Science and Society
The pushback against science is some of the most misguided disagreement in modern society — and the most damaging.
Very few topics are as erroneously divisive as science. Society is well acquainted with controversy and disagreement — but the pushback against the scientific movement is some of the most misguided. Unlike most genuinely controversial social issues, the case for science does not require adjudicating between competing values. It requires only paying attention to what has and hasn’t worked.
Issues within vs. issues of science
Science has real problems. Corruption occurs within research institutions. Incentives are frequently misaligned. The extrapolation of preliminary findings into mainstream headlines is a persistent pathology. Replication failures have undermined whole subfields. These are serious. They deserve attention and reform.
But these are issues within science — not issues of science. They are problems with the current shape of scientific practice, not with the enterprise of systematic empirical investigation. The shape can be changed. Science is not the particular funding structures or publication incentives of any given moment. It is the underlying method: form hypotheses, test them against reality, revise accordingly, repeat. That method has no serious competitors.
Why it matters
Put two possible futures side by side: one where science has broad social approval and one where it doesn’t. In the first, technology improves faster, disease is better treated, children born into bodies and minds that don’t function effectively have better prospects, and the planet’s trajectory is healthier. In the second, none of this. Improvements in human welfare are downstream of improvements in knowledge, and improvements in knowledge are downstream of functional scientific practice.
This is not just a technocratic argument. It is a claim about the relationship between truth-tracking and welfare. As Ayn Rand put it: you can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
How to get there
There are two positions one can take on how science improves its social standing.
The first: approval will follow once science addresses its internal problems. Love it once it’s better.
The second: recognize science as something worth caring for, then work to fix it. “I love you, let me help you get better” is substantially superior to “I will love you once you’re better.” The first position is how change happens. The second is how things stay the same.
Resources are finite — knowledge, money, attention, people willing to act. This is a real constraint. The argument for prioritizing science’s reputation is not that it is broken and deserves pity. It is that it represents the best mechanism we have for making things better, and the longer it must spend defending its existence, the less it can spend on the work.
The bottom line
Anti-science movements — or even science-mischaracterization, which is more common and in some ways more corrosive — harm welfare on net balance. The case against them is not that science is perfect. It is that Thomas Sowell’s observation applies here as everywhere: “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Holding science to impossible standards — refusing to act on its findings until every uncertainty is resolved and every critic silenced — is not rigor. It is paralysis, sometimes dressed up as it.
The nuclear bomb analogy is useful: pressing a button can be trivial or catastrophic depending on what the button does. Science is closer to the latter than to a light switch. The social approval or disapproval of science is not an abstract attitude; it has real consequences for every policy, every treatment, every technology that follows from what people believe about whether investigation into reality is worthwhile.
Imagine if campaigns had to run promoting the benefits of food. The less public-relations work science must do, the more science can simply help.