1.1 Introduction and When Is Science Relevant
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Learning Goals
[Link to PlayPosit]
After this lesson, students should
- Recognize the need to distinguish facts from values in political and everyday decision-making.
- Understand that scientific expertise has utility for political decision-making.
Sometimes people think political decision-making is entirely a matter of values and opinions. However, an evidence-based scientific understanding can inform us about which policies are likely to have which outcomes. Sometimes politicians disagree not only about values, but also about facts. Scientific expertise, when the system is working effectively, can help arbitrate some of these disputes over fact, though not those over value.
- Realize that social and behavioral aspects of the world can be approached scientifically and, therefore, have relevant experts.
Definitions
| Students tend to be familiar with the distinction between facts and values. The commonest misconception is the idea that there are no facts about values. A result from a survey about values can be a matter of fact, even if its interpretation is likely to be influenced by value. A simpler example: Biden’s love of ice cream may be a value he has, but that he loves ice cream is a fact about him. |
- Facts
- Claims about the objective truth of reality. Everything that is the case. What is, descriptively, including spatial relations, causal relations, attributes of objects, etc.
- Could be either true or false.
- Values
- What is of value, important, of worth. Oughts, shoulds, etcs.
- Democracy
- A system of government wherein a society’s citizens all have input into policies.
- Cannot be said to be true or false.
- Epistocracy
- A system of government wherein a particular subset of a society—privileged by their education or other markers of expertise—decides policies.
Examples
- "Ice cream is delicious!" is a claim of value.
- "Biden loves ice cream." is a claim of fact about a value.
Context
As the first topic of the course, this lesson sets the tone by teaching the importance of science in society and political decision making. Specifically, decision making should incorporate factual knowledge offered by scientific expertise with values judgment made by the general public. We provoke a discussion on democracy vs. epistocracy and allude to processes for incorporating facts and values that will be taught near the end of the semester.
After
- 12.2 Denver Bullet Study
- Denver Bullet Study method incorporates facts and values by splitting the decision making process into two parts. Factual evaluation is done by relevant experts, while the evaluation of values is done independently by the general public.
- 13.2 Deliberative Polling
- Deliberative polling incorporates facts and values by providing a neutral and factual briefing document as well as opinions by relevant experts, while letting participants from the general public deliberate with each other in groups.
Recommended Outline
Before Class
- Review PlayPosit and discussion questions and ask faculty, Gabriel, or Emlen any questions you have.
- Prepare a presentation for the brief topic overview.
During Class
- (20 min) Do some ice breakers.
- (10 min) Go over the structure of the course.
- (10 min) Have a discussion on the sort of world the students would like to see.
- (5 min) Give a brief topic overview.
- (30 min) Have a discussion of democracy vs. epistocracy.
- (5 min) Collect questions for plenary.
After Class
- Collect answers from notetakers for the forum / plenary.
Lesson Content
Ice Breakers
The purpose of this activity is to encourage students to turn their cameras on, get comfortable speaking with each other, and start to build a sense of camaraderie and community. The first ice breaker can be done in the whole class, and then one in small groups. You can switch out for different ice breakers if you have one you prefer.
Instructions
- (10 min) Ice breaker for class: Name, major, one interesting thing you learned or experienced recently.
- (10 min) Small groups
- Ice breaker: Two truths and a lie
- Choose roles for the first two weeks: spokesperson, notetaker, jester
The students can find descriptions of each role in the class syllabus. - Use some fun way of assigning spokesperson and notetaker for the first lesson (e.g. who woke up the earliest/latest today, who has the closest birthday). The GSI should explain the purpose of these roles—the spokesperson is the one who represents the group when the group is called on, and the notetaker jots down questions and insightful comments from group members.
Review of Class Structure
GSI will quickly review the structure of the class, encourage students to read the syllabus, and answer any questions. This is in the syllabus, so this should be a quick review and encouraging students to watch PlayPosits before section and look at the syllabus. Students should be reassured that, although there’s a lot of class time and a complex structure, there is not a ton of work outside of class, there will be many opportunities for questions and review, and most students who attend regularly and pay attention do well in this class. Emphasize participation as an essential part of learning this content and the importance of the class community, even when it’s online. And make sure to leave some time for questions!
Structure of Course
- Two topics per week
- For each topic, you will:
- Watch a PlayPosit video lecture and answer the embedded questions (10-45 minutes), due 6 pm the night before section.
- Attend a 90-minute section with your GSI in which you will discuss and practice applying the ideas from the lecture (Tuesdays and Thursdays).
- Attend a 50-minute plenary session from 10 to 11 on Wednesdays and 11 to 12 on Fridays. In these, faculty will address student questions, dialogue with each other on the topic, and emphasize the most important takeaways of the topic.
- Quizzes will be from 11 to 11:30 every other week on Wednesdays.
- The time after the lesson/quiz ends to 12 on Wednesdays will be for faculty office hours and free discussion between the faculty and students.
- As noted above, there will be a short quiz every other week. In these, you will be asked to apply topics to novel contexts with multiple choice and short response questions. There's a total of 6 quizzes. Your worst two quiz grades are dropped.
- Because participation is so important, attendance contributes to your grade. You get four freebie no-questions-asked absences without losing any credit. And if you email your GSI in advance with a good reason for an absence, we will will try to get you a recording of the session(s) you missed.
- There will be two course projects:
- A short essay analyzing the use of one or two course concepts in a current news or opinion article.
