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Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy may be damaging democracy

• DamnYuppie 5y ago
  I didn't read the article in its entirety and this comment isn't directed at the content of the article. Science itself has been politicized where the pursuit of truth has become secondary to the pursuit of funding and the alignment with the political agendas du jour. When I was younger my faith and trust in science was quite high. As I have aged and seen more of humanity and how it permeates all aspects of our existence I don't trust science like I did when I was younger. Now all I see are the motivations of those who are doing the "research". Having studied statistics in college with the express intent of how it is used for scientific studies I am well aware that with enough data you can get any statistical result you want. Even better vaguely word it so it resonates with main stream media and still gives the authors an out with their peers.
  • PerkinWarwick 5y ago
    While I see that funding will tend to constrict the research around the desires of the funders, it's worth considering that 'science' has also expanded into areas that don't deserve the title. The softer disciplines are particularly susceptible to the style of the day but lust after the cloak of correctness (and status) that hard sciences wear.
  • dahart 5y ago
    > Even better vaguely word it so it resonates with main stream media This explanation doesn’t resonate with me. Research most often has incremental results that need to be carefully qualified. Isn’t the far bigger problem that mainstream media takes subtle research results and “simplifies” them for the public by adding certainty and often mis-interpreting the results completely? Political agendas have been recently systematically trying to erode trust in science. (Because science and truth does threaten some politicians.) The idea that science can’t be trusted as the high-level summary is exactly what some people want, and it seems to be working. But what is the alternative? We have nothing better. The point of science is to try to protect against motivation and agenda, and it does work sometimes. Even when people are motivated, when the methods are reproducible and the results are peer-reviewed, that does help filter out some of the badness. And if it’s not enough: what should we do to improve it?
    • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      Media distortion is definitely a problem too, but it's not the only problem. Solar geoengineering is the hobbyhorse I usually use as an example of this. It's an open secret (see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01243-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01243-0) that most scientists in the field won't research it, partly due to safety concerns but partly because they think that decarbonization is the right policy and they don't want to risk "detracting from efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions". Maybe that's the right judgment, but it's hardly free from motivation and agenda.
      • michael_j_ward 5y ago
        Apparently a small scale version of that is being used to protect the Great Barrier Reef https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02503-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02503-9
  • GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    I don't see it as politicized science, but as abuse of science by politics. Just as when religious speakers abuse science for their purpose, science doesn't become religious, analogously when politicians abuse science for their purpose, science doesn't become political. And this abuse isn't new, politicians did it for ages, it just hit the fan now.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • epistasis 5y ago
    I think that you will find that science has been pretty much that way since the beginning. Can't do science if you don't have funding. If anything, this is simply more transparent these days. Grant review sessions most definitely have some amount of cronyism, and that famous luminary in a field will almost certainly get funding even if their grant application is worse than that of somebody with fewer citations or younger and with less of a track record. But there's awareness of it at least. And you'll find scientists on Twitter being very open about it, whereas before you'd mostly only find it at the pub during conferences. There's a great passage from ET Jaynes that I'm having difficulty finding right now. He was a physicist from the 1940s on, and as a young graduate student he talks about how he had to be very careful about what he studied, because if it had the potential to contradict one of the big names of the field, then it could tank his entire career before getting started. If he hadn't "played ball" early on, we'd never have gotten his later Bayesianism. Science is always a human process, there will be politics to some degree. Politics can only be minimized, not eliminated completely.
    • im3w1l 5y ago
      Science used to be a self-funded hobby of the upper classes. Then after that came the tenure system, where people had at least had safe and stable emplyment. Nowadays there are legions of precariously employed scientists desperately trying to hawk their science.
      • im3w1l 5y ago
        Replying to myself, I think I got the first part of that wrong. Patronage used to be important for a long time.
        • epistasis 5y ago
          Right, and the current situation is much better, and less political, than having to find a patron before you can even really get started.
  • XorNot 5y ago
    > Having studied statistics in college with the express intent of how it is used for scientific studies I am well aware that with enough data you can get any statistical result you want. Just doing what a good pseudoscientist does: first dismiss any rigorous logical tools...
  • everdrive 5y ago
    There's also just an extreme naivety when it comes to the definition of "politics." If you genuinely think that your position is morally and factually correct, you'll pursue that position. Now, imagine that your position truly is objectively factually and morally correct. (I understand things generally don't work this way, but stick with me for sake of example.) All you have to do is find a vocal group of people who disagree with the morally and factually correct position, and you can now call this "political stance" which someone can be "biased towards." (a simple example might be flat-earthers.) Now of course, this same process can work out in nearly any permutation: the mainstream group could be pursuing an idea which they believe is morally and factually correct, but of course simply be wrong. And then the protesting group, calling out the politicization of the issue, could then be the correct group. It must also be stated that the closer you get to the hard sciences, the less any of this politicization works. It's worth noting that things such as semi-conductors and computer chips all rely on science, and no one is politicizing whether they exist, or work. What is politicized is a bit more predictable: Questions of the cause of the ills of society, (ie, social sciences) questions about the role of men and women, questions about public policy. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that it's quite easy to call one man's truth a "political" ideology. If you poll enough people, nearly anything is "just a point of view" which could be construed as political.
• roenxi 5y ago
  Politicians have a lot of overlap in their beliefs, but anything relevant to it will be waved through the legislative process without much comment. We're all left to focus on the remains where there isn't much consensus. "Settling Politics" amounts to everyone agreeing about what to do on every matter all the time. Otherwise politics just isn't going to be settled. If the question is why science hasn't settled a particular debate, the answer is typically that the facts aren't really in question, and there is a secret debate about who is going to have to wear the costs.
