[Jan] Was science on the ballot?

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An email received by Thinkers Forum USA :

{Email posted with hyper link as is}

A rare recent ray of light from Science magazine, from Sheila Jasanoff and others:
“The pandemic has seen much hand-wringing about Americans’ unwillingness to “accept science” and follow public health directives…….It is tempting to treat matters of health, safety, and environmental policy as if they are primarily about facts, because this transforms intractable social disputes into seemingly answerable technical questions. But such moves are inimical to democracy. When the key issue is who decides, acting as if disagreements are mainly about evidence is bad politics and bad social science. It turns expertise into an object of distrust and exacerbates American culture’s tendency to alienate people from the perceived elitism of science (2). This creates fertile ground for alternative facts and conspiracy theories that reframe problems and relocate the focus of blame.

Science advice thus occupies a precarious position on the boundary between asserting facts and making policy. It faces the structural problem of being authoritative without becoming authoritarian. It divides power between scientists, who are mainly accountable to their peers, and authorized political representatives, who are accountable to the citizens they serve. This allocation of authority is fundamentally political, even constitutional. We should not be surprised if expert advisers find their claims being questioned, given their consequential role in contemporary governance.”
Worth reading in full and digesting at length IMO. Its at:
https://compcore.cornell.edu/science2021/

Jonathan
Jonathan Latham, PhD
Executive DirectorThe Bioscience Resource Project, Ithaca, NY 14850 USA