I think that the mechanism of the universe is a black box. We can provide inputs and get outputs to build confidence of how we think it works, but we can’t ever know conclusively.
That is, unless we escape the simulation and evaluate the mechanism’s implementation.
That's quite a common thought (well, since Kant anyway), but self-defeating in this context. We want to know as much as we can. Sure, there will be errors and omissions, but why should that stop us?
>The story is a long one, but for now let’s skip to the end: future-proof, established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus, born of scientific labour, in a community that is large and diverse. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).
Newtonian physics stood for hundreds of years, and we now understand it to be an approximation of quantum mechanics. It's still useful, but merely useful. Do not mistake "useful" for "true."
Your distinction is not useful for someone who needs help understanding what qualifies as "fact as we know it".
It could easily be misconstrued as a counter example to the quote in the article, which it is only in the strictest, most pedantic sense. In any reasonable interpretation, Newtonian Physics is still true.
Your example isn't great because newtonian physics is still correct and used everywhere.
I agree with your point, reality is certainly not statistical, and e.g. there would have been circles in which heliocentricity or a flat earth or some pre-germ theory of disease would have been agreed upon fact. Arguing that those aren't science is hindsight, at the time they would have been learned consensus.
If you can prove such a link between newtonian/relativity and quantum mechanics there are many many prizes in your future. The core problem is that both do not meet up. There is no link. They are both descriptions of observed phenomena, neither being any more or less an approximation the other.
> In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity for that to happen (if it were ever going to happen).
Yeah, that's just not true. It's an absurd claim. Medical science is loaded with examples of things that had wide consensus (but...95%? Probably? Feels like this is a loophole in the argument...) which were subsequently found to be false. Consider just a few examples:
* hormone replacement therapy
* aspirin for heart attacks
* mammograms for younger women (< 50)
Just this year, a huge RCT called into doubt the usefulness of mass colonoscopy [1], which was absolutely "scientific consensus" until now (you can see this, because the study was met with rather vicious backlash).
For a more basic science example, consider "The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" [2] which, of course, was so "consensus" that they named it "The Central Dogma": genetic information goes from DNA to RNA to proteins.
This was fact...until they discovered retroviruses. Then prions. Oops.
This stuff happens all the time. The authors are either not scientists, or they're so blinkered by ideology that they're unreliable.
> Just this year, a huge RCT called into doubt the usefulness of mass colonoscopy [1]
This reference seems to be saying that mass colonoscopy reduces the 10 year risk of colorectal cancer by a statistically significant amount. How is this calling into doubt its usefulness?
An ongoing theme in cancer research with regards to diagnostics is that a lot of the cancers caught by the diagnostic techniques would not be fatal. Hence, there is not a statistically significant reduction in mortality but rather a reduction in cancer. It is basically just saying: not all cancers kill you, maybe you are better off not knowing about the non-fatal ones.
Part of the backlash points out that cancer can affect quality of life in other ways and no one measured that. But either way, it throws the consensus into doubt.
There was no significant survival benefit. Just because you find and treat cancer doesn't mean you've made someone's life better or longer.
> The risk of death from colorectal cancer was 0.28% in the invited group and 0.31% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.64 to 1.16). The number needed to invite to undergo screening to prevent one case of colorectal cancer was 455 (95% CI, 270 to 1429). The risk of death from any cause was 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.96 to 1.04).
This isn't the final word on the subject, but it overturns the conventional wisdom that colonoscopy is an obvious win and worth all of the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it.
>This isn't the final word on the subject, but it overturns the conventional wisdom that colonoscopy is an obvious win and worth all of the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it.
I'd posit that the one in 455 people who would die without a colonoscopy would disagree that colonoscopy isn't worth "all the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it."
I would suggest that you ask my uncle about it, as he didn't have a colonoscopy and was eventually diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer.
But I won't make that suggestion, as it wouldn't be worthwhile -- because he's dead. From colorectal cancer.
I guess that what one person considers a waste of money, time, effort and pain, another might consider a worthy investment.
Currently, colonoscopy is the only way to confirm whether or not colorectal cancer (and/or pre-malignant polyps) is present.
I expect that eventually, we'll have a test for colon cancer, similar to the (PSA[0]) blood test that helps diagnose prostate cancer. But until then, colonoscopy is the only way to identify colorectal cancers.
For your part, I hope you never get cancer and live a long, healthy, happy life. But if you do end up with colorectal cancer, I hope you've disabused yourself of the ideas you've expressed and get yourself tested.
> I'd posit that the one in 455 people who would die without a colonoscopy would disagree that colonoscopy isn't worth "all the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it."
Your post is a fantastic illustration of how and why we can't rely on "consensus" to determine fact. People routinely fall in love with narratives based on what they "know", and refuse to accept new data that challenges their narratives.
For literally anything we do, some people will die afterward. You could set up a study where you punch people in the shoulder at random, and follow them to see if getting punched implies a survival benefit. Eventually, everyone in both groups will die -- we'd expect about the same number in each group at any given time, because punching people in the shoulder probably doesn't affect lifespan. But still, people will die after getting punched!
Here we have a large, randomized study where approximately the same number of people died with colon cancer after getting colonoscopy as did without the screening. The screening had ~no effect on outcome.
Also, you've misunderstood: the 455 people is not the number of people who would die with colon cancer -- it's the number of perfectly healthy people you'd need to screen to prevent one case.
> I would suggest that you ask my uncle about it, as he didn't have a colonoscopy and was eventually diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer.
While I'm sorry for your loss, the data from this RCT suggests that colonoscopy on perfectly healthy people confers little to no survival benefit, and trumps any anecdote.
>Also, you've misunderstood: the 455 people is not the number of people who would die with colon cancer -- it's the number of perfectly healthy people you'd need to screen to prevent one case.
No. I haven't. If we don't do any colonoscopies, that 1 in 455 who develops colorectal cancer will die (as my uncle did) if the cancer isn't diagnosed early enough.
Don't want to go through the "trouble" of a colonoscopy after 50 years of age? Then don't. If so, I hope that you or anyone you love isn't that 456th person.
Yes, Anecdotes aren't data. However, that 1 in 455 is a statistic and what are statistics? Data based on aggregations of anecdotes.
