Hello all,

This community will be removed from the instance in the near future because it is unmoderated, does not align with the instance’s focus, and frequently introduces political content into the local feed, which is contrary to the instance’s goal of minimizing political content.

Alternative versions of aboringdystopia are available on other instances:

!aboringdystopia@lemmy.world

!aboringdystopia@lemmy.ml

!aboringdystopia@lemm.ee

I would prefer locking the community to avoid losing visibility of the posts, but unfortunately locking a community is not an available feature.

  • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
    1·
    14 hours ago

    My loyalty to science first is why I’m on this instance. It’s not hard to understand that social drama distracts from and often undermines science. Calling a politician stupid gets us no closer doing more science. It doesn’t help get us funding or logistics. It doesn’t have anything to do with the science itself. It might well be true, but it amounts to useless whining. It’s increased noise for people who are looking for technically interesting things.

    Additionally, science being politicized is not a justification to further politicize science. When people push and pull science to one side or another it makes it harder to build the broad coalitions and broad consensus required to fund things and solve problems. The moment people start thinking in ists and isms they stop thinking about how to solve problems. At the end of the day, Ideologies are social constructs. They sorta exists, but they’ll always be less important the physical reality and practical mechanisms.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      11 hours ago

      Additionally, science being politicized is not a justification to further politicize science.

      This mindset is exactly the kind of toothless reaction that the people politicizing science in the first place are counting on, congratulations.

      When people push and pull science to one side or another it makes it harder to build the broad coalitions and broad consensus required to fund things and solve problems.

      You are equating why I am passionate about politics and science as essentially the same motivations as people who are explicitly bigoted and anti–intellectual which even if you were right, which you are not, misses a very important difference between me and those people you are intepreting I am having mud slinging fights with because it is fun.

      I am not bigoted and hostile at a fundamental level to science like the people I am trying to point out are who are actively lighting everything on fire.

      You don’t seem to comprehend you are playing an essential part in the ratchet mechanism here.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect

      Yet the erosion of public trust in science has significance that goes well beyond any particular policy decision or agency budget. The functioning of modern societies depends on what the English sociologist Anthony Giddens termed “abstract systems”: networks of institutions that use technical expertise to “organise large areas of the material and social environments in which we live.” From this point of view, the stark polarization of American politics around trust in science not only threatens the legitimacy of particular expert institutions, but also has potentially destabilizing consequences for society as a whole.

      …

      The idea that distrust in science is due simply to ignorance—or a “deficit” of information—has been especially alluring to many members of scientific, educational, and media institutions because it presupposes that what needs fixing lies not with those institutions but rather with ignorant others. Although this framing has long been discredited by scholars, it persists in part because these same institutions are uniquely well-positioned to supply more information. Yet distrust is a relational concept—it calls for repair, not more information. Efforts to fill the void left by distrust with more information are therefore unlikely to succeed; they also run the risk of aggravating the underlying cause of distrust.

      Another explanation for distrust of science, highly influential in the scholarly literature, rejects the deficit model but instead blames conservatives’ hostility to government. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway put it, “contemporary conservative distrust of science is not really about science. It is collateral damage, a spillover effect of distrust in government,” traceable to the anti-government, “neoliberal” ideology of the Reagan era.

      https://issues.org/new-politics-science-mills-st-clair/

      • tristynalxander@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        13 hours ago

        Omg, accept the loss. Also, diplomatic tip accusing people of being part of the problem or otherwise setting up with-us or against-us dilemmas never makes you friends. Shielding my communities from people who want to use us as political pawns doesn’t mean I’m siding with one side or another. If you can’t make people wanting to be left alone to your advantage, get better at politics and debate – and get better at it with people who actually want to interact with you.

        I’m sorry you feel like you’ve lost something. As outlined in the post there are alternative versions of the community – they’ll grow more rapidly now than ever. Maybe try diversifying.