“The scientistic attitude encourages policymakers to adopt what Hayek called a ‘pretense of knowledge,’ an overconfident, if not plainly false, belief in their own knowledge and powers of social control.” ~ Scott Scheall
“Policymakers are forever in search of causal knowledge and powers – to both know enough and be capable of bringing about specific states of social affairs – that no mortal can possess.” ~ Scott Scheall
“The perpetuation of the myth of ‘The Scientific Method’ encourages the pretense that we understand science. More to the point, it encourages the false notion that, because we understand science so well, we can always rely on the implications of a thing called ‘The Science’ as the fount of all political wisdom.” ~ Scott Scheall
“The pandemic has revealed a shortcoming in our ever more technocratic approach to addressing social problems: there are more and different kinds of problems than there are kinds of experts. The division of scientific expertise according to discipline, field, and sub-field does not encompass, much less map onto, all of the problems for which we…