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These claims that we must do what science dictates are self-serving, and the ongoing chant is getting really tiresome. Science does not lead inexorably to poli

These claims that we must do what science dictates are self-serving, and the ongoing chant is getting really tiresome. Science does not lead inexorably to policy. Science is only the first step, in how it allows us to understand the world around us. What we want to do about that is an entirely value-based decision. Deciding to implement policy demands filtering that understanding through a lens of our collective values as a society. Those values are fluid, and very frequently in controversy. It seems like the demands to "follow science" are an attempt to sweep some of that controversy under the carpet. In the case of climate change, it's pretending that there's cost/benefit analysis to be done. It ignores the possibility that the cost of doing something will exceed the likely damage expected. (I'm not saying that's the case, I'm just saying that folks are trying to skip that part of the conversation) It pops up in other cases, too. Virtually every economist will tell you that free trade is almost always a net positive for all involved. It harms a few, but on net the entire society is much better off. If we stopped with the science, then we should remove all tariffs and be done with it. But before we do so, there's still a moral question to be resolved: if a few people are paying the price to improve our overall economy, do we owe any debt to them, to make them whole afterwards? So stop pretending that a lack of the policy you want demonstrates that we're scientifically illiterate. Instead, recognize that the science can only inform our debate over the values.

millettjon 10y ago
If a large portion of the population does not value or understand science, how can you have a rational debate on values?
- nsxwolf 10y ago
  Let's say that eventually it is the consensus of the scientific community that things like consciousness, pain and free will are just illusions, and therefore, human rights are an outdated concept, and future policy decisions should reflect that consensus. You'd resist those policy proposals, and I think most people would. You'd base that resistance on your values - values, which in this case at least, you did NOT derive from the scientific consensus. My point is there are non-scientific origins for value systems, and they are more real and valid than scientifically derived ones - science can only give you facts about the material universe.
  - whateveracct 10y ago
    > Let's say that eventually it is the consensus of the scientific community that things like consciousness, pain and free will are just illusions, and therefore, human rights are an outdated concept That last part is a value statement that I doubt science could prove.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      Consciousness (and pain) aren't illusions because they correspond to external phenomena, and have a significant objective component. An illusion is something that nobody else can experience, even partially, other than the subject having the illusion. Even if free will is rule-based at some low-level, that doesn't erase the concept of rights. We have rights even among inanimate objects. For instance, some server instance has rights to access certain files. Rights are not pinned to free will. They are mostly about declaring certain unwanted actions of others to be wrong and punishable. Whether those unwanted actions are the result of free will, or whether they are deterministic, is immaterial. At most, that consideration only influences how we regard a violation of right; we might be somewhat more lenient if we believe that it was inevitable. This is why the criminal courts take a particular view toward defendants who are mentally deficient or insane; in effect, this is based on the belief that those people possess less free will. It is never declared, however, that whatever they did was OK.
      - stcredzero 10y ago
        We have rights even among inanimate objects. For instance, some server instance has rights to access certain files. You're really positing this as actual serious intellectual output? Just because it uses the same word does not mean that "rights" in the context of a server instance has anything to do with rights in the context of human rights. <facepalm>
        kazinator 10y ago
        I don't see the difference. Rights is just some security-related descriptor of an object, whether that be a human being or a Wi-Fi router or whatever. I generally don't equivocate over word semantics.
- hx87 10y ago
  You can certainly have a rational debate on values without much understanding of science, but rational debate on policies to reach those goals would be impossible.
SonicSoul 10y ago
its hard to do an objective value based analysis because it's hard to put a price on environment. That's the problem with capitalism. Making the world better for our kids does not maximize shareholder value. We can at least be honest with ourselves instead of simply denying facts to justify our decisions
- ancap 10y ago
  Capitalism has no problem with pricing the environment. It is governments which have prevented it from doing so. Privatize the skies, oceans and lands and you would clearly see the prices come into play. Now we could argue about the merits of doing such, but claiming a man tied to a chair is incapable of walking is incorrect.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    This is correct. The problem isn't capitalism, except in that we don't have enough of it. Our framework for private property won't recognize rights in air or running water, and so they become an easy sink for externalities. If someone contaminates your land (say, by spilling heating oil), there's a well-defined path for recovering the damages. But since we don't recognize an owner of air or water, when those are contaminated, there's nobody who can claim damages. By not fully recognizing property rights, we lose the ability to prevent polluters from externalizing their costs. EDIT: s/Or/Our/
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      The reason we don't recognize ownership of the air above your land is because we have no way to precisely track its flow and pollution. Land is easy to track, it doesn't go anywhere. It's a technical problem. Capitalism can't value something if it isn't capable of measuring it.
  - jwatte 10y ago
