In case you haven’t been paying attention, declaring that
the world is flat is once again a thing.
Despite the fact that Greek astronomers
demonstrated that the world was more-or-less round 2,300 years ago, and that
we now have photos from space that illustrate such roundness, there are a large
number of people out there who genuinely believe that the Earth is a disc, not a ball.
I was reminded of that once again as I read a Newsweek opinion piece, “Flat Earthers,
and the Rise of Science Denial in America.”
And that piece which, in part, described the author’s
experiences at the two-day “Flat Earth International Conference,” reminded me
of what often goes on at fishery management meetings.
The author notes that, at the conference,
“Most of the presentations were designed to show that the ‘scientific’
evidence for a global Earth was flawed, and that their own ‘evidence’ for
Flat Earth was solid. Virtually all of
the standards for good empirical reasoning were violated. Cherry picking evidence? Check.
Fitting beliefs to ideology?
Check. Confirmation bias? Check…”
If that doesn’t make you think of comments frequently flung
around at fisheries meetings, you have probably attended very, very few.
“We don’t care about your science. Your science is bullcrap,”
even though the odds are quite good that such captain never took
a detailed look at the data underlying the scientific conclusions, and the odds
are even better that, if he had looked at the data, he would have been unable
to incorporate it into anything like a valid stock assessment model.
Like the Flat Earthers, all that he needed to stand by his
statement was a self-serving belief “that the ‘scientific’ evidence…was flawed.”
“My knowledge and everything else is worth a thousand times
more than…”
what the scientists have believe is true, or
“We all believe in this room all your science all your data
all your equations that you guys pull out in a frickin app are all wrong.”
But, of course, they have no objective, contrary data to
support such positions. Yet they cling to is their own, imagined “evidence,”
which they desperately want to believe, to demonstrate that the science is bad.
For them, as for the Flat Earthers, such hard-held belief,
based on the skimpiest “evidence,” is enough.
They know that “science” is merely another way to describe a conspiracy
to conceal the truth.
And, as noted in the Newsweek
opinion piece,
“The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they hold
themselves up as skeptics, but they are actually quite gullible. There is a rampant double standard for
evidence: no evidence is good enough to
convince them of something they do NOT want to believe, yet only the flimsiest evidence is required to
convince them of something that they DO want to believe.”
Thus, we hear fishermen contest the
conclusions of a peer-reviewed stock assessment, which found that the striped
bass stock is overfished and subject to overfishing, not because they have
found problems with the data, but because their friend Joey knows a guy who was fishing for tuna on Georges Bank about a year ago, and he said that
the stripers were everywhere, so that must mean that there’s not really fewer bass, but that they just all moved
offshore.
Yet such people conveniently ignore the fact that the
striped bass stock assessment no longer incorporates data from Northeast Fisheries
Science Center’s Bottom Trawl Survey, which samples offshore waters,
“due to concerns about the low proportions of positive tows.”
In other words, the trawl survey was dropped from the
assessment because it wasn’t finding enough bass offshore to yield meaningful
results—but if you’re a true believer, you still know that they’re really out there, because that guy your friend Joey knows said so.
The scientists just got it all wrong...
It’s not just fishing boat crews and other industry members
who strike such anti-science postures. I
sit on New York’s Marine Resources
Advisory Council, where one of my fellow councilors—an educated man, with a
degree from a well-respected school—refuses to accept any of the recreational
harvest data provided by the Marine Recreational Information Program, despite
the fact that
the program received a generally favorable review from a National Academy of
Sciences panel two years ago.
He merely
shrugs his shoulders and says “That’s MRIP,” while rejecting any such data for
use as a policy-making tool.
It doesn’t matter what the National Academy panel of independent
experts might have said. He doesn’t believe that MRIP is valid, and nothing as simple as a detailed
analysis is going to change his mind.
It would almost be funny if important public policy issues
weren’t involved. But, as the author of
the Newsweek piece noted,
“Science denial is too dangerous too ignore…
“…all science deniers use roughly the same reasoning
strategy. Belief in conspiracy theories,
cherry-picking evidence, championing their own experts. These are also the tactics used by deniers of
evolution, climate change, and the recent spate of anti-vaxx. How many more years before the Flat Earthers
are running for school board, asking physics teachers to ‘teach the controversy’
just as Intelligent Designers did not too many years back?”
