Episode 103 - Science vs. Politics: Are They Really Separate?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

What is up, Brad fans? How you doing? How you living?

Today I want to work through some thoughts I've been having really for almost half a year now, all started back in November ish of last year.

And we all remember what big political event occurred then and the questions that I've been juggling with that I'm going to sort of try and work through with you all today. Is science political? I think the answer is yes. But like all things, it's a spectrum. Where should we be more political?

Where can we try and reduce that political influence? And what does this mean for how we interact with science information? Are we using it in the correct way? Are we scrutinizing it in the correct way?

And how can we maybe better navigate some of these discussions about using science in our decision making? And I'm talking about society as a whole.

Again, as you can see, based on that big political event that happened last year, there's been some pretty dramatic changes to one country's approach to science and that could have some pretty detrimental effects. So let's get into it. As always, I want to hear your thoughts.

e election time of last year,: 2024

of course, I'm talking about Scientific American, one of the biggest science magazines, of course in the US and probably in the world, made an endorsement for one political candidate. I think you know which one. And this was only the second time in history that they had done this.

And this ignited a bit of controversy, let's say, in the scientific media, in the scientific commentary world.

And I feel like most of the things that I saw, other science magazines, science reporters, journalists, the kind of people in my sphere, had the same take that I did in that this is fine.

This makes actually a lot of sense when you take what both candidates are saying about their support for science as an institution, science as an industry, research, all of that kind of thing, public health especially. But there was some voices and some pretty loud voices in the sort of science media sphere. I'm looking particularly.

Well, let's use one particular example of a podcaster who is quite, quite big and potentially had a pretty big voice in terms of influencing people's opinion, their audience's opinion on this election. It's maybe not the one you're thinking of. The name rhymes with Smex Meadman. We'll just leave it at that.

And this podcaster said that Scientific America making this bold claim of Endorsing one candidate is completely ridiculous.

I think he called the editor in chief an embarrassment and I think he had some other beefs with the editor beyond just the issue of endorsing a candidate. But you said things like let's get politics out of science, which makes sense.

I think that's something that on the surface again sounds very reasonable. We don't want scientific data to be influenced by politics. Pretty funny how that's exactly what's happening right now.

When you look at what the current administration is doing in terms of pushing scientists to remove certain data, not ask certain questions.

And they're really using the power of funding, of turning off the tap of funding and cuts to these departments as leverage to influence science for completely political and ideological reasons.

So this right here at this funding level, the fact that research is supported by government funds, I think right there, that makes it inherently political. Right? And I don't think that there's really anything wrong with this because basic research, you've heard me talk about this before.

Basic research, this research for the sake of research, let's say, let's call it that research where you don't necessarily know exactly what application is going to come out of it, how you're going to, you know, apply that knowledge in terms of a technology or something like this, or how you're going to make money off of it. This kind of fundamental basic research, as it's called, requires a bunch of money and there's a reason to do it. Right? There's a, there's.

The point of this video is not necessarily to make the case for fundamental research, but this type of research, whether it's like the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, even certain medical research, cancer studies, this kind of stuff that the government is engaged in isn't necessarily to make a profit or to have a technology right away, but it's meant to understand our world.

And through that understanding of our world we get innovation and we get things that we might never have even dreamed possible as like the Internet or you know, life saving technologies in medicines and things like this.

So there is a, I think there's a, you know, a modern society that has the funds to spare, let's say, and I would argue that we do have the funds to spare, puts a value on that and says okay, X amount of the tax dollars are going to that. Therefore, you know, that's all our knowledge, it's society's knowledge, let's do something with it. There's an inherent good in having that.

But the minute that we make that agreement and that government is going to fund this and not private industry and all these other things. It opens the door to funding decisions. Right, which are then political decisions.

So each government, I'm not just going to point out that this current US government is doing this.

They're probably the most extreme that I've seen in terms of like the us, Canada, Europe, you know, in terms of really pushing their political ideology onto scientific research. Again, super, whatever the word you want to use. Hypocritical.

