Science, the Media and Lawyers ...

Mikey23

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/20 ... or-science

my sincere apologies if this has been done to death already, but this article seemed like a very good explanation of the uneasy relationship between these three groups and why it is so difficult for simple people like you and me to make any sense of it all ...

the_cyclist_of_catan

The subtext of the argument is an interesting one.

Sports need to have rules, and as the rules become more complex - and the stakes become higher - the rules need interpreting and applying. In step the lawyers, whose job it is to interpret and apply rules.

But as science has progressed, and as the financial stakes in professional sport have got higher and higher, so people have found scientific ways to bend or break the rules. The rules have been changed from time to time to make some of the stuff that can be achieved through science against the rules, while other stuff remains completely acceptable and yet more stuff has yet to be uncovered. This happens in all sports where the stakes are high - whether it be athletics (in the 70s, the Eastern Block was using it as a propaganda weapon and so invested a lot of effort into improving performance through medical science) or Formula 1 (a sport where the cars are the important competitors, effectively function as mobile billboards, and many fields of science including aerodynamics and material engineering have lead to vastly improved performances over the last few decades).

As a result, the rules get really complicated, and the ways sought to improve performance - both within and outside the rules - gets more complicated too. The first half of the equation requires lawyers, the second half involves the scientists.

Now the lawyers' function is one I understand. One group act as the referrees or judges; a second group represent the athlete/team, and a third set represent the governing body or rules enforcement agency. The latter two argue things out, each putting their own side's views ahead of any personal knowledge or interests that they hold, each side tries to advance their own case and undermine that of the other side, and the first group decides who has won the argument. This is the basis of most adversarial legal systems, and it works pretty well when you're trying to determine if Smith robbed Jones.

The scientists also have more than one role; there are those who assist the athletes and teams to perform better, and most will emply perfectly legal means, some will cheat, and some will "push the boundaries". Then, when a case is in the offing, some scientists will be employed to support the argument that *this* happened, while other scientists will be called upon to say that it did not.

The interesting bit is that ultimately science deals in facts - either the Earth is round, or it is flat, and it is a matter of scientific fact. But it is only over time that the facts become fully established, and until they have been, scientists may put forward theories that ultimately prove to be incorrect. No scientist in the 12th century was going to be lambasted for saying that the earth was flat, but the same scientist might look a bit silly saying so now.

A big part of the problem is that lawyers are actually pretty bad at dealing with scientific matters in dispute where both sides can hold opposing theories, only one can actually be right, but given our current understanding it's not actually possible to say which side that is. As an example, asking a lawyer to rule on whether there is or is not a Higgs-boson particle is an exercise in futility; he'll listen to the arguments for and against, weigh up competing theories and the evidence for them, then come down on one side of the line or the other. But that judgment will not affect whether there is in fact a Higgs-boson particle or not, and I can well imagine situations where the lawyer decides that - on the basis of the evidence - it doesn't exist, only to be proved completely and utterly wrong in a few years' time when the science has moved on.

Hence the struggle - scientists are often trying to move on the cause of knowledge and understanding, but frequently from a point where not everything is known. Lawyers like to pretend that there is one right answer, and listening to the right scientist will give them that answer, but all too often that isn't the case either. Yes, there's a right answer, but we don't know what it is yet. As a final example of which, if LA had been charged with doping in 1999, the answer "did he dope?" would almost certainly have been "no". In 2012, it's a different answer. But what LA was up to in 1999 has not actually changed at all.

gsvbagpuss

That was a really good read Cyclist of Catan - thank you!

Mikey23

Yes, fascinating insight ... Thanks for that. And I thought that cycling was about turning the pedals and making the wheels go round thus propelling you forward. Whereas to understand the sport you need to be a pharmacologist, a scientist, a lawyer and a PR expert ...

the_cyclist_of_catan

I ignored the PR aspect, as it doesn't really touch on either the legal (the "court of public opinion" is a lousy judge of facts, notwithstanding all that "wisdom of crowds" nonsense - as evidence I cite the popularity of McDonalds), or the scientific. It does have a big impact on the finances in the background, though, in terms of contracts, endorsements, the cost-benefit analysis of action taken by the lawyers etc.