Politics and science, sitting as far away from the tree as possible

Dunno, but scientific consensus once held that the Earth was the center of the solar system, and that African Americans were biologically inferior, so scepticism seems healthy.

The general problem is that as science gets more removed from experience or intuition, we become reliant on 'experts', and have little experiential basis to judge their claims.

is there a way to make scientific consensus more acceptable to a public that doesn't want to hear the results?

The biggest one with regards to vaccines would unfortunately be if we had a massive outbreak of a vaccine-able disease that ended up killing only the unvaccinated children. It's like the battle against creationists - you're running up against a current of stupidity, desperation, and deeply held beliefs, and in an era where a group can project and spam information, it's difficult.

In the mean-time, more education against the anti-vaxxer bullshit (a good documentary would do wonders), as well as a bigger pro-vaccine push. I like the stuff Amanda Peet is doing, for example.

And in a public battle between the Jenny McCarthy/Oprah media-industrial complex

Oprah's role in this is pretty vile (same with RFK Jr). Without them, McCarthy would just be a two-bit ex-porn star with a cult following, but appearing on Oprah gives her national credibility for her claims.

Both the public and scientists are to blame for the mistrust of the scientific process that seems increasingly pervasive in the Western World. It should be pointed out that increasing skepticism of science is not the only enlightenment value currently under assault. In the United States the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the past 30 years has eroded respect for the separation of church and state. In Europe, nations that once believed in free expression are launching criminal trials against those who say unpopular things (like Kurt Wilders in the Netherlands) and banning modes of dress that the majority finds objectionable (like the proposal to ban burkas in France and several other EU nations).

The point is that enlightenment values like respect for the scientific process are always under attack and always require a staunch defense.

The public's proclivity to embrace hucksterism is not new. From the time of the traveling medicine shows and carnivals where "snake-oil" was sold in prodigious amounts to today's vitamin section at "Whole Foods" peddling scores of supplement products some of which have been proven to be useless or even harmful, the old adage "a sucker is born every day" has never been more true.

Scientists are partly to blame themselves and the popular press is also complicit. Scientists arrogantly talk about facts about which there is a scientific consensus without recognizing that in the scientific community, consensus falls apart with alarming regularity.

It wasn't long ago that the scientific consensus was that hormone replacement therapy was a safe, benign and effective treatment for the symptoms of menopause; now the consensus is that hormone replacement therapy is a major risk factor for breast cancer.

It wasn't long ago that the scientific consensus was that sun exposure was dangerously linked to skin cancer and should be avoided at all costs. The advice was cover-up and if you can’t, slather on the sunscreen. Now there is a growing consensus that vitamin D deficiency is a major risk factor for a variety of autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis and also a risk factor for several cancers, ironically including melanoma. Where do we get most of our Vitamin D? It's produced in our skin when we are exposed to the sun. All of a sudden, the consensus about avoiding sun exposure at all costs is collapsing.

The public is not unaware of the almost constant need for scientists to readjust their consensus positions and the resultant skepticism should not be surprising.

All of this is aided and abetted by the popular press; even good newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal usually get it wrong when reporting on science. Preliminary evidence from scientific studies or evidence that is suggestive but not dispostive is constantly being over hyped by reporters. How often do reporters tell us about the new miracle cure despite the paucity of scientific evidence? Does anyone remember how Vitamin C was supposed to prevent the common cold or how interferon was supposed to cure cancer or how vitamin E was supposed to prevent Alzheimer's Disease. None of it turned out to be true and it wasn't the scientists who were guilty of over hyping, it was the press.

It is probably a biological feature of the human brain to be inclined to ascribe a cause and effect relationship to events closely related in time. Vaccinations are typically given in the first three years of life; the symptoms of autism (lack of speech; failure to make eye contact; social dysfunction, motor disturbances) typically become apparent in the first three years of life. Often parents assume a cause and effect relationship; the evidence to the contrary be damned.

The situation Professor Drezner describes with autism is particularly heartbreaking. There is increasing evidence that autism is a genetic disorder and several susceptibility genes (mostly involved with how neuronal connections are formed in the brain in early life) have now been identified. The idea that genes that they have passed along to their children might be the cause of their child's terrible disorder is quite naturally a devastating concept for most parents. The idea that the vaccination did it is much easier to accept. Anyone who has a child with autism knows that the diagnosis of this disorder is one of the worst things that a parent can ever hear about their child; naturally it inspires many emotions including anger. The vaccination program becomes a useful target for sublimating that anger. It's perfectly understandable albeit unfortunate.

