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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks you can't separate science and politics when it comes to deciding policy?

I agree 100% we should not be fudging the science. If the LD50 of a chemical is 10mg, we shouldn't be playing with the number to make it 20mg to say it's safe.

But translating an LD50 of 10mg to government policy is of course fraught with political bias and interference. Scientists might say "that pesticide is toxic we should ban it", but they know one side of the equation. What's the economic impact? What's the impact on jobs? What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned? What if it's need in the defense industry?

Anyone who says "just follow the science" is inferring that science will give you one answer, and only one answer, and every other answer is undeniably wrong. That's rarely the case. It's usually probabilities, other theories are likely wrong, but maybe not. The world isn't black and white. Even in science.

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From what I understand reading through the memorandum, knowing a bit about how these agencies operate, and understanding how policy is made, what you want is what is happening here. Remember hurricane forecasts where Trump or one of his minions literally labeled his own projected path in with a sharpie? That's the nonsense we don't want to see.

The point of the memorandum and actions are that in the previous administration, in order to influence policy, the scientific evidence was ignored, manipulated, cherry picked, etc. to match a policy decision that was already made. This is trying to protect against that sort of action. They were producing false information and labeling it scientific evidence undermining trust in government and federally funded scientific research.

It's one thing to say: here's the evidence, but unfortunately we can't do that for reason X. It's another thing to say: outcome X needs to happen, here's some fringe science that supports us doing X.

Policy will still be made weighing in other factors going forward, it's just nice to know the evidence preceeds the decision and you can hopefully better trust the evidence to know if there are mistakes, it's not likely due to political pressure of say the current POTUS.

You talk about cherry picking or ignoring data. But that happens in science as well. I can remember in graduate school there were two senior researchers with competing scientific theories. They both just made judgement calls about which data could be ignored and which was solid and could be relied upon.

So if we extend this to the EPA, it seems like we might be getting into the realm where scientific integrity means “nobody questions our view of the science”.

You see that trend already “we follow the science”. Well there is not one universal scientific truth all the time. Two people could both “follow the science” and make very different decisions.

You are right in your intuition that government and science are not the same thing. Politics deals with power and subjective perception of values. Safety versus liberty is not something you can prove one way or the other, different people have different expectations from society and we try to develop political and leadership systems that account for those preferences.

When you go overboard is using politics to decide on issues other than values. For example, we have widely decided that poisoning people is bad. Some amount of harm is inevitable in the real world, and we have set (purely political) limits on acceptable risk, say, one in a million that you get cancer.

Once that value decision is made, the job of politics stops, 1 in a million cancer risk from Asbestos is the same as 1 in a million from second hand cigarette smoke. It's irrelevant how many people work in the cigarette industry, it's importance to the GPD, how well connected politically are the cigarette manufacturers etc. The risk becomes a pure scientific fact that is not amenable to political negotiations.

I agree with you - the complexity is that the division between 'doing science' and 'making decisions based on science and other factors' isn't necessarily clear. The simplest expression of this is choosing which of (possibly conflicting) papers to listen to. Drug companies have their version of this where they cherry pick clinical trials with results they like.

100% agree, science provides information about causal relationships, that's all. It doesn't make decisions for you, it doesnt reflect the will of people.

The decision making / consensus building should be the job of politicians. Saying science tells us we need to do x is a lazy shortcut.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is a correct stance. It is also important to note that two different branches of science can lead us to opposing outcomes. For instance much of the trash that is harmful and damaging to the environment was developed by material scientist seeking a cheap, human safe, and reliable storage solution for water (water bottles). This took a lot of very smart scientist incredible amounts of time. Of course environmental scientists rue the day these bottles ended up in the ocean. Science doesn’t lead us one place, it leads us all over the place.

Comments like yours and its parent get downvoted because "science" has become a religion in the eyes of many, and they find it heretical to question its teaching. As a scientist I find this ironic but also horrifying to see the same behavior that we've seen many centuries ago in other religions now intruding into science.

Science never tells you "what" to do. But it does tell you what is happening (e.g. Drinking water in area X will reduce your life expectancy by y% or change your odds of cancer Z by v%).

"Politicizing science" happens a lot, is terrible, and is stoppable, and must be a goal. Denying global warming is "politicizing science," saying "vaccines cause autism [when studies show they don't]" is politicizing science. Saying "Covid is no worse than a flu" is politicizing science.

This specific case is about EPA not being able to release numbers for a chemical that is KNOWN to be toxic (and epa is years/decades behind the science already) [1]

Your stance is weirdly reductive/defeatist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid

This is true, but the problem is the government policy may consist of (wrongly, without evidence) saying "no, it isn't poisonous".

The usual question is "what if the industry in question has made campaign or PAC donations? what if it's located in an electorally marginal state?"

Or, these days, "what if the government is dependent for its support on a weird youtube-based cult that thinks that 5G causes viruses?"

> What if there is one industry that has to shutdown if it's banned?

Then the world is improved and we should all feel relieved. Seems pretty straightforward.

Just because someone found a way to profit while damaging society doesn't mean they have some right to keep profiting once society realizes what is going on.

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