Believing in experts

[Dill]

(07-01-2023, 09:31 PM)michaelsean Wrote: My problem is “best science at the time.”  That doesn’t make it good science. It doesn’t mean it went through any of the rigors. It sounds more like a hypothesis. Best science should have already been proven. Honey has been used to treat wounds for a long time. 1000 years ago it was used. That was the best science at the time because it had been repeated over and over and found to be useful. It was actual science albeit not in the way we think of it today. Bleeding someone did not work, but in today’s age someone would call it the best science of the day because the current experts thought it worked.

A lot of things we did during Covid seemed like guesswork. Perhaps surprisingly I found the vaccines to be the least problematic, and got them. I got them mainly because I wanted us to get back to normal, but I wasn’t at all concerned about getting them.

Mike, what if we deploy a different, more limited definition of "science"? 

I.e., what if we call "science" only the kind of thing that appeared in 16th-17th century Europe, and began to displace faith, common sense, and tradition/custom as the basis of reliable knowledge with an experimental method based on empirical testing and critical collation of results so that new research could build upon old and established? The kind of thing that eventually gave us moon rockets, electric lighting, a cure for polio, and a network of telecommunications allowing us to face time with friends in South America or Japan?

If we do that then, say, bloodletting just looks like a pre-scientific practice swept away by science, something that was never "science," however "expert" its practitioners may have been viewed. And applying honey to wounds, even if effective, would not be "science" in the above-defined sense, but more like folk knowledge.

From 1965-69, doctors could only cure about 5% of children who developed acute lymphatic leukemia. Before that they could cure none.

Between 1970 to 1975, that number jumped to 15%. 1975-80, that number jumped to 85%.  

To the layperson, it's likely that a lot of this process would appear "guesswork." It involved dead ends, failures, and outright mistakes--all compiled in a way that future researchers could learn from them, while children died. If one totes up all the errors, one could say, with Leon, that in this process there were more wrong treatments than right. It's just that now, after that long and careful process, what they've got is mostly right. 

If someone in your family developed leukemia now, you'd want to go with "the best science" at this time, right? 

But how might this process play out in a pandemic from a new disease about which little is known? I'd want "experts" with knowledge of past pandemics driving pandemic policy. They would begin by worrying about what they don't know--e.g. how and how rapidly is the disease communicated?  They might want to mandate masks and social distancing, just to be sure. They might rush vaccines into development faster than normal to save lives. 

If it turned out the masks were not effective, that would not make the experts "liars" from a research perspective. If the vaccine were only 50% effective and had some serious drawbacks for .01% of the population, that would not mean that the vaccine "doesn't make a difference" or imposes undue risk if it saves exponentially more lives than it risks.  

It would be very sad if unscrupulous politicians played on a segment of the public's ignorance of scientific process to undermine confidence in science institutions and expertise, in the aftermath framing cautious policy as "lies" and government control. "They changed the distancing policy again so they don't know what they are doing! They're just guessing and forcing their guesses on us!"