Last week climate scientist Andrew Dessler posted a review/blog entry about Storm World over at Gristmill. I really appreciated the final paragraph, showing that Dessler truly understood what I was trying to get across. Moreover the words are so quotable and resonant that I thought I'd share them with you:
Overall, I think this book helps pull back the curtain from science. Science is much messier and, frankly, less scientific than most people realize. Despite that, science is incredibly successful and, I believe, a force for good in this world, and I am proud to be a scientist.
Fellow Scibling Rob Knop also recently reviewed Storm World, and came to similar conclusions. As he writes:
Science does progress despite the acrimony and personal conflicts. The process is not pleasant, and some end up suffering greatly, but ultimately it does work....
...Too many treatments of science oversimplify the connection between theory and experiment, and how easy the process of "falsification" is. Too many treatments of science make it appear that all ethical scientists will agree when the results of an experiment or observation indicate that their position is wrong. In reality, the results of experiment are rarely so obvious, and often ethical scientists with different approaches will disagree for a long time. The way science is described in this book is much more the way science works in the real world than the way many of us claim it works when trying to explain it to the general populace.
Exactly. My view is that even as we defend science and champion it, it doesn't do anyone any good to over-idealize it or shy away from its warts. We have to be honest about this thing we so love and treasure. It's not perfect, but it still works in the long run--and that's what's so truly amazing and admirable about it.
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While it is certainly true that science, like any human endeavor, is a messy business I would hope it could be agreed that it should hold no place for political advocacy. The key words in the above post are "in the long run". In the short run people tend to cherry pick what they like and disregard the rest.
As a scientist I have found that determining the precision and accuracy of the results of a scientific experiment or study are often the most difficult tasks of the inquiry. It is human nature to want to affirm or dissafirm your original hypothesis. Without going into a discussion of the epistemology of science, it is perhaps the most noble of scientific principles to not overstate your results.
The idea that science can be "framed" to suit ones political goals is repugnant. All but the most arcane and esoteric scientific papers have abstracts that can be clearly expressed to laymen and fellow scientists alike. Even those that do not lend themselves to simple explanations can be summarized in clear language accesible to anyone that understands the purpose of scientific inquiry.
Science is a tool to understand the universe not a lever to bring about social justice.
Chris, you said
I wish I could say the same thing for political "science".
I enjoyed reading Storm World and wholeheartedly agree with Dessler. Brings to mind another great quote from Sagan:
Lance's comment above begins with this: "While it is certainly true that science, like any human endeavor, is a messy business I would hope it could be agreed that it should hold no place for political advocacy." It's an interesting stance. I'd invite him to read Roger Pielke's new book "The Honest Broker: making sense of science in policy and politics (Cambridge U. Press). Then perhaps the Intersection can host a debate. Like it or not, science is increasingly being drawn into human economic and political decisions. I know we scientists try hard to avoid them - they are often the only things messier then our own work! But if we try to strip politics and political advocacy from science, we'll strip out human nature from science, and that would be bad. When you publish a paper on X, you are advocating for your interpretation of the world. Good scientists recognize that their data, conclusions, and statistics can be (and should be) dissected by their colleagues, but they are still already advocates for their position. SO why not take it the next logical step, and advocate political decisions based on good, open, controversial, incomplete science? Why not acknowledge that our work is messy? Whether you do it in a referred journal, or before a fishery management commission, or in from of Congress doesn't matter. But let's stop pretending scientists aren't advocates, and let's start admitting we have something more to contribute to society then our numbers and probability curves.