Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy may be damaging democracy

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-science-cant-fix-politics/

by anarbadalov • 5 years ago

235 258 5 years ago

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

DamnYuppie• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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) 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.

GoblinSlayer6• 5 years 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.

epistasis2• 5 years 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.

im3w1l2• 5 years 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.

XorNot• 5 years 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...

everdrive4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

tremon2• 5 years 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.

hprotagonist6• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

hprotagonist6• 5 years 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.

OrvalWintermute2• 5 years ago

too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative

This is particularly apropos in the wake of Russell Brand's recent video on FB's Fact Checkers for Covid 19 vaccine information [1] funded by BigPharma, having a huge financial stake in bigpharma, and intentionally hiding their funding by BigPharma, and not adding a notification that the fact checkers are in fact funded/invested by/in BigPharma.

I am starting to read completely disinterested 3rd party sources more, because weighing the pros and cons of a thing is more challenging when the supposed experts are deliberating concealing material relationships. Some old Emeritus professor, already retired, with several phds and just a passing bit of information often gives great criticism of a thing without having any stake in the outcome.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44B-OJcOXxc

motohagiography• 5 years ago

Was going to comment that it is not science that solves political issues, but rather, engineering. Even logos, ethos, and pathos together do not prevail over trebuchet.

Espressosaurus• 5 years ago

Engineering doesn't solve political issues either. War is politics by another means.

version_five2• 5 years ago

In your role as a scientist, shouldn't providing evidence of truth (or falsehood) be your main concern?

Statements about importance are value judgements that no doubt you have made, but are not really science and are basically political.

An easy example, "covid restrictions curb covid" may be true and you can provide experimental evidence. "We need to impose restrictions" makes a judgement about the overall situation under the restrictions being preferable to the one without them. This is not a scientific call, this is a societal judgement.

People too often pretend that an action immediately follows from some identified causal relationship. Smoking kills you does not immediately imply you should quit smoking, without the intermediate step of "you value your later life and health more than the ongoing benefits you get from smoking" (disclaimer, nonsmoker)

hprotagonist6• 5 years ago

In your role as a scientist, shouldn't providing evidence of truth (or falsehood) be your main concern?

Strictly speaking no, but that's more of a long digression on epistemology than what I think you mean. (but think of indiana jones here: "archaeology is concerned with _fact_, not _truth_ ...")

My role as a scientist is to work diligently to understand, as best as we are able, the natural world.

Yet, "I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth's precious wealth."

Out_of_Characte• 5 years ago

Statements of importance are indeed value judgements, That's why you have to argue that its universally good ( a virtue ) in order to get around the political stifle. This does happen quite alot but you don't always hear about it. The US happened to approve a 1 billion dollar funding request for Israel's Iron Dome. The vote was 420 to 9.

lmkg• 5 years ago

The science community as a whole needs to do the work of all three. The work of an individual scientist may be able to focus on just the one, and their lives are easier if they work in a context that gives them that specificity of responsibility.

But eventually, someone needs to do the work to convince people "science is trustworthy." And for a variety of reasons (both objective and social), scientists should be on the front lines of that work.

The question of "this is important" is tricky because it must involve a two-way discussion with the audience. But there are cases where a scientist must be making that case, e.g. in order to procure funding.

burnished• 5 years ago

Is a scientist not also a citizen?

GoblinSlayer6• 5 years ago

What to do when it's true, but the proponent isn't trustworthy? Just say no?

phkahler2• 5 years ago

Find another source. If it's true there should be evidence other than the proponents words.

AniseAbyss• 5 years ago

Maybe scientists should stick to their labs? You can invent a cure for cancer, but that doesn't automatically make you a good politician or leader.

hprotagonist6• 5 years ago

You need all three rhetorical modes in your lab too. Trust me!

jvanderbot2• 5 years ago

More concretely, there are also concerns with one side judging their own arguments (be them of any of the big three types) as valid without concern for their ability to convince others.

