Efficiency

I grew up treasuring efficiency. I wanted the remote-controlled car that lasted longest, not the flashiest one (yes, I realise that's not necessarily the most efficient, but from a child's point of view in which charging is not a cost it is. It gave me the most time for each 'play'). I wanted games which I'd use a lot. And once I had something I used it. I was even known to choose sweets based on how long they took to eat, since there was no point in the expensive sherbet dips which took 2 seconds to eat.
It was an essential feature of who I was. Maybe that's why I turned to science; the concept of parsimony is simply requiring theoretical efficiency. I was good at efficiency. When we ran around the mountains to reach various markers I planned the route. No other group took our route, and we won comfortably (also due to running the 26 miles rather than hiking).
When we spent two lessons in geography not learning about either tectonics or flooding in Bangladesh, and tried to guess from maps where to put a big city for best resource use, or how to link a number of cities in the best network, I was almost interested in geography. Nowadays we have computer programmes that do this (via iterative methods: no-one's found a programme to solve this better), or else we use slime mould.
As I grew older, we got into more complex problems. When we were asked how we'd guess a fraction if we could only be told that it was higher or lower, a load of people were stumped because they didn't understand the question. One guy said he'd go up in 0.1 intervals. He was thinking of ruling out each decimal in turn on a calculator display screen. I rolled my eyes. I would always start with 0.5, then halve the possibilities each time. It needs fewer guesses, which saves time.

Enough of the background. You can all see that fewer guesses is a good thing if, for example, it's an integral part of a computer programme. We don't want to spend three times as long watching our computers process things because the programmes are inefficient. Efficiency is hugely important.
Why do we have markets? We have markets because, we're told, they're the most efficient way to distribute goods and services. History shows us that all alternatives that have been tried (at a state level) are indeed distinctly worse. Hooray for efficiency! I can buy what I want cheaply because everyone else wants one cheaply too.

So let's look at housing. Yes, it's a bit of a jump in subject. This country's housing stock is hugely inefficient, requiring the architectural intelligence and insight of a chimpanzee. We have the ability to design buildings that need neither air conditioning nor heating, because they create and use draughts and sunlight.
Instead we stick a load of bricks together (or perhaps embed some steel in some concrete and encase it all in glass) and call it modern. Spanish haciendas and the old stone churches needed more ingenuity!
I've mentioned the incredibly backward nature of housing before. It amazes me that in the modern world we have the ability to save resources (both natural resources and money: heating or air conditioning are a large proportion of running costs for most buildings) but we don't use them. It hurts deep inside. Efficiency, I love you much too much (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcH-qRUvGlQ).

Well, I've clearly got a problem with housing. Thankfully, technology is used so much more in other industries, like... motoring?
I'm an efficient driver. In fact, when I started to learn, I was told that I was being dangerously efficient. I would coast everywhere, and we are told that it's best to have the engine engaged in order to have more control (and prevent safety mechanisms locking the steering wheel). I only really started leaving the engine engaged when my instructor told me that engine braking uses less fuel than an idling, disengaged engine (and saves brake wear). I love efficiency! Not for me the thrills of over-revving just for the sound, nor speeding right up to the junction only to brake hard.
We can make engines that run 40 mpg. We can even make vehicles that run 80 mpg. We can make vehicles so efficient that I could do the Oxford-Cambridge-London circuit with a quarter of a tank (rather than the half that I did use). We can fit more people into vehicles, and we even have specialised vehicles, called buses and trains, designed to do just this.

But do we? No.

Europeans are better at it than the wasteful Americans, who, despite needing to travel further, prefer their cars and engines huge and hugely wasteful. Not for me a money-saving, petrol-saving (gas-saving, for those of you not up with the hip lingo), world-saving vehicle. I'll waste my money on destroying the world, thank-you very much. I like the place that much. Well, with people like that around, I can sympathise.