I mentioned my uncle not because I want to pull your heartstrings. Rather, it's because while it's a simple thing to look at data and statistics, it's easy to forget that such data (at least in this case) breaks down in to anecdotes just like that one -- e.g., dead and/or very sick people -- who wouldn't be sick or dead with appropriate screenings.
If you don't care that some people will die without colonoscopies, that's your prerogative. I hope that attitude doesn't keep you or those you love from identifying potential colorectal cancer before it's too late.
That you don't care about others getting sick and dying[0] from the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths in the US, says something. Not sure what though and I won't speculate.
I'm sure that the your full-throated support for not doing colonoscopies is cold comfort to the (~36-56/100,000 Americans) ~118,000-185,000 actual, real people who develop colorectal cancer per year.
I'll say it one more time -- there are real people represented in that data. People who suffer and die every day. And if we did fewer colonoscopies, more of those people would, in fact, die, because their cancer wasn't diagnosed at all/soon enough. And so I have to put on my Quincy, M.E.[1] mask and ask: People are dying, doesn't anyone care? Is it correct to say that you don't care, or am I missing something?
It would be easy for me to just wish colorectal cancer on you and then ignore you, but I don't want you to get colorectal cancer (or cancer of any kind for that matter). Dying of cancer is a slow, agonizing, incredibly painful way to die and should be avoided as much as possible.
If you have a family history of colorectal cancer, please, please start having colonoscopies every two-five years starting at age 45.
If you don't, please do so every five years or so starting at age 50.
Or not. It's your life and (eventually) your funeral. That's up to you.
If you want another one: Alzheimer. The amyloid plaque theory was utterly dominant for 30 years. But the research led to nothing, the medicines that were developed don't work. This article was linked here recently: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-causes-alzheimers-scient...
I'm sure there are theories in history, political science or sociology which once met the criteria, but are wrong. One of the things that (IMO!) is extremely important for something to be accepted as a fact is whether we can explain it through a causal model. The assumptions of such a model should at least meet the same criteria, but probably even stricter ones. A simple hand-waving explanation, no matter how widely accepted, should ever be accepted as fact.
No it didn't. The Church was not a scientific body. The basis for their beliefs was not the scientific method, but faith in a literal interpretation of Scripture. Actual international scientific consensus (meaning, the consensus of actual scientists) has never had anyone murdered, if for no other reason than "science" has no body equivalent to the Church empowered or capable to do so, but certainly not for proving a hypothesis.
Well I'm glad Bruno died. Those hermetic mystics had it coming, and not proving anything significant is basically high treason to science, fully deserving immediate immolation!
As far as theories are concerned, "useful" means "makes valid predictions", so true, but within a limited scope (Newtonian physics: macroscopic events, from a human perspective).
If we take QM seriously, there's nothing stopping it from affecting macroscopic events from a human perspective. A cannonball whose trajectory was planned in accordance with Newtonian physics could suddenly and unexpectedly move three feet to the left, it's just ridiculously unlikely.[0] This isn't a piecewise function where Newtonian physics is true within some constraints of speed and scale, Newtonian physics is simply wrong and useful.
[0]: Under the Everett interpretation, which is no more or less scientific than the Copenhagen interpretation, this happens all the time and is witnessed by many humans.
Yeah, "future proof, established scientific facts" are pretty much the opposite of what scientific progress brings.
I find it repulsive to even entertain the idea of "future proof facts". To me that is hubris to the extreme, especially when it is based upon a consensus of those whose knowledge and instrumentation are grounded in the present.
Finally, as others have noted, science revolves around theories and observations, and what we can currently ascertain from said observations - not facts. Often times "facts" are nothing more than bullshit that has yet to be called out.
Imo, if someone is more interested in carving "facts" into stone than continually engaging with what we think we know - they aren't the right person for the job.
Since the article doesn't mention the word 'experiment' once I doubt it's even discussing science but rather 'scientific orthodoxy' which is something else entirely and should never be categorised as 'fact'.
The article seems to be making it's definition of "fact" as a guide to policymakers on what should be accepted as fact.
I think this is all a bit of a red herring. The question is how do policymakers deal with politically charged topics. And I personally haven't seen cases where more research or "science" is the answer, it's just crutch that people use to try and make their political point.
The article mentions climate change, which is a great example of something that's been scienced to death. The future is unknowable, there will always be some "we can never know" component to it, but that doesn't necessitate more research to find a smoking gun that will shut down all sceptics, not does it require that since we can't prove it, we ignore it. Some mix of balance of probabilities plus public will easily passes the threshold for doing something. So do something. Sequester CO2, build dikes, if the whole thing comes to naught, it won't be the most wasteful thing government did.
A pragmatic approach is what's needed, not some philosophical search for how we define truth, which just offsets the problem one layer and doesn't change the politics at all
At this point I think that the definition of truth is just another wedge issue introduced to the political teamsport - the process of searching for truth was already so noisy that it's best left to the people nearest to the feedback loops that help us iterate on solutions. Reading between the lines, this is a push to take power away from the bureaucrats in charge of the US (Western?) regulatory model (the so called "deep state") and move the "fact finding" process to somewhere the politicians could better influence it.
Climate change is a perfect example because oil companies and armed forces worldwide have been operating under the assumption that it's real and its coming, largely because they're the ones who have to deal with, for example, the immediate effects of storm size on ship builders, ports, and deep sea mining equipment. We've got a Jekyll and Hyde government with a Navy that has been preparing for climate change since the 90s while half the country fights tooth and nail against the very concept.
I think the pragmatic approach is to let the experts at the CDC, FDA, EPA, etc do the work they're qualified to do while working on checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture, politicization, and corruption.
If climate change turns out to be wrong, nevermind a deliberate hoax, it would result in incalculable damage to the reputation of the entire scientific community for the next century.
This presumes that all efforts to curb climate change make the world better.
Global regulation of fundamental economic development represents a shift to authoritarianism. That's not a positive move if you believe in individual liberty.
It also represents a significant loss of wealth. We pay more for the same services.
> The question is how do policymakers deal with politically charged topics. And I personally haven't seen cases where more research or "science" is the answer, it's just crutch that people use to try and make their political point.
They bring their professional and political judgment to a competitive information environment and use the fractional share of power vested in them to inform the consensus to make or not make a particular policy. That or they beat the snot out of each other, but either way what gets done in a given legislative session is the product of whatever consensus they were able to make, however they were able to make it, with whatever information was in the room with them at the time.
