@ceoln @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

I also think we can do better.

To be clear, the left's scientism here--as opposed to actual science--is in taking superficial and/or outdated perspectives, basing ritual behavior on them, and claiming it's science.

This has all sorts of pernicious knock-on effects that don't rise anywhere near the level of the huge death toll caused by the right's anti-vax anti-science perspective, but at this point I would argue are a comparable problem, (in part because it makes it almost impossible to combat the right's anti-science attitude).

Scientism is an anti-science perspective: it says that if you kinda go through the motions and say the right words, it's as good as continually refining your understanding through theory and experiment. Because it nominally is science-supportive, it exerts its negative effects by example rather than by exhortation. Because it's not actually based on anything solid, it has to be maintained by appeal to authority and/or social pressure rather than explanation, which also isn't good for a scientific outlook. In particular, if you oppose an anti-scientific political position with a scientism-based position, that it's not scientific will often be readily apparent, emphasizing that "the other side" doesn't actually care about the science either, reinforcing the original perception that something was off about science anyway.

Here are three examples of how this has played out in a negative way, two of which I've given, but I wanted to try to present the problems more clearly than I have previously.

(1) Ineffective vaccine requirements that are nonetheless requirements. As a hypothetical example, barring an unvaccinated 20 year old who has had Covid recently from university, while admitting an 80 year old who was (fully) vaccinated 20 months ago and hasn't had a booster, is what UO's policy calls for. If we think a lecture in a large lecture hall is a potential superspreader event (it is), and that attendees are in danger (they are), and that it's our responsibility to enforce behaviors that help mitigate the danger (debatable because enforcement always has downsides), then this is not a sensible way to do it. The students are probably okay anyway, and if we want to protect the 80 year old (professor?), that mandate isn't helping them at all. If everyone's very clear that this is some simple-to-enforce university policy that's rather divorced from how things actually are, sure, no worries. If criticizing the policy gets you shouted down for being "anti-science", that is a problem. (I don't know about UO specifically. I have witnessed substantial hostility directed against people who are critical of this sort of mandate.)

(2) Mildly effective masking requirements where all the focus is on masked-vs-not and not on effectiveness. Again, if it's clear that this is done for political expediency because "it probably helps some so we'll do it, but it's too much effort to do it well, so we'll do it poorly, and by the way we don't care if someone really hates masks", sure, no worries. If, however, the message is that the policy is "because of the science", no, it's loosely motivated by science and shouting people down who object pulls the wrong way. Unlike the vaccine one, where the problem is that having people vaccinated only protects them not everyone else (over the timescales that are relevant now), the problem here is that asking for actually effective masks *does* protect everyone else but we *don't* ask for it!

(3) Countering brainless anti-vax rhetoric with equally brainless anti-anti-vax rhetoric. Anti-vax sentiment is a real problem on two levels: one, it has led to a lot of unnecessary deaths, and two, it has led to a lot of unjustified skepticism of science. Unfortunately, the anti-anti-vax stance, while it might have been somewhat helpful in reducing deaths, isn't helpful in being pro-science. For instance, there's a very negative attitude towards reports of vaccine side-effects without regard for who is reporting it, how well documented it is, what the nature of it is, and so on. That's also anti-science! It also leads us, overall, to fail to ask important safety-related questions like: the CDC claims that it uses Rapid Cycle Analysis to detect vaccine-associated risks on a timescale of a couple weeks from VSD data; and people used VSD data to confirm myocarditis and GBS as rare side effects so the signal was in the data; but RCA was NOT how we learned about these side effects! So...is this system actually up and running?

You see another example with climate catastrophism developing on the left, to the point where I've had people tell me I'm anti-science because I'm quoting primary research and/or the relevant sections of the IPCC AR6 WG1 report to show why they're drastically overstating the case. It's bizarre. It's still pretty niche compared to climate denialism on the right, fortunately. But it's indicative of something really starting to go wrong with the left's relationship with science.