Ironic that the people that talk about like ridding scientific institutions of this kind of political bias are the ones to do it the most. Using the power of that funding to influence what gets researched, what can't be researched. Political. And it comes down to asking the questions.

What questions are we allowed to ask? What questions will be funded in terms of being asked? So science starts with a question. We ask a question about something we want to know about.

And then depending on whether we have the technology, the resources, the freedom to pursue that question, knowledge gets produced.

So before we even get to this, you know, the production of knowledge and what we do with that, there's all of these filters along the way that, that, that can be political. And this funding issue is the one that looms the largest. I think it's at least the easiest to understand.

And again, it's not just the current US Government that has used the power of funding to influence what they want. I would say every government has done that to some extent. Sometimes it's just a matter of shifting focus.

You know, a government comes in and they say, you know, we really want to tackle this problem. That's sort of our pet cause. So we're really, we're going to kind of divert some of the funding towards that.

e country, in the sort of mid-: 2000

And they even went as far as limiting what scientists could say, federally funded scientists could say to media. So you can see that there's a spectrum of this.

You can really go really heavy on it, like I would argue the current US Administration is doing, where it just kind of happens subtly along the way. And again, this is to point out that it is political. Science is political.

The political environment influences what questions will be asked, which questions won't be asked, which research gets Funding, which doesn't. Right. So that's the first step right away in which science is political. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.

It's really hard, it would be really hard to remove that bias again, because we need this vast amount of funding in order to do basic research. It's got to come from somewhere.

So we entrust it to government because that's really the only entity we have that's capable to do this kind of work or fund this kind of work. And therefore, you know, we're humans, we're stuck in this system. So it is what it is. Right.

So that's the first way in which government science is political.

And why it then made sense for a magazine that supports scientific research, open scientific research, as open as possible, let's say, to support the candidate that wasn't talking about gutting these institutions and wasn't openly questioning the value of their work or things that this institution, this scientific body has produced, which was robust, was not political and was benefiting people's lives.

In a similar vein, I think we can look at the personal level, the people that do science, and to assume that they're going to be apolitical, neutral, sort of totally unbiased actors is not realistic.

Yes, we want our scientists to follow the evidence as much as possible, to be completely unbiased when they're evaluating data and their theories and, you know, the questions that they're going to ask. And I would think I'm. I don't have data on this. I think it would be really difficult to get this data.

But I do believe that most scientists behave in this way. But we are all people, right?

Even the belief that a scientist will just immediately change their mind when presented evidence that refutes the experiment that they've done or the theory that they've come up with is a little naive. Yes, it does happen over time, but people are always going to be resistant to challenges to their ideas. And in a way that's a good thing.

We can't be just bouncing back and forth from every little thing. People have to have some conviction behind their ideas and the ability, ability to rebut critiques.

And they need to have the freedom to rebut critiques. Right. And people need the freedom to make critiques.

Again, this is why the basic research institution needs to be funded and then sort of left to its devices, mostly speaking, in order to have this dialogue, in order to have this conversation.

And so, yes, there will be people with their own inherent worldviews Political biases, cultures that might influence the way that they interpret data. And we've seen terrible examples of this in history.

Eugenics is a big one that comes to mind where, you know, people's views and attitudes and you know, backwards to us now, backwards thinking, you know, allowed them to justify terrible things using science, right? But over time these things get, that get found out, they get critiqued, they get rebutted. You know, society changes, we grow, we move forward, right?

That's supposed to be the process. So again, at the top level, funding all of this, these apparatuses that give us the ability to do this research is influenced by politics.

Everyone brings their own background in politics to their work. It's, it's unrealistic to think that they won't even again, on a spectrum, some do it more than others. This is the nature of humans.

We're human people and scientists are human people doing human work.

The important thing though is that science has built in self correcting mechanisms that if we make sure that our research institutions, our researchers are being held to these standards, then over time we will come to a better understanding, we will come closer to truth than not truth. And that is the goal.

