The frontlines of white fragility
A public Facebook post about the March for Science:
First of all, we wish to humbly say to our POC communities and Indigenous friends and relatives that we do not wish to speak for all POC or Indigenous peoples. Resisting this white supremacist system, however, means that we #WoCSpeakOut sisters continuously put ourselves on the frontlines of white fragility in order to serve our own communities. We are trying, through our presence, to uplift the voices of our people.
In that vein, we attempted, multiple times, to reach out to the March for Science-Seattle organizers (with other POC and some of our white allies) to advise them on how to make their event less racist/elitist/colonialist/sexist. We put forward a list of detailed strongly worded “suggestions” to help make the March for Science have an actual positive impact for the social justice movement. We hoped to help make the March more in line with the true values of our grassroots community.
Our list was not ALL the MfS organizers should have done, it was a list of suggestions on how to begin this process.
The March for Science organizers REJECTED our suggestions and REFUSED to work with us because they wanted to only work with “evidence-based people”. Our lived experience meant nothing to them. Our perspective as POC meant nothing to them. This elitism, racism, sexism, and classism is why we will not be at the MfS tomorrow and why we reject and denounce the MfS in Seattle and around the so-called United States.
This is the kind of thing that makes everybody think the left is disappearing up its own ass.
Why should anyone’s “lived experience” mean something to people organizing a march for science? People on the left really need to stop talking in the language of Chronic Self-obsession, because there is nothing lefty about Chronic Self-obsession. Science as an institution should make every effort to be less white and less male, but that doesn’t mean it’s required to take advice from everyone who offers it.
So here are a few of their “suggestions” [scare-quotes theirs].
Dear Western White Cis Male Scientific Community:
1. We need a great deal of healing before the scientific community can be credible to the general public in terms of equity and “inclusivity” (inclusivity is a white supremacist term, implies that they are doing minorities a favor instead of simply doing the right thing).
2. In order for the scientific community to begin regaining trust of POC and marginalized people, they need to openly acknowledge how they have failed us for decades with their inaction on climate change. They must openly acknowledge that they have failed the Global South, POC, poor people, Indigenous peoples, and Womxn.
Their inaction on climate change? That would be politicians and corporations and consumers, not scientists. Science as a discipline or community or profession is, just for one thing, the only reason we know anything about climate change. Science has gathered the evidence, and science has done its best to communicate it to the rest of us. Put the blame for inaction where it belongs.
4. In their values they say “Science is the BEST method for understanding the world”. This will greatly offend Indigenous communities, POC, and faith communities. This divisive messaging should be muted to “Science is an EXCELLENT method to understand the world”.
No.
5. Earth Day is EARTH DAY, not “Science Day”. This must be openly acknowledged and they need to be humble in their messaging to honor Mother Earth. Co-optation of this day for the ego of the scientific community will not be tolerated by POCs or Indigenous communities.
Oh for fuck’s sake. “Mother Earth” is a metaphor. The bullying language is childish and repellent.
6. There must be Indigenous women who are grassroots activists on the march steering committee, as well as WOC and other POC such as Queer and Trans POC.
7. Their paid organizer for the March must be a POC from the grassroots racial justice community, NOT a white person or a colonized POC who is trained to obey the system.
They were right to put scare-quotes on “suggestions” – all those “must”s are commands, not suggestions. This statement is enough to make me want to go watch Fox News or something.
There are 19 suggestions commands total. Enjoy.
You know, it’s interesting they were making such a big deal of Earth Day, because I’m always being told that caring about the environment is white, elitist, colonialist, and that I am being insensitive by being concerned about the environment.
How DARE anyone organise a march about any other topic, or for any other community, other than ME ME MINE?
Hah! That’s cute, the author actually thinks they speak for the majority of the public.
Womxn? I assume that’s a typo. How would you even begin to pronounce it?
We didn’t have to deal with bullshit like that locally, thank god, but there was still plenty of anti-science to deal with in PDX.
