A Plan To Defend Against the War on Science

A few snippets from the article...
...in Scientific American By Shawn Otto on October 9, 2016:

"Science is never partisan but it is inherently political, because its antiauthoritarian, evidence-based conclusions either confirm or challenge somebody’s cherished ideological or economic interests—and that is always political. Considered this way, politics is not a simple left-right continuum; it also has a vertical component between authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism. Thus there are authoritarians like Mao and Stalin on the left; Hitler and Mussolini on the right, but what they have in common is intolerance to the sort of open exchange that is central to art, science, and human progress.

This vertical tension between experts and authoritarians helps explain what is going on in both the Republican Party and in the European Union with the Brexit vote and the rise of a new authoritarianism, and why it is so corrosive to science. The argument is between antiauthoritarians who support science and evidence, and authoritarians who have had enough of experts.
This problem can be expected to worsen in the coming years, particularly if authoritarian candidates continue to be elected with the aid of a news media that treats any view, no matter how unsupported, as legitimate...

...Such rejection is essentially an authoritarian argument that says “I don’t care about the evidence; what I say/what this book says/what my tribe says/what my wallet says goes.” This approach is all too human, and is not necessarily conscious. It is, rather, reflective of the sort of confirmation bias scientists themselves continually guard against.
Francis Bacon noted the problem at the beginning of the scientific revolution, observing: “What a man had rather were true he more readily believes.”
Conservatives notice that many scientists are, in fact, left-leaning. If one is not a scientist, and is conservative, a shorthand is brought to bear, with suspicion of the science as—rather than an objective statement—being a politically motivated argument from the left."

The whole article (relatively long read) is @:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ar-on-science/