If you treat logos, pathos, and ethos as a self-certified checklist, you are doomed to fail as well. You must provide arguments of each three types that are convincing to others. Above all else, preaching to the choir is (IMHO) the biggest problem in my political environment (USA).

hobs• 5 years ago

In the context of politicians in the USA they will not perceive its a problem until it stop working.

Given how strong gerrymandering is there's no benefit to reaching out to the other side, just hold the line while scoring political points.

phkahler2• 5 years ago

"This is true" obviously needs to come from someone trustworthy or it is irrelevant.

This is why I categorically ignore everything from Dr Fauci. He's known to have lied to the public before to influence behavior. Since I'd have verify his claims from some other source anyway, there's no sense using him as a source at all.

patpending3• 5 years ago

I know his recommendations have changed over time, but can you cite well documented instances where he lied?

chmsky00• 5 years ago

Yep. Science is three things; space, time, field effects.

Human gossip is societies field effect.

A thing may be true but politics is obfuscating the importance.

alistairSH3• 5 years ago

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.

While I understand your argument, I'm believe there's something more going on.

Taking COVID, for example. From the pro-science side, we get:

"COVID is a dangerous virus. We should take X, Y, Z actions" from somebody with a PhD in public health, medicine, or similar.

And from the anti-science side, we get: "It's fake. It's the flu. X wasn't perfect, therefore X, Y, Z are all a plot to make you magnetic" from somebody on YouTube with no credential beyond being on Youtube.

I guess what I'm saying is there's something fundamentally broken about how people process information. All the Logos, Ethos, and Pathos in the world doesn't help when a significant portion of the population is brainwashed.

Jensson7• 5 years ago

And from the anti-science side, we get: "It's fake. It's the flu. X wasn't perfect, therefore X, Y, Z are all a plot to make you magnetic" from somebody on YouTube with no credential beyond being on Youtube.

Then why do we see articles saying that Youtube etc bans people with great credentials who are anti vax? There are people with great credentials on every side of every argument. Great credentials doesn't stop you from being an idiot or being wrong. If you believe the first person with great credentials you see, and that person happened to be anti vacc, would you be anti vax? Sounds like it to me. I'm pro vaccine, but I am strongly anti blindly listening to people with credentials.

canadaduane5• 5 years ago

I guess what I'm saying is there's something fundamentally broken about how people process information.

As far back as you can go, yes. 2.5M years. But I think the point is not to call what exists "broken," but to understand and then use it to the advantage of humanity. Cult-like behavior is human behavior--i.e. the rule, not the exception. Now how do we use this to advance the species?

PaulDavisThe1st• 5 years ago

COVID is actually a great example of some of TFA is about.

Many of the "facts" about COVID are not actually in much dispute. The people who view it as "a dangerous virus" and those who see it as "the flu" are much less far apart than they appear.

Nobody has seriously disputed the R0 values for COVID, nor the (rather) broad range of deaths per 100k cases. What isn't agreed upon is what the implications for policy should be.

Those who view it as a dangerous virus point to its transmissibility and capacity to cause hospitalization, and therefore its implications for public health issues.

Those who view it as "the flu" point to its relatively low death rate compared to other global pandemics of the past, particularly when adjusted for demographics, and correctly note that a given individual's chance of dying from COVID are extremely low (at least in countries with roughly adequate health care systems).

Both can claim "facts" on their side. The question is what policy consequences follow, and that is where the major differences lie. Depending on your perspective, the deaths (and long term illness) caused by COVID are variously worse, better or about the same as the damage caused by policies to contain it. Since making this assessment necessarily involves subjective judgements and questions of morality, it can't be settled by an appeal to science let alone mere facts.

None of this is to say that there are not relatively fact-ignorant people making various cases for certain policy approaches. But we could ignore those people, and the core debate would remain, and it's not a debate about truth or science, but policy.

dragontamer2• 5 years ago

Logos, Ethos, Pathos: you need all three. "This is true. I am trustworthy. This true thing is important."