And there is the self correcting mechanisms of the scientific method, replication, you know, designing an experiment that is carefully controlled in order to eliminate variables, then repeating that these are things that, you know, we learn a little bit in school.

But maybe we need to focus a little bit more of our attention on how knowledge is produced rather than what knowledge is being produced, because our evaluation of the data is the next way in which politics, a person's politics comes into play. I mentioned the example of eugenics.

You can look at scientific data and come up with a conclusion that is political, that is, you know, based only on proving your predetermined beliefs. Right?

If you, in the 30s, when people believed that other races or people with conditions like down syndrome were less than, they found ways to prove it scientifically. So the process of science should be unbiased.

If you adhere to the self correcting mechanisms of the scientific method as best as possible, you are going to produce a piece of data, but then we have to interpret that data, we have to apply that data, we have to say, what does this mean in the bigger context of society and all of the other bits of data that we have about the world and then what are we going to do with that? So that also is a biased and political act, right?

So this is, I think where we need to be very careful as a society we've invested in Producing this information, we've invested in producing this data. We want it to be as unbiased as possible.

We just discussed how that's a little tricky to do because we're humans and we have human institutions and all these things.

We have the self correcting mechanisms of science where again, if we're really focused on changing the scientific endeavor, if we really think that there's a problem, that's where we should be focused on. And then we have this data and we have to interpret it politically, we have to do something with it.

And this brings me to a couple articles that I saw recently in the last, again six months since the election, around New Year's, talking about why aren't politicians using science, why don't we use more evidence based policy in the world today? And kind of lamenting the fact that scientists don't have sort of a seat at the table.

And this I think is an important point and it comes to how we then communicate about science.

So if we understand that science is political, that there are all these places where bias can be introduced and we're not focusing our attention on the right correction points, which is again making sure that the self correcting mechanisms of science are being adhered to and we can absolutely make improvements.

You know, there's a lot of people that talk about improvements to peer review and the way that we fund science or review science or publish science, all of these things. That's where we can really focus our attention if we are truly worried about, you know, the over politicization of science.

But when it comes to, then what do we do with this information, how are we interpreting it, how are we using it?

This is where I start to have a few, I don't know, problems I guess because the articles that I was reading put a lot of the onus on scientists and say, well they got to be better at communicating to politicians. If you could better, if scientists were better at communicating then politicians would listen.

And one of the pieces that's linked in the description opens with this, this idea of the scientific advisor.

And it was like in the 70s in the UK and they had this completely, you know, sort of unbiased, you know, stoic scientific advisor that the Prime Minister could go to and say, hey, this is the issue, what does the data say? And give me the options. Kind of like a, like a, like a military council, right?

Where you say we got to do this is the objective, this is the mission objective. Give me three different, you know, ways in which we could achieve that using the tools of the Military, kind of the same thing for science.

Right, and it sounds great, but does any of us actually believe that even if that person existed, that any politician that we know of right now in our home countries would, would use that information, would unbiasedly use that information? I'm not so sure.

So the idea that it's just on scientists to better communicate to politicians, sure, yes, we could always get better at communicating. But you need an audience to listen.

You need somebody to actually understand what it is you're saying, understand the critiques that you're making, that you're making for and against a certain point, and understand how that data is produced and how they're coming to that conclusion in order to then make the best decision.

And I just unfortunately don't see that being the goal of many politicians, at least that are in the public, really in the public talking about some of these things, whether it's climate change, public health, all of these things. Again, because you can look at data can be produced and then can be interpreted in multiple different ways. And again, I find it funny.

Let's say that the people that decry this the most, the people that most say we're being politically silenced or our fringe ideas aren't being taken because the establishment wants to just shut us down, or it's been captured by pharmaceutical, you know, industry or whatever, these are the people that usually aren't adhering to the principles of self correction and you know, control, whatever it is, you know, what's, what's the right word? You know, again, that that rigorous method of making sure that your data is, is correct. These are usually the ones that don't do that the most.

