“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.
At the root of most of this is the government funding of most research. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the reality is that a huge amount of a scientists time is spent writing grant proposals.
This has several really negative consequences: firstly there is a bias in grant selection that puts pressure on scientists to produce the results that the government prefers; secondly because it comes from one purse that most cleansing of processes, that seeker of the truth, namely competition, is virtually eliminated; and thirdly it leads to a gross misallocation of resources.
There is a growing trend of that most loathsome (or so we are told) of people, namely billionaires, funding more and more science. Billionaires funding science surely has a similar selection and bias problem, however, there is only one government and there are lots of billionaires, a fact that produces the competition and diversity of interest that science so desperately needs. Additionally billionaires fund science in order to produce useful things, something that rarely comes out of government funding. This does, to some degree, bias against fundamental science, but applied science is pretty useful too, and so it is a resource allocation question. Perhaps $13 billion has been spent on the LHC and we have confirmation of the Higgs mechanism (and AFAIK, not much else). Which is great, but $13 billion could have produced a lot of other stuff which is way more practical and useful. The allocation of funds depends on sucking up to the government rather than producing practical and useful results. Sucking up to the government is definitely not conducive to the seeking of truth.
Because government is big, it tends to want big things and this, IMHO, leads to a neglect of science in the small.
One other thing I was reading about recently: Professor David Sinclair at Harvard got his funding cut in the brouhaha between Trump and Harvard. But some rich-but-non-billionaire guy started a “Friends Of Sinclair Labs” organization raising money from the public (mostly rich public) that has easily been raising all the funds he needs for his experimental work — and no doubt venture will fund him when he actually produces drugs.
FWIW, I have often said that Musk is the most important human alive today, which I stand by, but Sinclair is right up there on that list too. Actually I had an uncle named David Sinclair who was killed in an accident when I was about 10 years old, so I have a particular affection for the guy, and his work is in the “you are fucking kidding me, right” category.
Collegiality is the killer of pure science. It simply means “I won’t attack your work if you don’t attack mine.”
Science depends on everyone attacking everyone else’s work.
I should have added: Partisan collegiality is the worst. Ignoring errors because you like the guy’s politics kills humans. Or at least avoids helping them.