Post 9t24NN0gLiStAMYESm by wbtd@ex.tending.to
(DIR) More posts by wbtd@ex.tending.to
(DIR) Post #9t02rKGQXEj9729UWG by wbtd@ex.tending.to
2020-03-14T12:46:53.806847Z
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#herdimmunity Anyone remember Lysenko? Who thought ideology could determine biology? Good thing that couldn't possibly happen under capitalism.
(DIR) Post #9t02rMexczXYXhe72O by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-14T13:50:01Z
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@wbtd A bit of stretch. Lysenko devastated Soviet biology, agriculture and genetics for 2 decades and decimated Soviet scientific community (Vavilov).The current UK policy doesn't reject science, but science doesn't make risk analysis and policy decisions for you - it just provides you with facts to base them on. The UK government made a risk-based decision that is definitely driven by economy but is not unscientific in the way Lysenko did.
(DIR) Post #9t02y1oTX7Y3uoH2hs by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-14T13:51:18Z
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@wbtd Better examples would be precautionary principle, anti-GMO and anti-nuclear sentiments which consciously reject science to make place for ideology, but still nothing compared to Lysenko.
(DIR) Post #9t21PAXlN1lhDdBstU by wbtd@ex.tending.to
2020-03-15T08:34:39.220399Z
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@kravietz If your model of research funding is competitive rather than co-operative, and your model of research production is extractive—UK universities now manages themselves explicitly as factories to extract research knowledge and teaching income from lecturers and professors—then yes, actually, you have already made huge decisions about what society is, who are valid persons, what kinds of knowledge can be allowed into public discussion, and how humans should be treated. Those invisible assumptions create specific "research outcomes" that validate the initial assumptions, like this rubbish #herdimmunity claim.Read anything in the past 40 years of STS studies. Scientific research is not politically neutral, but to claim that it is neutral is a cornerstone of extractive capitalism. That does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed and unable to produce good research; see Sarah Harding's _Objectivity and Diversity_ for a good exposition of one model for how plural socially embedded scientifc research programmes that acknowledge differences of power, entitlement, culture, gender and so forth produce *better* science.
(DIR) Post #9t21PAqYFAnU9tytBA by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-15T12:43:09Z
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@wbtd > does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysedThat what I was just going to point out - various biases and flaws of scientific processes in different countries are well known. I could talk for hours about how science if broken in Poland and Russia, but none of these actually prevents them from doing *some* good science. These biases and flaws just prevent them from realizing their full potential but this is far away from how it worked in USSR.
(DIR) Post #9t21sJpztV2eRScSgq by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-15T12:48:29Z
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@wbtd Regarding competitive - ok, but where it isn't? Competition is primarily about *individual* ambitions and these can be reinforced by the system but are not given exclusively by the system.In Soviet science there was just as much competition as in the West and the greatest minds (like Sergey Korolyev) were quite a dicks in person. Same in open-source which is quite collaborative by nature but people like Linus Torvalds are both great and dicks at the same time...
(DIR) Post #9t222pn1x44kR4FIaO by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-15T12:50:23Z
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@wbtd So it seems like this competition and ambition thing seems to be an intrinsic feature of homo sapiens character and I don't think there's any culture in the world that successfully curbed this trait *and* at the same time delivered some great discoveries.
(DIR) Post #9t237m5HFyWqLQhTBw by wbtd@ex.tending.to
2020-03-15T12:52:26.610812Z
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@kravietz I'm trying to learn more about the Flying University in Poland. There's very little history in English but it seems to me an extraordinary innovation. Do you know any sources?
(DIR) Post #9t237mapMflXvHSfMu by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-15T13:02:26Z
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@wbtd The one between 19-20th century seems to be only discussed in Polish-language sources.During WW2 - best source is probably Jan Karski "Story of a secret state" (widely available in paper and e-book)And the one in communist Poland: "The flying university in Poland, 1978-1980", H Buczynska-Garewicz - Harvard Educational Review, 1985 and "The Flying University" C Pszenicki - Index on Censorship, 1979
(DIR) Post #9t23J5Km1gRjEULFAW by wbtd@ex.tending.to
2020-03-15T12:56:31.329095Z
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@kravietz I'm an anthropologist -- in terms of cultural comparison, this just isn't true. Our model of "the individual" is actually specific to one (colonial, dominant) culture but it's not a human universal.
(DIR) Post #9t23J5pGCKpgl2bagi by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-15T13:04:29Z
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@wbtd Happy to learn more about this - who should be learning from?
(DIR) Post #9t24NN0gLiStAMYESm by wbtd@ex.tending.to
2020-03-15T13:13:41.939721Z
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@kravietz Joy Hendry's introduction to social anthropology is a great foundation. The way in which anthropologists write, especially about potentially reflexive questions like the nature of personhood, can be offputting. However a good article on differing models of personhood, none of which look like Euro-American selves, is an article by Celia Busby called "Permeable and Partible Persons" ( I think). If you can't grab it easily off Google Scholar let me know.
(DIR) Post #9t24NNaqBHO8yVT6p6 by kravietz@social.privacytools.io
2020-03-15T13:16:28Z
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@wbtd One can grab pretty much everything easily from https://libgen.is/ these days :)