Chapter XVII: Descriptive Theory And Normative Theory | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “... excellent predictions would be yielded by the hypothesis that the billiard player made his shots

        as if he knew the complicated mathematical formulas that would give him the optimum direction

        of travel, could estimate by eye the angles etc., describing the location of the balls, could make

        lightning calculations from the formulas, and could then make the balls travel in the direction

        indicated by the formulas.  Our confidence in this hypothesis is not based on the belief that billiard

        players, even expert ones, can or do go through the process described; it derives rather from the

        belief that, unless in some way or other they were capable of reaching essentially the same result,

        they would not in fact be expert billiard players.”

        – Milton Friedman^I

        Normative versus descriptive theory is a very important foundational facet of philosophy of science that escapes people (even if they may intuitively sense part of it around the edges).  A descriptive theory is when you use all of the tools from the scientific method to do straight truth-seeking, to reveal ontology, and gain knowledge about the world.  One wants to know the world (and its causes and effects) as it is, and this process requires having no ulterior motives.  Normative (or prescriptive) theory is when one does have some goal or other motive, yet otherwise uses the tools of science (and exploiting the objective truth) to achieve a certain goal.^II  With normative theory, one's goal is not chiefly truth-seeking, but in order to achieve the goal one must use truth-seeking methods in their favor (because one must conform to the real world to be effective).  This has implications for theoretical science versus experimental science, as well as theoretical and experimental science together as compared to engineering.  Engineers will use the knowledge from theoretical science (and indeed they'll contribute to it based on what they find when they're tinkering—a more informal, goal-based sort of trial-and-error experimental method familiar to anyone who has tried to build something).  While engineers are trying to achieve some goal, they are also noticing things about nature, and so there's a lot of feedback between these two facets of philosophy of science, yielding a delicate dance between the two modes of inquiry.  Engineers have some normative goal, say, to make an airplane for such-and-such a cost, and to do so, one needs to know the relevant Newtonian physics because to achieve the goal (which appears to defy the laws of physics) one must exploit those laws.  Normative theories necessarily exploit facets of reality to achieve goals (this is the difference between fantasy and the real thing, when it comes to otherwise fantastic goals).  It is really important not to confuse descriptive and normative theory, which is a common misconception of those with a naive understanding of “science”.  As an example of a somewhat nefarious abuse of normative science, take many of the covid-19 pandemic proclamations of the Public Health bureaucracies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), The Center For Disease Control (CDC), and chief executive medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.  They constantly pointed out that their audience should “trust the science”, but they are unclear on what “science” they mean (and there is evidence that they attempted to utilize normative hypotheses while having you believe that they are descriptive epidemiology).^III  For example, early on in the pandemic, it was claimed that the general populace should not be buying and wearing masks, and then that healthcare workers nevertheless should, and then that those with symptoms should, and finally that everyone should.^IV  The arguments ranged from a debate over weather the virus aerosolizes into such a fine mist as to make it through most masks, to the claim that laypeople, untrained in personal protective equipment (PPE), would not use masks correctly, leading them to infect themselves at higher than chance rates by mask misuse (perhaps wearing a mask all day before touching the business side and then touching one's mouth).^V  The first is indeed a descriptive argument, although it is unconvincing: even if that were true, covid-19 would also pass through water droplets that masks would dampen; and anyway, it is common sense that a mask would tend to be protective against a respiratory virus for little cost.^VI  This was in contradiction to the fact that healthcare professionals such as doctors were wearing masks (and at the advice of the same organizations, meaning that the public and health-care sectors were being given contradictory descriptions of the same phenomenon).^VII  The second, that laypeople cannot properly use masks, is a normative argument: it admits that masks work (and that PPE-trained healthcare professionals may use them to effect), but argues that most people will not properly use them; in this view, it is both a (descriptive) medical fact that masks block viral material from reaching one's nose and mouth, and a (normative) fact that average people are likely to misuse PPE so as to increase their chance of contraction.^VIII  Yet the latter fact, insofar as it is true, is obviously different than claiming that masks don't work,^IX and is amenable to education; why didn't our Public Health apparatus instead opt to educate the public on how to properly use masks (something they, tellingly, didn't emphasize once they changed their minds to a mass-masking strategy).  In time, as many had predicted, it turned out that Fauci and co. had told a “noble lie” about mask efficacy because our Public Health institutions wanted the limited mask supply (which was limited due to our leadership's own negligence)^X to go to healthcare workers (who were at both at high risk and highly valuable during a pandemic, due to their profession), and so he meant to dissuade laypeople from buying the intervention for themselves^XI (a normative goal sought by making false or otherwise misleading descriptive claims).  If he was right that this strategy helped procure masks for healthcare providers and led to better normative outcomes overall (with the goal being fewer covid-19 deaths), that doesn't make the descriptive claims themselves anymore “scientific” as a result.  In another example, Fauci admitted that it was not only the evolving scientific research that had him changing his herd-immunity threshold prediction—he was also factoring in what he thought people could handle (meaning he was artificially changing the number he was communicating to the public, working them up to where he actually believed it to be).^XII  Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler uses the more politically-neutral example of classical economics as a normative theory (this is objectively how one should behave so as to maximize utility-profit), and behavioral economics as a descriptive theory of how the average human being actually behaves in economic contexts^XIII (evolutionary psychologists realize that this is both because organisms such as homo sapiens evolved to maximize genetic fitness, not economic-profits directly, and because even economists know that it is in part because even if everyone was a homo economicus who wanted to maximize economic-profit, they are not all in possession of the classical-economic knowledge required, which is incomplete and has taken many years for above-average-intelligence researchers to discover).  Engineering is a special case of normative theory because it is not exactly how one should behave to reach a certain goal, but how a machine should be assembled to meet a certain engineering goal (that is, how to build an apparatus that exploits descriptive laws of physics so as to meet a normative goal that may at first seem to defy them, such as human flight via airplanes and even rocket ships to outer space).

