Abuses of Science Political Cartoon Contest 345
AngryNick writes "The Union of Concerned Scientists has announced a cartoon contest for amateur and professional artists.
'The absurdity of political interference in science is fertile ground for satire,' said Dr. Francesca Grifo, Director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program. 'We hope these contests encourage amateur and professional cartoonists alike to express concern--through humor and art--about the impact of the abuse of science on our safety, health and environment.'
A celebrity judge panel will select twelve finalists and the public will then choose the Grand Prize winner. The winner will receive a host of prizes, including $500 and an all-expenses-paid trip to have lunch with the celebrity judge of his or her choice.
You can read Contest details, sample topics and the list of celebrity judges."
Abuses of Science? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, did anyone else read that headline and think that they were inviting people to make their political attacks on science in a cartoon?
I expected a cartoon attacking stem cell research, of maybe a mushroom cloud over hiroshima with the caption "scientific progress".
Of course, it's completely the other way, as I would hope... but yeah, title misleading!
Re:The Union of Concerned Scientists... (Score:1, Interesting)
Lyndon Johnson's Record (Score:5, Interesting)
Michael Crichton once again shows how focusing on local differences and exceptions and extrapolating them as a trend is an intellectual folly. If you want to seriously argue that the EPA budget-cutting, pro-mercury in the air, pro-arsenic in the water, pro-relaxation of pesticide rules Republicans that adamantly refuse to entertain the idea of ratifying Kyoto treaty are no different from the Democrats, then you're deliberately cherry-picking your facts to bolster your dellusional worldview -- you know, like Michael Crichton does.
Nixon was moderate to liberal on a number of domestic issues from wage controls to gun control to affirmative action to establishing the EPA, OSHA, and NOAA. He supported a lot of market regulation in a time period that pundits were saying that conservatism was dead. He was very different from many conservatives today, and many of his policies were great successes that were overshadowed by his personal corruption.
As for Johnson, he did open up a pristine area to drilling. However, he also said the following when signing the Clean Water Act:
Johnson's record on the environment was overall quite good. His wife Lady Bird Johnson was a tireless environmental advocate. It was Johnson's administration that first started looking into the environment as a matter of air and water pollution instead of just protected land conservation. Nixon just kept the ball rolling that Johnson kicked off. From the Wikipedia, here is a list of environmental regulations kicked off in the Johnson era:
To suggest that Johnson (and thus Democrats) are and were not environmentalists based on one single action against shows Crichton's lack of intellectual integrity.
Re:wish I could draw... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's analyse a troll's post, shall we? (Score:3, Interesting)
Setting up a dichotomy (badly).
This is stupid, and does not belong on Slashdot at all.
Summing up his own post.
it will be a right/republican bashing contest. And sorry to say for all you super liberals here on Slashdot
Flamebaiting one side of the dichotomy and propping up the other as victims.
I remember when Slashdot use to be about science and geekyness.....
Which somehow doesn't include cartoons about science (in trollland): An obvious falsehood baiting for an easy correction.
Gotta love Slashdot extremism. (Score:4, Interesting)
On the opposite side, however, those of us who do NOT agree with Al Gore are automatically tagged as those who want to destroy the atmosphere in the name of the all-mighty dollar. It's completely hypocritical to despise when the right vilifies the extremist left but accept when the left vilifies the extremist right; yet that's what's most likely going to happen not only throughout this thread but also in this political cartoon contest.
Even though I'm a staunch, evil Republican, I'm also a staunch conservationist. I do not accept the extremist, global warming theories that Al Gore and the majority of Slashdotters take as gospel. Even so, I make sure to recycle everything from plastic to office paper, newspapers, and cardboard; I make sure to keep my car properly tuned and maintained to maximize my fuel efficiency; I complain to corporations who make products that can be recycled but aren't, such as the Brita water filters; but I guarantee that I will be lumped in with the anti-environmentalist crowd because of my political affiliation and because I think that Al Gore is a freakin' nutcase with too much time on his hands and too much exporsure to abuse.
That's the problem with Slashdot and topics that intermingle politics with science. Anyone with any inclination to doubt the extremist beliefs of people like Al Gore and TripMaster Monkey is automatically tagged as anti-environment, which is complete BS, just like anyone who says that we need to lower pollution and sign Kyoto (which I am fervently against because of the way it singles out the U.S.) is suddenly tagged as a tree hugger.
And to prove that even further, I guarantee that I'll be modded as troll or flamebait, even though there are thousands if not tens of thousands of posts in Slashdot's archive to prove this. After all, anyone who dares to challenge the Slashdot groupthink is vilified because that's an acceptable practice, although the opposite is not. So be it.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to take my over-flowing, recycling bin out for collection tomorrow and take several bags of shredded office paper down to my township's collection facility. Yessir, just another evil, Republican doing his part to further ruin the environment.
*sigh*
Re:No Politics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The bluntness of scientists and possible offens (Score:4, Interesting)
And once sea level rises, and weather systems move as a result of increased heat, are those still going to be your best farmlands ? Or are they going to dry up and become deserts ?
And what will you do if, say, the best farmlands of China turn out to be too low and are buried underwater ? Do you think that the chinese are going to simply starve silently, or are they going to try to take yours ?
