I’m zipping my lips and encouraging her to find her own way, but it’s really hard isn’t it?

In the 70s, environmental concern and protection was something everyone could agree to work together on. It wasn’t until some people began making the denial of science a platform that science was seen as a partisan issue.

I shared my story to sort of illustrate that a childhood doesn’t need to seem traumatic to anyone but the child. Our moving around was exactly what a couple of my kids needed to further develop the resilience, openness, curiosity, and novelty seeking they were born with. Moving definitely enriched their lives and helped to develop their personalities and characters as well as drawing our family closer as a unit. But the one child experienced the same lifestyle as traumatic enough to trigger mental illness. She definitely has attachment disorders in spite of being firmly attached to me and to her siblings. Her dad wasn’t around much during her early years due to work. She is learning, but she is prone to attaching too quickly to the wrong people due to having to leave people repeatedly as a child. I think a child can be mismatched with perfectly good parents or a lovely family culture and wind up a mess in spite of nothing being actually “wrong” with is they are raised. Does that make sense? I’m thinking of a wild child matched with a sweet, permissive parent or a sweet, introverted artist matched with a logical, low-emotion parent or a loud, extroverted, quick to anger, quick to forgive type. Not even disagreeing with you, Dawn. Mostly just externally processing it for my own sake.

Interesting. Thanks for the link. This is a new avenue for me. We moved a lot when our kids were little. My husband was always getting transferred across the country. Everyone but one of us thought moving was a great adventure. She mourned and cried for months every time we left. The first time we left she was only 18 months old and she screamed for four days from Florida to OK. She developed separation anxiety and screamed at bedtime for almost a year after that. I thought she was too little to understand what was happening, but she remembers. She was completely undone. She went on to self-harm and worse during her teens and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She couldn’t get her meds right until I mentioned trying Ritalin to her doctor in the hospital. She was skeptical, but I told her that Ritalin was the only thing that smoothed out my husband’s highs and lows. He has never been diagnosed, but his behavior when he was young followed similar patterns. Somehow the Ritalin helps her mood stabilizers to do their jobs properly. She isn’t diagnosable with adhd behavior-wise but somehow the meds work. There is just SO much we have to learn about mental illness.

Well this topic has me worked up. One of my girls went back to school for comp sci after earning a degree in Neuroscience because of the thankless hours and pay as well as the constant fights in funding she was looking forward to. She had a great passion her whole life to learn about the brain, but came away completely disillusioned that she was going to be able to have a life in the field if she was going to also have children. My oldest is doing a PhD in science and policy. I see how incredibly hard she is working and how devoted she and her peers are to trying to interrupt the path we’re on. Could it be fear on the part of people who refuse to believe the evidence that we’re destroying ourselves? Stick our finger in our ears and say, “lalala can’t hear you.” If we believe we’re smarter than the people who are warning us then we’ll be ok. Anyway, I didn’t sleep well and worked myself up unto a mini panic attack at 3am. I feel as if we’re in one of those old movies where we’re in the wagon careening toward a cliff, but we’ve decided we’re just going to stay put and believe really hard there’s really no canyon down there. This topic makes me scared and sad and I’d better step away and silence the thread for a while. Hugs, everyone.

Also, historically when we fund science with our taxes we cure diseases and learn to build rockets. Leaving funding to business will support discoveries that enrich business.We have to pay them to work for us rather than for corporations

Middle eastern science was far advanced compared to west. The church put a prohibition on autopsy and actively suppressed scientific discovery when they believed it contradicted church doctrine. Still, as you point out science found a way, often illicitly, to advance itself in spite of the public attribution of natural phenomena to god’s will or to magic.

h Bliegoat, I think you may be right here. Science and scientists got arrogant. I said upthread that science has a PR problem and my does largely because science used to believe it was “settled.” There were to be no arguments against plastics or the right way to rear a child, processed food, which was obviously better than the old fashioned stuff that people eat right out of the ground, for goodness sake. They didn’t include women in medical experimentation. Because of that arrogance, the science community is loathe to make pronouncements about anything. They speak of confidence levels rather than giving advice for the most part. That can make them come off as wishy washy or not fully confident of their findings, but it’s an attempt to remain objective and open to continue leaening If anyone is to blame for breathless pronouncements that are later shifted or retracted, it’s certain media outlets who goniff half cocked without a complete understanding of the material. I realize that contradicts what I said earlier regarding the sand discussion. But the 24 hour news flood has forced writers to churn out filler and human interest stories. A careful reader will notice the caveats and warnings about confidence levels and sample sizes in most of these articles, but most of us are reading the news in great gulps and only process the pieces of the story designed to grab attention. That is why it is so striking when many pieces written by the most respected people in science and journalism are all sounding the same alarm in certainties and dire language. Science doesn’t usually present itself that way. That alone should make us sit up and take notice. The field has a a lot to atone for, as Bluegoat pointed out, but they are frightened for our future and they’re trying to help us.

