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Astronomy Becomes the Playground of the Social Left
This isn’t a shocking novelty to me, and it isn’t my first post on this topic. Yet it makes me despair when I see astronomy conferences taken over by irrelevant left-wing social issues. There’s an astrobiology conference going on now and, while I’m not there, I’ve been enjoying following the discoveries and new research online.
Today, though, the NASA Astrobiology Twitter feed is preoccupied with retweeting social issues that are apparently coming up. My inspiration for the post is this tweet, which complains about color-blindness in the workplace. Remember: racism is wrong because we’re all the same, deep down, and if you treat everybody the same, you’re a racist for not recognizing our differences. Her follow-up tweet here reminds us that because we need to make the culture of science inclusive, which means explicitly excluding “white male” science culture. This tweet celebrates the underrepresentation of men on one discussion panel, while this tweet complains about their overrepresentation on another.
I avoided this year’s big American Astronomical Society meeting in part because of the town hall session titled “Racism: Racial Prejudice Plus Power.” Note the session’s axiom:
We operate under the assumption that all people are created equal. If given the same choices and opportunities, all people will make choices that lead to beneficial life outcomes. Thus, any disparate and insidious outcome (e.g., astro demographics) is not natural/intrinsic, but created/extrinsic.
Remember what an axiom is? It is a statement of truth that is so fundamental that you don’t need to prove it. This “axiom” implies that all groups of people would choose to become astronomers at the same rate, if it weren’t for racism. There are no internal cultural differences that could possibly affect their choices, no differing priorities. Every difference in demographics must be due to racism.
Are fewer than 50% of astronomers women? That’s because of sexism. Conversely, are fewer than 50% of, say, schoolteachers men? Nurses? What about English majors? Women’s studies majors? That’s not sexism, though — except that because men freely choose not to go into these fields, that points to their own sexism in devaluing the work of schoolteachers and English majors.
Even better, get a hold of this page’s “About Us“:
“We are committed to an intersectional feminist approach combined with a framework of cultural materialism to understand the past and present repercussions of systemic oppression of marginalized groups on our ability to study the Universe
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I never tire of repeating this. And it looks like it’s time to drag it out it once again.
It was years ago that feminists within universities, in an attempt to lend credibility to feminist positions, went so far as to proclaim all commonly accepted knowledge as a male creation and thus dangerous to women. Their polemics led them to see as their mission nothing less than the transformation of society into a ‘gyno-centered’ world on the grounds that a woman’s point of view was far superior to that of any man’s. They furthered this thinking by stating that the tools of logic and science must be replaced with the far superior female instruments: focus on feelings and anecdotal evidence. This led mathematics professor Dr. Margarita Levin to dryly remark, “One still wants to know if feminists’ airplanes would stay airborne for feminist engineers.”
@timh The group I’m in here mostly works with constraining cosmological parameters. We’re part of the DES and LSST collaborations.
I have about five or six books in my collection about the Spanish Civil War and I’ve recently tried to find where I saw this pearl but I can’t dog it up again. Here it is:
When the USSR got control of the army they didn’t do it by having a majority or even the commander in every battalion. With just one or two people in influential positions in each battalion they were able through their party discipline to control the entire army.
What we see here is a few people with some minor influence that are joining organizations and boorishly dominating the conversation. It works.
I’m not surprised by this development.
Conversations about heavenly bodies are inherently sexist.
This is a joke, right? We haven’t even confirmed the existence of anything for astrobiologists to study.
In effect, all biologists can consider themselves astrobiologists?
I was thinking the other direction. It’s a fictional field of study, so a group of role players put together a fake organization to make some performance art satirizing the way left wing politics infests legitimite fields of study.
Perhaps you can answer something for me, if the edges of the visible universe are accelerating away from the center (origin?), how can the age of universe be confidently asserted?
It’s funny to me how these people constantly bray about “diversity” while they themselves are busily placing everyone into groups of like-minded or like-ethnicity clones where no diversity is countenanced. Especially the most important diversity of all: diversity of thought and ideas.
For every cosmological model, there are a set of parameters we actually measure. The age of the universe is an indirect value we can calculate from these parameters. So our certainty in an indirect value such as the age of universe depends on how accurate the measurements of these parameters are.
No, it’s actually a serious field with a respectable reputation within astrophysics. I do a tiny bit of work in astrobiology, so I can tell you a little about what goes on. Now, SETI (Search for ExtratTerrestrial Intelligence) is still a bit fringey, so don’t get those mixed up. The SETI guys are looking for messages from aliens. The astrobiologists would be excited if someone found evidence of single-celled bacteria on another planet.
But astrobiologists aren’t intending to study alien bacteria—not any time soon—because as you point out, no one has found such a thing yet. That’s not what “astrobiology” means. Astrobiology is about the search for the conditions for and signs of life on other planets. They’re doing things like looking for planets around other stars (exoplanets); figuring out what could make a planet habitable; working out whether water and carbon are necessary for life or if an organism could live with other chemicals and other forms of metabolism; designing telescopes that can look at an exoplanet’s atmospheric chemistry to test for signs of life; and so on. One of my friends who’s a radio-galaxy astronomer got into astrobiology by coming up with a way to look for signs of some equivalent of DNA in a planet’s atmosphere using polarized light. I, who mostly study galaxies and quasars, got into it by working on which kinds of galaxies are the most likely to produce “habitable” planets.
Since exoplanets were first discovered over a quarter-century ago, astrobiology has ramped up into a growing field with a lot of opportunity. There are over 4,000 exoplanets known. (I’m including the whole Kepler Telescope catalog of likely exoplanets, but the ones that are solidly confirmed so far is about 3,000—the statistics indicate that something like >90% of the candidate planets will turn out to be real detections, so I’m pretty confident in the higher number.) We’re building new telescopes that will search for smaller and smaller planets around sun-like stars, pushing the detection limits down to Earth-like planets in their habitable zone. We were almost there when the Kepler’s guidance equipment failed. One of my friends has come up with a way to search for exoplanets using Canon EOS Rebel digital cameras with an 85-mm lens. No telescope. We’ve tried it out and were able to detect Jupiter-sized planets.
Anyway, I hope this explains what astrobiology actually is.
Exactly. And I’ve seen them argue explicitly in favor of hiring discrimination against religious people, for example.
The lack of self-awareness is stunning.
This^ is fascinating!
The left used to talk about ‘equality’. But now that they’ve amassed power, they’ve proven every bit as capable of discrimination and prejudiced as they accused others of being.
They don’t really want equality, they just want to change the pecking order! They have no moral authority.
Yes, I believe this is exactly it.