Dr. Spencer and Jeff contrast science—evidence-based, open-ended inquiry like vaccine safety or climate data—as a neutral knowledge tool, while politics weaponizes it through selective facts, tribalism, and ideological dogma, notably during COVID-19. Spencer argues that "politicking" (with a C-K-I-N-G) manipulates findings to justify pre-determined outcomes, ignoring contradictory data, whereas science thrives on questioning even proven truths. Both agree their coexistence is rare, often adversarial, with politics undermining scientific consensus for partisan gain, revealing a fundamental clash between objective truth and manufactured consent. [Automatically generated summary]
This is not the way everyone normally thinks about thinking about science and politics, especially when they hear them together.
But here we go.
So science, science has been rather maligned by a lot of people lately who don't like what it says sometimes.
Science is kind of seen as a set of knowledges.
It's not really a set of knowledges.
It's a method for accumulating knowledge.
It's a method for discovering new things and new knowledge.
That's all it really is.
It's just a method.
And it doesn't have any dogma.
A lot of people think that you're not allowed to question science.
That's ridiculous.
That's the exact opposite thing that science has ever asked.
A lot of people imply that they'll smack down some evidence of something like, oh, this is evidence and it's scientific with a wink.
There's no getting around it.
This is the immovable wall that they're never going to get past.
And as soon as anyone says that, just start ignoring them immediately.
And if you do that, please just stop doing it, please.
Science is just a method.
So here's how it works.
There's some data and all data in science is, is observations.
Things that can be observed repeatedly are data.
And then someone comes along and explains the data.
These individual observations put together, you explain them all.
And that explanation, also called a theory, creates new predictions.
Someone comes along and says, oh, well, if that's true, why isn't this also true?
That prediction is a hypothesis.
That hypothesis leads to a test.
Someone says, oh, well, maybe that is true or maybe it isn't.
And then they.
So let's find some more data and harvest it.
Find a test and that test gives them, yeah, it gives them new data, new observations, and they either find that it's true or find that it's not true.
And if it's not true, that makes scientists so happy because they learn something new.
As soon as it is true, they go, oh, it's the same old thing.
Who cares?
The most boring thing is to not be proven wrong.
Science is built around questioning, around confrontation of old knowledge.
And absolutely, you should question it all the time and learn about it.
Really, everyone should.
Just question whether or not these things are true.
And it welcomes you to question them, which isn't really happening in most other areas of our world.
One of the things that people get wrong about science is the word theory itself has been misused greatly in our language.
A lot of people think that a theory is a guess.
Oh, that's just a theory.
I don't have to listen to that.
It's just a theory.
That's one of the things that leads people to start to dismiss scientific knowledge, actually.
Oh, you know, theory of evolution, it's just a theory.
It's not real.
It's just a theory.
Part of that is like when people say in theory, you could do this, which is the exact misuse of the thing.
But no one likes to say in hypothesis, you could do this.
But they do say hypothetical as in hypothetical situations.
In a hypothetical situation, you might be able to do this.
We are misusing this word, and I do it every day as well.
We are misusing this word in such a way that leads us to come to the wrong conclusion about what's really going on with the scientific method.
That's part of a larger mess that we're in, where people are now just wholesale ejecting scientific knowledge in entire fields, which blows my mind, but they are.
So we're talking, when you reference that, we're talking flat earthers, chemtrailers, antiboxers, largely widespread, quote unquote, mainstream, widely accepted scientific theories that are now being rejected in wholesale.
The most egregious of those, in my opinion, are the flat earthers.
Sorry to any flat earthers out there.
If you want to contact me yourselves, I can tell you why I think the earth is a oblate spheroid of that exact shape and all the data related to it.
I have no problem with it.
You can question the shape of the earth all you like.
Question everything.
But what you can't do is ignore actual observations.
And that's what you have to do in order to believe that the earth is flat.
You have to eject and just ignore huge amounts of data.
Funny little aside, short, like a comic short.