Science is the best method to understand the world. That’s what science does. It accurately describes the world and the way it works. It doesn’t matter if that “offends” anyone – you might as well say you’re offended by reality.
Also, “Womxn.”
Number 15 on their list is my favorite, though:
That is generally referred to as “quackery” and it has harmed and/or killed many people.
My favourite is No.4 : scientists should make sure they don’t upset faith communities.
This has to be a giant troll, right? Right? It’s hilarious.
I was at the Sydney march and it seems the organisers there bought it. There was a chap called Luke Briscoe who spoke calling for recognition of “sciences”. Apparently there are alternative indigenous scientific methods which value nature more than “western” sciences and are harder to pass on because it is encoded in ceremony. The dominant scientific method is the “Western method” but it’s not the only one.
You can read all about it in something called the Indigenous Science Declaration.
I’m reading A C Grayling’s book “The Age of Genius”. His thesis is the 17th century was the catalyst for the Enlightenment. In that century modern rational scientific thinking first developed. However most of the great minds of that period couldn’t really distinguish where science ended and complete and utter drivel started, for example, Newton was a religious nutter by modern standards. By the time of the Englightenment most of the pseudo sciences were banished to the outer darkness and a clear distinction between science and woo-woo appeared.
Essentially the “Left” is attempting to undo three centuries of progress by insinuating its drivel into the practice of modern science.
Sea Monster,
I don’t think that I’ll read ‘The Indigenous Science Declaration”. The myth that Indigenous people ‘value nature more than Western science’ should be busted by now. Humans everywhere they settled on the earth used their available technology to transform their environment to suit themselves.
Faith communities, sure (in fact, let’s hope so, or they’re not doing a very good job communicating science), but Indigenous communities? People of Color? Really? These people should practice what they preach and not attempt ” to speak for all POC or Indigenous peoples”, because if I were non-white I would be offended as hell by the suggestion that my ethnicity made me inherently prone to “other ways of knowing”.
I don’t even understand what they’re “suggesting”. You need healing, go and get some. Are you expecting the organisers of the march to somehow heal you? Of what? How? Or is this just a pretence that you’ve somehow been injured by…. a march being organised?….. Science?…. What?
These folks really need to stop typing on “racist/elitist/colonialist” computers, build some out of other-than-science methods and materials and type on those.
During the Bush years, it was typical to say that the right hated science, and the left was more “reality-based” (I guess that means not prone to using alternative facts?). As someone doing my PhD in Environmental Science, I found this statement hard to stomach, as most of the people who surrounded me were leftists, and other than those in the actual hard sciences, there was more anti-science thinking than I ever encountered on the right. The Environmental Philosophy folks felt that science was intrinsically evil at its core, and said that science was not welcome in the environmental community, because we had been responsible for messing everything up and we taught that humans were not animals (??? – Something taught by no scientists anywhere outside of Liberty “University”).
In the science department, there was one woman who embraced every woo idea she could find, but she was an exception. During my time in that department, I heard (from the non-science components) not only the above, but that we should be willing to teach creationism/cancel evolution if the majority of people wanted it, accommodate more religion (non-Christian – all non-Christian religions were seen by them as being inherently environmental), and be more accepting of alternative life styles. Oh, and the Enlightenment was to be hissed and spit at, because it was evil, bad, wrong, and enshrined science as the way of knowing. During the course of one of my graduate level philosophy classes (I had to take 2 Environmental Ethics courses), we read an article about Buddhism in which the author took western writers to task for their mis-interpretation of Buddhist writings, reading something environmental into something that was not meant that way, and was not practiced that way. The students booed and hissed this writer, proclaiming that obviously he knew nothing about Buddhism. I don’t know why the instructor didn’t call their attention to the name of the author – it was the Dalai Lama (not to be mistaken with the Devil Llama recently reported on WHTM). These kids actually believed they understood Buddhism better from a handful of philosophy classes than the Dalai Lama. If this had been my only (or even my first) experience with philosophy as a discipline, I might have been right there with Sam Harris in saying we don’t need it. A lot of the science students took just that tack, getting disgusted with the anti-science, anti-rational, and anti-any knowledge but traditional Eastern knowledge attitudes that permeated the department.
