The War on Science

""The War on Science" does a good job of contextualizing the current science/politics debate but is unevenly written and methinks it smacks a bit too much of half-baked undergraduate political ranting. Otto's book gave me a better understanding of recent anti-science political history and helped me frame the current issues, but his grandiose Malthusian rhetoric and interminable list of political recommendations at the end of the book made me doubt his reliability. There are some good ideas in here, but it takes some work to sift them out from the fluff.<br/><br/>Otto's thesis goes something like this:<br/><br/> * Scientists have lost touch with the public since Vannevar Bush's massive program of federal science funding made science a fear-driven national security issue and decoupled it from popular support. This has led to a serious decline in science outreach.<br/> * As a result, the average voter has little understanding or appreciation of science. The specialization and complexity of modern science don't make this any easier.<br/> * The post-modern academic left set the stage for the current anti-science movement by arguing that everything is a matter of perspective and there is no objective truth. As a society, we no longer have a standard for the "common authority of evidence".<br/> * Modern journalists do a massive disservice to science by presenting "both sides" of an issue with equal weight because they don't believe in objective facts.<br/> * The evangelical right uses this as a philosophical basis for resisting scientific advances that oppose their beliefs (evolution, reproductive controls, etc).<br/> * Big corporations manipulate the post-modern media (à la Bernays) to build popular support among the evangelical right for anti-science, pro-business objectives.<br/><br/>I was surprised that Otto tackled the academic left head-on. During my time in college, anti-science was discussed as an exclusively right-wing issue, so it was refreshing to see Otto discuss leftist anti-science bugbears (fluoridation, vaccination, and GMOs). But Otto reveals his leftist Malthusian tendencies by favorably citing Paul Ehrlich (of "The Population Bomb" notoriety) and by evidence-free rhetoric such as:<br/><blockquote>[Science] has enabled us to increase our population and our environmental impact beyond the capacity of our one small planet to support us... Population plus individualism plus technology may be our ultimate undoing.</blockquote>Otto's epistemology is unclear as well. He dismisses Kuhn - "Kuhn’s error was one of overextension — to intertwine the politics of science and the discovery of truth and call them one" and seems to have a rather Popperian philosophy on science - "If there’s no possible way to prove the hypothesis is false, then we aren’t really doing science." Otto also claims that climate science is the most important scientific issue of our time, despite its lack of falsifiable claims. He ignores any issues about the "theory-ladenness" of Popperian observation and ignores the fact that modern philosophers of science have thoroughly refuted Popper's ideas. Otto leaves us with no reliable way to separate science from non-science, which is a bit of a problem considering that his whole book is based on how important "science" is.<br/><br/>The relationship between science, religion, and government is the source of Otto's most interesting questions. Regarding the increasingly complicated and arcane nature of highly-specialized science, he asks:<br/><blockquote>scientific knowledge now plays a major role in most public policy challenges, and is the main arbiter and protector of individual freedom and social justice. A question arises: how best to bridge the gap between the voter and science so that democracy can be preserved?</blockquote>Otto's answer seems to be "more outreach" but I am skeptical that the general public has the interest or patience for it. He repeatedly claims that science is "anti-authoritarian" in its search for truth, but this runs directly contrary to Yuval Harari's claim that "Science is interested above all in power... science and religion prefer order and power over truth" in his <a href="http://books.max-nova.com/****-deus/">**** Deus</a>. I found Harari more convincing than Otto, but it still feels like my understanding of these dynamics is fundamentally incomplete. Time for some more reading...<br/><br/>Full review and highlights at <a href="http://books.max-nova.com/war-on-science/">http://books.max-nova.com/war-on-science/</a>"