Flutterby™! : On Science and Knowledge

Scott Pruitt denies basic climate science. But most of the outrage is missing the point.

Such knowledge-producing institutions — not only science, but also academia and journalism — are not immune to criticism, of course. And they are never entirely free of biases or error. Their procedures and results are always open to democratic dispute.

But absent some compelling reason to believe that those institutions have been corrupted or systematically distorted, we accept their results. Otherwise, epistemological chaos ensues, persuasion becomes impossible, and politics devolves into a raw contest of power.

This addresses something I've been pondering lately: How do we know what we know? This two-pronged problem, one, that "science" has been pretty lax about what gets published as such (see the reproducibility problem, and sciencing by press release in order to get research dollars), and two, that there's a lot of medicine and similar that gets handwaved, or even deliberately placebo'd, and the skepticism that this engenders spills over into other disciplines.

Which means that we get the anti-vaccination push, we get a whole lot of "alternative medicine", and we lose the basis for any discussion. Even something as simple as CO₂ and global warming, which really doesn't take much more than high school physics to talk about in an informed way.