  • tremon 5y ago
    "Settling Politics" amounts to everyone agreeing about what to do on every matter all the time. Otherwise politics just isn't going to be settled. But it's a misconception to think that the goal of politics is to "be settled". The goal of politics is to make decisions on how to rule the land right now, they don't get to wait 15 years and then try again (yes, some do, but that's a different problem). there is a secret debate about who is going to have to wear the costs. It's very sad that this has become a "secret" debate, because this is the heart of politics. I haven't decided if I blame politicians or the sensationalist media more for this, but these debates should not be secret. This is not just a problem in the US, in Europe I see the same: we are stuck with career politicians that are too chicken to either state their real beliefs in public, or to act on those beliefs in the senate.
• hprotagonist 5y ago
  2500 years later, Aristotle is still correct, and the three modes of rhetoric must work in concert or you're doomed to fail. Logos, Ethos, Pathos: you need all three. "This is true. I am trustworthy. This true thing is important." It is very frustrating, especially to many of my fellow scientists, that bellowing "THIS IS TRUE" as loudly as possible is insufficient. But it is insufficient.
  • programminggeek 5y ago
    The "I am trustworthy" part is totally taken for granted and too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative they are pursuing.
    • hprotagonist 5y ago
      Ethos is the hardest claim to assert. You have to live that one out; your community must, quite literally, bear witness to your actions which earn trust.
      • dgb23 5y ago
        It seems that many like to believe and follow leaders who affirm their beliefs even when they are caught lying repeatedly about important things. Posturing loudly and demonstrating confidence seems to trump all of the other principles for many. It's similar but more emphasized with chimpanzees. The problem is that we're not chimpanzees. We are smart enough to make very powerful technology, but not smart enough to use it sustainably.
        • canadaduane 5y ago
          > Posturing loudly and demonstrating confidence seems to trump all of the other principles for many. Nice word choice.
      • hacknat 5y ago
        Ethos is very hard, but pathos is harder, especially in secular society. Let me be clear, I think arguments about ethos generate the most argumentation and heat right now, but the silent killer is really pathos. People feel comfortable arguing ethos. Most people will not argue pathos openly though. We have a crisis of pathos in our culture. How do you claim that something is important without an appeal to authority? You can't. We live in a culture that is fragmenting its sources of authority; different groups of people have different sources of authority. Here's a good example. The external dialogue that a lot of conservatives give on climate change is that scientists can't be trusted. The internal dialogue that a lot of them (though not all) engage in goes something like, "The earth doesn't matter. God is going to come back and set things right. So we don't need to worry about it anyway."
• mmcdermott 5y ago
  The best the scientific process can do is establish facts about repeatable processes. Even then, it isn't carving facts in stone, but a case of increasingly accurate approximations of reality. The reason that it is impossible for mere fact to end political dispute is that facts are only one element in policy. Values are more important in the long run and facts can only be used to improve policy around shared values. People don't agree on values and they never fully will.
  • wombatmobile 5y ago
    > The best the scientific process can do is establish facts about repeatable processes. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, facts might be definitive. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we rely on others to curate facts for us. When we encounter an internally consistent subset of facts that suits our ideals and our interests, we adopt that point of view. There are infinitely many subsets of curated facts that can be presented as internally consistent. That's why there are so many different points of view. To complicate things further, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
    • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      That's an interesting topic that sometimes gets explored in sci-fi. If an AI is created that is able to learn all knowledge and form it into a single consistent model of reality but it ends up making conclusions we don't want to hear, what are the consequences for humanity and living things in general?
      • wombatmobile 5y ago
        Those “conclusions you don’t want to hear” are not from the AI. They are an embellishment by the sci-fi author. If an AI did do that, the “conclusions you don’t want to hear” would be artifacts of the AI’s algorithmic process or data set. Living things in general don’t worry about conclusions. They just live.
      • 5y ago
• Simplicitas 5y ago
  "Fanatical certitude" isn't exactly the same as "science". Maybe change title to "Why fanatical certitude will never settle political disputes"? What bugs me about these thesis is that they lead people to question science, as the best set of tools we have for reasoning, when used properly.
  • thereddaikon 5y ago
    The distinction exists but its also rhetorically insignificant. Nobody is conflating the academic research complex with the scientific method. But just as how other definitions have changed over time everyone knows that when someone refers to problems with science they mean problems with the academic research complex and related topics. Put another way in modern colloquial English what you call science is almost always called the scientific method. What everyone else calls science is really Academia. When people start publicly calling for other forms of reasoning and problem solving to be taught then your argument will be convincing.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  People forget that politics is preference. Science deals in the objective while politics deals in the subjective (preferences).
  • OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    I don't know how objective science is, because we bring all of our biases to the table when we interpret data. A young earth creationist, an old earth creationist, a fanatical darwin evolutionist, and an ardent panspermia UFOlogist are all going to view the same data very different, even if they have identical educational credentials. The holes in evidence for each don't matter, because they are the persuaded. If we think about truth bending to subjective reality, I am sure certain that some of the churchmen & scientists opposing Galileo's embrace of Copernican heliocentrism were completely certain geocentrism was the truth because their own astronomical observations were subject to slavish obedience to doctrine. This doctrine in their heads influenced their own observations. Narrative overwhelmed the senses. It is the mad among us that have the rare ability to completely discount all external input and see a thing for what it truely is. And, that is why we call them crazy.
    • tremon 5y ago
      I don't know how objective science is, because we bring all of our biases to the table when we interpret data You are conflating "science" and "scientist" here. The way science overcomes bias is two-fold: 1) by training scientists to be aware of their own biases, and 2) by having multiple scientists, each with their own biases, try to reproduce the same experimental results. Your artificial example is just that, they all fail 1).
  • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Science is conducted by people, all of whom have preferences. Until the day arrives that science is explored only by preferenceless beings, science and politics will continue to have a significant overlap, much of it at the invitation of scientists.
