yes certainly science can inform policy decisions. How do I put this...
Science has nothing to say about what we should set as the objectives of our policy. Science can, however, inform our approach to attaining that objective.
Science is science and policy is policy. In the end, if you want science to be useful, you have to recommend a policy, and scientists can do that, too. You just have to be clear on what is scientific results and what is policy recommendations based on said results.
Are you kidding, most political policies seem to be have essentially no connection to scientific results. Be it in energy policy, climate policy, education policy, economic policy, or whatever...
Policy prescriptions are always political. Science is a method of creating accurate predictions. It's a valuable tool to inform your decisions, but it fundamentally cannot tell you what you should do. Deciding which outcome is most desirable is a value judgement that has no scientific answer.
Science doesn't make policy decisions, but the scientific method is a way for wildly varying humans to try to agree on a common reality.
Once you have a method that allows you to agree with others on a common reality that everyone is free to observe (if they have the patience), then you have the necessary foundation for policy.
For example, if you don't understand the scientific method well enough to believe that Covid exists, you probably aren't going to like my policies for mitigating it.
You’re off base here. No single study should ever be used as a basis for policy. Real science is a slow deliberative process that incrementally arrives at the truth. Input from the broader community in the form of confirmatory studies and stringent fact checking is very much part of the process, especially in complex fields like biology and psychology.
The root of this discussion is about whether science is necessary or suitable for public policy, and we should probably accept that policy is not scientific, and nor should it be. The alleged scientific findings used as a basis for policy justifications today is mostly compromised and irreproducable junk designed to befog, mesmerize, and browbeat average people into submission, while an elite for whom words have no fixed meanings struggle among themselves for control of bureaucracies.
When policymakers say they defer to "the science" it is forfeiting their responsibility to act with wisdom and good judgment.
Democracy predates science by some three millennia, and to say that we can or should create a scientific democracy is nonsense. Democracy is an ideal and a quality, it is not a system that can be engineered from data with scientific findings or processes. Further, if you engineer a society with policies based on data and laws that only a few initiates understand, that is the specific antithesis to democracy. In the west, we use democratic processes to produce our elite classes, but unfortunately we do not produce wise ones, and they're happy to dodge accountability by blaming scientists or the weather.
Science doesn't create trust in authority either, it produces verification, reproducibility, and models for new tools. Science and data are neither sufficient, nor necessary conditions for wise policy that supports life and creates growth, even when it has made some great contributions to our well being. To say that science shows a given policy is good because it has a scientific justification is circular reasoning.
When you say you believe in science, either you practice it, or you trust its institutional practitioners, which basically means you trust the systems of academic administrators to make policy. Again, not democratic at all.
We actually don't need a public understanding of how science works, we just need to hold policymakers to a standard of accountability where they can't slither behind binders of gibberish when called to account for their decisions.
I think politicians generally don't make policy decisions based on science. I live in the UK and an obvious example is drug policy. They even fired the scientist whose drug research they didn't like.
But if the science agrees with a decision they've already made then they're happy to use if for justification, even if the science is junk (e.g. the crazy fines on taking children out of school in the UK).
Excuse me, but scientists are not public policy makers. Their job is to follow the evidence, not publish based on what they think will happen if they do.
This is critical. Public policy cannot and should not be based purely on science. Science can give us hints as to how me might be able to optimize for certain things, but it can't tell us what things to optimize for. That's a question of values.
I agree. Good public policy can never be fully rational or science based. There is always a necessary element of emotion, intuition, and forecasting that goes beyond science.
To the extent a study has a political conclusion, it's not science, but relatively few really do.
(Some have conclusions that policy entrepreneurs find useful to support a political agenda, either because of what they actually say or because of what people can be deceived into understanding them to say, but that's a different thing than actually having a political conclusion.)
But it should make the scientists more circumspect about public policy recommendations. They're not making evidence-based policy, if yesterday's models are evidence and today's models are not.
> This is how science works — it is a process that strives to be as accurate as possible, not come up with a static answer and stick to it (that’s what religion does).
That's fine. Many public policy advocates throw around the term 'settled science'. But based on what you said, is there such a thing?
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