In an article titled The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis, scientist Satoshi Kanazawa relates his experiences when his scientific investigation ran headlong into political correctness. It's a dismaying tale for anyone interested in advancing science, but not really surprising – scientists are, after all, as human as the rest of us. As I read his article (which relates a story in psychology), I was thinking about climate science and how political correctness and financial rewards have distorted the field. The impact of political correctness on science varies wildly according to the particualr field of science. For example, political correctness has little impact on nuclear physics, mathematics, or inorganic chemistry – but a lot on anthropology, psychology, climatology.
The only defense I know against this sort of thing is to be a determined skeptic – don't believe anything without reproducible evidence to support it...
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