This is the exact reason I don't believe science should be used blindly to affect government policy. It flies in the face of democracy and is subject to falsehoods just like any other human endeavor.
Of course science is imperfect, but it tends towards truth over time, whereas dogma and populism have no way of correcting mistakes that isn't just as likely to introduce new ones.
The scientific method is important to be used, but don't trust something just because another person believes it to be science. You need the hypothesis and the verification method. Others (all of us) have the obligation to challenge both the hypothesis as well as the verification methods.
I think it's really dangerous to tie the wrongness of the supposedly scientific facts they spouted to the wrongness of their deeds. Dangerous because if it turns out they were right about some point, then you look like an idiot and have to change your tune. And dangerous because it warps subsequent science, to avoid such embarrassment.
They believed in breeding a master race. In response to this, the acceptable opinion in the West ever since seems to have been that this is impossible, that humans are unique among creatures on this planet in that they are immune to the pressures of selective breeding. We can double the size of our chickens (and breed tame foxes, and smart dogs) but humans are apparently immutable. This is creationist nonsense, and it becomes more and more obviously nonsense every year. We need not have painted ourselves into such a stupid corner.
Frankly, genocide, or at least dehumanization and extreme indifference, seems like the logical endpoint of sincere belief in the concept of a "master race" which is inherently good and is hamstrung by perfidious inferior races. Once you've determined that a member of one race is worth less than another, it's natural to judge that the death of a member of this inferior race would be justifiable to save the race of a member of the superior race, and in this way the concept of genocide becomes, in your mind, a "defensive" action.
If I'm not mistaken, the Brahmins tick most of your boxes. Are they alright? Some would argue that they go in for a bit of dehumanization... but nobody is proposing a world war to stop them.
Actually I'm alright with people believing lots of crazy shit, in private. Because I think intellectual monoculture is pretty dangerous.
I do find it a little strange how many people want to turn the concept of "diversity" on its head and tell me the real diversity problem is that we don't let enough people with racist views into power.
My objection is to conflating them with scientific matters, i.e. empirical claims, especially about human biology. I worry that doing so actually weakens our arguments against such evil. We shouldn't build into our case against them scientific claims on which we may ourselves be proven wrong. It's not necessary.
(And, much as I enjoy using words like diversity in their older meanings, in the hope of tripping people into thinking, here I resisted the temptation. Intellectual monoculture was however a feature of most of the evil regimes of recent times, too, and one of their weaknesses.)
By way of analogy, when someone tells you he believes global warming is impossible because it would go against the Bible, you don't have to wonder that much what he would do about carbon emissions.
EDIT: Krugman had this to say about the R&R austerity paper "What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But "economic research" showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
Particularly telling: "The paper was published in an annual 'Papers and Proceedings' edition of The American Economic Review that was not subject to the same peer-review standards that other editions use before publication"
What was said above was "one of the most horrific and important examples of widely accepted science". Important words here are "widely accepted science". So science didn't go wrong, the LABEL of science was attached to something that didn't meet the scientific method. That something was then sold to people in power, and the science LABEL was used to convince people of the correctness of that something.
People are really quick to say this, but how many people have actually studied the 'racial science' literature of the 20s and 30s and figured out to what extent it meets the methodological standards of today? Yes, we know that they drew incorrect (and reprehensible) conclusions. It doesn't necessarily follow that their methods were any worse (epistemically speaking) than methods that currently pass muster.
Just the premise of the "racial science" studies would render them invalid, how could they even have controlled for the myriad variables that we have no idea how to control today?
I don't need a specific study to know that. Any sociology/economic/psychology research should be taken with a grain of salt.
So how is that not an example of "science going wrong"? Unless you are proposing that science is right by definition, or that governments should ignore most of the branches of science that are actually relevant to government.
There are plenty of branches of physics that are at least as speculative as sociology, economics and psychology (e.g. cosmology). The only difference is that these branches of physics have few political implications.
Governments (and people) should evaluate the merits of the information they receive. Properly conducted and repeated experiments with noted mechanisms of actions (e.g. vaccines) should have more weight than studies about trickle down wealth or whatever. Obviously, decisions have to be made, and some will be wrong unfortunately.
This is a good example of why it's not so simple as you're making out. Earlier, you put biology on your list of unreliable branches of science, and you claimed that you could know that the racial science of the 30s wasn't "real science" simply because it consisted of "studies about people". But vaccine science falls into both those categories!