I didn’t check, but did they remember to say that the existence of Science causes the murder of Trans-people?
The outrage-fueled drivel is not different from the motivation of Trump voters. Deliberate ignorance, emotional fervor whipped up by segregated sources of information, bullying…
If anyone is interested, the same group shared a hip hop hijabi music video. Here is the video on the artist’s own facebook page. I have no comment.
Their list includes ‘non-negotiable’ “suggestions” to oppose nuclear power and GMOs. Looks like the reason this lot got ignored is because they are, quite simply, anti-science.
@RJW Have you read this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_and_the_Air-Pump
The thesis, in a very small nutshell, is that the vicious and profound religious conflicts of the seventeenth century led some people to determine that they would trust only collectively-witnessed objective facts, as a way to allow communication without risking discord. Kind of like talking about the weather with strangers whose religious or political opinions you don’t know and are averse to eliciting.
Re science failing marginalised groups–there is a long history of this, which it seems we’ve recently begun to acknowledge. This, for example, was terrifying:
https://www.amazon.com/Women-Under-Knife-History-Surgery/dp/0785821104
A lot of medical science was built on the unconsenting bodies of women and slaves (as well as (male) soldiers and gladiators). It does seem, though, that we’re starting to collectively acknowledge some of the previously hidden people, who have made, and still make, science possible–e.g. Rosalind Franklin, Henrietta Lacks, the women in Hidden Figures.
@Steve Watson Nuclear power and GMOs are technology, not science. They shouldn’t really be relevant to the topic of the march.
guest – that is a good point, but very few people understand the difference. After all, technology rises out of the fruits of science, therefore it is science. Perhaps we could have made it a teaching moment on that, but at this point, it seems like that again was not the point of the march.
@iknklast A lot of technology these days is based on scientific work, but historically that’s a pretty recent development (I used to say it started with the commercial use of the electromagnetic spectrum, but one of my students dates it to the production of aniline dyes–though these two technologies became commercially viable around the same time, so swings and roundabouts). I think continuing to stress the distinction is useful and important, for several reasons. One of them is that science is a unified activity–the principles and techniques we employ to make and evaluate science for the most part (bearing in mind that some science is experimental and some is observational) apply to all of the subjects of science; if we ‘accept science’ in one subject we generally have to accept that the same principles hold throughout. On the other hand, it’s perfectly reasonable to accept some technologies and reject others; there’s no similar logical rationale for ‘accepting technology’ in the same way.
Guest – I wasn’t disputing any of that; I think, though, from the signs that were at our march for science, and from the conversations I’ve had with many people, few of them actually understand any of these distinctions. I agree that it’s important to continue stressing the distinction. I do that with my students quite a bit, and they will still leave my class not understanding the difference. Why isn’t a medical doctor a scientist? Why isn’t an engineer a scientist? They both study science (well, some engineers don’t), but the idea of a technician vs a scientist goes way past them. Just like the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. We’ll continue pointing it out, but they will continue not getting it, because we are fighting against an onslaught of entertainment, news, and documentary writing/filmmaking that doesn’t get it right.
I was talking to a writer I know about his book on colonizing the moon. When I asked him if he was going to talk to any scientists, he indicated he had talked to astronauts and engineers. It never occurred to him to talk to biologists or astronomers. He went straight for the technology. We can, and should, fight this, but expect to beat our heads against a brick wall for a long time (maybe forever – my head is getting a permanent dent).
:) the fact that most people don’t get it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying to make sure people understand it! I keep working at it because I think it’s important, and clarifies a lot about the ‘science’ vs ‘anti-science’ conflict.
I find it pretty simple to explain the difference:
We use science to discover facts about the physical world, and technology to accomplish goals. Science is a way for us to know things; technology is a way for us to do things. Science is its own justification, while technology is instrumental—we’re not that interested in the technology itself, but rather in the benefits it provides us.