    • 5y ago
• xqcgrek2 5y ago
  I am convinced scientific results should not be publicized, publicly promoted or broadly advertised at least a decade after publication. That's about the timescale it takes specialist communities to cross check or falsify results. Of course, this is exactly the opposite of how science works today. There are poorly written press releases galore, and flashy but tenuous results that seldom hold up to scrutiny. There's a reason a journal like Nature is routinely mocked in scientific circles.
  • naasking 5y ago
    Why given a timeline, just say results are probably real after two independent replications, and there should significant pop science hesitation on publishing anything that hasn't been replicated yet.
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  I'd have expected an article like this to include discussion of Naomi Klein's "Merchants of Doubt" which describes how 'respected scientists' have prostituted themselves to the fossil fuel sector (denying fossil-fueled global warming), to the tobacco sector (denying links between smoking and cancer), to the agrichemical industry (denying the link between pesticide use and bee/insect declines), and so on. It's a very long list and a very sobering read. Another good one is "University Inc. The Corporate Corruption of HIgher Education (Jennifer Washburn)", discussing how Bayh-Dole and exclusive licensing, along with the infiltration of corporate managers into research universities has fundamentally altered norms in academic research, to the detriment of scientific integrity. This kind of thing has happened in other countries, most notably in the Soviet Union under Stalin when Lysenko came to power. Fauci actually has some similarities to Lysenko, i.e. being primarily political creatures seeking to retain control of their institutions by whatever means available.
  • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Scientists don't just prostitute themselves to big businesses. Often they do it for small amounts of grant money provided by ideological entities. A scientist's price can vary wildly. Klein's basic premise is correct but it's too narrowly focused on involvement in science influence by groups she already has a dislike for. Of course this is often handwaved away as not being relevant because "the good guys" have less money to pervert things than "the bad guys" do, which leads to "it's ok when we do it because our motives are pure", which even if true, doesn't change the fact that it's still another perversion.
  • fallingknife 5y ago
    > denying the link between pesticide use and bee/insect declines Has this been proven?
• Zenst 5y ago
  Science works upon facts, politics works upon emotional ethos of those facts.
• zwieback 5y ago
  There are problems both on the producing side and the consuming side. Any scientist knows that research is often driven by politics, money or ego. The bigger problems are probably on the consumer side, though, and not only in under-educated social groups. Here's an interesting post I stumbled across recently: "People who trust science are less likely to fall for misinformation -- unless it sounds sciency" (https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/08/10/people-who-trust-science-are-less-likely-to-fall-for-misinformation-unless-it-sounds-sciencey/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/08/10/people-who-trust-scienc...) This confirms my sense that we easily glom on to things that "sound right", and if you're a scientist or engineer "sciency" statements sound right to us. Do we really have the time to dive in deep enough to figure out whether it's pseudoscience?
  • prancer_or_vix 5y ago
    That article is really interesting and something that, as an academic scientist, is pretty obvious. In theory, we have peer-review to keep ourselves honest, but as the article points out (maybe unintentionally), bad science gets through that process (really, as long as the "data" look believable enough and the "experiments" are methodologically sound and the interpretation of the "data" is also reasonable, it's reasonably undetectable to peer-reviewers). There are a lot of problems with the way science happens, and a lot of bad data is never found out, because it can be hard to show, definitively, that it was fabricated or manipulated without someone from the lab in question speaking up about it (which probably doesn't happen enough). At a certain point, though, there's too much information & data, good or otherwise, for any one person to parse. That's sort of why we have journalists: to acquire first-hand accounts and deliver them to a broader audience. The problem really arises when journalists significantly editorialize or disregard conflicting information. The Wakefield paper is a great example of that. Some journalists' cum pundits' gross negligence with regard to the retraction of that paper constitutes misinformation, but has shown to be very difficult to discredit because those actors abuse what we've all agreed is the role of the journalist: to give us valid accounts of actual events. The study discussed in the article you cited even used a real, but heavily criticized (unknown to the participants) scientific study in their experiment. I think the question is "what is the amount of effort that it is reasonable to expect a lay-person to put into the in/validation of information presented to them?" with the caveat that trust is generally earned over time, but once earned, can be abused (and I use the word abuse very purposefully here, because it is a violation of one's relationship in a harmful manner). Should one be expected to more rigorously critique the statement of a trusted peer because of the potential for abuse?
• acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Alvin Weinberg wrote along these lines years ago in his Science and Trans-Science paper [1] from 1972. Once I understood the concept, I see it everywhere these days. [1] http://www.quantamike.ca/pdf/Weinberg-Minerva.pdf http://www.quantamike.ca/pdf/Weinberg-Minerva.pdf
• new_stranger 5y ago
  As populations, we often start with good ideas - it's the implementation (through multiple industries) that often pervert (or ruin) the ideas impact. Our legal system is an example of what happens when you take good ideas and mutate them for months or years between many parties before providing overly complex implementation guidelines for which the actual enforcement parties find ways to cut corners to reduce workload. Building codes, police, healthcare, education, pollution, the list goes on and on...
  • horsawlarway 5y ago
    To be fair... It's very easy to have a good idea if you don't have to deal with the details. The implementation does have to deal with the details though, and the real world is often much, MUCH more detailed than folks expect.
• aantix 5y ago
  Because the arguments fundamentally aren't about science, they are about risk assessment. And where the thresholds lay.
  • michael_j_ward 5y ago
    If "assessment" is "what are the risks of outcomes", then that is probably science, right? Risk Tolerance is the political / value laden part.
    • GoblinSlayer 5y ago
      Risk management seems to be more based on gut feeling, so it's probably not science.