    First: "captitalism" means "the ability of private property owners to gate access to their property to others." What you're talking about is "market economy," which is not the same thing. Second: For a market economy to lead to the optimal outcome, it requires that rational actors make decisions based on perfect information. We have large swathes of society set up to reduce the access to "perfect information," under the guises of "trade secrets" and "privacy" and a host of other values. In fact, as soon as there is any information assymetry, there is a very strong incentive to slant the market to favor the information holder, which leads to much less efficiency. We can fight that either by regulating, or by making it a crime to hide any information. Until now, we have chosen the former. I doubt that you are arguing that the latter would be better. That's the reality of the world we live in today. Third: For the market economy to work, we also need "rational actors." We know from psychology that humans are nowhere near rational, and often act counter to their own self-interest. We also know from sociology that humans in larger groups are often easily misled from their own best-benefit path.
mattnewton 10y ago
I think a lot of people don't need to infer scientific illiteracy from policy, they can take it from the horse's mouth. http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/09/26/mobile-clinton-trump-debate-hofstra-sot-climate-change-01.cnn http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/09/26/mobile-cli... http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/ben-carson-argued-evolution-was-encouraged-satan http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/ben-carson-argued-ev... Etc etc
- jwatte 10y ago
  A lot of policies are quite scientifically illiterate or even disparaging. "Teach abstinence, not sex ed." "Don't coddle criminals, lock them up." "Trickle-down economics is the best way to create jobs." "Creationism makes just as good predictions as evolution, so it should be taught with equal emphasis." It goes on and on, even if we ignore any one of the arguments, the problem is that many people, even people in power, believe that what they and their clique wants to be true is just as important as what can actually be demonstrated to be true. Or to put it another way: If someone says something to be true, that's equally powerful no matter what their basis (repeatable, predictable measurements, or plain dogma.)
tzs 10y ago
> In the case of climate change, it's pretending that there's cost/benefit analysis to be done. It ignores the possibility that the cost of doing something will exceed the likely damage expected. (I'm not saying that's the case, I'm just saying that folks are trying to skip that part of the conversation) In the case of climate change, we can't even get to the cost/benefit analysis part of the conversation because some people (including the presedint-elect, and important members of the majority party in Congress who lead the committees that where climate action would originate) say that climate change is not happening, or that if it is happening humans are not contributing to it and cannot do anything about it.
- guscost 10y ago
  > In the case of climate change, we can't even get to the cost/benefit analysis part of the conversation Sorry? We were already at the "let's bribe farmers to grow extra corn and then burn it for fuel" stage, years ago.
  - novaleaf 10y ago
    keep in mind though, that was in part a geopolitical security strategy (energy security), as the USA was deeply reliant on foreign oil. (This was before the Alberta oil sands was viable, and fracking wasn't even a known option) Of course, can't say that's a good reason to continue the subsidies today though.
    - guscost 10y ago
      Good point, some of those policies were sold as different things to different groups.
- gwright 10y ago
  I hear this a lot and feel like it is a muddled response to a muddled understanding of climate change. For what it is worth: * Science is clear that CO2 causes warming (pure physics), but so do many other gases (methane, water vapor, etc). * Science is clear that global temperatures are rising (even if you quibble about the 'pause') * Science isn't clear regarding what part of global temperature rise is due to human activity. * Science isn't clear on how much and how fast temperatures might rise. * Science isn't clear on how to model the climate. Climate models have incorporated a net positive sensitivity to CO2 warming and make predictions that have exceeded actual temperature gains. So the models are not accurately predicting the climate. * Science isn't going to provide a definitive policy response to increased temperatures. There are many options. In particular, the warming due to CO2 physics is NOT the catastrophic warming that we see reported in the news. That warming is based on climate models incorporating a large positive sensitivity to the CO2 warming (as well as many other factors). The models are not "settled science". The actual sensitivity is not something that can be measured with today's scientific understanding of complex climate systems. Even if the climate models were making correct predictions. It doesn't automatically follow that the policy solution is to reduce CO2 emissions to 0. The costs of clean energy have to be borne by someone and cutting off energy supplies (because energy is more expensive) to developing economies, for example, also has consequences. The negative affects of warming can be mitigated also via relocating people, communities, and changing our land-use patterns, etc. The correct policy mix is going to depend on many factors, most of which are going to vary from place to place. A single global policy proscription isn't likely to be feasible for lots of reasons. Finally, criticism of policy proscriptions shouldn't automatically be interpreted and characterized as rejecting the climate change hypothesis. In many cases there are argument for or against policy proscriptions that aren't even related to climate change, such as improving air quality, increasing the efficiency of our energy systems, using market based approaches to avoid crony capitalism and favored industries, and so on.
bitwize 10y ago
You can either wait around for the market to catch up with reality and account for the externalities of environmental damage, or you can pass government regulations that help fix or mitigate the damage NOW. Case in point: the bans on CFCs and agricultural DDT.

