Samizdata

“An amateur sleuth is singlehandedly demolishing dangerous scientific groupthink”, writes Matt Ridley in the Telegraph:

In hundreds of studies that [Sholto] David looked at, scientists claimed to have found an effect on a tumour-suppressing gene called p16-INK4a, but had instead ordered the wrong antibody from commercial suppliers. They had bought an antibody that detects the activity of a different and irrelevant gene called p16-ARC, probably because it’s listed alphabetically first in the online catalogue.

As a result, teams of scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and even Wuhan have published results – often in high-impact journals – that make no sense. Yet the experts involved often claimed to have validated their hypotheses anyway.

As David put it: “What are we to make of cases like this where the wrong antibody was used but the authors still manage to rustle up interpretable results?” He blames “a mixture of outright fabrication, selective reporting, writing errors, and some teams blindly publishing contradictory findings without further questioning or curiosity”.

For too long, many people held back from denouncing these perversions of the scientific method for fear of “damaging public trust in science”. This, of course, allowed the bad practices to continue and spread. I trust science as much as ever, but as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production”, what is often labelled as the loss of public trust in science is more accurately described as a loss of public trust in scientists. If you, reader, are an honest scientist who wants to regain that trust, then you need to be less collegiate.

Matt Ridley continues,

Scientists, like all of us, are prone to confirmation bias, where they look for evidence to support their hunches and prejudices rather than to challenge them. What kept them honest in the past was that they relished the chance to challenge each other.

Now, with the insistence on “consensus” – another word for groupthink – and a monopoly of funding channels, dogma has been increasingly allowed to stifle debate. It does not help that science reporters, unlike those who tackle politics, the arts or business, often have a culture of deference rather than critique.

The self-correction mechanisms of scientific debate are no longer working well. Yet instead of tackling the problem with humility and reformation, the scientific establishment is inclined to lecture the public for our irrationality. Perhaps it should take a look in the mirror.