This ivermectin thing basically proves that logos isn't useful. Ethos + Pathos alone can convince a large population of people.

The Apple "Reality Distortion Field" was never about logic. It was about making people feel good about buying Apple products. That's fine, because Apple has decent enough products (I don't like them myself, but I can see why some others would like them).

But today, we can apply the "Reality Distortion Field" to any subject. Most recently: ivermectin.

-------------

What I don't get: why are people choosing to push snake oil (like ivermectin), instead of pushing the drugs that do work (3 different vaccines, dexamethasone, and monoclonal antibodies)?

Society has developed working treatments for COVID19: dexamethasone cut the death rate in half IIRC, and monoclonal antibodies cut it in half yet again. And yet, people are seeking treatments that straight up have no evidence of working.

I can put papers up for the efficacy of dexamethasone + monoclonal antibodies, and how this cocktail saves the lives of countless people across this country. But then I'm suddenly left in a "Russet's teapot" scenario where I'm apparently supposed to prove-a-negation when discussing ivermectin (even if countless papers fail to distinguish ivermectin from the null-hypothesis).

People's brains turn off. Because today's reality distortion fields / marketing / propaganda are much, much stronger than logic.

---------

Let me tell you how to do things in today's world.

1. Automatically find the people who have the poorest logic. Use ads, memes, and other such "low-quality" discussion points to find the lowest functioning brains. For example, clickbait headlines or "Nigerian Prince" scams. The dumber the argument, the better.

2. Reasonable people will ignore you. The only people who will interact with you are people with weaker argument skills. Spend as much time convincing _this_ group of your benefits.

3. Make it fun: give them memes to share with their friends. Even if its a bad / crappy argument, that's okay. That's what memes are about.

4. Sit back and relax as your crowd automatically spreads whatever argument you want amongst their friends and family. Now they're doing the hard work for you.

5. Bonus points: get enough people moving as a crowd, and even smart people start to get drawn into the masses. You'll start finding apologists who make better arguments on behalf of you. Keep up with the meme culture and pick/choose the best arguments. Crowdsource your marketing: the memes that become popular are the arguments you want to use.

At no point is "working" on logos actually beneficial to building a RDF (reality distortion field). You can build ethos + pathos simultaneously by just seeding opinions into a crowd through meme culture.

Bonus points#2: Use really, really bad arguments (World is flat. Lets to go Mars. 9/11 was a hoax. Hydroxychloroquine can save you from COVID19) as practice. The better you get at seeding bad arguments, the better you get at seeding any argument.

bena• 5 years ago

Sorry, just one correction:

It's "Russell's Teapot", it's named after Bertrand Russell, not a potato.

andrekandre2• 5 years ago

  > I'm apparently supposed to prove-a-negation when discussing ivermectin

i wonder if the bias towards ivermectin is because you can take it yourself, whereas dexamethasone + monoclonal antibodies you probably have to be in serious condition (in a hospital) before you can get it...?

is it possible there is some physiological issues about "going to the doctor" vs "self help/healing" ?

8note• 5 years ago

How do your fellow scientists get work through peer review without showing that it is trustworthy?

And how do they get funding to do science without showing its important?

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

To your point, American anti-intellectualism continuously undermines the "I am trustworthy" aspect of science. For a country whose current rise to prominence was so clearly aided by technology, and whose future relevance depends on technical innovation in an uncertain global future...

We are so lucky that COVID is only going to kill a million americans or so (700k and counting, probably 850k by Jan 1st), if this was the death rates of smallpox or the black death... ye gods. Our lack of respect in science is a huge part of vaccine hesitancy and our key role in continuing the pandemic.

The news media are terrible because for decades they have reduced science and technology either to simplistic caricatures, star trek gobbledygook, or even worse the WELL THEY SAID THIS, NOW THEY SAY THAT.

The general media's constant use of the high school nerd trope for all science and technology proficiency has been a long term failure in the progress of our civilization. Only, and only, because such proficiency leads generally to some degrees of upper middle class money to vast wealth is the reason it hasn't been worse.