In reality you're deciding whether or not any given branch of science is methodologically sound not by examining any actual studies in the relevant disciplines, but simply on the assumption that any study which has arrived at the "wrong" conclusion must have had a bad methodology.
Just stating that all of soft science is dodgy doesn't really distinguish us from them, does it? We do a lot of soft science!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
The point is that some research is weaker than others, and the reasons why haven't changed since WW2, so if it's a problem now, then it was a problem then.
Soft science has many questions to which we'd love to have solid answers. So (perhaps unfortunately) it's not going away, and I think we need to get better at sorting out what it tells us.
More importantly, the example of the Nazis is useful in an ethical argument, because they're an almost universally acknowledged example of evil. Much like we aim to test our programs with extreme inputs, we can use the "extreme input" of Nazism to test our ethical arguments. If I posit some universal ethical standard, and then find that it doesn't seem to work if we take the Nazis, we've proven by counterexample that my standard is not universal after all.
More seriously, it wasn't just this group that believed in this stuff, it was the many many institutions in the western world, as emodendroket points out. Certain departments at Yale, most notably, supported eugenics.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/american-eugenics-society-1926-...
edited portion in case people think I meant all of Yale, bad generalization, my bad.
Additionally, using science and other expert judgments can easily tend toward simply choosing experts and studies that align with whatever policy you want to push for unrelated reasons, or outright seeking to manipulate research for political ends.
Of course it can, but that's equally true for any other way of making decisions. So it's not a downside of science in particular.
Talk about science creating a mind boggling ongoing health crisis by telling people to limit their fat intake and replace it with cereals and bread.
Current scientific consensus is that it is caloric surplus - confounded by a bunch of poorly researched factors. For weight gain source does not seem to matter too much. This does not say anything about dietary specifics or how they affect intake and metabolism.
Technically nutrition science does not provide strong support for such statements as this carb vs fat one based on interventional studies.
Epidemiology alone does not tell you "therefore this change will be beneficial"...
I've looked into that and all I can say is the history is disputed - some people say there really was a nutritionist consensus, others that this was a popular misunderstanding based on overzealous popularisation of a small number of papers (similar to the myth that the consensus among climate scientists in the '70s predicted an ice age) and that working scientists never thought this.
Either way it's a failing of the process, but the appropriate response is quite different; in the first case all we can say is mistakes do happen, in the second we need to get better at ensuring that the real scientific consensus gets translated into appropriate policy actions.
Why? Do we believe that individuals are likely to be better informed than governments? (why?)
Uncertainty is a fact of life. Any decision-making process will lead to some mistakes. That's not a reason to give up on trying to make things better. If the government believes, based on the best evidence available at the time, that a particular fat tax policy (say) will, overall, be good for society, surely it's better to implement that policy than not.
I certainly believe that some individuals will be better informed and better able to translate that information into the best course of action for themselves given their goals than governments, especially "governments" as represented by a patchwork of laws and regulations the impact a complex thing like individual health. This is true even at the time that new policy is enacted and tends to become more true over time due to the inertia of government policy that goes down the wrong path.
Some individuals, sure. Most individuals, probably not.
I agree that government policy has inertia, and that overconfidence on uncertain issues can lead to imposing well-intentioned policy that ends up being harmful. But it's equally possible to make the opposite mistake, and hold off introducing policy changes for too long because of perceived uncertainty. E.g. car seatbelt laws and tobacco advertising laws should have been introduced earlier than they were. I don't think there's any general principle we can draw here; some government policymakers could do with more humility, others could do with more confidence, but all any one of them can do "from the inside" is try to figure out how strong the evidence actually is on a given issue, and use their own best judgement in determining whether there's a clear enough scientific/medical consensus to warrant policy changes, or not.
I thought the parent comment made it clear: the alternative we are supposed to use is "democracy". That is, the people who are ruled should determine the rules that are imposed on them.
Now, democracy does not preclude the use of science to make decisions. The voters may rely on science to inform their decisions (when the science is available). It does however preclude a rule by scientific experts/bureaucrats.
But I also think it's foolish to frame the decision as solely one of "science" vs. "gut instinct". The are many phenomena, especially when it comes to human society, that are too causally dense for us to sufficiently tease out the causal factors to make accurate predictions.
In those conditions, the goal should be to minimize the consequences of being wrong. We do that by decentralizing decisions to the greater extent possible.
I would expect the result to be strongly biased due to societal norms, much less direct manipulation.
Suppose a majority wants strong social programmes and basic income. The tiny problem is the economy is nowhere near big enough to afford it. Satisficing (!) executive branch puts some of the policies starving innovation and education budgets. Causing long term harm and stagnation.