“The sun moves in the sky—I see it with my own eyes” resembles the discussion upthread about sand, TBH In the Middle Ages, fear of science prevented western civilization from understanding the human body or discovering germ theory which led to a decimation of the population by the plague and other diseases. I’m afraid we’re standing on a similar precipice because we have failed to heed the lesson. We fear and devaluate what we don’t understand. We may not survive this second go-round at all; there may be no future generations.

I didn’t mean to condescend, you were admittedly responding with a rabbit trail and I was trying to get the conversation back on track. I said, “You’ll have to give me some examples of people who changed our understanding of science who were regarded as untrained by their contemporaries” but you responded by giving me examples of highly educated divergent thinkers whose ideas were ridiculed by some (and also hailed by many) instead, which isn’t really what I asked for. I agree with you that Galieo narrowly escaped the rack because of knee-jerk suspicion of science. Copernicus only published after he was dying anyway because he knew he’d be put to death. The “correct” view of the day wasn’t informed by science, but by superstition and trusting one’s own eyes above the knowledge of someone who had devoted his life to understanding and communicating the true phenomena. That seems to be what you are saying, correct?

I don’t believe we’re in immediate danger of our government embracing and funding ANY science, even bad science. Also Lysenko is a straw man. Soviet support and funding of bad science and suppression of free thought leading to devastating consequences for the population isn’t really relevant to a discussion of US policy. Or on second thought...

All interesting points for a different discussion, none of which have anything to do with the general lack of regard and knee jerk suspicion of science we are developing as a societal norm.

Reported.

That’s just it, most of us on this board don’t have the background knowledge to reject the assertions of respected scientific and journalistic institutions, but you see it happen daily. I’m pointing out that untrained people, including many politicians and people in business with the power and the money actively dismiss science as trickery, which is arrogant, disrespectful and dangerous. Science is never actually settled; it always evolving and deepening. You’ll have to give me some examples of people who changed our understanding of science who were regarded as untrained by their contemporaries. Unorthodox, sure. Uneducated? No. As I said above, skepticism is good. Skepticism causes us to question, to work through problems, to experiment and invent. But the suspicion that science is somehow out to fool us is something new. Our country didn’t used to be like this. We watch movies like Hidden Figures or Apollo 13 and feel proud to be part of a country that produces such incredible minds. The hard work, the talent, the perseverance—we have our kids watch because we want them to see those people as role models. Well guess what? There are people out there right now who are just as talented, hard working, and passionate but we no longer give them the funds or the respect they need to do their jobs. We used to approach novel ideas with curiosity and excitement and national pride. We have very little to take pride in anymore.

People who made those leaps were educated in the field though. In some cases they created their fields of knowledge.

That’s right, scientific understanding isn’t a linear discovery of a line of facts. Instead it works more like a spiral or maybe a footpath through the woods. You wander a little bit here, a little there, backtrack, come to a conclusion, discover something else you didn’t know before, readjust this piece, throw out that piece, and explanations are constantly expanded and revised as we continue learning. Think about how long the took to nail down planetary theory! Each interation came a little closer to the true nature of the solar system. The history of science is beautiful when observing from a distance of centuries, but it’s messy as heck up close as it’s happening.

This is a classical education board. Most of are more than roughly aquainted Galileo, Curie, Newton, Kepler, Edison, Einstein... we study their lives and admire their work. We appreciate that we no longer live in the Middle Ages where we pee in a bucket, burn literal witches, and die at 32 with three teeth left in our heads. Thank Science for that. Healthy skepticism supports critical thinking and allows us to make up our own minds, but habitual suspicion is corrosive. It doesn’t make us smarter than everyone to distrust everything, even those who have devoted their lives to improving or saving ours

Don't freak out when they decide to 'take a break' from college right before senior year, move into a 425sqft apt, and get a job as a server at a hotel. Seriously, don't do that.

My husband's family is from Ecuador. We met when he was 25. I was agog the first time I heard him call his mother "Mommy." Turns out it was Mami :) Totally normal and not at all infantile in South America.

That is actually the point. The US typically denies the problem, refuses to accept the science, creates an emergency, and then panics in reaction to it. If we would meet these issues head on (shortages of natural resources, climate change, abortion, poverty) and dig for the root causes we could use our historic and unique ingenuity and problem solving abilities to help us adapt to a changing world. Instead, here we are denying the problem, refusing to see what is right in front of us, ignoring the causes, and throwing up our hands saying, "Well, I suppose it is what it is."

I misunderstood. He just sounds so similar to an old roommate of my daighter’s. They were close when he was having a mental break and it jumped out at me that he didn’t believe in mental illness either.

We can run out of habitable places to live and grow food just like we can run out of the type of sand we need. We have plenty of desert sand but apparently it is too smooth and fine grained to be of use. The particular type of sand we need is growing scarce and we’re already seeing some of the effects. Whole islands are vanishing, Singapore and other islands are hoarding, and there is a violent black market for sand. These are actually, verifiable facts. We can run out of clean water in spite of huge oceans and we can run out of sand in spite of huge deserts.

You are closer to the situation, so you have a fuller picture, but that’s a lot of red flags in one paragraph. {{{hugs}}}

High levels of confidence in one’s political understanding coupled with low levels of actual knowledge correlated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180530154457.htm

Are you sure he isn’t schizophrenic?