Science and Politics

I would imagine I don't have to tell you that I think objections to the March for Science on the grounds that science shouldn't be "politicized" are absurd. Science is already politicized, which is exactly the point. Here's one take that's worth reading from Tim Requarth.

We eggheads get all scrambled trying to understand why people just won't listen when we 'splain the scientific truth to them. As Requarth explains, the problem isn't that they have a knowledge deficit that we can plug with our smart words. It's that they are motivated to believe by particular interests or loyalties. Scientists spend years getting their brains trained to apply certain standards of evidence and to change their conclusions when the evidence calls for it. But that makes us weird.

Here's Dave Levitan on the ways politicians deny and distort science. One pull quote I like:

Q. The “I’m not a scientist” line has become all-too-common, and it’s the basis of your book title. Why is this refrain bullshit in your view?

Dave Levitan: The basic reason is it's absurd for politicians to have to tell us what they're not an expert in. They don't say I'm not an economist. They don't say I don't have a degree in Middle Eastern studies or civil engineering, yet they're still perfectly willing to opine on these issues. So it's sort of a bizarre subset that they think it's a reasonable thing to say.

Here's why this is hard to talk about. We do claim to be experts in our fields, and we do make a privileged claim to truth. Cosmologists do not consider the age of the universe to be subject to debate (within a margin of error); biologists do not consider the fact of evolution and the antiquity of life (again, within a range) to be matters of opinion; climate scientists state that anthropogenic global warming is a fact, no longer a hypothesis. An if you disagree, you are just wrong. We know more than you do.

People don't like to hear that. However, as Levitan suggests, they commonly make exceptions. They respect the expertise of their physicians, plumbers and auto mechanics. On the other hand, I have to agree, all three categories of professional are capable of corruption, and of fudging or even lying in the service of a bigger paycheck. People might think that scientists are doing the same, to get grants or whatever.

Here's what's wrong with that. We aren't one auto mechanic trying to sell you a transmission rebuild that you don't really need. Science is a community of millions of investigators, graduate students, research assistants, and administrators. There is nothing that a scientist wants more than to prove that everybody else was wrong and get credit for a breakthrough. And there is no way that all those people are somehow going to successfully conspire to fool the entire world, and nobody is going to blow the whistle on them.

But it's also hard to explain to people that errors do happen -- in fact, we think that in some sense, everything we think we know is wrong because we can ultimately find a more precise answer. But the errors get fixed, the precision increases. Newton's theory of gravitation has been supplanted by Einstein's. In a sense Newton was "wrong," but he was a lot closer to the truth than Ptolemy. There is some question now about whether general relativity is exactly correct. Maybe physicists will improve on Einstein some day. They're trying really hard! But relativity works well enough for the Global Positioning System and robot probes to Jupiter, so you'd be a fool to deny it.

So I'm not sure what to do. Trying to explain stuff to people that they are motivated not to understand isn't going to get us very far, especially if they feel they are being talked down to or what they think is their own expertise isn't respected. Well sorry, but if you aren't an expert in physics and biology then no, you don't know as much as somebody who is. You should try to learn more if you are interested, but you need to approach that learning with a truly open mind. And if you can't be bothered, that's fine too, but then you need to stop thinking you know better.





* Mine is policy and practice related, so it's factual basis does inevitably get mixed up with values. But I find a lot of critics here don't succeed in separating out my factual assertions -- they end up arguing against facts because they are unwilling to state their value disagreements.