But that media trope has always colored all science and technology policy as culturally "well, that's what the nerds say, and they aren't cool or fun".

Possibly it goes back to how most ultra-rich """elite""" made their money in America: by control and exploitation. People that have influence and position distrust science, because it is complicated and unknown and preys on their paranoia, and so often for industrialists produces complications to their overall plan of "make money by selling products, offloading the actual environmental cost/impact of those products on ... anyone else".

Maybe I'm paranoid, but it does seem with the mastery of social media propaganda/manipulation by monied interests, sowing distrust in science is now at an all time high.

So the business-friendly right will distrust science because it threatens their money and power. The apathetic center won't like science because it isn't cool. The left... well, scientists are generally white and male so they are distrusted by identity activists, and the rest of the left is too disorganized to rally around science policy effectively.

mmcdermott• 5 years 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.

wombatmobile2• 5 years 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_Skies3• 5 years 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?

philwelch• 5 years ago

Sabine Hossenfelder put it as well as I've seen it put:

"Science doesn't tell you not to pee on an electric fence. It only tells you that urine is an excellent conductor of electricity."

naasking7• 5 years ago

That was a good one for sure. She does have some gems.

bo1024• 5 years ago

But the problem is that people aren't even agreeing on facts.

rkk3• 5 years ago

people aren't even agreeing on facts.

From the TFA.

"what happens to politics ... when rhetorical appeals to 'the facts' start to dominate people’s justifications"

Simplicitas• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

mensetmanusman5• 5 years ago

People forget that politics is preference.

Science deals in the objective while politics deals in the subjective (preferences).

OrvalWintermute2• 5 years 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.

tremon2• 5 years 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_Skies3• 5 years 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.

mensetmanusman5• 5 years ago

Yes, what is studied by scientists is based on preference (and therefore politics).

Nursie2• 5 years ago

The problem comes when preference has been based on something that becomes shown objectively false.

People are so attached to their preference that they dismiss facts and attack the whole concept of knowledge to maintain that preference.

mensetmanusman5• 5 years ago

Who has the objective falsifications? Is it actually a preference of risk reduction and complexity? Would be interested to hear your example.

xqcgrek2• 5 years 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.

naasking7• 5 years 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• 5 years 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_Skies3• 5 years 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.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

denying the link between pesticide use and bee/insect declines

Has this been proven?

Zenst• 5 years ago

Science works upon facts, politics works upon emotional ethos of those facts.

zwieback2• 5 years 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-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• 5 years 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?

zwieback2• 5 years ago

"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?"

Exactly, I think that's the crux of it

GoblinSlayer6• 5 years ago

Should one be expected to more rigorously critique the statement of a trusted peer because of the potential for abuse?

It's a little counterintuitive, but people don't complain about stuff they don't deal with.

acidburnNSA• 5 years 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

new_stranger• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Because the arguments fundamentally aren't about science, they are about risk assessment.

And where the thresholds lay.

michael_j_ward2• 5 years ago

If "assessment" is "what are the risks of outcomes", then that is probably science, right?

Risk Tolerance is the political / value laden part.

GoblinSlayer6• 5 years ago

Risk management seems to be more based on gut feeling, so it's probably not science.

everdrive4• 5 years 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.

esja3• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

This one comes to mind:

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.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

I also see stuff on the left calling objectivity a tool of "white supremacy." So yeah, very dangerous. The problem with science is that it shows the truth that both sides wish wasn't there.

nerdponx• 5 years ago

And in the middle you have the people who say they "believe the science"and are religiously unwilling to accept anything that isn't orthodoxy. Less dangerous in most cases, but kind of ironic.

willis9363• 5 years ago

The history of psychology psuedoscience being used to validate racial bias is undeniable. I'm sure there are groups on the far left throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but by in large the left complain about psuedoscience being used as a tool of white supremacy.

diag• 5 years ago

Are you aware of how often science and medicine has been used specifically to repress non-white populations? I'm not saying that's an inherent trait of science, but it can easily be employed in that way if people aren't actually aware of the biases people hold implicitly.

throw8932894• 5 years ago

"I love science" is just empty logo. Ask what papers they read/wrote recently, and it falls apart.

reedjosh• 5 years ago

The quotes you provide are not anti scientific method. They're meant to mock unthinking obedience to the authority figure science has become. The scientific method is great!

