How Does Government Listen to Scientists?

"I used to work at the Royal Society , Britain’s national academy for the sciences, and Claire Craig was then the Chief Science Policy Officer. She’s now Provost at Queen’s College, Oxford. She trained as a scientist but was quite open to learning from other disciplines, such as thinking about the cultural narratives that inform how communities understand or use science or technology. So, for example, how a culture’s myths and folklore, or how a community’s science fiction and fantasy, might influence how they respond to a new technology—or even what kinds of technology they might try to develop (to go back to your earlier point about tech moguls trying to recreate their favourite sci fi works). The main office wall in the science policy department had posters of Kurt Vonnegut’s diagrams of the shapes of stories that she’d introduced. I picked up the Frederic Jameson book from the staff library that she had curated there. How Does Government Listen to Scientists? is a book that she wrote distilling her years of experience in science policy. It helped me make the mental switch from being an academic, and kind of an idealist about how politics works, to the realities of working in policy. She explains that by the time a problem lands on the desk of government, it’s because no one else can solve it. If the free market could solve it, it would; if industry could solve it, they would, and they’d be benefiting commercially from it. So anything that lands on the desk of government is fundamentally unsolvable—and possibly expensive too. When you’re a policymaker, you have to understand that you’re going for the ‘least worst’ outcome, that there’s no outcome that is going to satisfy everyone, and that you’re working in an environment where some form of failure is almost certainly guaranteed. It’s different from being a scientist, where you might have the hope of being able to fulfill a particular vision or create something you are confident is going to be good in almost every aspect. When you’re in government, your remit is the unsolvable problems rather than just ‘the problems that haven’t been solved yet’. It’s one thing to think: ‘how can we use science and technology to build our perfect society, to build our utopia?’ It’s another thing to think: ‘how can we use science and technology to limit a particular dystopia?’ It’s a shift from idealism to pragmatism, so it’s bracing and powerful stuff. If you’re not comfortable with that mental shift, then stay on the science side and the technology side of doing pure research. But if you can make that shift, then you can work in politics because you understand that you have to live with imperfection all the time, navigating constant ambiguity and failure. And, again, that constant ambiguity and failure while trying to do something good is the bittersweet stuff of tragedy. It’s the road to hell being wide and starting at your feet. Governments all over the world had to come up with different pandemic response strategies in real time and with a very limited evidence base. Different strategies seemed to be more or less effective at different points in the development of the pandemic. At one point, Sweden seemed to have an effective policy with its light-touch approach, and then it didn’t. At one point, China did with its zero-tolerance approach, and then it didn’t. No one knew exactly what the tradeoffs were going to look like and how those would change over time, because so many of the impacts felt unprecedented for our era. It’s imperfect decision making, in very challenging circumstances. You’re more likely to be blamed for the harm you failed to prevent, than be congratulated on the harm you did prevent."