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Trust the Science?

Entry 2252, on 2022-12-12 at 11:29:26 (Rating 4, Science)

It seems to me that science is becoming increasingly politicised. There are several reasons I think this might be happening, but I will list a few examples first.

During the COVID pandemic we have had a lot of input from scientists, sometimes explaining the science behind the daily happenings, sometimes supporting the government agenda, sometimes denigrating those who oppose the accepted wisdom of the time. This has been particularly prominent around government backed interventions, like vaccination.

Climate change is another subject where science and politics overlap. Climate is fundamentally a scientific issue, but the response has become highly politicised, and science has become a tool to push a particular political agenda.

These two involve climate and health, which are two moderately respectable areas, where a fair degree of rigour is generally present, but there are other areas, especially in the social sciences, where the facts aren't quite so easy to separate from opinions. These might include subject areas related to social or political subjects, such as gender politics, racial issues, etc.

At the other end of the spectrum we have sciences which have a high degree of credibility, such as physics and chemistry, which are generally very reliable and less susceptible to claims of bias.

So it seems that the subjects which have a greater component of political relevance are the ones we really need to be questioning, where the others can be assumed to be accurate, although that is never an absolute rule, because all science can be questioned.

The question is this: are the less reputable areas of science that way because politics has infiltrated a previously "pure" area of knowledge, or is that particular science itself, by its nature political, and therefore has always been susceptible to bias and opinion masquerading as fact?

I'm guessing it's a bit of both. Social sciences have always been highly susceptible to bias and lower levels of objectivity, because of their inherent nature, but that in turn has been made worse through both subtle and overt political interference. This is both apparent in the daily reporting of these topics, but also in real, properly established scientific findings like the replication crisis in the social sciences, especially psychology.

In a recent poll of public trust in various professions, scientists did come out near the top, with almost 70% saying they are trustworthy and about 20% saying they are very trustworthy. At the bottom end of the scale, only 4% found government or big business very trustworthy.

So despite a lot of false predictions and errors made by scientists during both the epidemic and the recent periods of climate change, scientists are still rated highly. This is good, because despite the clear problems, science is still the best system we have to get to the closest approximation of the truth.

But the science being presented in papers in highly respected journals, and the pale imitation of science being presented by whomever the media or government currently favour, are two very different things.

Unfortunately scientific papers are usually too technical for most people to understand, so what we hear in the news is what most people think of as science. And it is an approximation to that, but far from being the real thing.

For example, in a recent debate on climate change, my opponent said the alternative to dealing with the climate is the destruction of the Earth, or at least the end of the human race, or if not that then mass extinctions. Note that the claim tends to escalate or de-escalate based on how much push back the person gets!

When this was presented to me I asked for a reference to the paper which said humanity would become extinct because of climate change. The person said it was on the news last night. I said: that's not science, that's popular news, now where is that paper?

That paper doesn't seem to exist, because none of the predictions of climate scientists will lead to the end of humanity, and very few lead to mass extinctions in any meaningful way. Climate change being an "existential crisis" is just political rhetoric which makes the issue seem far more dire than it really is.

Note that I am not saying we should do nothing about climate change, but I am saying the hysteria around a "climate crisis" or "emergency" is primarily political, and the science doesn't necessarily support this.

The same applies to COVID. Some of the predictions of the models, often created by non-specialists, have been absurd, yet no one seems to care. As long as the predictions suit the political agenda of the time, then they are accepted by the media, and by most of the population, without question.

So my advice would be this: don't treat all sciences as being the same. There is a clear hierarchy of trust in branches of science (and related fields) which might go something like this (from most to least trusted): mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, general social sciences, gender and ethnic studies.

These seem to be directly related to the amount of political interference. It is unlikely that politicians would be interested in the latest mathematical theorem, but they might find medicine far more of relevance, and any science relating to trendy issues like gender, race, etc will surely be of great interest to them.

So I say instead of trusting all science equally, look at them as a hierarchy, in roughly the order I gave above. I would trust a new finding in maths almost without question, and it is unlikely I would have too much skepticism towards physics or chemistry, but I assume all findings from gender studies, indigenous studies, etc are propaganda rather than real scientific findings.

Note that this is just a heuristic, and there are undoubtedly results from those areas I have less trust for that are true, but that is not likely to be the case in the majority of their findings.

It would be interesting to do the survey I mentioned above again, but break the sciences down into categories, similar to what I have listed, and see how the results might be different. I suspect, just based on my personal experience, that many people would have the same reservations as I do.

So all sciences aren't created equal. Some people would claim that some of the subjects I listed aren't even real science. I think I would agree. They could be science if they were done properly, according to sound objective principles, but in their current form they actually aren't science. What are they? Well maybe they are arts, maybe they are politics, maybe they are just activism with a thin veneer of academic respectability.

But that's all they are, so when you are asked to "trust the science" you need to be very careful about exactly what type of science is involved. Some is a lot more trustworthy than others.

Comment 1 (7347) by Phillip on 2022-12-18 at 15:54:06: This is a test

Comment 2 (7348) by OJB on 2022-12-18 at 20:43:58: Did it work, Phil?

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