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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   32504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I mean Medicine for instance is an example of a STEM field which can't function with the level of ideological mono polarity currently present in it - anything remotely politically controversial is super unreliable.

I would not count medicine as STEM. Also, there are plenty of subfields of medicine which are not very subject to ideology.

I would expect a Nazi obstetrician who wants to help Aryan women to give birth to new soldiers and soldier-makers for the Fuehrer and a minority ethnic radical feminist obstetrician to show a high degree of instrumental convergence in the long run.

The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry -- are generally few and far between. In most stuff which is tangentially related to medicine and controversial, the controversy is orthogonal to the science part: abortion, death penalty, MAID, embryo selection, germline editing, organ donation debates are all not about what is the case, but what we should do. Sure, sometimes activists smuggle in arguments masquerading as science, but mostly there are no open questions of fact there.

Every kernel of medicine has room for controversy, as Nybbler points out below. Where to prioritize resources, how research works (what do you do about males disproportionately signing up to be test dummies? ....a million other things. Some of it is certainly the "social" end of medicine like how to train and teach (is advocacy required?) but the hard science parts of it have plenty of dimensions.

Ethics are also fundamental to medicine and fundamentally on the spectrum of controversy.

The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry

Or kidney function?

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