We spend fortunes on paint jobs and bodywork, on getting the latest model and cleaning. Is any of this for efficiency? Do we improve the bodywork for better aerodynamics? Do we see that the latest model can squeeze out an extra few miles every day?
Do we do all this for comfort? Does the next model have a reclining, cushioned chair but our old one just the hard wooden seat? Sometimes convenience might play a part: a new CD player, better air conditioning, new upholstery, a gearbox that doesn't stick on 5th, but mostly this is all for one thing: style.
We waste money because we're buying respect. I don't know from whom these people are buying respect, because I can't see the reasons for admiring desperation and waste.

In fact, the more look around many industries, the more waste we see. People buy guzzling engines, cheap light bulbs, inefficient homes and refrigerators, endless new clothes etc. I can't really complain about some effects of fashion, like bars that charge as much for a measure spirits as the whole bottle costs. It's frustrating if people I know want to go there 'because it's nice', but it's a different issue.
This drive to waste is an inherent quality of capitalism. This is hardly a new observation: we've had complaints about consumption and consumerism for decades. Why does capitalism value short-term interests?
Firstly, the mobility of capital, and the nature of the stock market, means that at any one moment investors want to see an immediate improvement in stock values. They can sell when they want, and invest elsewhere, so if they have to wait, they won't.
Secondly, people have problems with future-discounting. They don't buy a product that costs twice as much and will last ten times as long. Having wealth now is given disproportionate value over wealth in the future. Maybe this is a psychological trait we have because of the nature of nature: life is nasty, brutish, uncertain and short. However, we don't live in nature any more, and life is more dependable. You can depend on regretting frittering your money away pointlessly.
Thirdly, at the intermediate level, companies have no incentives to prioritise long-term plans. Companies are run by individuals. They need make an immediate, individual impact, in order to be promoted (or not get fired). They need to get things done now. If you judge people on a month's results, but it takes a year to form a good relationship with a customer through friendly and efficient provision of follow-up services, then you'll have very pushy and unfriendly staff. CEOs can sack hordes of staff to cut costs and leave the company before it runs itself into the ground.
Of course, not all capital is as mobile. Those who can't keep up lose. Private investors and ponderous pension funds invest for the longer-term, fighting the other pressures to short-term considerations. When short-term considerations are given priority, long-term investors lose, along with everyone who has long-term interests: the workforce, customers (whose customer service might suffer if a company fails) and related business that work with that company (and have invested in future business). And who gets their money out first when a company goes under? Is it done under a length-of-investment basis, so that those who put their money in first get something? No, because that might lead to pyramid schemes (even though these are outlawed separately). Is it those with business relations? No, it's the big lenders. It's the people who invest short-term and could have bought the debt the day before. So there's even more reason that big banks with short-term investment outlooks thrive. We even have supercomputers buying and selling within fractions of a millisecond of each other. That hardly seems like a useful activity. The big banks make money, and we need to ask ourselves where this money comes from. Is it enough to say 'well, they pay taxes, so it's alright' (leaving aside their ingenious tax avoidance schemes which become so much more worthwhile when done on behalf of enormous amounts of capital)? If they're a tax on business itself, it's no good to allow it because some of the money goes to the exchequer. When businesses fail because of stock market games, employees and medium lenders lose out. When a stock-market investor makes money, it must come from somewhere. Do we, as a society, think that the supposedly more efficient distribution of capital is worth this tax of greed that costs billions of pounds?

That's enough getting side-tracked. The point is that capitalism is geared for as short-term an outlook as possible. This is partly because people are that way too. But we expect our societies to be run with some consideration for the future. So government needs to step in and impose long-term considerations. Not just environmental externalities, but incentives for people to make sensible long-term decisions.
We wouldn't be in a mess if people actually cared about efficiency and sustainability. Capitalism can never fully value efficiency of the sort I'd naturally want to value, because efficiency gains in resource management will always be outweighed by efficiency in resource consumption. Why make it stretch further when it's cheaper to use more?
The only time capitalism can value efficiency is when there's nothing left to consume. By it's nature it can't account for finite resources until they are gone, which is the height of stupidity. We need a hefty penalty on taking things that can't be replaced. Not just an environmental penalty because most of these things generate pollution, but a penalty that takes into account the incredible externalities of depriving everyone in the future of using that good for any and every possible future use.
Since we don't even know all the possible future uses of any good, the penalties need to be large to allow for possible very useful uses. That's efficiency. Why is it good to burn as much as possible now? If they knew what underlies modern economies, would most people really accept the sort of nihilism that says the future has no rights and that destroying the planet now is acceptable if it gets us better lives for a day or two?