'Follow the science' means don't question me I'm on the side of science.

Quotes like 'I fucking love science.' belie a tendency to get caught up in science's many miracles such that one can be lead by corrupt institutions claiming scientific credulity.

The two quotes are used in the 'dark corners' you mention to mock naivety in the belief of purity in science.

kiba• 5 years ago

It could alternatively means rejection of scientific authority in favor of one's own view, right or wrong.

everdrive4• 5 years ago

I don't disagree with the criticism that people claiming "I fucking love science" and "follow the science" are often (usually?) themselves not particularly scientific. On lousy image boards, very clever points do exist, but they're mixed in seamlessly with very poor points.

genericone• 5 years ago

Yes, when a museum puts out a poster saying the scientific method, rational thinking, is akin to whiteness... you know well certain that the very concept of science is being undermined as well as weaponized. I mean, someone unironically worked on this poster, its content, and its layout, probably spending several tens of hours looking at it on their computer screen, and then said to themselves and their peers, "this is fine".

https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651

everdrive4• 5 years ago

This remains one of the most infuriating things I've ever seen.

Sohcahtoa823• 5 years ago

That poster feels like Horseshoe Theory [0] in action.

It's equating a lot of positive attributes to being white, which is exactly what you'd expect to see from someone on the far right.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

mattbrewsbytes• 5 years ago

Do you think it is that people truly believe the scientific method is wrong or do you think it is something else?

I have a theory (I'm programmer, not psychologist) that with the pandemic there is a lot of emotions (fear, anxiety, anger, unknowns, etc.) floating around people's heads that get all jumbled up and they grasp for something that they can cling to which, however illogical to many, calms those fears to a manageable level. And then they find things online which support those ideas and they go deeper with them because it calms them to have "answers".

I see headlines of similar anti-vaxx, etc. things from US/EU and wonder if this is a western phenomenon? Are people seeing similar sentiments rising up in say Japan? Or other non-western countries?

willis9363• 5 years ago

I'm not suggesting that science is "left" or "right," or that the left is blameless here

Science isn't necessarily left but the left is scientific and the right is whatever the left isn't.

qsort• 5 years ago

the left is scientific

Yeah but is it? As someone who considers himself at least culturally left-leaning, I'm definitely seeing a worrying trend of moving away from the conviction that data, numbers, science, logic are valuable and desirable tools to interpret the world.

The fact that one of the catchphrases of the alt-right is "facts don't care about your feelings", as idiotic as that is, should really make you stop and think about what kind of worldview is being pushed.

popcube3• 5 years ago

I trust it is reversed. left trust some concept and fighting for it, extreme guys never changed.(e.g., don't kill cute animals!!) right build a perfect model for exist world, and fight for keep it. scientists work for find new theory -- it is a new concept, look so good! so scientists will move towards left, when they find theory do not work, they go back to mid. but sometimes they will walk too far to back...

woko• 5 years ago

That is post-modernism [1], the tendencies of our era. Boghossian's commentary [2] published in 1996 is still relevant these days, though it would need to be put in context.

Postmodernists like to respond [...] that both claims can be true because both are true relative to some perspective or other, and there can be no question of truth outside of perspectives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

[2] https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/philosophy/documents/f...

claudiawerner• 5 years ago

Postmodernists like to respond [...] that both claims can be true because both are true relative to some perspective or other, and there can be no question of truth outside of perspectives.

I wonder who the 'postmodernists' mentioned here are; for example, Foucault, who is often grouped under that umbrella, went to pains to say that just because multiple readings are possible, it does not mean that they are all valid from a single point of scrutiny.

