[xaa]

Oh, boy. Yes, it is true, no one knows better than we scientists that science is flawed and bias-prone.

You can say science is flawed but the best available source of truth we can have, or you can say science is too fallible to be more privileged than any other source of knowledge/belief. What you cannot do is have it both ways, to pretend science is infallible when you agree with it, and biased or problematic when you don't. This seems to be what many on the left are trying to do.

[peatmoss]

A thousand times this.

There is absolutely an institutionalist argument to be made against how science is practiced by fallible and biased humans. However, I've never heard of any method I'd trust more.

Science seems to be the only fair process for adjudicating when factual claims are at odds. I'd hate to rely on rhetoric, as that certainly isn't less subject to human fallibility.

At the same time, we need to be thoughtful about what are scientific questions and which are normative/ value questions.

Science could help us figure out whether ground up humans make good plant fertilizer. Humans need to make a value judgement on whether or not to fertilize plants with ground up humans.

Believing in the scientific method, recognizing the institutional ways that we can systematically fall short of its lofty platonic ideal, and understanding the limitations of science to tell us the "right" social policy is what I want.