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Comment by _brnu | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. The problem is that many of these decisions are not exclusively "science." They involve policy-making, and agenda-driven organizations are masking their preferred policy choices as "science." Toxic risk assessments are a perfect example. Toxicity assessments are famously arbitrary (e.g., adjusting acceptable dosages by orders of magnitude on the basis of uncertainty when one could argue for any other uncertainty factor).

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This.

Not many people are anti-science. It's just when opinion gets passed for science that we should be worried because opinions are instructed by agenda. And if there is a funding motive behind that agenda, well, your gonna have problems with corruption.

I dunno.

From what I've seen, most people are pro-sciencism, not science. Science is difficult and rarely provides easy answers. If it does not affect them, sure---nobody really cares about the big bang, dark matter, etc., and astronomy provides pretty pictures---but if the question interacts with their jobs, cultures, or lifestyles then they are very happy picking the result that agrees with them and ignoring any nuance or counter-evidence.

Would you or the parent have any specific examples? The only thing I can think of is the different values assigned to human life by different agencies.

That's one. And as I mentioned above, the uncertainty factors are pretty wild. Because some individuals within a species may more vulnerable to a toxic than those tested, the standard practice is to move the decimal point for the lowest/no observed effect dosage one place to the left. And when you're using animal studies, it's standard practice to account for inter-species variability by moving the decimal point to the left another digit. If your data was at all suspect, they will apply another uncertainty factor (though usually less than a full order of magnitude). And always, the adjustment is in the direction of being more conservative, notwithstanding the fact that humans are frequently more resilient to toxic exposures than small animals, not less. An order of magnitude is a big deal when dealing with very small exposures. Two orders of magnitude starts to become completely unmoored from reality. How conservative we are in the face of that intra/inter-species uncertainty is couched as "science," but it is TOTALLY a policy call. And it has real world impacts. For large manufacturers, an adjustment factor of half that much frequently means the difference between no pollution controls and tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars in pollution controls. I find that where you land on that uncertainty has nearly perfect correlation with your politics.

There are at least 70 million Americans that are anti-science. How many would be "many"?

Where does this number come from?

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