You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it.

Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale behind them. They're moral judgements. For example, if you want to go looking for scientific evidence for why the death penalty is a terrible idea you won't find any. You'll only find ethical and moral rhetoric about why killing innocent people by mistake is bad, or why the economics of keeping people in prison for decades when you could just kill them is irrational. Science has nothing to say. Science doesn't judge.

Secondly, people don't always believe evidence even if it's there. For example, if you take a random sample of teams and find the ones that make the best decisions are more diverse[1], some people will demand "positive discrimination" is a terrible idea and a meritocratic system must be better even in the face of the evidence or they'll just argue that the evidence is plain wrong. How do you persuade those people to change their minds?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-resea...

"The study was able to measure when teams made better decisions by tracking how often the decision maker changed their mind based on the input of the team. This is presumed to be a better decision since the Cloverpop process ensures that decisions are well framed with clear goals, adequate information and multiple alternatives to avoid groupthink."

In other words, this study defines better decisions as ones which make their product relevant, which unless you're a Cloverpop marketing exec, probably isn't a good metric.

As an example, I'll run through a sample "scientifically pragmatic" argument against the death penalty: The death penalty is a terrible idea because it fails a cost benefit analysis. The benefit is a deterence to commit certain types crime, and a cost savings compared to life imprisonment. These are measurably small (research has shown that severity of a penalty has a nonlinear relationship with deterrent effect). The cost is the violation of a moral imperative not to kill. A society with the death penalty has made a conscious decision to compromise a moral imperative. This weakens the authority of moral imperatives, particularly the one against killing. The purpose of such moral imperatives is to promote a more civil, less violent society, because such societies enjoy an evolutionary advantage, hence their evolution in the first place.

How the argument proceeds from this point depends on core axioms - whether one values happiness or survival more, for instance. But the point is that it's possible to logically break down what appear to be moral questions into purely pragmatic ones, in service of deeper axioms.

The problem with this isn't that it's ineffective - it's that it's complicated, error prone, and relies heavily on a correct accounting of second-order effects and beyond. Science is hard - you need research and facts. Moral judgement is easy - you just say what pops into your head. As such, people mistrust the very idea that morals could be calculable, because it removes their agency. If someone has a strong, irrational feeling that Billy Murderer has it coming and should fry for what he did to those kids, my above argument (fleshed out properly to appeal to their core values, provided that's possible) will not convince them that it's a bad idea in the long run, no matter how scientific or testable it is. So they say things like "science has nothing to say". In fact, it does - we just don't want to listen.

Minor nitpick: it's actually more expensive to execute someone than to imprison them for life, mostly because of the increased legal costs.

If this different went away and everyone had the same morality, the legal costs would be really low.

People not accepting evidence is kind of not really a problem of science, but of science communication. But yeah, its also becoming an increasingly severe problem with examples such as climate change denial and anit-vaxxers on the rise

[1] hans rosling - factfullness

Rosling points out that smart, well-educated, well-meaning people who believe in science also see the world incorrectly - so incorrectly that they perform worse than random chance on multiple-choice questions. That's fascinating, and it suggests the problem is far more fundamental than "science communication". When facts are at odds with our instincts or cultural biases, we tend to choose the instincts and biases.

I frankly admit some of the "facts" [0] known to me are wrong [1]. I know that for certain, as some of the "facts" are conflicting with each other, however that alone doesn't help with telling which is the wrong one, and which ones to base decisions & judgements off of. This causes various headaches; I end up resorting to fallible heuristics to try to sort out the good ones in time to make the necessary judgements and decisions. I actively try to gather more facts, hoping to improve decisive power in time.

However there's also a meta aspect: the trustworthiness of any given "fact" we learn. It's common to see people acting vigorously on information that's high impact but low trustworthiness. Another common sight is, as you say, people refusing to learn a new "fact "because it is in conflict with the other "facts" they already know, with little regard whether the new one is more trustworthy.

Somewhere along the road we fail, or maybe even refuse, to associate the "facts" we know with how much trust we can put in them. This is matter of handling and processing meta information, and frankly our current education and upbringing curricula don't seem to help much with it.

I hold it to be generally immoral to perform high impact acts based off of "facts" that are known with only low trustworthiness. And as you say science helps us with obtaining ever better set of facts.

--

[0] scare quotes to differentiate between information as it is known vs. idealized truthful facts

[1] either running counter to the idealized truthful facts, or imprecise enough to be misleading

In many cases this will overlap, but in some it won't, and that means those facts that create a worse world if everyone believes them to be true should be considered as false no matter the actual truth.

My first feeling is that this might create severe trouble down the line at some point, but it might be less trouble than the alternative? An idea to ponder.

edit: The ideas in question touched worth of people, for example. We tie worth to things like earning power, intelligence and beauty. Changing how society views these things changes society. This is on the surface, but some aspects can go much deeper into who we are as a people, since we're storytellers.

The problem with moral judgements is that moral is not absolute. It always changes. That's why it's absurd to judge events happened 100 years ago by the current moral norms. In another 100 years there will be very different moral norms by which many of the things we're doing now will be considered absolutely amoral.

> Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale behind them. They're moral judgements. For example, if you want to go looking for scientific evidence for why the death penalty is a terrible idea you won't find any. You'll only find ethical and moral rhetoric about why killing innocent people by mistake is bad, or why the economics of keeping people in prison for decades when you could just kill them is irrational. Science has nothing to say. Science doesn't judge.

