Eh this might be a little lackluster but here goes.
History is a progression towards an ideal. My initial reaction to that was- That’s stupid. Whose history? Which history? From where and what version? Does this insinuate that we never fall back two steps for everyone one we take? What is this ideal? I’m going to choose to assume the theory is much more complex than just that first sentence and move on.
What I gleaned from the presentation was this: Science is conducted how it is, for the reasons it is, because of the way we are socialized and because of the context of our society. We study breast cancer more than lung cancer because lung cancer is your own damn fault and we believe in personal responsibility here. We created Viagra because erectile dysfunction is way more pressing than creating a birth control that doesn’t make women crazy and threaten them with ever impending death (and if you think that shit is harmless read the insert some time and remember the patch).
We view science as unchangeable factoids. Or at the very least factoids that have very very little chance of changing. But in reality what we have is just a series of patterns created under the conditions of our choosing that can change at any time. For years the only symptoms of a heart attack you ever heard about were pain in the chest and arm. We defined it this way because we were studying white men. We didn’t analyze our society through racial, and gender bias terms so we saw no problem with that. But then they started to expand the study to men of color and women and suddenly the symptoms of a heart attack expand to include fatigue, nausea, extreme sweating, ect.
Science is “tainted” by the socialization process but every person who ever studies anything will be equally tainted (if in a different way). It’s inescapable. We can hope to reduce this through cross cultural peer review, but as globalization begins to dominate and the access to resources commands who studies what and how this gains from simple peer review is limited.
Science tries to be objective, but there is no view from no where. We have read a number of articles over the semester discussing false objectivity and this presentation sort of focused that concern of false objectivity into the scientific (medical) world.
1 comment:
Eh this might be a little lackluster but here goes.
History is a progression towards an ideal. My initial reaction to that was- That’s stupid. Whose history? Which history? From where and what version? Does this insinuate that we never fall back two steps for everyone one we take? What is this ideal? I’m going to choose to assume the theory is much more complex than just that first sentence and move on.
What I gleaned from the presentation was this: Science is conducted how it is, for the reasons it is, because of the way we are socialized and because of the context of our society. We study breast cancer more than lung cancer because lung cancer is your own damn fault and we believe in personal responsibility here. We created Viagra because erectile dysfunction is way more pressing than creating a birth control that doesn’t make women crazy and threaten them with ever impending death (and if you think that shit is harmless read the insert some time and remember the patch).
We view science as unchangeable factoids. Or at the very least factoids that have very very little chance of changing. But in reality what we have is just a series of patterns created under the conditions of our choosing that can change at any time. For years the only symptoms of a heart attack you ever heard about were pain in the chest and arm. We defined it this way because we were studying white men. We didn’t analyze our society through racial, and gender bias terms so we saw no problem with that. But then they started to expand the study to men of color and women and suddenly the symptoms of a heart attack expand to include fatigue, nausea, extreme sweating, ect.
Science is “tainted” by the socialization process but every person who ever studies anything will be equally tainted (if in a different way). It’s inescapable. We can hope to reduce this through cross cultural peer review, but as globalization begins to dominate and the access to resources commands who studies what and how this gains from simple peer review is limited.
Science tries to be objective, but there is no view from no where. We have read a number of articles over the semester discussing false objectivity and this presentation sort of focused that concern of false objectivity into the scientific (medical) world.
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