        Science education, too, suffers from the blurring of descriptive and normative theory.  On the one hand, there is the project played out by those often described as, “science popularizers,” or, “science educators,” whose goal is the democratization of science—to teach otherwise laypeople the scientific method.  Some of the great public educators in this tradition are physicist Isaac Asimov, astronomer Carl Sagan, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, entomologist Edward O. Wilson, and astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  These thinkers not only honestly teach their field's body of knowledge as they understand it, but each of them also uses their discipline as a lens through which to teach their audience to utilize epistemology for themselves.  On the other hand, there are those that go by the name of “SciComm” (meaning, “science communication”).^XIV  As the name may suggest, these folks see themselves as merely communicating the body of knowledge to an otherwise ignorant public: this presupposes that such communicators are in possession of the absolute truth and do not need to explain why one ought to believe it (in fact, many of them are journalists not educated in the scientific method, only taking the results of some field of researchers on faith that these experts got it right).  At best, this is the giving of men fish rather than teaching them to fish.  But at worst, it is the political manipulation or otherwise ideological indoctrination of the public.  One can see this when it comes to the topic of climate change.  It is the case that a fair read of the evidence suggests that anthropogenic use of carbon based fuels is warming the Earth, rising the seas, and set to increasingly cause problems over the next century (though the detailed timeline, magnitude, and location of damage is highly provisional and uncertain).^XV  The policies we choose to use to address climate change (or not),^XVI while they should be based in the best descriptive theory of climate change, are themselves normative arguments, and not naively implied by the geophysical facts themselves.  The kind of normative theory in which someone is trying to use evidence-based methods to manipulate your beliefs and behavior is called social engineering, and it tends to be immoral and misleading.  A grayer area are concepts like nudging, in which differences between classical and behavioral economics are exploited so as to get preferred outcomes from groups, technically without coercion.^XVII  For example, if it is empirically found that people are more likely to go with a default on average than to opt-in or opt-out of a program, policymakers who want to increase organ donorship may decide to make being an organ donor the default mode, requiring people to opt-out instead.^XVIII  The rub is that bureaucracies are then taking advantage of peoples' innate cognitive errors and biases^XIX rather than (for me, the purpose of liberal public institutions) educating the public on the relevant descriptive theory so that they (and by extension, their elected representatives) can make their own informed normative decisions about how to act in the world.  One can, as an expert, make normative suggestions, but domain-experts should have to convince people to do what they want with honest evidence, not force them to do it by any means necessary, including lies.

