Volume 4, Issue 1: Discerning experts: in the jungle of society and assessments
Discerning experts: in the jungle of society and assessments
Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynin Brysee, Jessica O’Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Milena Wazeck: Discerning Experts—The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, 2019, pp. xv + 281. Paperback ISBN 978-0-226-60201-1. $38.
Over the past two years, the practices of the scientific community have become more transparent, thanks to Facebook, newspapers, and (v)blogs: scientists have reported on the state of their research, their opinions, and daily predictions, and politicians on what they think about the scientific community. In the case of the latter, we have seen many things: from outright rejection to blaming and delegating responsibility to total devotion, pro-government and opposition politicians have viewed the work and opinions of scholars in many ways. Let us add that scientists have spoken at least as many times in non-scientific matters as political analysts about the role and scope of scientists.
To better understand the work of scientists and opinion-formers, a volume was published in 2019, even before the pandemic by Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynin Brysee, Jessica O’Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Milena Wazeck. Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, published by Chicago University Press with an astonishing cover, was presented by a group of seven scientists, historians and philosophers with three case studies.
Scientists and their assessments
Around the middle of the twentieth century, the channels of communication between scientists and society were reserved for epoch-making individuals, such as Albert Einstein and brilliant unique Hungarian physicists, often called „the Martians”. However, from the 1970s onwards, individual geniuses were replaced by scientific research teams consisting of hundreds of scholars, whose tasks varied greatly, but groups of scientists generally wrote reports over the years that reviewed, summarized, and evaluated existing scientific findings, sometimes supplementing them with new research.
Most scientists are content with a multi-year, sometimes thousands-pages long, multi-volume report on the state of affairs. They rarely exceeded their scope and made concrete proposals for political and social action, for example. If an environmental problem arose [the volume discusses acid rain (Ch. 2), ozone depletion (Ch. 3), and the weakening of the West Antarctic ice sheet (Ch. 4)], scientists have not come up with the idea that the XY government should do this and that, period. Rather, by harmonizing the results of existing sciences and interpreting the results of new fields, they have shown what the effects of acid rain on lakes, forests and humans, the effects of certain chemicals in the ozone layer and the possible melting of the Arctic ice sheet are from a theoretical point of view.
Scientists were reluctant to formulate policy recommendations, as they believed that they would step out of their own expert role, undermine their neutrality and their scientific identity and credibility. Many of the large-scale research groups operating today, e.g. the Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explicitly ban policy advice. Let the cobbler stick to his last, and the scientist to their notebook.
Recommendations and scientific menus
Nevertheless, the work of a group of hundreds of people, having the best minds of a given topic in their ranks for many years, sometimes decades, does not necessarily stop at some abstract, theoretical description and data. Therefore, a distinction between “policy-relevant observations” and “policy prescriptions” has been introduced. In the latter case, the scientist would try to prescribe some specific action plan for a given complex issue that everyone should follow. In the former case, however, scientists make only remarks that may be relevant to decision-makers in a particular decision-making situation.
Let's look at an example. When a virologist says that certain facilities should be closed and the presence of certain professions in society should be restricted, she is clearly using policy regulations. Of course, you have the right to think that way as an individual, perhaps even as a scientist, but if you speak as an expert on such an issue, you are clearly crossing your own boundaries. But, as the authors of our volume point out in detail, environmental problems—and epidemics can be listed here without any problems—are complex issues in the sense that both their understanding and their solution require the coordinated work of different experts in different fields.
A virologist may say that if things go on as they are now, we can expect deaths of this and that magnitude. They might also say that if things don’t change, the spread of the disease in closed spaces can be so-and-so over a period of time. These are comments of policy relevance, because if we know what will happen, if we leave all things as they are, we can decide whether we want to keep things as they are. But there are many ways and means to change the current state of affairs and there are many factors to consider: an action has many dimensions, from ethics to economics to psychology. And this cannot be seen quite naturally by one person, such as a virologist.
Ultimately, the scientific evaluation communities, but even individual scientists, do a kind of menu-making: they outline different choices for governments, and the latter decide on the specific actions they want to follow from the available menu.
What do we expect from scientists, after all?
We are not necessarily consistent in our everyday lives. One day the neighbor says “let’s learn because they can’t take it from you” and the next day he talks about scientists not knowing anything and being harmful. Similarly, one day we condemn our scientists for looking at their navels all day and the next day for trying to put their knowledge into practice on topics that concern us. It's hard to do good. If scientists from our tax money only research issues that concern them, it’s a problem; if scientists from our tax money research the issues that concern us, but they do not tell us clearly what the trouble was, that is a problem; if they tell us how to do certain things, it’s a problem. If they’re gutless and just menu, that’s the biggest problem.
Either way, scientists are not in an easy position. We don’t have to shed tears for them, of course, but to make sense of the difficulty of communication, let’s take an arbitrary, global problem. Suppose a gigantic team of hundreds of scientists is recruited. Now, these hundreds of people have been working on the problem for many years, even a decade, eventually coming up with thousands of pages of multi-volume assessments. Obviously, not many people know, want and will read this. On their own, few would understand what it contained. What can be done to get this to the right people, who are usually politically and industrially influential leaders who may be able to put expert opinions, advice, and comments into practice?
