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‘Science’ Sinking
Hello Ricochet! I subscribed to Ricochet in 2018 mainly to support the excellent flagship podcast, which I listen to every week. I have not posted before, not for lack of interest but for lack of time. However, I came across an item yesterday in the journal Science that was so troubling that I had to make time to put my thoughts into words. The lead editorial in the latest edition shows not only that Science the journal is lost to progressive ideology, but also that science the intellectual pursuit may be well on its way.
Yesterday morning a link to the electronic version of Science arrived by email. Science is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the leading cross-disciplinary science journals. A paper published in Science is a major achievement for academic scientists. Every week the journal has an opening editorial published by a guest contributor. The editorial typically provides an opinion about some current issue related to science. Typical headlines for the editorial would be statements like “Only international action can save sea turtles from climate doom” or “Academic scientists desperately need more money.”
This morning the editorial was titled “Save the Supreme Court and democracy.” This piece stood out for several reasons. It is completely political with only a very weak pretense of relevance to science. The editorial shows that the author (Maya Sen) either (1) has no knowledge of the constitution and hasn’t actually read the Supreme court decisions that she cites, or (2) does understand the constitution and has read the cases but chooses to ignore the facts anyway. And most disturbingly: The author must be confident that her highly-educated readers will be just as poorly informed yet confident in their opinions as she is.
Maya Sen is no un-credentialed slouch. She is a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. However, she has no problem making the following statements:
“When it resumes in October, the court will be poised to outlaw affirmative action, undercut federal regulations regarding clean water, and possibly allow state legislatures to restrict voting rights without oversight by state courts.”
“The court’s eye-popping move to the conservative right is confirmed by research that compares its decisions to public opinion.”
“If people think the court is ideologically opposed to them, they will be more likely to think that it is acting purely politically.” (stated unironically)
“As gridlock and polarization continue to undercut the efficacy of elected branches of government, the Supreme Court’s salience in matters of public importance will only rise.”
“Additional promising proposals by scholars to help reduce ideological imbalance include reconfiguring how the US selects justices and expanding the size of the court. Others—such as stripping the court’s jurisdiction—would address the argument that the court wields too much power.”
You can read the whole thing for yourself here.
By publishing this editorial, the editors of Science gave it the imprimatur of one of the world’s most respected hard-science journals. This adds to the shameful role that Science has played in promoting the risible idea that the Wuhan flu popped up due to natural causes, by the most incredible coincidence in all history, in a market just down the street from one of the three labs in the world that studies enhanced versions of coronavirus found in bats. They published this nonsense without noting the clear conflicts of interest of the authors, who played a role in funding the dangerous research in the shoddy lab that leaked COVID.
Science (the journal) was an institution that deserved respect based on decades of straight reporting and publication of excellent papers. The current editors are squandering that hard-won respect and it will take a very long time to re-earn it. Worse still, the scientific community remains largely silent as progressive ideology erodes their institutions.
All of this, IMHO, traces back to the corruption of science due to politicized government funding and warped incentives in the universities. But that’s a post for another day.
Published in Science & Technology
My grandfather gave me a gift subscription to Scientific American when I was ten years old (in 1970…) and I kept that subscription going for decades. When Michal Shermer’s column moved from debunking flat-earth theories to debunking Christianity, I finally had enough and cancelled.
Did you read Skeptical Inquirer, too?
Oh yes! Loved it. Quit when you did.
My reaction to the “smartest person in the room” argument is usually negative. In my experience, it’s often used to dismiss an argument that you can’t rebut.
I agree that it can be a good argument, in the type of situation that you indicate, when a very smart person with vast knowledge in one (or more) areas strays outside of those areas of expertise. An example, in my view, is Einstein’s (alleged) statement along the lines of “you cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
SCOTUS affirmed popular/majority opinion with Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. The idea that popularity determines legitimacy is so blindingly stupid…
The article at this substack explains how one man developped an algorithm so he could track the funding that scientists are offered up front before they undertake their “clinical trials.”
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/can-new-software-spotlight-hidden
I sometimes muse these studies might as well be called “monetarily funded propaganda using the name of Science.”
It also demonstrates there are two ways of viewing the little blurb at the end of any published science paper that details the researchers’ connections to Big Financial Pharma firms. And if the methods would be switched out to a more visual representation rather than abstract words, there is much more of a punch to the idea that Scientist ABC “scientifically undertook a clinical trial” that magically, like every other amount of research scientist ABC has ever done, helped bring forth the approval of another product for his sponsor and patron, Big Pharma firm XYZ.
This drives me [CoC] crazy. Why? Why do you need to speak out? “We can no longer remain silent!” Well, actually yes, yes you certainly can remain [CoC] silent.
Lightning is usually top down. It’s illuminating, but still I try to avoid it.
But seriously, movies are increasingly being made top down, with the morals written into the story arc first, and then trying to figure out a plot.
More like four decades ago, when it let Martin Gardner lose his logic as he attacked the Laffer Curve.
Never confuse credentials with education.
One of the best Engineering Managers I worked for had no college degree, but was self educated and always open to new ideas and ways of viewing a problem.
Hey, Martin Garner was one of the leading contributors to “The Skeptical Inquirer.” When they started to lose their marbles, Gardner was one of the few contributors that didn’t seem so swayed into leftist emanations. If he was, he didn’t show it or talk about it. If I remember correctly, he was the guy(?) who suddenly announced that he had just gone through some sort of life-changing event that actually involved something to do with the paranormal (which was total anathema to the organization) and had a previously unknown (to him) daughter show up unannounced at his doorstep. He was going to stop writing for a while while he took stock of his life. I always wondered what this paranormal event was that he wouldn’t describe. I could be mistaking him with another writer. Maybe Brian Stephens remembers this episode.
I don’t know about all that. I just remember when he abandoned logic as well as knowledge of probability and statistics when he hated on the Laffer Curve.
I thought he found God, though it has been a while.
Is that why so many are so horrible? We’re increasingly just watching old stuff and foreign films.
I think so. But I haven’t seen too many movies in the past decade. Cell phones kind of ruined theaters for me. The only films I would see would be on flights, and they are pretty international. Japanese and Korean. The Grand Budapest Hotel was fairly good. But I haven’t flown since covid.
I never grew up a Humphry Bogart fan, but now I like his films. Frankly I like anything made before 1990.
From the linked abstract:
Welcome to the party! Some of us have lacked “confidence in the Supreme Court’s ability to render impartial justice” our whole lives, witnessing how the Court consistently ignored the Constitutional text and legislated from the bench to support the progressive agenda on abortion, same sex marriage, and other social issues. The fact that the authors could even suggest this is somehow a “coming crisis” i.e. something new with a straight face made me wonder whether they are gaslighting us, or live in such a hermetically sealed bubble that they’ve never actually met a living, breathing conservative?
But then this gave the game away:
They’re gaslighting us. They don’t even care if their reforms are actually constitutional, just so long as they are “plausibly” so.
I have since found my error in recollection. It was Skeptical Inquirer investigator Joe Nickell who had the life-changing moment when a previously unknown daughter showed up on his doorstep (along with two grandsons). Though I didn’t get the whole explanation, Nickell suddenly started to believe that human intuition had some sort of “paranormal” legitimacy in an otherwise material universe. It had something to do with his daughters instinctual knowledge that her purported father was not her real father.