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Frank Deal's avatar

The frase "the science" should be banned. It presents science as static and unchanging.

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Brett Stephens's avatar

People will often cite how economic forecastors are "irrationally" certain about their forecasts. Gerd Gigerenzer points out that overstating forecast accuracy is actually rational. If you want to be successful in the forecasting game you have to pretend you can actually do it. This is a plague in science and medical communication. They think it hurts their credibility to honestly describe the uncertainty. Thus it's masks don't work to masks always work and never, the empirical evidence for masks working is weak, but on balance suggests it could be beneficial in many circumstances.

When they change policy they'll say "the science changed, so we changed our approach." They imply that the approach was correct before, but a new approach is needed now, but what they are actually saying, without realizing it, is that they were wrong before and now we have scientific proof of it.

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