Politics doesn't do so well on the falsification front. A solid constituency can sustain a useless program or erroneous policy or prevent a valuable or valid one from gaining prominence. Economists claim scientific rigor, but persistently promote and propagate policies and opinions that simply defy the facts and reason, deeply embedding their prejudice that working people must be kept at a disadvantage or else they will not be "productive" (newspeak for submissive). But there is nothing that governments do that doesn't require adjustment to changing circumstances or review of the relation between its intent and its effect. And if constituencies can poison the process in areas aside from support for research, the question of whether politics should get involved in science is beside the point. The point being, can politics respond rationally on any issue where there is a powerful interest group opposed to it or in support of an unreasonable policy or program? Science is not the issue. Reason is.

从科学的角度来看，这是一个复仇主义的问题。但从更广泛的意义上说，如果政府的权力源于人民保障权利的需要，那么问题就来了，反对谁?对那些否认他们的人。但这也包括那些其个人行为和利益剥夺了其同胞权利的人，尽管每一项单独行动似乎都不是，也没有明确的意图这样做。世界上有两种恶作剧，离间的恶作剧是恶意，归化的恶作剧是爱。对手式的政治倾向于支持前者，反对后者。
Whatever happened to the supercolider?

My turn: Surely Ken, you must agree, truth in politics does not exist.?There is no spying on Americans, we don?t have a domestic spying program,? Obama told Leno.
As for truth in science, surely multiverses, string theories, sub atomic particle smashers, higgs bosoms, and the uncertainty of quantum mechanics just to name a few, can best be be likened to Mother Goose and her nursery rhymes all be it a lesser expense, unless of course you try to measure the damage they also have done. Anyone afraid of wolves? =
Truth by and by, to dust the cobwebs off the sky, is clearly more simple than thought. And best of all it's absolutely free! So much for those expensive educations. Thanks, =

Michael,
Higgs bosoms? Now that's an experiment I'm in on! They might be small, but make up for it in energy level, I suppose.
I think the point is that America is lagging behind in science, and even where it still excels, in medical research, it is not getting any return on its investment, letting private interests take the credit, and the profit.The politician does not fathom the use of an experiment known to be likely to bear no fruit. It's most of what science does. It's called comprehension. If you don't explore what you think of as truth what you think is a fairytale.

I think the conversation was a bit confused. What does the word "values" mean here? You all seemed to be all over the map on that. And I think that is what caused a lack of agreement. This is not hard. We, the masses of the world, value Democracy as our core value. I would add Equality, but many other values come together in Democracy. It is easy to use that value as a measure of science. Does the science contribute to Democracy? If not then it is bad. If it does then it is good. Drones are criminal and undermine Democracy and so are bad science. Science that sees some humans as better than others is clearly anti-Democratic. I think what was confusing the conversation is that some people do not value Democracy and the guest (being a good liberal) does not understand class struggle as the primary dynamic in society and so does not understand that Democracy is controversial, because the rich want everything and to control everyone. The rest of us want something very different.

Of course I agree that as a human activity, science is political and value laden, but in the 1980s and 1990s there was an overreaction where people were REDUCING science to politics and power relations or "actor networks" which is at the other extreme from those who believe the scientific method is purely inductive and deductive and is separate or uninfluenced by politics and human values. Of course science is influenced by power relations and funding. However, we had students (including me) arguing about scientific theories who had no coursework related to that science. that is all I disagree with. I believe that science can neither be reduced to politics nor to pure induction and deduction.
很可能科学和政治(即使只是微不足道的)都是自我纠正的学科，因为它们都是经验的形式。经验(以及科学和政治实验)是一种学习，具有某种自我纠正的方面。也许正是在经验和学习的定义中，他们有自我纠正的方面。我希望我能足够乐观地相信，我们确实正在从科学和政治上的错误中吸取教训。

Sharyn Clough, the professor at Oregon State University has it right at least on this debate when she says that all data analysis, and even all experience is biased even if only because of temporal and spatial limitations on our attention and our circumstances. We are finite creatures and can only take the slenderest samples of our natural world, so our experience of the world is always selective, and therefore biased to some extent.

这里有一个简单的问题，证据和论证的规则是否应该像在科学和法律中一样应用于政治?也就是说，是什么限制了政治不让它放弃严格，转而支持个人利益和偏见?
更深层次的问题是，政治到底能否忠实于它的原则?对于提出的问题来说，这可能有点过分，但如果政治本身就腐败，这个问题就没有意义了。
So the real question is, what does the power of persuasion mean?

Actually, the song goes, "money can't buy me love."

Michael,
Do you know of Ane Brun? Of course, she, eventually, makes it all the way up to three. But if it all starts with "numero uno", why should anyone count? You really ought to check out some quantification theory. The quantifier is credited much too much, at the very great and extremely unjust expense of the qualifier.

