How to acquire and use the best science?

Hindrances include political correctness; damage from actions based on faulty science

Doing science, learning to understand how the world works, is inherently difficult, and the task is made even more difficult by human fallibility. Making the best use of the best scientific understanding is hindered primarily by human failings, especially the fact that human actions are influenced much more by beliefs than by objective evidence.

Political influence in the form of political correctness may be today’s most clear and present danger, both to achieving the best science and to exploiting it, but there are other hurdles as well.

Some of these are inescapable since science is done by fallible human beings.

The unhappiest consequence of these circumstances is that sometimes public policies and official actions are based on scientific mistakes, bringing substantial social damage. In the 20^th century, tens of thousands of men and women were sterilized on the basis of mistaken scientific views about the heritability of undesirable behavioral characteristics, leading to “eugenics”, improving the gene pool by eliminating undesirables.

From the 1980s to the present time, tens of billions of dollars have been spent and millions of people have been administered toxic medications in the mistaken belief that HIV causes AIDS.

During that same  period of time, dysfunctional economic and social and political initiatives have been based on the mistaken belief that climate change is being caused primarily by human activities.

This post will flesh out the background of the fallibility of science. Later posts will discuss the role of political correctness in public policies over HIV/AIDS and global warming.

Science ideally seeks to understand reality. Any other aims can only distract from and thereby hinder that purpose. Ideally, researchers should be free of conflicts of interest.  But almost all research nowadays requires considerable resources. There are not many providers of such resources who want only to assist scientists to understand reality better. No rearrangement of institutions and responsibilities can vitiate the influence on science of those who provide the resources. That limits immediately the range of likely scientific advances to directions favored by the patrons.

Amateur researchers, doing science out of simple curiosity and not as a way of earning a living, may be the most free from conflicts of interest; but they can seek knowledge only about matters that can be studied without the need for expensive resources; nowadays amateurs can contribute to new discovery in only a few directions, for example astronomy or animal behavior.

Admittedly there are government agencies and private foundations offering to support entirely “basic” or “pure” science in response to applications from would-be researchers; but everyone in the business understands what projects might possibly attract funding and which would not. There are many fewer potential patrons for research in parapsychology, for example,  than for understanding climate change. As Richard Muller [1] revealed long ago, researchers  wanting to do “pure”, “basic” science learn to ask for funds for projects that seem likely to attract patrons and then, if successful, use (embezzle?) as much as possible of those funds for what they really want to study.

Even amateurs, though, are not entirely free of conflicts of interest. It is perfectly natural for human beings to wish to excel at what they do, and to be appreciated for that; and the urge to satisfy curiosity about the world's workings can sometimes conflict with a desire to be first, to be acknowledged as being the first, to bring favorable recognition to one's family, clan, nation. In any such conflict, other psychological human factors come into play, perhaps foremost the instinctive facility to notice particularly things that fit with what we want or expect; and to fail to notice things that contradict our presumptions or wishes.

It is simply not natural for human beings to do what the so-called scientific method prescribes, namely, to come to believe only things to which the facts point. 

An ever-present hindrance to pure knowledge-seeking is the contemporary intellectual conventional wisdom, the mainstream scientific paradigm. Everyone is influenced by that in one way or another. Merely becoming interested in doing science inevitably means becoming familiar with what is taken to be the current state of knowledge; but major advances are aptly described as scientific revolutions. Those represent advances so unforeseen as to be described as revolutionary milestones; but they also represent, though perhaps less immediately obviously, gravestones of the earlier supposed understanding, the paradigm that has been abandoned and replaced. What was previously believed, the “scientific consensus”, has turned out to be, in some way or another wrong.

That is never easy to recognize, and those  who first do so find it difficult to convince others. As Bernard  Barber documented in considerable detail [2], novelties have always been at first resisted.

So any contemporary “scientific consensus” is at the same time a hindrance to dramatic advances: it tends to constrain the imagination of researchers; it makes it difficult for those whose imaginations have overcome that barrier to have their unorthodox research projects funded and supported, and to have their contrarian findings appreciated and accepted by their professional peers. It is, by the way, a rather well-kept secret that funds for what mainstream science regards as too highly speculative to be worth funding or spending efforts on may come from the Defense Department through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [3]: “For sixty years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. . . . DARPA explicitly reaches for transformational change instead of incremental advances.”

But on the whole, the bulk of contemporary scientific research is of a journeyman character rather than a pioneering one. In some part that stems from the fact that most present-day research is nowadays carried on within commercial ventures. In the past, some outstanding advances in basic science came from industrial laboratories whose owners understood that allowing dedicated researchers to follow their instincts was likely to lead to commercially profitable things; historians of science like to recall the fundamental discoveries made by Irving Langmuir at the General Electric labs in Schenectady in the early decades of the 20^th century, and in the middle of the 20^th century by William Shockley and his colleagues at the Bell Telephone Labs; but such circumstances remain of historical interest, there exist no contemporary analogues.

Most basic science is nowadays carried on in academic institutions. but here again,  as with amateur scientists, would-be a researchers feel the need to consider what is likely to attract funding; and this is much more critical for academics than for amateurs, because their professional careers depend on attracting research support.

The contemporary scientific consensus makes it difficult to correct entrenched major mistakes. Political correctness adds considerably to that difficulty. Those two influences conspired in creating and maintaining the mistaken notions about HIV/AIDS and global warming that are part of today’s common-sense conventional wisdom, continually entrenched by almost all the mass media.

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[1] Richard Muller, “Innovation and scientific funding”, Science, 209 (1980) 880-83.

[2] Bernard Barber, “Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery”, Science, 134 (196`) 596-602

 [3] https://www.darpa.mil/#