I want to see futuristic houses where the draughts are treasured parts of the architecture. I want to see a world where the amazing insights in mathematics are applied to everyday problems; where we travel in electric cars and have oil left to make plastics. But long-term visions require planning, and if you mention planning, you raise the dread shadow of state-planning and control, feared before anyone even sees what it actually looks like.

So we're stuck with the belief that out of chaos comes order. It's true; evolution proves the tautology that things that best survive survive best. Until a shock, like running out of resources, or meeting something new. Evolution shows that the order from chaos is only responsive, and never predictive. The dodo, the dinosaurs, the kiwi... there are endless examples of the losses incurred by the 'it'll work out without interference' attitude.
But not bothering to anticipate the future is incredibly inefficient. If we only ever respond, we'll always lag behind, dragged along by the forces we create. We need to get cleverer. We need efficiency.

Where can we find it? State planning is dead, a catastrophic failure, like the introduction of the cane toad. An impossibility that is too complex ever to work. Wait! What? We don't understand the problem well enough, so we dismiss it, but when it comes to problems like what to do when the resources run out we're told 'we'll solve it, even though we haven't yet'. I detect some bias in the levels of optimism.

As it happens, I think we should have great optimism about state interventions. The cane toad was a failure in adjusting complex market-like systems, but there have been hundreds of successful instances of biological control since then. Our understanding improved, and so did our success rate. Biology is leading the way. We just need economists and politicians to follow.

Equality

The following post is an amalgamation of some responses I made to an interlocutor who was promoting the doctrine of equality.

The idea that we can dismiss all characteristics as irrelevant to a person's worth is a circular argument. We start of with the supposition that everyone is of equal worth, and then use this premise to discard any factor that might make people of different worth, and then finally conclude that everyone is of equal worth.

The statement that everyone is of equal worth is false. There is obviously no practical justification for such a statement, so we turn to moral justification. I can't think of any moral premise that can lead us to the conclusion that 'everyone is of equal worth' except by arbitrarily assuming this to be so.

This assumption leads to some interesting conclusions. If everyone deserves the same amount of life satisfaction, then people like myself who are not particularly excitable or happy deserve far more resources than those who provide these things for themselves; or, in contrast, people like myself who are never depressed deserve less simply because of who we are.

Similarly, a hunter who catches three rabbits for every one rabbit another catches is in effect being told that his rabbits are of less value if both get the same outcomes. That's hardly fair treatment.

Finally, ability is not simply inherent to some people, but is multiplicative with effort. If I make the effort to achieve more, giving me the same reward is telling me that effort is worthless. If everyone deserves the same outcomes as everyone else, we are telling people that character and virtue are worthless. This is in stark contrast to many moral theories, whose main aim is to justify the labelling of virtues as virtues.

I know that invoking Karl Marx will make some people automatically disagree, but he agreed with me:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Marx is saying that we can have equal rights or equality, but not both. If try to change the natural differences in ability, desire and need then we will treat people very unequally, which would contravene a doctrine of equal rights and equal worth in the eyes of the law. I won't touch further on the idea of taking into account people's subjective wants and desires in order to try to give everyone the same amount of life satisfaction. There are enough problems with that for a post on its own.

