Authority-Driven or Data-Driven?

 "Because I said so"

"That's just the way we do things around here"

"He's the boss - so..."

 

Always disliked those expressions.  I was brought up to be more suspicious than trusting of those in authority positions.  Better to follow where the data leads you than where a 'leader' take you...  That's why studying science always pays dividends no matter what walk of life you eventually find yourself in.

When observing people, I am dismayed by how frequently the argument that simply sounds good or feels right will win.  In physics, I was trained to be suspicious of your intuition and look for confirmation from the experiments and the actual facts.

Years ago a friend of Irene's from MIT was visiting while he was in medical school.  We asked him how he liked it and he said that while he was excited to enter the profession, the education he was receiving wasn't all that great.  "They are just teaching us how to pattern match and to make associations - they are not teaching us how to think like my engineering & science courses did at MIT."  Interesting distinction, huh?

My buddy Erec recently forwarded a fascinating article:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

In it, a historical detective story plays out in which the who-dunnit is the (formerly) commonly accepted standard in the medical community that only particles smaller than 5 microns qualify as airborne.  (hence, droplets containing COVID-19 were, for so long, misidentified by the WHO as not being airborne).  The jarring collision between scientists that study airborne particles in general (who knew the 5 micron cut-off for being airborne was overly low) and the medical community that accepted the handed down cut off of 5 microns sets off the chase.  Long story short, the atmospheric scientists who were data-driven were correct (as we all now know) but the medically trained professionals were slow to pivot away from their 'accepted' cut off value of 5 microns.  Follow the data, people!

 

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_curve )

This whole thing remind me of Lakoff's family-as-a-metaphor-for-government argument:  Conservatives think families should be authority driven whereas liberals believe in the nurturing parent model.  Hence their preferred style of governing. 

I prefer my families nurturing, my governments liberal, and my facts served with a side of data; thank you very much.