I wanted to talk more about your example of the death penalty.

However, if you do look into the death penalty, you'll find:

- in places that lock people up for life instead of killing them, sometimes people are later proved to be innocent and then released.

- in places where the penalty is death, a jury that would've sent a person to life in prison will often choose to release the person instead of kill them, as they aren't 100% certain and the consequence is irreversible.

I think science absolutely has some things to say about this. You could take my two statements as hypotheses and do tests to see if they are true. (This would be a lot like medical tests, but it wouldn't be ethical to have a test group and a control group; you could, however, create a regression model between two similar societies (or the same one at different times) and control for various differences, the chiefest being 'uses death penalty' or not, and answer these questions ("prove"/"disprove" the hypotheses) with some confidence.)

I agree that while you could do a study to see if people are happier and economies fare better in societies with capital punishment ["science"], that the rational and the outcome have nothing to do with science. It is a lot like in the Ted talk "Teaching kids real math with computers"[0] where the speaker explains that math has four steps:

1. Posing the right questions

2. Real world -> math formulation

3. Computation

4. Math formulation -> real world verification

If step 3 was 'Do Science', then it becomes obvious that the other steps lie outside the domain of science, but it does not become obvious that we can't use the tools of science to reason about problems that people disagree on, including moral quandaries.

[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_...

The consensus among criminologists for decades has been that the death penalty is racist in application:

https://www.asc41.com/policies/policyPositions.html

https://www.asc41.com/policies/policypapers.html

if you take a random sample of teams and find the ones that make the best decisions are more diverse

The Forbes article that you cited doesn't include the term "best decisions". The term they use is "better business decisions". Business decisions often relate to optimizing products for the lowest common denominator among consumers in a particular market. In this context, the benefit of having a diverse team is unsurprising.

Do you know of any research of which the results indicate that diverse teams of mathematicians or physicists make better decisions?

Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Whether it's social security recipients or public school teachers, people whose income is determined by the government are as defensive of their livelihoods as people whose pay is set by market forces, perhaps even more so.

Likewise, hiring practices in the private sector change like the weather.

1. People love to nit-pick every single detail and shred of possibility that could be used to support their own beliefs and politics.

2. People who consider themselves to be the "Gold Standard" for whatever will believe themselves first and foremost.

3. People seek 'personal victories' for themselves by choosing to evince that they are right.

4. A reality that contradicts an ideality is unacceptable and dismissible.

5. Dualism can be used to create separatism.

The article implies it is 'scientists' vs 'activists'. Yet many more scientists have spoken out against the PACE trial than it its favour, eg: http://www.virology.ws/2018/08/13/trial-by-error-open-letter...

It implies that the 'activists' reject results for ideological reasons, rather than because the research being challenged includes verifiably false claims, statistical spin and poor methodology: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13591053177223...

No mention is made of the fact that when an information tribunal had to examine claims about these researchers being harassed and abused their judgement stated that claims about activist behaviour had been "grossly exaggerated": https://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/news/major-breaktn-pa...

When data from the PACE trial was forced out by this legal process it showed that using the trials prespecified outcomes undermined key claims from the trial researchers: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21641846.2017.12...

It is disappointing to see so many people seeming to uncritically accept a media smear campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

There's too many blind activist on both sides that drown out the middle. This causes the people in the middle to start to separate and choose sides because they see the crazies on one side or they other and think that party is retarded, which increases the divide. We're in a heavy downward spiral at this point and I don't foresee it getting better unless we take radical action, such as not allowing people with no science background to make decisions on matters that should be based on fact. Unfortunately this will never happen because the (USA) political system is entrenched with paid actors.

Sorry for the rant and taking a veer from topic. Lots of built up frustration about all this stuff.

Don't get me wrong, i'm a scientist myself (theoretical cs) and i do believe in the value of scientific method. But i do believe that (1) this problem here is about the "online" part, not "activist" and (2) every scientific field gets explored in the context of a society thus its choice, its means and its dominant approach will always be biased (which most of the time isn't any "bad", it's ok french cs community leans towards ocaml/coq but uk is more towards haskell/agda). To expand on (1), it is now long known that twitter and other ad-based plateforms favor stupid/bigot/simplified/aggressive interactions because that's what captures more attention.

So please stop mistaking social-media activism for normal activism and using this to simplistically and superficially discredit non-dominant political opinions (and push dominant propaganda forward like "left and right all extremes are same", everybody even the dominant liberals are stupid and angry on twitter, this is all irrelevant). So i don't know about this chronic fatigue whatever thing, but this argumentative trap comes up over and over, i'm kinda tired, so please folks when someone is talking about "<x> is doing <bad thing> online", the problem most likely isn't with <x> but with "online" because it most likely means "attention hijacking plateform based on control and manipulation".

And you responded loudly and angrily online, through the lens of your own biases. See how it works?

We should care who is dominant or who wants to be “right”. We should care to cultivate scientific consensus. Misinformed or incomplete science bound by some legal principles cannot be worse than “we feel this is the right and moral thing to do”. They can both be right or wrong and I don’t see why we’d have a preference for the one having less data to back it up. Again, all bound by some legal principles (data says sick people cost too much, herd them like cattle and drive down costs).