This is a good question to raise, but the question is mostly academic thought gymnastics. Would it be great if policies and decisions were based on facts? Sure it would.
But the real problem is not the distinction between "fact" and "very high confidence". The real problem is that is the misuse of dubious correlations to justify agendas. Politics, economics, personal decisions etc.
We don't have a crisis of scientific facts. We have a replication crisis. And because of that, a lot of bogus science goes unnoticed and makes way WAY larger impact than it should.
> Why haven’t science scholars devoted time to this issue?
This is a flat out lie. Metascientists have grappled with this question for a long time, including Kuhn and Popper (who are mentioned). The truth of the matter is that you can't identify a scientific fact, that's not really how science works. We rule things out, not in. But we also hone in on answers but never have an exact one. There will always be a lot of trust in the system. We trust that scientists won't lie. The truth is that there is very little lying. Because if you do, you are completely ruined. We're even seeing people distrust science not because scientists are wrong but because science reporting is wrong and people will blame scientists but not the reporting. Though the thing is, how is a layman supposed to know the difference? I wouldn't expect them to and I don't know how to. I can only really judge a "fact" that's in my niche in my field and everything else is an educated guess. I have training and experience, but there's still a lot of trust in the system. The world runs on trust and people are extremely trustworthy and good, even in this time where many people don't think this is true the evidence is right there that people are honest.
But the article is talking about two different things. It opens with
> Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to [knowing what is a fact]
but then starts discussing how we know the earth's core's composition. I'm surprised they didn't talk about the electron (or particles) as this is something Popper and Kuhn both talked about. Are they real or are they forces or just a mathematical construct? This is a far more philosophical question than discussing how public can understand if someone is teaching science or telling lies while sounding scientific. This is really missing the point if you're conflating these two philosophical ideas.
I do think we should teach more metascience in the sciences but I'm not sure this will do anything to build peoples' trust in science, and more importantly, scientific communication.
But how should policy makers deal with these questions? The same way news sources should. You communicate with the scientists and you have scientists (or former) on your team. People that can speak the language and communicate with you. This has to be a team effort because we live in a world of specialization. There is too much information for any singular person to even have a glimpse of reality. But you'll find that many politicians don't have members like these on their teams and I'm not sure how you could expect them to make accurate decisions (or how they can even trust themselves, but that's a different issue).
This very lightweight article doesn't touch on why Popper and Kuhn were so influential (although I'm partial to Imre Lakatos, who tried to rescue Popper from Kuhn). If you aren't familiar with the Logical Positivists and their approach to science, it's valuable background to understanding the debates.
The article shows that the West has not really come to terms with rejecting divine revelation and the end of absolute certainty. Some personalities seem more drawn to "facts" than others, probably the same ones that are drawn to authoritarianism (of whatever flavor). I doubt people with high openness (in the OCEAN / Big Five sense) really clamor for FACTS.
What a terrible, horrible, no-good article. Claiming to be able to arbitrate what is fact and what isn’t without even mentioning epistemology and all the open questions therein, the reason that science is a process and not an end result… very bad form for a professor of philosophy. Maybe he goes into the details in the book he’s flogging (his own book of course) but judging by tfa my confidence is low.
Things exist in context. What's good for an introduction to a book I've already bought is not necessarily good for a stand-alone article for a website. Although I would argue that even the former should have some mention of the obvious starting points and objections. If I read this introduction in a book store or library I'd be putting it back on the shelf.
No, I haven't read the book and I shan't for this passage gives me little confidence that the book would do them justice.
In the landscape of hypothesis and theory ... there are no known facts apart from those who've been proven elsewhere. Too many people (science people) make this simple mistake, not a lot, but still, too many.
Seems to fly in the face of the philosophy of science, which typically has science as a process of ruling out things that are incorrect and incrementally approximating the truth.
The article doesn't fulfill the promise of the title. Not only does it not explain how to identify a scientific fact (who samples the 95% "consensus" and who decides what to ask, for example?), it doesn't even define the term, despite multiple uses.
The reason is, of course, that there are no scientific facts. There are hypotheses, theories, and observations. There is a scientific method, which attempts to connect them together.
This is a deeply unsettling perspective to a lot of people who demand something science can't deliver but which religion can, and I'd count the author among them.
Whenever an author starts tooting about "scientific facts" I sense an agenda. And it's often followed by demands that I submit to it.
Elsewhere, the author pitches the book like so:
> My new book Identifying Future-Proof Science argues that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of human beings from fish, and the fact that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. ...
The first claim is laughable. Without a path for abiogenesis (there is none yet), claims this specific about evolution are anything but "fact." And the tautology of classifying the Milky Way galaxy as a galaxy makes me wonder if the author has problems with basic logic.
Seems to me we can identify a scientific fact: it's an empirical proposition for which we have sufficient scientific evidence. "Sufficient" is a community standard, and different communities may have different standards. That's not an ideal state of affairs, but it turns out to be a liveable one.
This doesn't solve the problem of "future-proofing" or universalizing facts, because THAT is not a solvable problem. But it does solve the local problem of making a community decision about who deserves respect and what topics are worth debating.
Make a specific proposal and I will show you how that is a community standard. The only reason I can't right now is because what you have suggested is not yet specific enough to be ANY kind of standard.
My point is that what is required by an actual real world application is not up to the community. It's up to the universe.
For example, if you want to judge the predictions of astronomers about close approaches of asteroids to Earth, the standard is not what the community thinks is ok, but whether their predictions are accurate enough to say for sure whether an asteroid will hit or miss. That standard is imposed by the universe, the laws of physics, and our desire to not get killed by an asteroid impact.
The article portrays Popperian falsifiability as a negative thing, when in fact it is exactly the kind of defining criterion that the author is hunting for.
Except it is a criterion of a scientific _theory_ , not a fact derived from it; because the natural sciences are entirely empirical disciplines (today), theories can only be _disproved_ , not proved, by experiments.
Progress - in the form of convergence towards truth among the community of experts (Peirce) - is achieved by revising theories. Like with software, there comes a point when tweaking the old implementation becomes frustrating, and it's time for a re-write from scratch - that'd be a Kuhn-style change of paradigm a la Einstein's theory of relativity. Different from the realm of software, older theories (e.g. Newtonian physics) remain valid and often useful for some restricted scope.