• everdrive 5y ago
  I'm starting to see anti-scientific method memes in the dark corners of the internet. I mean this literally: they suggest that the scientific method is a tool of the progressive left, and that the proper thing to do is reject it. They specifically call out the "I fucking love science" language used in insipid places like Facebook, and more broadly, must be referring to phrases when get cast about such as "follow the science." Of course nearly everything is politicized currently, and science has certainly been politicized in the past, (Galileo, Scopes Monkey Trial, Creationism in schools, etc.) but that doesn't make this latest round any less troubling. I want to be clear here that I'm not suggesting that science is "left" or "right," or that the left is blameless here. (they're definitely not blameless) That said, I do think it's very interesting to see a strict attack on the scientific method itself, which is at least to my eyes seems new. For example in the old Creationism debates of the 90s and early 2000s, the certainty of specific scientific evidence is what was brought into question. Perhaps that was only because the debates had to happen in the public eye, and have some air of validity though.
  • esja 5y ago
    That’s interesting - do you have some examples? I’ve seen quite a few similar memes, including some which explicitly support the scientific method, by contrasting it with what they claim to be politically motivated cherry-picking, “scientism”, etc.
    • orblivion 5y ago
      This one comes to mind: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/965/960/38a.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/965/960/38a... I've seen nobody criticize the method in the abstract. I agree with the grandparent poster that that's troubling, if you've seen it. What I've seen from the right is a skepticism of the institutions. I'll admit I share this sentiment to an extent, though my perspective is as a mostly ignorant outsider, trying to figure out who and what to trust. I have seen criticisms of the peer review system, though it came from Eric Weinstein, not a right winger. And if I had to guess, he is concerned about climate change. I don't understand the peer review system well, but it makes sense to me that that if badly designed it could go horribly wrong.
• azangru 5y ago
  > Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy, based on the belief that science is purified of politics, may be damaging democracy. Could anyone explain to me what the phrase "may be damaging democracy" means? I've been hearing it a lot over the last several years, and I've been wondering what democratic ideal people who use this phrase have in mind. It looks as if independent opinion-making based on one's trusted sources "may be damaging democracy", because most of us are not equipped to identify fake news; open and free exchange of opinions on social media "may be damaging democracy" for the same reason plus due to the tendency of falling into warring tribes; and now this tagline from the article claims that bowing to the experts may also be damaging democracy. Is there anything that doesn't, and what does it all mean?
  • CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
    I take it to mean damaging to democratic countries or, in a more abstract sense, damaging to the credibility of the democratic form of government in general. A good example of this is the current effectiveness of disinformation in democratic societies. Authoritarian countries do not suffer nearly as greatly from this.
    • azangru 5y ago
      So, instead of the abstract textbook word "democracy" one could rephrase this more concretely as "damaging to the present political situation in our country"? When put like this, this statement sounds truly conservative (small c, no necessary relation to parties); but I am hearing this phrase from people who are fine with the disruption of the political arena in the name of what they consider to be progress.
  • tgv 5y ago
    > damaging democracy IMO, it means something like undermining the trust in elected government and law makers. There's a lot of policy making for which there's no solid evidence, because –crudely said– social sciences are far too sloppy. However, I don't think much policy is based on it. But in the public on-line debate (whether that's run by trolls or not), many appeal to science in their arguments. Perhaps that has some impact? The article itself has the same vibe as online debates. The first example of biased science is medical experiments using men, and some totally unnecessary anthropomorphization of the reproductive process, which sounds more like virtue signalling than pertaining to the topic. Whorff-Sapir like arguments complete the picture. Other arguments in the article point out that scientists can have a rather limited vision, resulting in sub-optimal solutions. But as I said above, I don't think much policy making is largely based on science, and the examples given point as much in the direction of tunnel vision by policy makers as the scientists they consult. > Is there anything that doesn't Where trust is absent, everything appears hostile. That would make a good Latin fake quote...
• joshuaheard 5y ago
  Scientists see a block of wood, and observe that it has fixed dimensions, is made from a dead tree, and weighs a certain amount. Politicians see a block of wood and ask, how do we use that wood? Do we build a house, make a fence, or carve it into an ax handle. So, it's really apples and oranges. Scientists use the scientific method to determine the truth. Politicians are not seeking the truth, but are using consensus to govern the actions of their constituents. The consensus can be based on science and truth, or on irrationalities such as fear and hope.
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  From my perspective, a lot of powerful and also impressionable people are wrongly applying the label of "science" to the field of "risk-management". As an example, science can objectively tell you what impact they believe that a virus or a vaccine has on a human body. Science can not tell you what decision to make in light of the facts that the scientific-method produces. That decision-making process is the field of risk-management where everybody weighs the known facts and decides if the pros to some action outweighs the cons of that action. Saying something like "Science tells us that you must wear a mask and take the vaccine" is a completely false statement. That is not science. That is just one individual risk-management assessment that may or may not be identical to another person's. Science qua science is also value-free. The scientific-method cannot tell you what values in life are worth pursuing and taking risks for. Maybe living in the most free way possible (without vaccines or masks and avoiding decades of a medically paranoid health-state dystopia) is something that some people find worth risking their lives for. Science qua science cannot state that pursuing a subjective value is a good or bad idea.
• epgui 5y ago
  My problem with this article is that it doesn’t know how to draw the line between what is science and what is politics. Science absolutely exists as a thing on its own, “pure” if you will. And alongside it and with it also comes politics, yes! But that’s a feature, not a bug— both play a role. A very different role. Science is for everything descriptive and inferential. Politics is for everything prescriptive.
  • jjcon 5y ago
    Yeah this is one of my pet peeves - those of us in the science community should be saying: "if we do x, we will see y result" we should not be saying: "we should do x"
    • epgui 5y ago
      Exactly! Unless of course we're up front about what our goal/premise is. Then it's absolutely appropriate. For eg.: "If we want to minimize the burden of disease from X in Y conditions, we should take Z course of action." Other eg.: rather than saying "you should not urinate on the electric fence", a good scientist will say "if you want to minimize the likelihood of unnecessary suffering, you should not urinate on the electric fence."