They're the ones that scream about this the loudest and then they're cherry picking their data for obvious political or personal reasons. Right, so what do we do then in terms of using scientific data?

How are we going to use this if politicians won't listen or are using it for their own political games? The question then becomes, well, vote for different politicians.

But we as a society have the same problem right now in that it's not so much that there's a lack of trust in science. That's something that gets brought up a lot.

There's a lack of trust in science, but many, many polls, there's a lot of research on this actually that shows that scientists from institutions like universities and stuff are actually some of the most trusted people in society. Doctors as well, more so than politicians certainly, and journalists.

So it's not so much that there's a lack of trust in science, it's that everybody kind of has their own scientist that they follow, and you pick the one that says the thing that you want them to say. Right. Or you're.

More often the case is you're not hearing from the scientists themselves, you're hearing from the media talking about the science and interpreting it for you, again, in their own bias way. So this is another point where I think we have to be aware of where the biases come in.

And so I would say is the onus on scientists to communicate better. Yes, but who is the audience they are communicating to, and who is the ultimate audience that they're trying to reach?

If we're trying to reach people in the public, to convince people of the value of science or the value of public health initiatives and stuff, maybe scientists need to be in the forefront more. And that's an uncomfortable thing for a lot of people. Not a lot of people want to get on camera and do this kind of stuff.

But if media isn't doing the job of presenting the whole story or not twisting the facts to sort of fit their own preconceived spin on it, then people aren't going to hear the message. Right. So this is where I'm at a loss.

And again, if you've listened to any of my episodes, you probably know that I come to this point on science communication and say, well, what do we do? But I think it's important, again, to realize that it appears as though there's not really a trust problem with science.

It's are people getting the message? So maybe scientists, yes, need to be in the forefront more, need to be out there more, and that's difficult to do.

Journalists can try to be better at, you know, presenting this information and holding people to account when, you know, they're making, obviously, false claims. But there's an inherent tension in all of this that, again, comes down to the root of science, and that is that science is always changing. Right.

And this was something that people struggled with during the. To communicate during the COVID pandemic. Science and scientific information is asking you to do two things at once.

And that's believe that evidence that is being presented is robust and is pointing in a direction and in a lot of times converges on something that we can then call a fact. But we also want to hold in our minds that that could change. Right.

So holding these two ideas is maybe why it is difficult to communicate this stuff for media and then, you know, for politicians, these different audiences that are trying to both communicate and understand Scientific information and then ultimately use scientific information. How do you reconcile that thing?

You know, how do you say we want you to believe that climate change is real and all of this, but also, yes, science can change at any time. You know, we always have that caveat, right? And so there's always this sort of two sides. What about maybe, what about ism is the wrong word.

But there's always this caveat that gets put into scientific information.

And I think this is where scientists can be more forceful and say, yes, it can change, but right now, at this moment, this is what most of the data or this is our converging opinion, that kind of thing. Nobody really questions that. They wake up tomorrow and gravity won't exist, Gravity won't exert the force on them that keeps them to the earth.

That's something that we can agree on as fact. Right? But if you were being truly objective about science, unbiased about science, we could come up with a.

Something, something in the world could change. That would change that, and we would have to rewrite all of our theories and we'd all be floating around asking ourselves why. Right?

It is possible, however minute, you know, that, that, that's a very extreme example. But you see what I'm saying.

So we have to both be able to work with what we have and make good decisions using the information that we have, while also being open to the idea that it can change.

And when it does change, being okay with that and understanding why it's changing, why things are being updated, why, you know, public health rules are changing, you know, whatever it is. Right. Again, Covid, examples loom large in this. But it comes down to everything, right?

Everything that we do in science is predicated on building the most robust evidence for a claim for a theory, for a phenomenon, and then understanding that it can change. So that's the inherent tension and maybe that's the root of all of this. And nobody has figured out a good way to communicate that.

