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The article opens with the line - "As a vocal advocate of vaccinations for public health..." That's a political manifesto. Science is W = mg, F = ma, etc. P
by throwaway22032 2y ago
The article opens with the line -
"As a vocal advocate of vaccinations for public health..."
That's a political manifesto.
Science is W = mg, F = ma, etc.
Politics is whether you mandate that every bridge has a 500% safety margin against gravity, wind, etc.
In my experience almost no-one has an issue with scientific research into things like climate change, effective pandemic damage control, nuclear power, etc.
But a lot of people get very upset when you tell them what to do, or spend their money on things without asking them.
- addicted 2y agoVaccinations for public health is as science as you can get. Middle school science is F=ma. That stuff is barely interesting once you enter the 20th century.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway22032 2y agoI think you're missing my point, sorry if I didn't explain it well enough. Science tells you that, unless you wish for it to fail, a bridge needs to be strong enough to withstand gravity, wind etc, what the stresses are, how likely it is to fail given XYZ conditions, etc. Politics has you advocating for bridges to meet minimum standards under threat of legal sanctions, deciding what those minimum standards should be (one failure per 500 years? 5000? etc). They are different things. You cannot decide scientifically how many resources are worth spending on safety, value judgements are required. To put it another way - science can tell you how to build a stable bridge. It can't tell you whether you need to build the bridge in the first place, or whether one stable bridge is a better use of resources than three mostly-stable bridges.