What's particularly baffling about the "all science is political" crowd is that a lot of the papers they are defending are pretty blatantly terrible. It's rarely used to defend against marginal criticisms, instead it's truly awful papers that are about as far from defensible as possible. Take one that went around Twitter recently on Capitalism vs Communism:
This paper is horrible. Like legitimately one of the worst papers I have ever seen. And actual economists pretend that it's not bad! Among its many many problems are:
1. It is a paper about economic systems that controls for economy
2. There are zero high-income Communist/Socialist countries, and countries that were the same country as recently as 50 years prior the Capitalist offshoots are in a higher economic group in literally every single instance.
3. It largely compares Warsaw Pact Europe to Latin America for the Upper-Middle comparison, and then the Lower-Middle has only four Socialist/Communist countries and the Lower Income group is literally just China. For reference Low-Income Capitalist is 33 countries.
4. It excludes countries with a recent Socialist revolution but includes every country that is considered Capitalist regardless of how recently it changed governments/faced instability. This leads to the hilarious fact that Capitalist Yemen is included but Socialist Yemen is not.
I think this is genuinely the quality of paper the "science is inherently political" cope most often tries to defend. There's clearly a degree to which you can't protect against biases seeping in, but the scientific community has to acknowledge that we are nowhere near that threshold and A LOT of the papers criticized for being politically biased are just trash papers.
A really amazingly bad paper. It says something really grim about some academics that they saw that the paper was on "their side" and merrily tweeted it out, without thinking about any of these problems (or at least, when these problems were pointed out they didn't immediately say "oh my god, oops, I made a mistake", which would also be totally fine!).
> What's particularly baffling about the "all science is political" crowd is that a lot of the papers they are defending are pretty blatantly terrible.
Why is that baffling? People are trotting out the "all science is political" line precisely because they have no other way to defend their papers.
This is part of why economics is the dismal science. Even more than other sciences, it's unavoidably political. Political parties and activists have opinions on economics, much more than they have opinions on any other branch of science. The discourse is polluted with think-tanks that swim in the grey area between research and advocacy. And just think how weird it is that that there is such a thing as "left-wing" and "right-wing" economists; a categorisation that would be absurd applied to, say, geologists.
Peer review prior to publication only became popular around the 70s, and doesn't actually seem to improve quality that much. Post-publication review should be the norm, with no presumption that a paper is correct merely because it's "published".
"Peer review prior to publication only became popular around the 70s"
This is utter nonsense as far as physics and mathematics is concerned, directly from my own experience (Ph. D. in 1966). I seriously doubt it in all the other hard sciences, unless you are taking seriously various utterly disreputable 'scientific' journals.
In 1936, Einstein famously submitted a manuscript to Physical Review. When an anonymous referee made critical comments on it, Einstein blew a gasket and wrote the following response to the journal's editor:
"We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere."
Apparently Einstein had never previously been subjected to anonymous peer review. He had mainly published in German journals where editors alone decided what was worth publishing. None of his famous papers from the early 20th century were formally peer reviewed.
Once more unto the breach ...: "Peer review prior to publication only became popular around the 70s"
In the context of the age of the visible universe, somewhat earlier than 1936 versus the 70s would be a sliver of time. But surely here you can come up with a better example, perhaps in the 60s.
The statement quoted is simply false for the hard sciences as far as I know. But a serious example, which yours seems not to be, might surface to show me wrong, in which case I'll certainly accept that. But you are likely a physics expert, so can surely find one if it exists. Actually, your Einstein incident(s) sound like they might come from a very interesting and entertaining source, so why not share a specific reference with us? And the Physical Reviews is certainly an important journal, so it really would be interesting to know just when it became impossible for a single editor to be sufficiently expert that there was no real need from that direction for other referees, if one could persuade such a person to be editor. But the direction of more assurance of objectivity is at least one other crucial one, even then.
Of course, there is always the possibility that "the 70s" refers to 1870.
