from Hacker News

Science-Totalitarianism Now Threatens Liberalism

by freedude on 1/30/24, 3:31 PM with 1 comments

• by freedude on 1/30/24, 3:31 PM

  "In the second instance, allowing science to enclose swathes of policy debate gives scientists (and other expertly people) a great deal of political and moral power over our lives. To reiterate, “enclosing” does not imply that a specific group of scientific individuals are put in charge of policy. SAGE is – and was – principally an advisory body. Rather, it means that working within a particular scientific cosmology is the price of entry to serious policy discussion.

  However, in practice, this means that scientists and credentialed people de facto enjoy greater influence over the shape of policy than laymen, thus giving the former a hierarchical power over the latter that threatens the strictures of robustness. Laymen will never find it as easy as credentialed scientists to position themselves within a scientific cosmology and so will never be taken as seriously in enclosed policy debates. "