#science advocacy

[notwiselybuttoowell]

The prospect of an even more ideologically driven Trump administration slashing budgets and mass-firing federal staff has given America’s scientific community a sort of collective anxiety attack. “We all feel like we have a target on our backs,” said one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist, who added that agency staff are already seeking to “pivot” by replacing mentions of the climate crisis with more acceptable terms such as “air quality”.

“My god, it’s so depressing,” said another federal scientist about the incoming administration. A doctoral candidate, when asked about entering the workforce under Trump, simply puffed her cheeks and groaned. “If someone offered me a departmental position now, I’d jump,” said one Nasa researcher. “It’s hard, particularly for younger people. Hopefully we will survive it all.”

Trump – through his alteration of hurricane maps with a Sharpie pen, staring with uncovered eyes at a solar eclipse and suggestion that disinfectant injections could cure Covid-19 – is seen by many here at the meeting as a catalyst of scientific contrarianism.

This has been underscored by the nomination of Robert F Kennedy, who holds an array of conspiracy theories about vaccines, wind farms and chemtrails, as the nominee for the US’s new health secretary, as well as Trump’s promise this week to cast aside environmental reviews for “any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America”.

But scientists in the US face a broader crisis beyond the next president, amid a swirl of misinformation and declining trust in the profession among the American public. Overall trust in scientists has fallen by 10% since the pandemic, Pew polling has shown, with a growing partisan gap emerging in how science is viewed; nearly four in 10 Republicans now say they have little to no confidence in scientists acting in the public’s best interests.

“When we get that kind of polling data, it is concerning,” acknowledged Lisa Graumlich, a paleoclimatologist and the current AGU president. Gone, it seems, are the halcyon days of celebrity 19th-century scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt, or even the reception to the polio vaccine in the 1950s, which was greeted with ringing church bells, with its inventor, Jonas Salk, routinely being greeted with applause and handshakes when he was seen in public.

By contrast, Anthony Fauci, the face of the US response to the Covid pandemic, requires round-the-clock security protection due to ongoing death threats, even after his retirement. Climate scientists and meteorologists, too, have faced threats and harassment.

“The conspiracy theories are out there, the misinformation is there,” said Graumlich. “Social media engines and the algorithms can take a person that isn’t necessarily prone to a conspiracy mindset and have them end up in this rabbit hole of misinformation.”

Some researchers think scientists should adapt to this hyper-partisan environment by sticking to unadorned facts, rather than anything that could be seen as campaigning. “We have been come to be seen as just another partisan lobbying group,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist.

“I want us to get back to a point where scientists are seen as the establishers of facts rather than arguing for policy. We need to get back to a situation where we have a shared set of facts.”

Others are determined to press the case for science to guide decisions, if not in the White House then with Congress, which previously thwarted major Trump-demanded cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and Nasa’s Earth science work.

Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at Arizona State University who has come to AGU meetings since 1989, attended this year’s event to reveal terrifying findings about the loss of available freshwater around the world, due to the climate crisis and agricultural practices.

“People like me who are experts need to step up and say, ‘I think this should be done,’” said Famiglietti, who has tangled with a family member about Trump and has even taken to switching Fox News off from the TVs in his local gym.

“I mean I am not going to chain myself to a wellhead but I’m going to make sure the right people in Congress, in Washington, know about it,” he said. “Some people might want to jump off a bridge if they think about the next few years but I don’t think we need to go into a shell or be overly careful. We need to choose our words well, know our audience, but I’m very much in support of full speed ahead.”

[auntie-doom]

If a substance has a physiological effect, it will have side effects. If it doesn't list side effects or claims not to have them, then, simply, it hasn't been studied enough to know what the side effects/drug interactions are.

If it has effects, it has *effects*.

When you say you're anti-CAM what does that mean? Like what does CAM mean in that context? I genuinely haven't seen that acronym before and I'm assuming you aren't anti-camming as in like the form of sex work

Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.

