Science isn't the root of all evil. Evil is nothing more than a subjective concept and people have been doing shit that others may consider to be "evil", long before science came around. Most scientists also aren't looking to control "weak and intelligent people and everyone in between". Most people who work in the sciences usually do so because they happen to be very interested in better understanding how the world around us works and/or because they happen to want to help others. For example, I remember our cognitive neuroscience professor talking about a student he had becoming inspired while going over the motor control section and is now doing research on new potential treatment plans that could be used to help those with motor control issues.
At least from my experience, a lot of people in sciences are usually pretty nice. Some do have superiority complexes, but many of them are really nice and nerdy and will even sometimes get caught up in explaining certain topics that find really cool. Hell, in my cognitive neuroscience textbook, the chapter for attention is much larger compared to the other chapters because the author happens to do a lot of research in that area and is very interested in it.
People doubting your ideas and even looking to disprove them isn't a bad thing. This contributes a lot to advancing our understanding of shit. I think a good example of this can be seen when looking at the fusiform face area (FFA). Basically, Nancy Kanwisher, from MIT, scanned the brains of 10 participants using fMRI with her goal being to try and see if there was an area of the brain specialized for processing faces. At the time, if I remember correctly, this was a debate amongst neuroscientists. She discovered that there was an area of the brain that seemed to activate strongly when viewing faces (the FFA). So, the FFA must be specialized for recognizing and processing faces and that is it, right? Then another scientist, Isabel Gauthier, came along and was like "wait a minute". She argued that FFA actually did more than processing faces. She ended up creating this study (that I can't help but find incredibly amusing) where she created around 30-40 of these weird looking creatures referred to as greebles. These greebles could be categorized into both different people and families. They then had participants study these greeble famillies and individuals for several weeks. The idea was to get them more familiar with the greebles in order for them to be able to recognize them. Basically, they were trying to approximate what we tend to do with humans faces.
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Some members of the greeble gang ^
Back in the beginning, when the participants were greeble novices, when comparing their brain activity when looking human faces vs the greebles, there was no FFA activity when looking at the greebles. Thus, Nancy must have been right! The FFA will never activate because it only activates when looking at human faces, right? Well, after training the participants to become greeble experts, they looked at their brain activity again and they found that the FFA activated when participants looked at different greeble faces. While the FFA is an area selected for faces and does consistently activated when viewing faces, as it turns out, it doesn't only activate for faces. It also activates in cases in which we are using our visual expertise.
The point here is that, scientists sometimes will disagree with other scientists and will try to prove them wrong and that isn't in of itself a bad thing. It can play an important role in helping us better understand different concepts and phenomena. Along with that, discrediting others ideas isn't an issue specific to science by can be seen a most other disciplines so I get the point of singling out science here.
While science isn't a subject I'm that good at, even I can't help but love it. Loved it since I was a kid and I still love it as an adult who sucks at it. I don't get why others feel the need to demonize it.
There is no such thing there being a scientific reason for why people kill themselves. When researching suicides, researchers are looking into common factors involved in suicide. People kill themselves for a variety of reasons that can vary a lot from person to person. In researching suicides, you would likely be looking more at what are the most common patterns seen amongst those who commit suicide in order to better understand what seems to be the strongest risk factors for suicide. From there, that information can then be used to aid in the creation of better treatment plans and preventative measures in order to reduce the number of suicides in the future.
A lot of the people most hellbent on closing this forum are not even scientists. I honestly can't even find too many studies on SaSu and the few that I can find seem to be lesser-known. Along with that, some seem to be a bit nuanced and, at least in their abstracts, note wanting to look into the potential benefits of a community like this, as well.
Along with that, science is in and of itself a neutral subject. How people use their scientific knowledge will differ from person to person.
Also, scientists rarely use Chicago. Chicago is more commonly used in history. APA, meanwhile, is more commonly used in behavioural and social sciences. In the hard sciences, ACS style is more commonly used in chemistry, biologists commonly use CSE, and I think that they may use AIP in physics, but idk. Academia in general is a dick about citation styles, not just the sciences. Also, I don't know if using the wrong citation style would be enough to get your research paper ignored. It's more likely that you'll end up with editors or peer reviewers leaving negative reports calling you out on it, though I've never published a research paper before so take this with a grain of salt.
Anyways, if this post is all over the place it is because I haven't gotten any sleep and it is early morning right now. All that matters is that I finally got an excuse to talk about the greebles and now I can sleep peacefully.
