The importance of watching game film

For the second time in a row I’ll simply restate what I’ve said in an earlier post.  While some will take this as an impressive lack of originality, I prefer to think that my blog is on the verge of a membership explosion and so I must introduce new readers to my earlier work.  Hey, we all need our fantasies.  Or perhaps the recent conference I attended connects to what I’ve been saying for a while and I feel the need to blog about it.  At any rate, here it goes.

As I’ve noted before, science in decision-making is highly contextual.  To use Jamey Wetmore’s examples, science necessarily plays different roles in abortion and climate change.  The upshot of this is that simply asking about “the” rightful place of science sends us down on the wrong path.  As any sports fan will tell you, each opponent demands a new game plan.  You spend hours upon hours dissecting and document all strengths and weaknesses, accounting for injuries or suspensions, and mapping out hundreds of scenarios.  Simply put, you have to really spend some time watching game film.  It’d be lunacy to play a game otherwise.

We take the exact opposite approach with science.  It’s predetermined as the foundation of policy, and we’re always searching for the rightful place.  Even the supremely enlightened denizens of CSPO apparently believe that we should be engaged in this quest.  I fail to see how this attitude differs from a football coach using the same game plan every time because he knows the rightful place for the running game.  Why do we want the same for science?

Now all this can seem hopelessly academic and pointless.  Surely nothing much will change if scientists adopt a different vocabulary.   Carbon emissions will continue to rise, the oceans will continue to acidify, and rain forests will continue to be razed.  New words alone will not solve these knotty problems.  Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for honesty in public discourse, and something to be said against exaggerating one’s virtues and abilities.  If nothing else, minimizing the science-as-foundation rhetoric may foster a more honest debate.  That’s reason enough for me to make the switch.