Putting ideology before science
Darren Johnson on the Green party’s refusal to heed the Cass Report:
Labour’s Wes Streeting admitted that he had got things wrong in the past and called the review a “watershed moment” for the NHS. Even in Scotland, the previously gung-ho SNP belatedly welcomed the findings and it is hoped that changes will be made to provision there.
But sadly, that wake-up call does not appear to have been heard by the Greens. In the Scottish Parliament Green MSPs now stand completely isolated on the Cass findings. Their co-leader, Patrick Harvie, was reluctant to even accept the report as a valid scientific document.
In London, Zoë Garbett, the Green mayoral candidate last month (who now sits as a London Assembly Member after her predecessor resigned her seat just days after getting elected) joined Harvie in attempting to undermine the findings.
Which, as Johnson goes on to emphasize, is quite a reckless thing to do when the issue is the future health of children and Zoë Garbett probably knows less about it than Dr Cass.
This casual dismissal of such a landmark report was absolutely gut-wrenching for me. I had twice stood as the Green Party’s candidate for mayor of London and spent 16 years representing the Greens as a London assembly member. Throughout that time, children’s health featured high on my list of priorities, whether it was pushing for tough measures on air pollution or fighting for better homes for families living in overcrowded conditions. How dare leading Greens be so dismissive of a well-researched, scientific review tackling a shameful medical scandal.
My guess is that they dare because they don’t think of it as a medical issue but as a justicey one. They see it as not technical but political, and thus wide open to attack and dismissal on political as opposed to medical grounds.
I reacted with fury. “Vote Green if you want to completely ignore medical evidence and see more children pumped full of harmful drugs.” I wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in response to that awful, glib video from Garbett.
He knew it was risky, and he took the risk.
I am beyond despair that the political party I’ve been a member of for decades, that has always said “trust the science” when it comes to climate change or air and river pollution, is apparently putting ideology before science when it comes to pushing untested medical treatments for children.
Trust the science; no not like that.
Kinda makes one wonder whether most people have principles at all. Maybe the noncognitivists are right, and most people’s judgements amount to little more than emotional expressions to be rationalized after the fact. So it’s not that people are committed to trusting science. Rather, they’re committed to the group that says, “Trust the science.” They aren’t committed to protecting women’s rights but to the party that says women’s rights are good.
I think when it comes to medical or other technical subjects, we’re all forced to take shortcuts and rely on some heuristics. It’s just not possible to become an expert in gender medicine, climate science, evolutionary biology, and virology and infectious disease, to name just a handful of science-related controversies. So we look at things like what side do most of the credentialed experts take, how good are the best arguments made by their critics, what are the economic incentives and biases of the disputants, who seems to be arguing in good faith, etc.
And a lot of the time, this works quite well. You don’t have to look very hard at evolution/creation arguments before you notice that creationists tend to offer an argument on Tuesday that is shown to be an outright lie that even they don’t bother to defend, only to make that same bogus argument on Thursday to a different audience. And that they’re almost invariably arguing in support of a religious agenda, even when they try to hide it (“no, we’re cdesign proponentists!”) Etc.
And yeah, one of the criteria you might look at is who seems to be the “good guys.” Which can absolutely go wrong.
On gender medicine, you have a significant number of credentialed experts who insist that the science is settled, and they just want to help people live their lives, and a nontrivial amount of the opposition comes from religious right types who seem motivated by disgust and hatred rather than good faith intellectual disagreement. Sure, if you take a not-very-deep dive into the details, it becomes apparent that there’s a lot more going on, but very few people do that.
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Once you’re past the basic facts that there are only two sexes in humans, and that humans cannot change sex, all of these “credentialed” experts have taken off their scientist hats and put in their ideological ones, because any argument past those brute facts is no longer a scientific one. They’ve left science behind while still claiming to speak from a scientific perspective, hoping that nobody notices the switch, and that they’re now just “civilian” activists in lab coats, hoping their supposed authority will carry the day against the unsuspecting.
Climate change is a hoax, any attempts to mitigate it are wasteful, and humans have no effect whatsoever on climate.
At least, that would be the Greens policy if they applied the same “reasoning” to Climate Science as they do to Cass and children’s healthcare.
You cannot fully accept science in one area and deny it in another. The only way to combat scientific arguments is with better science, not fee fees.
I believe that the Cass report is well researched and evidence based. I am prepared to change that view if there is newer, better evidence, that overturns it. But I won’t hold my breath because I suspect that any further research will reinforce Cass.
Irritating and yet very typical to see politicians thinking they know more than politically inconvenient researchers. So too do conservatives dismiss climate science. But it is a little extra disappointing to see a scientist do the same: PZ also dismisses the Cass findings, on the basis that someone else has told him the findings are arrived at by analysing small studies.
Curiously absent is any mention of the fact that the organisations with larger bodies of data refused to make it publicly available…