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There is a dark side to this. Scientific consensus follows certain rituals and heuristics. Even if you can assume that the scientific consensus is the closest t

by marvin 7y ago

There is a dark side to this. Scientific consensus follows certain rituals and heuristics. Even if you can assume that the scientific consensus is the closest to truth you can get (this is debatable), the approach will fail in some situations. In particular, in war-like situations where there is little published science, data is scarce, data changes fast and there are policy considerations to be made across a multitude of disparate fields - fields that can not all be quickly evaluated with the scientific method. IMHO, as I've been saying throughout this crisis, many institutions that do well in peace-time are in a terribly dangerous situation when they follow their normal heuristics and routines today. Strong top leadership (political or otherwise) can mitigate this danger.

godelski 7y ago
> the approach will fail in some situations. Well... yes. Everything does. Treating this as a non-starter could be used in literally anything. > In particular, in war-like situations where there is little published science, data is scarce, This is actually probably one of the most well researched fields in existence. I'm a little confused about this statement. What do you think they do at places like Annapolis?
- tome 7y ago
  I presume marvin is talking about a particular war when in progress, not the phenomenon of war in general.
kqr 7y ago
Yet most strong top leaders I can name have (a) gained power during some sort of crisis, and (b) turned out to be on the wrong side of history.
s1artibartfast 7y ago
Given that Scientific consensus has limitations, what do you propose is better in situations where data is scarce? How does a strong leader mitigate this danger? Is the leader making choices by following their intuition? Does the leader make choices based on public sentiment?
- hansvm 7y ago
  One possible mechanism by which strong leadership could be more effective is that inaction and uncoordinated action can be less effective than any coordinated decision, regardless of whether that decision happened to be optimal. I don't know how often this happens in a pandemic or in a political setting, but as an example from software engineering bikeshedding seems somewhat common -- it probably doesn't matter whether curly braces get a new line, but there's probably a benefit to only doing it one way in a codebase. Not that strong leadership is the only path to resolution either, even accepting that some cohesive decision needs to be made, but it does solve that class of problems.
  - cycomanic 7y ago
    Strong leadership and science are orthogonal dimensions. You can have strong leadership that makes decisions based on evidence and scientific arguments, or not. I would argue the first is always better than the second. Again in the current crisis the decisions based on scientific evidence (pandemic models developed previously) was to act early and quickly with lots of testing. Most countries did not follow this, but I would say this had nothing to do with what the "scientific approach" was. Somehow people here conflate scientific with need to wait/establish all information. However in the end science is a method to establish truth/knowledge about the world around us. It can guide our decisions, but it's not a decision making method.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- marvin 7y ago
  Let me clarify. You can follow a scientific approach, and you can follow Science the ritual. When uncertainty goes up and time is of the essence, the latter is to a large degree subjected to the limitations and blind spots I highlighted. The former might not, if you adapt it to the current limitations. I am a scientist, by the way. What I mean by strong leadership is an intelligent leader that can quickly review evidence from multiple disparate fields and experts (scientists among them) and choose a good approach that takes all available constraints and uncertainties into account. The way a skilled military commander would do. In particular, such a leader does not focus exclusively on a single metric or concern, unless this is warranted by the situation. But that would be an exceptional circumstance in an exceptional situation. You may think that the focus on reducing death rates is focusing on a single metric to the exclusion of everything else, but this is not the case. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule being made in every country with a lockdown. Critical infrastructure, economics, mental health, healthcare that's unrelated to Covid19 and so on.
roenxi 7y ago
One interpretation of that as a strategy is "in a crisis with imperfect information we should centralise all power to popular people". If someone working to evidence (ie, science) can't make good decisions how on earth will strong leadership help? We've seen crisises that led to actual war time situations (pretty much all the wars in the Middle East, particularly when recently the 'strong leadership' in the US when they speculated wrongly that Saddam Hussein had WMDs) where with benefit of hindsight the entire planet would probably have been better off with weaker leaders, more evidence and people just sticking to their normal routines. Centralising power without a proven strategy is going to lead to more misses than hits. Even now, we don't know what the endgame here is. The lockdowns could still conceivably be failures if they turn out to have delayed all the deaths by 12 months instead of preventing them. We don't know. It is too early to say what did or didn't work.
- EmilioMartinez 7y ago
  >evidence (ie, science) An abrupt leap. I would move away from a passing vehicle without peer-reviewing its existence. If international and inter-city travel had been shut down in early February some nations would have remained fully functional today. Not to say I agree with current quarantines, but you have to admit there are thresholds for action. I'd like to know your stance on climate change, btw.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Science generalizes into engineering etc, so not everything needs to be peer reviewed. Without the germ model of disease aka science, we would be thinking about Coronavirus very differently. Thousands of years of human history and massive epidemics show how bad following common wisdom based on incorrect models can be.
  - cycomanic 7y ago
    >>evidence (ie, science) >An abrupt leap. Not at all, it seems more that you have a wrong conception what science means. Science is all about evidence, the scientific method is to make observations, then inductive hypotheses that are then tested. All this relies on using evidence. Peer review is one process how evidence can be evaluated, but definitely not the only one. Science is much older than peer review.
nfc 7y ago
Strong leadership "can" mitigate this danger. An interesting question is how likely it is that it'll mitigate it rather than exacerbate the problems. I suspect the type of strong leaders humans usually elect are not the ones that will maximize the chances of mitigating.
cycomanic 7y ago
I'm unsure what you mean about strong leadership and also why you believe scientific approach means to strife for scientific consensus. However regarding strong leadership I think the current crisis shows that the autocratic states are typically do worse, look at Russia for example, or even China if they would have reacted better early on we would not have this crisis.

