Good science needs intellectual honesty;

but dishonesty — albeit unintended dishonesty — is nowadays common

The search for reliable knowledge —what science is supposed to be — calls for intellectual honesty: experiments and observations and calculations must be done honestly, described honestly, and made generally known honestly.

That might seem to be a low bar, but it is not.

Certainly it is reasonable to expect that researchers refrain from deliberate dishonesty. But human psychology, emotions, normal ambitions, make it very difficult indeed to avoid subjectivity: in choosing research projects and specific studies; in assessing the results of research; in seeking assistance when one’s own competence might not be adequate; in respecting advice from other qualified people when that advice suggests unwelcome actions. One may genuinely believe to have worked correctly, but subjectivity includes unconscious biases and presumptions that can induce induced errors, so that a researcher may in all good faith report as true what is actually not true. The disseminated “science” is then unintentionally misleading, objectively speaking dishonest — albeit unintentionally. As mathematician Paul Halmos pointed out, to mislead is inexcusable, more so than offering a “white” lie[i].

Furthermore, a great deal of research requires considerable resources and therefore the approval of the entities that provide the necessary support. That can limit the direction or range of research, and it can limit or hinder entirely the honest publication of results. Again, the resulting findings may be unintentionally misleading, objectively dishonest.

Many researchers nowadays are not independent entrepreneurs, they are members of teams, and here the phenomenon of Groupthink[ii] substitutes an unwillingness to rock the consensual boat for honest individual thought.

Since contemporary science is affected by innumerable personal and institutional conflicts of interest, so the effective intellectual honesty — impartiality in all aspects of the work and its dissemination — cannot reach the high level that a God, or perhaps an empirically investigating robot, might be able to achieve. As mentioned before, the single most important thing to keep in mind is that science is a human activity and therefore fallible.

One common aspect of that is that researchers and scientific institutions aim to be seen as authoritative. That makes it natural to emphasize what has been achieved and to gloss over uncertainties.

I have in mind to illustrate that generality in several later postings. For example, the International Panel on Climate Change is so concerned to influence the world to take emission-controlling actions that the Executive Summaries of its Reports do not properly reflect the uncertainties acknowledged in the technical sections of the reports[iii].

Similarly, public-health authorities will emphasize, more than the facts might warrant, the effectiveness of certain actions — masking and social distancing to prevent spreading of an infection, say —  in the belief that any effect at all, even a not very great one, would be a worthwhile public good, and admitting uncertainty would decrease public adherence to the exhortations.

The drawback of such over-hyped official recommendations is the inevitable eventual backlash;  when the failure to divulge uncertainties becomes public knowledge, confidence in the supposed authorities declines, and conspiracy theories get a boost.

 Before fleshing out such examples of unintended dishonesty, however, I want to consider the pernicious and increasing influence of politics on science, in the shape of political correctness or wokeness, which makes dishonesty unavoidable through undercutting the logical and clear use of language.

That was brought home to me by essays from Anna Krylov[iv] and Scott Turner[v]; and when Tomas Hudlicky got into trouble for writing what might seem to be banally obvious and unquestionable: If researchers are chosen by any other criteria than qualifications and accomplishments pertinent to the intended work, then the quality of the resulting work will tend to be lower than it might have been. Hudlicky wrote that in a commissioned review of progress in organic synthesis for Angewandte Chemie, which abjectly apologized and withdrew the article after being deluged by protests[vi].

Krylov reminds how several branches of science atrophied under political control in the former Soviet Union — genetics cybernetics quantum mechanics, relativity, understanding of chemical “resonance” bonding. She points out that the governing system, “Communism”,  explicitly proclaimed the common, public, social good as justification for supposedly temporary totalitarian methods. Now Krylov finds herself In an environment where the asserted common, public, social good  of “Social Justice” is taken to justify a range of actions by redefining that phrase and making eponymy guilty of the alleged misdeeds of the eponym: “racism, patriarchy, misogyny, and other reprehensible ideas are encoded in scientific terms, names of equations, and in plain English words.  . . .  in order to build a better world and to address societal inequalities, we need to purge our literature of the names of people [whose words or behavior illustrated those ideas] . We are told . . . to rewrite our syllabi and change the way we teach and speak”.

Appropriately,  Krylov’s essay begins with a quote from George Orwell’s 1984): “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.

Scott Turner’s essay focuses on the adoption of political correctness by Nature, one of the  world’s leading scientific journals, which featured a guest editorial, “Science must overcome its racist legacy”[vii]. Turner examines two initiatives that were taken along that line: the purported value of incorporating indigenous knowledge into contemporary science, and the attempt to have indigenous people share in the benefits accruing from exploitation of native resources.

In the first instance, the “Maori way of knowledge” about water spirits was being given credit for guidance as to the behaviors of New Zealand’s waters; but it seems unwarranted to credit that as equal, let alone better, understanding of turbulent water movements than the more universal and quantitative Navier-Stokes equations. As to the second example, well-intended attempts failed to bring benefits from the exploitation of the South African hoodia plant to the particular San tribe in whose territory the plant — an appetite suppressant and aphrodisiac — thrived, owing the complexity of identifying and isolating and synthesizing the particular molecular species involved; it is far from easy to go from natural products to commercial medications.

