[dnissley]

Can you tell me why it's absurd?

I'm not even on the right, but I certainly take issue with a lot of the ideas coming out of gender studies (and similar) departments and how easily they are accepted as truth and how quickly they spread. Many of those ideas, if taken seriously, seem to have the possibility to rearrange society in a pretty awful way. In fact, anecdotally, they already seem to be having a pretty negative effect on our world and their influence seems to be on the rise. Now, I'm not quite as concerned about this as climate change, but it's still a real issue. Do you not see this as a real issue?

[en-us]

I am not saying that criticism of gender studies is absurd, I am saying that conflating climate science with gender studies is absurd.

The validity of the social sciences as "real science" has long been in question, long before the concerns of modern day politics. This problem is inherent to these fields, because instead of studying the objective physical world they study literature, history, politics, art, etc. Many social sciences are more accurately called liberal arts in my opinion, and they co-opted the word "science" to lend themselves credibility.

Then on the other hand you have climate science, which does study the objective physical world. The science around this involves collecting data and building models to describe the physical world instead of speculating about the nature of mankind. It is an apples to oranges comparison.

Just to illustrate, forget about climate science and gender studies because they are politically charged. If the above poster had criticized something like the study of French medieval literature and used that to argue that particle physics is a systemically flawed and biased field, I would also call that comparison absurd.

[username90]

You are mixing up arguments.

The argument is not: Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy.

The argument is: Social scientists pushed to be put on the same level as natural scientists, but then they pushed a bunch of politicized bullshit and tarnished the reputation of all scientists in the public's eye.

It doesn't matter what is true or not, people in general are stupid. The masses on the left trust scientists, since they feel that these bullshit pushers are pushing bullshit in the right direction (Not related to climate change). The masses on the right doesn't trust scientists for the same reason. The solution is not to teach people to properly evaluate the validity of different scientific claims, that is impossible, the solution is to build up the trust of scientists in everyone's eyes as much as possible by kicking out all the bullshit. Good arguments actually works, but if you try to feed them 50% bullshit they will refuse to swallow even the good parts since they stopped trusting you.

[en-us]

> Social scientists pushed to be put on the same level as natural scientists, but then they pushed a bunch of politicized bullshit and tarnished the reputation of all scientists in the public's eye.

I largely agree with this, but I think the masses on the right approach it more like the first argument:

> Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy.

More accurately, it seems to me that it has become "social science is not trustworthy and I don't agree with the field's mainstream ideas, so I can consider any science I don't agree with to be not trustworthy". So when climate science suggests that climate change is a problem, and the proposed solutions do not agree with right-wing economics, the natural conclusion is for them to reject climate science. This conclusion has been reached by right wing governments across the world, so it certainly seems that those who follow the ideology tend to reach it.

I think it happens both ways with people of all political persuasions, saying "I agree with these conclusions so this science is trustworthy" or "I don't agree with these conclusions so this science is untrustworthy".