It may or may not be a perfect term, but that’s twisting the meaning right off the bat. First it is equating science with intelligence, like they are synonyms. And while I am sure scientists do well above average on IQ and other measures of some kinds of intelligence, they may not do well in other ways.
More important you are making it as if the term is used mainly about scientists. In fact it is used about science groupies and technocrat supporters.
But sciencetards, to me, as a term is referring to a naive belief that 1) current science is final science 2) if something is not confirmed by mainstream science then you are moron to believe in it 3) lacking any sense of the history of science 4) lacking any sense of the biases in science, both epistemological and political - caused big business or caused by scientists tending to see themselves as NOT like religions people, and choosing their positions and research based on what for them seems like an old battle between good and evil. 5) have the false sense that they do not use the epistemologies of the people they hate and think are stupid.
I think scientism is a better term - aim at the belief system and not the people. Not because one needs to be nice, but I think it makes it clear that we are talking about a way of related to scientific research and not science as a whole. A naive and dangerous way of relating to it and using it in debate.
Here’s an example of sciencetardism. I was talking to a relative of my wife about how I caught a cold. I said I got caught in a near freezing rain, got a deep chill and got sick. He said ‘but we know now that colds are caused by viruses.’ He was condescending. I said, sure, I likely have a virus, but why did I get sick. It is not mutually exclusive to say that my illness is a virus and my illness was caused by my getting extremely cold. He said it has nothing to do with the cold. I said anything that causes stress can weaken the immune systems ability to fight viruses, for example, and we are surrounded by viruses all the time. Suddenly he started mulling. Me, I know I have a much better chance of getting sick if I get cold to the bones suddenly. I can find scientific research to back up why. But here’s the thing, right then I was just thinking for myself, based on my sense of my own body and intuition. I managed to present it in pseudoacademic terms, which is how most academic people speak anyway, so he gave me some minimal respect. If I had been one of those not so educated people who you could be seen as looking down on in your post, he likely would have just thought I was those trumptards, though not wiht their politics for hte most part.
People with academic backgrounds have been exposed to a lot of information, but they really have very little systematic, problem solving intelligence around it, unless they went on to work in that specific area. I have seen encouters between academics, who are not biologists, with theists where both sides are equally misinformed about evolutionary theory.
Sciencetardism is have a quasi religous attitude about certain beliefs one correctly or incorrectly thinks are true because they come in some way from scientific research and because other people in your social circles also think it is true.
Look aet how liberals accept the pharma/psychiatric model of emotional suffering. They should have the philosophical, sociological, and scientific tools - educated liberals, that is - to see how much damaging BS there is in that model. But they don’t. They laugh at the scientologists with their anti-psychiatry stance - and the scientologists deserve to be laughed at - but not for their anti-psychiatric stance, though I think they make it too utterly binary.
I think less well educated people actually stand a better chance of having a gut, there’s something fucked up with that stuff, response.
I don’t see where the ‘but’ comes in. If it is that way, then it is that way. He may agree as to the why or one of the whys.
It might mean that they are extremely clever about a number of things, but about certain things, where values come in or to question something paradigmatic would be emotionally threatening, they are stupid.
I’m not sure I want astrophysicists determining social policy. The ones I know have trouble relating to women, for example. (I am sure there are asome astrophysicists who are women. I don’t know how they relate to women.) I don’t like where the technocrats are taking society. And these are some very smart people who tend to be liberal socially and somewhat conservative economically.
I think that is a media created assessment. Extremely smart people believe in conspiracies. Extrememly smart people are a small percentage of any political group. Lefties used to be conspiracy theorists, but seeing this now identified with the right, they tone down their own conspiracy theories.
Everybody ran after the Bush administration when they wanted to go into Iraq over WMD’s. Which was what can actually be called a conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, since it was BS. I think less educated people are willing to consider it possible that something fundamentally and systematically wrong is happening. They can be manipulated as to what this is and who is to blame and what the solution is. But the educated person is much better at rationalizing, in fact they are better at dealing with counterevidence and not being affected by it. I just read a book summing up cognitive studies on this.