Video popped up on my social media thread today.
That was uh, if Google was a guy, and it just shows this poor, overworked middle-aged dude in a beard and a shirt and tie at a desk with people sitting down across from him asking a series of the most stereotypically inane things that people ask of Google, and one of them was young woman.
Sits down and says vaccines cause autism and he says ah yes well, I have this pile of a million hits of sources that say it doesn't and I have this one that says it does.
And she reaches across and plucks the single page out of his hand and goes, I knew it yeah, and storms off triumphant and he yells as she leaves.
Just because it's there doesn't mean it's true yeah yeah, and all these problems with science existed even before the internet, actually.
So yeah, and the internet provides its own level of chaos.
Oh, I know like, like removing the internet pop culture reference from it, it still speaks to the larger point of oh yeah, cherry picking data.
Yeah, go out, go out with a conclusion and then cherry pick the facts that you need to support it and ignore everything that disproves it.
So really, science is about making observations, finding explanations and conclusions based on those observations.
That's really all science is doing over and over and over again.
So what is politics?
Politics is the process of that people are doing all the time, of trying to.
It's a collection of things.
It's anytime you're trying to coerce cajole, convince other people to cooperate to get an outcome that you're looking for.
You're engaged in politics.
You know, if you're working at a company and you're not the boss, you don't get to just give orders.
Giving orders isn't really politics, although it in some ways it is, because other people can choose to not do it, but usually they choose to do it if they work there and they want to continue working there.
When you all work there and everyone's on the same level and then you have to convince some of the people to help you do a certain thing, that's also politics, that the conceit here is that in order to get anything done, you need the cooperation of other people.
I mean, even if something that you think you're doing alone in our world, you need the cooperation of other people.
You're going to go alone and go get a cup of coffee from the store.
Well, you needed someone to open that store and stock it with coffee and someone to work in that store to sell it to you, and you don't think of that as them cooperating in your thing.
But yeah, they are.
They're in a market system and that's how it works.
We don't think of that as politics.
But capitalism is providing a lot of these political connections just through application of money to get all these things done, and we don't have to talk to people really or do anything.
We don't really think of it as politics and I don't blame you for not thinking it's politics, because it's very low level.
It's basically just paying, Paying everyone for everything.
But almost everything else, like almost everything you do in a company on some level involves some level of politics.
You want to convince people to work late.
You want to convince people to do anything.
Anytime you have to convince people to do things, you're probably working in some kind of, on some level, some kind of politics.
And politics, when you really look at it, anytime you're doing politics, you are first finding the conclusion that you want, the goal.
And then you're going to work to point out things that lead people to want to help you with that goal or to get that goal themselves so that you can get whatever you're looking for.
And we do all kinds of things to point out and justify and manufacture.
And sometimes we lie, we cheat, we obfuscate.
We almost never tell the whole truth when we're trying to get this done.
We're only telling the part that serves our purpose.
And that is the exact opposite of the process we're doing when we're doing science.
What do you think?
Am I off base with this or am I?
Well, I just, I struggle with your definition of the word politics for starters.
Sure.
Because while I do agree that working your way up the social ladder at work or trying to inspire collective action at work is a flavor of politicking, the verb, the noun of politics, of the system of human governance where we work as a collective society, has more tools in its toolbox than just coercion, manipulation, and obfuscation.
Convincing.
To achieve its ends.
But for the purposes of this philosophical debate, I'm sure we can just deal with the segment of the concept of politics that you're talking about, which I absolutely agree exists in spades, both in the private sector and all over every flippin level of government I have ever had dealings with or paid attention to.
Human beings are a naturally, innately biologically social species, but we're also innately, naturally biologically selfish.
And invariably, when you're talking about issues surrounding politics, the noun, we're talking about one person or a handful of people saying, hey, this thing we want, we feel is for the common good, but we need the rest of you on board with it or it doesn't work.
So how do we get the rest of you on board with that?
