“Evidence-based” has become one of the favorite buzzwords of public policy operations. Especially lefty ones.
Everything is “evidence-based”. Or, better yet, it’s “based on the science”.
Evidence-based and science-based public policy went viral, in a bad way, during the pandemic where every policy, especially lockdowns, were described as based on evidence and science. Even when the experts were no more than administrators and politicians who couldn’t tell science from Scientology.
But there’s a fundamental difference between policy and science.
The conflation of policy and science, a keystone of progressive rhetoric for at least a century, has been used for posturing and gaslighting. And there’s never been quite as much of that as during the pandemic where policy became science and science became policy.
But policy is how you achieve certain desired outcomes. There’s a science to do doing so, but just citing science doesn’t make it science.
The CDC’s flip-flops have wrecked its image even among true believers in the authoritarian expert complex. But the CDC is an arm of the government. Governments are all about policy, not some sort of pure science. The CDC, notoriously terrible at its job, was answering to a variety of political masters from elected officials to unions to internal pressure groups.
The difference between policy and science becomes obvious when we consider the CDC’s flip-flopping on masks.
These flip-flops were not “evolving with the science”, as the expert gaslighters claimed, they were policies meant to achieve a certain state of awareness and certain subsidiary behaviors from the public.
Masks were recommended to
1. Create awareness of a crisis
2. Reshape people’s behavior around other people
Masks were not recommended because
1. Availability issues initially during the pandemic
2. To encourage people to get vaccinated
None of this is science. It’s policy.
Most people are slowly waking up to the fact that they’ve been told what to do as a result of policy, not some sort of objective scientism. And they’re getting angry as their heads spin from one contradictory guidance after another.
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