Esimerkiki Clive Crook FT:ssä:
For the sake of their own credibility, scientists should maintain a cautious distance from politics, and those who take up politics should not expect the deference to disinterested scholars they would otherwise deserve.
Mainio James Annan on äkkiseltään samaa mieltä:
"Scientists need to be a lot more pro-active with media"
(All together now) Oh, now we don't!
...I don't need to get involved at all, and (like most scientists) there are significant disadvantages to doing so. One of them is the shrill accusations of politicising climate science, although since this seems to depend on such a vacuous definition of politicisation that I'm already doing this simply by breathing, perhaps I shouldn't care. But it does make a cheap soundbite for the echo chamber, which is presumably the point.
Of course, that does not mean I won't get involved as and when I can be bothered. In fact I'm more than happy to talk to any journalist who contacts me, this happening so rarely that it is much more of a curiosity than imposition (and so far they have mostly done a pretty fair job). But I don't believe there is any particular obligation on me, moral or otherwise, based on my being a scientist rather than anything else.
Paitsi että Crooke ei kuitenkaan tarkoita samaa:
Some dedicated climate sceptics are beyond persuasion. Some are batty. One can understand how exasperating it is for climate scientists to deal with them. But given what is at stake, they had better get over it.
Oh no they don't. Meillä on sellaisia instituutiota kuin tiede, ja parhaimmillaan lehdistö, jonka koko funktio on filtteröidä informaatiota. Eli suomeksi pitää hullut ulkona, jos jokaiseen kaukoniemiseen ja pellepelottomaan joka on juuri mielestään keksinyt jotain mullistavaa pitäisi suhtautua vakavasti niin julkaisut olisivat valtavia tiiliskiviä täynnä toinen toistaan poskettomampia teorioita. Tällaisella julkaisulla ei tee yhtään mitään; julkaisun lisäarvo on siinä että se valikoi jotta lukijan ei tarvitse tehdä tätä itse.
Ajatus että keskustelua ilmastotieteen tutkimuksista, tai vaikkapa rokotteiden hyödyllisyydestä, käytäisiin sanomalehtien sivuilla johtaisi käytännössä siihen että sitä käytäisiin pienimmän yhteisen nimittäjän tasolla. Siis niin että kansa ("public") ymmärtää. En usko että kansa haluaa että esimerkiksi aivokirurgi operoi käsitteistöllä tasoa putkiaivo.
Asiantuntijavallassa on ongelmansa, mutta ratkaisu niihin ei ole se että asiantuntijat koettavat tiivistää alansa tietämyksen kolmen minuutin puolustuspuheeksi, ja sitten äänestetään. Eli siis se että luovutaan asiantuntijoista ja auktoriteeteista, kuten ajoittain osuva Theodore Dalrymple tarinoi:
As I was re-reading (Obedience to Authority), after an interval of 20 years, on a plane to Dublin, the woman next to me - a social worker in a Dublin hospital - said: "I've always been against all authority."
"All?" I asked.
"All," she replied. "We've suffered a lot in Ireland from the authority of the Catholic Church."
"What about the pilot of this aircraft?" I asked. "I assume you would prefer him to continue to fly it, rather than, say, for me to take over, and that were I to attempt to do so, he should exert his authority over me as captain?"
She readily agreed that in this instance his authority was necessary, though only for a short time, and was legitimate because she had granted it to him. I pointed out that even the brief authority that she had been so kind as to bestow upon him actually depended upon a whole chain, or network, of other authority, such as licensing boards, medical examiners and so forth, upon whose competence, honesty and diligence she could not possibly pronounce. She was not against all authority, therefore: on the contrary, she trusted much of it implicitly, even blindly. And necessarily so in a complex, technologically advanced society.
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