People are not practically equal. This is an undeniable fact (as long as you accept anything about reality at all). If we grant them equal moral worth then we make sure that we don't have universal rules that specifically grant more rights or punishment to a pre-defined group of people. That is the essence of giving everyone equal worth: that all are equal in the eyes of the law (to start with).
If we start dealing in resources, rather than simply moral rights such as which actions a person can and cannot take, we move into defining material worth. If we are defining material worth, we cannot escape the fact that people are not materially(/practically) equal.
I refuse to accept that equal moral worth necessitates a jump to enforcing equal material worth. Moral worth is about not denying a person a place on a bus simply because of skin colour. Material worth is unconnected. If a person cannot pay for the bus ride, then skin or not he doesn't get a ride.
If someone is so materially lacking that he is unable to fulfill basic moral rights, such as voting, getting public services that are theoretically available to all and so on, then these things are not available to all, despite the moral contention that they should be, and so our society has passed laws to ensure that they are more accessible. This requires material investment, but it is not a statement of material worth.

A lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction comes from the equation in people's minds of material and moral worth and the observable differences in material worth. The solution is not to attempt to make everyone of equal material worth despite the manifest injustices that would be involved, nor simply to state that it's a theoretical goal that can never be achieved (what a system of morality that would be, that states that the world is immoral, even before any free agent has taken his first action!).
The solution is to accept that it is fallacious to link material and moral worth. If we can expunge this foolish notion from people's heads a great many aspects of life would be avoided. Things like the hero worship of rich men, the hesitance to challenge and stand up to the old and established, the deference to irrationality because it's spoken by a successful businessman... all these things are partly caused by foolish people linking moral worth to other factors. A simple excision of the fallacy of 'the appeal to authority' from the world would be a nice start, including removing the use of (and need for) endless references to old philosophers (like Karl Marx).

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?

is the refrain of the Peasants' Revolt (of 1381). These people were not arguing about whether they ought to receive as much life satisfaction as everyone else. They were simply stating that 'Jack's as good as his master', not in terms of material worth, but in rights. They wanted to be able to travel to different farms and get paid what they could get (because labour was in short supply after the plague), rather than be constrained by area or by fixed prices. This line of radical politics has long been an English tradition, but I don't see it as leading necessarily to equal material worth.
In contrast, I can see an English tradition for pricking pomposity and arrogance. The English as a nation have for a long time had a tradition of marked irreverence for status and authority. It is this radical notion that moral (and intellectualand logical) worth is not linked to social status, power or wealth that has been particularly well-incubated in England, and it is this fact that continues to escape philosophers, politicians, the rich, wealthy and powerful all over the world.

Radicalism need not delve into strange notions of absolute equality. Simple confirmation of what peasants knew 600 years ago would be a good start for modern politics.

Bayesian inference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
'One of the crucial features of the Bayesian view is that a probability is assigned to a hypothesis, whereas under the frequentist view, a hypothesis is typically rejected or not rejected without directly assigning a probability.'
Most people have a truth and change it when enough evidence has accumulated. Some people learn to treat truths as more or less probable, but have to do this consciously. This leads to paradigm-shifting, because people stubbornly resist new evidence until it's really overwhelming.

Some experiments on belief revision have suggested that humans change their beliefs faster when using Bayesian methods than when using informal judgement. If I say I am intuitively Bayesian, I am claiming that I more naturally accept a certain level of uncertainty in statements of 'fact'; that my informal judgement typically involves subconscious assignation of probabilities of truth to certain statements rather than a binary system of accepting or rejecting it.
I'm sure that most people do this to an extent. But studies show that it's certainly not an everyday mode of thought.I believe that this approach to science is very important. Scientists currently test whether a hypothesis is true by seeing if the data pass an arbitrary limit of probability. If, given that the hypothesis is not true, the probability of getting the data is too small, they conclude that the hypothesis is true. The Bayesian method would be to assign a probability of truth to that hypothesis, using the data to measure that degree of probability.

The greatest evil

The greatest evil is not one action; a murder, a rape, a day's torture. It is a state of being. It is the merciless persecution of people by exclusion, insult, intimidation, theft, vandalism and maybe violence. Day in, day out, pursuing this agenda of destroying others' lives for their own twisted personal reasons.

It isn't triggered by rage or insult, personal greed or any sort of deliberate intent. It is sheer thoughtlessness. One might call it a lack of compassion, but it's done by people who in other ways can be very compassionate, and isn't the same lack of compassion one finds in deliberate crime. One might call it selfish, but it's no more specifically due to selfishness than almost any action is.

