Cambridge Consultants Blog
“Don’t look at the evidence!”
By Alan Richardson - Last updated: Friday, August 13, 2010The new LibDem MP for Cambridge here in the UK has thrown the cat amongst the pidgeons by suggesting that our legislators don’t understand science well enough. In particular Dr Huppert’s concern is that fellow Members of Parliament don’t understand that they should make decisions based on evidence and can change their mind if the evidence supports it.
I think one of the problems here is that “hard science” has proved its efficaciousness by for instance Newton’s laws of motion being good enough to send spacecraft anywhere in the solar system. Most legislative issues are not purely scientific (and don’t be fooled by quite subjective endeavours which add the word science to borrow the respectability of hard science) and science ends up being used as just another punch ball by the public relations machine that dominates government. For instance, last year, we had David Nutt being sacked as a government adviser because he pointed out that our drugs policy is anything but evidence based. If legislators had a little scientific training , its not that likely to transform their mode of thought, isn’t it more likely that they would use it to spin rather than inform their decisions?
Which I think means if you want the legislators to make decisions scientifically, you’d need a very significant representation from scientists rather than grafting a bit of training onto career politicians. The objective of career politicians is to be in power for their careers to promote and implement their vision for society, not to make evidence based decisions.
But should you want these scientific decisions? Part of the scientific method is you make observations, analyse their meaning over time and come up with a theory that fits the available evidence which then may get refined and disposed of as more evidence becomes available. In the real world, you often have to make decisions when the evidence in a scientific sense is unclear. So in the BSE crisis, it was a fact that for some time there was no conclusive scientific evidence that the meat was a danger to humans – at a certain level this amounted to no more than there had not been enough time for the disease to incubate in many humans. What we really need our leaders to have is judgement to enable them to make decisions when the evidence is incomplete. An ability to understand the scientific method may help when assessing the significance of scientific advice but I doubt whether society should have purely scientific decision making. Still I applaud Dr Huppert throwing this cat amongst the pidgeons because the current composition of our MPs with two trained scientists seems like they’re not a well represented minority.
