Charles Percy Snow, in his famous conference On “The Two Cultures”, he expressed it forcefully: «What do you understand by mass, or by acceleration? It is the scientific equivalent of Can you read?
That we see in the media intellectuals who are as scientifically trained as they are in everything else may be, for the moment, an entelechy: the minimum we should demand is that intellectuals who embrace pseudoscience be portrayed as anti-intellectuals. Because they don't base their opinions on evidence, basically..
Politically accepted nonsense
It is not about censoring ideas, or even avoiding exploring heterodox scientific ideas. The point is to consider deeply anti-scientific statements as uneducated, as the physicist emphasizes. Alan Sokal in his book Beyond intellectual frauds:
It would be better to imagine a continuum where well-established science (for example, the idea that matter is made up of atoms) is at one end; Next would be cutting-edge science (neutrino oscillations, for example) and dominant but speculative science (string theory); then, much further, bad quality science (N rays, cold fusion), and at the end, after a long journey, pseudoscience.
If you defend pseudosciences such as homeopathy, if you attack vaccines, if you suggest that 5G causes harm and a long list of ideas widely disseminated in the media, you should automatically be classified as an unread, uninformed, uneducated person, or perhaps even fanatical about some sectarian movement.
Again, it must be emphasized that these ideas can be expressed with the same joy as Miguel Bose publish your nonsense about the coronavirus on their networks. There is no need to censor. What we have to do is conveniently label, criticize, and, above all, question the media that encourages such characters and the institutions that elevate them to the category of intellectual, wise, or even political.
Yes because Among politicians we can find a certain percentage of functional illiterates. (that is, magufos) who have even directed ministries linked to science, such as Health. In the following video you can see some of the most scandalous cases. Cases that, perhaps when we consider science as an indistinguishable part of general culture, will not take place again:
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The news
If an intellectual embraces pseudoscience or nonsense, he is not an intellectual (and even less should he be a politician).
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.