{"id":239449,"date":"2021-07-27T06:29:15","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T06:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=239449"},"modified":"2021-07-28T07:32:40","modified_gmt":"2021-07-28T07:32:40","slug":"how-science-lost-the-publics-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=239449","title":{"rendered":"How Science Lost the Public\u2019s Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tunku Varadarajan \u2013 WSJ July 23, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

\u2018Science\u201d has become a political catchword. \u201cI believe in science,\u201d Joe Biden<\/a> tweeted<\/a> six days before he was elected president. \u201c Donald Trump<\/a> doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s that simple, folks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what does it mean to believe in science? The British science writer Matt Ridley draws a pointed distinction between \u201cscience as a philosophy\u201d and \u201cscience as an institution.\u201d The former grows out of the Enlightenment, which Mr. Ridley defines as \u201cthe primacy of rational and objective reasoning.\u201d The latter, like all human institutions, is erratic, prone to falling well short of its stated principles. Mr. Ridley says the Covid pandemic has \u201cthrown into sharp relief the disconnect between science as a philosophy and science as an institution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Ridley, 63, describes himself as a \u201cscience critic, which is a profession that doesn\u2019t really exist.\u201d He likens his vocation to that of an art critic and dismisses most other science writers as \u201ccheerleaders.\u201d That somewhat lofty attitude seems fitting for a hereditary English peer. As the fifth Viscount Ridley, he\u2019s a member of Britain\u2019s House of Lords, and he Zooms with me from his ancestral seat in Northumberland, just south of Scotland, in between sessions of Parliament (which he also attends by Zoom).<\/p>\n

At Oxford nearly 40 years ago, Mr. Ridley studied the mating patterns of pheasants. His fieldwork involved much crouching in long country grass to figure out why these \u201cjolly interesting\u201d birds are polygamous\u2014unlike most other avians. With the Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, he\u2019s finishing a book called \u201cViral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,\u201d to be published in November.<\/p>\n

It will likely make its authors unwelcome in China. As Mr. Ridley worked on the book, he says, it became \u201chorribly clear\u201d that Chinese scientists are \u201cnot free to explain and reveal everything they\u2019ve been doing with bat viruses.\u201d That information has to be \u201cdug out\u201d by outsiders like him and Ms. Chan. The Chinese authorities, he says, ordered all scientists to send their results relevant to the virus for approval by the government before other scientists or international agencies could vet them: \u201cThat is shocking in the aftermath of a lethal pandemic that has killed millions and devastated the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Ridley notes that the question of Covid\u2019s origin has \u201cmostly been tackled by people outside the mainstream scientific establishment.\u201d People inside not only have been \u201cdisappointingly incurious\u201d but have tried to shut down the inquiry \u201cto protect the reputation of science as an institution.\u201d The most obvious reason for this resistance: If Covid leaked from a lab, and especially if it developed there, \u201cscience finds itself in the dock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other factors have been at play as well. Scientists are as sensitive as other elites to charges of racism, which the Communist Party used to evade questions about specifically Chinese practices \u201csuch as the trade in wildlife for food or lab experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city of Wuhan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has \u201ccome to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China.\u201d Scientific journals derive considerable \u201cincome and input\u201d from China, and Western universities rely on Chinese students and researchers for tuition revenue and manpower. All that, Mr. Ridley says, \u201cmay have to change in the wake of the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the U.K., he has also noted \u201ca tendency to admire authoritarian China among scientists that surprised some people.\u201d It didn\u2019t surprise Mr. Ridley. \u201cI\u2019ve noticed for years,\u201d he says, \u201cthat scientists take a somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world is.\u201d<\/p>\n

He asks: \u201cIf you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an \u2018intelligent government\u2019?\u201d Science as an institution has \u201ca naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well.\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s what politicians mean when they declare that they \u201cbelieve in science.\u201d As we\u2019ve seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a \u201ctension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice,\u201d on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to \u201cremain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind.\u201d Mr. Ridley fears \u201cthat the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology.\u201d It\u2019s partly \u201cthe fault of outside commentators\u201d who hustle scientists in political directions. \u201cI think it\u2019s also the fault of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Epidemiologists are divided between those who want more lockdowns and those who think that approach wasn\u2019t effective and might have been counterproductive. Mr. Ridley sides with the latter camp, and he\u2019s dismissive of the alarmist modeling that led to lockdowns in the first place. \u201cThe modeling of where the pandemic might go,\u201d he says, \u201cpresents itself as an entirely apolitical project. But there have been too many cases of epidemiologists presenting models based on rather extreme assumption.\u201d<\/p>\n

