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Full Version: Why science can't settle political disputes
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https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-s...-politics/

EXCERPTS: . . . The science policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz subsumes the idea that scientific research is politically neutral — that is, guided purely by curiosity rather than by political need or cultural values — under the “myth of unfettered research.” Contrary to the popular image of scientists as monastic explorers of truth, science has been socially shaped and steered since its beginnings.

[...] disproportionately high levels of funding awarded to fields such as physics, whose results are more readily relevant to the creation of new weapon systems. The rise in biomedical science funding was likewise not because [...of...] curiosity but rather because of both the desire to improve public health and high expectations for patentable and hence profitable new treatments. Recognizing these influences does not mean that all science funding is so narrowly motivated but that funding generally accrues to fields with powerful constituencies, economic or political, or with appeal to broader values...

[...] Furthermore, scientific results have been shaped by the traditional maleness of research. Male scientists generally excluded women from clinical trials, seeing their hormonal cycles as unnecessary “complications.” Understanding of how drugs affect women’s bodies has suffered as a result...

[...] Values shape science at nearly every stage, from deciding what phenomena to study to choosing how to study and talk about them. ... Scientists make value-laden choices every day regarding their terminology, research questions, assumptions, and experimental methods, which can often have political consequences. Wherever social scientists have looked closely, they have found elements of politics in the conduct of science.

Discerning exactly where science ends and politics begins is no simple matter [...] Even though much of the public decries the explicit politicizing of science, few question the simultaneous effort to ensure that policymaking is “scientifically guided.” ... The movement to scientize politics explicitly seeks to depoliticize contentious public issues — or at least appear to do so.

As one set of science policy scholars puts it, it is hoped that putting scientific experts at the helm in policy decisions will “
away the tangle of politics and opinion to reveal the unbiased truth.” The scientizing of politics thus relies on the same assumption as attacks on the explicit politicizing of science: that science and politics are totally distinct and that the former is nearly everywhere preferable to the latter.

Yet is there any reason to believe that scientized policy would be value-free? Upon reflection, it seems unreasonable to believe that any human endeavor — being carried out by imperfectly rational persons — can be so. Even worse, evidence that a large number of published scientific studies have been so poorly conducted or designed that their results are not reliably reproducible suggests that even evidence-based policy is not guaranteed to be guided by reality...

[...] It can be countered nevertheless that even though values and politics play a role in research, science should still be a dominant means of settling public issues ... One question on this point is “Whose expertise?” New York Department of Health scientists thought they were being more objective when they made conservative estimates about the potential risks from the toxic-waste dump lying underneath Love Canal, New York — designing their analyses to avoid falsely labeling the neighborhood as unsafe. But equally talented scientists allied with homeowners made the exact opposite assumption regarding the burden of proof. Who was being less objective?

People with advanced degrees, moreover, have no monopoly on insight. British physicists, for instance, did not bother to include local sheep farmers’ knowledge when investigating the consequences of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on the local agricultural ecosystem. As a result, the scientists recommended actions that the latter considered absurd and out of touch with the realities of sheep farming [...] They also failed to take advantage of farmers’ understanding of how water moves through their fields, which resulted in the scientists’ failure to measure where rainwater pooled and underestimation of the degree of nuclear contamination.

[...] Even experts from different scientific disciplines often see controversial phenomena in wildly different ways. Ecologists are more often critical of genetically engineered (GE) crops [...] It is simple enough to argue that science should guide policy, but things quickly become more complex after recognizing that no single group of experts can give a complete and fair analysis of a problem.

Another question is “Can science even settle controversial disputes?” For instance, Silvia Tesh, in her book “Uncertain Hazards,” describes how scientifically proving that a substance has ill effects on human bodies is often very difficult, if not impossible...

[...] Digging deeply into any contentious case furthermore exposes a wealth of conflicting scientific perspectives. Consider the controversy over “shaken-baby syndrome” ... Since the 1970s, it has been accepted within the medical community that [...it...] can be produced only by abuse from a caregiver and not from other kinds of accidents or unrelated diseases. But shaken-baby syndrome diagnoses are questionably scientific and are at high risk of falsely putting grieving parents in prison for the accidental deaths of their children.

[...] The science policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz goes so far as to argue that science usually makes public controversies worse ... that decision makers expect certainty, whereas science is best at producing new questions. That is, the more scientists study something, the more they uncover additional uncertainties and complexities.

Moreover, can we be sure that scientizing does not introduce its own biases? The sociologist of science Abby Kinchy found that privileging fact-based assessments tends to push out nonscientific concerns. Controversy over GE crops is often narrowed to focus on only the likelihood of clear harm to the environment or human bodies. For many opponents, however, GE crops’ more worrisome consequences are economic, cultural, and ethical, which stem from the difficulty of keeping GE crops in place...

[...] The scientized debate regarding driverless cars is similarly biased ... Scientized debates also tend to be biased in terms of who bears the burden of proof. Many large businesses’ lobbies have demanded that any regulation affecting their products should be rooted in “sound science.” On its surface, that demand seems reasonable. ... However, the implication of “sound-science” policy is that no restrictive regulation of an industry can be developed until proof of harm is conclusively demonstrated.

Scientists are often not able to provide firm answers, especially for complex physiological and environmental phenomena — and typically not in the time scales appropriate to policymaking. As a result, calls for “sound science” end up being a delaying tactic that provides an advantage to the industrial firms producing risky products at the potential expense of humans and nonhuman species...

[...] Motivated by the belief that science and the political world are entirely distinct, many citizens have begun to see science as something to be isolated and insulated from explicit political influence and politics as something to be almost entirely guided by scientific evidence. People act and talk as if a kind of apolitical scientific politics can steer controversial policy decisions, thus sidestepping or obviating differences in values or worldview.

The resulting actions and talk are, however, far from apolitical but instead amount to a form of fanaticism. That is, political scientism starkly divides societies into friends and enemies, the enlightened and the ignorant. Just look at how political polarization over COVID science is spiraling out of control.

In a culture dominated by political scientism, citizens and policymakers forget how to listen, debate, and explore possibilities for compromise or concession with one another. Instead, we come to believe that our opponents only need to be informed of the “correct” facts or truths, harshly sanctioned, or simply ignored. No doubt there are cases where fanaticism may be justified, but political scientism risks turning every debate with a factual element into a fanatical one... (MORE - missing details)