Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy may be damaging democracy

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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People forget that politics is preference.

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

> 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?

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

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

And where the thresholds lay.

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.

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

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.

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?

Trying to channel Douglas Adams: Nature is. Science (and religion) attempt to explain it. Politics is explaining why you should give me your money.

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.

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.

This is the entire field of economics

> "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-...