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by vablings
12 days ago
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"Can you describe exactly how (by what mechanism) the government"
They give funding to research, that research is published and a scientific consensus is established. I don't expect everyone to have the same attitude as me, I am an engineer and work on my specific engineering problems that I am most educated and qualified to work on. I would not expect microplastic research scientist to start doing my job. That's the wonderful thing about this planet we live on, there are many different folks with many different skills, and everyone's lives are better for it. I find your speech hereto be very reductive and confrontational for essentially no reason, and possibly because you skimmed over a phrase in my other comment "personal consensus" |
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I'm not asking you to take up microplastic research, or even to form a specific opinion about it. I'm actually arguing the opposite: that if you are ignorant on the topic and disengaged with it, then you shouldn't insist that: 1) it's a fake issue and 2) surely if it is real, someone else will figure it out.
The insistence that it's not a problem has actual causal impact on whether we ever figure something out here. Knowledge doesn't just poof into existence. It must be funded, and as you identified this type of research is typically funded by you and me.
The government funds research that it believes is important to the public. You insist that it is not only unimportant, but an actual grift. And yet you simultaneously believe that the government can, should, and will fund research into this grift to ascertain whether it's a problem.
You are arguing that the government shouldn't fund research on this problem (it's a grift), but then assuming that you will get the benefits of them doing so anyway (they'll tell you if it's not a grift). In other words, you are de facto depending on other people to force the government to do the research, while you argue for the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem