By Dan Williams
Already it hasn’t been a good year for science and public relations. On Feb. 17, basketball star Kyrie Irving said on the podcast Road Trippin’ with RJ & Channing that he believed the Earth is flat. “This is not even a conspiracy. The Earth is flat,” he said. Irving is an icon of the sport and has a lot more influence than you or me over what people think.Irving also went to Duke University. Earlier this week, Shaquille O’Neal seconded Irving’s comments, saying, “It’s true. The Earth is flat.”
Another story broke in early February. Former NOAA climate scientist John Bates released a long critique of a research paper written by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers. The story first appeared on Feb. 4 on the blog of now-retired climate scientist Judith Curry, Climate Etc. In the post, he questioned the researcher’s disinterest. He claims bad data were used over good data to make the “pause” in the recent global warming trend appear nonexistent. The paper was published just before the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015, and Bates implies that the paper was rushed to publication in order to affect the outcome of the talks.
Bates and Curry are both well-respected members of the scientific community. Their views and criticisms deserve to be taken seriously. The House Science Committee is now conducting a “probe” into NOAA.
There is a mountain of a difference between what Irving and O’Neil said and what Bates and Curry have said. Nevertheless, there are some similarities.
They indicate that “science,” whatever that may refer to the process of gathering observational data and crafting and testing theories to explain said data, is an authority whose public credibility may be undermined. “Science,” besides the process I described, is also a cultural institution that has power over what people think. Apparently, Irving and O’Neal have just realized this.
We are a science-obsessed culture. Nearly every facet of our lives has had the imprint of “science-certified” stamped on it. We can hardly act without consulting “science” first. Just last week I saw the cover of a Time special issue: “The science of marriage.”
It’s not that surprising. In the Heracleitean world of flux, where all fixed points have eroded away, at least we may appeal to that amorphous body of knowledge called “science,” because it gave us such things as the Pap smear and the telephone.
In my time working at Jimmy John’s, I’ve learned a little bit about systems theory. At Jimmy John’s, we have a system. It’s fairly simple, and it works well. We can serve hundreds of people an hour. But the system can only take so much stress. And under too much stress, eventually it breaks down. One mistake at the register causes a hold up at the end of the line, which feedbacks to the register, halting the entire process. Nerves are on the edge; hungry people get angry. Deliveries can’t be made; waiting times skyrocket.
Science is like this. Science is very good at providing successive approximations to the truth. But science must remain, in the main, aloof from politics. This is difficult to achieve in the wake of Big (Government-funded) Science. And I do not suppose I can offer an easy solution. Still, I think we should take seriously the idea that science is a system, like the environment, that can only handle so much before it starts breaking down.
We should recognize that the more we demand from science, the more illusory certainty we crave, the more we are going to be disillusioned and dissatisfied.