When the experts disagree

What to do when experts disagree on a matter of general and public importance?

That happens more often than the newspapers or the television news reveal.

For instance, many certified experts do not agree that climate change is being caused primarily or chiefly by greenhouse gases and general human activity. Many doctors and medical researchers do not believe that some form of cholesterol is the cause of cardiovascular (heart) disease.

What to do in such cases, when perfectly qualified, serious specialists disagree with the official position represented by governments, international institutions, professional societies?

There exists no agreed protocol for handling controversies about apparently “scientific” issues; and such a protocol is badly needed in the contemporary world, where “science” is looked to for answers on just about everything.

Everyone cares, in one way or another, about health, money, religion, as well as many aspects of the local living environment; and most people recognize that politics affects those things in ways that become real at a personal level.

Decisions about these matters are guided by what is taken as authoritative knowledge and understanding.

Individuals rely on one or other of a wide range of sources: personal friends, publicly prominent pundits, institutions. As different individuals rely on different supposed authorities, individual decisions cover a very wide range of possibilities: most obviously on questions of religion, morals, ethics, but also on matters of health and money.

On those issues, most of us are influenced by the supposedly most expert institutions or individuals. However, it is easy to note, and rather difficult not to recognize, that on questions about health, or about money, there exists no single universally acknowledged authority.

Official recommendations and standard practices in medicine may be accepted as authoritative and reliable by many people, but there are also very large numbers who resort to what is often called alternative medicine: homeopathy, say, or herbal medicine, or chiropractic, or acupuncture, or so-called Christian Science; and more.

On money matters, it is common to find opposing recommendations from experts who differ in ways that are sometimes described as politically left or politically right: followers of Keynes by contrast to such free-market devotees as Hayek or Friedman. That economics typically cannot deliver unequivocal advice is reflected in the common witticism that answers from economists come rather unhelpfully as “on the one hand, ….  on the other hand”, or else as conflicting advice from different experts.

Outsiders are not qualified to judge which experts to rely on, since they are not qualified to assess how great and accurate is their relative technical expertise; so in practice choices are made on criteria that are not really relevant to technical expertise; perhaps personal charisma is decisive, or popularity, or fame of the individual experts, or their institutional affiliation, or their inclination to moderation and conservative approaches by contrast to taking risks in hopes of considerable reward.

On all matters of public policy, it is nowadays widely expected that decisions should “follow the science”, as though science were able to offer definitive answers on everything. But, as pointed out in my introduction to this blog, science is a human activity. It does not carry itself out, it is not an objectively automatic, robotic process. And “science” cannot speak for itself. No matter that any number of individuals and institutions proclaim what “science says”, these are always interpretations, opinions.

As earlier mentioned, the majority view, the “scientific consensus”, has typically become taken by media, public, and policy makers as authoritative, with dissenters ignored, dismissed, denigrated, laughed at, and described as “denialists” — a pejorative term that gained popularity as a label for the morally reprehensible, obviously factually wrong denial that Nazism murdered something like 6 million human beings in the Holocaust during World War II.

Whenever we are asked to follow the “scientific consensus” as though it were “Science”, it ought to bring to mind what Michael Crichton said:

“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. . . . Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way”[i].

It is acknowledged in retrospect that the majority consensus led us astray during much of the 20^th century as tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized in the name of “scientific” “eugenics”, supposedly cleansing the population’s gene pool of undesirable hereditary traits[ii]. But it is not widely acknowledged that the contemporary majority consensus might also be leading us astray over, say, cholesterol or climate change, or indeed any such issue of general importance.

Needed is a protocol by which impartial but technically competent and informed assessors examine and critique and adjudicate the claims of disagreeing specialist experts.

Under present circumstances, such disagreements sometimes lead to civil or criminal disputes and charges; and it is then obvious that the existing judicial system is quite inadequate for dealing with matters involving science. For example, one Texas judge was able to cause the national unavailability of a drug used widely by huge numbers of people[iii] by accepting an argument by doubtfully qualified plaintiffs, contradicting long-standing approval by the official Food and Drug Administration. Judges are often asked to decide whether someone can properly be called as an expert witness; but what when opposing sides can present equally qualified, experienced, informed experts who disagree with one another on the issue at hand? As Anthony Scalia put it, “I'm not a scientist. That's why I don't want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth”[iv].

Half a century ago there were vigorous public disagreements among experts as to the potential safety of nuclear power-plants. Arthur Kantrowitz proposed setting up an “Institution for Scientific Judgment”, a concept that has come to be called a Science Court, to force a publicly open presentation of evidence and arguments by experts whose views and recommendations differ. Unlike present arrangements in science, each expert would be subject to cross-examination under public scrutiny.

Although such a process would not necessarily establish a definitive view, it would make plain what the evidential and theoretical merits are of the various interpretations and opinions; and policy makers could then take action with the best then-available information; admittedly under conditions of less than total certainty, but that is after all a common enough responsibility of governing bodies.

Full-fledged discussions of the details and potential problems facing a Science Court are by Jurs[v] and in Chapter 12 of my Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland 2017).

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[i]      Michael Crichton, “Aliens cause global warming”, Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003; www.s8int.com/crichton.html or www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1300661/posts

[ii]      Philip R. Reilly, Eugenics and involuntary sterilization: 1907-2015, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 16 (2015) 351-68; Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012; https://hpsrepository.asu.edu/handle/10776/5663

[iii]     Judge invalidates F.D.A. approval of the abortion pill Mifepristone; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/health/abortion-pills-ruling-texas.html

[iv]     https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/antonin_scalia_784738

[v]      Andrew W. Jurs, “Science Court: Past proposals, current considerations, and a suggested structure”, Drake University Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Research Paper #11–06 (2010); reprinted in Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, 15  (#1, Spring 2010) 1-43.

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