The Limitations of Science

Back in the day-- that would be, in the mid eighteenth century-- philosopher David Hume remarked that science cannot offer us advice on how to conduct our lives. Science is about “is,” while ethics is about “should.” What is might influence what we should do, but it does not determine it.

And yet, Richard Lowry reminds us (via Maggie’s Farm) we all seem to believe that we should rely on science when deciding what we should do. He also notes that much of the science we are supposed to rely on involves computer projections, hypotheses about the future. This concerns pandemics as well as climate change. To repeat myself, and to repeat Wittgenstein, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow. In all cases, as we have recently discovered, computer projections are just that: projections. They are not scientific fact. Even if they were, they would not be telling us what we should do.

Lowry reasons it out:

Of course, our policymakers should be informed by facts and reason, but science has a limited competency. Once you are outside a lab setting and dealing with matters of public policy, questions of values and how to strike a balance between competing priorities are involved, and they simply can’t be settled by people in white lab coats.

Science can make the atom bomb; it doesn’t tell us whether we should drop it. Science can tell us how to get to the moon; it doesn’t tell us whether we should go. Science can build nuclear reactors; it doesn’t tell us whether we should deploy them.

The current pandemic has shown that scientific models are imprecise and even misleading:

The models of how the virus would spread and how many would be hospitalized and die were invested with a certainty they didn’t deserve. They were all over the map, and some have failed to accurately predict the course of the disease even a couple of weeks in the future.

If we are going to unquestioningly accept expert opinion, we’d better prepare for whiplash. At first, the elite consensus was that wearing masks was unnecessary. Now, we are told, it’s an essential piece of getting out of this mess.

We worried about running out of ventilators, but in recent weeks some doctors have been wondering whether they have been overused.

Lowry continues:

Then there are the big questions. Science can’t tell us how we should think about the trade-off between economic misery caused by shutdowns and the public-health risks of reopenings. It can’t determine the balance between shutting down a hospital’s elective surgeries so it can prepare for a COVID-19 surge and tanking its business, forcing it to furlough employees.

We should take is conclusion to heart:

The people in our political debate who are most volubly insistent that they are simply following “the science” tend also to be most resistant to nuance and prone to fervency rather than scientific dispassion. They are using “science” as a bludgeon and conversation-stopper.

And not just to stop conversation. They are invoking science as a higher authority, as a political tool to discredit the president. It’s politics, all the way down.