The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Big Deal, It Was 11 Against 1
“Minnesota Vikings Beat Reporter”–job listing, Poynter.org, Aug. 14
Quito Dentists Rejoice
“Ecuador’s President Abandons No-Drilling Plan”–headline, Associated Press, Aug. 16
Popular Science Is Neither. Discuss.
The website of Popular Science magazine, beset with “trolls and spambots,” is shutting off user comments, explains its online content director, Suzanne LaBarre. We can sympathize with that–but not with this:
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
All scientific knowledge is empirically based and tentative; “scientific doctrine” is an oxymoron, and “scientific certainty” a relative term. LaBarre’s comments exemplify the danger of religion’s decline. Science is corrupted when people look to it to provide them with a belief system.
NOTE: The excerpts above are from the August 16 and Sept. 25 BOTW Archives.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