The author Peter Vickers appears to have written this blog post motivated by a recent line of work that resulted in a book that came out entitled "Identifying Future-Proof Science":
https://academic.oup.com/book/44533?login=false (2022, Oxford University Press); putting it in my shopping basket/on my 2023 reading list & curious to hear from anyone who has read it already.
Crazy idea: I propose someone collect a list of facts - e.g. a wiki - that actual scientists can sign individually (e.g. owners of academic email addresses that do not contain a .stud. sub-string).
My contribution of a fact: "On earth, any fruit of _malus domestica_ (commonly called "apple") that is dropped will fall down" (which means from the height of any person towards the centre of earth) as long as (small print to establish the boundary conditions of Newtonian physics).
> theories can only be _disproved_ , not proved, by experiments
While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. General relativity and quantum mechanics have extraordinary predictive power: we can make quantitative predictions that match experimental results to ten or more decimal places. But predictive power gets worse by many orders of magnitude as you go down the scale from "harder" to "softer" sciences, to the point where we don't have any real predictive power at all in many areas of social science.
> a Kuhn-style change of paradigm a la Einstein's theory of relativity
Actually, no, this wasn't a Kuhnian change of paradigm. Why? Because a Kuhnian paradigm shift requires that the two paradigms are incommensurable. And that's not true for relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics. Relativity contains Newtonian mechanics as a particular approximation (low speeds and weak gravitational fields). So Newtonian mechanics is not incommensurable with relativity.
By contrast, the shift from Aristotelian physics to Galilean physics (I say "Galilean" since Galileo was actually the one that started the shift, before Newton was even born) was a Kuhnian paradigm shift, because Aristotelian physics and Galilean physics are incommensurable. Aristotelian physics contains teleological concepts that don't have any counterparts whatever in Galilean physics, not even as approximations.
> older theories (e.g. Newtonian physics) remain valid and often useful for some restricted scope.
With a true Kuhnian paradigm shift, this is not true: the old theory just gets thrown away. Aristotelian physics wasn't used by anyone after Galilean physics became the dominant paradigm, not even in a restricted scope. This is why Kuhn claimed that there is no such thing as scientific progress. He was wrong, of course: once a particular discipline actually becomes an experimental science (which Aristotelian physics was not), your statement about older theories does hold--Newtonian physics, as you say, being a prime example. But that is not what Kuhn was claiming happened in paradigm shifts.
> While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories.
It doesn't though. Acknowledging one thing does not mean that all other things are ignored.
> Acknowledging one thing does not mean that all other things are ignored.
That's true in the abstract, but in the particular case we are discussing, the view that a theory cannot be proved goes along with the view that what is important in science is falsification: we rule out competing theories until only one is left standing. But that is not what actually happens. What actually happens is that, as we get more and more data in a particular domain, we refine our models to have better and better predictive power. The more efficiently we can do that (because we are able to conduct controlled experiments with very accurate measurements involved), the "harder" the science is (the "hardest" by this criterion being physics). Nothing ever gets falsified and thrown away.
The other problem with the emphasis on falsification is that scientists still use theories that, by Popper's criterion, were falsified long ago. The obvious example is Newtonian physics. By Popper's argument, we should have abandoned it as soon as we had experimental and observational data, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that contradicted it. But what actually happened was that one branch of physics developed new theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, while other branches of physics kept right on using Newtonian physics, because, even though it was "wrong", it gave answers that were accurate enough for the purpose. In other words, its predictive power, while less than that of relativity and QM, was good enough for what it was being used for.
> Actually, no, this wasn't a Kuhnian change of paradigm. Why? Because a Kuhnian paradigm shift requires that the two paradigms are incommensurable. And that's not true for relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics. Relativity contains Newtonian mechanics as a particular approximation (low speeds and weak gravitational fields). So Newtonian mechanics is not incommensurable with relativity.
I don't think that's an adequate analysis. Newtonian mechanics to General Relativity was indeed a Kuhnian paradigm shift because it required giving up simultaneity, messed with causality, and did away with the notion that space and time were simply an immutable Euclidean background on which particle interactions took place. Instead, spacetime was itself malleable by the entities that inhabited it, and was described by hyperbolic geometry. All of these were tough pills to swallow and required significant revisions to how people thought about reality.
That Newtonian mechanics is embedded within GR is one data point to consider when deciding whether something is a paradigm shift, but it's not the only point that matters.
By your argument, quantum mechanics was also not a paradigm shift because it reduces to classical mechanics in some limit due to decoherence. I think any interpretation of Kuhnian paradigm shifts that excludes arguably the two biggest revolutions in science, ever, cannot be correct.
> I think any interpretation of Kuhnian paradigm shifts that excludes arguably the two biggest revolutions in science, ever, cannot be correct.
Tell that to Kuhn himself. The requirement of incommensurability for paradigm shifts is his, not mine.
I agree that there is a different concept of "paradigm shift" in science, which does describe what happened when relativity and QM were adopted. But that concept is not Kuhn's concept. In both of those changes (as I've already said with regard to the change to relativity), the old theory was contained in the new one as a special case or approximation. And that is precisely why they are not Kuhnian paradigm shifts--because the theories aren't incommensurable. That doesn't mean they weren't radical changes: it just means that Kuhn's ideas about how radical changes actually happen in science were not very accurate.
The author seems disturbed that science fact is socially constructed. His solution is an appeal to social construction. He has not moved the ball by doing this. In fact, he's lost yardage, because now science would have to come together in consensus over his arbitrary 95% rule... which would be yet another social process... just to arrive at an ongoing popularity measurement process. Yuck.
Seems like nothing he said really contradicts Kuhn. Kuhn agreed that normal science operates within a particular paradigm; and in that paradigm there are accepted facts. What we can't know is whether a new paradigm might emerge that rearranges sensory phenomena into a different set of facts that "makes more sense" in some way, or allows certain puzzles to be solved that cannot otherwise be solved. If enough of those puzzles can be resolved in the new paradigm compared the old, the stage is set for scientific revolution.
There must be a stable reality of some kind, because when we operate as if there is, we are perpetually rewarded. But how we think about that reality is not necessarily stable. Oxygen definitely exists. But remember that the guy who discovered oxygen never called it by that name. The original term was "dephlogisticated air" which is a reference to the completely discredited phlogiston theory.
All facts are theory-laden; that is, facts are facts of a particular theory. When a particular theory wins out, facts of such a theory are treated as facts beyond the confines of that theory.