millettjon 10y ago

If a large portion of the population does not value or understand science, how can you have a rational debate on values?

nsxwolf 10y ago
Let's say that eventually it is the consensus of the scientific community that things like consciousness, pain and free will are just illusions, and therefore, human rights are an outdated concept, and future policy decisions should reflect that consensus. You'd resist those policy proposals, and I think most people would. You'd base that resistance on your values - values, which in this case at least, you did NOT derive from the scientific consensus. My point is there are non-scientific origins for value systems, and they are more real and valid than scientifically derived ones - science can only give you facts about the material universe.
- whateveracct 10y ago
  > Let's say that eventually it is the consensus of the scientific community that things like consciousness, pain and free will are just illusions, and therefore, human rights are an outdated concept That last part is a value statement that I doubt science could prove.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Consciousness (and pain) aren't illusions because they correspond to external phenomena, and have a significant objective component. An illusion is something that nobody else can experience, even partially, other than the subject having the illusion. Even if free will is rule-based at some low-level, that doesn't erase the concept of rights. We have rights even among inanimate objects. For instance, some server instance has rights to access certain files. Rights are not pinned to free will. They are mostly about declaring certain unwanted actions of others to be wrong and punishable. Whether those unwanted actions are the result of free will, or whether they are deterministic, is immaterial. At most, that consideration only influences how we regard a violation of right; we might be somewhat more lenient if we believe that it was inevitable. This is why the criminal courts take a particular view toward defendants who are mentally deficient or insane; in effect, this is based on the belief that those people possess less free will. It is never declared, however, that whatever they did was OK.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      We have rights even among inanimate objects. For instance, some server instance has rights to access certain files. You're really positing this as actual serious intellectual output? Just because it uses the same word does not mean that "rights" in the context of a server instance has anything to do with rights in the context of human rights. <facepalm>
      - kazinator 10y ago
        I don't see the difference. Rights is just some security-related descriptor of an object, whether that be a human being or a Wi-Fi router or whatever. I generally don't equivocate over word semantics.
hx87 10y ago
You can certainly have a rational debate on values without much understanding of science, but rational debate on policies to reach those goals would be impossible.

SonicSoul 10y ago

its hard to do an objective value based analysis because it's hard to put a price on environment. That's the problem with capitalism. Making the world better for our kids does not maximize shareholder value. We can at least be honest with ourselves instead of simply denying facts to justify our decisions

ancap 10y ago
Capitalism has no problem with pricing the environment. It is governments which have prevented it from doing so. Privatize the skies, oceans and lands and you would clearly see the prices come into play. Now we could argue about the merits of doing such, but claiming a man tied to a chair is incapable of walking is incorrect.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  This is correct. The problem isn't capitalism, except in that we don't have enough of it. Our framework for private property won't recognize rights in air or running water, and so they become an easy sink for externalities. If someone contaminates your land (say, by spilling heating oil), there's a well-defined path for recovering the damages. But since we don't recognize an owner of air or water, when those are contaminated, there's nobody who can claim damages. By not fully recognizing property rights, we lose the ability to prevent polluters from externalizing their costs. EDIT: s/Or/Our/
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    The reason we don't recognize ownership of the air above your land is because we have no way to precisely track its flow and pollution. Land is easy to track, it doesn't go anywhere. It's a technical problem. Capitalism can't value something if it isn't capable of measuring it.
- jwatte 10y ago
  First: "captitalism" means "the ability of private property owners to gate access to their property to others." What you're talking about is "market economy," which is not the same thing. Second: For a market economy to lead to the optimal outcome, it requires that rational actors make decisions based on perfect information. We have large swathes of society set up to reduce the access to "perfect information," under the guises of "trade secrets" and "privacy" and a host of other values. In fact, as soon as there is any information assymetry, there is a very strong incentive to slant the market to favor the information holder, which leads to much less efficiency. We can fight that either by regulating, or by making it a crime to hide any information. Until now, we have chosen the former. I doubt that you are arguing that the latter would be better. That's the reality of the world we live in today. Third: For the market economy to work, we also need "rational actors." We know from psychology that humans are nowhere near rational, and often act counter to their own self-interest. We also know from sociology that humans in larger groups are often easily misled from their own best-benefit path.

