You could have far more latitude speaking up and making your case on a sensitive topic someone else raised, even if you privately gave them the idea. Taboos can only really be enforced so long as common knowledge exists that this-is-a-taboo-we’re-enforcing; doesn’t take much to destroy common knowledge about any social assumption.
This is true, but if the goal is to minimize risk, it’s hard to do. It depends in part on the size, coordination, power, and zeal of those who proclaim the falsehood.
The Catholic Church didn’t bother prohibiting Copernicus’ ideas until 70+ years after his death, when the reformation was underway and the Church was less obviously dominant and could less easily tolerate internal dissent, and also after Kepler and Brahe both put heliocentrism on a more sound empirical and theoretical footing and associated it with the Protestants. That’s why (in addition to annoying and insulting those in power) Galileo was put under house arrest for speaking up, even if he technically published his Dialog with permission from the inquisition.
What size coalition do you need to quietly assemble, without being caught or anyone breaking the silence, with what kind of structure and voice and power, in order to speak up relatively safely, when trying to speak against a taboo truth? I obviously don’t expect anything like a closed-form analytic answer, but unless there’s some easily-describable-and-communicable heuristic (with plausible deniability since this is the kind of thing that can come to be looked down on due to association with taboo truths), we’re right in the realm of expecting scientists to have, on average, an unreasonable level of political savvy.
I think a key distinction here is any of this only helps if people care more about the truth of the issue at hand than whatever realpolitik considerations the issue has tangentially gotten pulled into. And yeah, absent “unreasonable levels of political savvy”, academics are mostly relying on academic issues usually being far enough from the icky world of politics to be openly discussed, at least outside of a few seriously diseased disciplines where the rot is well and truly set in. The powers that be seem to only care about the truth of an issue when it starts directly impinging on their day to day; people seem to find it noteworthy when this isn’t true of a given leader.
I don’t think this will ever be fully predictable. E.g. in the US I don’t think anyone really saw the magnitude of the backlash against election workers, academics, and security folks coming until it became headline news. And arguably that’s what a near-miss looks like.
You could have far more latitude speaking up and making your case on a sensitive topic someone else raised, even if you privately gave them the idea. Taboos can only really be enforced so long as common knowledge exists that this-is-a-taboo-we’re-enforcing; doesn’t take much to destroy common knowledge about any social assumption.
This is true, but if the goal is to minimize risk, it’s hard to do. It depends in part on the size, coordination, power, and zeal of those who proclaim the falsehood.
The Catholic Church didn’t bother prohibiting Copernicus’ ideas until 70+ years after his death, when the reformation was underway and the Church was less obviously dominant and could less easily tolerate internal dissent, and also after Kepler and Brahe both put heliocentrism on a more sound empirical and theoretical footing and associated it with the Protestants. That’s why (in addition to annoying and insulting those in power) Galileo was put under house arrest for speaking up, even if he technically published his Dialog with permission from the inquisition.
What size coalition do you need to quietly assemble, without being caught or anyone breaking the silence, with what kind of structure and voice and power, in order to speak up relatively safely, when trying to speak against a taboo truth? I obviously don’t expect anything like a closed-form analytic answer, but unless there’s some easily-describable-and-communicable heuristic (with plausible deniability since this is the kind of thing that can come to be looked down on due to association with taboo truths), we’re right in the realm of expecting scientists to have, on average, an unreasonable level of political savvy.
I think a key distinction here is any of this only helps if people care more about the truth of the issue at hand than whatever realpolitik considerations the issue has tangentially gotten pulled into. And yeah, absent “unreasonable levels of political savvy”, academics are mostly relying on academic issues usually being far enough from the icky world of politics to be openly discussed, at least outside of a few seriously diseased disciplines where the rot is well and truly set in. The powers that be seem to only care about the truth of an issue when it starts directly impinging on their day to day; people seem to find it noteworthy when this isn’t true of a given leader.
I don’t think this will ever be fully predictable. E.g. in the US I don’t think anyone really saw the magnitude of the backlash against election workers, academics, and security folks coming until it became headline news. And arguably that’s what a near-miss looks like.