Scientists often don’t have many options. Let’s say in the hallway of a convent you run into a secretary on the way to the bathroom, or get involved in an elevator at a bigger rally with a politician, and you have about two minutes to tell them about your discovery and suggestions. In these two minutes, a coherent and consistent story should be told about the problem, the predictions, and the possible solutions. To at least try this impossible venture, scientists put together a few-page summary (called executive summaries) at the end of each 6,000-page evaluation that summarizes the key points in a few sentences, spanning an elevator-long time interval. We are well aware that, unfortunately, most people do not have much more time these days: if any scientist wants to make their voices heard as widely as possible, they must summarize what they have to say very quickly and concisely. And giving a 6,000-page evaluation in two minutes is not an easy task, whether we are talking about a summary or concrete proposals for action that go beyond that. Of course, it’s hard for anyone to think that you can cram 6,000 pages into, say, three without arbitrary selections. Discerning Experts discussed many examples of erroneous summaries, their background and how biased selections ruined major scientific findings.
Consensus, conservative assessments, and ruthless critics
Coordinating hundreds of scientists is also an impossible undertaking. Not just because there are hundreds of people, but because hundreds of scientists probably think a lot about a lot of things. However, the goal of the group, the state-supported scientists, is to assess an issue and form a detectable, interpretable opinion about it. It doesn’t necessarily look good and help to close an evaluation by saying 25 scientists think this, 33 says that, 47 think that way, while 67 prefer to stay silent, but are grateful for the scholarship. Such a conclusion can easily be swept off the table as an “irrelevant”.
This is why scientists often use a kind of conservative estimate, that is, they try to find the smallest common multiple that everyone in the group can still accept. For example, regarding the melting of the ice sheet, all members of the scientific community agreed that it could be a serious problem in the coming centuries. Opinions have been divided as to whether problematic scenarios may need to be considered much earlier. In fact, these conservative estimates are rarely informative, as they concern very long-term scenarios and involve the least possible drama.
What is the reason for conservative estimates? While in the internal functioning of science, criticism, debate, disagreement, and the tense confrontation of opinions can be especially fruitful for both science and individual progress, in the environment of scientific advice and political regulation, disagreement tends to hinder things. Many people believe that if there is no consensus within the scientific community, the often-dramatic advice and concerns should not be taken seriously. We get to wait, they say, while scientists decide what they want. What’s more, drama, attention-grabbing, panic are more emotional reactions that aren’t tied to academic life and practice, so they don’t help us in taking scientists seriously outside the classroom at all. The “least drama principle” can thus provide a sense of security for scientists, but it can very easily divert attention from issues that have a real existential stake.
Reaching a consensus is also a difficult task because these groups of experts want to preserve their credibility, objectivity and, say, their scientific integrity. One way to do this, for example, is to build the most colorful community possible. We are all biased in some ways, and many believe that bias can best be controlled by balancing our biases. If we are researching climate change, we are inviting scientists from poorer and richer countries, experts from agricultural and more industrialized regions alike, as the bias of one can be dampened by the values of the other (Chs. 5-6). This is somewhat analogous to the fact that between three and seven, five is the middle ground, so the compromise between two biased people would be the germ of objectivity. Either way, groups with more and more colorful perspectives and biases will obviously find it even harder to get to the vineyard. If that happens, the group’s results are likely to really deserve our precious and selective attention. As they did with acid rain, the melting of the ozone hole, and the ice sheet.
Take-home messages
According to the authors of the volume, it is still not emphasized enough that there is no value-free research that merely selects and describes pure theoretical data. When scientists provide just menus for politicians, they implicitly formulate certain answers and suggestions. If humanity is threatened with extinction while maintaining current practices, it is difficult not to hear the voice of policy proposals.
However, if the scientist steps out of their comfort zone, they can easily fall victim to immoral attacks and easily compromise himself. Naomi Oreskes, who exposed the immoral lobby of tobacco factories and revealed the pseudo-scientific practices of multi companies and hypocritical institutions about climate change, has long received sometimes deadly threats. That is why many people think that they should not comment on more sensitive issues, defending their own scientific status. However, history has shown that even discussing a particular topic itself can have similar negative consequences (many restrained, neutral climate researchers are discussed in the volume), regardless of whether one gives policy advice or makes only relevant, usable assessments.
Similarly, the cost of conservative, consensus-based estimates is often either an understatement or an underestimation of a real but lesser-known threat. In contrast, the highlighting of a serious existential problem, even in the absence of consensus, may point to areas where time for action is limited (such as the depletion of the ozone layer in the volume, where some scientists rang the bell too early with many uncertainties and thus contributed to the establishment of comprehensive and in-depth commissions in time). However, in the absence of consensus, it is difficult to determine why we should believe in one side rather than the other.
Discerning Experts deals with all these topics in a detailed way; the reader would often feel that there are too many details, and chapters 2-3-4, the three case studies, are dry as deserts. Nonetheless, the closing chapters, discussing the nature and scope of assessments, role of experts and their relations to each other, to threats and to society worth all your pennies. And as always, Chicago made a beautiful cover, with a helpful bibliography and index. Philosophy of science was hardly as practical and useful as this volume.
Adam Tamas Tuboly
Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, ELRN
Supported by the MTA Lendulet Values and Science Research Group.
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