The United Nations demonstrates again that politics and ideology count for far more than real science. From Lubos Motl: Six days ago, the UN boss Ban Ki-moon announced 26 members of a Scientific Advisory Board for the U.N. that will be hosted by UNESCO: UN Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board to strengthen connection between science and policy I learned about this news story because Fabiola Gianotti, the former spokeswoman for the ATLAS collaboration at CERN (who led the discovery of the Higgs boson), is one of the 26 folks who were appointed – one of the 3-4 “real top scientists” in the board. Otherwise I must say that the selection underscores the world organization’s political and ideological distortion of the scientific process. You would expect that if scientists are advising the world organization, they should be representative of the scientific community, kind of. However, you don’t need to look too carefully if you want to see how the members of the board were actually being identified. First of all, either 14/26 or 13/26 of the members are female. Nothing against that but this – clearly politically correct – proportion has nothing to do with the actual composition of the scientific community which is vastly different, closer to 1/6 than to 1/2. Second, the nationality of the members is extremely far from the distribution quantifying where science (and most of science) is actually being developed at the beginning of the 21st century. Just look at the homelands of the 26 members: South Africa, U.S., Barbados, Philippines, Australia, Oman, Ethiopia, Russia, Italy, China, Germany, Bulgaria, Argentina, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Brazil, India, U.S., Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, France, Kenya, Israel, Malaysia, Egypt. Well, this distribution may reflect the number of votes that countries have in the UN but as a collection of representatives of the world science, it is just silly. The U.S. will have two people in the board; one of them is female and one of them is an (Asian) Indian American. But the actual percentage of science that is being advanced in the U.S. is closer to 1/2 than to 1/13… The disciplines of the scientists are heavily distorted, too. About 1/2 of the members are involved or marginally involved with various types of environmental, ecological, climatic, “sustainable”, or biodiversity activism. This gives a huge overrepresentation to this class of folks whose net contribution to science is safely lower than 1/10, much less than 1/2 indicated by the composition of the board. Explains a bit about the UN’s IPCC, too…
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 21:18:07 +0000
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