It is thoughtlessness, low-level malevolence and a lack of principle. A valuing of immediate emotional concerns over principled action; partaking of the widespread belief that small unpleasantnesses don't really matter, especially when done to strangers, even though the person who ought to judge such a thing is the person to whom you're being unpleasant.

Anyone can avoid murdering a person. Someone who commits murder either doesn't subscribe to the same moral principles as the rest of us, or else was provoked beyond self-control.
But those same supposedly principled people who subscribe to moral rules and most stridently denigrate a murderer for his momentary loss of control will often be the same people who break their own principles in small ways every day, and will nevertheless feel self-righteous about themselves and their lives.

It is this hypocritical self-righteousness that is the greatest evil in the world. I can cope with murderers who claim that the rules are pointless and don't apply. I can cope with criminals who regret their misdeeds. I despise all the everyday bigotry, bullying and other hypocrisy that the self-righteous never admit is wrong.

Given that it is thoughtlessness that leads to some of this, is there some way to correct it? Well, of course there is; make people think about things. But the problem is then how to make people think about everything when they have no natural tendency to do so. We can have awareness campaigns about bullying, racism, sexism, leaving litter on the streets and about countless more things or aspects of these large problems, but the more things people are reminded about, the more likely they are to forget something.
What is required is not 'awareness campaigns' for individual cases of unpleasantness, but a general rule. Coincidentally, something rather useful was first described by Immanuel Kant, a famous German philosopher. His categorical imperative says that one should judge the principle underlying the action and consider what would happen if everyone were to act according to that principle.
In a democracy, voting might be a good example of an application of this principle. There is no commonly accepted immorality in not voting, but Kant's categorical imperative gives us a new analysis: we consider what would happen if everyone were to feel too lazy to vote and we realise that anarchy (or, if almost everyone were too lazy, rule by a very few people who had taken advantage of everyone's laziness to vote themselves power) is undesirable. We are therefore obliged to vote.
However, Kant's emphasis on the principles underlying an action is most relevant here. People will frequently judge that a little insult here or a push or a shove there are insignificant, but it is not their place to judge. They, when questioned on the subject, usually admit that the action was bad, but that it didn't matter. If we could only teach people to think about principles and not consequences then we might eliminate a lot of the little evils in the world that all add up to a lot of nastiness.
When a man owes £1, and decides not to pay the debt because it's insignificant, he is stealing. When he queue-jumps, he is cheating. When he insults someone, it can hurt, it can be spread and it can sow little seeds of doubt about someone in others' minds. If it was meant to be insignificant, then it was better unsaid. Bullies need to think what the world would be like if everyone were to bully those they could: we'd have no social cohesion at all, and we'd have networks of force and dependence. Without the social fabric of society, the bullies would either be petty-minded thugs living in perpetual fear of someone killing them in order to pre-emptively save themselves, or else weak dependants being abused by other thugs.
Queue-jumpers face a similar problem: if no-one had any respect for the accepted method of rationing demand to limited resources then we'd have great heaving masses at every counter. The sharpest elbows and strongest shoulders would win (I'm blessed with both, thankfully).

But this is just repeating what I've said before. What really matters is that the small things do matter. Nothing can be assumed to be insignificant. If it's wrong, it's wrong no matter how small it appears. £1 to one person might be a couple of minutes' work. To another it could be a day's pocket money.
We should always judge based on our principles, not on our feelings. I have heard people excuse themselves because they had been stressed earlier, had a bad night or just couldn't be bothered. Laziness is no excuse; nor is grumpiness, PMS or any other stress. The spreading of small evils is something that almost everyone does, and it is the false justification through irrational arguments that drives me utterly batty. When we talk about murder, we don't say 'oh, I did it because I slept poorly'.

What we do find, however, is that people say
"I just couldn't deal with it any longer. (S)He'd been going on at me for years and that [whatever it was] was the last straw."

