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A Nobel Doesn’t Make You an Expert: Lessons in Science and Spin

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 29 2017, @10:53AM   
from the who-watches-the-watchers? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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Original Submission

• Re:for science it's easy (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:06PM

  by khallow (3766) on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:06PM (#560770) Journal

  Alternately, we could just recognize that conflicts of interest exist rather than persist in the delusion that we can somehow do away with conflict of interest though laws, funding, etc. None of your three points are realistic to implement. Consider this: 1) How do you prevent your laws to defend trust in scientists from stifling their speech? For example, if my political faction has subverted the committees or courts that would handle such cases, then I can force scientists into expensive defenses of positions my faction doesn't like on the grounds that they're betraying the "trust" of the public or their fellow scientists. The trial is the punishment in that case.
  
  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.

  Parent