And that process has de-evolved, I believe, into the sort of base black and white binary wedge issue politics that we see at play today, where I think we spoke about it on one of your previous podcasts.
The guy who's on our side, nothing he says is wrong.
Everything he says is sacrosanct.
And the guy who's on the other side is always lying and always a piece of human garbage.
And if you voted for that guy, you're my enemy and I have to hate you.
That's the dark, nasty, gross side of politics that I think conflicts most directly with the scientific process that you're talking about.
So let's just imagine that we live in a world where things haven't devolved in this way.
I'm not sure if there's a period of human history that exactly fits that.
Let's say that we are even playing nice with politics.
Is it still ever a time when it's going to work not the exact reverse of what science is?
Well, yeah.
I personally have participated in the political process by attending town hall meetings, listening to the different candidates, asking them questions on their platform, listening to their answers, listening to other people's questions on the candidates' platform, and making an informed decision on who to vote for.
That's democracy in action.
And I don't think that really in any way lives up to the thing that you're talking about when you mention politics.
So you imagine that all of the candidates are answering all of those questions with complete and whole truths.
They're never trying to only underline the part that supports their arguments.
And oh, no, absolutely not.
But I'm also an independent thinking human being capable of critical thought.
When you listen to any person's answer to something, well, that's a statement.
That's not a fact.
If you care about the topic at hand, then you dig a little deeper and look elsewhere to confirm that that is or is not a fact.
And that's scientific theory right there.
So what you're saying is that the politicians you were listening to are engaged in the politics that I described, but you as a person are working above what they told you to find the actual truth despite what they told you.
No, not necessarily.
I'm saying that I, as an individual person, have access to the recourse of scientific theory and independent fact checking to confirm that what has been told to me by a politician is in fact factual and true and just and right.
Confirm or deny it.
Confirm or deny.
Yes, of course.
But I've also dealt with people in the political arena where they have presented me with actual facts.
Attending town hall meetings about my hometown is there's lots of talk of development going on and infill and densification and stuff.
There was a couple of years ago, city council had struck a deal with a developer for the use of an old chunk of city land that was going to get turned into a housing complex, like a new detached housing subdivision near my neighborhood.
So I attended the town hall meetings on the subject to get informed.
And the developer stood up and that mofo was pure politics, like all grin, all snake oil, all sales pitch.
But several counselors and the chief administrative officer of the city stood up and actually presented facts, aerial views of the lot, planned layouts, hard empirical facts on the impacts that this development is going to have, and had answered prepared for questions that arose from that evidence and those facts that they presented.
I don't consider that to be politicking.
That was rather civilized, scientifically themed discourse, in my opinion.
But what I'm hearing is that of the people you described, the ones who were trying to find some way to subvert the truth were engaged in politics.
And the ones that were just giving straight facts were not really engaged in politics.
Well, no, the ones that were trying to subvert the truth were engaged in subterfuge and chicanery and demagoguery.
For what purpose?
Well, for the developer, I assume the purpose was to ensure that he got his permits and made buckets of money.
Through the manipulation of people.
Yeah.
Which is really political, right?
Well, like I say, that's kind of where I'm having a bit of a sticking point with the use of the label of politics.
And I'll try and get over the semantics of it.
Yeah.
Okay.
As you know, I've been above average politically active for most of my adult life.
That's why I enjoy this conversation with you.
At a very sort of base reflex emotional level, I take issue with the thesis that sets up science as the good guy and politics as the bad guy of this closed choice, two-sided discourse.
Well, I mean, this is my point is that we will never really get away from politics.
We'll always have it because we'll always have people that want to convince other people of things.
And I don't want to paint it as an evil thing.
It is working in the opposite direction of science.
And if someone hears that that's true and that then it's the enemy, it's probably because they think a great deal of science.
And I love that.
But this isn't necessarily like a dark side, light side thing.
Politics is always going to be there.
We're always going to have people that need to convince people to be on board to get things done.
