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[–] 48 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

Matt Walsh is an unserious goon at best, an actual moron at worst.

But the reason that this sort of anti-science propaganda might actually work on well- intended people is because we don't advertise our major successes anymore. Or rather, we never really did advertise them enough, but as those successes became less visible compared to, say, a polio vaccine, just as it took scientists to inform us of the problem, they need to inform us of wins too.

When I was a kid in the 90s, we had a lot of alarm bells going off about the Ozone Layer, about acid rains, and climate change (termed "global warming" then). None of these were particularly visible problems to most people. Each of these became massively politicized, but the fix for the first 2 was a relatively narrow remedy: find and implement replacements for hydroflourocarbons through environmental regulations, and cut mainly two compounds, sulfer dioxide and nitrogen oxides, from fossil fuel power plant emissions through cap and trade regulation policies and smokestack scrubbers. And it worked quite well, to the point that the ozone layer is repairing, as are ecosystems previously ravaged by acid rains.

But scientists and the media never advertised that success nearly enough. Honestly we should have been politicizing that success, even, as much as we did the problems. Now it just seems to most like the problem quietly got forgotten like it never really mattered, rather than that it was a massive problem and we fucking fixed it through science, regulation and international cooperation. And that apparent disappearance of the problem without any noticeable change for the average Joe, and the resulting skepticism that it was ever a problem at all, has infected the one ongoing problem, the biggest and most complex of the problems, climate change.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 child)

    But scientists and the media never advertised that success nearly enough.

    The job is a scientist is not to educate and inform the general lay public - that's the job of the media. People like Bill Nye the Science Guy and Carl Sagan and Neil Degrass Tyson.

    For-profit media, for some reason (maybe it's the profit part?), seems to prefer to focus on the click bait that sells advertisements.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    Not placing blame or responsibility. Just explaining a problem that needs a solution. Maybe a major scientific publication should have an annual retrospective that gives major updates and ongoing work and issues that still need attention. Maybe a university program for scientific marketing. Idk. I don't have a real solution, just identifying a problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago

    But why would you expect "scientists" to do so? Don't we want them mainly... doing science?

    Someone should though yes. Given the ongoing rise of fascism all around the globe, I don't think it's a priority right now, but yes it would be good.

    And since it's good, my strong guess is that someone already did it. The reason then that we did not hear about it is bc "we" (collectively) did not care to hear about it. We'd rather click on more exciting stuff like which celebrity got yet another ass implant, or something.

    Even now, neither of us have run a Google or DuckDuckGo search to try to find it - it's more fun to talk than to listen 🤪. As monkeys, we run on hormones rather than logic, and it's easier to feel superior to everyone else than to actually put in effort to better ourselves.

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  • [–] 4 points 15 hours ago

    Wouod be good support for the next big scientific push. "There was a serious ozone problem but the world workes together and the problem was solved! Science can work together with governments to do big things. We need to do those big things to curb global warming!"

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