Science and the pandemic

The “Party of Science” is more concerned with the party-line than with honest science

Two recent articles:

Why We Can’t Trust Anything ‘The Science’ Says Any More

It’s as obvious as the swaddled noses on our faces that science is now just a weapon to be used against people who disagree with the left, or simply want to be able to retain the classic American freedom to run their own lives and families as they see fit. This runs much deeper and longer than coronavirus. Probably the most significant example of scientific corruption is the ongoing replication crisis. It’s summarized in Nature this way: “More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”

In other, other words: What “studies say” aren’t generally reliable.

Radiation Politics in a Pandemic

Why is Covid-19 science making us more partisan?

In his 2007 book The Honest Broker, political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. characterized two different idealized styles of decision-making: Tornado Politics and Abortion Politics. In the case of an impending tornado, citizens are bound together by a common purpose: survival. And simply acquiring information whether through science or direct observation drives the negotiation about how to respond. In contrast, Abortion Politics is characterized by a plurality of values, and new scientific information only contributes additional complexity to the divergent goals and motivations.

As Pielke admits, this is a somewhat rough characterization. Many contentious issues have elements of both Tornado Politics and Abortion Politics. The conflict over how to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic has been little different. Yet what has been striking is how many people seem to insist that the pandemic be treated as a case of Tornado Politics, as if it were a cyclone bearing down on us. But it hasn’t been this kind of case. Every day, its politics has come more and more to resemble that of abortion, as scientific information about the virus has become weaponized for partisan ends.

At CNN and the DNC, (AKA Tweedledumb and TweedleAOC) the narrative dismisses these concerns. They deny that there is any reason to doubt the edicts of unelected bureaucrats who claim that science supports their contradictory orders. Only Trump and his brain-washed supporters raise questions – which just goes to show how stupid and dangerous the Bad Orange Man is.

It is a cool story and a convenient framing, but it is simply not true. Long before Trump, smart people were raising the alarm.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science.

Andrew Gelman:

2011: Various episodes of scientific misconduct hit the news. Diederik Stapel is kicked out of the psychology department at Tilburg University and Marc Hauser leaves the psychology department at Harvard. These and other episodes bring attention to the Retraction Watch blog. I see a connection between scientific fraud, sloppiness, and plain old incompetence: in all cases I see researchers who are true believers in their hypotheses, which in turn are vague enough to support any evidence thrown at them. Recall Clarke’s Law.
...
2016: Brian Nosek and others organize a large collaborative replication project. Lots of prominent studies don’t replicate. The replication project gets lots of attention among scientists and in the news, moving psychology, and maybe scientific research, down a notch when it comes to public trust. There are some rearguard attempts to pooh-pooh the failed replication but they are not convincing.

Late 2016: We have now reached the “emperor has no clothes” phase. When seemingly solid findings in social psychology turn out not to replicate, we’re no longer surprised.

Daniel Sarewitz:

Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.

If we look back to the beginnings of modern science, we do not find demi-gods issuing pronouncements from atop a 17th century Mount Olympus. Instead we see curious scholars sharing research and debating theories.

This way of proceeding forms the sharpest contrast between what are thought of today as the early scientists and those who are dismissed as 'alchemists'. The interests and actions of the two groups often look indistinguishable. But the Royal Society categorically rejected the instinctive secrecy of their predecessors. Boyle's first publication was, quite aptly a plea for open publication and commentary.

John Seely Brown snf Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information

Today our scientific establishment and academic apparatus seems to be falling back into the primitive modalities of sorcery and alchemists, secret knowledge and esoteric mysteries.

Even worse, it is not too hard to find echoes of the darkest parts of the 20th century. Stalin spoke, the Politboro jumped, and Lysenko replaced Gregor Medel in the biology texts of the USSR.

Today, Twitter mobs get the same result.

When Brown University researcher Lisa Littman found evidence that transgenderism was a “social contagion” driven by social media and peers, her academic journal and university threw her under the bus after a pressure campaign from activists who didn’t like these findings. The episode “raises serious concerns about the ability of all academics to conduct research on controversial topics,” wrote former Harvard University medical school dean Jeffrey Flier. You don’t say.

Orwell:

A British and German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as "Science". There is only "German Science," "Jewish Science," etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past.

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