Power Line’s Steve Hayward gets interviewed by RealClearPolicy about the trustworthiness of science findings. Some of his comments are of the “inside baseball” nature, probably opaque to an outsider. On the other hand, you will find his conclusion helpful, I believe.
Bureaucracies tend to become single-minded about their mission. That’s understandable; at some point, if your job is to protect the environment, you're going to be zealous about it. If your job is to fight crime, you're going to be zealous about it.
The problem is, zealots don't make trade-offs very well. I think we really see this in the environmental area where, if you're a bureaucrat, you want to extend your mission. If the regulation is “X” you want it to be “X-plus-ten” – that's progress, we think. The biases and self-interests of bureaucratic organizations come into play.
As he notes earlier, a lot of the bias in science happens in the choice of problems to study, the formulation of hypotheses to test. There is also bias in the editorial and peer review process which he describes.
For example, making accurate statements about the importance of intact family structure in understanding social pathologies, once routine, is now considered racist and hateful although the underlying facts have changed not at all.