Deniers of fishery science use the same tactics, too, and
seek seats on management bodies where they can use their anti-science bias to warp
fishery management at the state and regional level (fortunately, the Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires that all federal fishery
management decisions be based on the “best scientific information,” a standard
that can be enforced through legal action—although last year, even that standard
was briefly put in peril, when proponents
of what they called the “Modern Fish Act” tried, unsuccessfully, to amend the
law so that information provided by fishermen might qualify as “science” for
management purposes, with no requirement that such information be gathered in a
statistically valid manner).
Thus, proponents of rational, science-based fishery
management are faced with a problem: How
do they convince the science-deniers not only that the Earth is round, but that
the fish that live in Earth’s oceans should be managed with applied science,
and not just with hope and belief?
It’s a difficult job, because it turns out that facts aren’t
likely to change the science-deniers’ minds.
The author of the Newsweek
piece suggests that, instead of emphasizing data and facts,
“A better way to respond is to stop talking about proof,
certainty, and logic, and start talking more about scientific ‘values’…what is
most distinctive about science is not its method but its ‘attitude’: the idea that scientists care about evidence
and are willing to change their views based on new evidence. This is what truly separates scientists from
their deniers and imitators.”
He may be too optimistic.
At least when dealing with fisheries issues, improved estimates of
population, fishing mortality or other key values are often viewed as a chink
in the scientists’ armor, that allows the science-deniers to attack the
management process. It’s not uncommon to
hear a fisherman say something like “Last year, you told us that the population
was in good shape; this year, you say there’s a problem. Why should we believe you when you keep
changing your mind?”
One of the problems is that the deniers appear to believe that
there must be one universal, unchanging truth. They thus view changes in the underlying data,
even if such changes improve its overall accuracy, as proof that the management system
is suspect, rather than as a sign that it is working well and bettering managers' understanding of the fishery in question.
Also, as the author notes,
“When people feel threatened they retreat into their silos,
and the Flat Earth community is no different.
They do their ‘research’ by viewing a spate of Flat Earth videos on
Youtube and—now that a quorum has been reached—they go to conventions.”
There’s no doubt that many in the fisheries world feel
threatened by science-based management, for when you’ve been earning your
living on the backs of dead fish, and suddenly some scientists come along and
tell you that you’ve been killing too many, the first sound that you hear in the
back of your mind is the hiss of a deflating bank account. While you might not attend any
conventions, that hiss just might drive you to join a group of like-minded deniers, where you
can reinforce your beliefs, if not deepen your understanding, while reassuring
each other that the science is, in fact, wrong, and that fishery management is
nothing more than a “green” plot to chase fisherman off the water.
That makes the fisheries science deniers, just like the Flat
Earthers, a difficult crowd to convince.
To make any headway, the Newsweek
piece suggests,
“we need to…reclaim the notion of uncertainty as a strength
rather than a weakness of scientific reasoning.
No matter how good the evidence, science cannot ‘prove’ that climate
change is real. Or that vaccines are
safe. Or even that the Earth is
round. That is just not how inductive
reasoning works.”
So it’s probably no surprise that science cannot prove,
beyond doubt, that striped bass are overfished.
“What scientists can
do, however, is to say much more than they do about the importance of
likelihood and probability, to puncture the myth that until we have proof, any theory
is just as good as any other. Scientific
beliefs are not based on certainty but on ‘warrant’—on justification given the
evidence…When certainty is the standard, science deniers may feel justified in
holding out for proof…That certainly is an irrational standard for empirical
belief.”
Maybe so. Maybe that would work.
Maybe I’m just pessimistic.
But the next time I walk into a fisheries meeting, and a
peer-reviewed stock assessment calls for landings to be cut, I still expect
someone in the crowd to exclaim,
“Your science is bullcrap.”
And I doubt that he’ll change his mind.
He’d rather walk off the edge of the world.
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