"Can science policy advice be disinterested?"

Bruce Smith, author of The Advisers, a book on scientific advisory committees in the U.S. government, reviews The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics by Roger A. Pielke Jr. I have found in the past that both of them were worth reading.

Apparently Pielke

identifies four major models of science advising—the pure scientist who prefers not to offer advice, the science arbiter who is objective but willfully innocent of policy realities, the science advocate, and the honest broker (his favorite) who is objective but responsive to the practical realities of policymaking—and tries to point out where each is appropriate.

Smith questions how useful these categories are, and while he is correct that it is hard to actually determine which category an advisor may fall into at a given time, I can see how the categories are useful for expository purposes.

I think the key element of Smith's critique is:

A key assumption of the book is that what is really wrong with science advising is that scientists lack a clear view of their choices and of what they are doing. Pielke seems to believe that once scientists get this straight, the rest of what needs to happen in the advising process will fall into place. I wish it were that simple.

Whether the scientists do or do not have it right is a small part of the overall problem, for in truth the scientists are bit players in this whole drama. What congressional staffers, civil servants, presidential advisers, journalists, media talking heads, and politicians at all levels do or think is far more significant.

It occurs to me that both Pielke and Smith may be right. For a scientists involved in providing science advice, a clear view of his/her choices and role may be very important. If Pielke is seeking to clarify the situation for scientists embarking on advisory services, many of whom are quite naive, that is a useful function which might have a wide audience. On the other hand, Smith seems to be suggesting that the entire system might be made to work better and that the scientific advisor's understanding is not the critical element in that improvement; that seems true to me.

One issue is why the scientific advice is requested. In my first experience with an advisory panel (many decades ago), the NIH officials that called for the panel clearly wanted a justification that they could use in asking for money. The distinguished scientists invited, who differed greatly among themselves in their ideas as to priorities for research in their field, could all agree that the field should get more money. I suspect one could have, and did, predict that outcome in advance. The advisory committee exercise was essentially ritual that had to be performed to allow bureaucratic acceptance of a foregone conclusion. Smith would be correct were he to suggest an alternative institutionalization might be more cost effective, but ritual has its place.

Of course scientists have specific knowledge that they should provide to the policy making process. Scientists chosen for advice also have devoted their lives to a field, and want to advocate for the things they care about. I think we all agree that both informing others from their specialized knowledge and advocating for their interests are good things to do. We like to differentiate between the two.

It is perhaps easier to do so in some contexts than others. Smith and Pielke take climate change as an example, and that is so complex an issue that it is not surprising that ones values and ones knowledge get intertwined.

Take a different example, that of the stem cell lines that are acceptable for federal funding under the Bush administration guidelines. Questions as to how many such lines exist and how stable they are may be more easily separated from one's value positions on the status of a human embryo than questions of the origins of climate change from ones feelings about the environment.

I do feel, however, that both the organizers of scientific advice and the givers of that advice try to identify the statements which are warranted by theory, research and scientific consensus and differentiate them from one's more general opinions.

While I am at it, we know that scientists almost always think scientific results will come more easily and rapidly than they actually do, and we know that many (perhaps most) important results are unexpected. Advice should be managed to take such human characteristics into account.