In order to have a large number of people cooperating in things, we're going to need someone to band them together to put them under one banner to go and march and go do the thing.
And that's, that will always be true, I think, until we're an autonomous collective, right?
But until we're that, we're always going to need this thing.
We're always going to have some political structure.
We're always going to have a method of doing politics.
I don't see anyone in history or now who's engaged in any level of politics that isn't doing it inevitably the exact reverse of the way science works.
And they don't do it that way because they hate science.
They don't do it that way because of anything that's bad or wrong with them.
It's just really the way that it works.
They have the conclusion first and then they work backward to the things that will work towards that conclusion.
Once you look at it that way, I'm not even sure that you can have it any other way, unless you just look at the world first and then you find where the conclusions are going.
But that would mean, like, I'm not even sure what that would mean.
That would mean that you're not even sure where anything, what's happening until it's happened.
That's a real weird way to try to have goals and then to find them.
Well, again, I think it begs clarification on exactly what we're talking about tonight when we're talking about the word politics.
You know, you mentioned like workplace, workplace stuff, working your way up the ladder, convincing a crew to toe the line, convincing people to work all the way.
Working anyone's worth any extra effort or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would suggest that for the sake of this philosophical debate, we cut that out and set it aside.
And even strictly within the terms of the politics of governance, the politics of governance.
The smallest scale we're going to go with is a municipal government.
But this is about politician politics, not politicking at the workplace, because that never, I agree with you, never in my life, when used within the context of in the workplace or in your circle of friends or socially, the phrase politicking is always viewed in a negative light.
Oh, he's politicking.
It's tantamount to political now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So within the bounds of political politics, yeah, I still believe that it does exist in a pure er form and has with any consistency?
No.
But I have personally met political figures who I honestly believe felt that they were just there to serve.
They, of course, had their own personal desire to maintain their paid elected position.
That's kind of a cornerstone of being a politician is you like the paycheck.
But as far as doing their job of being a politician, I have met politicians who honestly just take the pulse of the people who voted for them and then do what they want.
So that isn't really jumping to a conclusion and then manufacturing consent for it.
Maybe I'm just getting bogged down in semantics excessively.
Well, I mean, I think that you're going to have a tough time proving that that was what they were really up to.
You know, how do you know that they didn't?
They say that this is what the people wanted.
So that's what we did.
How did they know what the people wanted?
Right.
Well, because the people told them.
One of the cornerstones of politics is when a politician wants to get elected, they go and seek out large groups of voting blocks and they speak to that voting block and find out what they want.
And then they say, okay, I'll do that.
Vote for me and I'll do that.
The real question I'd like to ask is, can science and politics coexist?
Oh, I mean, to me, science has been, I mean, anytime anyone sees science as in their way, they work to degrade its potency, undermine trust in scientific findings.
Usually by propagandizing it, by labeling it with the word big in front of it.
Well.
Oh, oh, that's just, that's just big pharma.
Oh, that's just big oil.
Oh, that's just big geology.
Yeah, they do that, but they also do things like there's an entire subsection of our population that entirely rejects environmental science as a whole.
It's a whole section of science and it has a huge amount of data backing it up.
And they just eject it like it doesn't exist.
I live in a place that is Canada's heart and soul of that ideology.
Of that movement.
Like we had a 14-year-old girl from Finland come here.
She was a worldwide sensation because she was really smart and she was really loud and that's great.
And there were people who protested the little girl.
And I just looked around at people like, why are we protesting a little girl?
Do you really think you're going to lose your job because of what she just said?
The whole thing was ridiculous.
But they just double down and they want to believe that thing so badly that it's going to give them a better outcome if they lean harder on this side.
But science doesn't care about your opinion.
Physics is happening regardless of what you think might happen.
I try to tell people that all the time.
It's just a process.
You can't bend it.
You can't sway it.
You can't use politics against it.
You can use politics to try to get people to not trust it, but I don't think that's ever useful.
Oh, I agree completely.
