actual science.
> Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.
I think we do not have to go further than Covid times to see that it is absolutely not the case. Mass hysteria of the pandemic absolutely ostracized anyone who dared to suggest that (a) covid maybe is coming for a Wuhan lab, or (2) that lockdowns maybe not the best way to handle things especially if we consider impact on children. So... The evidence suggests that scientists are people like everyone else, make the same mistakes, may use their status to push their own biases and their own agendas, and pursue their own interests.
> Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.
All these things work only if people act with honor. The moment the incentives are misaligned nothing will work. Peer review is absolutely gamed. I do not know if you remember, but someone took his own life because of this -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27296433
> What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
Totally agree. Me too (as a scientist myself). However, I have absolutely no belief in the system itself. Today, I only believe those who I think do good science, either because I read their papers and I see that they are absolutely honest and upfront about issues with their work and ideas, or because I know from personal experience that these people will never falsify data just to put the paper out. My advisor is like this: we never publish a paper until we know that all the data tracks, and all the environment, scripts, data, etc are archived to ensure that if needed we can track the issue. However, some advisors are not like that, and I know it because students talk between themselves, and you just hear those stories, and you know.
There is no incentive today for a scientist to be honest (unless they grew up this way).
For sure Fox et al. have been pushing the idea that scientists have biases, but it can also be true that science has become more biased.
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
Scientists can have biases, but science itself is just a methodology for determining truth. The political leanings of the people publishing papers shouldn't matter at all. Anybody can read a study and point out the problems with it. Anything else is just ad hominem.
Its a fact that the EPA added ~6000 employees during the Biden administration and also instituted DEI policies to follow President Biden’s Executive Order 14035 (2021). This included employee-led special emphasis groups, LGBTQ+ events, and justice-oriented programs. All this is out of focus from the EPA's goal to safeguard the natural environment.
It should be NO surprise that there is massive push-back after a republican administration came to power. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned to cut the EPA’s size and funding and to eliminate DEI and environmental justice programs in the federal government.
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?