Crisis, Public health policymaking, Uncertainty, Knowledge, Pragmatism, Covid-19
Abstract:
"In this conceptual paper, we argue that at times of crisis, what is sometimes called “evidence-based” or “science-driven” policymaking—establishing scientific truths and then implementing them—must be tempered by a more agile, deliberative and inclusive approach which acknowledges and embraces uncertainty. We offer pragmatism as one potential option, using examples from the UK to illustrate how such an approach might have changed particular crisis decisions and led to better outcomes. We propose that to better prepare for the next public health crisis, five pragmatism-informed shifts are needed in the science-policy relationship: from scientism to science-informed narrative rationality that emerges from practice; from knowledge-then-action to acting judiciously under uncertainty; from hierarchies of evidence to pluralist inquiry; from polarized camps to frame-reflective dialogue; and from an “inside-track” science-policy dialogue to greater participatory democracy. We suggest an agenda for a pragmatist-informed program of applied research on crisis public health policymaking."
In a temporary crisis, the mandate is to enact policies that calm panic, even if they aren't just or scientific (and they usually aren't). A major complaint about COVID is that the panic came from the top down, as a justification for doing the unjust and unscientific things the people in charge wanted to do anyway. Nobody is really addressing the truth or lack of truth of that statement, we're all just slinging mud.
When we use a single word for a complex phenomenon (in this instance, the "scientific fact") we bound to have endless discussions talking past each other.
The focus on "95%" gives away that the focus of the article is on a preliminary stage of scientific inquiry, where uncertainties around the measurement (observation) process are dominant and the explanatory framework of what is happening is sketchy (statistical) in nature. This is typically the case when the system we want to establish scientific facts about is very complex (e.g. biological or much worse, human social).
Inceased scientific confidence obtains only when we can control that complexity and zoom-in into more fundamental behavior that can be both quantified and explained in more detail. That deepening of understanding leads to a cycle of prediction/measurement/experiment/confirmation that keeps adding "confidence" in a way that has nothing to do with statistical "95%" confidence. E.g., Netwonian laws were "proven" to very high certainty and yet they got eventually replaced by even more accurate scientific models.
Scientific facts are a journey, not a destination. For a sane discussion we need to clarify what phase of the journey we are talking about.
> When we use a single word for a complex phenomenon (in this instance, the "scientific fact") we bound to have endless discussions talking past each other.
I think of it as "what data type(s) would I need to store this information", and the epistemic status(es) (maybe with reasoning, etc) would be a part of that.
The author doesn't really get epistemology, it isn't that philosophers are out there mocking geologists and think that such ice ages probably didn’t exist and are just “nice ideas”. We are trying to establish frameworks of justification with explicit and rigorous criteria that we can use to determine when something is knowledge, and so far the double negative (non-falsifiable) is the closest we can get to an affirmation of scientific fact. This isn't some whim of epistemologists, this is because the task is very hard and simple 'its the current year' rhetoric does not resolve the problems with knowledge justification.
The author is a philospher of science, it's a discredit to simply suppose that he doesn't get epistemology just from this article. This blog post is meant to be an introduction to the book, which has more discussion and details: https://petervickersphilosophy.com/2021/07/08/identifying-fu....
This article is garbage. If we agreed that 95% consensus was “scientific fact” then plenty of “truths” that we knew back in the past would never be revisited. For example, homosexuality was thought of as a choice as recently as the 1980s. Or high fat diets caused heart disease. Or larger heads equals smarter people.
The reason why scientific facts don’t exist is because the truly great scientists before this author knew that facts are only as good until the next data point that disproves it.
On the other hand, trying to establish scientific fact as consensus will result in political fights to try to force the scientific community and policy makers into decisions that further their own agendas. The sex/gender political fight right now is a great example of how consensus can be forced to further agendas. It’s evil and should never be pursued. Leave science as it is.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadThat is, unless we escape the simulation and evaluate the mechanism’s implementation.
I think anything else is just semantics.
> I think anything else is just semantics.
Semantics is the science of meaning. So what do people really mean when they say that something is "just semantics"? Do they really mean sophistry?
Newtonian physics stood for hundreds of years, and we now understand it to be an approximation of quantum mechanics. It's still useful, but merely useful. Do not mistake "useful" for "true."
It could easily be misconstrued as a counter example to the quote in the article, which it is only in the strictest, most pedantic sense. In any reasonable interpretation, Newtonian Physics is still true.
I agree with your point, reality is certainly not statistical, and e.g. there would have been circles in which heliocentricity or a flat earth or some pre-germ theory of disease would have been agreed upon fact. Arguing that those aren't science is hindsight, at the time they would have been learned consensus.
Yeah, that's just not true. It's an absurd claim. Medical science is loaded with examples of things that had wide consensus (but...95%? Probably? Feels like this is a loophole in the argument...) which were subsequently found to be false. Consider just a few examples:
* hormone replacement therapy
* aspirin for heart attacks
* mammograms for younger women (< 50)
Just this year, a huge RCT called into doubt the usefulness of mass colonoscopy [1], which was absolutely "scientific consensus" until now (you can see this, because the study was met with rather vicious backlash).
For a more basic science example, consider "The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" [2] which, of course, was so "consensus" that they named it "The Central Dogma": genetic information goes from DNA to RNA to proteins.
This was fact...until they discovered retroviruses. Then prions. Oops.
This stuff happens all the time. The authors are either not scientists, or they're so blinkered by ideology that they're unreliable.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2208375
[2] https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Central-Dogma
This reference seems to be saying that mass colonoscopy reduces the 10 year risk of colorectal cancer by a statistically significant amount. How is this calling into doubt its usefulness?
Part of the backlash points out that cancer can affect quality of life in other ways and no one measured that. But either way, it throws the consensus into doubt.
> The risk of death from colorectal cancer was 0.28% in the invited group and 0.31% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.64 to 1.16). The number needed to invite to undergo screening to prevent one case of colorectal cancer was 455 (95% CI, 270 to 1429). The risk of death from any cause was 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the usual-care group (risk ratio, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.96 to 1.04).
This isn't the final word on the subject, but it overturns the conventional wisdom that colonoscopy is an obvious win and worth all of the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it.
I'd posit that the one in 455 people who would die without a colonoscopy would disagree that colonoscopy isn't worth "all the money, time, effort and pain we spend on it."