  • travisgriggs 5y ago
    > Science absolutely exists as a thing on its own, “pure” if you will. Interesting. I thought it did a great job of illustrating that while the quoted is true, the quoted represents an "ideal" (or pejoratively put a "fantasy"), as the reality of doing any real amount of such ideal science coordinates with the real world, the context of doing so, means it never ends up anywhere near pure and unsullied. It's like the fact that adding an even number and an odd number will always produce an odd number.
    • epgui 5y ago
      Well, science itself is independent of political motivations. Some alien civilization running the same experiments in a galaxy far, far away will get the same results and, eventually, reach the same conclusions about how the world works. Politics, being concerned with the allocation of limited resources, does two things to complicate this ideal picture: 1) It decides "which science" gets done right now, which means the progress of science may not be uniform in all areas. 2) It applies research findings improperly to serve non-scientific goals. Notwithstanding, the science remains just science. And crucially, trying very hard to stop or limit #2 from happening, in particular, is essential in making better _political_ decisions. Political decisions are inherently about how to manage conflict between social groups, and while it's not really my place to judge the quality of any given political decision, it's hard not to judge the quality of a political decision which is not based in the physical reality that we all share.
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  I know a lot of time I'm guilty of quick/skim reading articles I like shared on HN. I think this one is worth reading more thoroughly than normal. I found doing so rewarding. I was particular pleased that a conclusion I was forming as I read through was then voiced near the bottom. Namely: > The science policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz goes so far as to argue that science usually makes public controversies worse. His argument rests on the logical incompatibility of policy expectations and what science actually does — namely, that decision makers expect certainty, whereas science is best at producing new questions. That is, the more scientists study something, the more they uncover additional uncertainties and complexities. I'm not sure I've ever seen this basic contradiction put so cogently. We want policy (politics) to create certainty and stability. "Science" increases our risk of the unknown by making us more aware of it. Loved the article. (and still an avid scientist)
  • popcube 5y ago
    I remember a story , may from The Sea Around Us. politicians will decide how many fish they can capture in next year, scientists say 'please reduce x %, or we trust it will be terrible', politicians heard the advice and start taking. finally, they decided a number smaller than half of x.
  • JadeNB 5y ago
    > "Science" increases our risk of the unknown by making us more aware of it. I'm not sure I understand the phrase "our risk of the unknown". The risk something poses to us is surely the same whether or not we are aware of it—just that our mitigation strategies, and even the awareness that we need to mitigate, change in response to increased knowledge. Perhaps the idea is that people are more hesitant to make decisions when they become aware that what they had previously taken as absolute is in fact conditional? That seems like a good thing (although I agree that it can be taken to paralysing extremes).
    • kbenson 5y ago
      It's worded a bit ambiguously, but I think it means we have to deal with the knowledge of how much we don't know about something and when making policy, every new think you don't know is a point of contention that can be argued over. In some cases that's beneficial, because it keeps us from making a mistake, in others it's detrimental, because it keeps us from making the beneficial change, but if all policy decisions start tending towards infinite argumentation as more and more things we don't know the answers to are linked to the topic, that's also a problem.
• jleyank 5y ago
  Trying to channel Douglas Adams: Nature is. Science (and religion) attempt to explain it. Politics is explaining why you should give me your money.
• Symmetry 5y ago
  Scientists' and doctors' views on questions of "ought" can also be influenced by their background in weird says. A dermatologist might insist that people always wear long sleeve shirts and pants outside. Even if moderate sun exposure causes people to statistically live a bit longer on net they see lots of people who die of skin cancer and no more people dying of heart attacks than anyone else so the former are a lot more salient for them. As the famous saying goes, "nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it". Every scientific discipline inculcates values that may be different from those held by the general public ranging from how important it is to give credit to the originators of ideas to the relative importance of difference species to whether naturalness is valuable or not. This isn't bad, its probably necessary. But it's something that has to be accounted for.
  • JadeNB 5y ago
    > As the famous saying goes, "nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it". That seems like a very dangerous saying! As a scientist, I am biased, but I think it's also important to remember that nothing is as simple as you think it is when you're not thinking about it.
    • w-j-w 5y ago
      Scientists often think about one topic at length, and therefore tend to overestimate it's importance. This is a bias that needs to be corrected for. Thinking that a topic with which one isn't familiar is simpler than it really is is another unrelated bias.
      • kbelder 5y ago
        I remember an ad on the radio from the American Podiatrist's Council or some such organization, recommending that everyone get their yearly foot exam. Sure, it was trying to stir up business; but I think that ad mainly existed because podiatrists really did, in good faith, think everybody should get their foot examined once a year. You just lose perspective.
    • 5y ago
• carapace 5y ago
  Predictive power, the capability of making accurate predictions, should be the measure of what we call "science". E.g. physics is science, but economics, psychology, sociology are not. Today we have modern equivalents of the astrologers and tea leaf readers of old.
• wolrah 5y ago
  To me this article seems to miss the point. Obviously science can't provide objective answers to subjective matters. The problem we have in society right now regarding science, as I see it, is that we have a significant group of people who disagree about the objective parts. The people who think the world is flat, the people who think the world's age is measured in thousands of years, the people who think all the world's top climate scientists are part of a massive conspiracy, the people who think COVID is a massive conspiracy, etc. Our science problem as a society is that those people are mainstream. They're politicians, they're pundits, they're your next door neighbor, and they're all objectively wrong but they use the appearance of science to intentionally spread lies.