In asides to these main points, Turner also illustrates how political correctness misleads through superficial remarks, since “a little learning is a dangerous thing”[viii]: While much is said about the lingering after-effects of slavery in the United States, it is often neglected to recall that the enslaving was done in the first instance by Africans and Arabs; and that it was the colonial powers, notably Britain and the United States, that took the lead in abolishing the system of slavery — which continues to exist in other parts of the world, for instance the Middle East. And in the story of the colonizing of Africa, it ought to be remembered also that the San had been oppressed first by the indigenous African imperialist Bantu.

Science, the world’s other leading science journal, has not been outdone by Nature. Holden Thorp, “editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals”[ix] introduced himself with an editorial, “Inclusion doesn’t lower standards”:

“The cultural wars raging across the United States have sadly found their way into the world of science. Some university science faculty and administrators are resistant to making changes that would allow more students from under-represented groups to participate and thrive in the sciences. The rationale for this opposition is often that ‘accommodating’ legitimate social and pedagogical needs of marginalized groups will lower the standards of mastery and excellence in these fields. But this concern is just a crutch that protects faculty and institutions from having to do the work of correcting social injustices in higher education. It’s common to hear that improving student diversity in higher education requires lowering the bar to admission and watering down the curriculum so that all students can pass the course of study. I’m not aware of anyone who is advocating such a trade-off. There are known methods of teaching that allow more people from different backgrounds to master scientific material without compromising the quality of education. These include a greater use of active learning methods that engage students with course material through discussions and problem solving (as opposed to passively taking in information). Making such reforms may require faculty to learn new ways of teaching. But isn’t that the job — to foster education for everyone?”

In a single page, Thorp manages to illustrate just about everything that makes political correctness a danger to society, even as political correctness is laughably absurd intellectually and follows the playbook satirized by Orwell in 1984.

Thorp’s editorial illustrates the unhappy fact that it takes far more space and effort to demolish illogic and misleading statements than to make them. The editorial is replete with assertions, some dubious and some plainly wrong, all of them lacking supporting facts.

It would have been less egregious — though probably still wrong — to say that inclusion need not lower standards; but as it stands, the assertion is that inclusion has not lowered standards. Perhaps not every standard, but it certainly lowered the standards for admission at many places of higher education (for instance the University of Texas, and the University of Michigan Law School[x]). And since admission standards were lowered, it followed as a practical necessity that graduation standards declined, because of the obvious need not to flunk out all of those who had been admitted while lacking the background of preparation that correlates with success at college-level academics.

Thorp asserts his case by describing certain “social and pedagogical needs of marginalized groups” as “legitimate”. But those are apples and oranges, and lumping them camouflages what is actually at stake: giving priority to ill-considered means of achieving social ends while giving no priority to what formal education is about: intellectual criteria and standards.

“[K]nown methods of teaching . . . allow more people from different backgrounds to master scientific material without compromising the quality of education”. What are they? Apparently, “active learning methods . . . as opposed to passively taking in information”.

How does anyone absorb information “passively”? In any case, it takes little experience of actual classrooms to recognize that nothing can be effectively taught if the purported students make no individual (“active”) efforts to learn.

Editor Thorp claims to be unaware of anyone who “advocates” lowering standards to aid inclusion. Orwellian linguistic misdirection again: it has happened without anyone advocating it, indeed while denying it, just as with admission standards.

“Why wouldn’t . . .” universities re-name buildings? They are in fact doing so, wholesale.

“Why should [students] be the ones to do the work needed to fix a dysfunctional world they did not create?” Well . . . why should faculty? Why should anyone who was not active in that creation? Neither they, nor the universities themselves, created this world. If there is “systemic” racism and anti-inclusion, it was not created by present-day higher education or those who service it. Yet Thorp insists that “faculty and institution [must] make the cultural changes that students need”.

Thorp insists, in other words, that universities must engage in social engineering; but they are not qualified to do so, nor is it their proper role in society.

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[i]     Paul R. Halmos, I Want to Be a Mathematician. Springer‑Verlag, 1985, pp. 113‑14

[ii]    Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes, Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes, 1982

[iii]    Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, BenBella Books, 2021; review by HHB, “THE most important book about climate change”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 35 (2021) 1032–1042; https://www.scientificexploration.org/docs/35/jse_35_4_Bauer_on_Koonin.pdf

[iv]    Anna I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 12 (2021) 5371−76; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475. See also https://quillette.com/2021/12/18/scientists-must-gain-the-courage-to-oppose-the-politicization-of-their-disciplines/

[v]     J. Scott Turner, Decolonizing Science, Academic Questions, 35 (2022) 37-42

[vi]    Statement on Tomas Hudlicky’s contribution to Angewandte Chemie, https://www.gdch.de/service-information/nachricht/article/stellungnahme-zum-beitrag-von-tomas-hudlicky-in-der-angewandten-chemie.html

[vii]   Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam & Elizabeth Wathuti, Science must overcome its racist legacy, Nature, 606 (2022) 225-7

[viii] Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism; https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/41709-a-little-learning-is-a-dangerous-thing-drink-deep-or

[ix]    Jeffrey Brainard, “AAAS names chemist Holden Thorp as editor-in-chief of Science: University administrator’s interests include diversity and entrepreneurship”, 19 August 2019; https://www.science.org/content/article/aaas-names-chemist-holden-thorp-editor-chief-science

[x]    Gail Heriot, The sad irony of affirmative action,  National Affairs, #52, Winter 2013, 78-93’ https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action