Scientists aghast as Trump not repudiated

Nature, the leading British science publication, endorsed Joe Biden and now reports:

Scientists aghast as hopes for landslide Biden election victory vanish With so many votes cast for Trump in US election, some researchers conclude that they must work harder to communicate the importance of facts, science and truth.

As the possibility of a land-slide victory for US presidential candidate Joe Biden vanished in the wee hours of 4 November, some scientists saw the deadlocked election as a sign of their own failure to communicate the importance of science, evidence and truth to the general population.

“This election is not going to be a decisive national categorical repudiation of Trump, regardless of who wins the presidency,” says James Lindley Wilson, a political scientist who studies elections and democracy at the University of Chicago. ...

But as in 2016, Trump outperformed polls suggesting that his opponent was positioned for a potential landslide victory. ...

“Evidently a lot of Floridians are in denial about climate change,” says Oreskes. “How do we fix that? I don’t know, but obviously what we’ve been doing has not worked.”

Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York who tracks science policy, worries about what the results of the election say about the value that many Americans put on truth.

The article was written before Biden claimed victory.

I am a big believer in science, evidence, and truth, but never had any understanding of any scientific issue, ever before he went senile. There was no scientific reason to prefer Biden over Trump. The election was decided over other issues.

I am aghast at how the scientific establishment has been politicized, and signed onto a left-wing agenda.

Biden's first act, as apparent President-elect, was science-related:

A professor with the Yale School of Medicine will serve as a co-chair of President-elect Joe Biden’s task force on the coronavirus, according to a report from CNN. ...

According to her biography on the Yale School of Medicine website, Nunez-Smith’s “research focuses on promoting health and health care equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on supporting health care workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of health care quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases.”

Pres. Trump appointed experts for their competence in the field. This is obviously being appointed for her skin color, sex, and attention to "structurally marginalized populations", whatever they are. Her research does not even involve communicable diseases, and may not know any more about COVID-19 than I do.

If these scientists and science organizations were really so focused on "science, evidence and truth", then they would be criticizing this appointment. They will not.

Update: Scott Aaronson celebrates the Biden-Harris win, and says "I would love for Twitter to deactivate Trump’s account". No mention of any possibility of new policies that would make America a better place.

The comments point out that the Trump administration lacked the foreign policy disasters of the previous Bush and Obama administrations. One comment points out that 70 million citizens voted for Trump, and they certainly did not believe that Trump was sent by God to fight Satanic pedophiles, as Aaronson had claimed. It is clear that his support for Biden was just Trump hatred.

Another comment says:

I don’t see how anyone who has listened to Trump’s diatribes over the past four years and still chose to vote for him could be anything other than a right wing authoritarian.

So we have 70 million right-wing authoritarians? No, I don't know any.

If Trump were really an authoritarian, he would have used the COVID-19 crisis to seize new powers, and to order compliance with his policies. He did not. Instead, Joe Biden has promised to order dictatorial mandates such as wearing masks.