"The crisis, therefore, was not (merely) the result of individuals making bad decisions. Yes, they did, but people make mistakes all the time; blaming the crisis on mistakes is like blaming a plane crash on gravity. Instead, it was the product of fundamental forces within capitalism."

Chris Dillow: https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/03/against-schoolteacher-politics.html @academicchatter

#reputation #politics #publicOpinion #marxism #agnotology #sociology #ignorance #mediaStudies #academicChatter

"I was naive. I thought that the benefits of doing science would be self-evident. And I anticipated that our science—as people who look at the planet and see that it’s changing—would come under scrutiny and even attack because the implications are politically inconvenient. We’ve seen that before, and that’s what I expected. What I did not expect was that [the Trump administration] would go after pediatric cancer research first. That they would go after Parkinson’s research first. And they would go after vaccines, the greatest invention of humanity. And that has shocked me, the fact that science is under attack, not because its conclusions are necessarily politically inconvenient but because it is a way of telling the truth. That has been the most disorienting and frightening aspect of all of this."

An interview with climate scientist Dr Kate Marvel: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/top-climate-scientist-kate-marvel-just-resigned-from-nasa-heres-why/

#science #agnotology #ignorance #academicChatter #NASA

Academic Freedom index:
- good are northern countries;
- worst is Saudi Arabia;
- Pakistan, the USA and France have the same trend to zero;
- Germany and Israel are not shown because good and unchanged in the recent years, which demonstrates bias.

Try it: https://v-dem.net/data_analysis/VariableGraph/

#science #agnotology #ignorance #academicChatter #academicFreedom #NL #university #research #Pakistan #India #France