[The scientific establishment has always had a tendency] “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.”
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Samizdata quote of the dayJuly 24th, 2021 |
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Here’s the full article for you folks who’d prefer not to click on a WSJ link 😋 You’re welcome
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From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them.
‘Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “ Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.”
But what does it mean to believe in science? The British science writer Matt Ridley draws a pointed distinction between “science as a philosophy” and “science as an institution.” The former grows out of the Enlightenment, which Mr. Ridley defines as “the primacy of rational and objective reasoning.” The latter, like all human institutions, is erratic, prone to falling well short of its stated principles. Mr. Ridley says the Covid pandemic has “thrown into sharp relief the disconnect between science as a philosophy and science as an institution.”
Mr. Ridley, 63, describes himself as a “science critic, which is a profession that doesn’t really exist.” He likens his vocation to that of an art critic and dismisses most other science writers as “cheerleaders.” That somewhat lofty attitude seems fitting for a hereditary English peer. As the fifth Viscount Ridley, he’s a member of Britain’s House of Lords, and he Zooms with me from his ancestral seat in Northumberland, just south of Scotland, in between sessions of Parliament (which he also attends by Zoom).
At Oxford nearly 40 years ago, Mr. Ridley studied the mating patterns of pheasants. His fieldwork involved much crouching in long country grass to figure out why these “jolly interesting” birds are polygamous—unlike most other avians. With the Canadian molecular biologist Alina Chan, he’s finishing a book called “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” to be published in November.
It will likely make its authors unwelcome in China. As Mr. Ridley worked on the book, he says, it became “horribly clear” that Chinese scientists are “not free to explain and reveal everything they’ve been doing with bat viruses.”
That information has to be “dug out” by outsiders like him and Ms. Chan. The Chinese authorities, he says, ordered all scientists to send their results relevant to the virus for approval by the government before other scientists or international agencies could vet them: “That is shocking in the aftermath of a lethal pandemic that has killed millions and devastated the world.”
Mr. Ridley notes that the question of Covid’s origin has “mostly been tackled by people outside the mainstream scientific establishment.” People inside not only have been “disappointingly incurious” but have tried to shut down the inquiry “to protect the reputation of science as an institution.” The most obvious reason for this resistance: If Covid leaked from a lab, and especially if it developed there, “science finds itself in the dock.”
Other factors have been at play as well. Scientists are as sensitive as other elites to charges of racism, which the Communist Party used to evade questions about specifically Chinese practices “such as the trade in wildlife for food or lab experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city of Wuhan.”
Scientists are a global guild, and the Western scientific community has “come to have a close relationship with, and even a reliance on, China.” Scientific journals derive considerable “income and input” from China, and Western universities rely on Chinese students and researchers for tuition revenue and manpower. All that, Mr. Ridley says, “may have to change in the wake of the pandemic.”
In the U.K., he has also noted “a tendency to admire authoritarian China among scientists that surprised some people.” It didn’t surprise Mr. Ridley. “I’ve noticed for years,” he says, “that scientists take a somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world is.”
He asks: “If you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an ‘intelligent government’?” Science as an institution has “a naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well.” Perhaps that’s what politicians mean when they declare that they “believe in science.” As we’ve seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.
But there’s a “tension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice,” on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to “remain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind.” Mr. Ridley fears “that the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology.” It’s partly “the fault of outside commentators” who hustle scientists in political directions. “I think it’s also the fault of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don’t.”
Epidemiologists are divided between those who want more lockdowns and those who think that approach wasn’t effective and might have been counterproductive. Mr. Ridley sides with the latter camp, and he’s dismissive of the alarmist modeling that led to lockdowns in the first place. “The modeling of where the pandemic might go,” he says, “presents itself as an entirely apolitical project.
But there have been too many cases of epidemiologists presenting models based on rather extreme assumption.”
One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.” Mr. Ridley invokes Michael Crichton, the late science-fiction novelist, who hated the tendency to describe the outcomes of models in words that imply they are the “results” of an experiment. That frames speculation as if it were proof.
