This is my grandmother in the hospital. She is smoking. She is talking to my mother, who is smoking, in the hospital. Did I mention this was literally inside a hospital?
This is a reprint of Sometimes, Scientists are Idiots at Earthy Robot. Because, writing at 2, 4 and 6 am should be shared, even with grammatical issues.
OK, hear me out before you explode your brain goop all over the family iPad.
Scientists are often brilliant and can conceive of paradigms yet to be discovered by the rest of humanity. There are celebrity scientists and teachers that develop the minds of young humans in a way that others are simply ungifted at. These rare folk elevate the consciousness of humanity, in tiny amounts, day by day. And to the contrary, there are brilliant scientists that come up with ridiculously awful concepts, misinterpretations of fact and ideologies that can destroy entire species.
The word, "science" has been anthropomorphized in a way. The idea - the thought - the very word, SCIENCE, has a life of it's own now - a voice, if you will, especially on the Interweb. Because science is part of our everyday popular culture, we are often eager to transpose this voice into our own ideologies or to even forego logic, especially when it relates to our individual inability to change - which is so contrary to the true nature of scientific reason. It has become strangely easy to keep blinders on to avoid certain facts, and our love of science as a cute and cuddly creature can be used to distract others from that fact.
Let me offer an obscure and asinine scenario as an example:
Science "tells us" (see what I did there?) that jumping up and down is good for us. It helps our hearts, builds our muscles and promotes good circulation and reduces respiration strain over time.
Sounds reasonable enough and likely factual, right? But - hmm, I know of no scientific studies stating that jumping up and down on thumbtacks is bad for us. So, I am going to ignore that now and tell the world that:
Science "tells us" (again) that jumping up and down on thumbtacks is good for us. It helps our hearts, builds our muscles and promotes good circulation and reduces respiration strain over time. It also builds our tolerance to pain.
There is no "science" to directly disprove thumbtack jumping as a benefit. It's clearly common sense to avoid getting stabbed repeatedly in our appendages, but in my example, I have either an agenda or ignorance, both of which are troublesome misreprentations of true scientific inquiry .
Having an agenda helps me ignore the obvious truths at hand. Maybe I may want visitors driven to my website, really believe that thumbtacks are good for us, or the law I just legislated based on a huge donation from the thumbtack lobby requires support. Whatever the reason, the greater truth is ignored - it hurts like a mother f'er to jump on thumbtacks.
But this ridiculous example has no real world brethren, for sure, right? I am going to offer one example. It's a personal example. I know that it's factual, and it's scary.
After my father recently died, I was going through photographs to use in his memorial slideshow. There were literally hundreds of photographs of my parents and grandparents smoking cigarettes while holding us or near us as babies, toddlers, grade school kids and on and on. On it's own, this is shocking and sad.
However, the example at hand is in this photograph.
This is my grandmother in the hospital. She is smoking. She is talking to my mother, who is smoking, in the hospital. Did I mention this was literally inside a hospital?
Never mind the almost MadMen-esque look of my grandmother. That's for a different post on another day. Doctors allowed people to smoke in hospitals. Wait, what? It's true. And this photograph was taken after the 1964 Surgeon General's report on Smoking came out. This is after anyone with an ounce of scientific knowledge could smack their head and say, "Derrr". Yet, the government still allowed people to smoke in hospitals. Well, that all ended a long time ago, right? Umm. No.
According to Implementing smoking bans in American hospitals: results of a national survey, only 53.7% of hospitals implemented smoke-free policies before the JCAHO announced its tobacco control standard in September 1991. In 1991, I was twenty years old. This photograph was taken around the time of my birth. It took until I was twenty to ban something so painfully obvious that it defies reason. How is it possible that "science" allowed for smoking in a hospital? Because, sometimes, scientists are idiots.
Like the rest of us, scientists can cave to pressure or provide misleading reports and simply say, "The science tells us that it is OK."
There are many examples of scientific misrepresentations currently floating around the Twitters and Facebooks or the brains of politicians. We shouldn't throw our hands up and wander around like zombies when science is misrepresented. We need to use our heads, to learn scientific reasoning even if we are not scientists by trade. Informed opinions are a requirement in an age where knowledge is at our fingertips.
Climate Change science denial is probably the most pressing and egregious misrepresentation of science in the history of mankind. So, let's stop right now and collect ourselves because we are repeating our past mistakes, just as we did with smoking and our overall health.
Please don't use the photographs in this post other than to link to this article. They are actual family members and that would be lame of you.