Thank you—this is exactly the point. People confuse their own values with science, and ‘follow the science’ rhetoric only makes it worse. Science might say, ‘If you take action X, thing A increases,’ but deciding whether to take action X involves weighing A against everything else we care about—values, costs, benefits, and human experience.

COVID was a perfect example of this. Policies like isolating grandma in a nursing home or pulling kids out of school for two years were framed as ‘following the science,’ but they ignored entire fields of science and vast parts of the human experience. Loneliness has measurable health consequences—science shows it can kill. So do we isolate grandma to protect her from COVID, or risk her dying of loneliness? Similarly, the science of childhood education tells us that pulling kids from school harms them for life. These are real trade-offs, rooted in human values, not just science. And to be frank, that entire discussion was shut down completely. The entire decision making process was incredibly one-sided and myopic.

The same applies to dams. Decisions about whether to keep or remove them aren’t just ‘science versus activism.’ Both sides are informed by science, but they’re also driven by emotion, lived experience, and the values people hold. Science doesn’t tell us what to do—it gives us information about potential outcomes. What we choose depends on how we weigh those outcomes and whose priorities matter most. When rhetoric like ‘keep the dam = science, remove the dam = activism’ takes over, it oversimplifies these deeply human decisions and turns them into unnecessary battles. At the end of the day, it’s not ‘us vs. them’—it’s all of us trying to navigate complex trade-offs in a way that reflects the full spectrum of what matters to humans.

That doesn't negate the fact that one (or both) side can use bad or motivated science to justify their positions in a way that is falsifiable.

Questions of if (and how far) the salmon will go up the Klamath or if (and how many) homes will flood are example of this. Where opinions of fact differ, time will demonstrate one side to be right or wrong.

This highlights an inherent asymmetry of these situations. If the people who lose their livelihood are eventually proven right, that will be of little consolation. If the conservationist are proven proven wrong, it will be of little consequence.

A covid analogy would be non-parents using bad science to support school closure. If they are right, they lower their risk. If they are wrong, it isnt their kids that suffer.