Just imagine if every time someone felt grumpy or lazy, instead of taking it out on other people they controlled themselves. Would those poor benighted murderers ever reach the snapping point? If other people stopped the bullying and the cheating, would there be any gradual build-up of rage?
Are the 'great' evils strange manifestations of the devil, or could they perhaps be partly a result of everyone else's little evils building up in someone?

What are the similarities between a murder and an insult? They both require a lack of self-control. They are both wrong. Neither becomes right because of personal opinion. If you do something to someone else, it should be with his consent.

Care in the home

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_dishman_take_health_care_off_the_mainframe.html

The summary of this talk is that we currently have a centralised system of healthcare. People go to their GP or the hospital, have a 15-minute exam and get a treatment and then are sent out into the world again. Eric Dishman wants to take care out of the institutions and into daily life and the home.
This might work for some illnesses; acute infections that can be cured by a simple drug prescription, or broken bones because of a bad rugby tackle, but it's a grossly dysfunctional way to approach chronic conditions and ageing, which are by far the biggest burden on healthcare, and will be even bigger in the future, with an older population.

Chronic conditions wax and wane, and ageing is a gradual process. These things only get people to a doctor once the damage is done; when a pensioner has fractured his hip or after the asthma attack.
We have the technology for constant surveillance: to monitor how long it takes to recognise a friend on the telephone, and to analyse gait in the house. These things can detect subtle changes long before the patient will, and provide solid evidence of change. With such systems we won't have intelligent people getting sent away from Alzheimer's clinics because they still function well, even though they and their families know that they were once much better.
We have the basic systems (in this country: the US is worse) for care in the home. We have district nurses who visit patients who need minor care, and they do a fantastic job of freeing hospital beds, saving money and allowing people to enjoy the familiarity and comfort of their own homes.
We have GPs, who have some degree of personal knowledge of patients. But they don't get personal information, they don't necessarily know their patients well, and they typically don't make home visits.

We need to expand our system of caring for people outside of hospital (which is expensive). More nurses, more health visitors, and more automated early detection can all help prevent injury and disease.
As I know well, patients much prefer to live at home. Every nurse will remember patients moaning endlessly about wanting to go home, patients fighting to be let out, patients who are unco-operative because they're just not happy and patients who are rude. Patients refer to hospital as 'the gulag' and similar words, expressing their appreciation for incarceration.
We need patients to feel grateful for their medical care, and that will be more likely to happen when it comes as an addition to their lives, not as a replacement of their lives.

So, as Eric Dishman says, we need more research and effort to be put into home care. It is already well known to save money, despite not being as effective as it could be. With inventive home monitoring and better support the system could make patients happier and healthier (and we know that happiness has health benefits), hospitals less crowded and budgets less tight.

And if patients are seen in their own homes they won't be affected by hospital-acquired infections and epidemics. There will be much less risk of picking up a cold, C-Difficile or any of the other problems that plague the long-term bedridden.

The link between junkies and politicians

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_pisani_sex_drugs_and_hiv_let_s_get_rational_1.html

The points I want to take from the talk are these:
Politicians and junkies do stupid things: politicians make stupid policies and junkies do things that help them get HIV.
People respond more favourably to 'making the world a better place for starving children' than to 'making the world a better place for junkies'.
If junkies are going to be punished for those things they can do that reduce the risk to themselves then they will balance the risks of being caught and getting ill and take more risks.
Both have politicians and junkies have rational reasons for doing what is, practically, worse.
Politicians respond to people's desires to be tough on drugs and crime by punishing drugs users, and using any evidence of drugs use as an excuse to prosecute. They do this even though it costs the nation more money in health-care and harms more people's lives.
Junkies respond to these induced risks of having drug-using equipment by sharing equipment. They do this even though sharing equipment means that roughly half of them will get AIDS.

It's an interesting enough observation if we stop there and simply suggest that we take more notice of sensible solutions like needle exchanges, rather than ignoring them.
But I like this story because it brings attention to a problem that is dawning on me, and has been forming in the world for a while now, and that is the conflict between science and politics.