        To make matters worse yet, there are a contingency of social psychologists (and it is worth remembering that their own failure to implement the scientific method has landed them in a replication crisis, though one must also recognize that the detection of such a crisis and subsequent efforts to set it right are to the credit of a subset of those social psychologists implementing science's self-error-correcting mechanism) who have been hard at work making flashy headlines “disproving” the idea that anyone is a “scientist” in the sense of achieving the scientific ethic in themselves.^XX  The way they do this is generally to perform experiments on subjects which demonstrate that people do not generally, naturally follow the scientific method, but instead navigate the world by eschewing reason in favor of heuristics, often driven by biases such as emotions.  In some cases, they even purport empirical evidence suggesting that experts are generally no better, and perhaps worse (at least when it comes to hot button issues)!^XXI  But little of this should be surprising in the slightest, and is certainly not worth the sexy headlines about the non-existence of scientists: of course most people (even so-called experts, which does not mean what it used to due to effects such as grade inflation, anyway) do not embody the scientific ethic (that is, the descriptive science of human epistemological behavior is not to naturally follow the scientific method).^XXII  If we were all born natural epistemologists of the utmost quality, all of the details of epistemology and the ontology it reveals would be trivially understood by all of us, in life, hundreds-of-thousands of years ago.  There would be nothing for philosophers to talk about.  In reality, one need only glance at history to realize that philosophy of science is the hard-won (normatively correct) way of thinking over millennia (with a particular growth spurt during the enlightenment)—it was discovered at great difficulty, is learned at great difficulty, and is enacted at great difficulty.  But it is also clear from history that a number of great scientists did live as exemplars of the scientific ethic: the likes of at least Galileo Galile, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin (among many more) could not have made their great discoveries without following the scientific method in and of themselves.  Granted, scientists are only scientists when and while they're following the scientific method.^XXIII  While I prefer to try and live the ethic out to its fullest extent (no one is perfect enough to achieve a Platonic ideal), many whose credentials and job titles confer the title “scientist” will go home from “work” and believe in many different things on insufficient evidence—from religious dogma to personal opinions.  Regrettably, many will do this even when it comes to consequential matters such as their political positions (which in the worst case feeds back into their “scientific beliefs” being chosen based not on evidence, but on buttressing a political agenda).  The kernel of truth to the opponents of the lone-wolf scientist is that even in the best case, no man is perfect, nor can he study everything, much less contribute a clever discovery to every field.  Often, a single person cannot even adequately weigh all of the alternative hypotheses for explaining a phenomenon, on his own.  Here, once and only once the individual has done their due diligence to embody the scientific ethic as in individual, it is quite thankful that there is an entire society of scientists!^XXIV The reason is that, as a second order effect, Haidt is right that the society of scientists act as checks-and-balances on each other. From the cooperative standpoint, scientists work together through time (learning from the work of the dead) and space (working with their living colleagues in the present, friend and foe) to combine brain power and creativity (as well as to capitalize on increasing total man-hours and diversifying interests to solve the opportunity cost problem that one can only study one thing at a time and will die having studied a small fraction of the topics on offer) in their approach to problem-solving. From the competitive standpoint, scientists' failures such as bias and error ought to cancel out (if a field has a net zero bias on a given axis!) because each of the people fighting over the right answer might have the opposite bias as someone else in the argument, leaving only the evidence-based arguments imbalanced—leaning towards the provisional truth.^XXV  Furthermore, in keeping with the realization that scientists, too, are just people—homo sapiens evolved to maximize fitness—scientists are motivated to thrive doing some of their best work under competitive circumstances.  Oftentimes the egotistical motivation to either win status and fame for making a great discovery, or otherwise to win a battle with another researcher over who is right about a question each disagrees on can lead to discoveries as long as the ego is merely fueling the pursuit to use the scientific ethic.  For scientific progress to be made, individuals must strive to embody the scientific ethic, and to have any chance at succeeding, they must believe that it is attainable.  This idea that the scientists responsible for our progress to this point can be modeled as cognitive-lawyers defending emotionally-motivated ideas, making discoveries through sheer community-bias-cancellation, with no science going on at the individual level, is A. unrealistic, and B. reeks of the mediocre scientists of an age attempting to ameliorate their failures.^XXVI

        Descriptive theory is ultimately what gives us the tools to be able to pursue normative (or prescriptive) theory, yet descriptive theory may also be thought of as a normative theory whose goal is pure truth-seeking.  Descriptive theory tells one how the world behaves.  Given this nature, normative theory tells one how to behave so as to achieve a particular goal in that world.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See Misbehaving: The Making Of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.) (2015) (pp. 45-46, 360) (though I have yet to finish reading this book) which further cites Essays In Positive Economics by Milton Friedman (University Of Chicago Press) (1953) (pp. 21) (though I have not read this work).

II. See the “Marxism” chapter in The Sophistructure by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/03/chapter-2-marxism-sophistructure-0th.html) which further cites Misbehaving by Thaler (pp. 25-30) and The Ben Shapiro Show by Ben Shapiro (for Shapiro's use of the alternative “prescriptive”).

III. See my December 26th, 2020 Twitter interaction with columnist Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1342922464611995656?s=20&t=89bHmo2IgXUDuRzew4YcKQ, whom further cites "Covid-19: How Much Herd Immunity is Enough?" by Donald G. McNeil Jr. (The New York Times) (2020 / 2021) (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covid-coronavirus.html) (though I have probably not read this pay-walled article); "The Noble Lies Of COVID-19: Do We Want Public Health Officials To Report Facts And Uncertainties Transparently? Or Do We Want Them To Shape Information To Influence The Public To Take Specific Actions?" by Kerrington Powell and Vinay Prasad (Slate) (2021) (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html).

IV. See “Fauci Admits Post-Vaccination Masking Was About ‘Signals’ Weeks After Insisting Otherwise” by Isaac Schorr (National Review) (2021) (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-admits-post-vaccination-masking-was-about-signals-weeks-after-insisting-otherwise/) which further cites a journalist Tom Elliott's (@tomselliott) May 18^th, 2021 tweet, which includes of a clip of a ABC interview with Fauci: https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1394614545151414276?; "Top Disease Official: Risk Of Coronavirus In USA Is 'Minuscule'; Skip Mask And Wash Hands" by Jayne O'Donnell (USA Today) (2020) (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/); and "Fauci Said US Government Held Off Promoting Face Masks Because It Knew Shortages Were So Bad That Even Doctors Couldn't Get Enough" by Mia Jankowicz (Business Insider) (2020) (https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-because-doctors-shortages-from-the-start-2020-6) (though I do not believe I have read these latter two articles). See also "The Noble Lies Of COVID-19" by Powell and Prasad (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html) which further cites "March 2020: Dr. Anthony Fauci Talks With Dr Jon LaPook About Covid-19" by Jon LaPook and Anthony Fauci (CBS / 60 Minutes) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PRa6t_e7dgI); "Fact Check: Missing Context In Claim About Emails, Fauci's Position On Masks" by Rick Rouan (USA Today) (2021) (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/03/fact-check-missing-context-claim-mask-emails-fauci/7531267002/); and "Why Weren't We Wearing Masks From The Beginning? Dr. Fauci Explains" by Katherine Ross (TheStreet) (2020) (https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus) (though I don't believe I have read these latter two articles).

V. See "Bret And Heather 1st In A Series Of Live Stream: Tests, Masks, And More - DarkHorse Podcast" by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym-WGOq96G0&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=270&t=) (21:20 – 30:36); "Bret And Heather 4th Live Stream: Collapse In Guayaquil - DarkHorse Podcast" by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (Darkhorse) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=266&t=) (24:17 - 25:20, 1:18:46 – 1:21:44); and E. Weinstein's March 31^st, 2020 Twitter video: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1244858491354746882?s=20&t=A_841okMS0kR56rFw8d1Hg.