The role of science in society is interesting and how scientific advances (like a cure for autism someday) can be accelerated is an important topic. For those who are interested, the classic book on this subject is "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962) by Thomas Kuhn. It really is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the role of science in advanced western societies.

Thanks to Professor Drezner for raising this provocative subject.

The scientific community is itself to blame for much of what happened with the Wakefield article.

For those who are unaware of it, "The Lancet" is one of the four most prestigious medical journals in the world. The other three are the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature (Science and Nature also publish articles related to aspects of science other than medicine and health). Getting an article published in one of these four journals is extremely prestigious and scientists fight to get their work published in these journals.

There is a rigorous peer review process that governs what articles get published; this process obviously broke down with the Wakefield article. When it was published in 1999 investigators throughout the neurological community were incredulous; not one neuroscientist in a thousand thought Wakefield's findings were anything but clap trap,

I think it's fair to say that the assumption of most investigators was that Lancet decided to publish the article in a fit of "political-correctness" or in the attempt to be particularly provocative.

What the editors of the Lancet failed to understand is that health research is not like international relations. Foreign policy experts like Professor Drezner can debate how relevant or irrelevant academic foreign policy professionals are. In the world of health research every article is liable to be ascribed as extraordinarily important by parents desperate to understand why their children are ill. The Wakefield article spurred a decade long debate about whether autism was caused by vaccinations. Thousands of parents were deceived and it is entirely conceivable that some parents refused to vaccinate their children only to have those children contract preventable diseases. Certainly some of those children became sick; it is entirely possible that some died.

The stakes in the world of medical research can be very, very high. Foreign policy experts should be delighted that the question of whether their academic colleagues are relevant or irrelevant just isn't that important.

There is no "scientific consensus" & never has been.

I have asked journalists, politicians & alarmist lobbyists now totalling in the thousands to name 2 prominent scientists, not funded by government or an alarmist lobby who have said that we are seeing a catastrophic degree of warming & none of them have yet been able to do so. I extend this same invitation here.

There is not & never was a genuine scientific consensus on this, though scientists seeking government funds have been understandably reluctant to speak. If there were anything approaching a consensus it would, with over 31,000 scientists having signed the Oregon petition saying it is bunk, it would be easy to find a similar number of independent scientists saying it was true, let alone 2. The whole thing depends on a very small number of people & a massive government publicity machine, both very well funded by the innocent taxpayer.

Although your conversation on Autism was one of the few FB articles lacking the word "bellicose" or "bellicosity" in the past few days, it still managed to convince me to push the comment button.

I'll try to address your question directly as the verbose comments before me were a bit tangential.

Q: "Is there a way to make scientific consensus more acceptable to a public that doesn't want to hear the results? "

The current forum for scientific publication is not debate-centric. Although there are editorials in the NEJM and JAMA (probably the two most respected, although arguably corrupt, medical journals) the lay press is not very good at interpreting their summaries or the results of primary research. Unfortunately it requires a medium to filter the information into layman palatable chunks. This might be Sanjay Gupta or it might be 2nd hand religious punditry.

The lack of cohesiveness and aloofness of the medical community are part of the problem. There is no specialty of "autism is not caused by vaccines" people.. although Pediatricians have a large stake in the conversation. But relying on each provider to have one-on-one conversations about vaccines vs. autism is only part of their job description (especially when Peds already make considerably less than other doctors.. and must run a tight ship).

So coming back to the question--how to appropriately voice scientific consensus--I would like to imagine in an ideal world that the media would be able to effectively distribute the most accurate message. As those of us who read the newspaper know, the best information comes straight from an informed source who is able to distill the data into consumable text.

Given that there are three full-time, round-the-clock news agencies eating up our souls as we wait for the plane at the airport, one would hope that they could effectively understand and disseminate the information.

And now we get to my answer: the media should provide unbiased and informed coverage of the scientific literature. They are (sometimes) trusted and widely distributed and have an excellent forum for airing science.

But.. like that will ever happen.;)

Denial is a powerful defense mechanism often attributed to immature minds since it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality (Anna Freud). I'd say that explains the majority of those in denial about climate change, evolution, etc. The bottom line is scientist have to dumb it down, as much as that make folks like us cringe.

In re. to Drezner's question, nope. I obviously can't say what it's like outside the U.S, but ironically this nation has both a large number of well educated people and a similarly large distrust of scientists. I'm going to blame the Republican party's anti-intellectual stance, but I will admit that the Republicans didn't create the original problem.
Also, don't forget that the public seems largely driven by whatever the newspaper will scream about scientists this week. When they carried daily front page reports and constant half hour shows about global warming a sizable number believed it was true. When those reports stopped appearing the public became noticeably more skeptical, not because they had gotten some evidence that it was false (though the email debacle didn't help matters) but because it wasn't in the news. Maybe some kid who wasn't vaccinated will get some virtually unheard of disease and the media will demonize the parents next.

A: Make the public more scientifically literate and then make more journals open access.

I have been battling with the vaccine problem and the public's understanding of flu pandemics for years and it is very difficult to explain anything if they do not have the basic science background to understand the answer. The snake oil salesmen have a field-day because the public do not know enough to realise how preposterous their claims are. You can try and 'dumb down' your answer to 'have ICU units been full of pandemic flu sufferers or people who have had a bad vaccine reaction?' without any attempt to explain why but it is much better if people understand the why and are capable of making an informed decision. The other big part of the problem is a poor understanding of maths - specifically probabilities. It is very rare that a (biological) science paper gives a yes or no answer, to understand the conclusions you must be able to understand the method and confidence intervals and what they really mean. You also must be aware of the premises - often not explicitly stated - and, in modeling, just how subjective some of the input variables are. Very few papers can be taken on their own - often the case by press report - scientists in any given field will read a paper and it will nudge their position slightly one way or another balanced against everything else they have learnt.

Or resurrect Carl Sagan, but that poses some of its own problems for science.

After stating "...because scientists are not perfect..." , you link to a post on the "GlacierGate" Himalayan glacier misstatements in the supposedly scientifically peer-reviewed IPCC report and suggest it is merely a "flaw". If you had been following the stories subsequent to "ClimateGate", you would know that this is not the only "flaw" in the report but instead may be representative of it. See for example this listing of recent uncovered "flaws":

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/02/06/lawrence-solomon-ipcc-beyond-the-himalayas.aspx

or this excellent book on the "hockey stick", which was thoroughly discredited even before it was included in the IPCC report:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1906768358?ie=UTF8&tag=bishil-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1906768358

If only it were a matter of the scientists not being perfect. I have no reason to question the science done on vaccines, but it is becoming quite clear that some of the scientists pushing the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have veered from science into advocacy (to be charitable, perhaps fooling themselves because they so wanted it to be true). Because of this, we really have no idea how good is the evidence for or against. Overstating results (or hiding results that were inconvenient) to promote a political agenda, for personal aggrandizement, or for additional research grant funding appears to have occurred here.

Suggesting that the reason the public has become wary of scientists is because they are stupid avoids the real problem: when scientists become advocates of policy, they lose their independence and cannot be trusted.

Preliminary point: scientific consensus is a heuristic. It has no epistemic value on its own. Evidence counts in science, not authorities.

Nice false equivalence between autism research and climate science. As you point out, the science on autism research has not been replicated by other studies. By contrast, the science of climate research cannot be replicated. The raw data gathered from weather stations has been destroyed (it is still at the individual stations, but it would take an expensive process to gather it again). There is no documented procedure for how to process the raw data. Thus there is no documented procedure for when to discard data that are considered unreliable outliers. All we have is the processed data and the credibility of scientists who routinely denied Freedom of Information Act requests. Yet somehow this is supposed to be solid science? You would fail an undergraduate class in experimental design if you proposed such an ad hoc procedure for gathering and processing data.

Now let's move to the proxies - the notorious "hide the decline." Climate scientists are making the case for *global* warming based on the ring density of bristlecone pine trees concentrated in Siberia. Moreover, since 1960 the dirty little secret has been the tree ring density does not correlate to actual measured temperature. AGW-believers use the tree ring data when it makes the case for global warming, but "hide the decline" when it doesn't. That is an extremely disreputable form of selective citation and confirmation bias.

The oceans? They only show about half the warming of the land-based measurements (probably because the land-based measurements do a poor job of coping with the urban heat island effect), which would result in lowering predicted warming trends by more than a factor of two (after you subtract carbon's relatively modest impact on temperature the mythical "positive feedback" would have to be heavily slashed).

So we're left with the computer models. Once again the dirty little secret is that all of the climate models were falsified by the past 10-12 years of stagnant or slightly cooling temperatures. But no matter, just redo them until they (1) predict severe warming, and (2) agree with the historical data. Once again the ad hoc nature of climate science comes to the fore. But even this is highly strained. The computer models now explain the past 10-12 years by holding that aerosols have offset the purported positive feedback that carbon should unleash.

Yes, that sounds like good science to me.