Common sense and science

The voting public comes into play on science issue when things like tar sands pipelines and global warming are involved. The voter is suspicious of the motives of the BIG THING, whether it is a Canadian company of your own government. And in both cases they have limited data to go on.

Common sense comes up with conclusions and generalizations with little evidence. In psychology it is called heuristics. We do not always have the data, but we have to come to decision on the spot. We base our generalization on too few examples. Many of our political decisions are based on experience with humans and previous generations. We use experience with wars to predict future wars, even if the technology has changed. We can play computer generated war games to gain some confidence. But even that is bound to fail as the computer cannot cover all variables of the physical world.

Does conservation benefit us? Are we going to suffer from lack of diversity in the natural world? Probably, but the proof is hard to present to the voter. Biologists who study ecology have pointed to keystone species, species that define a habitat. Also, they tend to chart the food web. But the variables are still too many for definite proof to Joe Sixpack, the voter. We have thankfully explained populations and bag limits well to duck hunters.

Years ago an anti-nausea medicine came on the market and was given to pregnant women. Eventually some women started suing the company for birth defects in the babies. “I had two normal kids and then this third one was a Bendectin baby! It’s the drug’s fault!” It turns out nearly all the babies were from older women giving birth. The chances of defects go up with age.  And there was no Bendectin on the market with their earlier two kids.

Many social sciences do this kind of soft research where proper control groups are not available. The studies to do with prisoners are an example. Length of prison term, death penalty etc. etc. have not correlated to success. I suspect a good portion of prisoners returning to society were forced back to crime due to lack of jobs. But you cannot force the private sector to take criminals as employees. You could pay part of their salary from public funds. That probably is happening.

The point is, when people are involved, it is difficult to do scientific studies on their behavior. In lab settings, decision making has been studied. We use heuristics, short cuts. We rarely have solid reasons to make all our decisions. Even those of us who study the physical world that we can measure more accurately fall into the normal patters and decide by gut feel in our personal lives.