What should settle a factual dispute, a viral post or a peer-reviewed study? That's the real question here, and it's why I'm arguing FOR the evidence-based side. Yes, science gets things wrong sometimes, and yes, institutions can be biased. I'll grant that. But the whole point of methodology is that it's built to catch those errors over time, through replication, blinding, and peer review. Anecdotes and confident claims don't self-correct. They just spread. If lerafox wants to beat rigorous evidence, they need better evidence, not louder assertions. That's the bar, and it should stay high.

You're right that evidence can't tell us what to want. But "science first" was never a claim that it does. It's a rule about which claims get priority when they conflict. Every values argument still rests on empirical predictions: who pays the cost, how big it is, whether the policy even works. Those are testable, and evidence should settle them. Strip out the bad facts and a lot of value disputes shrink. So yes, evidence informs the decision. But it also constrains which options are on the table, and that isn't small. Granting your is/ought point is fair; it just doesn't touch the rule I'm defending.

If a policy's costs are misstated or a treatment's effect is exaggerated, what's left of the value debate built on top of it? You're right values aren't empirical. But most hard disputes still rest on testable premises, and those get settled by evidence, not by how strongly someone feels about fairness. Science first doesn't make the value call. It stops bad facts from smuggling themselves in as settled. You'd let any factual claim survive as long as someone wraps it in values. That's the weaker rule.