♫♪ ( ( ◙=◙ ) ) ♫♪ @soundwave@qoto.org

People who do not understand what science is, think that it behaves like everything else in the human world - that you can tell how "truthful" something is by the way that it makes you feel. That is - people who do not understand science, think that they can choose what they want to be true, based on how they want to feel.

So, it is unfortunate, but necessary - that the scientific community MUST communicate the dire circumstances of the environmental catastrophe that Climate Change is - by making the public afraid of the inevitable changes to come. That is the only way to convince the public that the situation is incredibly serious and important - we have to make them afraid of what will definitely happen if they don't decarbonise.

Only if they are motivated by fear, only if they are terrified, will they actually do anything to save themselves. We have to convince them that decarbonisation is imperative, by convincing them of the Truth of Climate Change - by manipulating their feelings - by making them afraid of what their inaction will most assuredly result in.

Lamentably, in Australia the scientifically untrained populous typically votes for the scientifically ignorant Parties - the ones who think that money is some kind of magical force that can always solve every problem.

And tragically, because those Parties believe that fairy-tale so blindly, they have allowed and supported the Media to become almost all-powerful in controlling what the people are told to believe is True.

They believe this delusion so completely, that - not only do they allow the privately-owned media free reign to manipulate people's feelings - and thus also what they believe - that they also pointedly and deliberately attack and tear down the one precious media organisation whose sole and only purpose was to the the ACTUAL truth. The publicly owned broadcasting news service wasn't actually doing anyone any harm - all they were ever allowed to do from day 1 forevermore - was report the facts. No manipulation of Truth allowed - ever.

But that was a threat to the Parties who want to decide what is True based on their ideological agenda. So they felt compelled to set fire to the ABC. An act that is - sociologically - pretty much the same as having book-burning bonfires in the town square.

In those situations, the scientists typically sit in their homes with their doors locked for fear that they, too, might become fuel for the fires.

But wait - there's more.
Those same Parties also decided that the CSIRO - a publicly funded research organisation - studying Climate Change - was also inconveniently not agreeing with their scientifically illiterate fairy-tale ideological agenda.
Unsurprisingly, all of those scientists were unceremoniously thrown onto a metaphorical pyre.

Please, don't vote for any Party or Independent that doesn't understand decarbonisation is our most desperate, urgent priority, as a country and as a species.

I think - a cool way to reverse climate change and also burst humanity into a new age of amazingness - is if we invent nano-robots and/or genetically engineer some artificial bacteria or algae, etc - to suck carbon out of the air and chemically spin it into strands of diamond. And we use that diamond rope to build space elevators. We could turn the Earth into a wheel with diamond spokes and build solar-powered cities in space with diamond hulls and diamond transport tubes. Build gigantic diamond mirrors to control how much sunlight arrives on Earth.

We could also dispose of our poisonous waste by flinging it into the Sun, for free (because space elevators use centripetal force to launch stuff - you don't need rockets).

And we could also just simply remove the root cause of the Earth's problem ... ie. us.

Let's go & live in Space!!!

OK Scientists - hurry up and get inventing!!

@freemo
When I was a kid (like 35 years ago) I saw on TV a small club of cool weirdos who had constructed tiny airplanes like this one - however - they were out of mylar and glued them via a strand of hair to insects and released them inside giant warehouse-sized empty spaces. I have searched the internet for photos or footage without success. Anyway now that I am an adult I wish to join that club.

Religion is all about denying your biological instincts, Pavlovian-conditioning and Stockholm Syndrome, so that they can control your thoughts, emotions, speech and deeds. Religion is all about control. Control of absolutely every aspect of your life. It is about taking a natural organism (you) and forcibly changing you into something that serves the Organisers of the religion. Religion is anti-freedom and anti-life. It is anti-naturalness. That's why it focuses so much on your ego - your sense of self, your sense of identity, your self-definition. Because your ego is only a fictional image that you have painted in your mind, and they want to be the ones to tell you what to paint. That's why they so desperately want to start molding you while you are young - as young as possible - the younger the better.

That's also why the Abrahamic Religions 2.0x and 3.0x have given a name and a face to Nature and have brainwashed their believers to hate that face and that name.

The Pagans called that force of nature, the naturalness of our biology the name of Pan.

It represents the fact that we are not separate from Nature, that Nature is inside of us, and they we are nothing but animals. We are animals, with the exact same needs.

Find Food. Feast. Fight. Fuck. Flee.