It's also rather strange that the talk of 'postmodernists' is as if it's an academic movement rather than the state of the world today (e.g. see Azuma's analysis of otaku in Japan as symptomatic of the postmodern condition; the increasing reliance on trope and categorized personalities in modern media compared to the grand narratives of modernist literature). Theorists of postmodernism tend to argue four fronts: why we're living in a postmodern world, how we got here, and what that means for meaning (political, religious, cultural) and how to deal with that.

The people who usually decry 'postmodernism' are in general perfectly happy to live in the world that word describes, with its media and piecemeal, disconnected consumption and purchase of images and simulations lacking any real narrative. Even more absurd is the tendency for some of the same people to resist narrative (e.g. "no politics in video games").

GoblinSlayer6• 5 years ago

Whether truth is relative or not has no effect on politics, because truth is simply not a concern there. The point of political claims is political interests, not truth, so they can't be defeated by walking and talking about truth.

azangru3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

azangru3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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...

benlivengood2• 5 years ago

A practical example are the Jan 6 riots in DC and the attacks on the integrity of voting. Both peaceful transitions of power and trustworthy elections are bedrocks of democracy and so attacking them weaken democratic societies. At some point a coup succeeds and democracy is dead.

azangru3• 5 years ago

Weren't the rioters convinced that they were saving the democracy that was about to be undermined by what they considered to be a stolen election? If so, weren't they participating in the democracy?

As a thought experiment, consider protests against fraudulent elections in other countries (Russia and Belarus come to mind, but I am sure I saw some other countries in newspaper headlines recently). Would you consider those protests to be an exercise in democracy?

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

Or a coup does not succeed and the powers that be start looking for ways how to actually strengthen the trust in democracy.

For example, Swiss constitution of 1848 was a result of a civil war. Its provisions made the division of powers between the federation and the cantons clear and Switzerland has never had a violent crisis again.

joshuaheard• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

epgui3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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"

epgui3• 5 years 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."

travisgriggs2• 5 years 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.

epgui3• 5 years 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.

travisgriggs2• 5 years 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)

popcube3• 5 years 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.

JadeNB3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

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?

Most people are horrible at dealing with uncertainty when making decisions. I don't know why this is. But taking an uncertain landscape, making a decision and then projecting certainty works better than conveying the risks for communicating with everyone but people used to making executive decisions.

So if you have two politicians, one who channels a scientist's healthy (and realistic) scepticism and one who takes a random position and blasts it, the latter will tend to be more popular.

dnautics3• 5 years ago

We want policy (politics) to create certainty and stability.

Maybe it's this half of the equation that needs to be examined.

thaumasiotes4• 5 years ago

That's not going to change. Certainty and stability is what people want.

archibaldJ• 5 years ago

Interestingly there is a correspondence of this in doing startup too.

jleyank• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

JadeNB3• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

dnautics3• 5 years ago

As a (former) scientist, I should also admonish that it is generally in the professional scientist's best interest to prolong the perceived complexity of any given thing to keep the grants coming. Even if they're not influenced by an interest outside of their scope, it's a mental habit that can be hard to break.

chalst• 5 years ago

Perhaps wisdom starts by accepting the conjunction of both the saying and your retort, which is not so far from a better-known saying, "the devil is in the details".

version_five2• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the stereotype of dentists giving out toothbrushes on Halloween.

Maybe if you're life is about preventing cavities you think that's what kids should always have in mind, but life would suck if before every action we asked "will this contribute to tooth decay" - much more than it would suck with a few cavities.

satellite22• 5 years ago

And it would be great if the public debate was about what outcome is better given two policies produced by honest but differently focused scientists.

It would also be good if all those models were used as basis to discuss divergent interests and that politics would remain politics as a tool to select policies that maximize a majority (but not everyone's) best interests.

I feel, instead the issue is that it's become unacceptable to disclose what are someone's own best interests and to defend those.

