[manux]

> scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same scenario).

I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens first.

[ptero]

I heard of tailoring findings to the preferences of the grant giver (advocate a wrong view and kiss your grant good-bye). This is very worrisome as a lot of experimental science labs are so grant dependent.

I actually think this is partly a self-inflicted wound -- a large fraction of major grant givers want truth and can stand findings that go against their beliefs, but given the heavy dependence of labs on grants there is a tendency to sugar coat findings to the taste of the money source.

Which is totally, completely and absolutely against the spirit of real science. My 2c.

[defterGoose]

> Which is totally, completely and absolutely against the spirit of real science. My 2c.

Absolutely true, but examine the power dynamic. The scientists are only able to provide results (whether for or against) if they have bread on the table. The funders (as private entities) provide an almost inescapable dilemma then for the researchers. So who's more at fault, the scientist or the ones holding the purse strings? Why would we expect scientists to live up to some lofty ideal while others seek only personal profit through them?

Really, this is just a greater indictment of what our system has morphed into, where science and R&D is increasingly seen as the province of private companies, and not to be funded publicly.

(Or worse, to be funded publicly and then gatekept for profit)

[nickff]

In the United States, the majority of research funding is from the Federal Government, and it has been increasing since before the Second World War. If there is a problem, it is likely in the government grant process.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science#United_Stat...

[achillesheels]

Hence the reason science has always been an aristocratic pursuit. Georg Feuerbach demonstrates this point with the thought-provoking claim that only a polytheistic tradition (such as Athens) can breed a love of natural beauty which obligates a love of knowing its ways.

But it is principally a love of Nature (and it’s universals) and not a love of wealth which moves the civilization higher. Galileo, Descartes, Newton had pretensions but immortal ones.

[danielam]

Don't follow the part about polytheism. I would say, if anything, polytheism is a hindrance to the development of science. For one, the capriciousness of the gods makes nature arbitrary and unpredictable.

FWIW, Stanley Jaki argues something quite different to what you've written in "Science and Creation" and "The Road of Science and the Ways of God".

P.S. A quick search doesn't bring up any noteworthy Georg Feuerbachs.

[achillesheels]

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/e...

George, my mistake. (Polytheism brings up the relevant passage starting with Jews)

The philosophers did not follow the gods, they believed in the divinity of reason. If anything, and consistent with the Scientific Revolution, the confidence in the self-certainty of reason permitted the imagination to expand “beyond” the natural, to examine it, to know it, to necessarily effect it for our reasonable ends.

Where I think the pagans fall short is in their worship of visible objects, where they have no concept of an invisibly present permanence in nature, ie electromagnetic radiation.

[danielam]

Oh, Ludwig Feuerbach.

If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all you have left is science as mastery of nature.

One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition. Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place. Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.

The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle science.

Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the intelligibility of what he's created.

In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.

[UncleOxidant]

I'm not sure I follow the connection here:

> only a polytheistic tradition (such as Athens) can breed a love of natural beauty which obligates a love of knowing its ways.

None of the people in your list below were polytheists:

> Galileo, Descartes, Newton

[achillesheels]

They were principally moved by Aristotle, however. First by Galileo falsifying him. Further, the development of analytical geometry and calculus necessitated the Greek polytheistic “infatuation” with geometry.

[xkcd-sucks]

> Bought off by whom?

Of course there's the usual shenanigans re: funding, but anecdotally it seems like most people are "bought off" (or coerced) by their colleagues or their selves, and the payment is career success and social approval.

For example: No grad student will invalidate their adviser's career. Very few people challenge the veracity of ubiquitous model systems or paradigms ("measuring $this means $that"). Results are sometimes tailored to be visually appealing. Unexpected results are discarded. The meaning of results can be overstated. An experiment can be set up which is internally perfect but which relies on completely nonsensical assumptions to inform its relation to salient natural phenomena. Etc.

To behave that way is to be a "bad citizen", make trouble for people, lose friends, and never get ahead. And practically speaking, most people who challenge prevailing wisdom are noob grad students who don't even know how wrong they are.

Of course, this happens to varying degrees in different fields. For materials chemistry of steel, it's pretty obvious when the tensile strength is less than reported. For organic synthesis, many published syntheses are bullshit but it's still obvious if a chemical isn't what it should be. For psychology and some of the newer theoretical disciplines (thinking of one rockstar "network scientist" here!), social consensus carries more weight than "reality" because reality is so tricky to measure.

[cuspy]

I was thinking primarily of other states or foreign entities who have an interest in undermining competitivity, stealing or suppressing emerging technologies. Mentioning elite families was as an illustrative contrast, since at least domestic entities (who may want to maintain a monopoly on certain technologies) would be less directly incentivised to undermine the institutions that serve them.

[exolymph]

How 'bout the Chinese government?

[vsareto]

And American companies. And the American government.

[giardini]

manux asks> "Bought off by who?"

Big pharmaceutical companies that stand to make trillions of dollars. Don't be stupid, follow the money.