I am capable of turning off my inner annoying atheist, I am incapable of turning off my inner annoying quackwatcher.

I have had real life fights with people I genuinely love about this and I do not regret it. I will absolutely not regret shitting all over someone's $500 herbalist certification.

[the-physicality]

thinking this labor day about all the athletes in women's sports who didn't have a stable league, who were only making decent money from a spot on their national team, who had to fight to get even a fraction of what they deserve. who spent their prime without a club league or the infrastructure to propel the sport. who came of age after title 9 in the usa [forcing schools to fund women/girls’ sports], the ones who fought for cbas and are only seeing big change at the end of their careers or after their careers concluded. who didn't have the media attention before, but are now showing just how much they can sell out stadiums and arenas. the players who played year round because overseas teams paid athletes what they were worth. athletes who endured and reported harassment but the league never took appropriate action. athletes who never had the media attention or ability to monetize their talent but who had careers that were just as impressive as the stars of today. who did it without the help of the science, technology, and medicine we have today. who set records with less support and fewer games in a season, which will be broken by kids who have had personal trainers since high school. athletes who played great games that are no long available to view, their talent no longer archived and accessible for young or new fans. athletes who still don't have a league or are just getting one in 2024. athletes who took it upon themselves to create change for which they will never reap the full rewards.

[girlcalledwhatsername]

One of those "is it worth it" debates i find myself having with myself is about mental health related posts that may make good points otherwise but subscribe heavily to and reference and frame mental illness through the biomedical model and the widespread (but false) idea that a chemical imbalance causes these issues. Comprehensive explanation for this + resources here. (Also worth looking into this activist's work where she describes what paychiatric gaslighting looks like)

The thing is I do not want to spread that misinformation anymore. It was presented to me as fact despite there being little proof of it, for a long time in my life from psychology teachers to therapists to psychiatrists of course. Just treated as a natural fact when it was literally pseudoscience on the same level as most rudimentary psychoanalysis.

So I have to make the decision to either simply not reblog it and therefore not engage with the wider mental health discourse and let people be mistaken from what is possibly just an honest mistake as something that has been taught to us all so so largely, they very well might just honestly not know it not be true, and then by leaving it alone I am letting that myth perpetuate from well-meaning people...

Or...

I actually correct the person, get a bunch of people who find their worldview so suddenly challenged being angry about it and calling me anti science as often happens and get retraumatised over my experiences with Psychiatric abuse at large.

And although I mostly choose the former and simply don't engage it leaves me feeling uneasy because I know I was that person once who didn't think to question the validity of chemical imbalance theories and if someone had told me about it honestly it would have saved me a world of pain. But too many people are progressive only on the surface and hate to have to consider abolitionist approaches to oppressive systems, too many people genuinely believe a host of more stigmatised symptoms and disorders to be deserving of incarceration or erasure, and i have no way of knowing who these people would be. And this is why pop psychology and liberal mental health advocates have run the anti-psych movement into the shadows - a movement to which we owe every step of our liberation as mentally ill people.

So how do you make this a bigger conversation again?

Like. Tell me this isn't blatantly a mass misinformation campaign at this point

[linked here]

[pandemichub]

[delicatelysublimeforester]

The Urgency of National Wildlife Week: A Call to Action for Biodiversity Preservation

[savage-rhi]

Magenta 🤬

[spacephobos]

tua having a nonverbal autistic character is so cool their next step in autistic rights and representation should be publicly sacrificing tom hopper

[troythecatfish]

[uptownsnail]

ive had such a good semester since i transferred, turns out good school/professors/disability department = good grades

[critical-skeptic]

Rare (Part II): The Lab-Grown Revolution

Let’s take this conversation up a notch because it’s not just about how meat is cooked (or undercooked, if we’re being honest). No, this is bigger—existential, even. It’s about the fundamental stupidity of resisting progress when science has handed us the golden ticket to ethical, sustainable, and technologically perfect meat. Yes, I’m talking about lab-grown meat, the one thing that should unite meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters alike, but somehow manages to attract opposition from every corner of the culinary and ideological spectrum.

