The Economist, May 14, 2025 Issue, quoting the late José “El Pepe” Mujica, Uruguay’s former president.
The “enormous advantages” of democracy [are] that “it doesn’t believe itself to be finished or perfect” and its tolerance of disagreement. –
Doctor’s Orders: It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened? By Daniel Immerwahr/The New Yorker. May 26, 2025
Citing evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research—these are potentially exhausting traits in a conversational partner, but they’re also marks of a scientific mind.
We imagine science as an open-ended pursuit in which doubt is encouraged, new evidence is welcomed, and theories are revisable. The basic sciences operate roughly like that. But “regulatory science,” in which conclusions are required on a deadline, works differently. A drug must be approved or not, a level of pollution pronounced safe or not. In these circumstances,… the authorities must at some point close the case, push errant facts aside, and draw a line. Such moments generate ‘inevitable friction.’ [Paraphrasing the arguments made by Gil Eyal, author of “The Crisis of Expertise” (2019).]
It’s when uncertainty collides with urgency that the authorities enter the fray, convene commissions, and issue findings. Those who accept the sanctioned conclusions gain official backing. Those who don’t are ruled out of bounds. No longer recognized as colleagues with legitimate hypotheses, they risk being treated as crackpots, deniers, and conspiracy theorists.
Drawing a line is necessary: at some point, you have to declare that the Holocaust happened… But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you’re endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies. You also marginalize too many intelligent people, who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies, and waving counter-evidence in your face.
Testimony of Judith Curry, Hearing before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology – House of Representatives, March 29, 2017
[Note: IPCC is the acronym for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its job is to provide governments with scientific information to guide climate policy]
I came to the growing realizing that I had fallen into the trap of groupthink in supporting the IPCC consensus. I began making an independent assessment of topics in climate science that had the most relevance to policy. I concluded that the high confidence of the IPCC's conclusions were not justified and that there were substantial uncertainties in our understanding of how the climate system works.
I realized that the premature consensus on human-caused climate change was harming scientific progress because of the questions that don't get asked and the investigations that aren't made. We therefore lack the kinds of information to more broadly understand climate variability and societal vulnerabilities.
As a result of my analyses that challenge the IPCC consensus, I have been publicly called a serial climate disinformer, anti-science, and a denier by a prominent climate scientist. I've been publicly called a denier by a U.S. Senator. My motives have been questioned by a U.S. Congressman in a letter sent to the president of Georgia Tech.
While there is much noise in the media and blogosphere and professional advocacy groups, I'm mostly concerned about the behavior of other scientists. A scientist's job is to continually challenge their own biases and ask how could I be wrong? Scientists who demonize their opponents are behaving in a way that is antithetical to the scientific process. These are the tactics of enforcing a premature theory for political purpose.
There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure comes from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies and scientists themselves. Reinforcing this consensus are strong monetary, reputational and authority interests. Owing to these pressures and the gutter tactics of the academic debate on climate change, I recently resigned by tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.
Unmasking Scientific Expertise by M. Anthony Mills/Issues in Science and Technology, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, Summer 2021.
The problem with the follow-the-science charade is that it papers over this messy reality [of weighing tradeoffs and deciding policy], concealing both the rationale and context for such decisions from public view… What the public sees is different policymakers and different experts all claiming to be ‘following the science,’ often in different directions at different times. As a result, public health policies can start to look like arbitrary political whims, particularly to those already disinclined to trust scientific and political elites. And this, in turn, produces both bewilderment and backlash—especially when “the science” changes, as inevitably it does under conditions of radical uncertainty.
But the charade ultimately erodes the credibility of both experts and lawmakers, undermining the legitimacy of the policies they advocate. If we pretend our disagreements about public policy are fundamentally scientific in nature, then our political discourse will inevitably devolve into counterproductive debates about ‘the science.’
We should not expect these disagreements to track our ideological divisions too neatly, or the political alignments surrounding them to remain stable over time. Thus it was in 1976 a Republican administration that adopted precautionary policies, based on expert advice, to prevent a potential epidemic. And it was the mainstream media—the Times no less—that criticized these policies as disproportionate, alarmist, and motivated by ‘the self interest of government health bureaucracy.’