Dying for Facts: Conclusion

In the last few posts, I’ve told the story of a couple heated debates. One still ongoing: “Does capital punishment deter criminals?” Another ended: “Do antiarrythmia drugs save lives?” The latter debate is over because people on both sides of the debate got together to find out the answer!
If we really want to improve political discourse in this country, we need to do what the cardiologists did in the 1980’s-convince opponents to collaborate with each other to find the facts. The CAST study, after all, brought together people who had been aggressive adversaries and turned them into constructive collaborators.
Take school vouchers: Imagine if a group of anti-voucher Democrats got together with pro-voucher Republicans and funded a research program comparing their favorite approaches. Both groups want what is best for their children and grandchildren, after all, so they ought to be sufficiently motivated to spend money in ways that will determine what’s best for the kids.
Now let’s take their partisan partnership a step further, and imagine that these adversaries are not only teaming up to fund the research, but are even joining forces to design the research. Not that I expect the legislators, themselves, to design such studies. But I can envision their respective scientifically-trained staffs playing a role in the design of the research trial. Indeed, by involving opponents in the design of a research study, we’ll end up with a better study. For if the study was put together exclusively by opponents of vouchers, rather than a bipartisan group, the study would hardly be likely to end up as a fair test of their efficacy.
Suppose that a bipartisan research committee-one that also includes social scientists knowledgeable about education-decides to conduct an experiment: They pick, say, 80 school districts from around the country, and randomly decide that 40 will have a voucher program for the next three years.
After intense debate the committee comes to consensus about what outcome measures they will use to evaluate the voucher program-some combination of, say, standardized tests scores and graduations rates. They even agree on the statistical methods they will use to assess these outcomes. What, then, is the likely outcome of their experiment?
Did you think I’d have an opinion on whether vouchers would benefit students? Well I hate to disappoint, but that is not at all what I meant by “the outcome of the experiment.” What I meant was: What will happen once the experiment is complete? And that, perhaps, can best be answered by looking at what will not happen…
Let’s imagine for a moment that a pro-voucher interest group funded a study which demonstrated that vouchers improve students’ test scores. It is pretty easy to envision the anti-voucher crowd criticizing the study-complaining about the outcome measures, for example, or about the use of an inappropriate control group. If the anti-voucher crowd, by contrast, helped design the study, it would be much more difficult for them to oppose vouchers on the grounds that they harm educational outcomes. Moreover, important legislators would be on board with the facts, having played a role in obtaining the data. As I’ll demonstrate in later chapters, the progress of science depends as much on psychology as it does on the nuts and bolts of any given research study. Partisan partnerships can help overcome some of those psychological barriers that so persistently prevent us from basing our policies on the best information science has to offer us.
I know this must sound woefully idealistic. But middle-age hasn’t caused me to abandon my ideals. In fact, to the contrary-my career in science and medicine has taught me that social progress depends on people striving for ideals, and it has shown me, too, that the scientific method is one of the very best tools humankind has created to help pursue those ideals.
I recognize that science is rarely as clean as it may appeared to have been in the anti-arrhythmia trial. Often it is quite messy, in fact-plagued by some of the same problems that afflict our political system: Strong opinions and even stronger emotions; name-calling and lies; even the frequent inability of scientists to admit when they are wrong. Indeed, “scientific truth” is often a matter of opinion, frequently a function of political consensus rather than indisputable evidence. For years, after all, Newton’s laws were the “truth,” until later physicists, most notably Einstein, revealed the laws to have been only better approximations of the truth than those of Newton’s predecessors.
Nevertheless, even if science is often more ‘truthy’ than truth-determining, the scientific method remains the best method humans have created by which to inch themselves, bit-by-bit, toward the truth about how the world works and how it might be improved. After all, people used to think that epileptic seizures were evidence that a person was possessed by the devil; whereas now scientists can pinpoint the area of the brain responsible for seizures, reducing future seizures with medications or surgery. Similarly, people used to think that continents were immovable, and now scientists have discovered that the continents used to be joined as one super-continent and, indeed, are continuing to drift across the globe.
Science is awfully good at revealing certain kinds of truth about how the world works. I would like to find ways to bring more of these truths to bear upon our social policies.
What do you think?
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