Instead everyone produce fallacious models that show that their prefered policy is in everyone's best interests.

silexia• 5 years ago

I agree completely: much of science now is highly politicized. We have seen what happens to professors or research scientists who try to take a position that countered popular opinion on a sensitive topic - they have protests against them, they are spat upon and assaulted, and they lose their jobs.

All of the other scientists and researchers see this and adjust their own behavior and areas of study to avoid being mobbed.

I have had to become increasingly cautious and wary of trusting all published science, especially that in social areas now.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

Politics is a fundamentally alien experience to most STEM people.

Politics is manifestly not about the public good - not even with compromises.

It's mostly about a few unpleasant - sometimes charismatic - individuals pursuing power for their own personal benefit, and covertly that of their funders and sponsors.

Science has nothing to contribute to this, because the entire business is so hopelessly toxic and corrupt that rational debate about policy doesn't even get to first base.

If you want rational policy you don't want politics. It's perfectly possible you don't even want democracy.

What you want is administration - a very different process where mature competent executives and managers who do not have Dark Triad personality traits make intelligent, informed, and compassionate decisions in the public interest based on evidence, expert guidance, and their own good instincts. And their power is strictly limited to the lightest possible enforcement required to do the job.

No country has even been run like this, but a few have managed to operate like this in selected subfields.

jrumbut3• 5 years ago

This is what the article is getting at, there are questions to be answered before you ever get to scientists evaluating evidence for and against different policies aimed at solving a problem.

What problem are we solving, what is or isn't a problem, what constitutes a better outcome, and what types of policies are allowable may be informed by science but are often (and often appropriately or at least inevitably) decided by culture, law, art, force majeure, etc.

raxxorrax3• 5 years ago

I think the article wants to argue against that.

It isn't rational that you love your wife more than other women. Why constrain yourself to such rules for policies?

Is dying for your freedom rational? Investing in symbolic architecture? Skydiving could be seen as fundamentally irrational. Some still do it.

All depends on how exactly you define rationality.

Overall it might be prudent to value rational arguments, I complete agree with that.

edit:

It isn't rational that you love your wife more than other women. Why constrain yourself [...]

Reading it again, this can transport something different than the point I tried to make...

m0zg6• 5 years ago

Fun fact: incidence of skin cancer in notoriously cloudy and rainy WA is substantially higher than in almost always sunny HI or CA or TX. I bet the vast majority of "scientists and doctors" don't even know this.

https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/AtAGlance/

reissbaker• 5 years ago

The rates are extremely similar once you control for race (which the page you linked allows you to do, by the way). White people get skin cancer at much higher rates than non-white people, because melanin acts as permanent mild SPF, and white people have less skin melanin than non-white people: that's what makes them white, after all. Since Washington is more white than Hawaii, California, and Texas, if you don't control for race it looks — counterintuitively — like Washington is more risky than the others in terms of skin cancer. But it's not, it's just that you're selecting different population demographics.

Also notable is that sunniness doesn't really determine UV exposure; partial cloud cover can actually result in more UV-B exposure, counterintuitively: https://www.drgurgen.com/are-the-suns-uv-rays-really-stronge... And even full cloud cover doesn't completely block UV. So WA and CA aren't as different as you might think.

Meanwhile, as one might expect, most states that get freezing cold for months at a time have lower skin cancer rates than those that don't when controlling for race: if you don't go outside for more than a few minutes a day, while bundled up under multiple layers, for months at a time, well — you see less skin cancer. Some heavy farming states seem to have more skin cancer, but again that makes sense since farm workers are outside a lot.

Vermont and New Hampshire seem like odd exceptions to this rule — but I suspect there's also just some other selection bias at play. UV exposure from the sun causes skin cancer at high rates in white people; trying to make assumptions about states isn't necessarily an easy thing to do, since many other factors are at play when considering who lives where and how much they go outside.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

Presumably this only applies to scientists and not to politicians, economists, think tanks and PR firms, and so on.

