The Systemic Problem with Science that Enabled Fauci to Prosper.

KARL POPPER CALLED FOR INSTITUTIONAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE OVER 80 YEARS AGO.

John H. Fund flagged this matter on Australian Sky News, on Friday 31 July, talking to James Morrow about the Fauci scandal. Fund is a political journalist, currently the national-affairs reporter for National Review Online and a senior editor at The American Spectator.

FUND

Well, we cannot forget that Anthony Fauci is not alone here.

We should not focus just on him. Lots of other people that Anthony Fauci was corresponding with in assembling and meetings were part of this cover-up and part of this campaign of intimidation against any critics who dared to challenge these lockdowns.

This is a systemic problem.

What we really have to do is, I think, challenge the very scientific-industrial complex we have created in this country.

Remember that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about a military-industrial complex. We also warned about an educational-industrial complex. We have increasingly seen science funding controlled by the federal government that has become a cesspool of corruption and favouritism and hatred.

POPPER ON THE INSTITUTIONS OF SCIENCE

Hence the need for more attention to the institutions and the customary practices in science that Popper identified over 80 years ago when he was in New Zealand, writing The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and the papers that appeared in The Poverty of Historicism (1957).

He claimed that the objectivity of science comes from the process of more or less free criticism in the scientific community.

It may be said that what we call ‘scientific objectivity’ is not a product of the individual scientist’s impartiality, but a product of the social or public character of scientific method; and the individual scientist’s impartiality is, so far as it exists, not the source but rather the result of this socially or institutionally organized objectivity of science. (Popper 1996 220)

Considering what drove progress in science and industry, he contemplated what could STOP progress.

By closing down or controlling laboratories for research, by suppressing or controlling scientific periodicals and other means of discussion, by suppressing scientific congresses and conferences, by suppressing Universities and other schools, by suppressing books, the printing press, writing, and, in the end, speaking. All these things which indeed might be suppressed (or controlled) are social institutions…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. And the competing hypotheses need personal representation, as it were: they need advocates, they need a jury, and even a public. This personal representation must be institutionally organized if we wish to ensure that it works. (Popper 1961 154-5)

The audience that Popper wanted would come through the teaching that Jacques Barzun advocated to produce laypeople who know enough about the history and methods of science to follow public discussions of controversial scientific matters. The scientists, for their part, would be alert to the moral, social and political implications of their work.

THE GOVERNANCE OF SCIENCE

Popper’s reference to the institutional context of science in The Poverty of Historicism points to the governance of science. This became a big issue in Britain when Marxists such as John Bernal, a world leader in molecular biology, pushed for government control of the national research effort (Bernal 1939). This provoked a reaction to defend autonomous science led by Michael Polanyi and he wrote “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” that was published in Minerva (1962). For an account of this episode and a survey of the range of issues involved, see Ravetz Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971).

Other postwar developments intensified the issue of governance, notably the rise of Big Science and the official discovery of the phenomenon of “normal science”. Big Science refers to the major research and development projects on the model of the Manhattan Project which transformed the scientific and academic landscape (Shills 1972, Greenberg 2001).

In his unpublished lectures Popper referred to the menace of Big Science with too much money chasing too few ideas and other adverse effects. Speaking from a very different vantage point President Eisenhower in his farewell speech to the nation in 1961 warned that the nation’s scholars might be dominated by Federal employment and project allocations.

…the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Barzun saw that college science teaching at the time (1948) was creating a large, powerful, and complacent class of college-trained scientists at the heart of the industrial and political system. “The technicians [normal scientists] - wedded solely to their workbench - will work for any group that hires. .. And the mass of people – the citizens - are trained to accept the authority of experts.”

His remedy - teach science as a humanities subject.

Then came Kuhn’s account of normal science, which many people accepted as the proper way to go, especially in the social sciences where researchers were keen to copy the more prestigious disciplines (Notturno 1984).

A TURN TOWARDS DARKNESS

A more recent development is a rapidly growing literature on problems in the quality of published research. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of Lancet wrote “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).

There is concern about the increasing incidence of retractions and the higher rate of retractions in high impact journals (Fang et al 2011) and the dangerous liaison of science and politics (Butos and McQuade 2006).

Less than 12% of articles in 2004 in The Journal of Economic Theory passed three tests – stating a theory, explaining why it mattered and testing it (Klein and Romaro 2007).

There are problems of replication of results and politicization in some fields such as climate science. Another concern is the declining publication of negative results (Fanelli 2012) and it would be interesting to explore if this has any basis in the persistent teaching of confirmation theory rather than critical rationalism in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

ENTER GORDON TULLOCK

The economist Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) was inspired by his contact with Popper to make a significant but little-appreciated contribution to the literature on the governance of science. He is regarded as one of the most gifted and innovative economists not to win a Nobel Prize. In The Organization of Inquiry (1966) he approached the topic of scientific research and publication as a student of legal, social and economic systems to sketch a scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline, given a particular combination of motivational factors and institutional incentives.

Concerning the people who engage in pure and applied research he identified three kinds of curiosity:
1. Pure curiosity and compulsion to find how the world works. This drives the great scientists.
2. The passionate desire to solve practical problems. This drives the great builders and engineers.
3. “Induced curiosity” directed to either pure or applied problems.

The researchers with induced curiosity are those who do not have a consuming passion for research but do it as a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” in the struggle for tenure and promotion and the 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.

Closely related to the motives of the investigators is their concern for the quality of the work and their willingness to test their assumptions and their results. Tullock noted that the dedicated truth seeker and also the serious practical problem-solver must pay close attention to reality to align their ideas with it and this demands constant testing and critical evaluation. In contrast, the researcher who is only aiming to publish to satisfy the requirements of an employer or grant-giving agency can be happy with results that are merely publishable even if they are not robust. As Tullock put it, scientific concern with the real world can run second to other matters.

If he could establish and maintain his reputation, and hence his job, by reporting completely fictional discoveries, this would accomplish his end. While an investigator motivated by curiosity or practical utility must, of necessity, concern himself with real phenomena, the man motivated by induced curiosity could, if the risk of discovery were not great, simply ignore reality. (Tullock 1965 56)

SELF-PERPETUATING CORRUPTION OF PEER REVIEW

He suggested that a self-perpetuating process could occur in a journal or a field of research dominated by investigators with induced curiosity (or “normal” or “uncritical scientists”) so the work could “gradually slip away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects”. The peer review process is designed to avert such a decline however if the reviewers are too closely associated with the authors either personally or by membership of a school of thought then the rigor of the process may suffer. Tullock speculated that this would be most likely to happen in a field dominated by “induced” and “normal scientists” rather than the dedicated truth seekers.

Towards the end of that slippery slope is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to support a “side” on some issue. 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…these symptoms may be found in some of the social sciences.

When Tullock wrote the book in the 1960s, he considered that the natural sciences were sound, but he thought that parts of economics and the social sciences were well down the slope that he sketched. In view of the concerns that are being expressed about the state of science at present, it may be time to revisit Tullock’s analysis to see what we can learn from it.

Can Science be Saved?