Meat Eaters: Primitive Loyalty to Tradition

Let me start by addressing my fellow omnivores. I’m a meat-eater. I’m human, and like most of humanity, I’ve inherited an evolutionary predisposition to enjoy the taste, texture, and smell of cooked meat. It’s primal, it’s ingrained, and I make no apologies for it. But here’s where I draw the line: when meat-eaters cling to the idea of killing animals as though it’s some sacred rite of passage. As if stabbing a cow and carving it into steaks is essential to our identity as humans.

Newsflash: it’s not. You don’t need to worship the blood and guts of traditional meat production to be a meat-eater. If lab-grown meat tastes the same, feels the same, cooks the same, and is molecularly identical to what we’ve been eating for millennia—without killing a single sentient being—why wouldn’t you jump at the opportunity? Oh, right, because “ooga booga, real meat come from real animal.” Congratulations, you’ve just made a cannibal look rational.

Vegans and Vegetarians: A House Divided

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the aisle. There’s a subset of vegans and vegetarians who get it—who see lab-grown meat for what it is: the ultimate compromise, a way to enjoy the sensory experience of meat without the moral or ethical baggage. But then there’s the other subset: the purists, the moral absolutists who oppose lab-grown meat on the grounds that it “still perpetuates the idea of eating animals.”

Let me break this down for you: lab-grown meat isn’t an animal. It’s meat without the suffering, the factory farms, or the environmental devastation. It’s the answer to your prayers, but because it still looks and tastes like the thing you’ve sworn off, you can’t handle it. That’s not morality; that’s dogma. You’ve turned your ideology into a prison, and now you’re standing in the way of the single greatest leap forward for animal welfare.

Capitalists and Industry: Stagnation for Profit

And then there’s the meat industry itself—a bloated, lumbering dinosaur that refuses to evolve. These are the same people who’ll tell you lab-grown meat isn’t “real” while pumping traditional meat full of hormones, antibiotics, and God-knows-what else. They’ve built their empires on the backs of industrial-scale slaughter, and they’re terrified of a future where they can’t profit off mass suffering.

Let’s be real: the technology for lab-grown meat is here. It’s been here. But the meat industry doesn’t want to adopt it because it threatens their bottom line. Transitioning to lab-grown meat would require rethinking supply chains, retooling factories, and—heaven forbid—investing in innovation. Instead, they pump millions into lobbying campaigns to convince the public that lab-grown meat is unnatural, unsafe, or unappetizing.

The Anti-Tech Luddites

Of course, no discussion about lab-grown meat would be complete without mentioning the anti-science crowd. These are the same people who think vaccines are a conspiracy, 5G causes brain cancer, and lab-grown meat is somehow “unnatural.” Never mind that traditional meat production is the most unnatural thing imaginable—an assembly line of death designed to maximize efficiency at the expense of ethics, sustainability, and basic decency.

Lab-grown meat is the culmination of human ingenuity, a way to mimic nature while transcending its flaws. But these Luddites would rather cling to their superstition and pseudoscience than embrace a solution that benefits everyone.

The Cannibal Analogy

Here’s the analogy that sums it all up: Imagine a society of cannibals. You offer them lab-grown human meat—identical in every way to the real thing, but made without harming a single human being. Any rational cannibal would jump at the opportunity. But no, these hypothetical cannibals would rather keep eating their siblings, chanting “real meat taste better” while wiping Aunt Linda’s blood off their chins.

Sound absurd? That’s exactly where we are with traditional meat production. We have the technology to produce perfect, cruelty-free meat, but instead, we stick with the old ways because they’re familiar. It’s embarrassing.

Transcendence Through Technology

I might be biased as a transcendentalist, but I believe humanity’s purpose is to embrace technology that allows us to evolve beyond our primal instincts. Lab-grown meat isn’t just a scientific breakthrough; it’s a moral imperative. It’s a way to enjoy the best parts of being human—our love of food, flavor, and culinary creativity—while leaving behind the worst parts: our cruelty, wastefulness, and ignorance.