- A final poster or brief presentation in which you will apply give course concepts to a question of your choice at the intersection of science and society.
Discussion of Utopia
This is a brief discussion getting students starting to think about how society is and how it might be better. You can tease the students about their utopian thinking. (Can they imagine something even better? Conversely, is it realistic?)
| Students tend to enjoy this topic and it isn't heavily discussed in the PlayPosit. Feel free to take an extra five or so minutes from the later democracy/epistocracy discussion to go into more detail on utopia if your students are enjoying it. |
Instructions
- Ask students: “Imagine the world you would love to see us reach 50 years from now. In what ways would it look different from the present? Everyone write a sentence or two in the chat but wait to hit return until the instructor’s signal.” (This is called a Waterfall: This way everyone writes without being biased by others’ responses).
- Ask a few students to expand on their written response from the chat, addressing: “For those things that you described, how much would achieving them depend on experts vs. how much would it depend on shifts in values/priorities?” Did you see any utopian ideas in the chat that surprised you?
- Zoom Poll: To achieve your ideal world, is what’s needed primarily a change in knowledge or a change in values?
- Waterfall: If you said knowledge, what kinds of experts would you need to work towards your goal?
- Waterfall: If you said values, do you think experts or knowledge would also be needed? If so, what kinds?
Brief Topic Overview
The purpose of this activity is to review the basic ideas of democracy vs. epistocracy, facts vs. values (as covered in the PlayPosit, but since it’s the first day we can’t expect all students to have watched it), in order to set them up for a productive discussion in later activities.
Instructions
- GSI presents:
- Claims of fact vs. claims of value (give a few examples).
This is usually very straightforward. Claim of fact: All sheep are black. Claim of value: It is more important to safeguard public health at the expense of the economy. Claim of fact about values: Saul's favourite ice-cream flavour is chocolate. Tricky: Fox News is a propaganda outlet. (How one chooses to define "propaganda" involves values judgment.) - Democracy as government by the people, typically representative democracy, vs. epistocracy as government by experts (also called technocracy).
No need to go into detail about how they’re manifested in practice, we’ll have students discuss that in the next activity.
- Claims of fact vs. claims of value (give a few examples).
Discussion of Democracy vs. Epistocracy
The purpose of this activity is to really get the students thinking about the roles science does and not play in decision making. We give some recommended points to try and bring up. But, this discussion should be open ended so as to facilitate discussions and questions that can be carried over to plenary.
Instructions
- Zoom Poll: Which would you prefer to live in, a democracy (government by the people) or an epistocracy/technocracy (government by experts)?
- Democracy
- Epistocracy
- (15 min) Small group discussion
- Why did you give the answer you did to the Zoom poll? What are the benefits of your choice? What are the costs/limitations of your choice?
- In what ways is the current U.S. political system epistocratic and in what ways democratic? What aspects have been successful? What are limitations/problems/failures of our system? In what ways is the U.S. governed by people who are neither representative nor experts?
- Optional: What about other countries with which you're familiar?
- (7 min) Discuss the questions above in the whole class. GSI should try to make sure as many as possible of the following points are mentioned:
Challenges of Democracy: What if people are misinformed? How are minorities protected from the potentially oppressive will of the majority? What of people who don't have a vote such as foreigners and children? Challenges of Epistocracy: How do we decide who the experts are? How do we decide what they should be experts about? What's to prevent the experts from having systematically different interests from the majority and imposing those interests on them? Democracy in Current U.S. System: It is a representative democracy with unequal representation due to gerrymandering and the Senate, which gives more power to sparsely populated states than they have people. Representation also decreases the extent to which the US is a pure democracy, insofar as representatives are guided by interests beyond those of their constituents such as funding to get re-elected. Epistocracy in Current U.S. System: Politicians are partly guided by experts, including scientific consultants and public servants with accumulated expertise on political matters such as those in the State Department and CIA. Many decisions are delegated to other federal agencies like the FDA and CDC. Neither Epistocracy nor Democracy: In some respects the U.S. is an oligocracy/plutocracy, with a few unelected non-experts and companies with lots of money having way more power than most other citizens through lobbying and funding political campaigns. This is especially true since the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which ruled in 2010 that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections.
- (8 min) Return students to small groups to discuss the following questions: If you were to create a government from scratch, in to what extent and in what ways would it be epistocratic and democratic?
- How would your system come to a decision on a new healthcare plan?
- How would you deal with disagreement about facts? How would you deal with disagreement about values? Why are they different?
- How might your system go awry? How would you go about minimizing such problems?
- How different is your system of government from the one we have? How could we get there from where we are now?
- How can expertise on psychology, decision-making, and society help us make better decisions as a society?
Introduction to Ed Discussion
The purpose of this activity is introduce students to the Ed Discussion forums, to get them to set up accounts, and to have them start using it right away to share and react to course topics.
Instructions
- Give students link to our Ed Forum, have them sign up.
- Have students go into their section's thread on Science in a Democracy and post:
- One lingering question, observation, worry, or reason for optimism that they might like to hear the faculty talk about in the plenary.
- One response to a classmate's post.
Changemaker
Consider the Ladder of Inference. Why is it integral to distinguish between fact and value? Where do both of these fall on the Ladder and what role does the reflexive loop have? If you need a quick refresher on the Ladder of Inference, go here: https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-ladder-of-inference/