Neil deGrasse Tyson: #Rationalia should govern the world

[Brian Peacock]

Our time is nigh comrades.

[JimC]

We were born to rule!

[pErvinalia]

You're late. As always.

http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=51368

Better than being premature..

[mistermack]

The evidence clearly shows that disabled people contribute less than they cost to society.

They should therefore be destroyed.

And gays are unlikely to reproduce. Exterminate them. And that goes for women over 45.

Exterminate. Ex TERMINATE !!

[pErvinalia]

Exi Terminate!

[laklak]

Now children, when he shows up here behave yourselves!

[Svartalf]

who?

[Tero]

Dill!

[Brian Peacock]

Now children, when he shows up here behave yourselves!

Yeah, we don't want a rerun of the PeeZeeJokeGate incident.

[JimC]

Can we ask him if he's any relation to Mike?

And does he like ears?

[Svartalf]

He sure is known for talking people's ears off, if not biting them...

[Drewish]

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736

Feel the love.

[cronus]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/20 ... ible-idea/

A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea

By Jeffrey Guhin

Imagine a future society in which everything is perfectly logical. What could go wrong?

“Scientism” is the belief that all we need to solve the world’s problems is – you guessed it – science. People sometimes use the phrase “rational thinking”, but it amounts to the same thing. If only people would drop religion and all their other prejudices, we could use logic to fix everything.

Last week, US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson offered up the perfect example of scientism when he proposed the country of Rationalia, in which “all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence”.

Tyson is a very smart man, but this is not a smart idea. It is even, we might say, unreasonable and without sufficient evidence. Of course, imagining a society in which everyone behaves logically sounds appealing. But employing logic to consider the concept reveals that there could be no such thing.

There has always been a hope, especially as elites became less religious, that science would do more than simply provide a means for learning about the world around us. Science should also teach us how to live, pointing us towards the salvation that religion once promised. You can see this in any of the secular utopianisms of the 20th century, whether it’s the Third Reich, scientific Marxism, or the “modernisation thesis” of Western capitalism.

Yet each of these has since been summarily dismissed, and usually for the same two reasons.

Flawed science
First, experts usually don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that – through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true – mislead us and misinterpret information.

Rationality is subjective. All humans experience such biases; the real problem is when we forget that scientists and experts are human too, and approach evidence and reasoned deliberation with the same prior commitments and unspoken assumptions as anyone else. Scientists: they’re just like us.

And second, science has no business telling people how to live. It’s striking how easily we forget the evil that following “science” can do. So many times throughout history, humans have thought they were behaving in logical and rational ways, only to realise that such acts have yielded morally heinous policies that were only enacted because reasonable people were swayed by “evidence”.

Phrenology – the determination of someone’s character through the shape and size of their cranium – was cutting-edge science. (Unsurprisingly, the upper class had great head ratios.) Eugenics was science, as was social Darwinism and the worst justifications of the Soviet and Nazi regimes.

Scientific racism was data-driven too, and incredibly well-respected. Scientists in the 19th century felt quite justified in claiming that “the weight of evidence” supported African slavery, white supremacy and the concerted effort to limit the reproduction of the “lesser” races.

It wasn’t so long ago that psychiatrists considered homosexuality unhealthy and abhorrent. There is at least one prominent, eminently rational psychiatrist who hasn’t come around on transgenders. And many scientists decided that women were biologically incapable of the same kind of rationality you find in men, a scientific sexism reborn in contemporary evolutionary psychology.

Positive vibes
And yet, despite its abysmal track record, people continue to have extremely positive opinions of “science.” As a sociologist, I do a lot of fieldwork with creationist evangelicals, and I’m struck by how rarely any of them dislike “science” as such; they don’t like certain scientists, and they especially don’t like evolution, but “science” is always just fine.

And for those who more strongly identify with the idea of rational thinking, their commitment is immutable. Just ask the 25 million people who “fucking love science”.

Part of the problem here is that nobody really knows what science means. Most people define it as the exploration of the world we live in, which is a fair if simplistic description (and not much on which to base a nation). The academic definition is frequently debated, without any really clear headway. (It’s hard even to figure out how to define physics, chemistry and biology.)

(continued)

[mistermack]

Flawed science
First, experts usually don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. They often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that – through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true – mislead us and misinterpret information.

Is this about climate science? If not, it should be.

[DaveDodo007]

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736

Feel the love.

Christ has he even visited here. You end up being called racist and sexist because it is full of lefty/liberals who are intellectually bankrupt and have no other arguments, well except for logical fallacies which they love. It is no Camalot that is for sure.