Comment by andriesm
2 days ago
Surely what people want to "use it for" is completely orthogonal to the science itself?
Let the science science, and policy makers make policy.
I think the problem comes when we want scientists to make policy recommendations.
I think scientists should help us determine what the facts are, not decide what to do about them.
What to do is for courts and democracy and for individuals to decide?
Even the choice of which question you want the scientists to answer is inherently political, because it frames the issue and causes the available data to contain the answer to that question instead of some other one, which influences (and therefore can be manipulated to influence) what conclusions can be drawn from the available information.