Science is in trouble

A fairly recent study of 204 scientists replying to a journal's questionnaire, 197 reported they were aware of cheating by their colleagues. They judged that 58% of the cheating was intentional, and they reported that only 10% of these intentional cheaters were dismissed; most of them, in fact, were promoted. However a more recent meta-study with a much larger N found this to be a severe underestimation. This meta-study found instead that 72% reported questionable research practices on the part of their colleagues, with almost 15% reporting falsification of data and outright fabrication of results. Anonymous self-reporting in this particular study, indicated that roughly 34% stated that they themselves used questionable practices (unethical, fabrication, purposefully suspect statistical manipulation, etc.). (Perhaps this is an anti-anthropic principle whereby an entire scientific methodology is constructed on the belief that all others are mere illusion .)

Science and scientists are not separate from society or the mores inherent therein. (Hence T. Kuhn's implication that paradigms constrain innovation.) Scientists are the same as people anywhere - they have children, mortgages,pay taxes, read newspapers, and suffer the same severe prejudices and belief systems which colour the world view of humans everywhere. Additionally, the clear (or should that be, appalling) trend toward corporatization of economies and governments, and the instance on efficiencies and market driven outlook has effected scientists no differently from anyone else.

 And like everyone else subject to these trends, intellectual freedom and creativity has been severely impacted. On the whole, scientists now spend much more time justifying their work, applying for funding, and in trying to find commercial uses for their work, than on science. Is it any wonder so many ... bend ... the results to fit what will garner them continued employ?

 Basic science assumes that questions about the universe must be followed up without knowing answers or where research might lead. Try getting that concept across when your department funding is being cut and you have to justify continued expenditure. If you are trying to do something that has never been done before, you have to be on the edge - different from everyone else. And different means different, such that you probably will have trouble communicating with the professional manager or MBA bureaucrat holding the purse strings. Try explain why you need six months to think about chaos theory and its application to quantum spin in lowering rounding errors in FPUs. And by the way, you do not know if it will amount to anything, cannot say if you will have anything to show for it at the end, but you think it might be interesting. Add to this that being a good scientist is not necessarily equivalent to having good social skills or having a high tolerance of wilful ignorance, and you will see why funding is unlikely.

Used with the kind permission of Kevin Moore
 

So who gets funded? Conservatives. And who are the conservatives? Those who do mediocre science and who do not rock the boat. And who can generally justify their work based on its contribution to society - such as producing more fuel efficient missiles. Or who cater to the intellectually bereft - those who portray their psychopathology as religion, and their ilk in power. And of course it is these folks who are asked by managers to sit on 'Peer Review' committees to help decide who is funded. So along comes a grant application which took three years to develop proving that axiomatic set theory is inherently flawed. Who's going to approve this grant? The Peer Review conservative who spent 20 years building a career based on the fact that set theory is the best thing since sliced bread?

Consider too the dissertation process for the senior degree. One idly may ponder the question of how many graduate students make it through a PhD in the hard sciences if they disagree with the ontological outlook of the majority on their thesis committee, or worse, discover flaws in the work of committee members.  How many brilliant scientists who could not or would not bow to the pressure to conform to the majority view, failed to have their doctoral research approved? Failing to cite to say, APA standards appears to be for some entrenched (tenured) folk more important than the ideas being presented. William Cude's work to give but one example, presents case after case were brilliant minds were denied entry to the academy for just such picayune foolishness.

The same standard of mediocrity occurs when trying to publish one's research. Peer-reviewed research journals have practised exclusion as their modus operandi. They exclude authors by limiting their publications to just a few papers. They suppress innovation by limiting their peer reviewers to a small cadre of 'established' scientists. They exclude potential readers by having subscription fees of hundreds of dollars per year, or being available only in the libraries of big research universities. They exclude by exorcising material inimical to their own work. They exclude by precluding work inimical doxa, (as was done for example in the United States with those seeking research grants for non-fiction versions of the Warren Commission Report). It is an up hill battle for anyone in pure (rather than applied) research who seeks to explore innovative ideas.

