| I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts. Few outlets that reported on this controversy even seem to have read the memo, nor are the criticisms of it I have read based on facts (or on words). They seem to be based on the idea that the writer has drawn the wrong conclusion. The facts or lack thereof seem to be irrelevant: if he had cited the same papers but made the opposite argument, he would have been fine. The idea of scientists being some kind of arbiters of truth makes me very uncomfortable. The process of science is really messy. People want to publish surprising and extraordinary findings (which often turn out to be false, and the more extraordinary, the more likely this is). We have to publish or perish. And many other problems. Over the long term, science finds truth. In the short term, it is quite unreliable. Scientists are tired of having their work used to support agendas, when in reality we only observe, and usually the observations don't even support the agendas they're being used for. At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just be left out of politics. Politics appears to be a lost cause, far beyond any ability for facts or reason to be useful, and we have always done our best to leave politics out of science. To the left and right, I would just plead: leave us out of your petty squabbles and let us get on with advancing humanity's future. But I must admit there are some publicity-seeking members of this profession who undercut this hope. To more directly respond to your post, there is an awful lot of confusion between what science says, and the value judgments derived from a combination of scientific observations and some ideology. I do not think the public, left or right, is generally capable of disentangling facts from their interpretations of the consequences of those facts. |
Neither do I, see footnote 2. However, the article this thread is responding to was talking about factual decisions, so I stuck with that assumption.
>At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just be left out of politics.
By all means, leave politics out of science [0], but we need science to inform are politics. Otherwise, we just get more of the raw ideology that is the very reason you don't like politics.
Science should not be left to just the scientists. They do the hard work of collecting data and running experiments. But mostly, they end up answering very specific questions with varying degrees of confidence. Once they have those answers, they guess at broader implications. These are informed guesses, based on their knowledge of other highly specific results and thinking that others have done. However, this latter part of science is far more accessible than most people realize. So, instead of actually engaging with the science, they simply appeal to the scientists. This is made even worse because they are attempting to understand the conclusion without the argument, and so will tend to misunderstand. Further, since the general public almost never engages with the actual science, politicians and activists have near free reign to misrepresent the results.
[0] Mostly, the question of what to study should be a political one, but politics is so corrupting that I see no problem giving scientists a lot of insulation from it.