Science Says ...

What are facts, and how can we respect them?

The recent and prevalent locution of "science says ..." is grating to everyone- scientists, civilians, red, and blue. We get the shorthand meaning, but it has unpleasant, domineering overtones. Yet, sadly, something needs to be said, if facts can not make themselves heard. The "science says ..." mantra means that not only is something a fact, but it is widely, perhaps unanimously, recognized as a fact by experts who know where such facts come from and what they mean. Lately this usage has been in flood due to the pandemic, a way for data-driven people to criticize their more negligent neighbors.

The problem is that facts are not always totally clear or secure. So we have to fall back on arguments from authority, to support what we believe are important actions, based on other values. Masks were originally denigrated - by scientists! - as not very useful for protection against viruses that were small enough to easily pass right through typical cloth. But as more data came in, it became clear - to scientists - that even partial filtering and simple dispersion of infectious aerosols was quite helpful, not only for others facing a possible asymptomatic carrier of SARS-COV2, but to mask wearers themselves, by reducing the infecting dose. This is especially true in a setting with decent ventillation. Evidence piled up from epidemiological studies as well as mechanistic studies of mask wearing, that even lax masking is better than none. Now a shorthand for all that is "science says...". 

But the evidence is hardly 100%. Small studies and suggestive trends in disease data from well and poorly-masked populations make for important public health recommendations, but not quite facts. More detail and mechanism will be helpful, including the relative amounts of virus capture and dispersion by masks, and the role of the infectious dose in the severity of disease- the race that is run between viral replication and immune defense. Few people are themselves directly conversant with all this work, which means that most have to appeal to the authority of those that are. But then any blogger can claim to be an authority, and declaim a different set of conclusions and thus facts. 

We seem to have mostly settled down about these facts, tentative as they are, when it comes to the coronavirus, even though actually respecting them and changing habits comes hard to some. But climate change has been a different matter, being so economically important and implicated in everyone's current way of life. One's conservatism is directly related to resistance to changing one's way of life, which necessarily implies denying and disbelieving the once-subtle, now overwhelming evidence that "science says" assigns blame for accelerating climate change to us and our production of heat-trapping gasses.

Facts? What facts?

This is where the "science says ..." mantra becomes politically fraught and adversarial. If reality is knocking on your door and telling you to repent, confess your sins, and change your ways, experience tells us that is has to knock extremely hard. Addicts tend to change only after they have hit rock bottom, and see death in the eye. Listening to a bunch of pointy-heads and libtards go on about the biosphere, arctic ice, and obscure species is just not compelling. Quite the opposite- it is often taken as offensive and completely out of touch with a fossil fuel addict's immediate struggles and attachment to basic habits and ways of being.

And who cares about facts anyhow? Not the modern Republican party, not our president. Whether "science says" those facts or their own eyes behold them, the social facts of political control in grossly unfair setting of US power structures, and continuing support from the morally unmoored rich and their corporations, are far more significant than any global risks that all will bear with increasing pain over the coming decades. The social facts of the right wing media's blizzard of propaganda are likewise shaping a totally different world, in both values and truths and facts, than what scientists are perceiving. The mantra of "science says" then comes to mean a set of values rather than just facts, that we should perhaps attend to non-human species and ecosystems instead of worrying about a war on Christmas; that expertise is more valuable than con-jobbery and lying propaganda; that worrying about the vastly excessive human population on Earth might be more important than saving every fertilized egg for the patriarchy. For science is a value system, both in its methods and its objects. It is largely and generously funded by society, but naturally has its own agenda, which seems far-sighted and logical enough to its practitioners, but is, in the end, a set of values, which themselves will be judged by society as worthy of propagation, or not.

• An example of how the science has to be parsed pretty carefully, by expert observers. Masks, planes, and time.
• Our degraded country.
• That tired Taliban, ready to take over all of Afghanistan.
• Medicare advantage, or disadvantage?
• Are we great again, or what?
• Climate action and inaction.. still highly insufficient.