VI. See "Bret And Heather 1st In A Series Of Live Stream: Tests, Masks, And More - DarkHorse Podcast" by H. Heying and B. Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym-WGOq96G0&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=270&t=) (21:09 – 23:16).

VII. See "Bret And Heather 1st In A Series Of Live Stream: Tests, Masks, And More - DarkHorse Podcast" by H. Heying and B. Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym-WGOq96G0&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=270&t=) (21:39 – 22:52); "Bret And Heather 4th Live Stream: Collapse In Guayaquil - DarkHorse Podcast" by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=266&t=) (24:17 – 25:20); “Fauci Admits Post-Vaccination Masking Was About ‘Signals’ Weeks After Insisting Otherwise” by Schorr (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-admits-post-vaccination-masking-was-about-signals-weeks-after-insisting-otherwise/); and "The Noble Lies Of COVID-19" by Powell and Prasad (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html); and E. Weinstein's March 31^st, 2020 Twitter video: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1244858491354746882?s=20&t=A_841okMS0kR56rFw8d1Hg.

VIII. See "March 2020: Dr. Anthony Fauci Talks With Dr Jon LaPook About Covid-19" by LaPook and Fauci (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PRa6t_e7dgI) (0:44 – 1:06) and E. Weinstein's March 31^st, 2020 Twitter video: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1244858491354746882?s=20&t=A_841okMS0kR56rFw8d1Hg.

IX. See "The Noble Lies Of COVID-19" by Powell and Prasad (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html).

X. See "China ‘Began Stockpiling PPE Months Before Covid Outbreak’: China Also Started To Buy Up Global PPE Stocks In Europe, Australia And The US Around The Same Time, Experts Say" by Ashley Rindsberg (The Telegraph) (2022) (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/08/china-began-stockpiling-ppe-months-covid-outbreak/) and E. Weinstein's March 31^st, 2020 Twitter video: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1244858491354746882?s=20&t=A_841okMS0kR56rFw8d1Hg..

XI. See “Fauci Admits Post-Vaccination Masking Was About ‘Signals’ Weeks After Insisting Otherwise” by Schorr (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-admits-post-vaccination-masking-was-about-signals-weeks-after-insisting-otherwise/); "The Noble Lies Of COVID-19" by Powell and Prasad (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html); "Bret And Heather 1st In A Series Of Live Stream: Tests, Masks, And More - DarkHorse Podcast" by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym-WGOq96G0&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=270&t=) (21:20 – 30:36); "Bret And Heather 4th Live Stream: Collapse In Guayaquil - DarkHorse Podcast" by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-W9O7qhstY&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEt7hPOrxyU6KNlrePgVe5-3&index=266&t=) (24:17 – 25:20); and E. Weinstein's March 31^st, 2020 Twitter video: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1244858491354746882?s=20&t=A_841okMS0kR56rFw8d1Hg.

XII. See "The Noble Lies Of COVID-19" by Powell and Prasad (https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html).