> In 1939 former editorial assistants L. J. F. Brimble and A. J. V. Gale assumed a joint editorship of Nature. The Brimble–Gale era is now most famous for the editors' unsystematic approach to external refereeing. Although Brimble and Gale did sometimes consult external referees, papers submitted or recommended by scientists whom the pair trusted were often not sent out for further review. Their successor, John Maddox, would also print papers he admired without external refereeing. It was not until 1973 that editor David Davies made external peer review a requirement for publication in Nature. Nature's example shows that as late as the 1960s a journal could be considered scientifically respectable even if its editors were known to eschew systematic external peer review.
Maybe you're flagging the word 'popular' here, but clearly there was much more divergence in attitudes to peer review until the 1970s. The other citation shows the Lancet adopting it in 1976 (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the-birth-of-modern-peer-review/). Other papers did adopt it earlier: “Science and The Journal of the American Medical Association did not use outside reviewers until after 1940".
Perhaps you're critiquing the precision of TGGP's language, but the fact that two dominant journals didn't utilise comprehensive peer review until the 1970s suggests that the point has some legitimacy. It's not particularly clear from the sources about the actual history of 'peer review *prior* to publication' versus 'peer review *post* publication'.
This is one of the better papers I have read on this topic in a long while. Should be required reading for all undergraduates in all disciplines. Biased? You bet? But cautiously, skeptically, so.
I agree with most of your points, although your attempt to equivocate between "woke" and righ-wing in terms of politicizing science was a bit annoying. Those are not symmetric at all. "Woke" is coming from within the institutions and seems to have taken over quite a few of them. The right-wing is entirely from without and seems to have almost no influence over what happens within science itself.
I agree that they're not the same, and the "from within" distinction is important. But I was thinking of what's happened to e.g. Bret Weinstein or Jordan Peterson - both famous for pushing back against woke stuff, and both famous for being scientists, facing up to the facts, no-nonsense, etc etc. - but both ended up pushing incredibly unscientific made-up nonsense (which happens to be aligned with the right-wing) and their fans don't seem to care at all.
On the contrary, I quite like both of them, but was confused and lost by Bret's incomprehensible position on vaccines. Not sure what Peterson has "pushed" that's unscientific though. Except the religious stuff, which I would largely consider non-scientifc rather than anti-scientific. Also, he's been pushing that stuff for decades. He wrote his main book on that in 1999. He just became more famous recently.
I think this part of the otherwise excellent essay will cause a lot of people to do a double take for a few reasons:
1. You don't give specific examples of what you're thinking of when you claim the right ignore unscientific claims. Here you name Jordan Peterson but beyond it still being unclear what you mean, he's not really a scientist is he? He's a sort of humanities academic, and/or a "clinical psychologist" but I don't get the impression he is known for his scientific research. As for Bret Weinstein, again, you name a name but not what claims are unscientific.
2. The reason the right don't bat an eyelid is because they don't agree that their views are unscientific. Go read their work and you'll see what I mean - it's the exact opposite! The people who oppose academic output on COVID and climate change see themselves as actually the true, apolitical scientists who aspire to non-political science as you request in your essay, and their primary criticism of COVID and climate science is that it's not scientific enough. Their criticisms of COVID and climate science take the form of scientific rebuttals to published articles, usually criticizing the reliability of either data or methodology.
Now, you might disagree with them. But from their perspective there is no hypocrisy here, because they see opposing wokeism and also attacking COVID/climate science as the exact same thing - pushing back on unscientific politicized research. To resolve whether there is genuine hypocrisy here you'd have to go deep and evaluate their claims to determine if they are sciency enough to meet the bar for being considered "scientific", but that in turn would mean establishing what the bar is and applying it fairly.
In practice, I think there are very few truly neutral people who engage with the critics arguments about those fields and don't themselves become critics because the problems the "right wing" point out are usually pretty blatant. A high school level understanding of math and science is sufficient to understand what the problems are.
I could not agree more with your conclusion, but I think one of your arguments is a little sloppy here. When you talk about the shooter referencing certain studies in his manifesto, you argue that calls to counter this with politically motivated science is 'two wrongs making a right' (in the view of WIRED etc.).
