Some excerpts from the War on Science (Otto)

We have seen the emergence of a "post-fact" politics, which has normalized the denial of scientific evidence that conflicts with the political, religious or economic agendas of authority.

Over the last 25 years the political right has largely organized itself along antiscience lines that have become increasingly stark: fundamentalist evangelicals, who reject what the biological sciences have to say about human origins, sexuality and reproduction, serve as willing foot soldiers for moneyed business interests who reject what the environmental sciences have to say about pollution and resource extraction. In 1990, for example, House Democrats scored an average of 68 percent on the League of Conservation Voters National Environmental Scorecard and Republicans scored a respectable 40 percent. But by 2014 Democrats scored 87 percent whereas Republican scores fell to just over 4 percent.

Such rejection is essentially an authoritarian argument that says "I don't care about the evidence; what I say/what this book says/what my tribe says/what my wallet says goes." This approach is all too human, and is not necessarily conscious. It is, rather, reflective of the sort of confirmation bias scientists themselves continually guard against. but I wonder how much modern science is really aware of confirmation bias

Those on the left are more inclined to accept the evidentiary conclusions from biological and environmental science but they are not immune to antiscience attitudes themselves. There, scientifically discredited fears that vaccines cause autism have led to a liberal anti-vaccination movement, endangering public health. Fears that GMO (genetically modified) food is unsafe to eat, equally unsupported, propel a national labeling movement. Fears that cell phones cause brain cancer or wi-fi causes health problems or water fluoridation can lower IQ, none supported by science, also largely originate from the political left.

• This was well illustrated by a 2011 battle in San Francisco, where the board of supervisors, all of them Democrats, voted 10--1 to require cell phone shops to warn customers that they may cause brain cancer (an ordinance that was widely criticized and later repealed).

The ideas of postmodernism align well with the identity politics of the left, and they have helped to empower disadvantaged voices, which always adds to the conversation. But what works in this case for political discourse is demonstrably false when applied to science. A scientific statement stands independent of the gender, sexual orientation, ethic background, religion or political identity of the person taking the measurement. That's the whole point. It's tied to the object being measured, not the subject doing the measuring. This is the number one thing that the average american citizen, or university student no longer seems to understand. Science is not a meta-narrative about relative truth, it is a story told that is ground in measurements and data. Hence, data literacy is also a large problem and if policy makers are not data literate, it makes the interface with science even more difficult

Without objective truth, the nattering of warring pundits can go on forever, and can only be settled by those with the biggest stick or the loudest megaphon --in short, by authoritarian assertion, a situation not of postmodernism but of premodernism. Which is exactly what's happening. And which runs completely counter to the enlightenment ideas of American democracy and the journalism that is supposed to inform it.

Wherever the people are well informed,Thomas Jefferson wrote, they can be trusted with their own government. We have to develop more robust ways of incorporating rapidly advancing scientific knowledge into our political dialogue, so that voters can continue to guide the democratic process and battle back authoritarianism as we did at our foundation and have done throughout our history. That will require the media to rethink their role in reporting on issues in which scientific knowledge is crucial. Is that idealistic? Yes. But so were America's founders.