I would suggest that you ask my uncle about it, as he didn't have a colonoscopy and was eventually diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer.
But I won't make that suggestion, as it wouldn't be worthwhile -- because he's dead. From colorectal cancer.
I guess that what one person considers a waste of money, time, effort and pain, another might consider a worthy investment.
Currently, colonoscopy is the only way to confirm whether or not colorectal cancer (and/or pre-malignant polyps) is present.
I expect that eventually, we'll have a test for colon cancer, similar to the (PSA[0]) blood test that helps diagnose prostate cancer. But until then, colonoscopy is the only way to identify colorectal cancers.
For your part, I hope you never get cancer and live a long, healthy, happy life. But if you do end up with colorectal cancer, I hope you've disabused yourself of the ideas you've expressed and get yourself tested.
Good luck!
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet
Your post is a fantastic illustration of how and why we can't rely on "consensus" to determine fact. People routinely fall in love with narratives based on what they "know", and refuse to accept new data that challenges their narratives.
For literally anything we do, some people will die afterward. You could set up a study where you punch people in the shoulder at random, and follow them to see if getting punched implies a survival benefit. Eventually, everyone in both groups will die -- we'd expect about the same number in each group at any given time, because punching people in the shoulder probably doesn't affect lifespan. But still, people will die after getting punched!
Here we have a large, randomized study where approximately the same number of people died with colon cancer after getting colonoscopy as did without the screening. The screening had ~no effect on outcome.
Also, you've misunderstood: the 455 people is not the number of people who would die with colon cancer -- it's the number of perfectly healthy people you'd need to screen to prevent one case.
> I would suggest that you ask my uncle about it, as he didn't have a colonoscopy and was eventually diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer.
While I'm sorry for your loss, the data from this RCT suggests that colonoscopy on perfectly healthy people confers little to no survival benefit, and trumps any anecdote.
No. I haven't. If we don't do any colonoscopies, that 1 in 455 who develops colorectal cancer will die (as my uncle did) if the cancer isn't diagnosed early enough.
Don't want to go through the "trouble" of a colonoscopy after 50 years of age? Then don't. If so, I hope that you or anyone you love isn't that 456th person.
Yes, Anecdotes aren't data. However, that 1 in 455 is a statistic and what are statistics? Data based on aggregations of anecdotes.
I mentioned my uncle not because I want to pull your heartstrings. Rather, it's because while it's a simple thing to look at data and statistics, it's easy to forget that such data (at least in this case) breaks down in to anecdotes just like that one -- e.g., dead and/or very sick people -- who wouldn't be sick or dead with appropriate screenings.
If you don't care that some people will die without colonoscopies, that's your prerogative. I hope that attitude doesn't keep you or those you love from identifying potential colorectal cancer before it's too late.
That you don't care about others getting sick and dying[0] from the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths in the US, says something. Not sure what though and I won't speculate.
I'm sure that the your full-throated support for not doing colonoscopies is cold comfort to the (~36-56/100,000 Americans) ~118,000-185,000 actual, real people who develop colorectal cancer per year.
I'll say it one more time -- there are real people represented in that data. People who suffer and die every day. And if we did fewer colonoscopies, more of those people would, in fact, die, because their cancer wasn't diagnosed at all/soon enough. And so I have to put on my Quincy, M.E.[1] mask and ask: People are dying, doesn't anyone care? Is it correct to say that you don't care, or am I missing something?
It would be easy for me to just wish colorectal cancer on you and then ignore you, but I don't want you to get colorectal cancer (or cancer of any kind for that matter). Dying of cancer is a slow, agonizing, incredibly painful way to die and should be avoided as much as possible.
If you have a family history of colorectal cancer, please, please start having colonoscopies every two-five years starting at age 45.
If you don't, please do so every five years or so starting at age 50.
Or not. It's your life and (eventually) your funeral. That's up to you.
[0] https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy,_M.E.
Edit: Fixed references and closed emphasis asterisk.
I'm sure there are theories in history, political science or sociology which once met the criteria, but are wrong. One of the things that (IMO!) is extremely important for something to be accepted as a fact is whether we can explain it through a causal model. The assumptions of such a model should at least meet the same criteria, but probably even stricter ones. A simple hand-waving explanation, no matter how widely accepted, should ever be accepted as fact.
Scientific racism and the various eugenics movements say hello.
Bruno was burned because he was a hermetic mystic and didn't really prove anything significant about the planets.
As far as theories are concerned, "useful" means "makes valid predictions", so true, but within a limited scope (Newtonian physics: macroscopic events, from a human perspective).
[0]: Under the Everett interpretation, which is no more or less scientific than the Copenhagen interpretation, this happens all the time and is witnessed by many humans.
I find it repulsive to even entertain the idea of "future proof facts". To me that is hubris to the extreme, especially when it is based upon a consensus of those whose knowledge and instrumentation are grounded in the present.
Finally, as others have noted, science revolves around theories and observations, and what we can currently ascertain from said observations - not facts. Often times "facts" are nothing more than bullshit that has yet to be called out.
Imo, if someone is more interested in carving "facts" into stone than continually engaging with what we think we know - they aren't the right person for the job.
I think this is all a bit of a red herring. The question is how do policymakers deal with politically charged topics. And I personally haven't seen cases where more research or "science" is the answer, it's just crutch that people use to try and make their political point.
The article mentions climate change, which is a great example of something that's been scienced to death. The future is unknowable, there will always be some "we can never know" component to it, but that doesn't necessitate more research to find a smoking gun that will shut down all sceptics, not does it require that since we can't prove it, we ignore it. Some mix of balance of probabilities plus public will easily passes the threshold for doing something. So do something. Sequester CO2, build dikes, if the whole thing comes to naught, it won't be the most wasteful thing government did.
A pragmatic approach is what's needed, not some philosophical search for how we define truth, which just offsets the problem one layer and doesn't change the politics at all
Climate change is a perfect example because oil companies and armed forces worldwide have been operating under the assumption that it's real and its coming, largely because they're the ones who have to deal with, for example, the immediate effects of storm size on ship builders, ports, and deep sea mining equipment. We've got a Jekyll and Hyde government with a Navy that has been preparing for climate change since the 90s while half the country fights tooth and nail against the very concept.
I think the pragmatic approach is to let the experts at the CDC, FDA, EPA, etc do the work they're qualified to do while working on checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture, politicization, and corruption.