Where is the minimax decision in here? Over what timeframe?
(P.s. I could've as easily picked liberal, fascist, military or conservative example. This one is relatively easy to understand.)
The second part of my response was to your framing of "science vs. gut-instinct". My point is that sometimes ignorance is thrust upon us by the complexity of the circumstances. In that case, my point was that decentralized policy making (separate from any notion of voting) was essential to reducing the worst case.
In other words, I am not claiming that democratization "results in minimax optimal decisions". I am claiming that decentralized governance structures do "result in minimax optimal decisions". Does that change your question?
edit: fixed spelling
In some cases yes. In others this doesn't seem to be the case - e.g. decentralised housing/planning/zoning policy seems to have lead to worse outcomes than more centralised approaches.
I haven't surveyed zoning policies, so I don't know whether I agree with your conclusion, but I'd like to clarify a couple things.
First, we must ask ourselves what the goal of optimal zoning policy is. Is it to maximize the number of people who live there? Achieve an ideal rent/wage ratio? Maximize the efficiency of shared infrastructure?
Perhaps it is to maximize the desirability of living in an area. If that is the case, then if people are complaining about the house prices that may mean you're doing something right.
In any case, assuming we settle on a shared metric (which may involve a combination of these various factors), we need to distinguish between comparing the average case and the worst case performance of centralized vs. decentralized zoning policy.
I would say that my claim is that decentralized zoning policy will have a significantly better worst-case than centralized zoning policy, and that crafting a good zoning policy is enough of a gamble that I'd rather settle for a less-than-ideal decentralized policy than risk a horrendous centralized one.
Now, to tie back to the original debate of scientific expertise in particular: would adding a group of economists and social scientists to the central planning committee tilt the situation in favor of central planning? I very much doubt it.
"At the core […] is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea […] comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people."
— Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, front bookflap[1]
Because the costs of building new housing are local but the benefits are global, or at least more widely distributed than the costs. If one borough builds denser housing, that borough is the one that has to worry about building work, plumbing, schools and all the rest of it for those residents, while businesses from all its neighbours benefit from more customers and cheaper employees. For a starker example of the same effect think about taxation and public services: if we relied on local taxation being spent locally then rich areas would have low tax rates and high-quality public services (because even at low rates they can still raise a lot of money) while poor areas would have both higher taxes and worse services.
Localised government is rather like privatisation: it works well when the costs and benefits are on the same scale, but rather less well when there are externalities.
And even if we had perfect predictions, we would still have to choose what to do.
For example, if we had a perfect economics, we could predict exactly how many people would be made unemployed compared to how many made how much richer by raising the minimum wage (or trade barriers, or taxes). How should we weight these?
I think it's easy to greatly overstate how useful science is to policy-making. There are narrow areas where they should (and do) call a specialist in. But the big debates are not over factual, empirical, matters.
Three is NO way to do that. There are ways to misuse scientific results. Premature generalisation, assumptions of safety. Cherry picking to support preconceptions. Attributing strong support to tentative and/or unchallenged results. And more...
One less drastic solution may be to require a full disclosure of the process for all experimental results (to allow reproduction) and place much higher value in funding decisions on reproducibility.
One particularly egregious approach reproducibility requirement can address is doing enough "independent" studies until you like the result, then report that one study only (e.g., toss a coin 10 times; repeat as a new study until you find 10 tails; report a new discovery). My 2c.
This happens not only in which studies get submitted to the public, but also which submitted studies get chosen for publication. Journals are proving to be a poor way to handle the amount of science humanity is doing.
Environment has changed enough - especially number of people - that attempting to use traditional methods en masse could be very risky.
(Much less in nutrition or medicine where we have made major gains on the average.)
But again, getting back to agreeing, scientific findings should not be used blindly, they should be used to inform. And as reproduction of findings occurs, the the topic that is being informed gets re-enforced or course corrected. It is very similar to policy, you have to try things. Some times the policy does what you want, other times it doesn't, and the process should continue and be correcting.
Science is the only tool specifically designed to weed out falsehoods and reach an objective consensus based on how nature works.
How is this "subject to falsehoods just like any other human endeavor"?
There is no substitute for science.
We all seem to agree that democracy only works when the population is informed. Well, are we going to inform ourselves with the beliefs and tweets of those which we grant moral authority? Or science?
But science tells us nothing about what should be. That’s the realm of morals, ethics, and its applied (mis)application: politics.
"Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.
For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society."