I want a world where evidence counts

Today’s world is not my kind of place. I want to live in arational world where intelligent women and men debate ideas in a reasoned wayand in which they make decisions based on evidence: scientific evidence,evaluative evidence, evidence based on analyzing facts and past experiences. Aworld where emotions and feelings have a role but they don’t replace knowledge.Instead, they help us define the goals about what kind of future we want. In mypreferred world, the women and men – all of us – who look at data and thinkabout how we got here, and which way we should go next and how to get there,are educated and cultured. They know history and they understand culture.

We will still disagree with each other, as we come fromdifferent backgrounds and we have had different experiences that have shapedour worldview. We can disagree on issues of societal importance: Where shall weplace our limited resources? What is the right level of government involvementin the economy? How large income differences can we tolerate? How should wepunish offenders? How much immigration is good? We can debate all these importantpolicy matters in a civilized manner, and evidence of what actually brings ustowards our policy goals will inform our decision-making.

There is no one great truth. Intelligent, thoughtful peoplecan arrive at very different conclusions. Furthermore, the devil is often inthe details. The answer is seldom, if ever, all or nothing. For example, ineducation, as MatthewYglesias points out on Substack, there are “tradeoffs between cultivatingthe performance of the strongest students and shoring up the performances ofthe weakest ones.” The trick here, as in most policy matters, is to calibratethe policies so that they produce an optimal outcome in terms of encouragingthe best students to excel without creating excessive inequalities. There areempirical ways of finding that sweet spot.

There, nevertheless, are truths that are fixed: the Earth isnot flat; dinosaurs did not roam around with cavemen; gravity causes light tobend; emitting CO2 and methane into the atmosphere warms up globalclimate. Journalists who present “both sides of the story” in the name ofevenhandedness when one side represents an obvious falsehood do a greatdisservice. People are entitled to their opinions but if someone claimssomething that is patently false – like, the world was created 5,000 years ago– they are dismissed as a crank. People worship thousands of different gods andan increasing number of us are at the very least agnostic about the existenceof even one. Yet, every believer also believes that believing in their god andworshipping him or her exactly the way prescribed by their religion is the onlyway to heaven, while others are sent to eternal damnation. Going to war orkilling each other based on religious differences may be the most irrationalthing humans engage in.

Today, identity politics seem to rule. It is somewhat ironicthat the origin of identity politics is at the Right end of the spectrum (thewhite supremacists with their “great replacement theory”), but it has now beenowned by the progressive Left – and for them, the identity that overwhelmseverything else is race. Well, we know, of course, that the continuum, ratherthan a straight line, is circular and the opposite ends eventually meet. Humansnaturally have multiple identities. I personally don’t think of myselfprimarily as white or even a man. I am also a father and a husband in amulti-cultural and multi-racial family, a son of my parents (who both have left us), a Finn, a European and animmigrant, speaker of a minority language, a jazz afficionado, anenvironmentalist, a culinarist, etc. etc. The notion of reducing everything torace (and gender) is plain insulting. Not to mention intellectually lazy,especially in a world where a steadily increasing proportion of people defysimple racial categories. Like my own daughter. Yet, now we see segregationagain, this time voluntarily initiated by some colored persons, including at someuniversities. What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. think? His goal was acolorblind society where every human is judged by their character, not by thecolor of their skin. Or Nelson Mandela who prioritized peaceful coexistence andforgiveness over revenge and mayhem?

The preposterous ”great replacement theory” assumes a wideconspiracy whereby Jews and liberal elites are intentionally promotingimmigration (illegal and otherwise) of colored non-Christian people to Americaand Europe so that whites would become a minority. Conspiracies tend to be generallyimplausible because they assume that, well, large numbers of people actuallyconspire towards some nefarious goal – and no-one ever spills the beans. Thisdoesn’t mean that conspiracies are non-existent. But many of the conspiracytheories going around sound like they came from a 1950s B-list horror-movie,like the one about elites actually smuggling children whom they would eat at asecret basement of a pizzeria in Washington, DC (coincidentally, a pizzeriathat I and my family have personally frequented). In an election year, therehave been congressional efforts to solve the immigration crisis at the southernborder of the USA, but a certain group of rightwing representatives has blockedany solution or compromise because they want to use the administration’sinability to deal with illegal immigration as an election trump card (on June4, President Joe Biden used executive authority to impose new restrictions onillegal immigration). If that’s a conspiracy – and maybe it is – it certainlyisn’t a secret one. Cynical it is: to prevent a solution to a problem thatranks high on people’s list of worries just so you can paint your opponent asincapable.

The debate on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic providesanother example of the politicization of an issue that should be evidence-based.While both theories of a natural origin and a lab leak are plausible, there iscompelling evidence that would point to the latter (the principle of Occam’srazor would strongly favor a lab leak). Yet, in the US congress the issue hasbecome sharply divisive along party lines. Despite scientificevidence, the Democrats flatly refuse even to consider the possibility of alab leak, apparently fearing that it would further erode trust in thegovernment and the scientific community.

The cynicism of politicians breeds cynicism among regularpeople. If we are concerned about democracy, we should fight cynicism, whichmakes people feel that their actions – or voting – have no influence onanything. Cynicism’s sibling, sarcasm, is an unhelpful attempt at humor but itseems to be the dominant form now.

I believe that a key to the gridlock on many fronts would beplacing evidence in its rightful place. Evidence comes from a variety ofsources and in different shapes. However, it is not evidence just because it’swritten in a book that some consider holy. Nor is it evidence if it simply is basedon some person’s feelings. We know that in a criminal court, the rules ofevidence are stringent. Prosecutors must present the evidence in a systematicway so as to convince the judge and the jury that there is no reasonable doubtof a person’s guilt. The system is not infallible but, as a rule, no singlepiece of evidence alone is sufficient to convict a person. And when newevidence – or better methods of discovering evidence – is presented, this willbe weighed against the previous verdict. This is pretty much how science worksas well. Scientists use the best available methods, considering all possiblefactors and alternative explanations, to home in on the theory that best standsup to scrutiny – convincing the peer reviewers and the broader scientificcommunity is a bit like convincing the jury of your peers – until somethingcomes along that calls for rethinking or refining the theory.

Evaluative evidence equally draws upon multiple sources ofinformation using multiple methods. Some methods – like randomized controlledtrials – have been borrowed from medicine but they are by no means the only, oreven the best, source of evidence. Apart from quantitative methods, there arequalitative approaches that can be equally rigorous. Participatory approachesengage the claimholders and intended beneficiaries, so that their experiences weighin on the assessment (again, the experience of a single individual does notconstitute evidence and it’s important to recognize that different groups ofpeople may win or lose and have different priorities and expectations in thefirst place). We need what MichaelQuinn Patton has called bricolage, a full set of approaches andmethods from which to select the most appropriate for each question to beanswered.

One of the founders of the discipline of evaluation, theAmerican psychologist and methodologist Donald T. Campbell (1916-1986) wishedfor a society that would be guided by evidence. Policies would be developed onthe basis of what works, instead of political convictions. This vision maynever come to pass – and maybe that’s a good thing, as we do need a healthydebate on the goals that we would like to advance as a society. However, todaywe seem to be further away from this vision than in a long while. Not only is trustin science and expertise at an extraordinarily low level, we don’t even want tohear any opinion or counterargument that contradicts our deep-seated beliefs. Onboth the Left and the Right there are efforts to silence, sometimes violently,voices that do not conform with their worldview.

This is a sad state of affairs. Without a reasoned,evidence-based debate society will not be able to advance.