What Scientists Get Wrong about Politics
By Alan Dove
In my May book review post, I criticized Neil deGrasse Tyson’s naïveté about policymaking, but didn’t go into detail about my objections because that would take a whole separate post. Here’s that post, which focuses on a problem I see a lot when scientists weigh in on politics.
One of the ideas Tyson advanced in his 2024 book was a proposal for a utopia he calls “Rationalia.” In his ideal nation, all policy would be based entirely on science and reason. Instead of appealing to the will of an easily misled majority or anyone’s personal ethics or religious beliefs, legislators would look only at data and logic. That he presented this proposal without apparent irony reminded me that even really smart scientists often have really dumb ideas about politics, law, and society. Let’s fix that.
Tyson’s Rationalia is an extreme version of a fallacy that comes up a lot in scientific circles. “Laws should always be based on facts,” say the researchers. “Facts aren’t the only thing that matters,” reply the politicians. Both are right. In recent years, this argument from different premises has gotten inflamed by the tendency of some politicians to pretend that facts don’t matter. The extreme version of that view, a dystopia we might call Irrationalia, is pretty much where the US is at this moment in history. I’m not going to defend Irrationalia; we all know it’s a disaster. Yes, facts do matter. They’re necessary. But they’re not sufficient.
Let’s take a big current policymaking issue as an example: climate change. Certain facts, as shown by decades of scientific research by thousands of investigators, are absolutely clear. The Earth’s climate is changing, that change is accelerating, humans are the major cause of that change, and it’s going to lead to major problems for humanity in the coming decades. There’s more science to do, of course. There always is. For example, researchers continue refining the estimates of how much warming we can expect under different carbon emission scenarios, and how much sea level rise we’ve already signed up for. Additional precision is great, but there’s also a much bigger question science can’t touch: what should we do about it?
If your answer starts with “It’s obvious we should…,” then you haven’t thought this through. Nothing is ever obvious about “should.” It has layers. The first layer is fact. That’s what science is for. Science tells us what is, whether we want it to be that way or not. In order to decide on the best action to take, we absolutely must start there. But we can’t stop there.
The cuteness of these kittens is a fact. Which one I should pet is a question of values and policy.
Here are a few proposals for climate change policy. We could pass a law banning all fossil fuel use worldwide, effective tomorrow. Or we could put all our money and resources into climate engineering research and projects: carbon capture, orbital reflector panels, cloud seeding, piping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, and so on. Are these ideas too extreme? Okay, let’s take a more moderate, blended approach, phasing out fossil fuels over time while boosting research on climate engineering. Maybe add mitigation to the mix, building levees to protect low-lying population centers. Or, you know what? We could just do nothing. All the data say this is a problem that will be worst a century or more from now. I won’t be around then. You probably won’t either. Let the great-grandkids figure it out.
Now, using only science and reason, tell me which of those mutually exclusive proposals is the One True Answer. You can’t. All of them are resting on an additional layer of ideas that we have to filter the facts through: values. Without agreeing on what we value, what our priorities are, we can’t agree on a course of action. And science can’t tell us what our values should be. Science tells us what is, not what should be.
There are a few ways to get from fact to value to policy, ranging from absolute monarchy to pure democracy. History says that the closer we get to the latter, the better our collective decisionmaking tends to be, but even then, the process is messy. It involves open, free conversations and debates among as many people as possible, from as many different backgrounds as possible. We still won’t be able to reach a consensus, so at some point we’ll have to take a vote and obey the will of the majority. In other words, politics.
This is, of course, the worst way to govern, except for all other forms of government. The real bummer is that regardless of how well you argue your case as a scientist, a majority of people may favor policies you think are wrong. But guess what? Scientists who think their own proposals for policies are purely rational are mistaken. No matter how well you know the facts, you cannot support any course of action until you pick your values and connect them to the outcomes you want. If you’re advocating a policy, you’re arguing an opinion, whether or not you admit that to yourself. A popular bit of bumpersticker wisdom among the rationalist set is that people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. We’d do well to heed the first part of that aphorism as much as we emphasize the second.