Climate science is already far down the road to politicization. “Twenty or 30 years ago,” Mr. Ridley says, “you could study how the ice ages happened and discuss competing theories without being at all political about it.” Now it’s very hard to have a conversation on the subject “without people trying to interpret it through a political lens.”
Mr. Ridley describes himself as “lukewarm” on climate change. He accepts that humans have made the climate warmer, but doesn’t subscribe to any of the catastrophist views that call for radical changes in human behavior and consumption. His nuanced position hasn’t protected him from attack, of course, and the British left is prone to vilify him as a “denier.”
Climate science has also been “infected by cultural relativism and postmodernism,” Mr. Ridley says. He cites a paper that was critical of glaciology—the study of glaciers—“because it wasn’t sufficiently feminist.” I wonder if he’s kidding, but Google confirms he isn’t. In 2016 Progress in Human Geography published “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”
The politicization of science leads to a loss of confidence in science as an institution. The distrust may be justified but leaves a vacuum, often filled by a “much more superstitious approach to knowledge.” To such superstition Mr. Ridley attributes public resistance to technologies such as genetically modified food, nuclear power—and vaccines.
If you spurn Covid-19 vaccination, Mr. Ridley says he would “fervently argue” that it is “the lesser of two risks, at least for adults.” We have “ample data to show that—for this vaccine, and for others, going back centuries.” He calls vaccination “probably the most massive and incredible benefit of scientific knowledge.” Yet it’s “counterintuitive and difficult to understand,” which may explain why its advocates have been vilified through the centuries.
He cites the example of Mary Wortley Montagu, a British aristocrat, who pushed for smallpox inoculation in Britain after witnessing its administration in Ottoman Turkey in the early 18th century. She was viciously pilloried, he says, as was Zabdiel Boylston, a celebrated Boston doctor who inoculated residents against smallpox during a smallpox outbreak in 1721.
Vaccines have been central to the question of “misinformation” and the White House’s pressure campaign against social media to censor it. Mr. Ridley worries about the opposite problem: that social media “is complicit in enforcing conformity.” It does this “through ‘fact checking,’ mob pile-ons, and direct censorship, now explicitly at the behest of the Biden administration.” He points out that Facebook and Wikipedia long banned any mention of the possibility that the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”
The World Health Organization is a particular offender: “We had a dozen Western scientists go to China in February and team up with a dozen Chinese scientists under the auspices of the WHO.” At a subsequent press conference they pronounced the lab-leak theory “extremely unlikely.” The organization also ignored Taiwanese cries for help with Covid-19 in January 2020.
“The Taiwanese said, ‘We’re picking up signs that this is a human-to-human transmission that threatens a major epidemic. Please, will you investigate?’ And the WHO basically said, ‘You’re from Taiwan. We’re not allowed to talk to you.’ ”
He notes that WHO’s primary task is forestalling pandemics. Yet in 2015 it “put out a statement saying that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. Now that, to me, suggests an organization not focused on the day job.”
In Mr. Ridley’s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B’s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, “the space for heterodoxy is evaporating.” So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution. It’s sure to be a costly divorce.
I went to school in the 1960s and 70s. Back then biology physics and chemistry were seperate subjects. At no time was it ever explained to me what the scientific method was. The history of science, how pioneering scientists painstakingly discovered the stuff that we now know, was never taught. I suspect that the teaching of science has only deteriorated since, so it is no surprise that the vast majority of people don’t understand what science is, and what science isn’t. The climate change nonsense could not have survived for over thirty years if the general public understood the scientific method.
Hmm, I went to school in 1970s and certainly was taught about the scientific method, and whilst biology physics and chemistry were taught as separate subjects, my physics teacher was rather prone to say things like “all science is physics, everything else meaningfully called science is just flavours of physics”… and my fav “Social sciences are science in the same sense that witch doctors are doctors.”
