> On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I thought I noted that there have always been internal critiques from
> > scientists... and I'd bet we'd agree that UCS is a group of scientists
> more
> > or less outside the mainstream of the scientific establlishment.
>
> Actually I wouldn't, not by a long shot. It might be the perspective
> of what I've worked in, but nothing I've read from them has seemed
> based on controversial readings of the state of knowledge. I'll grant
> that there is, at least traditionally, a reluctance to get involved
> when one's subject matter becomes a political football and distracts
> from interesting problems, but that tendency isn't what it used to be.
> Are there some counter examples that come to mind?
>
I didn't mean that their science was outside the mainstream, I meant that the group's activities were. Like you, I think their scientific positions are pretty non-controversial
>
> > I'm also
> > sure that Progressive experts in all fields have a tendency to treat all
> > challenged to their authority as hysterical and anti-science.
>
> What do you mean by "Progressive experts"?
>
I capitalize Progressive to associate the experts with those committed to scientific/bureaucratic management, on the one hand, and power-blind science-based policy on the other. I don't see all scientists hewing to these values or acting in this manner but I do see most folks in the National Academy of Sciences, on NIH/NSF review panels, and/or invited to give Congressional testimony in this way.
>
> > I'm not sure what you mean by science studies in your last paragraph, I
> was
> > thinking of the work of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Joan Fujimura, Steve
> > Epstein, Daniel Kleinman, Susan Leigh Star, Brian Wynne, etc. these folks
> > don't use science as a club.
>
> I don't mean that people in science studies -- I'm not familiar with
> most of the names here -- use science as a club. My point is in my
> admittedly casual exposure to perhaps a vulgar version science studies
> is it often conflates scientists for people *outside* the respective
> field unjustly accusing critics of particular technologies being
> hysterical and anti-science, examples of the latter I make a hobby of
> collecting.
>
I've sat in seminars and meetings with agbiotechnologists at a number of research universities and a few professional meetings and watched/listened to them sneer at opponents in just this way. The contradictory/sad thing - and perhaps the thing that drove me most nuts - was that these very same people were those likely to institute demands on graduate students in their programs that they participate in regular seminars on the ethics of agbiotech and who had heard a few hundred times from folks like me about the limitations of the "agbiotech's going to save the peasantry and feed the world" position.
>
> --
> Andy
>
> Alan