WalterBright3• 5 years ago

I see all the time PhD's who, when dealing with matters in their own field, assiduously adhere to reason, facts, the scientific method, evidence, etc.

But step outside that field, and they latch on to something that emotionally appeals to them, and all that reason, facts, etc., flies right out the window.

Of course, I never do that myself.

evv555• 5 years ago

Critical thinking is domain dependent. For example, just because you can kill it on white board interviews doesn't mean you will be able to navigate relationship issues. The way I imagine many PhD's I've talked to is like the RPG character where you max out one line of development at the expense of all the other lines. The counter-example would be the "T shaped" development profile which is the ideal imo.

scelerat• 5 years ago

INT and WIS are separate, orthogonal stats

thaumasiotes4• 5 years ago

Even if moderate sun exposure causes people to statistically live a bit longer on net

This reminded me that the weight range we term "overweight" has lower all-cause mortality than the weight range called "normal weight". (There is another tier above "overweight", "obese", which has high mortality.)

KingMachiavelli• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure the study you are thinking of [1] only applies to ages > 65 [2] for which there are a lot of possible explanations. Other studies have found that past a certain age no lifestyle choices matter including smoking & diet since it takes too long to influence when you die.

If you look at [1], a ton of the studies they looked at adjusted for preexisting illness like hypertension and diabetes. It's basically like saying people who fall off sky scrapers don't die of cancer.

It is also important to remember the associated costs and decrease in quality of life associated with being overweight.

That said it is possible the lower-end of the overweight BMI range could be moved up a point or two but that's probably less than the variance between populations anyway.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/99/4/875/4637868?fbcli...

[2] https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/...

carapace• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

randcraw2• 5 years 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?

mensetmanusman5• 5 years ago

Flat earthers are mainstream? Man, I am out of touch.

rjbwork• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

hackeraccount• 5 years 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.

dirtyid• 5 years ago

Institutional perversion of soft sciences can't even solve scientific disputes.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 5 years 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.

glitchc3• 5 years 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.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Critical thinking is at an all-time low in Western society.

I think you are viewing the past through rose-colored glasses.

glitchc3• 5 years ago

Fair enough. Perhaps it's better to say that we seem to be in a local minimum right now.

m0zg6• 5 years 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.

naasking7• 5 years ago

These are all very good points. The ability for misinformation to propagate means that manufacturing consent has become a lot harder. As we've seen with COVID, that has some downsides, but it also has upsides because selling war is going to be a lot harder. Every tool has light and a dark side.

jrumbut3• 5 years ago

I've seen a lot more blanket skepticism and cynicism, but these new views are often as uncritical as the credulity they replaced (and as easily exploited).

I haven't really seen an increase in people doing the hard work of gathering facts, considering new perspectives, and challenging their own assumptions or prior beliefs. It's more like switching from uncritical consumption of NYT to uncritical consumption of YouTube.

I did like your idea that this could be a good thing though, not sure I believe it yet.

panabee• 5 years ago

every truth is born an opinion.

karaterobot• 5 years 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.

canadaduane5• 5 years 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/Cognitiv...

datavirtue• 5 years ago

Don't we delegate the job of understanding and digesting facts and conflicting information to our representatives, theoretically?

dragonwriter2• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

We've changed the title to the subtitle now, which presumably summarizes the article better.

danielam5• 5 years ago

Related article: "Why Science cannot be Value-Free"

https://www.kul.pl/files/57/wydzial/lekka-kowalik/Lekka-Kowa...

(HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28697385)

Razengan• 5 years ago

Politics is about mass-manipulation of emotions, and I’m sure there are sciences to help with that.

papito• 5 years 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• 5 years 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

randcraw2• 5 years 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.

thaumasiotes4• 5 years 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• 5 years 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/ . 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

> 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/

Alright, my fair biases disclosed, on to the reading the actual article: /1

fullshark• 5 years ago

This is the entire field of economics

cratermoon• 5 years 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?

magicink812• 5 years 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-...

raxxorrax3• 5 years 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.

Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy may be damaging democracy

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