Re colonising the moon–that does seem to be a technological rather than scientific endeavour.
I posted too soon, or carelessly–this is what I was taking issue with in your previous comment:
‘technology rises out of the fruits of science, therefore it is science’
This is a common idea, and has often been true since maybe the mid-nineteenth century, but it’s not definitional (pace Francis Bacon, who did try his hardest).
*Rolls Eyes*
Allow faith communities a say in a *science* march? Well, they can fuck right off with that “suggestion”.
I’d be delighted if POC scientists or science involved/interested folk were at the forefront of the march – let’s face it, there’s plenty of them. And, yes, it’s probably worth trying to make sure that happens. Science does have an unpleasant and disturbing history in its dealing with POC (and white women). Acknowledging that, while continuing to go forward with better ethics and values, is an important thing to do. But throwing out the results of the scientific process because it was historically as colonialist etc as every other system – that’s sheer, bloody nonsense.
The idea that “lived experience” should somehow be elevated above actual evidence is the reason I am becoming thoroughly alienated by left politics. I just can’t be bothered to fight this shit. The Right ignore reality to preserve their business interests, the Left to preserve their “identities”. It’s utter bollocks.
I love the comment that the organisers only want to work with “evidence based” people. On a science march? Well who’dathunkit?
Oh dear, I seem to have provoked a tangential argument about science vs. technology ;-).
In the original context:
I have no idea what, if anything, the Seattle MFC people were planning to say about nukes or GMOs. However, the safety of the latter at least is a matter for science, and being anti-GMO and pro-organic (at least, in the dogmatic sense, which is what I read between the lines there) is pretty much by definition anti-science, which goes along with the alt-med stuff elsewhere on that list of “suggestions”. Which is pretty much all I was trying to say ;-).
I’m not up on the terminology, but I would have thought “white fragility” meant when you talk about systemic racism, and white people start crying “But I’m not racist! How dare you!”. People ignoring you as a bunch of self-righteous irrelevancies doesn’t seem to qualify. (But whining about being ignored does seem to meet the definition of “fragile”).
Not quite. You see, colonizing the moon will require a lot of things that don’t exist on the moon, and those are the province of applied science, not technology. There is nothing technological about building an ecosystem. Sure, we can build buildings and cities and roads and domes, but…sooner or later reality will hit, and then you’ll need science to get you out of the mess technology got you into. So I stand by my earlier post.
You know, the most annoying and frustrating part of this, to me, is that there’s a way that this discussion COULD have gone, but won’t because of missives like the one in the OP.
It’s absolutely true that scientific institutions have allowed their practices and conclusions to be distorted both by preconceptions and by privilege blinders. Deciding what to investigate, how to investigate it, and how to best interpret the data are all very human decisions, and like a lot of human activity, bias has a nasty way of yielding some very unfortunate, and even downright wicked results.
But the whole point of objecting to these things is that these are not ‘science’, but rather the corruption and disruption of science. The scientists who opted to come up with theories about female sexuality (without a woman among them), or the ones who designed the Tuskegee Airmen study–they were doing science WRONG, and that’s shameful, and yes, is an argument for a more diverse body in place of groups like this, especially, to help promote the inclusion of women and PoCs, not as a ‘favor’ to them, but rather because it helps the practice of science be truer to its mission.
A letter written from that point of view might’ve actually been persuasive. This? Not so much, and really, counterproductive.
guest @ 17
Seems like an interesting book and worth reading. I like the point in the review about the ‘self evident’ method and the tendency for our generation to project modern values onto the past.
I’d agree with your comment about the religious wars of the 17th century. The Thirty Years War was a great catastrophe, however it transformed Western civilization.
Freemage @ 27, I agree, but you meant the Tuskegee Study minus the Airmen!
Thank you Dave!
*clicks on link*
I didn’t know any of that.
Ima post it.
