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This is an interesting article for several reasons. One is the immediate - more knowledge about mammography leads to scientists telling us to rely on it less -

by jerrya 14y ago

This is an interesting article for several reasons. One is the immediate - more knowledge about mammography leads to scientists telling us to rely on it less -- and that will be a message that flies in the face of what women's organizations may want to hear. Second, it's another example of a medical technology or science that upon further inspection, turned out to be not so scientific. It's something to consider when you hear or read a "Science, it works, bitches". It's something to consider when various groups are demanding some form of government action based on "Science, it works, bitches."

gruseom 14y ago
I agree with your main point, but it's ahistorical to say that if something was wrong then it must not have been scientific. That's a popular and seductive view that manages to commit both the hindsight and no-true-scotsman fallacies. The truth is that science (by which I mean the community of scientific opinion) is often wrong. It's just hard to see this in any given case until enough time has passed. For example, in the 1960s scientists told women not to breast-feed their babies because Science had proven that "formula" was better. That could hardly seem stupider or more absurd now, but an entire generation was affected by it. To me, that's a reasonable baseline against which to guard ourselves. It seems arrogant to suppose that we're smarter or less error-prone than the experts of 40 years ago. The conclusion I draw from this is that public policy should be skeptical of scientific opinion — not dismissive of it, of course; that would be silly — but inclined to err on the side of pluralism and non-intervention. That would also be an appropriate use of the word "skepticism" as opposed to the dogmatism that calls itself by that name these days. I'm uncomfortable (as your comment suggests you are) with the zealotry of the more aggressive pro-science movements that have arisen in recent years. They speak in the name of science, but emotionally they are proto-religious. Science, the abstraction, does not exist. What exists are communities of fallible and corruptible humans. We need to take that into account, everywhere and deeply.

by jerrya 14y ago

gruseom 14y ago

I agree with your main point, but it's ahistorical to say that if something was wrong then it must not have been scientific. That's a popular and seductive view that manages to commit both the hindsight and no-true-scotsman fallacies. The truth is that science (by which I mean the community of scientific opinion) is often wrong. It's just hard to see this in any given case until enough time has passed. For example, in the 1960s scientists told women not to breast-feed their babies because Science had proven that "formula" was better. That could hardly seem stupider or more absurd now, but an entire generation was affected by it. To me, that's a reasonable baseline against which to guard ourselves. It seems arrogant to suppose that we're smarter or less error-prone than the experts of 40 years ago. The conclusion I draw from this is that public policy should be skeptical of scientific opinion — not dismissive of it, of course; that would be silly — but inclined to err on the side of pluralism and non-intervention. That would also be an appropriate use of the word "skepticism" as opposed to the dogmatism that calls itself by that name these days. I'm uncomfortable (as your comment suggests you are) with the zealotry of the more aggressive pro-science movements that have arisen in recent years. They speak in the name of science, but emotionally they are proto-religious. Science, the abstraction, does not exist. What exists are communities of fallible and corruptible humans. We need to take that into account, everywhere and deeply.