Scientists tend to think that science communication is linear: you can do good science communication or you can do bad science communication. But as this pandemic has shown, you can actually be great at communicating science, but support harmful policies.
Someone who is competent at communicating science but supports harmful policies is perhaps the most dangerous type of science communicator because they are leveraged by people in power to downplay ongoing harm and injustice.
I'd just rush to stress that science and policy are emphatically different things.
#Science can tell you where a policy might go, but it's a political matter as to whether to adopt policies to go there.
Whether you support a policy or not can be informed by science, but at the end of the day, the subjective and objective are different things.
@volkris @luckytran Science is separate but it should influence policy. It should be like the king's advisor.
@JohnShirley2023 @volkris @luckytran
Science is obviously the explanation for phenomena, but being an explanation is it what we perceive and (hopefully) comprehend.
Being it is "we", science is like us: organic. Darwin said that our morality is the evolution of animal's affection for their young.
Science as our evolution is specifically the good stuff such as empathy, which we find on other evolutional tracks (whales, and even octopuses they say).
If it isn't moral, it isn't Science.
I wouldn't use the term science that way.
I'd say #science refers to the application of a technique, the scientific method, to scrutinize proposed explanations and see if they really match what we observe in the world around us.
That's what makes scientific explanation distinct from other explanations for phenomena, the structured testing against observation.
One key value of the scientific method is the separation of the process from human bias. A hypothesis either is or is not consistent with observation, regardless of what the human thinks about it.
So in the end to inject morality into science is to undermine the whole value that science offers.
@volkris @johnbessa @luckytran I know what you mean, Volkris. But a scientist can be a moral person, to the benefit of society. That doesn't mean they distort their scientific work for some agenda. It might mean that if they discover a new nerve-gas, for example, they choose not to disclose it, since it will inevitably be used for mass murder.
One way to think about it is that science--the application of the scientific method--is only one part of what a scientist does in practice, the same way that sawing is only one task of many that a woodworker engages in.
So for example, collecting data outside of a hypothesis is an important task, but since it's not direct application of the scientific method, I wouldn't call it "doing science".
In the same way, science can tell a researcher that this chemical has fatal effects, but it's not science that tells him whether he should expose his enemy to it.
We put up a firewall between science and morality so that each of them does its job as well as possible, science telling us what is possible and morality telling us whether to actually do it.
@volkris @JohnShirley2023 @luckytran
I have no issues with methods, but the scientific method is just a method.
The real twist in comprehension, as the goal of life, is that science is out there as the scientific reality of nature, and science is in us as its comprehension.
We have this "other thing", concrete reality. It isn't marxist, but it might as well be. Solely the outcome of industrialization, it is anomalous in natural history.
It is going to end soon, one way or another.
Yep, that's exactly my point. Science is only one out of many tools in our toolbox, and that's part of why it's useful to be specific about what science is.
@JohnShirley2023 @luckytran
@volkris @JohnShirley2023 @luckytran
Nature is the steady item.