New Fear
I have been on tumblr a long time. A looooong time. Far longer than I should have been, really.
And I've been arguing with schmucks about birds being dinosaurs... pretty much that whole time. Folks tend to get angry when a dinosaur blog posts birds, after all. It happens.
And while the game of whack a mole is ancient, it's not unpredictable. Usually, it ends in one of two ways:
- the person admits they were wrong, and they back down
- the person stops arguing with me and blocks me
I'm okay with either one, really. the former is ideal, the latter at least brings me peace.
Never before this past weekend has someone insisted they were right no matter what I say
And this isn't a coincidence.
Over the past few decades, anti-science sentiment has risen worldwide. I mean you just have to look at the COVID19 pandemic, or general reactions to the problems of climate change.
While of course people who think their opinion matters more than evidence have always existed, they have never been quite this bold before.
The idea that the colloquial definition of dinosaur matters, at all, is a completely new idea and one that has no basis in reality.
And yet, multiple people this past weekend argued exactly that.
And it sounds exceptionally similar to the idea that people could pick and choose things about COVID19 to believe, or the general republican position on science (only things that back up their bigotry are true).
It really seems to reflect a general increase in anti science sentiment and public anti-intellectualism.
Reality isn't actually up for debate. Reality isn't actually subjective. And science is the measure of reality
This isn't the same as the biases of society impacting science and making it worse. Saying "what people think is more important than science" is not the same as saying "science forgot a very important variable / factor / to consider data gained by different cultures / to have a wide variety of perspectives/ etc."
And allowing people to continue to perpetuate and believe in delusions leads directly to the spread of misinformation, leading to more people not understanding reality, and so on
This matters because reality matters. Because the reality of our world is not something we can change or escape. And, in fact, us ignoring the reality of the world - like thinking we can have infinite growth on a finite planet - is directly leading to the destruction of that world (climate change).
I am terrified of the rise of anti-science sentiment. I am terrified of the rise of cherry picking, deciding reality is what you want it to be, ignoring evidence. We see this from purely scientific topics all the way to social justice (how much of racism is ignoring the evidence of a) race being a social construct and b) how much racism impacts people's lives? Almost all of it).
This is bigger than birds being dinosaurs or evolution or climate change. This is about our society going on a deeply disturbing and self-destructive path.
And I really don't know what to do about it.















