#I also wonder if maybe OP is assuming that everyone thinks 'dinosaur' means 'the taxonomic clades containing dinosaurs'

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This post is really weird to me, because on the one hand I'm with OP on finding anti-science sentiment extremely disturbing, but on the other hand the staunch belief that every word has exactly one True Meaning, and that anyone who uses it differently is stupid or anti-intellectual, is itself a part of anti-science movements.

Maybe this will surprise some of my followers, since obviously I love stupid semantic arguments like 'if you cut a ravioli in half is it a sandwich?'¹, but one of the reasons I like them is because, despite their sillines, they point to the important truth that words are, fundamentally, made up. The "meaning" of a word is not determined by the inventor of the word, nor by some "higher authority" like a dictionary or a scientist, but by how people use it. That's what it means to ask "what does word X mean?" - you're asking "what do people mean when they say X?". And this is a vitally important thing to think about, because you can't communicate with someone unless you know what they mean by the words they choose.

The idea that colloquial definitions matter is NOT new, not at all, and to say it "has no basis in reality" is just false. It's false when it's about dinosaurs, it's false when it's about planets, it's false when it's about sandwiches, it's false when it's about genders; it's just false! Linguists call this approach "prescriptivism" - the idea that language is defined by a set of formal, rigid rules, and the only "good" or "correct" usage is to follow those rules. But the alternative, "descriptivism", is the actual evidence-based approach to language - to find out what a word means, you have to observe how people use it, because that's what determines the meaning.

Descriptivism isn't anti-science or anti-intellectual - if anything, the ones in denial about reality are the prescriptivists who say that 'dinosaur' CAN'T mean "giant extinct lizard" despite the fact that there exist people who use it that way and so that is in reality one of its meanings.

And obviously it's fine to dislike certain usages - I loathe the expression "I could care less" because it's a corruption of "I couldn't care less" and has the same meaning despite its literal meaning being the opposite.

But I still accept that "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less", even though I wish it didn't, because if someone says that to me I know that's what they mean.

In the same way, if your four-year-old niece asks for a dinosaur toy for her birthday you know that she's not asking for a stuffed penguin, and if your friend says "I just watched that dinosaur movie from 2000", you know they're not talking about Chicken Run².

tl;dr: the argument here isn't about the historical or biological relationship between avian and non-avian dinosaurs, it's about the real-world usage of the word 'dinosaur', and the reality is that one of that word's meanings is, in fact, 'large extinct lizard from millions of years ago'. It's not the definition paleontologists use, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

¹ It's still a ravioli if it's from the Ravenna province of Italy, otherwise it's a sparkling bread bowl full of thick soup.

² Unless they're a paleontologist or someone who loves playing with language. No generalization is ever completely accurate.

New Fear

I have been on tumblr a long time. A looooong time. Far longer than I should have been, really.

And I've been arguing with schmucks about birds being dinosaurs... pretty much that whole time. Folks tend to get angry when a dinosaur blog posts birds, after all. It happens.

And while the game of whack a mole is ancient, it's not unpredictable. Usually, it ends in one of two ways:

the person admits they were wrong, and they back down

the person stops arguing with me and blocks me

I'm okay with either one, really. the former is ideal, the latter at least brings me peace.

Never before this past weekend has someone insisted they were right no matter what I say

And this isn't a coincidence.

Over the past few decades, anti-science sentiment has risen worldwide. I mean you just have to look at the COVID19 pandemic, or general reactions to the problems of climate change.

While of course people who think their opinion matters more than evidence have always existed, they have never been quite this bold before.

The idea that the colloquial definition of dinosaur matters, at all, is a completely new idea and one that has no basis in reality.

And yet, multiple people this past weekend argued exactly that.

And it sounds exceptionally similar to the idea that people could pick and choose things about COVID19 to believe, or the general republican position on science (only things that back up their bigotry are true).

It really seems to reflect a general increase in anti science sentiment and public anti-intellectualism.

Reality isn't actually up for debate. Reality isn't actually subjective. And science is the measure of reality

This isn't the same as the biases of society impacting science and making it worse. Saying "what people think is more important than science" is not the same as saying "science forgot a very important variable / factor / to consider data gained by different cultures / to have a wide variety of perspectives/ etc."

And allowing people to continue to perpetuate and believe in delusions leads directly to the spread of misinformation, leading to more people not understanding reality, and so on

This matters because reality matters. Because the reality of our world is not something we can change or escape. And, in fact, us ignoring the reality of the world - like thinking we can have infinite growth on a finite planet - is directly leading to the destruction of that world (climate change).

I am terrified of the rise of anti-science sentiment. I am terrified of the rise of cherry picking, deciding reality is what you want it to be, ignoring evidence. We see this from purely scientific topics all the way to social justice (how much of racism is ignoring the evidence of a) race being a social construct and b) how much racism impacts people's lives? Almost all of it).

This is bigger than birds being dinosaurs or evolution or climate change. This is about our society going on a deeply disturbing and self-destructive path.

And I really don't know what to do about it.