Call to Action: Demand Better

We need to demand better—not just from the industries and governments that control our food supply, but from ourselves. It’s our collective mindset that fuels this stagnation. Every time we accept traditional meat as the default, every time we shrug and say “it’s just the way things are,” we’re complicit in our own backwardness.

It’s time to call out these mentalities. The meat purists, the anti-science cultists, the capitalist traditionalists—they’re all obstacles to progress. And if we don’t battle them with reason, logic, and, yes, forceful advocacy when necessary, we’ll continue to be the most willfully primitive species in the universe. An embarrassment to any advanced species out there, and to our future selves.

Final Word: Eat Meat, Advocate for Lab-Grown

Eat meat if you want to. Enjoy it, savor it, celebrate it. But don’t settle for the old ways. Demand lab-grown meat. Advocate for it. Push for a future where we can have our steak and eat it too—without the blood, the suffering, or the shame. If we can’t do that, then we deserve every bit of mockery and scorn any intelligent alien species would heap upon us. And frankly, we’d deserve it.

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Why Many Nobel Laureates Demand Senators NOT to Confirm RFK Jr as HHS Secretary

What is wrong or right with these Nobel Prize Winners? Global Healthcare Drama Reflected by Donald Trump X is a platform to find the pros and cons of any societal issues. Unlike other social media platforms or writing sites, freedom of expression enabled by Elon Musk help us gain unique perspectives globally. Yesterday, Donald Trump’s tweet on X took a swing at America’s fractured political…

[considernature]

A quick primer: Danaher is a corporation that owns Cepheid, a medical diagnostics company that manufactures these test cartridges called Genexpert that can really effectively diagnose all sorts of infectious diseases, from TB (both standard and drug resistant), to HIV to Hepatitis. Danaher currently sells most Genexpert tests at a 300% markup in low and middle-income countries, making them prohibitively expensive and preventing sick people in those places from being accurately diagnosed. Less than 1% of Danaher's total revenue is made up by price gouging the most vulnerable people on Earth, but yet they continue to do so.

So, we're going to make it cost them. While petitions may seem useless, Danaher has lowered the cost of some Genexpert tests in the past in response to petitions. Sign this petition above demanding that Danaher charge low and middle-income countries no more than $5 per Genexpert cartridge. With enough support, we can hopefully convince Danaher that it will cost their reputation more than it's worth to continue allowing millions of people to suffer with undiagnosed infectious disease.

It will take you less than 5 minutes to fill out this petition, and you could save real human lives by doing so.

Please sign this petition to tell @DanaherCorp that their test prices are too much. Why should someone have to spend ALL their money just to get a test? Medicine should not be a luxury. #TimeFor5 #PeopleOverProfits

[wat3rm370n]

Value-based care is a red flag that a healthcare CEO was not thinking things through.

Everyone else notices how this “value-based care” idea will lead to grotesquely perverse incentives, right? Physicians for a National Health Program at least recognized the problem.

People - Wife of Murdered UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson Says He Received Threats and She's 'Trying to Console' Their Children - the wife of slain CEO Brian Thompson, said her husband did not alter his travel plans in spite of the threats. By Liam Quinn Published on December 4, 2024, 12:38 PM EST. Part of the text is highlighted with a marker, the part highlighted is “did not alter his travel plans in spite of the threats”.