And maybe it needs to start earlier. Maybe education in our countries needs to be focused less on knowing the facts and more on how do we know these facts. I don't know.

This is where I'm spitballing and this is where my thoughts come to this conclusion. And I look to you, the audience, to comment. Let me know what you think. How can we better change this?

I think scientists, yes, need to be in the public eye more. They are trusted figures. We should embrace that, that they're trusted figures.

But we also, again, need to understand that we're all just grabbing Our experts that we like that are telling us what we want to hear and we need to be a conscious audience. So as much as a lot of the stuff in science media and the science world is about communication, we got to communicate better.

Scientists are bad communicators. We're not getting it out there enough, unfortunately.

And maybe this is like committing the cardinal sin of content creation, of being someone that puts things out there for people to consume. Is blaming the audience a little bit. But I think that we do need to be a little more critical.

We need to understand when there is a body of evidence, what makes that evidence strong. Why do you know? The majority of scientists agree that this one thing is true and there's a few fringe things, fringe people that don't believe that.

Is it the case that those fringe people are poking a hole and seeing something that no one else is seeing? It's possible. It is possible.

So if we're really concerned about science and depoliticizing science, it's not about withholding funding, it's not about going in and scrubbing certain language out of different websites and things like this.

It's about focusing on the self correcting mechanisms of science and ensuring that the institutions are strong and have those self correcting mechanisms strictly being adhered to. And I don't think that there's really a switch that you can just pull like a policy decision that you can just make. It's down to people, right?

These are norms, these are things that people need to be entrusted to do. And I would say again, majority of institutions follow this and it is a slow process, but over time we do get there.

So reports in the media about the over politicization of science in some cases are true. Right? You do see examples, I could think of a few where some wacky ideas seem to be coming out of academia. Right.

But the answer to that is not to then burn the whole thing down, it's to engage with those ideas and try to best show why the evidence isn't there yet. Or even just to say, look, that's an interpretation of the data, right? What, what does it mean? Why are we interpreting the data in that way?

And is there another way to interpret that data? And what is the ultimate goal of this data? What are we trying to do with it? Right.

I'm avoiding specific examples to not get overly political, not get censored on different social media platforms. But the point is we have a mechanism for this.

The self correcting mechanisms of science and of our institutions are there and that's where we should focus our attention, I believe, and also in terms of educating the public, communicating to the public, and in terms of communication, science, communication, we got to find a way to instill the idea of really understanding how this works. Maybe in the past we didn't need this.

Maybe in the past it was we, because of the information environment, because of just society and the way it was, our lack of certain technology, social media, this kind of thing. It wasn't necessary to really critically think about the data that was being used to make these decisions.

We are unfortunately, in a world where that seems to be very important. Critical thinking, understanding, you know, the difference between a randomized controlled trial and an observation, an observational study.

This seems to be important stuff. It's unfortunately, can be pretty boring stuff unless you're super, you know, into it like someone like me.

But I think it's a critical skill because as we've discussed, science is not free of bias, it's not free of politics. It's interwoven in there. It's part of our society and it's being done in our names. Right? We are funding it for good reason, I think.

And the things that science produces, the knowledge that science produces, this understanding of the world can be used for good or bad. We are in control of deciding how it gets used, right? But in order to do that, we need to better understand it.

So again, maybe I'm committing the cardinal sin of communication and blaming the audience. But I think we can do. I think we can do better all around on the communication side and on the receiving side, let's say.

That's what all I have for this topic. So let me know what you think.

Let me know if you think I'm completely out to lunch on this one or where you think better emphasis can be placed, either from scientists communicating to media to politicians, directly to the people, or how do we need to better understand what's going on in our scientific institutions and the data that's being created. Thanks for listening, everyone. As always, leave a like review. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

Love to hear what you're thinking. Reach out to the show on social media, Instagram brad4u or email 2brad4ummail.com check out freak motif who does all the music for the show.

And take care. And until next time, bye for now. I.