[…] it came up in comments and Dave Ricks provided a link, I belatedly learned of the Tuskegee […]
Freemage @27:
Yes, exactly. And science is a tool for overcoming those inevitable human biases, prejudices, and intellectual weaknesses. Sometimes our furious smallness overcomes the forces of science. However, science is our best hope for cutting through our human bullshit to determine truth.
This is wrong on so many levels, not least because a person cannot be colonized, at least not in the sense the author uses the word. A place can be colinised by people or other animals and plants, a person can be colonised
(Whoops, fat fingers, small keypad!)
…a person can be colonised by mites and other parasites as well as various infections, typically of a fungal nature. The word the author wanted, ie. one to describe a person who has elected to work with, rather than against the colonisers is colonialised.
But, really; trained to obey the system? Does she mean ‘trained and studied to become a scientist? Or is a POC (incidentally an acronym which I have now heard several times used as a slur, as in ‘too many f…..g pocs around here’!) who does all the neccessary learning somehow a traitor to the cause because POCs shouldn’t have to know the stuff in order to be included because racism and shit?
“WE DEMAND TO BE INCLUDED BY BEING TREATED DIFFERENTLY…..BUT DON’T YOU DARE TREAT US DIFFERENTLY, BECAUSE REASONS. DON’T OFFER US INCLUSIVITY COS THAT’S WHITE SUPREMACY BUT WE DEMAND…ER…INCLUSION. JUST BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT SCIENCE IT AIN’T ALL ABOUT YOUR FANCY WHITE SCIENCE. YOU HAVE TO STAND ASIDE FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW NO SCIENCE EXCEPT THE INTUITIVE AND GOD-BASED KIND WHICH IS SO THE SAME…..IF THEY’RE A POC, THAT IS. YOU CAN GET YOUR WHITE, APPROPRIATING FINGERS OFF OF OUR WAY OF KNOWING! DAMMIT! All this shouting’s given me a headache. Now, where’s my paracetamol”?
Oh, and is the old ‘Uncle Tom / choc ice’ thing really still a thing?
I don’t really agree with that, much as I love science. Poetry is the best way to understand the world. But science gives us a lot of knowledge about the things in the world, that’s for sure.
Bollocks. You’re relying on an equivocation about the meaning of “understand” for the sake of a deepity. No poetry is not the best way to understand the world. It’s one of the best ways to communicate our feelings about the world, but that’s a different thing.
No, poetry (and the arts in general, I was abbreviating) helps us to an understanding of the world, science just gives us useful information about the things in it. I am with Wittgenstein, the world is made of facts not things, and science has nothing to say about them. Not getting this is why scientists often get so muddled up when they enter the world of policy.
Well I agree that you need more than science to make good policy, which is why I disagreed with Neil deGrasse Tyson when he said policy should be based on evidence full stop. But I think your objection to “Science is the best method to understand the world” is a quibble, and kind of a fake one.
It’s a quibble, but not a fake one. Like I said, I love science and I think it is hugely important, it just doesn’t do what some of its supporters want to claim for it. If science could explain the world, we wouldn’t need more than science to make good policy. But we do.
The sentence you’re quibbling over didn’t say science can explain the world.
No, I think the quibble is fake. Saying “Science is the best method to understand the world” isn’t saying it’s the best and only method to understand the world in every conceivable sense. You’re saying science can’t do everything, which I agree with, but you’re distorting a reasonable claim in order to do that.
Also, the reason we need more than science to make good policy is not because science can’t explain the world, let alone because science is not the best method to understand the world. It’s because morality and thus policy rely on emotions. Science could explain the world up & down but that still wouldn’t produce right feeling.
I think the quibble between ‘understand’ and ‘explain’ is finer than any I am making. My point is that science doesn’t help us understand the world at all, it only gives us information about the things that are in it and that is very different, as Wittgenstein said. You say you don’t agree and I won’t accuse you of faking because I honestly don’t have a way of seeing into your motives. A map will give you lots of information about China and be very useful in getting around there (even if it is quite inaccurate), but it won’t give you any understanding of the country, although lot’s of people have thought it does.
