lumpen 🍉 III (@scrum)

@Air_Quotes_Comedian

yeah i mean the thing about science, at least, the old enlightenment view, is it's supposed to be democratizing in that scientific truths are universally valid because they are are imminently demonstrable. This is still true of course when we're talking about fundamentals of natural sciences like physics or thermodynamics or chemistry. But like that line about "a sufficiently advanced science becomes indistinguishable from magic" it goes the other way, that magic and woo and now indistinguishable from science to a lot of people, since these so few people are even taught these fundamentals.

There are these processes under capitalism of stratification and bureaucratization, and in science increased specialization, or with universities being increasingly funded and controlled by private interests, you can't even talk about objective universal science like you could 100 years ago, because like the religious dogmas of old, there interest is involved in what is deemed ot be "true", but in order to serve their interests, they must pretend to be disinterested, objective, unbiased. But in order to do that, they need people to be generally ignorant of scientific principles and so defer to their authority.

You can literally just pay any research firm or university department to do a 'study' that can "prove" or "disprove" ( in reality, suggest, imply, or call into question) just about anything, and then you also pay other quacks to do 'peer review" and even if the findings get challenged down the line, it doesn't matter, because the study gets picked up by media outlets who run with whatever factoid the financiers of the paper wanted to put out there. Say the beef industry funds a study with the aim of "proving" the health benefits of ground beef, they pass it off to the media who runs the headline "New study finds ground beef is good for you actually" and by the time the study is ripped to pieces by actual scientists who take time away from their actual research to debunk this garbage, the damage has already been done, and millions of people have heard that "ground beef is good for you actually" and have increased their beef intake accordingly,. if you try to argue with them, they'll be like "uh this is science, facts don't care about your liberal feelings"

All that ^^ is very obvious to me, because of my intermediary-at-best knowledge of sociology, economics and history, what used to be called "critical theory". And this is exactly why there's been such a push against the humanities and "soft sciences" because the ruling class doesn't want people to see through their grift. In fact many people would call me a conspiracy theorist whackjob for connecting these dots, because they simply were never exposed to any kind of critical social theory, and so anything that calls into question the sacred legitimacy of these scientific institutions must mean I am some tin foil hat wingnut.