mattnewton 10y ago

I think a lot of people don't need to infer scientific illiteracy from policy, they can take it from the horse's mouth. http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/09/26/mobile-clinton-trump-debate-hofstra-sot-climate-change-01.cnn http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/09/26/mobile-cli... http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/ben-carson-argued-evolution-was-encouraged-satan http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/ben-carson-argued-ev... Etc etc

jwatte 10y ago
A lot of policies are quite scientifically illiterate or even disparaging. "Teach abstinence, not sex ed." "Don't coddle criminals, lock them up." "Trickle-down economics is the best way to create jobs." "Creationism makes just as good predictions as evolution, so it should be taught with equal emphasis." It goes on and on, even if we ignore any one of the arguments, the problem is that many people, even people in power, believe that what they and their clique wants to be true is just as important as what can actually be demonstrated to be true. Or to put it another way: If someone says something to be true, that's equally powerful no matter what their basis (repeatable, predictable measurements, or plain dogma.)

tzs 10y ago

> In the case of climate change, it's pretending that there's cost/benefit analysis to be done. It ignores the possibility that the cost of doing something will exceed the likely damage expected. (I'm not saying that's the case, I'm just saying that folks are trying to skip that part of the conversation) In the case of climate change, we can't even get to the cost/benefit analysis part of the conversation because some people (including the presedint-elect, and important members of the majority party in Congress who lead the committees that where climate action would originate) say that climate change is not happening, or that if it is happening humans are not contributing to it and cannot do anything about it.

guscost 10y ago
> In the case of climate change, we can't even get to the cost/benefit analysis part of the conversation Sorry? We were already at the "let's bribe farmers to grow extra corn and then burn it for fuel" stage, years ago.
- novaleaf 10y ago
  keep in mind though, that was in part a geopolitical security strategy (energy security), as the USA was deeply reliant on foreign oil. (This was before the Alberta oil sands was viable, and fracking wasn't even a known option) Of course, can't say that's a good reason to continue the subsidies today though.
  - guscost 10y ago
    Good point, some of those policies were sold as different things to different groups.
gwright 10y ago
I hear this a lot and feel like it is a muddled response to a muddled understanding of climate change. For what it is worth: * Science is clear that CO2 causes warming (pure physics), but so do many other gases (methane, water vapor, etc). * Science is clear that global temperatures are rising (even if you quibble about the 'pause') * Science isn't clear regarding what part of global temperature rise is due to human activity. * Science isn't clear on how much and how fast temperatures might rise. * Science isn't clear on how to model the climate. Climate models have incorporated a net positive sensitivity to CO2 warming and make predictions that have exceeded actual temperature gains. So the models are not accurately predicting the climate. * Science isn't going to provide a definitive policy response to increased temperatures. There are many options. In particular, the warming due to CO2 physics is NOT the catastrophic warming that we see reported in the news. That warming is based on climate models incorporating a large positive sensitivity to the CO2 warming (as well as many other factors). The models are not "settled science". The actual sensitivity is not something that can be measured with today's scientific understanding of complex climate systems. Even if the climate models were making correct predictions. It doesn't automatically follow that the policy solution is to reduce CO2 emissions to 0. The costs of clean energy have to be borne by someone and cutting off energy supplies (because energy is more expensive) to developing economies, for example, also has consequences. The negative affects of warming can be mitigated also via relocating people, communities, and changing our land-use patterns, etc. The correct policy mix is going to depend on many factors, most of which are going to vary from place to place. A single global policy proscription isn't likely to be feasible for lots of reasons. Finally, criticism of policy proscriptions shouldn't automatically be interpreted and characterized as rejecting the climate change hypothesis. In many cases there are argument for or against policy proscriptions that aren't even related to climate change, such as improving air quality, increasing the efficiency of our energy systems, using market based approaches to avoid crony capitalism and favored industries, and so on.

bitwize 10y ago

You can either wait around for the market to catch up with reality and account for the externalities of environmental damage, or you can pass government regulations that help fix or mitigate the damage NOW. Case in point: the bans on CFCs and agricultural DDT.