by marvin 7y ago

godelski 7y ago

> the approach will fail in some situations. Well... yes. Everything does. Treating this as a non-starter could be used in literally anything. > In particular, in war-like situations where there is little published science, data is scarce, This is actually probably one of the most well researched fields in existence. I'm a little confused about this statement. What do you think they do at places like Annapolis?

tome 7y ago
I presume marvin is talking about a particular war when in progress, not the phenomenon of war in general.

kqr 7y ago

Yet most strong top leaders I can name have (a) gained power during some sort of crisis, and (b) turned out to be on the wrong side of history.

s1artibartfast 7y ago

Given that Scientific consensus has limitations, what do you propose is better in situations where data is scarce? How does a strong leader mitigate this danger? Is the leader making choices by following their intuition? Does the leader make choices based on public sentiment?

hansvm 7y ago
One possible mechanism by which strong leadership could be more effective is that inaction and uncoordinated action can be less effective than any coordinated decision, regardless of whether that decision happened to be optimal. I don't know how often this happens in a pandemic or in a political setting, but as an example from software engineering bikeshedding seems somewhat common -- it probably doesn't matter whether curly braces get a new line, but there's probably a benefit to only doing it one way in a codebase. Not that strong leadership is the only path to resolution either, even accepting that some cohesive decision needs to be made, but it does solve that class of problems.
- cycomanic 7y ago
  Strong leadership and science are orthogonal dimensions. You can have strong leadership that makes decisions based on evidence and scientific arguments, or not. I would argue the first is always better than the second. Again in the current crisis the decisions based on scientific evidence (pandemic models developed previously) was to act early and quickly with lots of testing. Most countries did not follow this, but I would say this had nothing to do with what the "scientific approach" was. Somehow people here conflate scientific with need to wait/establish all information. However in the end science is a method to establish truth/knowledge about the world around us. It can guide our decisions, but it's not a decision making method.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
marvin 7y ago
Let me clarify. You can follow a scientific approach, and you can follow Science the ritual. When uncertainty goes up and time is of the essence, the latter is to a large degree subjected to the limitations and blind spots I highlighted. The former might not, if you adapt it to the current limitations. I am a scientist, by the way. What I mean by strong leadership is an intelligent leader that can quickly review evidence from multiple disparate fields and experts (scientists among them) and choose a good approach that takes all available constraints and uncertainties into account. The way a skilled military commander would do. In particular, such a leader does not focus exclusively on a single metric or concern, unless this is warranted by the situation. But that would be an exceptional circumstance in an exceptional situation. You may think that the focus on reducing death rates is focusing on a single metric to the exclusion of everything else, but this is not the case. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule being made in every country with a lockdown. Critical infrastructure, economics, mental health, healthcare that's unrelated to Covid19 and so on.

roenxi 7y ago

One interpretation of that as a strategy is "in a crisis with imperfect information we should centralise all power to popular people". If someone working to evidence (ie, science) can't make good decisions how on earth will strong leadership help? We've seen crisises that led to actual war time situations (pretty much all the wars in the Middle East, particularly when recently the 'strong leadership' in the US when they speculated wrongly that Saddam Hussein had WMDs) where with benefit of hindsight the entire planet would probably have been better off with weaker leaders, more evidence and people just sticking to their normal routines. Centralising power without a proven strategy is going to lead to more misses than hits. Even now, we don't know what the endgame here is. The lockdowns could still conceivably be failures if they turn out to have delayed all the deaths by 12 months instead of preventing them. We don't know. It is too early to say what did or didn't work.

EmilioMartinez 7y ago
>evidence (ie, science) An abrupt leap. I would move away from a passing vehicle without peer-reviewing its existence. If international and inter-city travel had been shut down in early February some nations would have remained fully functional today. Not to say I agree with current quarantines, but you have to admit there are thresholds for action. I'd like to know your stance on climate change, btw.
- Retric 7y ago
  Science generalizes into engineering etc, so not everything needs to be peer reviewed. Without the germ model of disease aka science, we would be thinking about Coronavirus very differently. Thousands of years of human history and massive epidemics show how bad following common wisdom based on incorrect models can be.
- cycomanic 7y ago
  >>evidence (ie, science) >An abrupt leap. Not at all, it seems more that you have a wrong conception what science means. Science is all about evidence, the scientific method is to make observations, then inductive hypotheses that are then tested. All this relies on using evidence. Peer review is one process how evidence can be evaluated, but definitely not the only one. Science is much older than peer review.

nfc 7y ago

Strong leadership "can" mitigate this danger. An interesting question is how likely it is that it'll mitigate it rather than exacerbate the problems. I suspect the type of strong leaders humans usually elect are not the ones that will maximize the chances of mitigating.

cycomanic 7y ago

I'm unsure what you mean about strong leadership and also why you believe scientific approach means to strife for scientific consensus. However regarding strong leadership I think the current crisis shows that the autocratic states are typically do worse, look at Russia for example, or even China if they would have reacted better early on we would not have this crisis.