One motivation: Pessimism sells. \u201cYou don\u2019t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It\u2019s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.\u201d Mr. Ridley invokes Michael Crichton, the late science-fiction novelist, who hated the tendency to describe the outcomes of models in words that imply they are the \u201cresults\u201d of an experiment. That frames speculation as if it were proof.<\/p>\n

Climate science is already far down the road to politicization. \u201cTwenty or 30 years ago,\u201d Mr. Ridley says, \u201cyou could study how the ice ages happened and discuss competing theories without being at all political about it.\u201d Now it\u2019s very hard to have a conversation on the subject \u201cwithout people trying to interpret it through a political lens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Ridley describes himself as \u201clukewarm\u201d on climate change. He accepts that humans have made the climate warmer, but doesn\u2019t subscribe to any of the catastrophist views that call for radical changes in human behavior and consumption. His nuanced position hasn\u2019t protected him from attack, of course, and the British left is prone to vilify him as a \u201cdenier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Climate science has also been \u201cinfected by cultural relativism and postmodernism,\u201d Mr. Ridley says. He cites a paper that was critical of glaciology\u2014the study of glaciers\u2014\u201cbecause it wasn\u2019t sufficiently feminist.\u201d I wonder if he\u2019s kidding, but Google confirms he isn\u2019t. In 2016 Progress in Human Geography published \u201cGlaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.\u201d<\/p>\n

The politicization of science leads to a loss of confidence in science as an institution. The distrust may be justified but leaves a vacuum, often filled by a \u201cmuch more superstitious approach to knowledge.\u201d To such superstition Mr. Ridley attributes public resistance to technologies such as genetically modified food, nuclear power\u2014and vaccines.<\/p>\n

If you spurn Covid-19 vaccination, Mr. Ridley says he would \u201cfervently argue\u201d that it is \u201cthe lesser of two risks, at least for adults.\u201d We have \u201cample data to show that\u2014for this vaccine, and for others, going back centuries.\u201d He calls vaccination \u201cprobably the most massive and incredible benefit of scientific knowledge.\u201d Yet it\u2019s \u201ccounterintuitive and difficult to understand,\u201d which may explain why its advocates have been vilified through the centuries.<\/p>\n

He cites the example of Mary Wortley Montagu, a British aristocrat, who pushed for smallpox inoculation in Britain after witnessing its administration in Ottoman Turkey in the early 18th century. She was viciously pilloried, he says, as was Zabdiel Boylston, a celebrated Boston doctor who inoculated residents against smallpox during a smallpox outbreak in 1721.<\/p>\n

Vaccines have been central to the question of \u201cmisinformation\u201d and the White House\u2019s pressure campaign against social media to censor it. Mr. Ridley worries about the opposite problem: that social media \u201cis complicit in enforcing conformity.\u201d It does this \u201cthrough \u2018fact checking,\u2019 mob pile-ons, and direct censorship, now explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration.\u201d He points out that Facebook<\/a> and Wikipedia long banned any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.<\/p>\n

\u201cConformity,\u201d Mr. Ridley says, \u201cis the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.\u201d Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for \u201cscience as a profession,\u201d which he says has become \u201crather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.\u201d Increasing numbers of scientists \u201cseem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

The World Health Organization is a particular offender: \u201cWe had a dozen Western scientists go to China in February and team up with a dozen Chinese scientists under the auspices of the WHO.\u201d At a subsequent press conference they pronounced the lab-leak theory \u201cextremely unlikely.\u201d The organization also ignored Taiwanese cries for help with Covid-19 in January 2020. \u201cThe Taiwanese said, \u2018We\u2019re picking up signs that this is a human-to-human transmission that threatens a major epidemic. Please, will you investigate?\u2019 And the WHO basically said, \u2018You\u2019re from Taiwan. We\u2019re not allowed to talk to you.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

He notes that WHO\u2019s primary task is forestalling pandemics. Yet in 2015 it \u201cput out a statement saying that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. Now that, to me, suggests an organization not focused on the day job.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Mr. Ridley\u2019s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency \u201cto turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.\u201d This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B\u2019s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, \u201cthe space for heterodoxy is evaporating.\u201d So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution. It\u2019s sure to be a costly divorce.<\/p>\n

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University\u2019s Classical Liberal Institute<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=239449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239450,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239449\/revisions\/239450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}