How to Talk to a Science Denier
“Climate change is a hoax—and so is coronavirus.” “Vaccines are bad for you.” These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise a...
Books like mitpress.mit.edu/978026254505... suggest, anecdotally, that some science deniers have suffered a trauma related to loss of control. Distrusting the establishment is easier than accepting how little control we have to stop bad things from happening to us. I would love a real study though.
04.03.2026 15:05
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Might be useful to plot the total amount awarded vs time as well since one objection I heard is that, with the NSF funding everything up front, we should expect the slow to be less. I have done it myself, by the way - the objection is wrong no matter how you look at it.
02.03.2026 14:57
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Uh…this chart is concerning.
02.03.2026 12:06
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How could this number be possible? Sure, childcare is too expensive but this # flies in the face of lived reality. Many households earning much less appear to have 2-3 children who are in daycare or otherwise cared for.
27.02.2026 15:15
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Is funding willing these days? We shall see.
19.02.2026 16:30
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But if you can control the crosstalk, you can make smartgoo. or at least encode memories
19.02.2026 02:31
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can you make them talk to each other? like you raise the temperature and one dissolves, then modifies the phase diagram of another?
18.02.2026 22:53
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Science?! On Bluesky? I haven't seen this since I first joined.
11.02.2026 17:28
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when you put it that way…yikes!
10.02.2026 23:49
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Yep, that’s where we are.
10.02.2026 23:23
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Quite a salty response.
10.02.2026 17:28
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that is bad.
20.01.2026 19:24
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I keep waking up expecting to read about a military buildup near Greenland, but can they really keep the troop movements required to take Greenland a secret? Think of the lead up to just grabbing Maduro.
19.01.2026 18:21
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Good on you for responding but experience and recent history has shown that, at least with adults, you can't reason most people out of antiscience no matter how obvious it is they are wrong. Maybe I'm just jaded though.
19.01.2026 18:06
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Don't they pay you for that? Don't give that away for free!
08.01.2026 20:34
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My kids, while watching the new stranger things, thought it was so unrealistic. They said, “They can’t just walk into a school like that!”
08.12.2025 12:35
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14.11.2025 21:59
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It all depends on what you are trying to do. That way of thinking about it doesn’t get a first year student in physics anything they could use at their stage of development to calculate something. It comes into its own in graduate level classes though
25.10.2025 12:21
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I sometimes think, on my darkest days, that promoting the communication of science with the public was a terrible mistake and a major contributor to the snake-oil science era we now find ourselves in.
15.10.2025 18:13
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There aren’t really enough Americans. Americans aren’t dumber or even less hard working - there just aren’t enough of us to support the size of the current tech/university sector. I read we have 5% of the population but 20% of the “smart” people. can’t find a source for that now.
20.09.2025 17:48
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It is an annual fee too so it is worse than the headline says. But can be lifted at will for companies that toe the party line I guess so it could be used to exert extra control over private companies.
20.09.2025 17:23
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I am trying to remember where I read this first but, in fact, as Asimov predicted, our technology may be so advanced in some areas it already is indistinguishable from magic. Not only to our ancestors but essentially even to ourselves.
19.09.2025 23:22
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You’re worried too?
12.09.2025 11:17
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I wonder how they feel about supernovas?
07.09.2025 16:38
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So do something. Please. People’s lives are at risk.
05.09.2025 23:46
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5…4….3….2….
18.07.2025 23:10
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So far China is the only one competing in terms of money. If the US goes full authoritarian, that may be where people go. For now I am doing my best helping my people get postdocs in Europe. but the numbers are not in our favor
10.07.2025 20:07
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they are certainly trying but the loss of funding is far too great for them to make up. Many were cutting science themselves. There are now new programs throughout the world to attract US scientists but the numbers are still so small.
10.07.2025 17:37
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fantastic!
17.06.2025 19:06
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The fact that it depends on the observer’s idea of “naive” makes me nervous. I feel like something like an “emergent symmetry” can be defined less ambiguously, so the key may be to have a measure a “behavior”.
16.06.2025 11:06
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