Obviously we have warmed the planet a great deal but I don't think that is going to stop the next ice age.
Global regulation of fundamental economic development represents a shift to authoritarianism. That's not a positive move if you believe in individual liberty.
It also represents a significant loss of wealth. We pay more for the same services.
They bring their professional and political judgment to a competitive information environment and use the fractional share of power vested in them to inform the consensus to make or not make a particular policy. That or they beat the snot out of each other, but either way what gets done in a given legislative session is the product of whatever consensus they were able to make, however they were able to make it, with whatever information was in the room with them at the time.
But the real problem is not the distinction between "fact" and "very high confidence". The real problem is that is the misuse of dubious correlations to justify agendas. Politics, economics, personal decisions etc.
We don't have a crisis of scientific facts. We have a replication crisis. And because of that, a lot of bogus science goes unnoticed and makes way WAY larger impact than it should.
This is a flat out lie. Metascientists have grappled with this question for a long time, including Kuhn and Popper (who are mentioned). The truth of the matter is that you can't identify a scientific fact, that's not really how science works. We rule things out, not in. But we also hone in on answers but never have an exact one. There will always be a lot of trust in the system. We trust that scientists won't lie. The truth is that there is very little lying. Because if you do, you are completely ruined. We're even seeing people distrust science not because scientists are wrong but because science reporting is wrong and people will blame scientists but not the reporting. Though the thing is, how is a layman supposed to know the difference? I wouldn't expect them to and I don't know how to. I can only really judge a "fact" that's in my niche in my field and everything else is an educated guess. I have training and experience, but there's still a lot of trust in the system. The world runs on trust and people are extremely trustworthy and good, even in this time where many people don't think this is true the evidence is right there that people are honest.
But the article is talking about two different things. It opens with
> Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to [knowing what is a fact]
but then starts discussing how we know the earth's core's composition. I'm surprised they didn't talk about the electron (or particles) as this is something Popper and Kuhn both talked about. Are they real or are they forces or just a mathematical construct? This is a far more philosophical question than discussing how public can understand if someone is teaching science or telling lies while sounding scientific. This is really missing the point if you're conflating these two philosophical ideas.
I do think we should teach more metascience in the sciences but I'm not sure this will do anything to build peoples' trust in science, and more importantly, scientific communication.
But how should policy makers deal with these questions? The same way news sources should. You communicate with the scientists and you have scientists (or former) on your team. People that can speak the language and communicate with you. This has to be a team effort because we live in a world of specialization. There is too much information for any singular person to even have a glimpse of reality. But you'll find that many politicians don't have members like these on their teams and I'm not sure how you could expect them to make accurate decisions (or how they can even trust themselves, but that's a different issue).
The article shows that the West has not really come to terms with rejecting divine revelation and the end of absolute certainty. Some personalities seem more drawn to "facts" than others, probably the same ones that are drawn to authoritarianism (of whatever flavor). I doubt people with high openness (in the OCEAN / Big Five sense) really clamor for FACTS.
No, I haven't read the book and I shan't for this passage gives me little confidence that the book would do them justice.
"established scientific facts can be identified via a solid (>95%) international scientific consensus"
All statements are false. Some are useful.
Seems to fly in the face of the philosophy of science, which typically has science as a process of ruling out things that are incorrect and incrementally approximating the truth.
The reason is, of course, that there are no scientific facts. There are hypotheses, theories, and observations. There is a scientific method, which attempts to connect them together.
This is a deeply unsettling perspective to a lot of people who demand something science can't deliver but which religion can, and I'd count the author among them.
Whenever an author starts tooting about "scientific facts" I sense an agenda. And it's often followed by demands that I submit to it.
Elsewhere, the author pitches the book like so:
> My new book Identifying Future-Proof Science argues that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of human beings from fish, and the fact that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. ...
https://petervickersphilosophy.com/publications/
The first claim is laughable. Without a path for abiogenesis (there is none yet), claims this specific about evolution are anything but "fact." And the tautology of classifying the Milky Way galaxy as a galaxy makes me wonder if the author has problems with basic logic.
This doesn't solve the problem of "future-proofing" or universalizing facts, because THAT is not a solvable problem. But it does solve the local problem of making a community decision about who deserves respect and what topics are worth debating.
It doesn't have to be. We can use predictive power to judge how strong our evidence is.
For example, if you want to judge the predictions of astronomers about close approaches of asteroids to Earth, the standard is not what the community thinks is ok, but whether their predictions are accurate enough to say for sure whether an asteroid will hit or miss. That standard is imposed by the universe, the laws of physics, and our desire to not get killed by an asteroid impact.
The author Peter Vickers appears to have written this blog post motivated by a recent line of work that resulted in a book that came out entitled "Identifying Future-Proof Science": https://academic.oup.com/book/44533?login=false (2022, Oxford University Press); putting it in my shopping basket/on my 2023 reading list & curious to hear from anyone who has read it already.
Crazy idea: I propose someone collect a list of facts - e.g. a wiki - that actual scientists can sign individually (e.g. owners of academic email addresses that do not contain a .stud. sub-string). My contribution of a fact: "On earth, any fruit of _malus domestica_ (commonly called "apple") that is dropped will fall down" (which means from the height of any person towards the centre of earth) as long as (small print to establish the boundary conditions of Newtonian physics).
While it is technically true that a theory cannot be "proved", that view ignores the huge range of predictive power in our various scientific theories. General relativity and quantum mechanics have extraordinary predictive power: we can make quantitative predictions that match experimental results to ten or more decimal places. But predictive power gets worse by many orders of magnitude as you go down the scale from "harder" to "softer" sciences, to the point where we don't have any real predictive power at all in many areas of social science.
> a Kuhn-style change of paradigm a la Einstein's theory of relativity
Actually, no, this wasn't a Kuhnian change of paradigm. Why? Because a Kuhnian paradigm shift requires that the two paradigms are incommensurable. And that's not true for relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics. Relativity contains Newtonian mechanics as a particular approximation (low speeds and weak gravitational fields). So Newtonian mechanics is not incommensurable with relativity.
By contrast, the shift from Aristotelian physics to Galilean physics (I say "Galilean" since Galileo was actually the one that started the shift, before Newton was even born) was a Kuhnian paradigm shift, because Aristotelian physics and Galilean physics are incommensurable. Aristotelian physics contains teleological concepts that don't have any counterparts whatever in Galilean physics, not even as approximations.
