Science and politics

I've gotten pretty involved in Wikipedia over the last few months, which has led me to all manner of conclusions about it. I won't bother sharing most of these here, at least not right now. But as anybody who's spent much time there (and by "there", I mean places other than in the articles themselves, which often give the impression of a stable competence) knows that it's a hotbed of conflict. Much of this conflict can be described on one of several axes: the inclusionist-deletionist axis (should we have articles on individual Pokemon/municipal councillors/small corporations, etc.?), eventualist-immediatist axis (if somebody makes a questionable addition to the article, should we immediately revert it in the interests of the current quality of the article, or leave it there in the hopes that people will tinker with it until it's good, in the interests of the future quality of the article?), the protection of living persons-completeness of information axis (should the focus be on thorough reporting of notable living people, in the interests of completeness, or on the conservative reporting of notable living people, in the interests of decency?). There are dozens of these, and I'd strongly recommend that anybody whose life is short of drama and warfare go right down, register an account, and line up on one side or another.

One of the axes, though, is on tolerance of pseudoscience (should we portray natural selection as an open controversy within the scientific community, or as a scientific consensus that is under assault only by fringe scientific elements and non-scientists?), and this axis has recently got me thinking about science and politics. Normally, I associate anti-scientific viewpoints with the right-wing - young earth creationists, global warming deniers, etc.

(Disclaimer: I don't consider myself competent to have strong views on existence of anthropogenic global warming, but from what I've seen the portion of the scientific community that strongly believes in its existence appears to be both i. larger by orders of magnitude than portion of the scientific community that is skeptical, and ii. generally more persuasive. Regardless, I do consider myself competent to have strong views on whether action should be taken to combat the possibility of anthropogenic global warming, on the grounds that the reasonable possibility that carbon dioxide emissions are imperiling our way of life is quite enough justification to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.)

But one of the places I've spent some time at Wikipedia is on the homeopathy article. When I first showed up there, I was broadly unaware of what homeopathy was, besides that it was something that a lot of people seemed to consider an alternative to "conventional" medicine. Since I've learned more about it, I've concluded that it's batshit insane. In brief, its tenets are that substances that cause a given set of symptoms are useful for curing afflictions that cause the same symptoms, and that the more diluted these substances are the more potent they are as cures. Some homeopaths go so far as to suggest that these cures are at their most potent when they're so diluted that not a single molecule of the alleged cure remains (one explanation given is that water has a memory, so even if a substance is no longer present in the water, the water can "remember" when it was and behaves accordingly). It is the sort of thing that I cannot imagine any reasonable person believing for any reason other than religious ones, and I'm not aware of any religion that considers homeopathy a key tenet.

(Apparently in the late 1700s, homeopathy enjoyed a much greater success rate than conventional medicine, which sounds like a point in homeopathy's favour until you realize that the day's conventional medicine included things like bloodletting.)

And yet, by and large the people who believe in homeopathy, at least in the developed world, aren't young earth creationists and other conservative quacks, but hippies who, by and large, believe in evolutionary science and are adamant about fighting global warming.

So, um, yeah: what's up with that?

Random things one learns while researching Wikipedia articles...

The Calgary Sun did snapshot profiles of all the Calgary candidates in the last provincial election. They can be found here. I find the responses to "political heroes" interesting. First of all, it seems like pretty well every P.C. candidate named Churchill, which isn't all that surprising I guess. A little more surprising is that four candidates in Calgary were willing to come out and name Pierre Trudeau as their political hero. These bold four came from three different parties, none of which were the Liberals: they were two New Democrats, a Green, and a Wildrose Alliance candidate (who also cited Ralph Klein and Peter Lougheed as among his heroes).