 I finally got a friend who's a chef to critique my cooking, and she told me to use more spices. I have to say, everything's tastier now. It really was sage advice. Funk is a show about all sorts of different subjects, and I often find myself in need of expert guidance when I'm in over my head in some unfamiliar field, but it can sometimes be weirdly difficult to get a straight answer from people who know a lot about something. You may have had the experience of trying to convince someone to relax and be frank about their domain of expertise, rather than vaguely informative in a sterile, non-committal way. So what's the deal with Ayn Rand's philosophy? Well, it's kind of its own thing. She didn't really think much of previous philosophers and sort of, oh, I'm not a Rand fanboy or anything. You can just give it to me straight. Oh, well, most philosophers think that it's trash. Sometimes, this sort of obfuscation can be chalked up to the nuanced way that people who know a lot about a subject think about it. A lawyer might not be able to answer a question like, is this unconstitutional with a simple yes or no, because the situation is just too complicated to sum up with a one-word answer. There's also the practice of hedging in academic language, where any unqualified statement is an invitation for nitpicking and technical objections. But sometimes, a simple straightforward answer to a question exists, apparent to anyone with a background in the field. And it's not immediately obvious why an expert in a position to give advice would withhold that information from someone who's begging to be informed. In their 2008 essay, Recognizing Rhetoric in Healthcare Policy Analysis, Jill Russell and colleagues used some famous or infamous philosophical tools to give us something of an answer. The way they see it, when we're talking about science and policy, we usually frame it as a binary relationship between facts and decisions, what they call naive rationalism. Scientists go off somewhere and discover facts, and those facts tell us what we should do. The shy reluctance we see in solicited expert advice is confusing according to this model. If the role of an expert is simply to summarize the facts and what they say ought to be done, it doesn't make any sense that they'd hold back when invited to do so. The authors assert that naive rationalism is an incomplete picture because it leaves out the motivations, values, and backgrounds of the individuals participating in that process. That facts and policy can't be abstracted away from the specific character of the humans involved. When a scientist chooses a hypothesis to test, that decision is informed by all sorts of squishy, non-scientific things. What funding is available, what the scientist finds interesting, what sorts of causal explanations they can imagine, what they think they can publish, all of which vary significantly depending on who they are, where they come from, their culture, their values, and so on. Even if we could assume a perfect, unbiased scientific process after the selection of a hypothesis that gave us an unambiguous true answer, the questions that end up getting asked are significantly influenced by subjective factors. We can clearly see this effect at work in highly controversial subjects, where the same question will be asked repeatedly if anyone finds the first answer unsatisfactory. It's hard to get researchers to replicate studies about things like biology or psychology, but when it comes to gun control or the behavioral effects of violent media, why don't you check again just to be 100% sure? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Expectations, framing, attention, interpretation, all sorts of important facts of the scientific fact-finding process are inextricably entangled with who's doing and parsing the science. The other side of the naive rationalist science-policy dynamic is even more fraught. You can collect all the data you want, maybe discovering a large number of true things about the universe, but it can only ever tell you what is the case, not what should be done. For example, the essay mentions a rigorous research finding that silly-looking padded undergarments reduced the likelihood of older people suffering a serious hip injury in a fall. This was taken as clear evidence that the elderly in care facilities should be mandated to wear padded knickers. But when this policy was announced, many of the employees in those facilities refused to follow it, because forcing adults to wear silly looking underwear just so they won't hurt themselves was seen as a violation of their dignity. Knowing facts can help to predict what the outcomes of a particular policy might be, but deciding which outcomes deserve attention and which we ought to pursue is always the result of a very subjective value judgment. Russell and her co-authors suggest that the main things missing from the naive rationalist view of evidence and policy can be summed up as rhetoric. Now, for many people, rhetoric is a four-letter word when it comes to evidence-based decision making, a perverse distortion of facts to mislead and manipulate others. But as we've seen, the facts that get discovered and the decisions made with those facts are both heavily influenced by subjective factors, and understanding the rhetorical framing around them is a good way to figure out what role those factors play. It may be uncomfortable to think of a model of evidence-based policymaking as having an intrinsic rhetorical element, but the authors assert that we get a lot more out of our analysis if we consider it explicitly. We can examine how policymakers are defining the problems that need to be solved. Are we collecting data to fix high crime rates or high unemployment rates, high abortion rates, or high rates of unwanted pregnancy? It undercuts the idea that enough fact-gathering can eliminate all uncertainty about policy decisions, emphasizing the huge gap between knowing and acting. It gives us room to think about assumptions of value, responsibility, morality, and so on. And relevant to our original question, it gives us a new criterion to think about the relationship between experts and decision makers. Expert advisors are in a tricky position when it comes to the rhetorical nature of their work. Convincing someone to follow a certain course of action is already hard, but the whole reason the expert is being consulted is because they have access to certain ways of looking at the world that decision makers don't have. They can summarize their point of view in a number of ways, but in order for it to be meaningful to their audience, they're always going to be leaving some important bits of what they know out of the message, and what they choose to include and exclude can make all the difference in how their audience receives their advice, and what they ultimately choose to do with that information. For example, take a doctor trying to convince someone to give up drinking soda for breakfast. Unloading every minute detail of the pancreas and insulin and blood sugar and diabetes and every other medical fact that the doctor can marshal in support of their recommendation is likely to leave the patient glassy-eyed and unreceptive. The message of soda for breakfast bad will likely be stored alongside other silly things that doctors gripe about, like not getting enough exercise or enough sleep. A scared, straight approach might work, limiting the explanation to necrosis of the feet and possible amputation, but depending on the quality of the performance, it might make the patient feel attacked or even anxious about going to the doctor in the future. Again, a naive rationalist might just bulldoze over these aspects of the scenario, saying, we did a test, the number's too high, the patient should stop drinking soda for breakfast. But by including rhetoric in our analysis, we're invited to ask questions about who we're trying to convince and why we're convincing them. Who is this person? Someone who doesn't think that it's weird to have a Coke with their pancakes. Why is their blood sugar so high? Well, that's certainly part of it. But the United States also puts an incredible amount of sugar in everything and has a cultural norm of drinking carbonated syrup water with two out of three meals. What is the doctor trying to do with this information? Maintain or improve the patient's quality and longevity of life? Does the enjoyment the patient gets from drinking soda for breakfast outweigh the health risks they take on by doing so? I'm not sure. Maybe we should ask them and find out. With that more rhetorically sensitive mindset, the doctor is in a better position to act as a productive bridge between the facts as they understand them and policy suggestions. Maybe they can ask how the patient would feel about cutting back on breakfast soda or maybe keeping it and cutting out sugar in other ways. Whether they're aware of the potential problems they might face if they continue, both for themselves and for the people who might have to take care of them if they can't walk anymore. Importantly, this isn't a distortion or softening of the truth to manipulate someone into some behavior. It's not lying. It's communication and decision-making with a sensitivity to the inherently rhetorical nature of that process. This helps to explain the reluctance of experts to drop the hammer whenever they have an opportunity, like why a philosopher might not come right out and say, Ayn Rand's philosophical contributions are laughable. If someone actually wants more information, they can always ask for it, but if they're put off or offended by some assertion, regardless of how well the evidence supports it, the rhetorical part of the equation breaks down, leaving the experts scrambling to rebuild trust. As annoying as it can be to coax a straight answer out of a specialist, if they're actually interested in helping people make good decisions in accordance with the facts that they know, it's kind of the game that they have to play. Being right and knowing things is important. Picking good policy is important, but without the consideration of rhetoric, they're both kind of useless. Do you find Russell et al's model of the role of rhetoric in health care policy compelling? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.