[paganel]

Why?

Science (especially social sciences) is many, many times wrong, by definition (that's what science does, it gets less and less wrong until it reaches a certain epsilon of "less wrong" which it considers as the "truth").

This is not the fault of science because, again, errors/being wrong are included in its definition, so to speak, the problem is that those errors/wrongs, when applied to the life of real people, with real human lives, will most probably kill them or affect their lives negatively in very big ways, especially so if it's a concerted effort coming from the top.

There are countless examples for that, the latest that comes to my mind is the pro-austerity policy imposed by the IMF on Greece, because that's what the science of economics was advising at the time, i.e. austerity. It turned out that that was a mistake (and IMF were quick to acknowledge it), but by that moment the damage had already been done.

There's also the example of failed policies imposed by the likes of Robert McNamara and his men (they were mostly men) back in the 1960s, but I didn't catch those times in person, so I only know about those failures via links found on this website (and which I'm too lazy to search for right now).

[KSteffensen]

The way I read your argument is "science is not 100% correct, only 85% correct. That means they are 15% wrong. Since science is 15% wrong and those 15% wrong will have negative consequences, we should ignore science and do what we feel is the right".

I acknowledge that science doesn't have all the answers and probably never will. However, I believe it is better to take its results into account when making public policy instead of relying on gut feeling or ideology.

I certainly hope science is taken into account when deciding things like building regulations, fisheries quotas and food additive regulations.

[enkid]

If we disregard "science" how are we going to make any decisions? It's not like we're using magic here. Science is simply a way of attaining and verifying knowledge. To abandonment means to abandon those thought process for evidence, etc. Rejecting bad science is important, but science is the thing most equipped to do that. The alternative is doing things based on personal experience or a belief system, which historically have had worse results.

[jjk166]

Every way of thinking is wrong, but science very quickly becomes least wrong.

Yes of course there will be cases where doing what the science says produces a bad result, but that is no reason to trust the tea leaves instead. The question is not who is right, it's who is closest to being right. On average, science will consistently outperform all other approaches.

[bryanrasmussen]

there's lots of public policy that is antagonistic to more grounded science than the social sciences, science that while it can be proven wrong at some point is unlikely to be and if it is proven wrong will probably be in small particulars rather than in the large. Evolutionary theory would be one obvious example.

[_0ffh]

Some social sciences are not even trying to be scientific anymore. They have denounced even the mere concepts of truth and of the scientific method as a tool to approximate it. These people need to be removed from academic life and from all teaching positions as a matter of self defence. (Ed. And they and their sympathisers obviously know who they are.)