“I would just like to say that the implication of Sarewitz and Jasanoff is that no effort should be made to educate policymakers on the processes that science uses. Science is simply too hard for them to understand.”

Actually, the implication of Sarewitz and Jasanoff is that scientists who try and educate the public (be they policymakers or not) assume that science is too hard for them to understand. Which is insulting.

They also imply that such an education process is:

1) insufficient to influence policy

This kind of public education only tells people what science does. Why scientists do what they do, or why science (and how it is conducted) matters to (insert person and occupation here) is rarely dealt with as much detail or consideration. I think this lack of complete education has something to do with an interest in researcher autonomy – but that could be another post.

2) too simplistic to accurately reflect the complicated nature of scientific research.

Sarewitz covers this pretty well in his blog, and we’ve dealt with it a fair amount here at Prometheus. Science is more than just the scientific method. And I would suggest that the issues of great concern to policymakers these days rely on science that has difficulty in following the traditional scientific models, due to difficulties in replication, ethical/technical/resource limitations, or other reasons.

and 3) scientists are presumed to know the policy process (and its associated politics).

Perhaps this is a result of the traditional disdain of the social sciences and humanitites by the natural sciences, or a naivete about the universality of any Ph.Ds knowledge base. In any case, there is a serious disconnect between how policymakers solve problems and how scientists solve problems. When one tries to use the methods they learned in the other area, cognitive dissonance is a likely outcome.

(Don;t feed me straight lines and I won;t sin)

On the other hand, Sarewitz may not know much about science.

Sarewitz: “Kennedy told the Congressional audience that “the ultimate test of truth in science” is the replication of results: Hmmmm. Well, there’s certainly no way to replicate a billion or so years of Darwinian natural selection, so I guess the theory of evolution must not be science. And obviously you can’t replicate a general circulation model’s prediction…”

There you have it. My thirteen year old niece’s Advanced Placement Biology high school class is doing gene splicing and selection on bacteria. Do you suppose it only works because their teacher is secretly praying that it does? Or could there be something to natural selection since artificial selection replicates it so reliably?

Ask any farmer or dog breeder.

Just how dumb does he think our Congresspeople ….

Oh.

Okay, you’re right. He’s appropriate in context. Send a fundamentalist to catch a fundamentalist, eh?

I think that’s crazy. And it’s going to lead to bad policy.

Regards.

http://issues-org-danielsarewitz.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://issues-org-jerrysheehan.blogspot.com/atom.xml