Which are facts, part of the world – both things.
Science isn’t like a map. It’s the only reliable means we have to determine (over time) what things are true and what aren’t. Metaphor is often hugely important for individuals learning about, understanding and learning to understand the world, but it isn’t worth much if we can’t tell what’s true from what isn’t.
That’s what religion does, after all, it’s (partly) a bunch of poetic interpretations of what we see about us. The problem (one of the many problems) is that those metaphors are so lazy and fit the actual world so poorly that they can cause people to stop actually examining the world with any sort of critical eye.
The idea that science is the best way to understand the place is based on the fact that it’s the best way we have of finding out what’s true. The teaching of the findings of science can certainly use some poetry and the best teachers – in my opinion – do this. Policy certainly can’t rely on science alone but it needs to be informed by it. Science ought to overturn our incorrect biases and misunderstandings when we’re making policies.
Science is a map. The goal of science is to create the most useful and complete map possible, but it doesn’t tell us what is ‘true’. The ‘truth’ of physical reality may be utterly different to what human perceptions can grasp, we will probably never know for sure because we have nowhere outside of our perceptions to judge. Science is very useful and it can definitely help us see through bias and misunderstandings of certain kinds, but that is its limit. I don’t think that is a small thing, by the way.
Scare quotes and all.
You don’t need to keep explaining the point you’re making. I know what point you’re making, I’ve seen it a million times. They murder to dissect yadda yadda.
So then science isn’t a map, is it, by your own admission? It’s the map, the process of creating the map and – to some extent – the skills (and the development of those skills) required to use the map effectively.
Of course science tells us what is true exactly because it removes our perceptions from the equation. For a fact about the world to be true, it has to persist regardless of anyone’s personal opinion. That’s not to say that opinion isn’t important, but when we have ‘opinions’ like Trump’s cancelling funding for climate change programmes then we need to rely on what’s actually true.
It is true that anthropogenic climate change is a reality, regardless of anyone’s perceptions. That is a truth about the world that we know only because of science. No denial can stand up to that truth because the evidence is for the most part free of contamination by personal perception.
Certainly it’s possible that what I’m calling truth really isn’t. We could all live in a hologram. But it’s a tiresome argument. We have no choice but to observe the world the way we do and the truths we construct through science are consistent with how we’re able to do it. If there’s something we can’t perceive then I doubt it matters. And we’re back to religion again.
This really is a tiresome argument though and I’m regretting being drawn into it.
If this is aimed at me, you don’t understand my point. I didn’t use scare quotes and didn’t say anything about dissection or murder. I work with research animals as models of disease, so I am more relaxed than most about scientific method.
Call map-making if you prefer.
@pinkeen:
Scare-quotes. Right there.
No, those are just quotes.
@Pinkeen
So who are you quoting? They are there to indicate that your special understanding of truth is different from everyone else’s.
I was quoting you, using the word in the sense you were using it, rather than the way it might be commonly used. I wasn’t suggesting that ‘truth’ does not exist, which I take scare quotes to do.
Sigh. Yeah, I’m out of this conversation, which is going nowhere and becoming increasingly disingenuous. I suspect most of us have trampled this ground for as long as we can remember and getting sick of our own footprints, so I won’t bore everyone more.
Why the accusations of fakery and disingenuousness? Is it so improbable that people disagree with you in good faith? I don’t really want to squabble about what constitutes a scare quote either, but we don’t have to. I always understood it to mean ‘I don’t believe this thing I mention is real’, if you use it differently, I really don’t mind.
Oh ffs @Pinkeen, where do I begin?
1. I did not accuse you of fakery, that’s an outright lie.
2. I don’t, never have, and didn’t indicate that it is improbable that someone might disagree with me in good faith, you made that up.
I’m amazed that you can’t see that your argument is disingenuous.
But anyway. My fingers are in my ears, I’m not listening and I won’t respond again.
I referring to you and Ophelia. But again, why the overheated language?