I’m sorry if this seems like victim blaming, but I do think this demonstrates that people who become CEOs of giant healthcare corporations should definitely not be assumed to be particularly clever or insightful, I also think they shouldn’t be trusted with responses to disasters or “innovations” to any systems for that matter. It does seem like common sense that the CEO of a health insurance company that spends all its time and resources to avoid paying for people’s healthcare should’ve shown a little less hubris. (Of course elites always panic about the wrong things, even if it hurts their own interests, this is a known pattern.) I would’ve assumed that a person in that situation would be aware that the company is likely on the shitlist of any number of wronged and angry patients. But wait, there’s more - while some major media outlets have repeated the idea that this guy kept a “low profile” (do better, AP and PBS!), in fact in a newsletter from Payday Report, Mike Elk reported that this guy was being sued by Hollywood Firefighters union, saying “The union sued Thompson for failing to reveal that United Healthcare was under DOJ investigation. As a result, the pension fund lost $25 billion in value. Meanwhile, Thompson had cashed out over $15 million in stock while selling the stock to pension funds like those of the Hollywood Firefighters union.” and pointing to Ken Klippenstein’s report. So the list of people with axes to grind is numerous. Not what I’d describe as a low profile, but whatever.

The lack of judgement that stood out to me though was in another article which mentioned that: “At an investor meeting last year, he outlined UnitedHealth's shift to "value-based care," paying doctors and other caregivers to keep patients healthy, rather than focusing on treating them when they get sick.”

Who is Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO shot dead in Manhattan? By Megan Cerullo Edited By Anne Marie Lee Updated on: December 4, 2024 / 8:22 PM EST / CBS News For a top executive at a $562 billion company that affects how millions of Americans get health care, Thompson kept a relatively low profile. At an investor meeting last year, he outlined UnitedHealth's shift to "value-based care," paying doctors and other caregivers to keep patients healthy, rather than focusing on treating them when they get sick.

This “value based care” sounds quite obviously like a recipe to get doctors to fail to notice or even note any signs of serious disease. It sounds like an incentive to not document anything well, and to deliberately not notice any problems. Instead of being paid to cure and treat illness and relieve suffering, they would be incentivized to have patients with no sickness documented. Just sweep it under the rug! And if the patient dies, so be it because then they’re not a patient anymore and not covered by health insurance anymore, so they wouldn’t count in the metrics. And try to recruit mostly healthy people into your patient pools, and avoid taking on patients with chronic illness or any serious condition. Similar to the madness of “high risk pools” in privatized insurance. And already we have this problem with networks where some providers that are in-network are begrudging about it, and have their clerical staff make it as hard as possible to make an appointment if they have the “undesirable” insurance. I can’t prove this happens but it sure seems like it does since I’m not the only person who’s talked about running into this type of treatment and runaround when a specialist seems like they don’t want you as a patient even though they’re accepting new patients and supposedly are in-network.

Obviously an optimistic person might think that there would be an incentive just because not all patients die outright, and surely to mitigate downturns would be desirable. But that’s where loss aversion comes in, and also that market incentives are known for absolutely stinking at long-term goals, seemingly always favoring the short term. Andt if the patient takes a huge downturn and becomes disabled because of a preventable condition doctors failed to document, report, or treat, the patient will likely be shoved off the private healthcare insurance when they lose their job, and into Medicaid and maybe eventually Medicare, so then, again, not the problem of the private health insurance company. It’s all about socializing the losses and privatized profits.

I was astonished that this concept could be taken seriously given this glaringly obvious flaw. It’s so obvious that this would NOT be an improvement. Especially in the system we have that’s rife with perverse incentives already. I was relieved to find that Physicians for a National Health Program recognize the problem, and that there’s a published article from 2016 on the “countervailing incentives” and behavioral economics involved, and it articulates how the cognitive bias of loss aversion works so that people are more motivated to avoid loss than to seek gain. They didn’t articulate the gruesome corruption that I just envisioned. But anyone who’s worked in or adjacent to any kind of healthcare or health insurance in the trenches will know how the violence of the system plays out. It’s quite obvious this scheme would benefit the most lurid and ruthless of healthcare providers, and it would force even decent caring doctors into morally injurious situations as they would be pressured by employers to hide disease more than to prevent it or maintain health in patients. We already see how this works in these bureaucracies. If they’re looking for a solution to “upcoding”, which is a legitimate problem in the current payment system, then I suggest better oversight by patient advocacy oriented regulation makes sense. There’s no market solution here that would “naturally” benefit patients with the “invisible hand” they set up.

