froghawk on 16/2/2015 at 14:59

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demagogue, it's really not as simple as 'people are stupid' - most people are very busy and have to work hard to survive, they're trying to do the best they can to take care of their families, and they're scared. It's really not as googling or going to a library, because you're going to find a ton of conflicting sources of information, and the best information is behind paywalls and incomprehensible to most people anyway. These people don't have a ton of time to be doing research, and if they do try to put time into it, they'll be confronted with many voices screaming louder than the scientific community - but without the tools to know who to trust. Given the circumstances, I don't know how you could expect an outcome other than the one we have right now. The education divide has become too large, and it seems a bit silly to expect people to independently become educated enough to understand who is lying (or to even desire that level of education in the first place). People are being manipulated, and I think it's unfair to place the blame on the victims rather than the manipulators themselves.

Re: misreported vaccine effectiveness, there does seem to be a legitimate question of this with mumps and mumps only. There's been an ongoing lawsuit against Merck by two whistleblowers since 2012, claiming that the massive 2006 and 2009 mumps outbreaks were the result of Merck's attempts to cover up the mumps vaccine's declining efficiency: (http://www.forbes.com/sites/gerganakoleva/2012/06/27/merck-whistleblower-suit-a-boon-to-anti-vaccination-advocates-though-it-stresses-importance-of-vaccines/)

The verdict is still out, however, but you can see how that kind of lawsuit happening might lead to people questioning a lot of things, even if it's unmerited. The global warming denialism, on the other hand, is just ridiculous.

I'm not trying to say that scientists need to make the public understand on their level, because obviously that's absurd and impossible. But they do need to start having a bigger hand in making sure that journalism reports on their findings more accurately, and that schools are better arming people with practical science tools for navigating the world and not being taken advantage of.

demagogue on 16/2/2015 at 15:17

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Well my day to day job is (or was when I was a regulatory lawyer) dealing with the fact it's not that simple, so I know. That's why I said that was a caricatured version that isn't anything I'd actually believe myself. To be technical, the majority of the public by statistical definition is going to be middling, at the peak of a normal distribution, and not able to be experts for all the reasons you mentioned. And I am completely sympathetic that most of the public doesn't have the time, energy, or care to deal with the headaches that go into good policymaking, and are often overwhelmed with the daily obligations and stresses of life. (Since I do have virtue ethics leanings though, that's a good thing IMO. People shouldn't be forced to care about things they don't actually, because then they usually come up with bad ideas ... because they didn't care much in the first place. Of course, there's a problem on the flip side when people care too much maybe too.)

Something closer to my actual position that I write articles about is that, even granting the limitations of the public, in a modern democracy, it's not sufficient for government to be run purely by technocrats behind closed doors in any event ... because democracy, legitimacy, consent of the governed, etc.

But I still think there's a chicken egg problem here. Of course the public can get manipulated, and those doing the manipulating should be accountable for it. But on the other hand, there are parties and groups that only get power (to even be in a position to manipulate) because of preexisting public support. I had in my mind the kind of casual disgust I see in some of my neighbors, and the power of things like the Tea Party, Wiki Leaks, the Occupy Movement, etc, which to me are rather irresponsible movements that don't deserve much respect, but they get legitimated anyway pretty much by popular support fueled by conspiracy theories.

On that note, I don't think stupidity or ignorance is behind a lot of problems with popular approaches to policymaking anyway. It's more like inflated ideology which makes people willfully blind to certain concepts otherwise not all that hard to understand even for casual participants.

faetal on 16/2/2015 at 15:27

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Dema, I sometimes think that the world would be best run by a giant cybernetic computer which is programmed by experts with code viewable by all.
Try to insert an aggressive tax break which fucks over the public to feed the rich? Nope, you've violated directive AR587-AH4.

Etc.

demagogue on 16/2/2015 at 15:33

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By the way, since I have written about the uses & abuses of science in policymaking, I can say that the problems get pretty tangled up and usually not as simple as "Scientist X is a republican so is biased towards Y".

There are all sorts of constraints in the sociology of policy-science production that have to do with how policy-relevant science gets funded, how research is conducted, how academics want to advance their career, how journals publish articles, how policymakers or agencies latch on to different studies and what they do and don't take away, etc.

Here's a relatively simple model that's been helpful to me though. One article I read noted that it was actually quite hard to define what exactly you need to get good science for policy-making, since so many factors are involved and sometimes you don't even know when you have it, but it was much easier to define what makes for bad science for policy-making, since a catastrophe is usually easy for all to see. And then he noted that one way to define the good science was to just situate things so it won't fall into one of the traps.

Then he defined three poles of assessing policy-relevant science production, based on (1) quality, (2) salience, and (3) legitimacy. So e.g. (to over-simplify a bit, but it dramatizes how you can use the model & how the three poles are in tension) "ivory tower" science that independent researchers do may be the best quality, but it's not very salient in the sense that policy-makers don't know how to use it to decide between competing policies. Then industry-funded science may be very salient to policy-makers, it pushes them in a very clear direction, but we can question its legitimacy as the researchers have a vested interest. Then we have what might be termed "alt science", the kind of science that civil society groups latch onto that is very salient and arguably legitimate (in the sense it has widespread popular acceptance), but very often it's shit quality science that mainstream scientists aren't going to accept because it uses bad methods.

So the idea is, while it may be hard to know how to set up good science production, what you can do is try to ensure that those three poles are met, that the science is quality and uses accepted methods; that it's salient so policy makers can actually use it to come to good decisions; and that it's legitimate in the sense the researchers are independent and do not have a vested interest in the outcome, or even the perception of it (because of who is funding it, etc). A lot of research institutions actually have institutional checks to try to avoid these kinds of problems, because it's not like they've never thought of the problems of bias and legitimacy. But it's good to make it explicit and part of the public debate.

.....................

Edit:



There's a lot of strands there to tease apart, but to answer your question directly, I'm talking mostly about what happens when you put a group in charge of policy-making, what kind of policies are they going to implement for what kinds of reasons. I don't trust that leaders of the occupy movement are going to make good policy because I suspect they're more interested in shaming the establishment or people espousing asshole outlooks on life like your buddy in that situation than promoting the social good ... Because if they weren't, if they were interested in the social good, I'd think they'd spend more time publishing policy-relevant economics articles rather than organizing carnivals shaming the establishment. Pretty much the same reasons I distrust Tea Party leaders making policy in the reverse direction.

faetal on 16/2/2015 at 15:52

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Oh wow. The plot (and indeed the perpetrator) thickens.