I see my original post was modded Overrated. I guess the pro-industry astroturfers are out again tonight. Makes me wonder if Slashdot was given any "donations" to make the two mods unmetamoderable...
Re:Jesus would have been pro-science. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sure, I can't think of a better subject to pick (Score:4, Interesting)
Here here to that! Micahel Crichton's works are disturbingly close to science, without actually being accurate (that is the danger - that they are confused with science by young/uneducated minds).
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths.
Ad hominem attacks are highly effective. Why is this? Is it a quirk of human nature "I hate this guy so I don't listen to anything he says," or is it actually rational? Think about this for a moment:
If one takes a Bayesian view of probability [wikipedia.org] (probability represents one's degree of belief in a proposition, not a frequency of occurrance), then if one is a rational Bayesian agent, one must incorporate all "relevant" information when ascertaining the belief of a hypothesis, through the chaining of probabilities. Starting with a prior on a statement (unfortunately what prior to choose is often unclear, and is perhaps even arbitrary), one modifies the belief by multiplying by conditional probabilities as gathered by evidence.
One can easily make the claim (the "proof" for this shall be left as an exercise to the reader) that given the sum of experiences one has collected over their lifetime, (direct experience or transitive experience through discussion, books, and other media) one can infer that there is indeed a conditional probability connecting the probability that entity A is a "zealot" and that information from entity A is incorrect.
Bayesian reasoning/inference differs significantly from "pure" boolean reasoning in that it captures this information in a way tha tis actually useful in real life. For instance, the statement "if someone is pointing a gun at you, they will kill you" is obviously false under boolean logic systems, however in real life it is prudent to infer that it is likely enough that htey will kill you that you should take it into account in your planning process. Similarly with the "ad hominem" attacks. The following statements are all valid in a Bayesian framework (when one takes into account the independence of these propositions from other information known about entity A):
All of these statements are fairly vague (I'm sure one can find a far more rigorous discussion of this somewhere online), however I trust you can see that independent of all other information on Entity A these statements are correct.
That leads me to conclude (in an albeit simplified fashion) that because information on a subject/individual/particular point is highly limited (indeed, with things like global warming, etc, even having a PhD in the field is only a reasonable start, not a comprehensive, authoritative educaiton), one must consider all information about an argument (and weight it according to statistical correlation) when one makes an inference (once again assuming one is a Bayesian, which is a strong assumption, but definitely closer to human reasoning under uncertainty than pure boolean logic, or
Re:It's not a religion 'till someone dies. (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Accuse DDT regulation of being motivated to protect birds for their own sake. Do not mention that birds are the primary preditors of malaria-carrying insects.
2. Assume that the effects of DDT use are stable; do not assume that insects will become resistant.
3. Assume that the number of infections prevented similarly follows a constant rate ad infinitum.
The argument FOR banning DDT that I've always heard was the the benefits of DDT are strong at first but are quickly reversed due to its effect on and the differing adaption rate of birds and insects. While the initial number of insects killed and human lives saved from DDT application is very high, the insects which are affected by DDT adapt in short order and become resistant while bird species (their primary preditors) die off, resulting in far, far more malaria-carrying insects and human lives lost to malaria infection than before DDT was introducted.
I suppose that there are portions of this argument that could be debated, but rarely do I see it addressed other than a bunch of malarky about how it makes birds egg shells thinner (remember, kills off insects' primary preditor) and that egg shell thinness was the sole reason why DDT was banned across the world.
UCS and Soviet Union? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sure, I can't think of a better subject to pick (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know why global warming is happening, but I weary of people presenting part of the evidence, and then shouting down any who don't completely agree.
Re:It's not a religion 'till someone dies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Malaria is not a terrible scourge that puts people in fear of their lives. It is a common disease that, much like the flu, is unlikely to be fatal except in those who were already ill or infirm. Those deaths are still sad and should be prevented where possible, but people have a very distorted perspective of it because they only know about it by the death count and not through personal experience. The flu has a non-negligible death toll, and pretty much everyone gets the flu at some point during their lives, but this is rarely seen as a scourge of mankind, just a disease that is worthy of reasonable preventative measures.
Your implicit claim "and there is absolutely no possible issue or complication with DDT, which will completely eliminate malaria" is silly. First, it won't completely eliminate malaria. DDT-resistant mosquitos already exist. If DDT use was truly widespread, this would be the dominant strain within a generation, and then we'd have no way to respond. Second, even if DDT is safe, this has not been sufficiently demonstrated. DDT is very unique in terms of how it accrues and remains within the human body for a very long time, and just stays there. Unlike many substances humans could be exposed to, you can't just observe people closely for a few years and say "Yep! They seem okay!" It's very dangerous to say "Well, we don't know exactly what the consequences of this will be 40 years down the road, but let's go ahead and use it!" especially with such a dubious benefit as temporarily reducing a single not-terribly-dangerous disease.
I would be very skeptical about deploying drugs that have not been fully studied, that collect in the human body for a very long time, with unknown consequences, on a large chunk of the population, just to decrease incidences of the flu for the next 10 years. The benefit just wouldn't be worth such a risk. But that's essentially the equivalent of what you're advocating, it's just a more exotic-sounding disease that many people mistakenly believe is dangerous to the general population in these countries.