On the one hand, on the other hand

There is an interesting but I feel confused piece in Nature by some "philosopher" at some state school opining on science. I will admit I am not a scientist by profession, engineering and medicine is my forte, but perhaps my botanical and mathematical studies will assist. I also was a philosophy minor so again a foot in the door as they say.

Now what does this person say. Let us start:

Today, St Paul is making a comeback: the authority of science is again under attack. In areas of national and global consequence — from climate to medicine —political leaders feel confident that they can reject scientific claims, substituting myths and cherry-picked facts. I have spent five years investigating why this has happened and what can be done.

First,  I am not a fan of Paul, he sort of showed up late, and then wandered all over making claims that somehow were askance of what was said back in Jerusalem. Grace and all that stuff. Out with the good works and in with grace. But I digress. Science is interpretative. It interprets what we observe. It is iterative. As we get better tools to observe we do change our science. Science is also a true dialectic process. Marx never saw it at work but just look at Darwin. Then Watson and Crick, and just look at what we see today. Science is a continual conflict. It seems never to be settled. It is the challenge and joy of science. Climate science will continue to change as we learn to measure better, calculate better, get better tools and the like. Medicine is changing every hour, and just what politicians are doing there, well I leave it to the scholar.

He continues:

It is tempting to think that scientific authority is natural and will soon reassert itself like a sturdy self-righting boat knocked over by a rogue wave. The ugly truth is that science is more like Facebook, whose positive features are also vulnerabilities. Precisely because it allows us to connect and share, Facebook creates opportunities for misuse. Similarly, science is an exemplary form of enquiry because it is technical, fallible, done in communities and able to reshape our values. But these very features allow detractors to reject the authority even of eminent experts.

Just what this is saying I really do not know. Science requires understanding. One cannot understand the metastatic basis of cancers by using Facebook. One must read the literature, observe the cases, test the hypotheses and start over again when one's assumptions fail, as they often do. You communicate with others who are competent. You subject your ideas to critiques, to those who object, to those who know more. You learn by mistake and errors, and correcting them.

Science denial, however, is like crime: combating it requires both short-term and long-term strategies. A crucial clue to a long-term solution comes from studying the experiences of non-Western nations that imported Western science. They had to work out how to incorporate it while convincing sceptics that it would not destroy their culture and values.

 Science denial is what? Criminal? China has "imported" western science, and frankly they are peers in the process. Russia has always had expertise in science. India likewise. The list goes on.

The final remark is as follows:

I conclude my book with a discussion of the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt barely escaped the Holocaust — she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933 and shipped to an internment camp for a few weeks in 1940 — and lived through a time when human rights vanished and moral authority disappeared. Her writings on politics, truth and lying have been much cited in recent discourse on the sorry state of politics. Most relevant are her writings on authority. This, she thought, is neither innate nor automatic, and facts alone don’t have it. It is possible only thanks to institutions that create what she called public space. Without that, it is possible for people who are not personally accomplished, who pontificate in recycled stock phrases, who polarize situations and who are insatiable braggarts coveting media coverage, to acquire power and influence. She could explain that only by telling the full story of how humanity got itself in that position in the first place, in books such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Now I have studies Arendt in some detail. Her commentary on Eichmann is confusing at best, banal? But her study of totalitarian regimes was reflective of Hitler, and trying to make a nexus with the US today is more than a stretch, but the left seem to feel it is essential. Arendt is a student and former lover of Heidegger, the German and Nazi philosopher whose work is a bit heavy, but after all it is German. Heidegger had his day, and one suspects it has come and gone. The French version was Sartre, again, it came and went. But Arendt did have some influence on the New York "intellectuals" of the post war period in the 50s. Pleasant she was not, but authority she could opine on, after all she was educated in Germany. Authority must be questioned, if we learned anything from the 1960s it was just that. Beware of anyone who says, "Because I am an expert". The expert must be back by facts, by a process, by an analysis, and by it you will a cross examination of that. It is a continuing dialectic that ensures a convergence, a synthesis in Hegel's world.