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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:22AM (3 children)
pay them the same whether you like the answer or not, and they will have no bias for personal profit.
whether a nuclear scientist works in industry or in academia, they should get the same salary.
whether they are employed by the company owning the nuclear plant or not should again have no influence on their assessment.
therefore if the company goes bankrupt they should still be paid afterwards (by the state, obviously).
science works because scientists trust each other.
1) you should have some laws in place, stating that the trust should not be violated.
2) you should be able to find experts in the same field who have absolutely no common financial interests.
3) you should pay scientists decent amounts of money, so that they have a lot to lose, but not a lot to gain, if they do yield to corruption.
with this, society should be reasonably safe when trusting scientists.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:45AM
That'll be 30 years or so worth of a nuclear engineer salary - that's the incentive to provide the answer in the positive, this is how long one would expect as active professional life if you go ahead and build the nuclear plant and hire that person.
In the conditions the answer is negative, you won’t dare to go ahead an build a nuclear plant, but you'd still pay that wage.
Mmmm... isn't this actually an incentive to provide a negative answer? I mean, good money for nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:06PM
2) Consider the statement you've made there. How are you going to find experts in a field who have no financial interest in the field? Sure you can find people who've trained for a field and then left it (much as I have with math research to give an example), but then you have the problem that they're no longer experts because they're no longer in the field. It will be impossible.
3) Where's this money coming from? Sure, I can see huge funding transfers, from say the US military or Social Security to something sciency would be superficially more useful. But the key problem with the approach is that you are paying people for being scientists rather than for what they do. We already have too much trouble with governments paying scientists to do useless work.
Consider the nuclear industry example. A business trying to design and build new types of plants has to struggle even more to find viable talent because scientists can just suck low risk public funds instead. And any scientist willing to give it a go with the business has to worry about the effects on their career since they are now subject to "trust" regulation and liabilities, and create legally recognized conflicts of interest, both which can sabotage their future career. It makes an already dysfunctional environment worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @04:17PM
You have zero idea about how "science" actually works.
You really don't need a law for this. What you are trying to get at is "professional reputation". Believe me, good quality scientists care very much about their professional reputation. And in the business, reputation is very hard to get back once you have lost it. What is a bit harder to suss out is which scientists have the best professional reputations. Even for those of us who work in a particular field, it can take a bit of time and experience to figure out who is who.