来源：《新科学家》
原文见刊日期：2022年4月30日
If you have a tricky bit of policy you need to sell, try reaching for some scientific words – whether or not research actually backs up your claims.
如果你需要推行一些棘手的政策，试着用一些科学词汇——不管研究结果是否真的支持你的主张。
This tactic has been a favourite of the UK government in recent years. At the start of the covid-19 pandemic, it resisted calls for social distancing measures, as had already been implemented in some other countries. The reason given was that policies such as lockdowns would be unworkable because people would experience “behavioural fatigue”, a sciencey-sounding concept supposedly based on research in psychology, but which scientists advising the government later denied. “If you look in the literature, you won’t find it because it doesn’t exist,” one told the BBC in July 2020.
近年来，这一手段一直是英国政府的最爱。在新冠大流行之初，英国政府拒绝了要求采取社交距离措施的呼吁，而其他一些国家已经采取了这些措施。英国政府给出的理由是，封锁等政策将不起作用，因为人们会经历“行为疲劳”，这是一个听起来很科学的概念，据说是基于心理学研究，但为政府提建议的科学家后来否认了这一点。“如果你看文献，你不会找到这个概念，因为它根本不存在，”一个人在2020年7月告诉BBC。
Now, the UK government is using the same playbook for its new policy towards asylum seekers, which calls for “scientific methods” to assess whether those who are unaccompanied and say they are children are under 18. These are age-assessment methods with a veneer of science, involving X-rays or DNA methylation, that probably sounded fantastically scientific in the corridors of power, but when it comes to proving they work, they are sorely lacking.
现在，英国政府对寻求庇护者的新政策也采用了同样的策略，呼吁用“科学方法”评估那些无人陪伴、自称是儿童的人是否不满18岁。这些都是表面上带有科学色彩的年龄评估方法，包括x射线或DNA甲基化，在权力走廊里听起来可能非常科学，但当要证明这些方法有效时，则严重缺乏证据。
It’s not just politicians in the UK who wield the stamp of pseudoscience. The European Union’s peculiar carbon accounting allows it to claim that biomass is a renewable energy source, when in plain language it generally means burning trees, a practice that actually fuels climate change. And last year, law-makers in Texas banned abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy if a doctor could detect a “fetal heartbeat”, a medical-sounding term that doctors say has little medical meaning for a bundle of cells.
不只是英国的政客们打着伪科学的旗号。欧盟特有的碳核算制度使其可以宣称生物质能是一种可再生能源，但通俗地说，它通常意味着燃烧树木，这种做法实际上加剧了气候变化。去年，德克萨斯州的法律制定者禁止在怀孕六周后，如果医生能检测到“胎儿心跳”，就不能堕胎。“胎儿心跳”是一个听起来很医学的术语，但医生们表示，对一束细胞来说，这个术语没有什么医学意义。
It is right that democratically elected politicians should make decisions by weighing scientific evidence as a factor, rather than simply “following the science”. But as Fiona Fox, head of the UK’s Science Media Centre, says, government science must truly be science, not just political spin. Throwing in a few choice phrases to “science things up” isn’t good enough.
民选政客应该通过权衡科学证据作为一个因素来做出决定，而不是简单地“遵循科学”，这是正确的。但是，正如英国科学媒体中心的负责人Fox所说，政府科学必须是真正的科学，而不仅仅是政治导向性陈诉。在“科学的东西”中加入一些精选的短语是不够的。