By Dean Midyette
Pioneer Staff
Listen up Apple! You too, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, IBM, Tesla and all you other technology based multinationals. We demand that you change. In the future we, the citizens of the world, insist that you begin basing policy and innovation decisions on unproven opinion rather than good science.
If this were the case you would see investment money sprinting for the door, looking for opportunities that were far more fundamentally sound. If the markets wont tolerate opinion-based decision-making in the private sector then why do we settle for it in the public domain?
Last Saturday, on Earth Day, marches and rallies were held in over 600 cities worldwide in support of science. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to support evidence-based policymaking instead of policy based on ideological political agendas. According to March for Science organizers, science upholds the common good and serves the publics best interests.
Human knowledge is accelerating exponentially. Prior to the year 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. Today it is estimated that human knowledge is doubling every 13 months, with a majority of this new knowledge created through science.
The challenge for the private sector has been to monetize the knowledge they create through scientific experimentation. The challenge for governments is to ensure that the decisions they make will get them re-elected.
In our rapidly evolving world, we need to press the next government of British Columbia to enact law and policy based on good science rather than partisan politics and to support publicly funded scientific endeavours more robustly and without a muzzle.