We should double down on knowing things rather than trying to ignore things.
I don't know why anyone pushes for that.
I don't know anyone who doesn't believe the Earth is getting warmer.
I know people who say that maybe it's not really humans that's doing it.
And, you know, the cause, the full cause is maybe not completely known, but the Earth's getting warmer.
Like that's fact.
There's a couple of people I know that actually say that it's not actually getting warmer.
They try to pull up individual things, but this is the thing of politics.
They'll pull up NASA stuff.
Oh, you know, there's the depth of the snow in this part of, you know, Antarctica is deeper now than it was 10 years ago.
How do you explain?
Wyoming had their coldest day on record just last week.
And it doesn't matter.
The overall temperature of the entire planet as a whole is increasing.
That's just fact.
It's possible for the overall temperature of your house to increase and you to have more frost in your freezer.
It doesn't mean that it's not warmer in your house.
One place can get colder.
The fact that we have people that are trying to use a political solution to oppose science bothers me greatly.
You have to just ignore real things.
And it's easier to ignore things when it's hard to see the evidence of it right in front of you daily.
Whether the earth is warming is hard for an individual living on one part of the planet to know absolutely full on all the time.
In some places on the planet, they know it.
Like I think the people in the Middle East probably know it more than anyone.
They've had places that were over 120 Celsius every year now.
They're cooking in a way that we don't understand.
It's easier for a person to think that the Earth isn't a sphere because when you're sitting in one spot and looking at the planet, you don't see that it's a sphere.
And that's further entrenched by the fact that most people can't do the math to show that it's actually a sphere, that it's not a flat or a slightly curved bowl-shaped thing or whatever they currently say it is.
You know, most people can't just pull that out and say, oh, well, what about that?
You've obviously not looked at this.
And so that allows them to feel like no one is opposing them and that they're right.
And what they're engaged in isn't science, it's politics.
And from my view, and maybe I'm overstating it, but the idea that we have a system that can give us objective truth and that that can be undermined in any way, not just anyway, but now undermined by entire sections of our population.
To me, it scares me that politics might overwhelm science and that we might dive right in and eject things that are just absolutely true in favor of feeling good about whoever's telling us whatever they're telling us at the moment because they're the person we want to support.
If we need politician X to get rid of the last prime minister because he's bad.
So, you know, we need this guy.
But he happens to believe the earth is flat.
Well, I guess we have to believe the earth is flat in order to get rid of that last prime minister because he's terrible.
What are you going to do?
Hey, that's politics, right?
So what do you think?
Can politics and science coexist in our world today?
Well, yeah, absolutely.
I think politics and science have successfully coexisted for a really long, friggin time.
And they can quite easily coexist with the same basic tenets of separation of church and state.
The only time science and politics, I think we've got them in a sort of excessively adversarial role in our public consciousness now, primarily because of COVID-19.
Like if you think about it, prior to COVID, about the only time science was a regular topic of discussion in political circles and, you know, attacked by the demagogues was usually around issues of climate change.
Because in Western democracies, one of the cornerstones of any left-leaning party was green initiatives, being environmentally conscious, because there's a big voting bloc out there that cares about that stuff and they know that.
So they would come out in favor of that.
And their political opponents that were pro-development on the right, well, it wasn't good enough to attack their opponents.
They also had to attack the science behind the opponents.
And that whole thing boils down to the biggest thing that's wrong with politics today, which is tribalism in politics, where like you pick your camp, you pick what party you belong to, and you were an absolute dogmatic lockstep supporter of that party.
No matter what they do or who they put in charge, you tie your personal identity to that party.
And that's intentional on behalf of the people who run those parties.
They want black and white divided voting populace.
They don't want free thinking moderates.
It's a lot harder to sway them.
Yeah, exactly.
They want a nice, rabid, easily riled up core voting block that hates their opponents so much, they will always vote for the favored party just to keep the opponents out.
But like, I could go on for probably three hours on the issue of tribalism in politics on its own.
