Hello tremon

> So what do you propose as a solution? A closed, xenophobic culture will likely not accept any outside help.

Yes of course.

As jcranmer said in this subthread:

>> The reason that the anti-science right-wing comes to the forefront is most likely that intellectual faculty at universities are heavily left-wing. Most social sciences display a distressingly high degree of correlation between research findings and prior political belief, but this is masked by many of them being overwhelmingly left wing: anthropology and sociology have a 30:1 and 28:1 left:right ratio, respectively. (cf. https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/ratioi/0053.html ).

That shift didn't occur overnight. So it is reasonable to suppose that a shift in the other direction wouldn't be rapid either. I suppose you could try opening new universities but my sense is that a cultural shift back is already underway on university campuses, it's just in a nascent form at the moment.

>> Universities teach liberalism

>No, they don't. They teach critical thinking. We had that discussion on HN a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829194

I'm not being literal. The dean (I hope) doesn't literally get up on a pulpit and declare the virtues of liberalism every day.

You've got to remember that a university is a hierarchy. There are signals, special words, used by people in the hierarchy to declare their colours to a particular banner i.e. status/social signaling.

This means that 'teaching liberalism' is usually more covert than overt. If you've ever walked into a Church (cue solemn organ music) and refrained from chatting to your friend about whatever Richard Dawkins said this week, then you were affected by the environment (to not seem disrespectful) without even needing a person to influence your mood. That such a thing can influence even the most vehement opposition to the ideals of the Church is a testament to the power of an environment.

Onto the controversy:

> Sure. That computer you're reading HN on probably wasn't possible with the knowledge of 30 years ago. But "major scientific discoveries" is a perfect True-Scotsman phrase, so I don't expect you to agree with me on that.

Ah but tremon! I did selectively disallow computer science!

> All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science.

Tell me about the major breakthroughs outside of computing that have affected people's everyday lives in the last, say, three/four decades. With respect to the advancements of the past of course, since it is easy to turn a mole hill into a mountain without a benchmark.

> You mean how we can never predict who is most likely to develop which cancer [1], or which cancers are curable [2], or who is most at risk from developing Alzheimer's [3]?

Let's look at a success story:

"Although polio has no cure, prevention is available through a vaccine. In the United States, it is given as an inactivated polio vaccine. Approximately 90 percent or more of polio vaccine recipients develop protective antibodies to all three poliovirus types after two doses, and at least 99 percent are immune following three doses."

Are Alzheimers or Cancer(s) treatments at this level of effectiveness?

I have to caution you here. I'm not claiming equal difficulty for each disease. Obviously there's a range from the trivial to the nearly impossible.

From the perspective now of the average person there has been a stagnation in medicine. 1 in 3 people will develop Alzheimers, so there is immense focus/money available to solve for X here. Yet it remains unsolved. The same thing is true broadly speaking of cancer. Progress has been very incremental. Yes, some cancers can now be shrugged off in a way they could not in the 70s, but fundamentally you'll get a different reaction from a patient with polio ("They have a cure for that, right?") than from a cancer patient ("How bad is it and How long do I have to live?")

It is not just the perspective of common people either. Experts in these areas are very worried about the big picture.

The fact is that the majority of medical papers in journalist are found to be not reproducible. I know what I'm saying here. It sounds like heresy but hear me out. If the majority of 'medical discoveries' are unreproducible, then maybe most of the practitioners are not actually doing science. These storm clouds don't get much press today but it is widely known within the community.

Allied to that it is hard not to notice that 'biotech' isn't doing very well in Silicon Valley.

I should also make a personal note: I asked my doctor whether he could do something with a genome sequence of myself and family. He said no. There is no point; at our level of resolution it only matters to have the past medical histories of family. That always seemed a bit suspect to me, especially given the original promises made. Sounds like failure to me.

> Ah, so that's the problem. Have they considered that their tribal enemy's wages haven't gone up either?

Unfortunately there is also decreasing belief in science on the left tribe. It is just that it is occurring in different areas of science. The disease is the same though. Its expression is just different. The reason why there's not such an outcry about that is that broadly speaking the average left oriented person believes 'Science is on their side'. This is because of what I mentioned before: there are more leftists in the academy.