Thursday, Sept. 21, 2017
In this farewell lecture, Jonathan Samet—outgoing director of the USC Institute for Global Health—addressed the changing paradigm of evidenced-based decision-making. Science advances knowledge, chiseling at areas of ignorance and reducing uncertainties, which may slow evidence-based decision-making. With regard to environmental pollution, for example, great progress has been made as research has documented the damage done to human and ecosystem system health by man’s activities, motivating action and guiding interventions. However, over recent decades, the paradigm of evidence-based decision-making has been increasingly threatened as powerful stakeholders, with seemingly threatened interests, have undermined scientific evidence by creating doubt and even offering personal and collective beliefs as an equivalent basis for decision-making. The strategy of doubt creation can be traced to actions of the tobacco industry initiated as the evidence mounted showing that smoking causes cancer and other diseases; the same tactics have spread, particularly around environmental pollutants. More challenging is the emergence of outright dismissal of evidence and its replacement by belief, whether consistent with or counter to what is known.
Jonathan Samet
Director, USC Institute for Global Health
Distinguished Professor and Flora L. Thornton Chair, Department of Preventive Medicine
University of Southern California
Referenced readings & documentaries from the talk:
- The Trump Administration and the Environment — Heed the Science in The New England Journal of Medicine by Jonathan M. Samet, M.D., Thomas A. Burke, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Bernard D. Goldstein, M.D. (2017)
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
- Sidelining Science Since Day One by Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (2017)
- Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment (2009)
- Merchants of Doubt documentary by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2014)
- Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein (2012)
- Doubt Is Their Product by David Michaels (2009)
- The Bottom Line or Public Health: Tactics Corporations Use to Influence Health and Health Policy, and What We Can Do to Counter Them edited by William H. Wiist (2010)
- The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols (2017)
- The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Lawrence Otto (2016)
- Examining the mistrust of science: Proceedings of a workshop—in brief by National Academies of Science (2017)
- Major Gaps Between the Public, Scientists on Key Issues by Pew Research Center (2015)
- Many Americans are skeptical about scientific research on climate and GM foods by Pew Research Center (2016)
- Public confidence in scientists has remained stable for decades by Pew Research Center (2017)
- Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science by Dave Levitan (2017)\
- Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin by Cornelia Dean (2017)
- A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age by Daniel Levitin (2016)
- Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-truth Era by Daniel Levitin (2017)
This talk was part of the 2017-2018 USC Global Health Lecture Series and was hosted by the USC Institute for Global Health. A livestream video version of the talk was posted to Facebook. A regular lecture video will soon be embedded here on this page.
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