So you should maybe consider that for its own episode and we'll try and just touch it on a on a periphery basis here.
It's on the list, yeah.
But like sort of dark side politics, propaganda politics, tribal wedge issue politics has a really difficult time coexisting with science, but it has a really difficult time coexisting with anything.
It's a dogma.
It's crossing the line from government into a cult.
Cults are getting their own episode eventually too, anyway.
It was never more starkly brought to light than it was during COVID because we had this new disease that sprung up that nobody knew anything about, legitimately, because it's a brand new disease.
And the greatest minds, the greatest scientific minds of the world were busting ass to figure out what vectors it was using to get into the human body, what they could do to fight it, what measures we could take to avoid the spread.
Like you remember way back in the beginning when we weren't even sure if it was airborne or whether it lived on a medical outside of the human body.
You know, there was a period of time when even the grocers were shut down for a while because they were so petrified that just by like touching door handles and stuff, we would spread the disease and everybody would get sick.
And so then the scientists doubled down and the scientists made some observations and the scientists presented some evidence and said, hey, we should do these things.
We've advanced the theory and seen it bear fruit that social distancing, masks, regular hand washing, the bread and butter stuff that keeps prevents the COVID cold from spreading, it works on this too.
So we should do that.
And then at some point in the process, it got politicized.
It was intentionally and premeditatedly subverted by politicians for political ends.
So can they coexist?
I think they absolutely can, but I think it's the politicians that need to change, not the scientists, in order for that to happen.
Oh, yes.
Every fight that's ever been picked with science was never picked by science.
Science was just a bunch of people trying to find stuff out.
All those fights were picked by other people.
Yeah.
Although, like, there are plenty of political fights that have been picked on behalf of science that then people attempting to accomplish a political goal using science.
Yes.
No, people leaping to the defense of science because it's been conflated as part of their core political ideology.
Like the whole COVID political mania thing cuts both ways.
I saw just as much nasty, vilifying, tribalist, propagandist behavior on the left side of the alley as I did on the right, just because their end goal was perhaps marginally more noble because they were doing it from a stance of, well, we believe this because we don't want people to get sick, versus people on the right saying, well, we believe this because we believe in personal freedom.
They were both just as guilty of the same deplorable behavior, even though they were defending science to do it.
Science shouldn't need your defense.
And if you have to be insufferable to do it, we'd rather you don't.
Sorry.
Mean to offend anyone.
You're going to do it anyway.
I know it.
But again, like you have to wonder, like, I guess it turns into sort of a chicken or egg thing, like who fired the first shot, because a regular message that we heard through all of the modes of government discourse and propaganda was trust the science.
We're doing this because the scientists told us to.
We're trusting the scientists.
Trust the science.
Trust the scientists.
And that opened the door.
Like, if people wanted to argue against that, well, scientists had now been held up as a shield.
So they had to start chipping at that shield to make their point.
Oh, we can't trust those scientists because they're bot.
They're government shills.
They're part of the conspiracy now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Conspiracy is getting its own episode too, by the way.
I'm advertising for future episodes just to keep good.
Awesome.
Yeah.
The point that you mentioned at the beginning was that idea of the process of science is you make an observation, you come up with a theory to explain it, and then you test that theory by putting it rigorously under the faucet of a shower of more data and information and see if it holds up.
Whereas the idea of politicking, maybe call it politicking with like C-K-I-N-G rather than politics.
Sure.
The act of politicking is, I know what my conclusion is.
This is what I want people to agree with.
So I'm going to work backwards and feed them cherry-picked data and intentionally ignore contrary data in order to manufacture public acceptance of the conclusion that I want accepted.
And I think science and politics with a C does, can, and will absolutely coexist.
Science and politic king, C-K-I-N-G, can't.
They are the antithesis of each other.
They're going to coexist only in so much as two things can both be in existence at the same time.
That is not to imply that at any point is their coexistence going to be in any way amicable.