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Which is unfortunate, since such social policy matters relatively little to the future of our nation and world when compared to, say, policy informed by climate

• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's the same disease that leads to "if a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric." The purpose of science is to give you answers to questions you didn't already have. But it's hard enough to avoid things like selection bias even when you're acting in good faith. If you start using it to work backwards from a political platform to determine which questions you want to ask to lead to the policies you decided on ahead of time, the thing you're doing is the reverse of making policy based on science. It's manufacturing "science" based on politics. Which isn't actually science. If you knew the conclusion of a study before it was conducted, its conclusion provides no new support for your position. This kind of implies that if we want actual science, we can't have politicians deciding what to study, and we can't have scientists getting fired for their conclusions no matter how politically inconvenient they are.