**Here are some of my notes from the “Speaking to Inform” from the advance competent speaker series. This is not my speech, but rather an altered version to make it more suitable for reading. **

Has anyone ever said to you

“Well that’s your opinion”

What if the context isn’t really say a value judgement, but something which ought to be rooted in scientific fact.

On one hand we have a group which perhaps has entirely eroded trust in science - namely anything about diet and fitness; ideas like superfoods, eating chocolate, and notion that sitting is killing you.

Then the other group which has more rigour but nevertheless strongly affected - often when science is applied to more important issues; issues such as climate change.

And then there’s a third category - which is when considering important social issues; perhaps science isn’t the solution and approach the problem from a humanities perspective might be the correct one.

Asimov’s Axiom

Firstly let’s consider the erosion of trust in science. How many times have we seen from dietary advice where science starts off something like this:

  • Step 1: We are totally sure that X is perfect for your health.
  • Step 2: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Believe us this time!

It doesn’t help when you demand “show us the data!” That the only decipherable information is with terms like odds ratio, p-value and so on which most doctors can’t even tell you what they mean! Then how is a common citizen suppose to know when science is ‘done’ or halfway to done; or in other words - wrong?

But you see - there are levels of ‘wrong-ness’ if you like. Concepts and ideas of p-value and odds ratio really exist not to place irrefutable truth, but merely to help illustrate the amount of grey there is in our knowledge. I say this with the caveat that science should be reproducible; though in practise it unfortunately rarely is (particularly in biomedical sciences) - but that would be a discussion for another day.

In early days of humanity, we believed that the world was flat. Not because we were stupid, but because of strong solid evidence. Let’s think about this idea - consider me holding up this book. The book is flat but when I hold it up, you can see that there is an aspect of some form of curvature. You can call an object ‘flat’ if the curvature is essentially non-existent. So maybe if we think about the earth we can call the earth ‘flat’ if the earth’s curvature is close to 0. In fact if we do measure the curvature of the earth we find that it has a curvature of 0.000126 per mile; pretty close to 0.

But our views changed and we saw that the world is spherical - but that too is wrong, because the earth is a bit flatter on the poles, because of how it spins, but that’s wrong as well! The earth has mountains and valleys and isn’t entirely smooth. In fact one might argue that the earth is most like the shape of a pear.

What now?

It is easy to challenge scientific fact - however on the pretense of value; that is perhaps how many of these questions must be framed.

In today’s world; for better or worse spouting “facts” may unfortunately get the response:

“Who are you to say that?”

To understand the difference between a fact and a value, consider the following two arguments on for government policy to think about:

  1. Climate change will undermine the wellbeing of future people
  2. It is wrong to undermine the wellbeing of future generations.

And maybe therefore we ought to take action and prepare for the worse case scenario.

Why does the value statement work?

Because even in the worse case scenario, if climate change is not real - we have just invested in renewable energy sources reduced pollution in countries where it is an issue (China) at relatively low cost.

Mind you - the truth can be said of issues like immunization and host of other questions - where you should consider.

On immunization the worse case scenario is that your child will have autism (which by the way, was found that the paper was retracted and also had several undeclared conflict of interests) - but beyond your child (and even if you believe in the natural way of building immunity), you would be putting society at risk; babies under 6 months who are too young to have these shots and be able to fight it, and anyone who is immunosuppressed will be at risk because of your downright selfishness.

Through these social issues, instead of relying on scientific fact (which can always be wrong), we must also consider the moral value to our society.

Notes:

  1. Who are you to say that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uYpwehCoYc

  2. If you’ve ever wondered what a group of mathematicians, statisticians and actuaries talk about during lunch times - spurious correlations# and stupid choices of the government has often been a go to topic.

    To understand what spurious correlations feels like; consider if I was naive policymaker wanting to decrease the number of drownings which occur at Bondi beach. I might look at the data and see when there is an increase in ice cream sales; there is also an increase in drownings. Perhaps the naive solution then, is to of course ban icecreams from Bondi between the hours of 9am and 5pm! Of course ignoring the fact that people tend to go to Bondi when the weather is hot.

  3. Scott Adams: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109880240641/sciences-biggest-fail