The journal Nature Human Behavior (affiliated with Nature) has published a study by economics doctoral student Floyd Jiuyun Zhang analyzing the effects of political statements and endorsements by scientific publications on opinion. The TL;DR version of the article is the endorsements didn’t do much to change people’s opinions about issues or politicians but they were effective in changing people’s opinions about scientists.
There’s a proverb that covers this pretty well: “Cobbler, keep to thy last”.
You misrepresent this. Its really a study specifically looking at Trump and his handling of Covid. It does by an artificial method and I think is pretty poorly written. Anyway, with heir contrived method they showed that people on the right trust scientific journals even less if the criticized Trump’s handling of covid and especially if they endorsed Biden over Trump saying that they thought Biden would handle it better.
In the short term this is not surprising and I dont think too concerning. Any president could potentially mishandle a crisis and if so will face criticism, including from science journals. Supporters of that president will respond in kind but you expect things to go back to normal. This cases unique since the response by the right included not just being angry at the science but resorting to massive conspiracy science and quack medicine.
The bigger issue is the long term rejection of scientific findings when it interferes with preferred ideological beliefs. What you see is rejection of published science with citations of some published articles with little literature or science to support their beliefs. What exists is usually almost cartoonish in nature, very poorly done. Most commonly, as I keep pointing out, they get some emeritus guy in his 80s, often with a prior history of working for the tobacco lobby or the energy industry, criticizing something, but for the right that is the same thing as real science.
Steve
You may be right. I hope so.
Matt Yglesias had a reasonable take on this earlier this week. This is paywalled:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/natures-bad-editorial-is-a-small
The gist is that scientific organizations taking partisan positions is bad because it reduces the credibility of the scientific organization and doesn’t change anyone’s mind on the politics. And he links to Josh Barro here (not paywalled):
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/why-wont-the-editors-of-nature-follow
In a world where people tend to follow norms of behavior there is no need or call for journals or scientists to take any position on topics that can be considered political. In a world where a politician claims that he knows more than anyone else and offers medical advice, that is wrong, is it wrong to criticize that person? Just the act of criticizing them will be portrayed as taking a position based upon politics. Do we have an obligation to advocate against having that person remain in office? It makes me angry because we should never be in that position to begin with.
I think there is a high chance that you have read McMasters Dereliction of Duty. I think we know the bad outcomes that can follow when the people in place who had the authority/power to alter or at least advise against bad management/policy kept quiet for their own reasons. Those can be selfish reasons or any under of others including fear. In this case do clinicians keep quiet for fear of losing the public confidence of people who support a political candidate?
Personally, I think you should do the right thing. Just like with masks when they should not have told people to not wear masks for fear there wouldn’t be enough, in this case the right thing to do is to criticize the politicians giving out bad advice/policy and when the election came to make clear that one of the candidates had a bad track record.
Steve
It’s not difficult, you just give people your honest medical opinion and accurate facts. You don’t need to include your political opinion at all, especially in terms of advocacy for a specific candidate or party.
No one wants to hear such opinions in a professional setting.
The example of Vietnam is complicated by the fact that the military is subordinate to the elected political leaders. You can raise your opinions with the chain of command, but you might be told to, and have to, shut up and color.
But the principle here is why that policy exist. A military that takes sides in domestic partisan politics is a cancer on the institution and a threat to democracy. So the military has formalized the principle as law. Nature should follow the same principle if it wants to be taken seriously as and objective and reliable source of science.
No, you always have the option to resign. If all of the Chiefs resigned rather than cover up to help the civilian leaders then the civilian leaders would have a lot of explaining to do. The truth would out. When was the last time we had a mass resignation of the Chiefs?
Going to continue to disagree with you. I think the medical profession had an obligation to criticize the bad policies and in particular the bad actions taken by Trump. There are now millions of people who believe that drugs and therapies work for which there is no evidence which has lead to thousands more deaths. People now believe conspiracy theories over published science because of things he said. Maybe we could have tried to criticize things he did and said without mentioning him by name but it would have been pretty apparent we were criticizing him. I really did spend a night caring for a pt who drank bleach and we know where that idea came from just as a very specific example.
So the accurate facts and medical opinion would have necessarily lead to criticizing Trump. Facing an election an honest medical opinion would have been that we would be better off with Trump out of office.
Steve
“In a world where people tend to follow norms of behavior there is no need or call for journals or scientists to take any position on topics that can be considered political.”
Seriously? What world is that? Consider just Covid and Global Warming. Consider Fauci claiming in Clintonian style that he didn’t fund gain of function research. Heh. No, ECO just funneled his money through. Consider being denied grants and being ostracized if you don’t toe the line on Covid or AGW.
The world before 2016. Consult your Weekly Reader version of conservative news and you might find out that Fauci was a civil servant, so not exposed to elections. There was no need for journals to make recommendations about his election since he had none. SO I know you want to change the subject away from Trump but at least do it in a plausible manner. Oh, and FTR, Fauci and the CDC did receive criticism during the pandemic. I have criticized here several things they did and didnt do. What’s nice is that in reaction to criticizing Fauci we didnt have every liberal int he country go glom onto some conspiracy theory. Again, I really did have an old lady tell me she didnt want her meds since she knew there were 5G chips in it. For you this is just funny talking pints trying to own a lib. I was dealing with the fallout.
Trump, uniquely in history (I cant find anyone else and i have asked others) decided to make specific recommendations about drugs, treatments, opine on when the pandemic would end, undercut the seriousness of the pandemic. This had never been seen before. He declared he knew as much as the doctors and his fans, of course, believed him. If he had limited himself to saying that it was his job to weight the health risks against the economic risks, that was his job actually, and announced that we should not follow all of the CDC guidelines due to a negative economic impact that would have been fine, but he was offering advice on medical care for which he was very much not prepared to opine. Sounded like a 5th grade science student.
Steve