Required Reading

Jake Young explains the apparent anti-science attitude among us wingnuts:

To summarize, I think some Republicans do not reject science per se, rather what they reject is the tendency for scientific facts to be used for planning. By planning, I mean active organization of a system to achieve a desirable (to some) outcome. Planning can be applied to any complex system -- societies, economies, climate, etc., and it is predicated on the assumption the knowledge of how a system works gives one the ability to control the outcome.

But wait, there's more. The very next post on the same blog includes a comment from MarkH explaining why we right-wing crackpots insist on extra evidence:

I think you've gone off the deep end here Jake. The doctors aren't having their rights violated. This is about criminalizing the poacher. And to some degree, doctors are the property of the state. It is impossible to have medical education without significant state subsidization, and although I don't know the specifics of every single country in Africa, that's a safe generalization to make.

For instance, here in the US, your medical education is heavily subsidized by the state. Probably on the order of 100k/student. Resident training programs also receive about 100k/resident from government entitlement programs.

In other words, the existence of a government program is used as a precedent for more government. That means we must take the disadvantage of a state-run fix for a problem and double it. Equivalently, we could insist on twice as much evidence as we would if there weren't a political solution planned. (In the hypothetical case of a government program that produced an attitude of “Not again! We've done that already.” it might make sense to insist on less evidence than usual.)