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Vox Day’s ignorance about scientists

Vox Day takes an ignorant shot at research scientists:

While I have tremendous regard for the effectiveness of the scientific method, I have very, very little respect for scientists. They are very, very far from the impartial devotees of scientody that they so love to portray themselves being. With a few notable exceptions, they are cowardly, contemptible herd animals more interested in jousting for a better position among the herd hierarchy than advancing the state of human knowledge.

I mean, that’s really bizarre. It’s just wrong. Where did he get that? What an ignoramus. He probably hasn’t interacted with a scientist in a professional setting in…well, in his life. What is he basing that on? What examples could he possibly have? As a scientist and someone who is surrounded by scientists at all stages of their careers almost every day of my life, I know for an absolute fact that what drives these people’s very being is a curiosity about the natural world and a passion for discovering the truth about it. “Seekers of truth,” as my boss calls us when he wants to remind us to be very impartial in our interpretation and reporting of our results. They think about scientific questions and their answers everywhere and all the time—at home, while exercising, during happy hour, at the movies, always. It consumes their minds; this is what drives them and their careers, not conforming to the herd’s opinion or jousting for better positions in the herd.

If he wanted to criticize researchers about their way of life, a libertarian like Day should attack their operating in an entirely socialist funding system, with no emphasis on or even awareness of profit and loss or the economics of their profession. They aren’t concerned with justifying their absorption of tax dollars or the profitability of their endeavors, precisely because they are so totally immersed in the scientific questions they are asking and the truths they are seeking. They consider this nature-understanding passion so important to society that they endorse the transfer of billions of dollars from people who earned it to themselves.

This immersion in and dependence on complete socialism in scientific research attracts the types of State lovers who want to use State coercion to address such real or imagined problems as global warming. On issues that are unfortunately so infused with politics, like anthropogenic climate change or stem cell research, most scientists take the socialist position that the State should enlist them to determine what is right and then it should fund the right and forcibly prevent the wrong.

If he were specifically addressing their political bias in a couple of scientific matters (the point of his post was global warming skeptics), then Day would be on firm ground. But unfortunately he makes a sweeping generalization that originates from his complete ignorance of the lives and motives of research scientists. It is obvious that they suppress or discourage contrary opinions on a few select political-scientific matters like global warming and possibly even the Duesberg hypothesis—but to conflate this political bias with scientific bias and ulterior motives, here in the 21st century, and suggest this is worse than it’s ever been, after the widespread and well-known suppression of counter-cultural ideas in the previous two or three centuries, exposes Vox Day’s bias and ignorance.