科学的测量:我们是无限的生物，试图测量和我们一样不可测量的无限宇宙，却徒劳无功。宇宙就是我们自己，无限的一个或相同的。衡量分歧，真理团结!如果有人怀疑这一点，就像我们一直被教导要衡量一切一样(“人是一切事物的尺度”普罗泰戈拉斯)，那么我会建议一个简单的科学实验:你的科学或尺度是什么?
至于从政治上资助这项科学实验，金钱并不是答案。
"Money can't buy me love." The Beatles
=

如果说政治和科学的利益和承诺曾经有过明确的区别，那是因为，在一定程度上，科学和政治都是统一的。当教育与迷信和愚昧(如文盲等)相抵触时，目标就简单多了。同样地，当政治对科学的兴趣在我们的大学里培养出更多的科学家，并给大学拨款让他们从事他们选择的研究时，事情就简单多了。
As the government can fund the arts through a few grants to a few distributors of grants (themselves artists), it need not choose whose art is worthy and whose is not. Likewise, funding universities for their own research does not require Congressmen to know a lot of science, while being responsible to the people.
共和政体优于民主政体的一个优点是，如果明智的人当选，他们将决定如何花钱，(不一定)基于民主原则，而是基于他们自己对事实和优先事项的调查——通常通过委员会传唤证人等方式，就像审判一样。
I suspect that your question here is whether we are doomed to bad science by bad politics--and vice versa. If a scientist must kiss the ring of politicians to do or publish research, that is good if the politician is good, and bad if he is bad. If a politician must answer to the rich, or to crazy religious cults, to be elected--well, that is a sign that too few people vote to make a republic work. When the worst elements of society can control who wins in elections, we cannot be surprised that we get bad government. It is true that universal suffrage does not promise the best government or the best choices, but it is true that it would prevent some of the worst governments and the worst choices.
Plato did not propose a republic because it would be right in its judgments, but because it provided a stage upon which a government could be right, if the people are right. If the people are wrong, either as a body or in their government, well--the discussion is over, yes?
It falls upon those who know politics, and those who know science, to become partners. For 50 years after the Great Depression New Deal, there was effective partnership, but it was limited by limits of the nation--economy, funds, education, and the will to work together.
我想看到世界的变化。我希望选举只持续5到6周，国会选区要小到可以有效地步行或在城镇集会场所进行竞选。我希望看到5个主要政党，这样每个人都可以找到一个他们喜欢的政党，他们必须为统治而妥协。在科学方面，我希望看到硬科学和软科学(社会科学)在政治上完全分离。我希望太空计划或超级对撞机的模型不要成为大学研究的模型。将大型科学项目与更具针对性的项目区分开来的，并不仅仅是规模或资金的问题，真正的区别在于大型科学项目的政治本质，而不是人们更熟悉的研究。研究一项常见的医疗实践是否最有效不需要国家的意志，逐案分析，但进入太空就需要。这主要是因为每个人都想要最好的医学实践，但并不是每个人都希望我们用可以支付医药费的钱向外太空发射探测器。
Whether a science project is or should be political depends upon whether it rests upon political judgment--which science is where we want to put our money and our national will? A republic is better suited to such decisions than a democracy.

This week's On The Media had a segment with a sequence of Republicans in the leadership preferencing a statement on climate change with the phrase, "look, I'm not a scientist, but..." in a tone that seemed to make the label scientist a pejorative. One of them was chairman of the envoronment committee.

What Brooke Gladstone, at On The Media, was getting at was that the Pope's Encyclical on climate change means that Republicans can't go after conservative catholics on the basis of climate change denial, so the strategy, as evidenced by a series of actual statements, is to denigrate science.
It is often enough said that the problem of democracy is all about the calibre of people in office. I think it was Kant who claimed that a system could be devised in which a city of devils could be angelic, if self-interest were only so ordered as to lead to this. But maybe bad people deserve good government too. As, by the way, bad scientists deserve good science. Solution? A culture of critique. But this only works if the person offering a thesis is held responsible for responding to the reasonable expectations of the critic, not just the supporter. Rules of evidence and reason apply. But only if the people expect this, and refuse to recognize an evasion of responsibility in this, is democracy workable. Consider the case of "Pudd'n-head" Wilson. It's a great send-up of American rejection of reason. But reason wins out in the end.

Is there an "ideal speech situation"? Not, I think, as Habermas would have it. Not if consensus is as pernicious a thing as I suppose it. Regimes of conviction such as conventional wisdom lose the meaning they pretend to realize. In an adversarial situation error generates opportunism. But error is the genesis of meaning, not foil to it. In the long run it is not possible to mean what we say without a bit of indulgence from our interlocutor. A system of opportunism does not eliminate error, it merely retrenches us against recognizing our own, while intensifying our recognizing it in others, even where it isn't there at all. But how can there be a system of "linguistic competence" in which indulging error is the genesis of meaning? A Balkanized self-interest? We have that in theory. We have two parties, but each member is mythically individual. I mean, we are supposed to elect representatives as if the two-party system had never emerged at all. Congress and Senate vote, nominally, as if each member were independant. And so we are at a loss for general themes amongst them as a basis for deciding who to vote for. And yet, in private, they are quite partisan. And so they run on vaguely unpolitical themes and act on agressively political ones. But nothing counteracts this. For one thing, the media refuses to cover politics properly for fear of losing out on political advertizing, or of providing it for free (advertizing rates actually go up during political campaigns, a kind of extortion, I think). But the result is a complete lack of critical review. Compare an American political interview with one on the BBC. Or, for that matter, the "question and answer" sessions a Brittish PM puts up with weekly. The fact is, a hidden agenda is entrenched in American public life, and has been from the beginning. Even the Federalist already shows this.