  • randcraw 5y ago
    Alas, the people most willing to draw bold conclusions from science also put the least effort into being scientific. Ted Cruz is a good example. He argues that he's a scientist not because he has done science, but because his parents have done science. Thus, he's a "legacy" scientist, and because they emanate from him, his arguments must be scientific. The man isn't this stupid. But in endorsing such nonsense, his supporters are willing to be. "We don't need no stinkin facts!" How can reason hope to overcome willful illogic of this magnitude?
  • mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Flat earthers are mainstream? Man, I am out of touch.
    • rjbwork 5y ago
      They kind of were for a bit, but like many other conspiracy theories, it all got rolled up into QAnon in the past few years. And that is definitely mainstream.
• s1artibartfast 5y ago
  One thing that I have been increasingly aware of is people confusing science with utilitarianism. Science investigates truths about the world we live in. Utilitarianism incorporates science, but is built on subjective moral and ethical assumptions. I see a lot of people who disagree with utilitarian proposals labeled as "anti-science".
• blowski 5y ago
  I would hardly call myself anti-science, but I (and I imagine many on this forum) get frustrated at bad science. Things like shampoo adverts, lottery number predictions. So I can see how for, some people at least, statistics which measure the probability of you dying from COVID are lumped into the same category as the probability of England winning the World Cup. It seems like the whole this is made of arbitrary guesswork (though I realise it isn't, at least in the case of the former). Then there is the problem of the media mis-interpreting science. So we have the never-ending compilation of headlines from "Chocolate/Coffee/Bacon is good/bad/irrelevant for your health". Again, these are much more about getting views than sharing information, but there's a consequence of sowing mistrust in science. And then we just have people not quite understanding complex statistics. "Nate Silver predicts 90% chance of Biden winning election" seemed to be interpreted by many as "Nate Silver predicts Biden will get 90% of the vote". There's been loads of this around COVID stats. It confuses the hell out of me - I've found myself listening to the same episode of "More or Less" twice, in an attempt to really understand it. So I search for a simple explanation and stumble on someone giving a simplistic - but wildly wrong - interpretation, but I'm too stupid to realise it's wrong. Finally, many reporting on science use it to justify their political views. So we have "climate change stats predict sea level will rise by x%" (science) followed by "therefore it is scientifically proven that we must spend $x billion" (politics). Clearly, the first is a different type of fact than the latter, but if you disbelieve the second you may find yourself doubting the first as well, because they're asserted by the same people. When the assertions are more subtle, this is really difficult. As a Christian (more of the Benjamin Franklin variety than Joel Osteen), I find the trend to set up science as some kind of ultimate authority on everything to be just as troubling as those use The Bible for the same purpose. Ultimately, both of these rely on the same flawed human tendency to want simple answer to complex questions. As so many have said before me, science is about "what and how", religion is about "why", but the questions and answers are just as complex in both cases.
• pmdulaney 5y ago
  The most recent issue of Scientific American has a piece that talks about how detrimental increasingly restrictive abortion laws are. That is a great example of science being politicized. From a science standpoint they could just as easily talked about the tens of millions of babies that have been killed by means of abortion. But the bottom line is that a science magazine should not be expressing an opinion on a controversial moral issue as though it is a matter to be determined by science.
• panabee 5y ago
  every truth is born an opinion.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  I am immediately suspicious of any scientist (or expert in a subject) who doesn't say "well, actually, it's sort of complicated..." because it always is. Everything is complicated and confounded by innumerable factors, and requires years of study to even see the full shape of. But, politics and media do not currently thrive on presenting complexity, so if you're going to run the risk of asking a scientist their opinion, you either select scientists who are willing to dumb down the science, or you ignore everything they say that doesn't match what you already believed.
  • canadaduane 5y ago
    I have a cognitive bias poster on my wall that categorizes about 1/4 of researched biases as "Too Much Information" [1]. In the context of Democracy, the trouble with "actually, it's sort of complicated", is that there is absolutely no way that all citizens can approach everything this way and still have time for, e.g. the Pursuit of Happiness. In other words, trust (and trustworthiness) is key. We must delegate to someone, whether expert or not. Traditionally, organizations with cult-like properties envelop people in a kind of "information bubble" that makes deciding who to trust a tractable problem. The culture of science does this to some extent, but is unable to compete well for a number of reasons. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Cognitive_Bias_Codex_-_180%2B_biases%2C_designed_by_John_Manoogian_III_%28jm3%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Cognitiv...
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      Don't we delegate the job of understanding and digesting facts and conflicting information to our representatives, theoretically?
      • analog31 5y ago
        Increasingly, our representatives are chosen by what district we live in.
      • jkhdigital 5y ago
        Yes, but delegation is always accompanied by principal-agent problems (like moral hazard). Lobbyists ensure that all but the most morally unimpeachable representatives will inevitably place moneyed interests before their electorate.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  The headline is an easy thing to explain [0], but the article has nothing to do with the headline. [0] to wit: You cannot resolve “ought” questions with “is” facts, Political disputes are almost universally clashes of “ought” beliefs (even when rhetorically framed as being about “is” facts to convince people of different “ought” beliefs to sign on) Science addresses “is” facts. Therefore, science cannot resolve most political disputes.
  • dang 5y ago
    We've changed the title to the subtitle now, which presumably summarizes the article better.
• danielam 5y ago
  Related article: "Why Science cannot be Value-Free" https://www.kul.pl/files/57/wydzial/lekka-kowalik/Lekka-Kowalik_2010s33.pdf https://www.kul.pl/files/57/wydzial/lekka-kowalik/Lekka-Kowa... (HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28697385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28697385)
• Razengan 5y ago
  Politics is about mass-manipulation of emotions, and I’m sure there are sciences to help with that.