We need not just to let go of that idea, but to call it out, and reject it outright.

Lawsuit Against Murdered CEO - Firefighters pension accused UnitedHealthcare CEO of fraud, insider trading Ken Klippenstein Dec 04, 2024 In May, the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund had filed a lawsuit against Thompson, alleging he had sold over $15 million of UnitedHealth stock despite being aware of an active Justice Department antitrust investigation into the health insurance company that he did not disclose to investors or the public. Though UnitedHealth, the lawsuit alleges, was aware of the Justice Department investigation since at least October 2023, the public would only learn of the case when the Wall Street Journal published a story about it on February 27, 2024. When news of the investigation broke, it erased almost $25 billion in shareholder value. But by that time, Thompson had already cashed out, selling over $15 million in personally held UnitedHealth shares, per the suit. If true, the account affirms the countless internet memes’ depiction of Thompson as a rapacious health insurance executive fat cat. Literally none of the news media coverage I’ve seen about the murder has included this context, instead tugging at heart strings about the two sons he’ll be leaving behind. Members of Congress have likewise issued anguished statements about the tragic loss of life, remarks that decline to mention the allegations against him or the vast sums of money the company he oversaw has contributed to them and other politicians.

Behavioral economics and countervailing incentives in value-based payment - By Daniel R. Arnold Healthcare, May 17, 2016 But there is mounting evidence that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. Of the numerous findings that relate to the crowd-out of intrinsic motivation, two seem particularly relevant to physicians: (1) negative effects of monetary rewards are strongest for complex cognitive tasks and (2) motivational crowd-out spreads to work that is not directly incentivized. With respect to complex cognitive tasks, even very large financial incentives undermine performance. For example, rural villagers in India offered half their annual money income experienced worsened performance on complex memory and puzzle-solving tasks. The spread of motivational crowd-out to work not directly incentivized has been observed in England. In 2004, the U.K. government introduced a pay-for-performance scheme with 136 indicators for family practices. By 2007, improvement for incentivized measures had plateaued, and quality deteriorated for two measures that were not incentivized.

PBS - Hacking Your Mind - Weapons of Influence Episode 102 | Marketers and politicians hack into your autopilot system — learn how to fight back. Aired 08/05/2020 | Expired 09/10/2024 | (transcript) One of the field's key insights is that gut feelings like loss aversion lead consumers to make predictable mistakes, and companies in a market economy make a lot of money by encouraging us to make those mistakes. Until then, the widely accepted view had been that markets actually protect consumers from their mistakes. “And so I would often hear something like the following -- "Yes, yes. I understand that the people in your experiments and some of the people I know do foolish things, but in markets, then -- and then I claim..." They could never quite finish this sentence without literally waving their hands, and the argument is somehow if you choose the wrong career or fail to save for retirement, that the market will somehow push you back toward being rational. There's a reason why no one can make this argument without waving their hands, and that's because the argument is just silly. You know, if you don't save enough for retirement, what happens to you? You're poor when you're old. The market doesn't discipline you. Suppose people have a weakness for gambling. What's going to happen? Will people build casinos, or will they offer programs to help people curb their gambling addiction? Well, people have made a lot more money on casinos than on programs to stop gambling.”

[frnwhcom]

Sylvia Earle: Pioneer of the Deep Blue

Sylvia Earle, affectionately known as “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times, has been a pioneer in oceanography and marine conservation for over four decades. A National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence since 1998, Earle’s career has been marked by deep ocean exploration, innovative research, and a relentless pursuit of protecting the marine environment. Early Life and…

[theadaptableeducator]

Empires of Earth: The Cosmic Unsustainability of Colonialism, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Capitalism

Stephen Hawking, a renowned theoretical physicist, has provided insightful perspectives on various global issues, though his work primarily focused on cosmology and theoretical physics. Nevertheless, his ideas on human nature, the future of humanity, and our place in the universe can be extrapolated to offer a framework for analyzing the interconnectivity and unsustainability of colonialism,…