Cosma Shalizi (2017): Review of Collins and Evans, Why Democracies Need Science: "This book has two big themes... that the scientific enterprise rests on certain values, which are attractive and should be pursued, and are consonant with a democratic polity and society...
...(though not quite the same as those of democracy). The other is that there should be a "College of Owls", staffed by sociologists of science (and a few sociologically-minded scientists) which can advise democratic governments about scientific controversies, in particular about whether there really is a serious controversy on a certain subject.... Democratic (and other) governments have long institutionalized means of getting advice on scientific and technological questions.... Expanding this to getting advice about understanding the state of scientific controversies is probably a wise development, and I am fully persuaded by Collins and Evans's arguments that this would not pre-judge what governments should do.... I am less persuaded that this can really be cleanly separated from evaluating the science itself.... If every report from the Academy was paired with a report from the Owls, about the state of the scientific debate, and whether any appearance of controversy is worth taking seriously, this might well be very valuable.
If Collins and Evans gave any explanation for why an un-democratic regime could not also have a College of Owls, and use it just as effectively as a democratic regime, I missed it.... It can be hard to conduct scientific inquiry under non-democratic regimes, when they choose to interfere.... But it can also be hard to conduct scientific inquiry in a democracy, when the demos chooses to interfere. (There are two ways we know that "Socrates is mortal", after all.)...
#shouldread
