Proving the opposite

A professor of mathematics complains that unlike the fortunate Chinese, America does not enjoy the benefit of being ruled by scientists:

For complex historical reasons, Americans have long privately dismissed scientists and mathematicians as impractical and elitist, even while publicly paying lip service to them. One reason is that an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs and scientists are sometimes tone-deaf to the social environment in which they state their conclusions. A more politically sensitive approach to problems and issues, on the other hand, often leads to positions that simply don’t jibe with the facts, no matter how delicately phrased….

Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate scientists cooking up the global warming “hoax,” the health establishment using vaccines to bring about socialism – it’s hard to imagine mainstream leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.

I always enjoy the left-liberal arguments which revolve around the idea that because someone, somewhere, might be laughing at an idea, it must not be true. And, of course, given that there is no global warming and climate scientists did cook up one of the most colossal scams in human history, the professor manages to explain more cogently than he imagined why Americans, for all their flaws, still aren’t dumb enough to vote for scientists.

The problem isn’t so much that “an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with religious and cultural beliefs”, it is that ideology hidden under a veneer of an abstract, scientific approach to problems and issues often leads to conclusions that are at odds with readily observable reality.

Americans don’t refuse to vote for scientists because they think scientists threaten their beliefs, Americans refuse to vote for them because they conclude, on the basis of considerable evidence, scientists are foolish and stupid.