scientists shouldnt be in the business of setting policy. they should report facts and its up to the public in a democracy and its representatives to make the policy. policy setting adds value judgements to facts.
ie science can tell us the amount of deaths or tradeoffs associated with certain choices but should never make the decision itself.
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.
Policy makers are rewarded for making decisions. Scientists are rewarded for being accurate.
It's a constant battle. A politician with a science report has official CYA for whatever they do, as they were making the decision based on scientific estimates.
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.
A policy prescription requires weighing of values, which a scientist should avoid at all costs. It's quite literally the point of science, to understand how the world works without injecting your personal biases about how the world should work.
No, it is never the scientists job to talk about policy. At all. Ever. Once they do that, they have no credibility, and become no different from the politician.
No. It's perfectly valid to use science to inform your policy decisions. But the headline demonstrates the recent tendency to assert that scientists should be the ones ultimately making policy decisions. There's an important difference there.
The people who make informed decisions need to be informed. While unelected scientists are not in a position of dictating policy, reason dictates policy should conform to scientific knowledge.
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.
Scientists should stop trying to make policy off the back of their studies, which are too narrow to provide a full picture of something like food and environmental issues.
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.
Exactly, the process of applying scientific results to human society falls well within the realm of politics. We should not allow scientific bureaucrats to have a say in the kinds of policies implemented, but rather limit their contribution to answering empirical questions based on inquiries presented by actual politicians.
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).
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 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.
This is insincere. Scientists have been in policy since the beginning of time. Some of the greatest scientists in early US history were literally politicians. But beyond that policy makers routinely have gone to scientists for recommendations. From where to find fish and gold, to which foods to eat to prevent illness and disease. These predate the US as a country.
The big problem is that when science goes head to head with the "politics" of the day then there are problems. Galileo encountered this, as did even Darwin (he elected to withhold publication to avoid many problems). The end result in the short-term is the scientist is ostracized ... the long-term vindicated.
Now maybe you're asking scientists to do the same today. Don't publish papers or offer recommendations if it will ruffle feathers. I'm sure many scientists do this, but frankly I don't think this is a satisfactory answer.
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.
ie science can tell us the amount of deaths or tradeoffs associated with certain choices but should never make the decision itself.
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