I forgot to link it on Wednesday, given how busy we all were at Arizona State planning the future of ScienceDebate (about which I hope we'll have more to say soon). But my latest Science Progress column, which has already prompted some critical responses, is about Obama's OIRA pick, Cass Sunstein. Without disapproving of the choice, I argue that there are definitely some serious issues that have been raised about Sunstein's stance on the role of "cost benefit analysis" and "reason" in the regulatory process:
...peering into Sunstein's writings on risk, rationality, and regulation--and other scholars' reactions to them--there's a troubling sense of what might be called, for lack of a better word, elitism. Or as Sunstein put it in his book Risk and Reason, "when ordinary people disagree with experts, it is often because ordinary people are confused." Sunstein even admits in the book that his approach is "highly technocratic."
The problem is this angle could oversimplify matters, for we also have very strong reasons to be very skeptical of so-called "experts" on science and risk. Anyone who has peered into these sorts of debates closely--over, say, the herbicide atrazine or arsenic in drinking water--knows not only that the issues are exceedingly complex but also that there is a lot of ideological distortion of science by "experts" who are really ideological allies of special interests. If the choice is between such experts and the public, I'll take the public every time.
You can read the full column here.
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We clearly have to distinguish between different kinds of experts. I don't know if Sunstein is talking about the real experts or the so-called "experts" in ID for example. While not trusting expert opinion and being skeptical is a necessary part of the scientific method, there are at least some areas where the public argues with experts because it's either confused or ignorant, and I am by no means trying to put the public down. But for example, as you yourself mentioned in the last column, most of the public disagrees with experts on evolution, a depressing fact. One might claim that this case is much more clear cut than others, but the fact remains that at least in some cases the experts are right through a strong consensus. I am presuming Sunstein is saying that in those cases his office will align with the experts, or that the experts will be part of his office's policy-making. I am not sure there is a good reason to assume that he is referring to some kind of decisions that his own "experts" will take, independent of more objective scientific experts.
There is also a difference between an expert who is providing information on which risk is to be assessed, and an expert who is evaluating risk on the basis of a prediction with numerous variables. An expert who has the information, for example, on child abuse, can accurately state that the occurrence of child abuse in a family is many many times higher than child abduction, and yet most people are more fearful (rate higher risk) of stranger abduction. I don't think that it's an issue of ignorance in that case, it's an issue of emotional resistance. With crime rates, experts have the facts (violent crimes have decreased) but the media plays up violent crime (to get ratings) so that the general perception goes against the facts. So in those cases experts can evaluate risk more accurately. Similarly with climate change where the evidence is staggering but both emotional resistance and, until recently, media portrayal (giving time to both "sides" as if there was an equal amount of evidence) have made public understanding of the risks much less accurate than experts'. (Other than those experts employed in the service of encouraging blindness and ignorance). But in other instances, experts are no better than laypeople at predicting events & hence evaluating risk. For example in the stock market. So there are evidently fields where expertise is claimed but it's more smoke and mirrors than anything.
The real challenge, FWIW, will be what is meant by "cost" and what is meant by "benefit" in any action OIRA takes under Mr. Sunstein. Natural resource protection, such as marine MPA's, is very hard to evaluate in a traditional business C/B analysis because the resources in question are often not privately owned - so there is no transaction record to guide the "value" of the resource. Thus, lacking key economic data, the C/B analysis gets bogged down in either technical issues, or litigation because no one can agree on the basis from which to start the analysis.
But I digress . . . . . .