You accused me of disingenuousness and I asked why. Why assume I am not in good faith? I asked you if it was so improbable, I didn’t make anything up at all. So why say that?
My argument isn’t disingenuous. I mean what I say. You may not agree, but I am surely at least as well placed to understand my own motives as you are. I am amazed you can’t see that.
The event in Ottawa did start with an acknowledgement that the Parliament Buildings were on unceded Algonquin territory, and the opening was done by a first nations woman who mostly spoke about environmental issues (though I grant her speech did have a bit too much invocation of the Creator for my taste). The other speakers did include women (the MC and main organizer was Katie Gibbs, director of Evidence for Democracy), and persons of colour. As far as I could see, both from the podium and from the signs in the audience, everyone seemed to be in agreement with the idea that science is fact and reality and we ignore it at our peril.
I find it odd that some people who point out the sad facts that the institutions of science have historically often been unfair to women and people of colour think that the way to address it is to question the basic tenets of science rather than attacking the institutions. I find the concept that rationalism is somehow “male” and “white” to be offensive and demeaning, and ironically in support of the idea that women and persons of colour are not up to the task of doing “real” science.
Theo Bromine #60:
That is such a good point. And isn’t that what we’ve been seeing in other kinds of activism lately? In the name of fairness and inclusivity, activists are reinforcing the same limiting biases they used to rail against. “Put me back in my box!”
Theo Bromine: That’s what I was trying to get at, yes. The proper charge is that the white/male dominated institutions have been doing science wrong, and to call them on their hypocrisy when it arises, not toss the very concept of science out.
Oh, puckernuts, I’m embarrassed. Yes, I meant the vile Study, not the Airmen, whom I’m glad you gave a shout-out for. I can’t even claim ignorance, here–I knew damn well the difference between the two entities, and just got lazy typing.
Thanks for the correction, and the links!
Pinkeen, the heat is because your way of “arguing” [scare quotes intentional] is annoying. You’re way too cryptic, and when called on being too cryptic you simply shift your ground. It looks like mere provocation for the sake of it. If that’s not what it is you should make the effort not to be cryptic and provocative for the sake of it. This kind of thing is why I had you on moderation for so long.
@Freemage #61:
I don’t want to nitpick, but I don’t think the problem is that the institutions are doing science wrong, rather they are doing institutions wrong. The electronics lab is neutral, but if the closest women’s washroom is on another floor, that’s a problem.
I don’t think I am cryptic, although I accept that some of the things I say can be difficult to understand, and when asked or challenged I try to explain. But even if I am found cryptic I think throwing words like ‘lie’ around unwarranted and a bit silly. I think that some people round here find any sort of disagreement ‘provocative’.
Oh stop that. That’s just a boast that you’re too deep for our tiny minds. No, you’re not; you just like to throw out short, inadequate, unsupported assertions and then refuse to elaborate. Your very short contentless remark @ 36 is just silly, and you led us into a marsh of digression with it.
I explained what I meant, and it isn’t original to me but is a view held by many much more brilliant women and men such as Wittgenstein etc etc. You can disagree with it, but it is far from contentless. I am getting that you don’t like digressions, but some of us do, and it is not at all obvious that that sort of discursive remark will be taken against quite so violently and accusations of dishonesty thrown around all over the place. But now I know.
And I was teasing you, gently, as a return to your hostility.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last forty years or so it’s that mentioning Wittgenstein – by name only and not by his ideas – excuses any of us from having an actual argument and presto-changeo bullshit when an argument is not going our way.
But I did mention his arguments, specifically that the world is made of facts and not things. You are choosing to ignore that stuff and concentrate instead on shouting ‘lie’. I don’t know how that registers on the bullshit metre.
No. Pinkeen, that is *all* you said. Literally those words. You didn’t explain anything by doing so, that’s not how explanation works. It’s certainly not how understanding works.
I didn’t shout “lie”. You said I accused you of something I didn’t, That was a lie. Get over it, I have.