“Science, politics and truth”

The notice on the wall of the Biophysics Institute inviting to Ennio Candotti’s talk was provocative and I had to go. That was many years ago, but I still remember as if it was today.

Far from being a celebrity, Ennio was pretty well know in academia in Brazil. Italian born, the physicist got his education in Brazil and was first secretary, then advisor and finally president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) from 72 to 2007. During this time, it was part of his job to argue with politicians in the Brazilian congress for the science cause.

The room was crowded and his opening statment was alarming: “Scientists and Politicians will Never understand each other” 

In his view, that I fully support, the dialogue was impossible because of the difference in their concepts of truth. 

“For a scientist, truth is absolute based on the evidence that you have. If you can see, measure and weight this table, then this table existis” he said, using the table in which he was lean as an example. “But for politicians, truth is consensual. If it is on their best interest that the table doesn’t exist, they may agree that the table doesn’t exist and even sign a document, over the table, confirming the table’s non existence”.

That talk had a profound effect on me. After it I started to see how people in general can also create consensual truths, based on wishful thinking, many times trying to promote it to ’scientific’ truths. Many times at the expense of hard evidence.

(One of ) The problem(s) with consensual truths is that the consensus’ group, big or small, is not absolute. And other groups can reach different consensus according to their interests and create a different ‘consensual truth’. And everything becomes relative.

But, after Galileo explained ‘relativity’ and Einstein explained the ‘special’ relativity (that applies to light), we know that while some things may be relative, not everything is. Starting by the table itself.

The power of science is to use evidence to remove prejudice, bias and break through consensus to find the ‘absolute’ truth. If you find ‘absolute’ a too strong term, I may settle for ‘evidence based’ truth. Which is in fact a more appropriated term since evidence truths can change if new evidence presents itself. Or even if we find a new interpretation of the evidence. But evidence is always an ‘anchor’ since you (or the interpretation) cannot simply denny its existence.

Evidence truths can be ugly. But when we choose to built things over them, we save the time needed to reach consensus, we safeguard decisions, we simplify and speed up solutions. We reach ‘absolute truths’ (those which the amount of evidence in their favor are so massive, that it is really unlikely they are not true) faster.

It is difficult to built anything over consensual based truth exactly because, without evidence as an ‘anchor’, truth can change from one minute to another, following some new ‘momentary’ trend and dismount everything.

In the long term, evidence based truths helps everyone: even the lawyers and politicians that could benefit from consensual truths in the short term. Consensual truths helps only those whose power depends on not reaching… I was going to say absolute truths, but in fact, it is not reaching anything.
Only evidence based truths can eventually amend Brazil and bring together the people (and friends) that were brought apart by some trend momentary consensual based truth.

Originally published on LinkedIn in May 2016