What kind of school was it Perry? Mine was a pretty ordinary comprehensive.
Science and every other human group or endeavour. We’re pack animals.
I think it depends on your teachers. I had people who were scientists before they were teachers (in the 70’s) and we certainly were taught both the scientific method, and skepticism as the main strength. (Believe actual data, and not prediction.)
What Matt Ridley says here is true – it should not be true, scientists should be open minded and go where the evidence leads, but it is true.
A scientist who goes against “peer review” and so on, is unlikely to stay a scientist.
The era of the Gentleman Scientist (typically a country squire or a clergyman) who did not depend on science for their income (and therefore could be open minded – and speak without fear) has long gone.
Just as there is no sound consensus in climatology and epidemiology (not to mention nutrition, psychology, and psychiatry), there is also no sound consensus on what constitutes ‘the scientific method’.
Even an enthusiastic Newtonian like William Whewell recognized that Newton’s published views on ‘method’ were no more than ad hoc justifications of his results.
Perry wrote:
That is true in principle, or at least it is a necessary working assumption for all ‘hard’ scientists. But in practice, it is unfeasible to explain biological phenomena ENTIRELY on a physical basis, at least for now. Not sure about chemistry.
Minor public school.
You can’t over estimate the power of FUNDING sources (government, corporate, and private). Also, In human institutions, “circling the wagons” is the default position, driven by the Bandwagon effect, peer pressure, institutional inertia…..It takes a lot of guts to stand out from the herd. Between conflicts of interest, competition for tenure and grants (regardless of source: public/private), coopted peer review, peer pressure, the 15 minutes of fame allure, fiddling with the data, the CULT of models/algorithms, I don’t think you have to be a flat-earther to be skeptical of science/academia, and not just the soft sciences. To be clear, models and algorithms are very useful but they are tools, not ends in themselves.
I am sympathetic to scientists; I believe, all those folks who piggy back on the work of others, media and activists, consultants, share the blame. Have you ever read a scientific paper that didn’t limit its conclusion to a very precise set of variables and probabilities? By the time it reaches the general media and internet, these qualifying conditions and caveats are lost, and instead we all too often read wildly extrapolated conclusions and broad generalizations. Think of all the junk that is lumped under nutrition. Is there anything at all that is not a panacea or anything at all that we are not deficient in? Not to mention, and this is just my opinion, conflation is intentionally used to deceive the public.
99%++ of scientists are second-raters, so naturally they gang up to hide that fact and to keep the very few first raters from making the gangsters look bad.
It never works for long.
I had one of my papers unpublished for being “too avant garde”! It was perfectly straight forward but in a scientific area of turmoil at the time. Shame, as the experiment only took a few hours. It went in the thesis though and didn’t arouse any ire from the external examiner.
The odd thing is that if you want to become one of those really famous scientists who is remembered forever, upsetting the status quo is the one thing that you really have to do.
I went to school in the 1960s and 70s. Back then biology physics and chemistry were separate subjects. At no time was it ever explained to me what the scientific method was. The history of science, how pioneering scientists painstakingly discovered the stuff that we now know, was never taught.
My experience was much the same except I went to school in the 1970s and 80s in Tasmania at state schools.
Sometimes there was a little history to introduce the topic, but not much. I seem to recall the Curie’s getting a some coverage, possibly because nuclear was quite topical then.
The actual term ” the scientific method ” is not something I had heard until about the late 90’s when I really started getting suspicious of secondhand smoke, ozone and climate claims.
John Brignell’s Number Watch website (and his books) may have been the very place.
As a chemist who works with a bunch of physicists in a US national lab, I can say that while they think “all science is physics, everything else meaningfully called science is just flavours of physics”, when they try to execute a project involving anything but pure physics, they screw it up. “Chemistry is so simple, even a chemist can do it, so we need not concern ourselves”. And the whole project suffers! Every time.
Regarding hard vs other science, I have a simple rule: if the university department has the word “science” in it, it is not science. Same with “studies”.