One small example: I was at a conference once where a scientist's unique contribution to quantum mechanics was recognized. He had paid his own way to the conference. He had never been able to receive funding for his work - the peer review committees suggested his work was too esoteric and not in keeping with recognized practices. He could not find work in his field. He ended up spending much of his career teaching high school. He even worked doing odd jobs in order to survive. He wrote half a dozen papers all of which he had to self publish. At the age of sixty-eight, his work was finally recognized for the brilliant contribution it was. But he was a broken and bitter man.

(A small side point here  illustrating another problem - scientific fundamentalism: Many string theorists use the anthropic principle, a teleology no less tautological than that of creationism. This because of the idea that the arising of vacua, i.e. multiple universes, whereby those which allow for observers or sentience a.k.a. Bell's Theorem, are preferentially favoured. Fundamentalism in the guise of scientific theory is still fundamentalism. Instead of string theory to create universes, we can instead compute them viz.. Schmidhuber sans recourse to quantum mechanics.)

Or consider a colleague in anthropology: For several decades the prevailing belief was that the Clovis people migrated across the Bearing Strait following big game about 13,500 years ago and in the process populated the Americas. When research began to uncover much older artefacts in North America, and DNA and carbon dating evidence traced these to as much as 50,000 years ago, the researchers involved such as my colleague were vehemently attacked. Although it is now almost universally accepted that the Clovis people were not the first American settlers, at the time a few of those presenting contrary research lost their positions, and several more lost funding and advancement opportunities. Most could not even get their work published in peer reviewed journals. The classist response that "well, that's just how science works" fails to see the alternatives to this Big Science approach to research, as well as fails to take into account the shattered careers of those who pursue truth rather than fiction.

 The great inventors of the past were almost always men of private means and outside the normal scientific strata. This is getting harder to do all the time. Carlos Slim Helú, Ingvar Kamprad,Alice Walton, Li Ka-shing are people of private means - are any of them going to spend their money and time dabbling in quantum mechanics? How about the billionaires of the computer world? Or Hollywood superstars? Or multimillion dollar football or hockey players? For the most part people with the money today have no interest in the beauty of the universe. Their sights are set much lower. To dream about things other than survival or looking good or defeating a competitor or having a bigger house or climbing a social list is a completely different skill set than that need to be a real scientist. Who are the social heroes? Movie stars, sports stars, captains of industry, lawyers, bankers, doctors, and so on. Not scientists.

Cheating and fraud in science, censorship and suppression of research, funding classism, and the like are I feel, far more common than the general public believes. All of us in the hard sciences know of incidence of data manipulation and outright fraud. We know whose papers are likely to be true, and which (very few) journals to trust. For the rest, the pressures to produce or be denied funding are great indeed.

Science, real science, is in trouble.

An excellent introduction to the fact that science and scientists are products of society: Thomas Kuhn's La structure des revolutions scientifiques. Whilst Kuhn's analysis is IMHO very sorely lacking, particularly in regards to Big Science and the realities of non-academic/non-traditional interests in science, it is none the less good to read. Bourdeau's analyses of science would be worthwhile after Kuhn, then go on to examine some of the current literature in field.

Another interesting read concerns the fact that many CEO's in private and public sectors, including university and college CEO's, begin their tenure by "Short-term performance increases that are sometimes observed after ... successions [which] may be evidence of self-interested behaviour. New CEO's may cut allocations to long-term investment areas such as research and development (R&D), capital equipment ... in an effort to drive up short-term profits and secure their positions." (Harrison & Fiet, Journal of Business Ethics Apr 1999), which nicely describes the state of research in most institutions of higher learning now that the corporate model has so impoverished academic science almost to the point of catatonia.

Please also see my article on iatrogenia which describes albeit briefly, the business of medicine as the antithesis of real science.