Religions know that if we accept who we truly are: just naturally selfish animals, then we don't need them.

So they portray the natural energy of our being as something to be scared of and shun, they train us to ignore our instincts, and instead, train us to pretend that we are something completely unnatural.

If there was a purely objective, scientific test using only machines, chemistry, electricity and magnetism - that could test how happy and natural a person is - on a biological level - then it would find that the more religious a person is, the more utterly miserable that person is.

Living a life that is completely unnatural is literally and purely exactly the wrong way to live.

And that is what religions want us to do.

The Unscientific way of judging whether something is True or not, is to let your feelings decide for you. The catastrophic danger of this method is that your feelings are influenced by what you want to be true. It is also easier for me to convince you that something is True if I know how to manipulate your feelings.

The Scientific way of judging what is True or not is to let the facts convince you. Observable, testable, repeatable facts.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

Hypothesis. (can anyone corroborate?)

The root cause of anti-science, is the same as the root cause of:
Superstition
Conspiracism
Religion (generally)
Scientific Enquiry

... and it is this: humans hate uncertainty. We are biologically allergic to it. We simply loathe not being able to assume that the future is reliably predictable - the events that will transpire today and tomorrow are known with confidence.
Ancient humans invented magic, superstition and religion to try to control and/or predict the future.
Scientists throughout history have personally tried to understand the world, to be able to predict the future, because they were/are not comfortable with uncertainty.
Modern conspiracy theorists and anti-science-ists hate the intrinsic uncertainty of science - their mistake is that they judge science using black-or-white thinking. For them, science can never be good enough as a source of truth because science can never be 100% certain about anything - and yet that is precisely its power.

The difference between scientists and anti-scientists is, that scientists are comfortable with a little bit of uncertainty. They know that we can never fully 100% understand the world - but that's OK, as long as we understand it a lot - and as long as our understanding continues to grow. The Enlightenment in Europe starting in the 1600's was basically the birth and growth of a subculture of people who were a bit more comfortable with a bit of uncertainty - but who were keen to reduce how much uncertainty they had to put up with - by figuring out Nature and The World. The intention being - so that they can then predict the future with more certainty.

Anti-science-ists haven't learned - haven't understood - that uncertainty is OK We don't need to be 100% right all the time. We don't need to know absolutely 100% of something before we can be permitted to speak knowledgeably about it.

Have you ever considered the possibility that you might be wrong?

I think ... that the root cause of all of humanity's woes ... all of history's problems, and all of humanity's and Earth's future problems, is that we are uncomfortable with uncertainty.

We have a burning, aching, agonising need to eliminate uncertainty.

This is where religion and superstition comes from.

This is where anti-science comes from: black-or-white-thinking.

Consipracism is merely mistrust (= anti-uncertainty).

@freemo
Except for literally every Xian who prays or does healing hands

@2ck

@namark
No. Natural selection becomes twisted and perverted into Unnatural selection, if money is involved. I thought I'd made that perfectly clear, Einstein.

Forgive the blunt question, but if a researcher has obtained a paper from sci-hub and they cite that reference, do they have the moral right to also include the publisher's name?
I don't really care. I'm just poking the bear. We have to ask ourselves these questions.

The USA's lack of healthcare is effectively a form of eugenics.

By making healthcare unaffordable, they are effectively manipulating their gene pool to eliminate unhealthy specimens.

Furthermore, the wealthy 1% who can afford medicine are predisposed to selectively breed from only the finest stock in their elite gene pool.

The small number of genetically imperfect humans who can afford to breed are only a small taint in the scheme.

The USA is trying to breed The Master Race, using money to weed out genetic diseases.

Of course, people who are not wealthy enough to afford healthcare are still breeding. However, the healthy fraction of those will carry on to spawn the next generation. But the ones with genetic health issues and are not wealthy will statistically be less likely to make babies & pass on the genes.

The USA has merged money with the law of Natural Selection - effectively including an imaginary force into the mix of natural forces.

The (unintentional?) upshot of this will be a type of eugenics.

Isn't it funny how the people who distrust science have never studied science beyond middle school.

@deesapoetra
Then how are you going to stay immortal?

@deesapoetra

Just please be humane and make sure you let it get transplants from deceased donors after you harvest your clone's parts to replace your own.

When I grow up, I want to be a GMO

@josemanuel
Having ADHD can help, too.
Not everyone, but definitely some. I've always been the one-eyed man in the country of the blind, in terms of being able to see problems from multiple points of view simultaneously.