• hackeraccount 5y ago
  Science shouldn't be settling political disputes. Politics is the realm of people's most base instincts and desires - try to step in that and like the man wrestling a pig you'll end up covered in filth and the pig will be deliriously happy. I doubt the wisdom of people who say - I want to stop global warming so I studied climatology. You're going to open yourself up for a heartache if the plan is to study and learn enough so that you become a voice of authority and then use that voice to control what happens. It's not like people are terribly confused about what the least damaging course of action to take is. If resources were unlimited there would be little disagreement about what to do. Resources are limited though so we need to choose who gets what they want and who does not. There are messy compromises that can be made. Tricks that can be played. Sometimes there's power enough so that only one side sacrifices. In all of that though Science can inform what choices are available but when it starts trying to make them it will get slapped down.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dirtyid 5y ago
  Institutional perversion of soft sciences can't even solve scientific disputes.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  A core part of the issue is statistical literacy and statistical expertise. A surprising number of scientists suck at stats. This leads to all sorts of shifty analyses and conclusions, often about statistical significance or causation. People who appeal to science as objective tend to not understand how much freedom there is in choosing analyses. The most overconfident seem to know just enough stats to be dangerous.
• glitchc 5y ago
  Critical thinking is at an all-time low in Western society. Enough people aren't being trained to think critically nowadays, and increasingly, societal pressure, which used to put pressure on officials to vet and verify facts and positions, is diminishing. Until that changes, we will fall further and further into the cult of celebrity/personality, which is fundamentally appeal to authority. A person reading this MIT article should ask "Why should I believe what this article says?" If the answer is "because it's MIT! Duh!", then that's the problem in a nutshell. MIT is not a substitute for their own critical thinking faculties, nor is an MIT professor/academic/spokesperson/author the absolute arbiter of truth.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Critical thinking is at an all-time low in Western society. I think you are viewing the past through rose-colored glasses.
    • glitchc 5y ago
      Fair enough. Perhaps it's better to say that we seem to be in a local minimum right now.
  • m0zg 5y ago
    I'd actually say critical thinking has seen considerable improvement in the past few years. For one thing people no longer unconditionally trust the press and government institutions like they used to in, say '00s, and instead see them for what they are - a little more than Pravda and Politburo. Wars are also a lot less feasible now (thanks, ironically, to the cancer that is social media) than they used to be - people will bypass the media and shit all over the military industrial complex saber rattling. The establishment's control over narratives is at historic lows - that's why you're seeing increasing censorship - "consent of the governed" is getting a lot harder to manufacture. I'm pretty sure NYT would not be able to sell Iraq war to the public in 2021. I like that. I wish there was a less society-damaging way to achieve the same effect, but there doesn't seem to be one.
    • 5y ago
• papito 5y ago
  The difference between you and a scientist is that the scientist very well may be wrong, but at least the scientist tries. If you don't like that uncertainty, Twitter is full of people who are very, very sure.
• ReptileMan 5y ago
  I think we should punish public figures for getting things wrong and prescribing things wrong. A good example was mask mandate and outside gatherings. Everybody from politicians, officials, scientists and celebrities got it terribly wrong with stay home (turned out to be uneeded because risk of infection was so small). So until those people have been punished they must be barred from giving any more advice. Btw - this is not about scientists during pure science, but when they cross the border into policies. Wrong advises should have bad consequences for the people giving them
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• randcraw 5y ago
  Frankly, the agenda of this book puzzles me. Is there political counterflow that compromises integrity in some parts of science? Of course there is. For millenia this has been so. From Gallileo to Darwin to Haber to Einstein, the political or religious disruptions arising from science theory or experiment or technology often prompt someone to argue that governmental policy should not change in the light new facts or a new interpretation -- not if that change disrupts cherished societal values or impedes vested interests. It sounds like the author's argument is that political winds WITHIN scientific communities are fomenting bias in their work because they're not satisfied with publishing papers but now want to effect political change. Therefore they tolerate no dissent from an official party line. Perhaps climate change warrants such circumspection, but I know of no other scientific subdiscipline that does. As such, the rise in politics in ONE scientific subject doesn't justify a book that seems to tar and feather ALL of science. I suspect a book that attacks only the climate science community was deemed to narrow to attract a broad audience. And of course, exploring that topic wouldn't compellingly break new ground either. Finally, it seems to me that this is exactly the WRONG time in history to be impugning science or scientists. Without concrete and viable suggestions of how to redress the forces that have broadly compromised scientific integrity (which I doubt the author proposes), chinking away at science's armor can only aid the cause of anti-science, and feed the rising barbarian horde.
  • thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > It sounds like the author's argument is that political winds WITHIN scientific communities are fomenting bias in their work because they're not satisfied with publishing papers but now want to effect political change. Therefore they tolerate no dissent from an official party line. > Perhaps climate change warrants such circumspection, but I know of no other scientific subdiscipline that does. Anthropology is especially notorious for this, far more so than climate science (!), but you could describe all of the social sciences this way.