But the shooter wasn't injecting politics into science; he was using science to inform his politics (poorly, I should add). So the argument from the activists wouldn't be that two wrongs make a right, it would be to do politically motivated science to avoid giving their opponents the ammunition. Which is also very misguided, in my opinion, but it's a very different argument that deserves to be properly rebutted.
"witness all the people complaining about “wokeness” invading science who don’t bat an eyelid when right-wingers push unscientific views about COVID or climate change"
So, the author has decided what views are "unscientific" according to his ideological beliefs. He's doing the very thing he condemns.
I agree with most of what you write, except wrt ideology. I only ever see this point brought up with regards to a person making an explicit ideological claim, even though implicit ideologies generally go unscrutinised. For example, biologists who conduct experiments on animals, or do research to help make factory farms more efficient, are acting under the ideology of 'animals are worth less than humans and it's fine to treat them as objects'. The person who criticises this, however, is marked as being ideological. I think similar points could be made regarding how open science should be, the treatment of human participants, conducting research on behalf of weapons manufacturers, etc.
Good point. I definitely think that scientists should carefully consider the ethical system they're working under and whether it might be better for the world if they did something different. With regard to the animal rights question, the "Three Rs" movement is trying its best to combine the ethical stuff with practical scientific questions - trying to come to some kind of reasonable compromise between "animals have rights" and "we should do experiments on animals" while ensuring that the science is as above-board as possible.
Lots of people in science and related fields won't state their opinions on various matters because they are too controversial, despite being almost statements of the obvious to people knowledgeable in the field. I've been told things in private conversations that if repeated on the internet generate storms of controversy. In particular some medical treatments are known to be useless or even counterproductive by experts, but woe betide anyone stating it out loud. I'm not sure if that comes under politics or social acceptibility.
I think it's extremely important to examine the accuracy of the specific beliefs of people who want science to be political. If their beliefs stemming from "believing in" "science" are often or mostly false, that kills it.
There's an amazing situation with COVID related beliefs where people seemed to have skipped the critical step of examining or searching for the science. Masks is my best example. This or some tweaked version is true: There's no scientific evidence that masks reduce COVID spread in the real world. 2) There's definitely no scientific evidence that cloth masks reduce COVID spread in the real world. 3) There's no scientific evidence that mandates reduce COVID spread in the real world.
All that hinges on "scientific evidence" being trials, which is the only way we'd know, and the standard scientific approach. There are only two trials, the Danish study reporting no significant effect for surgical masks, and the Bangladesh mosque study reporting a significant effect for surgical masks for old people, and no effect for cloth masks for anyone.
We wouldn't care about lab studies, droplet reduction inferences, computer modeling, etc in a universe where we know about trials and how to conduct them, and where they're super cheap to do. Any serious scientist should be able to list at least six reasons, in five minutes of reflection, why masks wouldn't reduce COVID spread, in either direction, in the real world (even surgical masks). I mean imagining if, from doing a bunch of trials, we discovered that masks didn't reduce spread, what the reasons might be. Even a research psychologist should be able to spin up several decent hypotheses there, easy, if you can deactivate their leftist ideological identity.
People have these amazing beliefs about scientific issues, without any evidence or search for evidence, and they have them at Time 1, the day after the question emerged. There's an issue of conflating a government agency's recommendations or claims for science, which is a big chunky issue itself. When the media doesn't even engage with scientific evidence directly, now you've got people who don't look stuff up depending on intermediaries who don't look stuff up, who in turn depend on government intermediaries who.... well, I have no idea what they do since they don't tell us. They don't disclose their methodology, and it appears to be an unscientific one – they're not doing meta-analysis, and their artifacts are just propaganda sheets full of false statements, errors, and stunning exclusions of contrary studies. When there's so little research that looking it up is trivial, it gets super awkward.
Otherwise, the big thing you missed is that "reality has a leftist bias", or that science backs one's ideology, has fully backed it, and necessarily backs it in the future, because well leftist ideology is just true, even the part about men and women not having different bodies, morphologically, or invisible forces causing all unfavorable outcomes for some groups, etc. There's also a distinctive issue with the very content of leftist/coercensor ideology, such that they commonly don't distinguish between their ideology and descriptive reality. They'll use their proprietary abstractions as descriptive terms, things like social justice, or even fake clinical pathology terms like some non-existent phobia (it's unclear why it's always a phobia specifically) to smear all humans who disagree with or don't conform to their ideology on some topic outsiders won't even be familiar with. They've broken the is-ought understanding, and in a deep, multifaceted way.
I also find it very unusual that biologists of all people would often be socialists. You'd think evolution by natural selection is the best example of an emergent process that requires no central design or planning ahead, and biologists would all be devotees of Hayek or something.
Being a socialist isn't contrary to being a biologist. Biology is the stuff of life, but humanity, though part of life, mastered the art and science of shaping nature for our own benefit. So, even though we are part of nature and living world, we've created our own rules and don't belong to the cycle of nature. Long ago, we did. We hunted other animals, and other animals hunted us. We killed and were killed, we devoured and were devoured. But we've created civilization, which is an art of how to control and restrict nature to make things easier for ourselves. And socialism promises scientists mechanisms by which the wilder aspects of human nature are tamed to make for a more harmonious society. Some degree of socialism have been successful, but full-blown communism was bound to fail because it undermines incentives.
There's a problem with some 'science' when it's done well by professionals who because of bias publish a press release which distorts the results. This may be because of funding for the always needed 'further research' or because they know the results will upset benefactors. Tobacco control science is horrendous for this.
Thoroughly, enjoyable, essay. It reminded me of this recent quote from the American mind:
“Scientism is the philosophical claim—which cannot be proven scientifically—that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “Science says . . . ” is likely in the grip of scientism. Genuine scientists don’t talk like this. They begin sentences with phrases like, “The findings of this study suggest,” or “This meta-analysis concluded. . . .” Scientism, by contrast, is a religious and often a political ideology. “It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion; the thing which people believe that they believe in.” When science becomes a religion—a closed and exclusionary belief system—we are dealing with scientism.
The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility.
The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris.
Aaron Kheriaty. Technocracy and Totalitarianism. The American Mind. January 2023.
"Trofim Lysenko’s Soviet agriculture .. exacerbated famines that killed millions in the Soviet Union and China"??
Chomsky advises dividing such figures by 100 or 1000 and I advise ignoring them, since they are often entirely made up.
Nobody has starved to death in China since 1951, despite what our media tell us. Even during the Three Difficult Years of 1959-61, everyone had something to eat every day–despite the US Grain Embargo.
Yes and the Irish potato famine didn’t really kill 1 million people, after all, Ireland was still exporting food the whole time and many took Swift’s advice and started eating babies instead…
Millions suffered and hundreds of millions of people knew about the Irish famine of 1845, and some photographs survive.
The only person who 'knew' about 'Mao's Great Famine,' learned of its existence 30 years after it allegedly happened. Though tasked with monitoring America's Grain Embargo, the CIA's annual reports for 1959-61 make no mention of it, nor did many prominent visitors then wandering around China.
The book, 'Mao's Great Famine,' was a blatant fraud, even on its cover, which featured a heart-breaking photo of a starving Chinese child begging.
When I pointed out that the photograph was of Chiang Kaishek's very real Great Famine of 1942 and asked why he did not use an image from his 'Great Famine,' the author said he couldn't find one.
The insides are even more fraudulent. Even nutty in places.
What's particularly baffling about the "all science is political" crowd is that a lot of the papers they are defending are pretty blatantly terrible. It's rarely used to defend against marginal criticisms, instead it's truly awful papers that are about as far from defensible as possible. Take one that went around Twitter recently on Capitalism vs Communism:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2105/AJPH.76.6.661
This paper is horrible. Like legitimately one of the worst papers I have ever seen. And actual economists pretend that it's not bad! Among its many many problems are:
1. It is a paper about economic systems that controls for economy
2. There are zero high-income Communist/Socialist countries, and countries that were the same country as recently as 50 years prior the Capitalist offshoots are in a higher economic group in literally every single instance.
3. It largely compares Warsaw Pact Europe to Latin America for the Upper-Middle comparison, and then the Lower-Middle has only four Socialist/Communist countries and the Lower Income group is literally just China. For reference Low-Income Capitalist is 33 countries.
4. It excludes countries with a recent Socialist revolution but includes every country that is considered Capitalist regardless of how recently it changed governments/faced instability. This leads to the hilarious fact that Capitalist Yemen is included but Socialist Yemen is not.
I think this is genuinely the quality of paper the "science is inherently political" cope most often tries to defend. There's clearly a degree to which you can't protect against biases seeping in, but the scientific community has to acknowledge that we are nowhere near that threshold and A LOT of the papers criticized for being politically biased are just trash papers.
A really amazingly bad paper. It says something really grim about some academics that they saw that the paper was on "their side" and merrily tweeted it out, without thinking about any of these problems (or at least, when these problems were pointed out they didn't immediately say "oh my god, oops, I made a mistake", which would also be totally fine!).
> What's particularly baffling about the "all science is political" crowd is that a lot of the papers they are defending are pretty blatantly terrible.
Why is that baffling? People are trotting out the "all science is political" line precisely because they have no other way to defend their papers.
This is part of why economics is the dismal science. Even more than other sciences, it's unavoidably political. Political parties and activists have opinions on economics, much more than they have opinions on any other branch of science. The discourse is polluted with think-tanks that swim in the grey area between research and advocacy. And just think how weird it is that that there is such a thing as "left-wing" and "right-wing" economists; a categorisation that would be absurd applied to, say, geologists.
Peer review prior to publication only became popular around the 70s, and doesn't actually seem to improve quality that much. Post-publication review should be the norm, with no presumption that a paper is correct merely because it's "published".
http://neural-reckoning.org/reviewing.html
"Peer review prior to publication only became popular around the 70s"
This is utter nonsense as far as physics and mathematics is concerned, directly from my own experience (Ph. D. in 1966). I seriously doubt it in all the other hard sciences, unless you are taking seriously various utterly disreputable 'scientific' journals.
In 1936, Einstein famously submitted a manuscript to Physical Review. When an anonymous referee made critical comments on it, Einstein blew a gasket and wrote the following response to the journal's editor:
"We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere."
Apparently Einstein had never previously been subjected to anonymous peer review. He had mainly published in German journals where editors alone decided what was worth publishing. None of his famous papers from the early 20th century were formally peer reviewed.
Once more unto the breach ...: "Peer review prior to publication only became popular around the 70s"
In the context of the age of the visible universe, somewhat earlier than 1936 versus the 70s would be a sliver of time. But surely here you can come up with a better example, perhaps in the 60s.
The statement quoted is simply false for the hard sciences as far as I know. But a serious example, which yours seems not to be, might surface to show me wrong, in which case I'll certainly accept that. But you are likely a physics expert, so can surely find one if it exists. Actually, your Einstein incident(s) sound like they might come from a very interesting and entertaining source, so why not share a specific reference with us? And the Physical Reviews is certainly an important journal, so it really would be interesting to know just when it became impossible for a single editor to be sufficiently expert that there was no real need from that direction for other referees, if one could persuade such a person to be editor. But the direction of more assurance of objectivity is at least one other crucial one, even then.
Of course, there is always the possibility that "the 70s" refers to 1870.
If you go to TGGP's link, sources are clearly given for that claim. This is one citation (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2015.0029) that claims in the abstract that:
> In 1939 former editorial assistants L. J. F. Brimble and A. J. V. Gale assumed a joint editorship of Nature. The Brimble–Gale era is now most famous for the editors' unsystematic approach to external refereeing. Although Brimble and Gale did sometimes consult external referees, papers submitted or recommended by scientists whom the pair trusted were often not sent out for further review. Their successor, John Maddox, would also print papers he admired without external refereeing. It was not until 1973 that editor David Davies made external peer review a requirement for publication in Nature. Nature's example shows that as late as the 1960s a journal could be considered scientifically respectable even if its editors were known to eschew systematic external peer review.
Maybe you're flagging the word 'popular' here, but clearly there was much more divergence in attitudes to peer review until the 1970s. The other citation shows the Lancet adopting it in 1976 (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the-birth-of-modern-peer-review/). Other papers did adopt it earlier: “Science and The Journal of the American Medical Association did not use outside reviewers until after 1940".
Perhaps you're critiquing the precision of TGGP's language, but the fact that two dominant journals didn't utilise comprehensive peer review until the 1970s suggests that the point has some legitimacy. It's not particularly clear from the sources about the actual history of 'peer review *prior* to publication' versus 'peer review *post* publication'.
As someone who has refereed hundreds of papers, I can reassure you that it does help to stop many dreadful papers being published.
This is one of the better papers I have read on this topic in a long while. Should be required reading for all undergraduates in all disciplines. Biased? You bet? But cautiously, skeptically, so.
Excellent essay, hits all key points on the topic.
I agree with most of your points, although your attempt to equivocate between "woke" and righ-wing in terms of politicizing science was a bit annoying. Those are not symmetric at all. "Woke" is coming from within the institutions and seems to have taken over quite a few of them. The right-wing is entirely from without and seems to have almost no influence over what happens within science itself.
I agree that they're not the same, and the "from within" distinction is important. But I was thinking of what's happened to e.g. Bret Weinstein or Jordan Peterson - both famous for pushing back against woke stuff, and both famous for being scientists, facing up to the facts, no-nonsense, etc etc. - but both ended up pushing incredibly unscientific made-up nonsense (which happens to be aligned with the right-wing) and their fans don't seem to care at all.
On the contrary, I quite like both of them, but was confused and lost by Bret's incomprehensible position on vaccines. Not sure what Peterson has "pushed" that's unscientific though. Except the religious stuff, which I would largely consider non-scientifc rather than anti-scientific. Also, he's been pushing that stuff for decades. He wrote his main book on that in 1999. He just became more famous recently.
I think this part of the otherwise excellent essay will cause a lot of people to do a double take for a few reasons:
1. You don't give specific examples of what you're thinking of when you claim the right ignore unscientific claims. Here you name Jordan Peterson but beyond it still being unclear what you mean, he's not really a scientist is he? He's a sort of humanities academic, and/or a "clinical psychologist" but I don't get the impression he is known for his scientific research. As for Bret Weinstein, again, you name a name but not what claims are unscientific.
2. The reason the right don't bat an eyelid is because they don't agree that their views are unscientific. Go read their work and you'll see what I mean - it's the exact opposite! The people who oppose academic output on COVID and climate change see themselves as actually the true, apolitical scientists who aspire to non-political science as you request in your essay, and their primary criticism of COVID and climate science is that it's not scientific enough. Their criticisms of COVID and climate science take the form of scientific rebuttals to published articles, usually criticizing the reliability of either data or methodology.
Now, you might disagree with them. But from their perspective there is no hypocrisy here, because they see opposing wokeism and also attacking COVID/climate science as the exact same thing - pushing back on unscientific politicized research. To resolve whether there is genuine hypocrisy here you'd have to go deep and evaluate their claims to determine if they are sciency enough to meet the bar for being considered "scientific", but that in turn would mean establishing what the bar is and applying it fairly.
In practice, I think there are very few truly neutral people who engage with the critics arguments about those fields and don't themselves become critics because the problems the "right wing" point out are usually pretty blatant. A high school level understanding of math and science is sufficient to understand what the problems are.
You might be interested in my attempt to hold physics education research to normal scientific standards, especially with regard to causal inference. Some but not all of the problems are tied in with politics. The stages of the story can be retraced from this last paper: https://econjwatch.org/articles/invalid-methods-and-false-answers-physics-education-research-and-the-use-of-gres.
I could not agree more with your conclusion, but I think one of your arguments is a little sloppy here. When you talk about the shooter referencing certain studies in his manifesto, you argue that calls to counter this with politically motivated science is 'two wrongs making a right' (in the view of WIRED etc.).
But the shooter wasn't injecting politics into science; he was using science to inform his politics (poorly, I should add). So the argument from the activists wouldn't be that two wrongs make a right, it would be to do politically motivated science to avoid giving their opponents the ammunition. Which is also very misguided, in my opinion, but it's a very different argument that deserves to be properly rebutted.
"witness all the people complaining about “wokeness” invading science who don’t bat an eyelid when right-wingers push unscientific views about COVID or climate change"
So, the author has decided what views are "unscientific" according to his ideological beliefs. He's doing the very thing he condemns.
Where are you getting your beliefs about his epistemic process?
I agree with most of what you write, except wrt ideology. I only ever see this point brought up with regards to a person making an explicit ideological claim, even though implicit ideologies generally go unscrutinised. For example, biologists who conduct experiments on animals, or do research to help make factory farms more efficient, are acting under the ideology of 'animals are worth less than humans and it's fine to treat them as objects'. The person who criticises this, however, is marked as being ideological. I think similar points could be made regarding how open science should be, the treatment of human participants, conducting research on behalf of weapons manufacturers, etc.
Good point. I definitely think that scientists should carefully consider the ethical system they're working under and whether it might be better for the world if they did something different. With regard to the animal rights question, the "Three Rs" movement is trying its best to combine the ethical stuff with practical scientific questions - trying to come to some kind of reasonable compromise between "animals have rights" and "we should do experiments on animals" while ensuring that the science is as above-board as possible.
Lots of people in science and related fields won't state their opinions on various matters because they are too controversial, despite being almost statements of the obvious to people knowledgeable in the field. I've been told things in private conversations that if repeated on the internet generate storms of controversy. In particular some medical treatments are known to be useless or even counterproductive by experts, but woe betide anyone stating it out loud. I'm not sure if that comes under politics or social acceptibility.
I think it's extremely important to examine the accuracy of the specific beliefs of people who want science to be political. If their beliefs stemming from "believing in" "science" are often or mostly false, that kills it.
There's an amazing situation with COVID related beliefs where people seemed to have skipped the critical step of examining or searching for the science. Masks is my best example. This or some tweaked version is true: There's no scientific evidence that masks reduce COVID spread in the real world. 2) There's definitely no scientific evidence that cloth masks reduce COVID spread in the real world. 3) There's no scientific evidence that mandates reduce COVID spread in the real world.
All that hinges on "scientific evidence" being trials, which is the only way we'd know, and the standard scientific approach. There are only two trials, the Danish study reporting no significant effect for surgical masks, and the Bangladesh mosque study reporting a significant effect for surgical masks for old people, and no effect for cloth masks for anyone.
We wouldn't care about lab studies, droplet reduction inferences, computer modeling, etc in a universe where we know about trials and how to conduct them, and where they're super cheap to do. Any serious scientist should be able to list at least six reasons, in five minutes of reflection, why masks wouldn't reduce COVID spread, in either direction, in the real world (even surgical masks). I mean imagining if, from doing a bunch of trials, we discovered that masks didn't reduce spread, what the reasons might be. Even a research psychologist should be able to spin up several decent hypotheses there, easy, if you can deactivate their leftist ideological identity.
People have these amazing beliefs about scientific issues, without any evidence or search for evidence, and they have them at Time 1, the day after the question emerged. There's an issue of conflating a government agency's recommendations or claims for science, which is a big chunky issue itself. When the media doesn't even engage with scientific evidence directly, now you've got people who don't look stuff up depending on intermediaries who don't look stuff up, who in turn depend on government intermediaries who.... well, I have no idea what they do since they don't tell us. They don't disclose their methodology, and it appears to be an unscientific one – they're not doing meta-analysis, and their artifacts are just propaganda sheets full of false statements, errors, and stunning exclusions of contrary studies. When there's so little research that looking it up is trivial, it gets super awkward.
Otherwise, the big thing you missed is that "reality has a leftist bias", or that science backs one's ideology, has fully backed it, and necessarily backs it in the future, because well leftist ideology is just true, even the part about men and women not having different bodies, morphologically, or invisible forces causing all unfavorable outcomes for some groups, etc. There's also a distinctive issue with the very content of leftist/coercensor ideology, such that they commonly don't distinguish between their ideology and descriptive reality. They'll use their proprietary abstractions as descriptive terms, things like social justice, or even fake clinical pathology terms like some non-existent phobia (it's unclear why it's always a phobia specifically) to smear all humans who disagree with or don't conform to their ideology on some topic outsiders won't even be familiar with. They've broken the is-ought understanding, and in a deep, multifaceted way.
Hi,
I think it will be mute once we have the pandemic treaty https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/from-may-2024-unelected-officials?s=w our health will be controlled by the technocracy whatever the science says.
Here's my small run down of why the science says we don't need a global treaty of nations https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/we-do-not-need-a-pandemic-prevention?s=w
I also find it very unusual that biologists of all people would often be socialists. You'd think evolution by natural selection is the best example of an emergent process that requires no central design or planning ahead, and biologists would all be devotees of Hayek or something.
Being a socialist isn't contrary to being a biologist. Biology is the stuff of life, but humanity, though part of life, mastered the art and science of shaping nature for our own benefit. So, even though we are part of nature and living world, we've created our own rules and don't belong to the cycle of nature. Long ago, we did. We hunted other animals, and other animals hunted us. We killed and were killed, we devoured and were devoured. But we've created civilization, which is an art of how to control and restrict nature to make things easier for ourselves. And socialism promises scientists mechanisms by which the wilder aspects of human nature are tamed to make for a more harmonious society. Some degree of socialism have been successful, but full-blown communism was bound to fail because it undermines incentives.
There's a problem with some 'science' when it's done well by professionals who because of bias publish a press release which distorts the results. This may be because of funding for the always needed 'further research' or because they know the results will upset benefactors. Tobacco control science is horrendous for this.
Thoroughly, enjoyable, essay. It reminded me of this recent quote from the American mind:
“Scientism is the philosophical claim—which cannot be proven scientifically—that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “Science says . . . ” is likely in the grip of scientism. Genuine scientists don’t talk like this. They begin sentences with phrases like, “The findings of this study suggest,” or “This meta-analysis concluded. . . .” Scientism, by contrast, is a religious and often a political ideology. “It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion; the thing which people believe that they believe in.” When science becomes a religion—a closed and exclusionary belief system—we are dealing with scientism.
The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility.
The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris.
Aaron Kheriaty. Technocracy and Totalitarianism. The American Mind. January 2023.
"Trofim Lysenko’s Soviet agriculture .. exacerbated famines that killed millions in the Soviet Union and China"??
Chomsky advises dividing such figures by 100 or 1000 and I advise ignoring them, since they are often entirely made up.
Nobody has starved to death in China since 1951, despite what our media tell us. Even during the Three Difficult Years of 1959-61, everyone had something to eat every day–despite the US Grain Embargo.
Yes and the Irish potato famine didn’t really kill 1 million people, after all, Ireland was still exporting food the whole time and many took Swift’s advice and started eating babies instead…
Millions suffered and hundreds of millions of people knew about the Irish famine of 1845, and some photographs survive.
The only person who 'knew' about 'Mao's Great Famine,' learned of its existence 30 years after it allegedly happened. Though tasked with monitoring America's Grain Embargo, the CIA's annual reports for 1959-61 make no mention of it, nor did many prominent visitors then wandering around China.
The book, 'Mao's Great Famine,' was a blatant fraud, even on its cover, which featured a heart-breaking photo of a starving Chinese child begging.
When I pointed out that the photograph was of Chiang Kaishek's very real Great Famine of 1942 and asked why he did not use an image from his 'Great Famine,' the author said he couldn't find one.
The insides are even more fraudulent. Even nutty in places.