But step outside that field, and they latch on to something that emotionally appeals to them, and all that reason, facts, etc., flies right out the window.
Of course, I never do that myself.
I often wonder whether the epistemology we are "born with" can actually be improved very much (in a general sense), or whether the best we can do is teach domain-specific techniques to override our defaults on those topics.
We also need to deeply care and understand ourselves.
It would also be good if all those models were used as basis to discuss divergent interests and that politics would remain politics as a tool to select policies that maximize a majority (but not everyone's) best interests.
I feel, instead the issue is that it's become unacceptable to disclose what are someone's own best interests and to defend those.
Instead everyone produce fallacious models that show that their prefered policy is in everyone's best interests.
Politics is manifestly not about the public good - not even with compromises.
It's mostly about a few unpleasant - sometimes charismatic - individuals pursuing power for their own personal benefit, and covertly that of their funders and sponsors.
Science has nothing to contribute to this, because the entire business is so hopelessly toxic and corrupt that rational debate about policy doesn't even get to first base.
If you want rational policy you don't want politics. It's perfectly possible you don't even want democracy.
What you want is administration - a very different process where mature competent executives and managers who do not have Dark Triad personality traits make intelligent, informed, and compassionate decisions in the public interest based on evidence, expert guidance, and their own good instincts. And their power is strictly limited to the lightest possible enforcement required to do the job.
No country has even been run like this, but a few have managed to operate like this in selected subfields.
Which is basically inhuman. For an administration of any sort, you need a selection process and the selection process will then be gamed by exactly the people who seek power.
Which is why we have large bodies of political representatives: people will not stop seeking to acquire power and act in their interests and the interests of their backers, but they will be counteracted by people doing exactly the same but pursuing different ends. That’s a very human thing.
Based on what I have seen, most politicians genuinely believe they are working for the common good. Their understanding of what the common good is obviously varies.
In a system like that, politics is mostly about playing the long game. You build a personal brand that gets you elected and re-elected and gives you influence within your party. You build and maintain your networks, you collect political capital by supporting others' goals, and you spend the capital to advance your own goals. You try to find a balance between short-term and long-term goals, because your opponents today may be your allies tomorrow, and you don't want to alienate them by playing too hard.
Unpleasant and toxic people may sometimes survive in politics. They are rarely successful, because politics is all about people skills, at least in the system I know of. (Such people are more common in administrative positions, because their status is more secure in a meritocratic hierarchy.) People focused on specific topics often also have a hard time in politics, because they have a tendency of becoming unpleasant when things don't go their way in the niche they are interested in.
The public image of politics can be toxic, because the current publicity game requires it. The same politicians often appear quite different behind closed doors, where they are allowed to speak off the record.
All of the other scientists and researchers see this and adjust their own behavior and areas of study to avoid being mobbed.
I have had to become increasingly cautious and wary of trusting all published science, especially that in social areas now.
It isn't rational that you love your wife more than other women. Why constrain yourself to such rules for policies?
Is dying for your freedom rational? Investing in symbolic architecture? Skydiving could be seen as fundamentally irrational. Some still do it.
All depends on how exactly you define rationality.
Overall it might be prudent to value rational arguments, I complete agree with that.
edit:
> It isn't rational that you love your wife more than other women. Why constrain yourself [...]
Reading it again, this can transport something different than the point I tried to make...
It is a preference and that is what form the basis of interests.
> dying for your freedom Is somewhat different, it's already the execution of a policy (fight) for a preference. And I think it can be perfectly reasonable outcome as it's not even hard to find chapters in History during which conditions made it the only acceptable choice
What problem are we solving, what is or isn't a problem, what constitutes a better outcome, and what types of policies are allowable may be informed by science but are often (and often appropriately or at least inevitably) decided by culture, law, art, force majeure, etc.
This reminded me that the weight range we term "overweight" has lower all-cause mortality than the weight range called "normal weight". (There is another tier above "overweight", "obese", which has high mortality.)
If you look at [1], a ton of the studies they looked at adjusted for preexisting illness like hypertension and diabetes. It's basically like saying people who fall off sky scrapers don't die of cancer.
It is also important to remember the associated costs and decrease in quality of life associated with being overweight.
That said it is possible the lower-end of the overweight BMI range could be moved up a point or two but that's probably less than the variance between populations anyway.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/99/4/875/4637868?fbcli...
[2] https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/...
Maybe if you're life is about preventing cavities you think that's what kids should always have in mind, but life would suck if before every action we asked "will this contribute to tooth decay" - much more than it would suck with a few cavities.
That seems like a very dangerous saying! As a scientist, I am biased, but I think it's also important to remember that nothing is as simple as you think it is when you're not thinking about it.
Sure, it was trying to stir up business; but I think that ad mainly existed because podiatrists really did, in good faith, think everybody should get their foot examined once a year.
You just lose perspective.
Also notable is that sunniness doesn't really determine UV exposure; partial cloud cover can actually result in more UV-B exposure, counterintuitively: https://www.drgurgen.com/are-the-suns-uv-rays-really-stronge... And even full cloud cover doesn't completely block UV. So WA and CA aren't as different as you might think.
Meanwhile, as one might expect, most states that get freezing cold for months at a time have lower skin cancer rates than those that don't when controlling for race: if you don't go outside for more than a few minutes a day, while bundled up under multiple layers, for months at a time, well — you see less skin cancer. Some heavy farming states seem to have more skin cancer, but again that makes sense since farm workers are outside a lot.
Vermont and New Hampshire seem like odd exceptions to this rule — but I suspect there's also just some other selection bias at play. UV exposure from the sun causes skin cancer at high rates in white people; trying to make assumptions about states isn't necessarily an easy thing to do, since many other factors are at play when considering who lives where and how much they go outside.
Also because one doesn't want to get arrested.
As the famous saying goes, "nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it".
Every scientific discipline inculcates values that may be different from those held by the general public ranging from how important it is to give credit to the originators of ideas to the relative importance of difference species to whether naturalness is valuable or not. This isn't bad, its probably necessary. But it's something that has to be accounted for.