Science Is Political, and We Must Deal with It

Science Is Political, and We Must Deal with It (The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2021, 12, 27, 6336–6340 Publication Date:July 15, 2021)

The notion of an “apolitical science” is appealing—one might almost say axiomatic—to many scientists... The notion that science and politics do not mix is, moreover, seemingly recommended by the example of history...

oppressive dictatorial regimes have no monopoly on interference with science, as George W. Bush’s administration showed: a US House of Representatives committee found in 2007 that the government had “engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science”. (That incident looks almost benign in comparison to the distortions and obstructions of science by the Trump administration.)

But a well motivated opposition to such state interference in science should not be confused with the canard that science should or can be kept “free from politics”. The scientific endeavor has always been intrinsically entrained with politics, at least since Francis Bacon argued in Novum Organum (1620) that scientific knowledge, systematically amassed, could fuel the engine of state power... The issue is not, then, whether and how science can resist being “politicized”, but how the political and ideological dimensions of science can best be managed to make it most effective and beneficial both as an intellectual quest and as a means of, as Bacon put it, relieving (hu)mankind’s estate...

The evidence is overwhelming, for example, that women, minorities, and people of low socioeconomic status still suffer from systemic biases in science... To suggest that science should be immune to calls in the broader society to re-examine the biases and incentives that inhibit diversity is not just in itself a political act, but moveover one that may be against the interests of science. Are such efforts ideological interference in science?... The better question is how inequalities and biases should be addressed—and how far we should go in doing so... That the practice of science is inherently political is recognized by most serious scholars of the history, sociology, and philosophy of science...

Science is apolitical. Practitioners, however,...are human, with all the foibles in varying measure of that species... Science is self-correcting, however, so EVENTUALLY, too often after a powerful proponent dies, new paradigms do emerge.

With COVID, people are getting a close-up view of how the sausage is made--aerosol, vaccine side-effects (VAERS), etc. The hope is that Americans will trust evidence-based info more in the long run, though they don't always follow advice in the short term...especially as translated into policy...

>2 margd:

proponent -> opponent ?

>3 librorumamans: I was thinking of a senior professor holding fast to his interpretation, training his students, only to be upended by a young Turk--but paradigm shifts happen in many ways. Most visible to the public in medical and dietary advice. We're seeing a series of them in COVID, I think, e.g. aerosol spread(?) masks(?) Chinese lab(?).

The Scientific Revolutions of Thomas Kuhn: Paradigm Shifts Explained
19 February 2017

...Paradigm shifts, according to Kuhn,* occur within a scientific community when a fundamental shift in the way normal science proceeds. In other words, science is based on the assumption that one’s scientific community knows exactly what the world is like and scientists take great pains to defend that assumption, in a very insular way. The shift happens when something out of that ordinary experience of scientists jars that assumption. Sometimes it is abrupt and sometimes it takes time, perhaps decades or more as in the case of the phenomenon of chaos theory (Gleick, 2011), for example...

https://michaelperazzetti.com/2017/02/the-scientific-revolutions-of-thomas-kuhn-...

* Kuhn, T.S. (1997). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

>4 margd: The point about waiting for the old guard to die is true and it has happened in science just like everything else, however there are other ways to shift a paradigm and I've lived through two of them in my lifetime.

The first happened when I was a kid. I still remember the issue of Scientific American discussing the findings of the mid-ocean ridges (which had happened a few years before) and what this meant for the understanding of the forming of the continents. I followed the discussion through the pages of Scientific American and in less than a year the continental drift theory had completely wiped out all of the competing theories which included the ones we had been taught in general science class in high school.

The second was the understanding of solar physics. I was in college and had just finished a course in this field when the analysis of a lot of then new data demonstrated most of what I had just learned was not so. I ran into the teacher of the class a month or so later and asked him what he thought and he said his entire course needed to be redone and that a lot of what he had just taught us was no longer true.

Funding is extremely political. And perhaps the one thing I've learnt in a university career to date, is that science follows the money. You get a tiny amounts of money for pure 'blue sky' research which creates the seeds of ideas, but anything ground-breaking comes on the backs of a lot of people and equipment which are only paid for if politicians (including corporate politics of course) decide the possible outcomes are worth the risk.

Keeping the politics out of the rest of the process is that hard bit.

I've read studies on bias in grants and publishing--and seen it in the flesh, e.g., the young and female have heavier burden than do mossbacks. Happily, though, science encourages self-reflection and correction. (Can leave a lot of blood on the floor!)

In defense of science, very few other systems encourage self-reflection and correction in time. Maybe democracy?

>4 margd:

Thanks for the clarification.