The pandemic experience has reinforced another fact I've long taken for granted, this time concerning the attitude of my fellow Bostonians as well as our immediate neighbors - when it comes to certain questions, we find the experts and follow their science. I've found that this has been a reliable approach throughout much of the pandemic, providing an appropriate basis for educated guesswork on top of a solid foundation of necessary public health guidelines. Again, as I noted above regarding STEM, this is not something I've given much thought; I've always taken for granted the concept of following the science.
But as case numbers dropped over the past couple of months, I've sensed a bit of a wobble in how this is translating into policy. A friend who lives in a nearby town summed it up when he recounted a heated public debate (over Zoom, of course) in which local officials were accused of "inventing their own science". I think there is a good point here - the CDC's springtime recommendation to rollback restrictions for outdoor settings was based not just on the accumulating data regarding the effect of vaccinations but also the long-suspected safety of being outdoors. And yet, in this particular town, the outdoor mask mandate remained in place longer than perhaps any other municipality in the commonwealth.
I sense something of a contradiction. This town is the type of place that I assume would value STEM education, but this recent anecdote suggests that it may also be a place where following the science proved to be a better fit for bumper stickers rather than governing principles. As I thought about this over the past couple of weeks, I realized that much of the problem here is the way I framed the situation. There is a temptation to suggest that the officials were indeed "inventing their own science", but I think they would argue that the matter was more about a dispute over interpreting the science rather than a challenge to the premise of following the science. You could say that the science is hard to follow, but the more precise summary is that the science is never certain, leaving room for interpretation. In a sense, what the situation exposes is a handful of nuances that are being glossed over in a rush to choose sides, with the most important of these being a tendency to conflate science and certainty, particularly whenever we invoke the idea of following the science.
The problem is that when we talk about following the science in the abstract, we do so with the conviction that a certain combination of elements such as intellect, data, and methodology will point us to the right answer for a given question, but in reality we often have to reach a conclusion before the science can reveal the correct answer. The problem is that when town officials commit to following the science, we dismiss the absurdity of describing policy with buzzwords. The problem is that when you think about it, following the science is the easy answer to hard questions, or perhaps the vague answer to precise questions, based on some incredible fantasy that the right answer will always reveal itself just in time, like assuming that the mythical bridge will appear the moment we realize we need to cross it. If it were so easy to follow the science, everyone would do it.
When I put my STEM background in the context of the past fifteen months, I realize that my education was in some ways insufficient preparation for following the science because the coursework was always grounded into a foundation of certainty. Even subjects such as probability - which is in some ways the elementary study of uncertainty - imposed the illusion of certainty through principles such as confidence intervals and p-values. My hazy recollection is that STEM education kept uncertainty out of sight and out of mind until I reached college, and even then it was quite unusual to acknowledge that most of our study operated within a certain margin of error. It may be wise to consider the importance of developing a more intricate curriculum for working with uncertainty, which could address certain common problems - if we are too hasty to impose needless certainty, we risk moving forward with careless assumptions, which are often discovered amidst the rubble of previously inconceivable accidents; if we do not learn how to reach a conclusion despite incomplete information, we risk freezing at the moment of necessary decision, which may explain the prevalence of status quo bias. Somewhere between those two examples is perhaps the most important skill of all - knowing how to incorporate new information into an existing framework of uncertainty, which is the logical progression of going from following the science to leading the science.
One of the many lessons of this pandemic will be the way it reinforced an obvious fact of life - there is only the certainty of uncertainty. The question of how we deal with ambiguity is in some ways the question that has always defined our lives, with the pandemic bringing this fact to new prominence. There is no doubt to me that STEM education is among the most important aspects of ensuring the public can meet this challenge - as I said, I take its importance as a given - because the application of knowledge is often the first step toward dealing with life's various unknowns. But I am curious about how students will learn the complimentary skills to supplement STEM's technical foundation, particularly in terms of leading through uncertainty. There is only so much value in knowing how to build a bridge, and of course there is little purpose to it if no one goes to the other side. The past year has shown once again that the problem facing science is not about how to best apply its accumulated knowledge, but rather how to move us forward in the face of its perpetual uncertainties. It seems that even the best and brightest in the field, who were able to cook up a vaccine for a disease that didn't exist two years ago, have no answers for seemingly simpler questions like "how can we get this town to understand that there is never going to be enough certainty to ensure perfect health after the end of its outdoor mask mandate?"
Some suggest that our scientific knowledge doubles every decade or so, which is a hopeful observation - the seemingly catastrophic problems on the horizon may have solutions that exceed the reach of today's feeble imaginations. But it's not so hard to imagine a future where we have the solution yet don't use it; I think the scientists have proven a hypothesis or two about certain problems, but the problems persist. It sometimes feels like I am encountering daily variants on the age-old joke - have you heard the one about the country that turned off its brain? It's the one where cigarette companies stay in business, or where elected officials spend their time making it harder to vote. It's the one where people can shoot each other because a bunch of slaveowners once wrote that owning a gun was one of the ten rights. It's not so hard to imagine crashing into a wall some can see from today, thirty years away; the situation would be familiar to me for its resemblance to all I know, the present. It would be a lingering symptom of a society suffering from a peculiar ailment - a preference to follow rather than lead, to value any instruction expired or otherwise that excuses us from the burden of generating a single original thought. It's as if we are collectively unable to see where we are going because we're squinting at yesterday's instructions, remaining loyal to yesterday's ideas, preferring the certainty of the past to the questions of the future. We want to cross bridges when we get there, but we haven't accepted that the bridge won't be there unless we start building. It's as if we forgot that sitting at the world's steering wheel means we need to set the bar a little higher than merely being followers. It's time to have a look around so we can see where we are, figure out where we are going, and commit to leading the way.
