| > We must be careful that articles/papers like these are not used by the anti-scientific crowd to promote their talking points and agendas. It is a slippery slope. At the moment you started to avoid talking about some things because your political opponents could use your ideas to promote their agenda, you stopped being a scientist and became a politician. You thinking is no more scientific, it is political. You are not a scientist anymore, you are a politician. I dramatize a bit, it doesn't happen all suddenly, but before you started to devise a strategy of censoring discussion due to political reasons, you should find a way to do it without inhibiting thought and free flow of ideas. From the other hand, I don't understand the discourse at all. If you don't like what anti-scientific crowd says, just don't read them. They will find talking points with you or without you. I believe, people are mistaken that you can curb somehow anti-science movement. Lets take for example that story with "vaccines cause autism". If the paper claiming that was not published, there would be no antivaxxers, oder? I believe it doesn't matter. They would find something else, the whole point of their ideology "science is a conspiracy which hides things". So not published paper comes into the category of hidden things. They always find something. It is dynamic system with a chaotic behavior, you can try as hard as you like to remove triggers created by science, but conspiracy theories would be spawn by something "smaller". |
It is not about censoring or playing politics. It is about the wording of the title of the OP article and its rather well-known thesis. All Scientists know the limitations of their own understanding and continuously revise it using the Scientific Method.
Given the very real negative agendas out there, it is every scientifically-minded person's duty to be aware of how their own words might be turned to discredit Science itself even though they did not mean it originally. The fact that the anti-scientific crowd might find something else to attack is beside the point. Science does not exist in vacuum but is subject to societal context/pressures and hence scientists must learn to navigate them judiciously in their writings.
As Isaac Asimov noted; The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”