I never said public debate didn't have any value.
Your own source talks about debate as public engagement, educating the public, ensuring actual scientific viewpoints are represented to combat the garbage and ignorance.
What it doesn't say is scientists think debate is a good way to arrive at correct conclusions. Science isn't performed through public debates where the audience votes at the end to decide if climate change is primary caused by human activities or if the Λ-CDM cosmological model best describes the observed universe.
Public debate (I'd call it discussion) for the kinds of social things you mention is important I agree, but since there's no mechanism for determining who was "right" and because the vast majority of people aren't going to have the time or information necessary to make a truly informed and meaningful judgment on the issue, it becomes a marketing exercise where the one with the better rhetorical tricks or charisma convinces the few people that aren't already ideologically entrenched.
The climate change 'debate' is the perfect example, because the vast majority of people that are 'against' it think the way they do not because of scientific evidence, but instead because of how much control government should have over people, but don't examine their own beliefs to that degree so they just end up at 'scientists are paid by the globalists to get fake results'.
But I think I understand what you're saying and more debate in society around the issues and changes that impact that society is good (and the quality of debate is lamentable). Where I maybe diverge is in where we determine what those changes should be.. there's not nearly enough 'evidence based policy' IMO. The evidence around what changes a policy would probably make doesn't originate in a debate, where a public debate is useful is for determining what values are more important and how much certain values should be taken into consideration over others when making a certain policy.
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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
What a cop-out. Intellectuals have publicly debated every matter under the sun, from evolution to the big bang theory.
And the issues we're talking about aren't obscure matters like the behaviour of quarks. Institutionalising racial and gender identities in education, politics, and law is a fundamental change to those institutions. The absence of public debate on this fundamental change is fuelling powerful resentment. If the people championing these changes want to win public support, they need to step onto some kind of public stage and engage with their critics. If they don't, the backlash will be really ugly. The image I keep coming back to is the rattle-brained models in Zoolander having a gasoline fight.
Oh, and it seems most scientists disagree about the value of debate.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/02/1...nd-technology/ |