Alex and Rudy welcome historian Cliff Conner for a discussion of his
recent book The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump. They
discuss how this tragedy is a tragedy of capitalist science which is
seen across the capitalist world, the role of science as an
unchallengeable source of authority, and how that is squared with the
anti-intellectualism needed to sustain a power structure, the influence
of money in regulation and research, the precautionary principle and the
risk-assessment principles for commercializing new products and the use
of reductionism in research and how that is inseparable from the
bourgeois mentality. The conversation then moves to the American
university and the effect of the Bayh-Dole Act, and the relationship
between military spending and research, including the US’s economic
addiction to “weaponized Keynesianism” and how American policy makers do
not care about the failures of military technology as long as the money
keeps flowing. They discuss the ideals of objectivity and neutrality,
‘value-free’ science as an ideological tool, and how the social
sciences can strive for objectivity. They end off talking about what
changes and what things will stay the same with Biden, and how
non-capitalist economies have shown that other models of science are
possible where innovation did not rely on profit as a motive.
https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/11/28/the-tragedy-of-american-science-with-cliff-conner/
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