• westurner 5y ago
  First, not having read the article: #EvidenceBasedPolicy is a worthwhile objective even if only because the alternative is to just blow money without measuring ROI at all [because government expenditures are the actual key to feeding the beast, the economic beast, the...]. What are some examples of policy failures where Systematic review and Meta-analysis could have averted loss, harms, waste, catastrophe, long-term costs? Is that cherry picking? The other times we can just throw a dart and that's better than, ahem, these idiots we afford trying to do science? Wouldn't it be fair to require that constituent ScholarlyArticles (and other CreativeWorks) be kept on file with e.g. the Library of Congress? Non-federal governments usually have very similar IT and science policy review needs. Should adapting one system for non-federal governments be more complex than specifying a different String or URL in the token_name field in a transaction? When experts review ScholarlyArticles on our behalf, they should share their structured and unstructured annotations in such a way that their cryptographically signed reviews - and highlights to identify and extract structured facts like summary statistics like sample size and IRB-reviewed study controls - become part of a team-focused collaborative systematic meta-analysis that is kept on file and regularly reviewed in regards to e.g. retractions, typical cognitive biases, failures in experimental design and implementation, and general insufficiencies that should cause us to re-evaluate our beliefs given all available information which meets our established inclusion criteria. We have a process for peer review of PDFs - and hopefully datasets with locality for reproducibility and unitarity which purportedly helps us work through something like this sequence: Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom We often have gaps in our processes to support such progress in developing wisdom from knowledge that should be predicated upon sound information and data and then experience, bias, creeps in. Basic principles restricting the powers of the government should prevent the government - us, we - from specifically violating the protected rights of persons; but we have allowed "Science" to cloud our judgement in application of our most basic principles of justice - i.e. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; and Equality and Equitability - and should we chalk the unintended consequences up to ignorance or malice? More science all around: more Data Literacy - awareness of how many bad statistical claims are made all day around the world everywhere - is good and necessary and essential to Media Literacy, which is how we would be forming our opinions if we didn't have better tools for truth and belief for science. "What does it mean to know?" etc. Logic, Inference, Reasoning and Statistics probably predicated upon classical statistical mechanics are supposed to bring us closer to knowing: to bring our beliefs closer to the most widely observed truths. Which Verifiable Claims do we trust? What studies do we admit into our personal and community meta-analyses according to our shared inclusion criteria? "Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)" is one standard for meta-analyses, for example. http://www.prisma-statement.org/ http://www.prisma-statement.org/ . Could the bad guys or the dumb good guys lie with that control in place, too? Can knowing our rights - and upholding oaths to uphold values - protect us from meta-analytical group failure? Perhaps STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, art, and Medicine/Math) majors and other interested parties can help develop solutions for #EvidenceBasedPolicy? This one fell flat. Maybe it was the time of day? The question should be asked every year, at least, eh? "Ask HN: Systems for supporting Evidence-Based Policy?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920613 >> What tools and services would you recommend for evidence-based policy tasks like meta-analysis, solution criteria development, and planned evaluations according to the given criteria? >> Are they open source? Do they work with linked open data? > I suppose I should clarify that citizens, consumers, voters, and journalists are not acceptable answers "#LinkedMetaAnalyses", "#StructuredPremises"; Ctrl-F "linkedmeta", "linkedrep", "#LinkedResearch": https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/ Alright, my fair biases disclosed, on to the reading the actual article: /1
• fullshark 5y ago
  This is the entire field of economics
• cratermoon 5y ago
  Is this coming from the same place as articles arguing that we should just give up trying to deal with COVID-19 and let people day because yeah, a shame, but that's the cost of doing business?
• magicink81 5y ago
  > "In a popular YouTube video from a few years ago, for instance, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that America’s problems stem from the increasing inability of those in power to recognize scientific fact. Only if people begin to see that policy choices must be based on established scientific truths, according to Tyson, can we move forward with necessary political decisions." Neil is a blow-hard. Due to his own lack of humility and skepticism, he is precisely the worst public figure to represent science. His prescription is a recipe for dark ages totalitarianism. > "Scientizing public controversies often prevents the recognition that people without science degrees often have important contributions to make." Yeah. Because politics is about many people coming together, sorting out their needs and desires, and taking action. Not only the high priests. > "Decision makers expect certainty, whereas science is best at producing new questions." Decision makers don't expect certainty (they are good at dealing with uncertainty). Rather, decision makers (all of us) produce certainty when we make a decision, by coming up with the current best story about how the world works, what we need and desire, and how we might attain it together. Science adds important information to our current best story of how the world works. > "Scientizing policy privileges the dimensions of life that are easily quantifiable and renders less visible the ones that are not." Are we tracking case numbers? What about the fact that 4th graders are now at a 2nd grade level of education? Divorce rate? Depression? Suicide? Social cohesion? Incomes? Crime? Nope, just case numbers. Carry on! > "Political scientism starkly divides societies into friends and enemies, the enlightened and the ignorant." The vxd and the unvxd. Ask yourself a simple question how far away are we from recommending sending people away to training camps so they can learn the proper gospel of science? Or simply letting them waste away in a ghetto or gulag? Alternatively, how far are we from inviting those we disagree with over for dinner? How far from a warm embrace of someone wearing a red hat are you? Which are you closer to? > "In a culture dominated by political scientism, citizens and policymakers forget how to listen, debate, and explore possibilities for compromise or concession with one another." I recommend we read Hannah Arendt for an understanding of what politics must be for us. This essay points to a fundamental misunderstanding, in my opinion, that politics is about making "the best decisions" but really it's about making "the best decisions we can make together*". From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: This capacity to act in concert for a public-political purpose is what Arendt calls power. Power needs to be distinguished from strength, force, and violence (CR, 143–55). Unlike strength, it is not the property of an individual, but of a plurality of actors joining together for some common political purpose. Unlike force, it is not a natural phenomenon but a human creation, the outcome of collective engagement. And unlike violence, it is based not on coercion but on consent and rational persuasion. Arendt maintains that the legitimacy of power is derived from the initial getting together of people, that is, from the original pact of association that establishes a political community, and is reaffirmed whenever individuals act in concert through the medium of speech and persuasion. For her “power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy ... Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow” I recommend reading all of her books, but for a brief summarization of The Origins of Totalitarianism and why it is important today, this book is well written and poignant: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-Movements/dp/B08QW7WCQR https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-...
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  Rationality was hip at the end of the 19th century when the intelligentsia believed religious dogmatism was the root of all evil. Rationalism was the logical counter-draft. The early 20th century proved that humans can also commit atrocities and form dogmata without religion. Later thoughts relativized rationality, which was a necessary step in my opinion. We rarely see rationality today even if many try to claim it for themselves.