“Science” seems to be the new god. All sides of the U.S. political spectrum claim “science” to be on their side, very much as partisans of days-gone announced that God supported—or perhaps demanded—their policy preferences. What are they talking about? One can look up countless works about both the philosophy of science and the nature of God, but for now, I’ll stick with a superficial discussion of the nature of science.
Science is a human activity, very much as hockey is a human activity. (This does not necessarily imply that non-humans cannot engage in science or hockey.) There is no “body of science” or of hockey to discover, though thousands of reports have been written on scientific activities and hockey games.
The activity of science consists of three parts: definition, observation, and speculation, in no particular order. All three parts are always jumbled together. Observations often use defined units and are reported with defined words But there would be no definitions without some prior observations, along with speculation to give meaning to the observations, because there would be nothing to define. (I’m tempted to say that observation must have come first during ancient prehistory, but to do so would be speculation.)
Scientists try to define words and units of measure precisely, though there is generally some degree of inaccuracy or uncertainty in their statements. Sometimes definitions that are clear in one context become ambiguous in another, slightly-different, context, or become completely bastardized by the popular news media.
Observations generally include some degree of uncertainty and are meaningless without interpretation, which is a form of speculation. Sometimes the uncertainty is very small, but sometimes it is huge. Our popular science-news media rarely explains the magnitude of this uncertainty.
Speculation is sometimes called interpretation, hypothesis, theory, error-correction, adjustment, elimination of outlying results, experimental design, etc, but is necessarily speculative. Some scientific speculation is based on abundant strong evidence from multiple independent sources, but other speculation has no basis beyond a scientist’s uninformed hunch. The popular scientific news media does not do a good job of explaining the degree of supporting information behind the scientific speculations they report.
There is no unbiased research; whoever pays for the research does so because they hope to get some desired result. Not all research is published; publishers tend to select reports that reinforce their biases or contain surprising results, and we rarely learn of unpublished research.
Just because scientific results are imperfect, speculative, and subject to human failings does not undermine their value. We do need to pay attention to the science. But we should understand science as a human activity, not some holy body-of-knowledge to be worshiped. It is usually reasonable to accept what an “expert” says because we cannot all be experts on everything. But some doctors are quacks, some investment advisors are incompetent or crooked, and some scientific pronouncements are misleading or just plain wrong. If there is just one study, it probably does not mean much. Even if there are dozens of studies, if they were all funded by organizations with a common interest they might not mean much. If a scientific issue is really important to you, check several independent sources before deciding, including at least one contrary source if you can find one.
Posted 2021/07/01