Posted by Sebastienne
Ben Goldacre - columnist, GP, empiricist hero of the secular left - published a column in the Guardian this Saturday: "How can you tell if a policy is working? Run a trial". In it, he lambasts UK politicians for their lack of interest in the effectiveness of the policies they propose. And he's right, as far as it goes; policies with intuitive appeal are much more likely to be accepted than policies which just happen to be effective. We might think we can increase the intuitive appeal of tried-and-tested policies by educating people (the MPs who will vote, and the public who will later vote on them) on the evidence; but I don't know if anyone has actually run a trial on this approach, so we'd better not rely on it.
There is a real problem here. It is not a trivial proposition, to convince people that their intuitions are not to be trusted - but it's an important goal that anti-oppression activists and pro-science empiricists share, although we rarely acknowledge it.
