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> but at some point courses of action have to be decided And doing that is not the scientist's job. So scientists should not be filtering what they say because
by pdonis 5y ago
> but at some point courses of action have to be decided
And doing that is not the scientist's job. So scientists should not be filtering what they say because they want to encourage or discourage some course of action. They should just be telling the truth as best they know it.
> for many problems, it's not enough to delegate this to individuals, the decision has to be taken on a collective level.
First, I think the problems for which a collective decision has to be made are much rarer than many people think. Governments have gotten their fingers into all kinds of pies that they don't actually need to be in, but where government intervention serves a special interest.
Second, there isn't just one collective level. There are many of them. As a general rule, you want people who are going to bear the costs and reap the benefits in a particular area to be involved in collective decisions about that area, but you don't want people involved who aren't. That generally means pushing collective decisions down to the lowest possible collective level. But again, our political system very often doesn't do that.
Third, when it comes to collective policy decisions, scientists have no special expertise; they are just citizens like everyone else. Scientists who believe some kind of action is required because of something they found in their scientific research still are only seeing that one narrow viewpoint of their research; that doesn't give them any special ability to see the big picture or to take other interests or factors into account.
> What this article also argues against is tactics that specifically target this unavoidable amount of uncertainty with the interest of delaying action.
Uncertainty can be used either way: it can be used to try to delay action, or to try to motivate it (we don't know whether X will be a problem, but if it is, it will be huge, so we can't take a chance on not doing something about it). Both can be issues.
- xg15 5y ago> As a general rule, you want people who are going to bear the costs and reap the benefits in a particular area to be involved in collective decisions about that area, but you don't want people involved who aren't. But this is exactly what the article is arguing for. Often enough industry groups like the tobacco or oil industry were manipulating policy such that they were reaping the benefits while everyone else was bearing the costs. Those industry groups are already producing biased research. The article argues that more scientists should be ready to expose this bias. This rule also isn't completely general. Those who bear the costs, those who reap the benefits and those who would be affected by actions might be three different groups. It sometimes can be desirable to make a rule that is applied very broadly to avoid inequities and arbitrage effects. Finally, in global issues such as climate change and COVID, everyone is bearing the costs, so action can't be restricted locally. > Uncertainty can be used either way: it can be used to try to delay action, or to try to motivate it (we don't know whether X will be a problem, but if it is, it will be huge, so we can't take a chance on not doing something about it). Both can be issues. Both can be issues, yes. But in the discussed fields, again climate change, COVID, tobacco use, health effects of highly processed food, etc, scientific consensus is by a wide margin that X is both very likely and will deal enormous damage. So uncertainty in that direction is already very small.