XIII. See Misbehaving by Thaler (pp. 25-30).

XIV. I have previously expressed many of my views on this topic, see my February 12^th, 2020 Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1227772371395923968?s=20&t=GeKIzvmv6Q13Ye453TlnyA; my August 3^rd, 2020 Twitter thread (which doubles as a retweet of mathematician James Lindsay, @ConceptualJames): https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1290386734073688064?s=20&t=GeKIzvmv6Q13Ye453TlnyA; my February 8^th, 2021 twitter interaction with physics PhD-student @EricsElectrons: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1358896718763286530?s=20&t=GeKIzvmv6Q13Ye453TlnyA; my October 24^th, 2021 Twitter thread in which I criticize biologist Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford, whose Twitter bio begins with the elitist, credentialist, and authoritarian sentiment, “Back off man, I'm a scientist.”) for explicitly arguing for including political ulterior motives in “science”: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1452289709351350275?s=20&t=GeKIzvmv6Q13Ye453TlnyA; and my November 28^th-29^th, 2021 Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1465096815867539460?s=20&t=GeKIzvmv6Q13Ye453TlnyA, in which I criticize “Coronapod: Uncertainty And The COVID 'Lab-Leak' Theory” by Noah Baker and Amy Maxmen (Nature Podcast) (2021) (https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzLzAxODVjZWE1LTllM2ItNGI4Mi1hODg3LTI2ZjkxZjkyNzY1Zg/episode/MjFmYmVlYzAtZmZjOS00OWU1LTk3M2YtZmY2ZGMzMzNlMzA2?ep=14). See also the “The Sociology Of Scientists” chapter.

XV. See The Physics Of Climate Change by Lawrence M. Krauss (Post Hill Press) (2021) as well as the summary of my views after reading the book, "Climate Change 101" by Steven Gussman (Instagram) (2021) (https://www.instagram.com/p/CPr87x4gwGg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link).

XVI. For examples of differing views on both the descriptive theory of climate change, as well as our normative response to it, see The Physics Of Climate Change by Krauss as well as "Climate Change 101" by Gussman (https://www.instagram.com/p/CPr87x4gwGg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link); Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 136-154, 287, 335-357, 382-383, 449, 465); "The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost" by Paul. C. W. Davies (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2006 / 2007) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11595), "Think Outside The Kyoto Box" by Gregory Benford (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2006 / 2007) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11774), "Our Planet Is Not In Peril" by Oliver Morton (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2006 / 2007) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11849), all from What Is Your Dangerous Idea? edited by Brockman (pp. 43-53); “Is Biden’s Climate Change Plan A Step In The Right Direction?” by Sukhayl Niyazov (Areo) (2020) (https://areomagazine.com/2020/08/03/is-bidens-climate-change-plan-a-step-in-the-right-direction/); “Danger's Deliverance” by Michael Schellenberger (Quillette) (2018) (https://quillette.com/2018/08/23/the-saving-power-in-danger/); “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Greta's CRAZY Climate Change Arguments” by Ben Shapiro (DailyWire) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RVooYlyl20); and “Climate Change Is Not the End of the World, but It Will Bankrupt Us | With Bjørn Lomborg” by Jordan Peterson and Bjørn Lomborg (DailyWire) (2022) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNgZWSSsBE4). This is a live debate, with too many positions and arguments to present, here: I encourage you to go explore, applying the epistemology you have learned from this book.

XVII. This concept is from Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness / Nudge: The Final Edition by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (Yale University Press / Penguin Books) (2008 / 2009 / 2021) (though I have not yet read this book). For an example of a criticism of the concept of “nudging”, see “Ben Shapiro - "Nudge" & Libertarian Paternalism” uploaded by YouTube user Questions Answered in 2019 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNRe_rcpG3o) which appears to be taken from a Daily Wire Live stream of Shapiro doing public speaking at Politicon.

XVIII. See “Ben Shapiro - "Nudge" & Libertarian Paternalism” uploaded by B. Shapiro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNRe_rcpG3o).

XIX. Shapiro has characterized “nudging” in much this way on The Ben Shapiro Show, but I don't know in which particular episode(s).

