I agree, but I wouldn't put that much of blame on scientist themselves - what I think did most of the damage is science reporting, which is yet another case of audacious journalist lies. Most people do not learn "what science says" from research papers, they read about it in lifestyle magazines, on news sites, and now on Facebook. It is there where "coffee possibly linked to cancer (p < 0.1) (study on 100 people)" gets turned into "Your Morning Coffee Will Give You Cancer" (and cue in articles with opposite conclusions next week).
I don't get why people have such tolerance for being lied to. People should be fired from their jobs for spewing such nonsense and misrepresenting facts. Of course news sites and marketers have zero incentive to say the truth, but I hoped that at least the recipients would care. Apparently, most of them don't.
As a side note:
> "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you."
Well, I recently learned that US Congress basically got fed up with all those "visionary projects" and preemptively shut down the space race. From [0]:
"Wernher von Braun also proposed a manned Mars mission using NERVA and a spinning donut-shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century.
The Mars mission became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved."
I don't get why people have such tolerance for being lied to. People should be fired from their jobs for spewing such nonsense and misrepresenting facts. Of course news sites and marketers have zero incentive to say the truth, but I hoped that at least the recipients would care. Apparently, most of them don't.
As a side note:
> "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you."
Well, I recently learned that US Congress basically got fed up with all those "visionary projects" and preemptively shut down the space race. From [0]:
"Wernher von Braun also proposed a manned Mars mission using NERVA and a spinning donut-shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century.
The Mars mission became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved."
[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA