“Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing.”
Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.
sign of the times. make that ‘science’ of the times.
what can one do when huge portion, MILLIONS utterly convince Apollo 11 was faked?
ignorance like a 20-on-the-richter-scale shaking the whole world to pieces.
a new dark ages is upon us.
This didn’t just start 50 years ago. This started when humans developed egos, shortly after the first cave paintings.
“Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.”
Science is corrupted by it’s addiction to tax dollars. When the tax subsidization ends, then the political corruption of science will end with it.
Proper Science is the pursuit of knowledge, and understanding. In contrast today,what is called science if all too often the pursuit of fame and fortune. See Micheal Mann, and your bug entomologist David whatshis name.P
Interesting article with many different themes. The main points that I got from it is that we have gone to far in curiosity driven science and not enough into technology or goal driven science. The curiosity driven science has created all kinds of unintended consequences like the fragmentation of knowledge, not enough focus on meaningful practical solutions, gathering grants creates prestige instead of producing science that can be applied to real problems, the proliferation of bad science erodes confidence and willingness to fund more reasearch
I don’t think you can really expect “selfless honesty” since that defies most everyone’s nature. Being a “demanding customer” that provides structure and oversight to science funded by the taxpayers to solve specific problems is a better solution but it still depends on the integrity of politically appointed overseers. Privately funded science should do as it pleases, of course, because there is value in curiosity driven science. Goal oriented science would need to have people that don’t care about ruining friendships by cancelling research projects or can resist becoming more interested in accruing kickbacks than producing results. There would also be immense resistance from the scientific establishment but the existing system is failing so there needs to be creative destruction. Making science more competitive and making the review process a structured opposition by sceptics would also help.
I liked this part:
“But if your constituency, to use Marqusee’s term, is society, not scientists, then the choice of what data and knowledge you need has to be informed by the real-world context of the problem to be solved. The questions you ask are likely to be very different if your end goal is to solve a concrete problem, rather than only to advance understanding. That’s why the symbiosis between science and technology is so powerful: the technology provides focus and discipline for the science. But Vannevar Bush’s beautiful lie has led to institutional cultures organized and incentivized around pursuing more knowledge, not solving problems.”
That is probably the best quotation to use to summarize this excellent article. It’s a long read but well worth it.
Much of the corrupted science is incentivized around pursuing tax grants, giving it a political focus, not pursuing knowledge or solving real problems.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/Classics/CUCD/atkins.html
Cut the tax umbilical cord and science will be delinked from the political corruption and need to prove predetermined false hypotheses.
It may not need stating, but politics is more overtly corrupt these past few decades then ever before in my lifetime.
Scientists are unlikely to pursue true science when they are more easily and richly paid to promote corrupt scientific conclusions for corrupt politicos from bottomless borrowed taxes.
Not to mention money. Being able to bring in moolah to an academic department is one way of demonstrating one is worthy of tenure.
Actual creativity and being able to do with $1 what everyone else needs $5 to accomplish won’t work in that environment.
What David Lentz and Oz (Gollum) said.
The motto today is, We make the science that satisfies the Chicken Little fears and fills our and our political string pullers pockets.
As far as the climate change portion of this larger question, I find that what’s most disturbing is the politicization of the science with people on both sides seeking to discredit a scientific theory from a political perspective. (“This theory can’t be right because it violates my political belief structure.”)
But we started down this road when the AMA abandoned its former positions about the mental health of homosexuals, there again a science was transformed by political opinion rather than just an objective study of facts — facts that did not suit the new theory were banned from polite discussion around 1990 after about a twenty-year open fight.
Climate science is trying to achieve this same feat but there are more dissidents, some of whom don’t mind going to a similar extreme and distorting known facts to suit their agenda.
The reality would be mundane if it had no political consequences. There are similar debates about how asteroids came into existence, except that the political impact of that is nearly zero so nobody but a few specialists care about it.
With climate change and the economy intertwined, almost everybody has a stake, therefore almost everybody has an opinion, and I’m willing to bet that fewer than 1% of these opinions are based on anything but hopeful conjecture either way.
Education, one of the four hidden dynasties…
https://idmprogram.com/the-procrustean-bed-of-cancer-as-a-genetic-disease-cancer-7/
In Greek mythology, Procrustes is a son of Poseidon (god of the sea) who often invited passersby to stay at his house to rest for the night. When he showed them to their bed, if the guest was too tall, he would chop off their limbs until the bed fit just right. If they were too short, he would stretch them on a rack until the bed fit just right. The great contemporary thinker and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb often uses this allegory, but it is also quite appropriate to describe how the facts have been tortured to fit the theory of the Somatic Mutation Theory (SMT)
The real problem is that GOVERNMENTS are using the climate change concept for self-serving and self-aggrandizing purposes.
They simply do not care if climate change is valid or not.
They do not care.
If you think they care, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
They’ve found a cash cow of immense proportions, turning their citizens into slaves, and they will exploit it without limits.
Climate change proponents themselves have found an advocate in governments, but they don’t realize the Frankenstein monster they’ve unleashed because the Climate Change concept has been quite rewarding for them and they’ve blinded themselves to what they’ve done.
“They’ve found a cash cow of immense proportions, turning their citizens into slaves, and they will exploit it without limits.”
The limit is their ability to sell the swindle to taxpayers.
Yes the media is in cahoots, but the media wouldn’t have a leg to stand of without the scientists, and the scientists wouldn’t risk their reputations without bottomless grants/tax funding as an incentive.
I think linking the problems with climate change science with acceptance and legal equality for gays and lesbians is comparing apples to oranges. Climate change is a physical science issue while gay rights is a cultural issue. Mixing the two together will, correctly imo, alienate the majority of climate change sceptics and lukewarmers.
The problem with climate change is that alarmists have wildly exaggerated the effects of CO2 induced warming. They took an accepted hypothesis and used it to produce religious like hysteria based entirely on Armageddon-like predictions of future events. Can you imagine another scenario that is similar? For instance, it is accepted that that the San Andreas and Cascadia fault lines will eventually slip enough to cause a massive earthquake and tsunami. If we followed the climate alarmist playbook we would immediately insist on mandatory evacuations of all people in those zones by 2020 without compensation…or you are subduction zone denier who wants tens of thousands of people to die. In both cases the self-righteous scientist becomes a moral crusader and then becomes a tyrannical dictator.
Another PRIMARY problem for “science” … is that the vast majority of what is reported to be “science” is actually “statistical correlation and manipulation”. With the advent of powerful personal computers, “scientists” no longer have to do REAL science … you know … like with experiments … double blind … and whatnot. Instead, all they need is to harness a few graduate assistants … crunch some irrelevant statistics … cherry pick a timeframe and pool of incidents and voila! Your JUNK is reported as “science”. Add to that the ease and power of graphics programs that allow desktop publishing of maximum-impressive-looking charts and graphs … and voila! As Thomas Dolby sang … SCIENNNNNCCE !!!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2VNxmn0lNA
And the lapdog media pass-thru the JUNK with nary a sceptical comment. Especially when the “science” is NEGATIVE … and argues against anything and everything you enjoy.
And the prediction of a 8.5 or greater earthquake and its devastating effects is a much more credible prediction than the extreme runaway warming scenarios.
A couple of years ago, I attended the International Peer Review Congress, which was in Chicago that year. I noticed that the speakers were overwhelmingly biomedical and pharma researchers, and I also noticed a disturbing trend, that I believe is taking hold in all areas of academia: Researchers seem to believe as an article of faith that diverse data sets can simply be accumulated as a “big data” collection, and that data is endlessly malleable so long as you can discover statistically significant correlation. This is a terrible idea.
I also noticed that almost none of the studies presented were the result of experimental data. Virtually all of them were based on re-purposing data collected for other experiments – so a researcher might write a paper about the impact of obesity on the recovery of arterial stent recipients based on data collected for a clinical trial of an anticoagulant administered as part of the follow-up care.
The problems with this approach are that 1) the trial population was selected for a particular purpose to control variables that aren’t related to your study, and 2) you have no way of knowing if the original data is trustworthy, or if it might have been massaged by the researchers who published the original study, and 3) since you’re not directly observing the experiment, you may miss seeing other effects that weren’t recorded because while they are important to your study, they weren’t important to the original experimenters.
There is a real resistance to collecting experimental data, because it’s really expensive, and it takes a long time. A clinical trial may take months or years to complete, whereas you can publish a nice exciting paper based in recycled data in a few weeks.
Curiously, this didn’t seem to bother any of the speakers at the conference. I got into a discussion about this afterward with a couple of editors from Plos One, and they seemed to feel that my concerns weren’t of particular importance.
Ironically, I was there to promote a tool the startup I was working with had built to check the compliance of your study design with the CONSORT statement and other reporting standards. Everyone agreed that this would be a really useful tool for peer review, but no one felt that it was important enough that they should pay for it. 😉
Reminds me of our desk chair chemist. Smart guy. Great with numbers. His constant frustration that his carefully calculated figures didn’t correlate well with actual results was almost comical. Unfortunately, desk calculations cannot account for mechanical quirks, leaky valves, slightly different corrosion rates in piping and human factors like vaying levels of operator’s interest in working. Data is important but it’s not the only thing. You need more than that to understand a complex system, any complex system.
For a very long time I have understood science to be the new religion where the guy in the white lab coat replaced the guy with the collar on backwards. Just like the guy with the silly collar was esteemed beyond his worth so too has the guy in the white lab coat come to be esteemed beyond his worth. Where once the collar guy spoke truth beyond question now the lab coat guy is beyond question. The problem is that just like the guy in the collar the guy in the lab coat is utterly human with all of humanities foibles. Science, alas, is not the salvation of mankind and the guys in the lab coats are just as corrupt as any other fallen human.
As someone above alluded to, statistics is being abused terribly and used incorrectly. It’s supposed to be for illumination not support.
The article goes off the rails in its worship of the DoD. We don’t have personal computers because of the DoD. We have them because of free markets.
Despite my unwavering Christian faith … you are EXACTLY right. Secular humanism and “science” is not the antidote for religious dogma … it’s the REPLACEMENT of religious dogma. But dogma nonetheless. We need a new bumper sticker that reads: … Scientific Dogma is my Copilot … on the bumper of every Tesla.
Quite right. It is an interesting argument about which is the New Priesthood in Post Modern society, those that wear the Lab Coat or those that have a Lamb Skin making them a Member of the Bar.
In Olden Tymes children would be asked, if they wanted power, whether the would choose to be King or Pope.
The right answer was to be Pope because he crowned and confirmed Kings, thus being a Kingmaker.
(Monarchs rule by Divine Right and the Pope spoke for the Divine)
In the present era, where most politicos are lawyers, who makes whom? Who gives the credibility and who profits most by the power conferred by the other?
We have seen in TV commercials actors wearing Lab Coats but I strain my remembrance to imagine the commercial where I have seen the actor wear the gown of a Judge.(Judges being the most powerful lawyers)
As with Popes and Kings, there was mostly only one Pope but many Kings. So too it is with Judges and scientists, proportionally similar.
I doubt that Vannevar Bush lied about anything.
Suzuki isn’t an entomologist but a geneticist.
Michael Mann is indeed despicable.