XX. For more on this topic, see the “Dispassionate” and “Laws And Facts, Theories And Data” chapters. See also “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth” by Kahan (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/) which further cites “Climate-Science Communication And The Measurement Problem” by Dan M. Kahan (Advances In Political Psychology) (2015) (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12244), “Ordinary Science Intelligence’: A Science-Comprehension Measure For Study Of Risk And Science Communication, With Notes On Evolution And Climate Change” by Dan M. Kahan (Journal Of Risk Research) (2017) (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13669877.2016.1148067), “The Polarizing Impact Of Science Literacy And Numeracy On Perceived Climate Change Risks” by Dan M. Kahan et al. (Nature Climate Change) (2012) (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1547.epdf?sharing_token=NsJrFASmVbmpmJCcNMcFQ9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NYee_jCoPLeM51t0U5YAdW5yMyKblD54KJXMtIXjZ-SeEQFA6Qu_fQwfTAPwYD6j_AfdhHc9TqT2twy6k56HxAyQPR-B9m9AuOi8EApzG0ngHfjCCZonCGqxMOBeSTFfbb95rZf_mGsBw7vZ4OEgXkc1XofDTMHMgX47zqCGwx94qfcUMgKM7fH5A5W-cxv3rNebZfg6MPnJ7s8GcTtudc7T9wc-vlCbcBVXee-npyjvtfp1b3f8FQMhLq3B59fm2-MtUq37xTnw1zl5yt3xj58VD7SYJ6C1ev-tt8EEVLSQ%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=blogs.scientificamerican.com), and “A Note On The Perverse Effects Of Actively Open-Minded Thinking On Climate-Change Polarization” by Dan M. Kahan et al. (Research & Politics / RAP) (2016) (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168016676705) (though I have only read the abstracts for these papers). I want to be clear that, especially since the “scientific curiosity” result (which I predicted), I generally like both Kahan and Haidt. It is not clear to me the degree to which Kahan ever interpreted his own work in the way I am criticizing it, but it had been common and plain to see a more Haidtian interpretation in which no one actually conquers their biases through reason.

XXI. See “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth” by Kahan (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/). My sense is that, rather than concluding that scientific expertise is no defense against bias, we should read this as an indictment on those we award scientific credentials (and the institutions whose standards produce such thinkers).

XXII. See my February 12^th, 2020 tweet (and surrounding Twitter thread): https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1227772378840735744?s=20&t=A7xiCVtXw4BHhD-YAeI_Rw.

XXIII. I have memory of mechanical engineer and science-educator Bill Nye making this point (that one is not a scientist while they are engaged in something un-or-anti-scientific, even if they may be a scientist while working on some other problem using the scientific method); I thought he did so when discussing climate change at Christian creationist Ken Ham's creationism museum, but I cannot seem to find it, see “Bill Nye Tours The Ark Encounter With Ken Ham” uploaded by the Answers in Genesis YouTube channel (Answers In Genesis) (2017) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPLRhVdNp5M). Years later, I heard Shapiro make the same argument, see my June 10^th, 2021 tweet: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1403051383490760707?s=20&t=DCNthFeN0lS6CUz-8KqrkQ, which further cites “Your Experts Are Self-Serving Idiots | Ep. 1273” by Ben Shapiro (Daily Wire) (2021) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFRTTNbXxGM) (15:27 – 17:43, 18:56 – 23:45, 24:52 – 28:07).

XXIV. I don't love my use of the term, “scientific society,” here, but I use it because I like even less the popular term, “the scientific community.” Usually when “community” is used thus, such a “community” doesn't exist in the way implied. It also often carries elitist baggage, referring not to the sub-group of people dedicated to following the scientific method, but to those who have educational degrees or jobs in a scientific field. Furthermore, it is often used to commit a fallacy: arguments from authority in which someone using the scientific method to offer an alternative hypothesis gets shouted down, not on the basis of a consensus of evidence, but on some alleged “scientific consensus” among the “scientific community” (the popular ideas and biases of the day, in their field). In this way, the “SciComm” types bully free-thinking “laypeople” into mainstream stances on a given topic, rather than educate them on their view of the evidence and its consequences.

XXV. See The Coddling Of The American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt (pp. 109).

XXVI. See for example, my December 18^th, 2021 tweet (and surrounding Twitter thread): https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1472267676349304832?s=20&t=WkIeaecqJHwwBdLbZ-Piyg; my March 2^nd, 2022 tweet (and surrounding Twitter thread): https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1499047120581582856?s=20&t=CeNgVy3DLmQMyFwSQzM8uA; and my October 2^nd, 2022 tweet (in response to a tweet by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, @skdh): https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1576651261834715137?s=20&t=saBi_BN2A8NxClnpOOSCSQ.