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There are two worlds colliding here. The scientific world is primarily oriented towards finding stable consensus truths that are independent of individual bias

There are two worlds colliding here. The scientific world is primarily oriented towards finding stable consensus truths that are independent of individual bias. The political world is primarily oriented towards persuasion and behaviour modification - either for personal gain, or (more rarely) to promote fairness, equality, and perhaps even opportunity. To politicians, scientific facts are only one of many available tools for persuasion, and they're not particularly good at it. These worlds are incompatible to such an extent that people operating in one world are fundamentally unable to understand the other. So the question is really "How do you create a political consensus?" The answer is well-known - you set up numerous apparently independent think tanks and PR operations to promote your message across multiple media, you put journalists-for-hire in positions of notability and influence, you design soundbite concepts and memes that spread the message virally. You use psychological techniques learned from the ad industries and corporate psychology to dramatise and frame your message to make it more personally relatable. For bonus points you set up an enemy who opposes your message and you demonise, belittle, and humiliate them. Ideally you frame the "debate" to make disagreement literally unthinkable, while also making all supporters feel as if their beliefs are entirely their own, arrived at rationally and objectively. Scientific consensus on its own will do none of this. And a scientific "fact" is powerless against this process.

ImHereToVote 4y ago
You forgot that you also convince the people who oppose your message, that it's the other, also very undesirable group that is actually responsible for your message.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> Ideally you frame the "debate" to make disagreement literally unthinkable, while also making all supporters feel as if their beliefs are entirely their own, arrived at rationally and objectively. The important prerequisite, and what I think is one of the major differentiator between your "scientific world" and "political world": promoting the idea of the debate itself, as an activity that's meaningful and useful in discovering the right solutions and objective facts about reality. The thing is, a debate is actually the exact opposite of that - it's entirely orthogonal to objective reality. But it sure does work well to build and reinforce "us vs. them" divisions and group people into conflicting sides. In the "scientific world", you don't do debates. It's obvious they're a stupid waste of time. In this world, you collate what you know, share the connections you see and the reasoning you use, and try to tease out some underlying structure from all of it, that's mapping reality better than the one you had before.

ImHereToVote 4y ago

You forgot that you also convince the people who oppose your message, that it's the other, also very undesirable group that is actually responsible for your message.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> Ideally you frame the "debate" to make disagreement literally unthinkable, while also making all supporters feel as if their beliefs are entirely their own, arrived at rationally and objectively. The important prerequisite, and what I think is one of the major differentiator between your "scientific world" and "political world": promoting the idea of the debate itself, as an activity that's meaningful and useful in discovering the right solutions and objective facts about reality. The thing is, a debate is actually the exact opposite of that - it's entirely orthogonal to objective reality. But it sure does work well to build and reinforce "us vs. them" divisions and group people into conflicting sides. In the "scientific world", you don't do debates. It's obvious they're a stupid waste of time. In this world, you collate what you know, share the connections you see and the reasoning you use, and try to tease out some underlying structure from all of it, that's mapping reality better than the one you had before.