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What explains the adherence to bad ideas in the form of bad policy?
The political economist Gordon Tullock had a go at that, inspired by Karl Popper to look at the institutional organization of science and especially the way that peer review works.
Turning to Gordon Tullock (1922-2014). Climate science was not yet on the radar when he wrote in the early 1960s and he thought the natural sciences were good shape. His scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline drew on his experience of the social sciences including parts of economics. He was a colleague of James Buchanan in the Virginia School of public choice studies and he was unlucky not to share the Nobel Prize with Buchanan, probably because he was temperamentally a contrarian and he was easily distracted. In addition to seminal work on economics he wrote a book about the social life of insects and he engaged in long-running correspondence with Karl Popper, trying to persuade him to take up some of Tullock’s ideas in quantum physics.
After he met Popper at a Volker Fund (free enterprise) conference at Emory University he put aside the work that became The Politics of Bureaucracy and wrote The Organization of Enquiry. He took the social/institutional approach advocated by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism, written in New Zealand during the war as a companion to The Open Society and Its Enemies.
The idea was to explain the development or lack of scientific and industrial progress in terms of the institutional context rather than psychological factors (advocated by Comte and Mill) or the manifestation of a historical tendency.
Contemplating the factors that could stop the progress of science Popper suggested closing down or controlling laboratories for research and anything that impeded the free exchange of criticism and ideas in the scientific community. “Scientific method itself has social aspects. Science, and more especially scientific progress, are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests.”
He went on to suggest that competing hypotheses need personal representation, advocates, “and even a public.” He might have suggested ‘an informed public’ because the public at present is so misinformed about the weather that politicians are easily driven by public opinion to embrace disastrous policies.
Tullock sketched a scenario that has a haunting resemblance to the progress of climate science and probably other fields as well, judging from the famous warning issued by Richard Horton in his capacity as editor in chief of Lancet. “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may be simply untrue…Science has taken a turn towards darkness” with reference to small sample sizes, invalid analyses, conflicts of interest and obsession with fashionable trends (Horton 2015).
The scenario involves a combination of personal and institutional factors. The personal factor is the rise of the normal scientist who does science for a living, working under the direction of the laboratory manager without necessarily having any sense of vocation or passion to find the truth. The institutional factors include the rise of Big Science driven by Big Government, the imperative to publish perish to maintain tenure and research grants and the politicisation of intellectual life.
At the individual level he identified three forms of curiosity. First the pure curiosity of the scientist engaged in a compulsive or or obsessive quest for the truth,. Second the equally driving practical curiosity of the person obsessed with making things work better. Third, the “induced curiosity” of the researcher who does not necessarily have a passion for research or the truth but takes on science as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” to obtain tenure and promotion, and the large numbers of scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories.
Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest.
Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it. This demands constant testing and critical evaluation but in contrast, the researcher who is not so motivated can be happy with results that are merely publishable Tullock suggested that for these scientists concern with the real world could become secondary to other matters and if the investigators could maintain their reputations and their jobs by reporting fictional discoveries that would serve the purpose.
The peer review process is designed to maintain standards and he developed the scenario further to consider what would happen if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought. He was working before natural science was seriously politicized and of course in the radically polarized world of climate science nowadays the membership of the correct school of thought has become a professional imperative for most investigators.
He observed the politicization of the social sciences because he and Buchanan had both suffered from it (denied funding by the left-trending Rockefeller Foundation) and he observed that the end of the that slippery slope of declining standards is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a particular position. At this point
“Simply presenting a rationalization for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view…The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia”.
Readers can decide for themselves how far various fields have gone down that path, bearing in mind Horton’s warming in The Lancet.
To conclude with a reminder of Winsberg’s suggestion quoted at the head of this review –to trust the scientific consensus based on the organization of the community. This means referring questions of scientific credibility to a consortium of politically correct grant-seekers, environmental fundamentalists and UN officials dedicated to the transformation of the economies of the western world. That is not really what one might have expected from a scholar in the Queen of the Sciences!
This is for nerds.