> older theories (e.g. Newtonian physics) remain valid and often useful for some restricted scope.
With a true Kuhnian paradigm shift, this is not true: the old theory just gets thrown away. Aristotelian physics wasn't used by anyone after Galilean physics became the dominant paradigm, not even in a restricted scope. This is why Kuhn claimed that there is no such thing as scientific progress. He was wrong, of course: once a particular discipline actually becomes an experimental science (which Aristotelian physics was not), your statement about older theories does hold--Newtonian physics, as you say, being a prime example. But that is not what Kuhn was claiming happened in paradigm shifts.
It doesn't though. Acknowledging one thing does not mean that all other things are ignored.
That's true in the abstract, but in the particular case we are discussing, the view that a theory cannot be proved goes along with the view that what is important in science is falsification: we rule out competing theories until only one is left standing. But that is not what actually happens. What actually happens is that, as we get more and more data in a particular domain, we refine our models to have better and better predictive power. The more efficiently we can do that (because we are able to conduct controlled experiments with very accurate measurements involved), the "harder" the science is (the "hardest" by this criterion being physics). Nothing ever gets falsified and thrown away.
The other problem with the emphasis on falsification is that scientists still use theories that, by Popper's criterion, were falsified long ago. The obvious example is Newtonian physics. By Popper's argument, we should have abandoned it as soon as we had experimental and observational data, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that contradicted it. But what actually happened was that one branch of physics developed new theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, while other branches of physics kept right on using Newtonian physics, because, even though it was "wrong", it gave answers that were accurate enough for the purpose. In other words, its predictive power, while less than that of relativity and QM, was good enough for what it was being used for.
I don't think that's an adequate analysis. Newtonian mechanics to General Relativity was indeed a Kuhnian paradigm shift because it required giving up simultaneity, messed with causality, and did away with the notion that space and time were simply an immutable Euclidean background on which particle interactions took place. Instead, spacetime was itself malleable by the entities that inhabited it, and was described by hyperbolic geometry. All of these were tough pills to swallow and required significant revisions to how people thought about reality.
That Newtonian mechanics is embedded within GR is one data point to consider when deciding whether something is a paradigm shift, but it's not the only point that matters.
By your argument, quantum mechanics was also not a paradigm shift because it reduces to classical mechanics in some limit due to decoherence. I think any interpretation of Kuhnian paradigm shifts that excludes arguably the two biggest revolutions in science, ever, cannot be correct.
Tell that to Kuhn himself. The requirement of incommensurability for paradigm shifts is his, not mine.
I agree that there is a different concept of "paradigm shift" in science, which does describe what happened when relativity and QM were adopted. But that concept is not Kuhn's concept. In both of those changes (as I've already said with regard to the change to relativity), the old theory was contained in the new one as a special case or approximation. And that is precisely why they are not Kuhnian paradigm shifts--because the theories aren't incommensurable. That doesn't mean they weren't radical changes: it just means that Kuhn's ideas about how radical changes actually happen in science were not very accurate.
Didn't Cyc have a whole bunch of those?
Seems like nothing he said really contradicts Kuhn. Kuhn agreed that normal science operates within a particular paradigm; and in that paradigm there are accepted facts. What we can't know is whether a new paradigm might emerge that rearranges sensory phenomena into a different set of facts that "makes more sense" in some way, or allows certain puzzles to be solved that cannot otherwise be solved. If enough of those puzzles can be resolved in the new paradigm compared the old, the stage is set for scientific revolution.
There must be a stable reality of some kind, because when we operate as if there is, we are perpetually rewarded. But how we think about that reality is not necessarily stable. Oxygen definitely exists. But remember that the guy who discovered oxygen never called it by that name. The original term was "dephlogisticated air" which is a reference to the completely discredited phlogiston theory.
How we can act judiciously under uncertainty ?
related:
Medical Science: "The science-policy relationship in times of crisis: An urgent call for a pragmatist turn" ( August 2022 )
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...
Keywords:
Crisis, Public health policymaking, Uncertainty, Knowledge, Pragmatism, Covid-19
Abstract:
"In this conceptual paper, we argue that at times of crisis, what is sometimes called “evidence-based” or “science-driven” policymaking—establishing scientific truths and then implementing them—must be tempered by a more agile, deliberative and inclusive approach which acknowledges and embraces uncertainty. We offer pragmatism as one potential option, using examples from the UK to illustrate how such an approach might have changed particular crisis decisions and led to better outcomes. We propose that to better prepare for the next public health crisis, five pragmatism-informed shifts are needed in the science-policy relationship: from scientism to science-informed narrative rationality that emerges from practice; from knowledge-then-action to acting judiciously under uncertainty; from hierarchies of evidence to pluralist inquiry; from polarized camps to frame-reflective dialogue; and from an “inside-track” science-policy dialogue to greater participatory democracy. We suggest an agenda for a pragmatist-informed program of applied research on crisis public health policymaking."
The focus on "95%" gives away that the focus of the article is on a preliminary stage of scientific inquiry, where uncertainties around the measurement (observation) process are dominant and the explanatory framework of what is happening is sketchy (statistical) in nature. This is typically the case when the system we want to establish scientific facts about is very complex (e.g. biological or much worse, human social).
Inceased scientific confidence obtains only when we can control that complexity and zoom-in into more fundamental behavior that can be both quantified and explained in more detail. That deepening of understanding leads to a cycle of prediction/measurement/experiment/confirmation that keeps adding "confidence" in a way that has nothing to do with statistical "95%" confidence. E.g., Netwonian laws were "proven" to very high certainty and yet they got eventually replaced by even more accurate scientific models.
Scientific facts are a journey, not a destination. For a sane discussion we need to clarify what phase of the journey we are talking about.
I think of it as "what data type(s) would I need to store this information", and the epistemic status(es) (maybe with reasoning, etc) would be a part of that.
⇐ Francis Crick
The reason why scientific facts don’t exist is because the truly great scientists before this author knew that facts are only as good until the next data point that disproves it.
On the other hand, trying to establish scientific fact as consensus will result in political fights to try to force the scientific community and policy makers into decisions that further their own agendas. The sex/gender political fight right now is a great example of how consensus can be forced to further agendas. It’s evil and should never be pursued. Leave science as it is.