Another good talk on the subject was here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial.html

Michael Specter talks about a number of instances of 'science denial' which have had measurable negative consequences. The aversion to vaccines, fear of genetically modified crops (which is foolish, unlike quibbling with the direction that GM research is taking) and, of course, denial of climate change, all have direct consequences that add to the sum total of suffering in the world.

Elizabeth Pisani has found yet another one of these instances of science denial, and hers is a fine example of politically-motivated science denial. This is not a scare story about vaccines spread by stupid or cynical journalists and believed by the gullible and ignorant. This is the deliberate prioritising of political expediency over scientific fact, and it is this aspect of science denial that is as worrying as any other.
We can all agree that gullible people need to be educated, and we can all agree that media scaremongering in order to sell copy is morally dubious (at best). But I am certain that there are people out there who truly believe that science should be subservient to politics.
I have heard someone say that he has 'no problem with science or scientists, until they try to dictate what we should or should not do. That's meddling with politics, and they don't belong there.'
I'm very keen to stress that science is a process, not a belief-system, and that it makes no moral demands or statements. One cannot call scientific knowledge evil; one can merely say that it is being abused. However, part of this labelling science as a process is describing what it does. Science is the best process by which we ascertain truth. We have no better method for finding out what is true and what is false.

Given that science gives us what we know to be true, let's look at the idea that science does not belong in politics again: this idea is telling us that the truth is unimportant in running our countries. I find this idea incredible. Do we really want politics based on lies, rumour, scandal and opinion? I know that's what we have, but are we happy with it?
Voting figures and opinion polls suggest that we're not.

I see here a fundamental conflict between the current politics, the ideal of democratic engagement and the ideal of enlightened rule. Obviously the current political system is neither enlightened nor democratically engaged, and people who are empowered by the status quo try to 'play off' the two opposing ideals. Democratic engagement at the moment would mean less science involved in governance, because it would hand power to the large media corporations who promote and sway opinion. Democratic engagement is a measure of opinion; if it were perfect each and every person's opinion would matter. Enlightened rule contrasts with this because opinion does not matter: only truth matters. Science tells us what is most likely to be true, and so where science gives us an answer we would do best to heed it.

The simple problem is, as Michael Specter says, sometimes you are not entitled to your opinion. Where science gives us an answer then democracy is defunct. If we are to aspire to being well-governed and democratically governed then we must accept limits on those things on which democracy can pronounce. We must have a constitutional recognition (written or unwritten) that no amount of desire or stubbornness can undo scientific findings.
Science is rarely concrete, but when it reaches a conclusion, that conclusion is the most likely to be true. Democracy must cede to science those areas of life that science can govern. We do not vote on the best way to treat high blood pressure, and we should not vote on the best way to prevent AIDS. We cannot have people staking out for democracy every decision that a government can take.

I see here the ghosts of science denial in all its forms, trying to keep science out of politics. It is not only those who truly believe that it is morally right to value majority opinion over truth, but those who stubbornly believe in falsehood and will side with majority opinion to protect it from truth.
I can imagine that a large number of fundamentalists would be upset were science to be welcomed into government. Science is the utter opposite to fundamentalism. Where fundamentalism holds certain facts to be universal and true, science questions everything, and no theory in science is unquestionable. That is not to say that one can simply discard a theory; to question is not the same as to ignore. Where fundamentalism provides a solid foundation of unmoveable knowledge, science provides a shifting sea of grains of data which form great pyramids of knowledge, but can occasionally fall apart.
It is the stubborn adherence to dogma of any sort that is the greatest rival to science. Religion springs to mind as the most obvious example, but free-market fundamentalism can be as dogmatic as any religion.

Stubbornness is inherent to human beings. We are stubborn creatures: economists call it the sunk-costs fallacy, psychologists no doubt have a name for it too (I remember going to a talk about research in which people stuck with their previous option in a sequence of choices 70% of the time. The best solution would have been to change every time). We can't fight stubbornness sub-consciously. We must have it laid out before us: dogmatic faith is no way to run a country.

Running a country is a practical task. It is hard enough to do well without having reality questioned by any sort of faith.