Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn’t hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn’t want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don’t like sharing that power.
Reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science…
SasquatchBanana@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This doesn’t disprove their meme. What it is saying is still true. Those scientist you mention held back progress and couldn’t be “real scientists”
Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
I feel like there’s a term for that sort of thinking…
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
No True Scotsman? That could be true if the image is merely descriptive of our messy reality.
I see the image as including a prescriptive message that states an ethical ideal: a real scientist should welcome their findings challenged, even refuted. Science excels by dispelling falsehoods. That seems right.
in b4 “if by whiskey” 😄
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more “it is as it is” mindset of those on the technical side?
I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.
SasquatchBanana@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You got it. It has been my experience as well.